Working from Home: Day 1

Today was Day One of working from home under Idaho’s stay-at-home order.  Because my job constitutes an “essential service” under the order, I am not obliged to work from home as a matter of law, and there may be times when I will have to leave the house and put in a bodily appearance at work.  I was in fact reluctant to work from home, because women are not very good at compartmentalizing, and it is already hard enough for a woman to keep home life separate from work.  On the other hand, the county would like us to work from home as much as we can, and there are some technical things to rehearse and work out before we go live with virtual court next week; besides which, the respite from the commute will save me a few bucks in gas money.  So I opened up my roll-top desk and set up my work laptop, and Legal Eagle Beagle Ltd. was in business.

Though this is the first time I have worked from home, it is actually not the first time I have worked at home.  From time to time I have a motion or a brief to get out that requires some intensive research and writing, or I have a trial that requires some intensive preparation: then it is good to work on these projects surrounded by pleasant and familiar things.  But today many of the daily business activities that I normally do only at the office took place at home.  These activities stayed in one room that is actually set aside as a study, so I could still compartmentalize somewhat; and I could also look out the window at the pleasant spring weather.  Except for a couple of virtual meetings to test and practice with the software we are using to stay connected to the office and the court, there was no face time with colleagues.  In our line of work, we depend a lot on each other’s input and advice.  There was, however, plenty of face time with Scarlett the Cat, my furry, four-legged co-counsel.  At the end of the business day, with no huge projects demanding immediate and continued attention, the laptop was powered off and shut up in the roll-top desk, out of sight until tomorrow morning.

Thus passed my first day in this strange new reality that leaves us in our comfortable surroundings but has brought out our inner Howard Hughes, turning us into reclusive germophobes, and about which we cannot seem to have a rational discussion that doesn’t end in hysteria and recriminations.  It’s hard to see the whole picture when you’re inside the frame, and I don’t quite grasp the whole concatenation of circumstances that led us, suddenly, to this pass.  I do know I am more dismayed by the reaction to the coronavirus than I am by the thing itself, and by the fact that there seem to be many people complaining that the government has not gone nearly far enough in curtailing our freedoms.

And there are two things that frighten me.  The first is that, for our slide into the moral sewer, we have merited this plague, and worse; the second is the inescapable fact that a just God has permitted this, on a global scale.  

Will we learn the lessons He is trying to teach us?

Random Thoughts

- I haven't had much to say lately on any subject, because there is so much that is so depressing going on, both in the world at large and in my own little corner of it, that I have felt like silence is the only response I can muster. Maybe it's time for the choleric side of my personality to reassert itself over the melancholic, which has had the upper hand for the last few years.

- There is indeed a sea change in the world, and the signs include the Brexit vote in June of last year, and the election of Donald Trump in the United States last November.  People are finally beginning to reject and push back against the "Enlightenment" ideology that has so fascinated the West's elites, and held Christendom in thrall, for the last two and a half centuries.  But the corrupt elites are themselves pushing back -- hard.  It remains to be seen whether we have started to regain our senses in enough time to save Christian civilization, and whether enough people are willing to defend it.

- It is easy enough to expose the hypocrisy of the "open borders" crowd by asking them why they don't tear down their own fences and gates and throw open their own real estate holdings to all and sundry, no questions asked.  It is because they know they will be cleaned out and maybe even not escape the experience physically unscathed.  A nation -- which is an extension of the family, which springs from our human nature and has rights in the natural law -- is no different in this respect.  A family has the right to let some people into its home and keep others out, according as its interests dictate; to expect guests and visitors to obey the rules of the house; and to expel those who will not comply.  A nation possesses these same rights.  A national government also has the same duty to look first to the well-being of its own citizens, that parents have to look first to the well-being of their own children.

- It's depressing to think how far we have slid down the sewer of violence in the 21st century, and still more depressing to realize that that is the way our Elders and Betters, including those who run the mass media, want it.  Seven gangsters and gang associates died in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929, and the nation was aghast.  Eighty-eight years, a world war, multiple regional wars and countless murders, abortions and terror attacks later, the deaths of innocent civilians in European cities at the hands of Muslim extremists are barely making the news anymore.  The leaders of Europe declare their resolve to "carry on" and not be intimidated by terrorists, but they are utterly unwilling to do what it takes to put an end to the predations of terrorists.  Instead, they spend their time coming up with hash tags, and putting up barriers, and telling their people they are just going to have to put up with terrorism as a part of life, and chewing their nails about insoluble and even non-existent problems, like "climate change" and "carbon footprints."  Why is it they think it impossible to keep out of their countries people who want to destroy them, but consider it totally feasible to adjust the earth's temperature by means of legislative enactments?

- Let us not kid ourselves that mass murders like the one in Vegas last week are unrelated to the scourge of abortion.  Mother Teresa warned us of this at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1994:

But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.  And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?

