Visibilium

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Gun Free

One reaction to the NRA's proposal to put armed police officers in every school:

'Their solution to resolve the issue around guns is to put more guns in the equation?' said Superintendent Hank Grishman of the Jericho, N.Y., schools on Long Island, who has been an educator for 44 years. 'If anything it would be less safe for kids. You would be putting them in the midst of potentially more gunfire.'

The empty symbolism of the unenforced gun-free zone is seen to be safer than a potential gunfight between good and evil. In a world without moral distinctions, good guys with guns should be avoided as much as bad guys with guns.

Sunday, December 02, 2012

Advantages Of A Global Market

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Wall Street banks are looking to help offshore clients sidestep new U.S. rules designed to safeguard the world's $640 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market, taking advantage of an exemption that risks undermining U.S. regulators' efforts.

U.S. banks such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have been explaining to their foreign customers that they can for now avoid the new rules, due to take effect next month, by routing trades via the banks' overseas units, according to industry sources and presentation materials obtained by Reuters.

The rules, a result of Washington's Dodd-Frank reforms, aim to prevent financial catastrophes in the over-the-counter (OTC) market - a huge, opaque market which is partly blamed for felling Lehman Bros in 2008 and fuelling a global financial crisis.

They call for U.S. banks dealing in OTC instruments, such as interest-rate swaps and cross-currency options, to effectively set aside capital against the risk of trades turning sour, execute their trades on electronic platforms and report them to U.S. authorities - requirements that worry the banks' offshore clients and threaten to drive business away from Wall Street.

OTC brokers say liquidity has already begun to suffer.

"A Thin Line"

Russia is trying to navigate a fine balance between supporting Orthodox values and tolerating different religions.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian lawmakers are reworking a draft law introducing prison terms for religious offences after signs that Vladimir Putin is concerned it could undermine the delicate balance between the country's many religions.

The president's party proposed the law after two members of the Pussy Riot punk band were jailed for two years over a protest in a cathedral against Putin's increasingly close ties with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Putin has trod a thin line between celebrating a secular state of many religions and promoting the Russian Orthodox Church since rising to power in 2000, but has leaned more on the Orthodox Church for support since starting his third term as president in May following protests against his rule.

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Moscow, November 1, Interfax - Forty percent of Russians, mostly women and religious people, believe in the supernatural beings, the Russian Public Opinion Study Center (VTsIOM) said, following a nationwide poll held before Halloween.

Some 22% believe in omens, 21% in horoscopes, 8% in palm reading and spells, 6% in aliens, and 2% in zombies, the center said.

Fifty-seven percent said they were not superstitious (71% of men and 46% of women).

There are more believers in supernatural elements amongst women than amongst men. Some 30% of women believe in omens, and the indicator is only 14% amongst men; while 29% of women and 12% of men believe in horoscopes.

Churchgoers believe in omens and horoscopes more than atheists (21%-22% against 7%). The belief in omens is particularly characteristic of Orthodox Russians (26%); only 13% of followers of other religions and 7% of atheists believe in that.

Halloween is an ancient Celtic holiday marked on October 31. The holiday's symbol is the Jack-o-lantern - a carved pumpkin with a lit candle inside. Halloween costumes depict witches and similar characters of films and books. It was traditionally celebrated in English-speaking countries but became popular in Europe and the CIS at the end of the 20th century.

Combating Collective Guilt

Moscow, October 31, Interfax - Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky does not believe that the blame for the killing of Russia's last Emperor Nicholas II and his family rests with the people of Russia.

'I don't believe the people of Russia should repent for the killing of the tsar's family because the people of Russia did not kill the tsar's family. It was done by several bastards on the orders of other bastards,' the minister said at the 5th International Festival of Orthodox Media Faith and Word, commenting on the statement made by one delegate referring to the discussion on the need for the people of Russia to repent for their sins to the tsar's family, which has been occurring on the Internet for the past few years.

Medinsky also spoke about the issue of the burial of the body of Vladimir Lenin, saying that 'the Culture Ministry will not come up with any initiatives regarding any burials and re-burials.'

'It is our official position, and there is also my private opinion as a citizen,' the minister said, adding that he would not like his private opinion on this issue, which he characterize as 'rather sharp,' to be associated with the official position of the government.