- It is worth remembering that in that same speech, Mother Teresa -- who is loved by both conservatives and liberals -- did not fail to draw the line between abortion and contraception:

In destroying the power of giving life, through contraception, a husband or wife is doing something to self.  This turns the attention to self and so it destroys the gifts of love in him or her. In loving, the husband and wife must turn the attention to each other as happens in natural family planning, and not to self, as happens in contraception.  Once that living love is destroyed by contraception, abortion follows very easily.

- I'm really getting sick of these NFL demonstrations. I don't watch football, but if I did, it would be for entertainment -- just like going to a movie or watching a TV show. For years, we have been putting up with having leftist propaganda shoved down our throats every time we go to some entertainment venue, and I, for one, am fed up. That's not why I pay to get in.

- Leftists reduce everything to politics. The last time I argued about this taking-a-knee business with a leftist, I was accused of hypocrisy on the grounds that patriotic displays, which I don't object to, are nothing more than a political argument for the side I agree with. This is how the left operates: redefine the terms so nobody else can possibly win.  We have to stop buying into their planted axioms.  In fact, everything is not politics, and displays of patriotism are not political. Patriotism is a virtue, and standing for the anthem with your hand over your heart is a civic ceremony wherein we give expression to that virtue and reaffirm our identity as Americans. These idiotic protests strike at our unity as Americans.  I say, throw the bums out. The First Amendment doesn't apply to players on the field. They are there to work and earn their keep, just like I am whenever I go to court.  Hold them to the same standards as any other employee in any other workplace.  I don't get to do or say anything other than what I get paid for in the course of my employment, and neither should they.

- It would be interesting to know just what Harvey Weinstein -- who looks every inch a disgusting pig -- did to lose him the protection of The Establishment.  Whatever it was, it cannot have been sexually predatory behavior.  Hollywood has been glamorizing sexually predatory behavior for years, and has show itself quick to circle the wagons around sexual predators in its midst.  When, for example, the authorities nabbed Roman Polanski on his way to a film festival in Zurich in 2009 -- more than 30 years after skipping out on his sentencing in Los Angeles for plying a 13-year-old girl with booze and quaaludes, then raping and sodomizing her -- the film community rose in outrage at the authorities.  Harvey Weinstein, incidentally, and not surprisingly, was very vocal in defending Polanski.  So what heresy did Weinstein commit that made his own company throw him out on his ear?  One is tempted to speculate that he might have said something that could, in a certain light, be construed as mildly favorable to Donald Trump.  That would correspond more exactly to the Hollywood Left's idea of high crimes and misdemeanors.

- I suppose the sea change I mentioned above might be taking place in the Church as well as in Western society at large, as witness the filial correctio published recently, several weeks after it had been presented to the Holy Father and gotten no response.  It is refreshing to hear heresies straighforwardly designated as heresies, but I cannot say that I am surprised that the Pope continues not to respond.  If a Pope really does subscribe to heresies, and he cannot bring himself to declare definitively against them, declaring definitively in their favor is not an option: the charism of infallibility that he possesses in virtue of his office prevents this.  The only thing a Pope could do in these circumstances would be to remain silent.  Whatever the case may be, the Church is in a real crisis.  We should be prepared for the possibility that we will not see this crisis resolved during the current pontificate.

- On the other hand, we are just a week way from the 100th anniversary of the culmination of Our Lady's appearances at Fatima, Portugal, when tens of thousands of believers and non-believers within about a 30-mile radius witnessed the miracle she promised to perform to prove that she really had appeared to the three children and called for penance, repentance and conversion.  We are also in the centenary of Red October, when the Soviet Union was born -- the instrument by which Russia has spread her errors throughout the world, as Our Lady warned she would.  One also thinks of the hundred years satan asked God to give him in which to destroy the Church in the vision Pope Leo XIII is said to have had that inspired him to compose the Prayer to St. Michael.  We have certainly seen the fury of hell intensify all over the world over the last several years, and the storm roils every level of Church and state, from the palaces and mansions of the great down to the most humble individual.  Are we now near the end of those hundred years?

I hope we may live to see the promised triumph of her Immaculate Heart, and that soon.

More on The Common Good

The common good entails respect for people's sensibilities.  I hasten to add, in our cock-eyed world: people's legitimate sensibilities.  Legitimate sensibilities are reasonable and grounded in nature and reality.  Sensibilities that are unreasonable, grounded in fantasy, and purport to require other people to give way before them at all costs, are not legitimate and should not be catered to.

Recall that the good of individuals is bound up in, and not swallowed up by, the common good.  The good of individuals involves consideration for their feelings, and for their attachments -- to family and friends, to places, to neighborhoods, to institutions, to culture, to manners, to creeds, to traditions.  The common good is not being served in any situation where callousness is institutionalized.  Where flesh-and-blood human beings are viewed as raw material to be "formed" and "molded" and experimented on according to some ideology, and can be uprooted and moved around and situated and employed according to the pleasure of governing elites -- and where there is no real emergency, like armed invasion, forcing a drastic change in priorities -- the common good is being trampled.  If you treat people's feelings as worthless, and their legitimate, natural attachments and aspirations as stupid and pointless, they begin to believe it, and to treat others accordingly.  Then we shouldn't be surprised when crassness and coarseness and even violence become widespread.

When people are objects to have things done to rather than for; when they are valued only to the extent they are "useful"; when their feelings and sensibilities are trivialized; then the common good is being violated.    

Questions

To all you women who engaged in such shameful conduct over the weekend in D.C., and any similar conduct elsewhere, a few questions*:

1. Why is Madonna, who has spent decades touting herself as a sex object and who offered to administer blow jobs to anyone who would vote for Hillary, one of your spokespersons against the objectification of women?

2. Why, if you want to be thought of as more than a vagina, did you wear big pink vaginas on your heads and/or dress up in vagina costumes?

3. Why, if you want to be thought of as strong and smart and powerful and made of stern stuff, are you melting down over a man's crude remarks from 20 years ago?  Why, if you want to be noticed for your brains rather than your lady parts, did you cheer so loudly over Ashley Judd's utterly incoherent "nasty woman" rant?

4. How many of you, who are now screaming over Donald Trump talking about grabbing pussy, voted for accused rapist, exploiter of White House interns and actual grabber of pussy Bill Clinton?  How many of you voted for him twice?  How many of you continued to support him even after all the disgusting revelations?

5. Why in God's Name did so many of you expose your young children to the visual and auditory obscenity on display at the march?  Why did you make your young children wear vagina hats?

6. How is it that you have not figured out that it is precisely this kind of behavior, which is fit only for insane asylums, that helped motivate so many of the rest of us to use our votes to remove your party from power?

*Not addressed to the mercenaries who swelled the crowds in exchange for filthy lucre.

Cui Bono?

"The famous Lucius Cassius,
whom the Roman people used
to regard as a very honest and
wise judge, was in the
habit of asking, time
and again, 'Cui bono?
 To whose benefit?'"

Can today's level of liberal dismay and cognitive dissonance be overstated?  For a long time, and especially the last eight years, the liberals have, or seem to have had, a lock on society at all levels, all over the world.  Even the Catholic Church is choked with leftists, all the way to the top of the hierarchy.  The liberals were certain of their hegemony.  But in A.D. 2016, the bunker has been busted.  In June, the United Kingdom voted to detach herself from the Soviet Union's velvet-upholstered successor, the European Union.  And now, in the States, a man who has never held political office or served in the military, who has been relentlessly ridiculed and savaged in the media, has trounced the heiress-apparent to Obama's neo-Marxist empire.  Not only that: the Party of Hillary has failed to gain a majority in the House or the Senate, and has lost control of all but five states and numerous local offices.

And the left is stunned.  Their frenzy and hysteria could not be greater if Old Scratch himself were elected president (assuming they believed in such a person).  Yet there is a clear disconnect for liberals between their outrage over the election of Chief Deputy Devil Trump and real life.  How do they handle their friends and relations who they know voted for Trump?  How do they account for people they know who have never hitherto shown the slightest inclination toward racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, phobophobia, etc., etc., etc. suddenly popping up and voting for a candidate they say embodies all these things?  Are they to believe that every single one of these people was a crypto-[insert prejudice-du-jour here] and it never emerged until now, despite countless opportunities to forward an Agenda of Hate?  The Hillary supporters I associate with daily have not changed their behavior toward me, as surely they should if I am really as low as I'd have to be to vote for a guy that is really as evil as they think Trump is.

It is hard to have to face up even to the possibility that one's world view might be somewhat off.  So for the last week the liberals have been taking comfort in the wearing of diaper pins, and in the notion that their side is being vindicated by events.  I refer not to the professional rioters out pillaging big cities to prove that Trump's election was fixed -- although we could talk about that -- but specifically to the "hate crimes" and "harassment" that minorities are allegedly suffering at the hands of Trump supporters.  See? they say.  We told you so!  We told you America would become a mean, dangerous place with Trump in the White House, and it's already starting even before the electoral college!  Ideology is so important to some people that they clearly devoutly wish it to be true that their fellow, flesh-and-blood human beings are being subjected to torments and degradations in Trump's name.  I think there are many out there who would be positively crestfallen to discover that this is not happening.

And I shall enjoy seeing their crests fall.  It is daily becoming more obvious that these harassment stories are being weighed in the balance and found wanting.  A woman who claimed a redneck in a Trump hat stole her hijab in Lafayette, Louisiana, later admitted to having made the whole thing up.  A story about a racial assault in Philadelphia, with enough idiotic specifics to check against the facts, proved to be groundless.  And then there is the gay Canadian filmmaker and his unsubstantiated story that even Snopes cannot get on board with.  Even anti-Trump types have come under fire as far-right fanatics, like the guy in San Francisco who flew a Nazi flag over his home to protest the election result.

But even setting aside debunked stories, I am calling Bravo Sierra on these "hate crimes" allegedly committed by Trump supporters.  These stories simply do not pass the smell test:

1. I voted for Trump, and I do not recognize myself in the caricature of Trump voters that is being put out there.  These "hate crimes" clearly reflect the left's cartoonish image of Trump supporters and what they believe, rather than reality.