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Rupert Brooke, 1914

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Syria, A Century Ago

Take another section through Syria, a degree lower down, between Tripoli and Beyrout. To begin with, near the coast, are Lebanon Christians, Maronites and Greeks for the most part. It is hard to disentangle the politics of the two churches. Superficially, one should be French and the other Russian, but a part of the Maronites now have been in the United States, and have developed there an Anglo-Saxon vein which is not the less vigorous for being spurious. The Greek church prides itself on being old Syrian, autocthonous, of an intense local patriotism that (with part) would rather fling it into the arms of the Turk than endure irretrievable annexation by a Roman power. The adherents of the two churches are at one in unmeasured slander of Mohammedans and their religion. They salve a consciousness of inbred inferiority by this verbal scorn. Behind and among the Christians live families of Mohammedan Sunnis, Arabic-speaking, identical in race and habit with the Christian, marked off from them by a less mincing dialect, and a distaste for emigration and its results. On the higher slopes of the hills are serried settlements of Metawala, Shia Mohammedans who came from Persia centuries ago. They are dirty, ignorant, surly, and fanatical. They will not eat or drink with an infidel (the Sunni as bad as the Christian), follow their own priests and notables, speak Arabic but disown in every way the people, not their co-sectarians, who live about them. Across the hills are villages of Christians, yeomen, living at peace with their Sunni neighbours, as though they had never heard the grumbles of their fellows in the Lebanon...

A section a degree lower would begin with German Zionist Jews, Speaking a bastard Hebrew and German Yiddish, more intractable than the Jews of the Roman era, unable to endure near them anyone not of their race, some of them agriculturists, most of them shop-keepers, the most foreign, most uncharitable part of its whole population. Behind these Jews is their enemy, the Palestine peasant, more stupid than the peasant of North Syria, materialist and bankrupt...

Jerusalem is a dirty town which all Semitic religions have made holy. Christians and Mohammedans come there on pilgrimage; Jews look to it for the political future of their race. In it the united forces of the past are so strong that the city fails to have a present: its people, with the rarest exceptions, are characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors passing through. Questions of Arabs and their nationality are as far from them as bimetallism from the life of Texas, though familiarity with the differences among Christians in their moment of most fervent expression has led the Mohammedans of Jerusalem to despise (and dislike) foreigners generally.

T.E. Lawrence, Syria, The Raw Material, 1915

Which Unchristian Sentiment Underlies The Welfare State?

I believe that we ought even to suppress the maxim about love for one's neighbour. Make it the duty of the state or the municipality to take care of the sick and the crippled, and leave men the illusion of living healthy in a healthy world.

Caesar in Pio Baroja's Caesar or Nothing

Ortega y Gasset On Hunting

If one were to present the sportsman with the death of the animal as a gift he would refuse it. What he is after is having to win it, to conquer the surly brute through his own effort and skill with all the extras that this carries with it: the immersion in the countryside, the healthfulness of the exercise, the distraction from his job.

In all of this, the moral problem of hunting has not been resolved. We have not reached ethical perfection in hunting. One never achieves perfection in anything, and perhaps it exists precisely so that one can never achieve it. Its purpose is to orient our conduct and to allow us to measure the progress accomplished. In this sense, the advancement achieved in the ethics of hunting is undeniable. Therefore it is necessary to oppose photographic hunting, which is not progress but rather a digression and a prudery of hideous moral style.

Every authentic refinement must leave intact the authenticity of the hunt, its essential structure, which is a matter of a confrontation between two unequal species. The real care that man must exercise is not in pretending to make the beast equal to him, because that is a stupid utopian, beatific farce, but rather in avoiding more and more the excess of his superiority. Hunting is the free play of an inferior species in the face of a superior species. That is where one must make some refinement. Man must give the animal a "handicap," in order to place him as close as possible to his own level. The essence of sportive hunting is not raising the animal to the level of man, but something much more spiritual than that: a conscious and almost religious humbling of man which limits his superiority and lowers him toward the animal.

I have said 'religious,' and the word does not seem excessive to me. A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous.

Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, in the laws of nature.

Jose Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting as quoted by my-hunt.com

Monday, October 29, 2012

Schumpeter On The Sophomoric Mass

The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work. His failure to do so may be due either to lack of natural ability—perfectly compatible with passing academic tests—or to inadequate teaching; and both cases will . . . occur more frequently as ever larger numbers are drafted into higher education and as the required amount of teaching increases irrespective of how many teachers and scholars nature chooses to turn out.
The results of neglecting this and of acting on the theory that schools, colleges and universities are just a matter of money, are too obvious to insist upon. Cases in which among a dozen applicants for a job, all formally qualified, there is not one who can fill it satisfactorily, are known to everyone who has anything to do with appointments . . .
All those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unemployable drift into the vocations in which standards are least definite or in which aptitudes and acquirements of a different order count. They swell the host of intellectuals in the strict sense of the term whose numbers hence increase disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment. And it often rationalizes itself into that social criticism which as we have seen before is in any case the intellectual spectator's typical attitude toward men, classes and institutions especially in a rationalist and utilitarian civilization.
Well, here we have numbers; a well-defined group situation of proletarian hue; and a group interest shaping a group attitude that will much more realistically account for hostility to the capitalist order than could the theory—itself a rationalization in the psychological sense—according to which the intellectual's righteous indignation about the wrongs of capitalism simply represents the logical inference from outrageous facts. . . . Moreover our theory also accounts for the fact that this hostility increases, instead of diminishing, with every achievement of capitalist evolution.