2. The evidence offered to support these stories ranges from non-existent to...well, next-to-non-existent.  Mostly the existence of a report of an incident is the only evidence, even though an accusation is never evidence.  Many reports are pure hearsay, or hearsay upon hearsay.  The person passing on a report often claims or implies that the source is unimpeachable, but never names this source or tells us whether he questioned the source live and in person, or read it on social media, where anybody can say anything about anything.  Some people cite to the existence of photos or videos, as if these can never be photoshopped or staged (and where, by the way, is the moral outrage at the cameraman who is videotaping an assault with his phone instead of using that phone to call the police?).  Others cite to the sheer volume of reports as proof of their believability, adding another honoree to the Non Sequitur Hall of Fame.  Instead of producing competent evidence of Trump-supporter malfeasance, the proponents of these stories accuse anyone who so much as questions them of "creating an environment" that "silences" the victims.  In other words, (a) it doesn't matter whether these reports are true, and (b) my use of my right to free speech oppresses assault victims.

3. Fraudulent hate crimes are a standard leftist tactic.  During my university days, radical activists liked to stage some sort of "assault" at one of their sparsely-attended demonstrations, or claim to have "found" a racist message on a chalkboard in an empty classroom, just to liven things up.  The evidence that these incidents were other than the work of those who reported them was nugatory at best; and the question that never got answered was why, if this is such a racist/sexist/bigot/homophobe/etc.-ophobe society, there was a need to gin up fake evidence to prove it.

4. Conservatives prefer to stomp liberals in the voting booth rather than in the street.  We work hard to earn the money to buy clothes and would rather not bloody them up needlessly.

5. Conservatives would not profit by resorting to desperate tactics of street-thuggery after chasing the Party of Hillary out of the White House, the House, the Senate, 45 governorships, and numerous local offices.

6. Conservatives are too busy trying to lead productive lives to engage in brigandage.  This may come as a shock, but we are really quite ordinary, boring people whose idea of raising hell is to add an extra tablespoon of melted butter to the popcorn.  We do not live for the thrill of imprisonment, as this would interfere with getting up and going to work in the morning.  (Probably most people who vote Democrat are the same way; otherwise, we wouldn't need professional rioters to loot and pillage in the wake of an election.)

All we really need to do is ask ourselves: who wants these "hate crime"/"harassment" stories to be true?  Who needs these stories to be true?  Who profits if they are true?  Is it really plausible that Trump supporters want to look like a bunch of bigots?  Or is it more plausible that liberal leftists want Trump supporters to look like a bunch of bigots?

Cui bono?

Getting Out the Vote: Election Thoughts

We created a haven of freedom in a world governed by brutal tyranny. 

We invented the airplane, mass-manufactured automobiles, and pioneered space travel. 

We produce enough food to feed ourselves and the rest of the world. 

We give massively to charity and send emergency relief to disaster areas around the world. 

We crushed Hitler, bankrupted the Soviet Union, and beat those commie bastards to the moon.

We brought the Apollo 13 astronauts back home using pencils, papers and slide rules.

We have been the freest country on earth, where millions have flourished throughout her history. 

No matter what happens today, nobody can ever take any of this away from us.

-- What was the point of early voting?  Let people vote on Election Day.

-- I was at my polling place before it opened this morning, and there was already a line starting.  By the time I got my ballot and got into my voting booth, the joint was jumping.  As the poll worker looked for my name through her roster of registered voters, I noticed that a lot of people were marked as having already voted. I don't recall things being so busy and lively at the last presidential election.

One Idaho county reports that they ran out of ballots and had to have more printed.

-- While I do not think Donald Trump is another Reagan, I do see similarities between this election and 1980.  Reagan was widely ridiculed by the media and the intelligentsia, as Trump is.  Reagan was not beloved of the GOP establishment, as Trump is not.  Reagan had been divorced, like Trump.  Reagan polled behind Carter, like Trump has polled behind Clinton.  And, of course, Reagan absolutely crushed Carter in a landslide, and repeated his performance on an even greater scale four years later against Mondale.

-- My conclusion about this election is that it is absolutely essential to defeat Hillary.  Trump is in some ways an unknown quantity; we know what he says now about the issues, and that this does not match what he has previously said about those same issues.  Hillary, however, is very much a known quantity, and a very bad quantity.  We can be absolutely certain that her victory would be a disaster.  That is why I decided that it would be a waste to vote for a non-viable third-party candidate.  A vote for a third-party candidate nearly always constitutes a vote for the Democrats.

-- This election also makes me think of the 1990 election of Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua, when the voters dumped socialist Daniel Ortega.  P.J. O'Rourke covered this election and reported having gone in with a sense of discouragement over the widespread belief that the Sandinistas would win.  He said the high level of turnout should have been a clue that the conventional wisdom was not so wise after all.  People do not show up in their droves, from the ass-end of nowhere, he remarked, to maintain the status quo.

-- Hence my theory of this election: high turnout means a victory for Trump.  I doubt people will flock to the polls to vote in Obama 2.0.

We shall see.

You Will Be Assimilated. Resistance Is Futile.

These lights went up the same day the opinion was published.

This photo is from the White House's Twitter feed, which also now has a cartoon of a rainbowed White House as its avatar.  The Executive Mansion, owned and kept up by the American taxpayer, is currently the residence of a man who, just a few short years ago, declared that he believed marriage to be between one man and one woman.  Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has discovered the "right" to same-sex "marriage" in the Fourteenth Amendment -- a right hitherto undetected by any human being since the Constitution was ratified -- that same man has turned the house first lived in by Thomas Jefferson into a gigantic billboard for homosexualism. 

But, lest we be too distracted by this puerile display and mockery of an historic monument of the nation's founding, let us take special note of Obama's speech celebrating the Supreme Court's travesty.  You can read the whole thing here; this is the money quote:

I know that Americans of good will continue to hold a wide range of views on this issue. Opposition, in some cases, has been based on sincere and deeply held beliefs. All of us who welcome today’s news should be mindful of that fact and recognize different viewpoints, revere our ["]deep["] ["]commitment["] to religious freedom.

But today should also give us hope that on the many issues with which we grapple, often painfully, real change is possible. Shift in hearts and minds is possible. And those who have come so far on their journey to equality have a responsibility to reach back and help others join them, because for all of our differences, we are one people, stronger together than we could ever be alone.

Let us leave to one side the hypocrisy in this divide-and-conquer president of appealing to national unity.  I have already been ridiculed as a paranoiac because I perceive this new development as a frontal assault on my free exercise of my Catholic faith as formerly guaranteed by the First Amendment.  Now along comes Obama, vindicating my point and proving that, like always with leftists, this victory is not enough.  It was never going to be enough, just like all the previous victories garnered after long years of shoving gay propaganda down everyone's throats.  Nothing is never enough.  It's not enough that government at all levels supports the gay lifestyle. It's not enough that big business supports it.  It's not enough that the entertainment industry supports it.  It's not enough that the education system, from kindergartens to universities, supports it.  It's not enough that the media support it.  It's not enough that popular culture supports it.  It's not enough that some heretical Catholic bishops and priests support it.  It's not enough that Disneyland supports it.  It's not enough that now five out of nine Supreme Court justices support it.  No: I must also support it.  And since I must support it, if I will not do so voluntarily, the next step is to use force to make me.  And if I still refuse to give way, then I guess the next step is liquidation.  Because leftists think they can only have peace when there is an absence of opposition.

Yet that still will not be enough.  Even after all the intractables are liquidated, opposition will continue to be redefined.  One day, opposition will consist in all those who are not actively participating in the gay lifestyle and gay sex, even though they condone it.  Meanwhile, the misery of homosexuals increases as they struggle, pathetically, to re-invent reality in the face of nature, reason and God, their carefully-constructed edifice of imaginary "rights" having turned into a maximum-security prison from which there is no escape -- not even death.

Martin Luther said: "Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God."  This idea of reason as a whore has borne much evil fruit over five centuries, and perhaps none more poisonous than the current assault on marriage and the free exercise of religion.  We are in a mess now that can be fixed only by divine intervention; we had better pray and strive to somehow deserve it.

Starri, Starri Blight

If you pay a creepy-looking, tattoo-covered, bushy-armpitted, ritual sex magick-performing New Age guru-ette up to $7,000.00 a year to educate your children at a place founded on pagan principles, named after a pagan earth goddess and staffed with pagans and womyn's studies majors, should you be surprised to find out that "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" at that school?

Apparently it does come as a surprise to parents at Minneapolis' Gaia Democratic School, whose kids were taken on a field trip to a sex shop as part of a year-long (!) sex ed class.  School director Starri Hedges, who arranged and led the field trip, claimed that the children were not exposed to anything that was considered pornographic, although they could see sex toys and other unspecified products.  "What I saw happening on our trip, I thought it was beautiful because kids could talk to these sex educators without any shame, without any fear," said the delusional Hedges.  Regarding the outrage of parents, who were not consulted ahead of time, Hedges said: "It was certainly the first time we have taken that kind of field trip and it will probably be our last, which I feel bad [about] because the kids had so much fun" -- "fun" being a core principle upon which the school's educational philosophy is based.  Hence, no doubt, the school's board of directors' issuance of a press release defending Hedges and her misbegotten field trip.

Nevertheless, many of the parents of children enrolled at Gaia Democratic are calling for Hedges' ouster, and several have pulled their children out of the school.  One parent has instigated a criminal investigation on the grounds that children were exposed to pornographic material -- an allegation that may be supported by the fact that the sex shop has since been cited for keeping sexually explicit materials in the view of minors.  “I want her done and out, and that school closed,” said one parent. “I want her away from children.  It’s borderline predation.”  It seems that otherwise progressive, forward-thinking, open-minded, neo-pagans do not want their own kids to be groomed for early sex, proving that the Age of Aquarius has its limitations after all.