Joseph Schumpeter writing in "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy," 1942 as quoted in the Wall Street Journal

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Your Post Office At Work

In this South Carolina town, the Post Office has refused to deliver mail because it has deemed the road unsafe. It's time to get rid of the Post Office's monopoly on first-class mail delivery.

Thursday, October 04, 2012

Corporal Punishment Busybodies

Finnish Orthodox clerics stand up for woman deprived of her kids

Helsinki, October 2, Interfax - The Orthodox parish in Helsinki whose members include Anastasia Zavgorodnyaya is planning to appeal social services' move to take the Russian woman's four children into their custody.

'Until now we have often contacted the mom, and we are sure that there is no danger for the children in the family,' Deacon Juha Lampinen told the largest Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, in an interview, a transcript of which appeared in Tuesday's issue of the daily.

'Taking a newborn baby who is five days old from their mother in the course of a special police operation is something that makes you think of a novel by Franz Kafka,' well-known Finnish Orthodox Priest Heikki Huttunen told the paper. 'Finnish authorities discriminate against Russian mothers.'

At the same time, the head of the social services of Vantaa, the city where Zavgorodnyaya lives, brushed aside accusations of Russophobia. 'We have the best law on the protection of children in the world,' Anna Cantell-Forsblom said. However, she said she knew nothing about the Zavgorodnyaya affair.

Zavgorodnyaya reportedly had her children taken away from her after her six-year-old daughter said at school that her father had given her a slap on the behind. [Emphasis added]

Russia On Romney

There are predictions that if the Republican Party loses the election in November, it will be the death of the Republican Party. This would be no loss, to be sure. However, what would replace it? A radical fascist group such as the Tea Party?

In any case, Mitt Romney is the wrong man at the wrong time. While it's true that there's little difference between Democrat and Republican, it becomes a matter of choosing fascism light or full blown fascism. Mitt Romney would bring on full blown fascism.

In the U.S.A., no candidate will be elected to any office that doesn't answer to the Israeli AIPAC, the insurance lobbies, the military industrial complex and the power elite.

Greenhouse Effect And Global Warming

An analysis of Greenland ice showed that even before the Industrial Revolution, human action has changed climate...

Researchers have found that a significant amount of methane was already emitted into the atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution. From an analysis of ice cores in Greenland, it was observed that over a period of 200 years, which covers the heyday of the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty in China, there was a great increase in the emission of greenhouse gases. The study challenges the UN view that climate change caused by man began only around 1800. A record of the atmosphere trapped in ice from Greenland indicated that the level of methane rose for nearly 2,000 years and remained at this higher level for nearly two centuries.

National Rifle Association Endorses Romney/Ryan

The National Rifle Association has endorsed Mitt Romney, his campaign announced late Thursday evening. 'As the Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed, the Second Amendment protects a basic and fundamental individual right—the right to bear arms,' said Mitt Romney, via press release. 'And it is the NRA that protects the Second Amendment. I am proud to have their support for my candidacy, and when I am president, I will do all in my power to defend and protect the right of all law-abiding Americans to keep and bear arms.'

Today's My Day To Be Nice

Here's the first comment to the linked letter to which the venerable Ad Orientem blog referred in the posting about the new RC Archbishop of San Francisco's alleged snubbing of California's Episcopal Bishop. I didn't give a crap about the letter, but the comment was a hoot:

I could not in good conscience work with this person who has chosen to accept the statements of his pope who has said that gay people are 'not fully developed humans' and has labeled people of same gender orientation as 'morally defective' not mention that he has equated marriage equality with mortal sin....

As some RCs have complained about my anti-RC positions, I'd like to compliment the forthright language quoted by the commenter. Heck, the language is forthright almost to the point of...Orthodoxy.

Tuesday, October 02, 2012

Here Comes The Garbage Man

Now, this is a novel theme: a garbage man who complains about indifferent customers.

'My name is Richard Hayes, and I pick up Mitt Romney's trash,' the man says to the camera in the 60-second Web ad. 'We're kind of like the invisible people, you know. He doesn't realize, you know, that the service we provide, you know, if it wasn't for us, you know, it would be a big health issue, us not picking up trash.'

Richard, yes, your job is supremely valuable, but how much is it worth? Tell Mitt what your number is, and I'm sure that he'll meet your request, provided that your colleagues, union and nonunion, don't undersell you. Ah, the sweet dignity of fair pay for fair work.

Here's the ad:

Richard, your Mom should have named you Haynes Richard instead of Richard Haynes. Maybe your name could have propelled you into becoming a customer.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

More Robbers

I'm Celebrating The 70s While It Lasts

I just realized that if Romney wins the Presidential race, we'll lose the Carter-like feeling of the last four years. I have time to celebrate the 70s while it's still appropriate.