Concerning this imbroglio, a few observations:

-- We are constantly preached at that one should not judge another based on appearances.  This is true -- up to a point.  We should not automatically assume that a person who is physically beautiful must therefore also be beautiful on the inside, lest we cast aside ordinary prudence.  Likewise, we should not think ill of a person based on external factors that are more or less out of his control, like skin color or body type or poverty or illness.  But what about deliberately self-inflicted physical oddities?  Should we not pay attention to the red flags raised by persons like Starri Hedges who give the appearance of great personal creepiness based on things she's done to herself?  Does not her willingness to take children as young as 11 to a sex shop prove this creepiness to be more than skin-deep?

-- Sex is a basic human drive and an instinct so deep as to require no training, except in self-control.  Why, then, does any school have a year-long course in sex -- manifestly not about self-control, since it includes a trip to a sex shop -- except to break down the inhibitions of children?  This is what is known as grooming, a practice formerly restricted to child molesters, but which now parents are paying schools to do to their children.

-- What is the rationale for keeping kids away from porn if it's okay for them to be exposed to sex toys?  What is the rationale for keeping kids away from sex toys if it's okay to subject them to a year of sexual indoctrination in the classroom?  Where were the outraged parents while this was going on?

 -- Incidents like this prove that when you reject the natural law -- as these parents did implicitly by sending their kids to a school that operates explicitly on principles directly opposed to the natural law -- you leave yourself defenseless in the face of evil.  Worse, you leave defenseless those who are entrusted to your care.   

-- Do any of these parents think it's okay or even actively support the exposure of other people's children to the filth that they do not now want their own children exposed to?

The father who has filed a complaint with Minneapolis police against Starri Hedges has been quoted as calling the incident "a major breach of trust," and observing that "you just can't erase those images."  He is absolutely right; and he is absolutely right in declaring Hedges unfit to have anything to do with children.  But there is a legion of reasons why neither he nor any of the other parents should ever have reposed any trust in Hedges or her school in the first place, and no knowing when, if ever, the damage to their children will ever be undone.

The New Alchemy

Bruce Jenner is now officially pretending to be a woman, and we are advised from nearly every quarter that he deserves respect and support and plaudits for this "courageous" and "difficult" decision to pursue his "right" to be whatever he wants to be.

This sort of thing is possible only in a world that rejects (a) God, and (b) objective reality.  The recognition of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good and loving God necessarily rules out the idea that a person can be a woman "trapped in a man's body" and vice versa.  God cannot make mistakes or fail to carry out His ordaining will.  And contrary to the fevered imaginings of the so-called Enlightenment philosophers, it is possible to perceive and grasp reality, and to distinguish it from that which is unreal.  Sex (not "gender": funny how, in an age saturated with sex, we cavil at using the word) is inescapable.  The sex chromosomes, which inhabit every single cell in the human body, are inescapable.  Persons who think they can create their own reality should think about trying to apply that principle to their checking accounts.  Go ahead and decide you're a billionaire, and then start trying to spend accordingly.  See where that gets you.

With God and objective reality out of the picture, no one is safe, not even from himself.  Now anything is not only possible, but permissible.  The willingness to traverse boundaries previously understood as being impassible marks the death of human dignity.  The body is nothing more than fodder for experimentation, to be used and abused as we please.  We are just human chattels.  We are reverting back to the slavery that our forebears fought and labored so hard to abolish, only this time it will be without even the minimal protection of the law.  The idea of the integrity of the human person is meaningless.

And since we need not respect our own integrity, others need not respect it either.  Maybe someone else should be able to decide for us that we should be the opposite sex.  That day in fact has already come: already we are seeing stories about parents putting their children -- even five-year-olds! -- through this process, and attributing it to the child's "choice."  Is it not the height of immorality to hold a child -- manifestly too immature to make life-changing decisions, possibly not even having yet attained the use of reason -- to a whim?  What if the child decides to pretend to be a dog or a cat?  Should he be held to that, even to the extent of being surgically mutilated to look like a dog or a cat?  Where are the laws to protect children from this extreme form of abuse inflicted on them by those whose duty it is to love and care for them?  In the end, where will we get laws to protect adults from this kind of treatment?

Bruce Jenner is not a woman, and he is not a hero for trying to live like one.  He is properly an object of pity, not only on account of his deep disorder but also because he is surrounded by people who do not love him enough to uphold the truth to his face.  And the truth is this.  God made him a man, on purpose, and it is His will that Bruce live like the man he was made to be.  He can put on women's clothes; he can fill himself full of hormones; he can go through the "counseling"; he can pay some quack tens of thousands of dollars to mutilate his body; he can even bully the rest of the world into playing along with his fantasy.  But he can never, ever make himself into something that he is not, much less find happiness in the effort.

More Random Thoughts

-- The secular lay members of the Mystical Body of Christ have their own role to play in the history of salvation and a special dignity all our own that is different from that of priests and religious.  It is crass clericalism of a major order to think that the secular lay faithful are not fully participating in the life of the Church unless we are engaged in a flurry of activity at Mass or otherwise doing things that priests ought to be doing.

-- When we go chasing after imaginary "rights," we forfeit our authentic ones, both for ourselves and for others.  When we start chasing after the "right" to pursue our unbridled passions, even at the price of putting to death unwanted babies in the womb, we forfeit our right to a well-ordered society.  When we start chasing after the "right" of two people of the same sex to enter into "marriage," we forfeit the free exercise of religion.  When we start chasing after the "right" of one spouse to put away the other spouse when he gets tired of her and trade her in for a new model, we forfeit the right of the innocent spouse to a common life and consortium; we forfeit the right of the children to live in an intact family with both mother and father; and we forfeit the property rights of the spouses.

-- That last point bears a little closer examination.  Has anybody besides innocent spouses noticed that no-fault divorce is just a great, big redistribution scheme?  File for divorce, and suddenly, your property isn't your property anymore: the marital estate -- not to mention the separate income of the spouse who makes the most money, even if he is not the one who filed -- gets turned over to the legislature and the courts to distribute as they see fit.  This kind of power in the hands of government perverts the mission of government, which should be to protect society's building-block institutions.  That is why the law favors those who set out to torpedo their families, and leaves those who want to stay together without any recourse.

-- Think you know all about the "Red Scare" and the Hollywood blacklist?  Did you know, for instance, that every single one of the Hollywood Ten was in fact an active member of the Communist Party and had pledged his allegiance to the Soviet Union?  Did you know that, in an effort to gain control over the movie industry, the Communists instigated two bitter, violent and ultimately fruitless strikes of behind-the-scenes studio employees in 1945 and 1946?  Did you know that the blacklist was actually instituted by the studios themselves -- not by the government -- in response to the defiant performance of the Hollywood Ten in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947?  If not, then you need to read Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters: Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler by Allan H. Ryskind.

-- It is always the priests who have to add their little ad-libs to the Mass, or take out parts of the Mass they don't like, who can't faithfully say the black and do the red, who have the greatest reputations for humility and pastoral-mindedness.  This proves that we no longer have a clue in what humility consists.

-- I am happy to be able to report that it has been some years now since I have seen sand or twigs or nothing at all in local holy water fonts during Lent.  But if you are unfortunate enough to live in a place where that foolishness still goes on, don't just take it.  Carry holy water around (REAL holy water, blessed according to the Rituale Romanum -- find a priest willing to do this and create a big supply) and fill the empty fonts, dumping the debris when necessary.

-- Fr. Chad Ripperger is a big proponent of spiritual contracts.  A spiritual contract is when you ask God that, every time you say a particular prayer or do a particular good work, He understand you to be offering that prayer or work for some intention.  That way, you can always pray for the intention even when you are not consciously thinking about it at the time of the prayer or work.  Here is an example of some of my own spiritual contracts.  I like to say the Litany of the Sacred Heart after every Holy Communion.  I have marked particular lines in the Litany with the names of people for whose intention I want to pray every time I say that line.  Sometimes, I just say that line as an aspiration; and every time I do, I am praying for that person.  I also have spiritual contracts tied to some of my daily prayers.  The thought that I am praying for the intentions of people I love every time I say some part of those prayers helps me to persevere in prayer even when I don't feel like it.

-- In these days of institutional rottenness both in the Church and in the secular world, we are told that those who speak out against this rottenness and who try to restore what has been destroyed are "divisive" and "uncharitable."  Bl. Clemens Graf von Galen, the Lion of Münster, teaches us how to respond to this accusation:

My Christians! It will perhaps be held against me that by this frank statement I am weakening the home front of the German people during this war. I, on the contrary, say this: It is not I who am responsible for a possible weakening of the home front, but those who regardless of the war, regardless of this fearful week of terrible air-raids, impose heavy punishments on innocent people without the judgment of a court or any possibility of defence, who evict our religious orders, our brothers and sisters, from their property, throw them on to the street, drive them out of their own country. They destroy men's security under the law, they undermine trust in law, they destroy men's confidence in our government. And therefore I raise my voice in the name of the upright German people, in the name of the majesty of Justice, in the interests of peace and the solidarity of the home front; therefore as a German, an honourable citizen, a representative of the Christian religion, a Catholic bishop, I exclaim: we demand justice! If this call remains unheard and unanswered, if the reign of Justice is not restored, then our German people and our country, in spite of the heroism of our soldiers and the glorious victories they have won, will perish through an inner rottenness and decay.

-- Things in the Church have been so bad for so long that we are ready to leap on any little crumb of comfort -- any tiny sign, for instance, that in fact we have been mistaken all these years about our pastor or our bishop being a doctrinaire leftist, or that reverence will soon be restored in our local parishes -- in the frantic hope that it portends a change for the better.  But once we have devoured that crumb, we see that nothing has really changed, and we feel emptier than ever.  We may  have to endure even worse times before authentic reform comes.  But when it does come, we will not need to wonder whether it is here.  It will be unmistakable.  

Holy Week and "Gender" Politics

With liberals, everything is always about politics, which means the rest of us must constantly be indoctrinated, lest we fail to see the light.  We can't just have music: we have to have some message set to a tune.  We can't just have a novel: we have to have an attitude adjustment.  We can't just have plays or movies: we have to have leftist sermons disguised as entertainment.  Even religion isn't safe from this busybody interference.  We can't just have Holy Mass, or Vespers, or the Rosary, or Stations of the Cross: our once Catholic worship and devotions have to be salted down with a heavy seasoning of philistinism, narcissism, secular humanism and even downright Marxism.  It is always during this, the holiest week of the year, that the top is off the salt-shaker and the spoons and castor oil are out, and we are lined up to take our medicine.  It is time for us once again to be force-fed our annual lessons in "gender" theory, beginning with the reading of the Passion on Palm Sunday and culminating in Holy Thursday with the washing of the feet.

These days, during the reading of the Passion, and while a multitude of men stands around, we have women reading the parts of St. Peter and Pontius Pilate, and men reading the part of the maidservant who confronts St. Peter.  Why is this a big deal?  Because, apart from the fact that it is jarring to hear a woman reading St. Peter's lines, it is obvious that this is not being done out of necessity, since there are plenty of men around; it is clearly being done to make a point, even if those who orchestrate it vehemently deny it.  One grows weary of being peppered by these little points during Mass.  It is hoped that eventually we will grow so used to them that we start ignoring them -- and therein lies the danger.  To ignore them is to be anesthetized, and therefore compliant.  This sort of thing prepares us, gradually, to accept the lie that there is no difference between men and women. Each time one of these little stunts is pulled, that is one more degree added to the temperature of the pot of water that we frogs are sitting in. And the lie has broad and deep implications. If it is true that there is no difference between men and women, and men and women do not each have their proper roles and inclinations ordained by God in virtue of their different endowments, then there is no reason why marriage should only be between one man and one woman; there is no reason why children need both their mothers and their fathers; and ultimately, the union of Christ, the divine Bridegroom, and His spotless Bride, the Church, is a joke.

The gender-bending and general confusion in secular society about the nature of maleness and femaleness is being harnessed by the women's ordination crowd within the Church.  We need to get it through our thick skulls that there is no real difference between the sexes, you see, so that we will realize what an injustice it is that women cannot be ordained to the priesthood.  The inherent dignity of women demands that they have a role at the table too, and not just as sacristans or preparers of meals or on cleaning crews, the argument runs; therefore, women must swarm the sanctuary, must read the male lines in the reading of the Passion, and must have their feet washed -- even though the rubrics of the Mass specify that only men are to have their feet washed, as they symbolize the all-male college of Apostles.  

But this line of thinking betrays a worldly mindset as well as a total lack of understanding of the self-immolation that is the ordained priesthood.  If the inherent dignity of women demands that they have a role "at the table" -- which seems to be how we now think of the Altar of Sacrifice -- why wasn't the Mother of God there at the Last Supper; or, if she was there, why wasn't she mentioned in Scripture? If any woman deserved a place "at the table," surely it was she.  Perhaps the answer is that the Mother of God, rather than standing on her dignity, took her (unglamorous) place at the blood-soaked foot of the Cross, which is identical to the Mass.  Besides: is there something undignified about being a sacristan or preparer of meals or on a cleaning crew?  Generations of saints, including the Mother of God herself, might disagree with such a proposition.   

The Mass is the August Sacrifice of Calvary, where our redemption was won and the powers of hell were decisively defeated; it is not a forum for politicking, and the faithful are not there to serve as a captive audience for liberal propaganda.  For years, the world has been telling us that the sexes are fungible and that sexual identity is purely a societal construct that has nothing to do with nature. This is patently false. Why, then, are we Catholics buying into the gender-bending ideology, and why are we applying it to the Mass?

Idiocracy

For behold the sovereign the Lord of hosts shall take away from Jerusalem, and from Juda the valiant and the strong, the whole strength of bread, and the whole strength of water.  The strong man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet, and the cunning man, and the ancient.  The captain over fifty, and the honourable in countenance, and the counsellor, and the architect, and the skillful in eloquent speech.  And I will give children to be their princes, and the effeminate shall rule over them.  

Isaiah 3:1-4

We Cannot Tame the Spirit of Murder, Part II

Is it possible that the reason for the media's failure to cover arch-abortionist Kermit Gosnell's murder trial is that the details are too shocking and disgusting?  Seems hard to believe in an age when kids spend their days and nights parked in front of gory video games, women regale the United States Congress with details about their promiscuity, liberals bring a peculiar gay sex practice out of the shadows to denigrate the Tea Party movement, and a popular television drama portrays a serial killer as the good guy.  American culture these days sets the bar pretty high on disgusting.

So how has the Gosnell story proven to be too much for a media gluttonous for sensation?  Is it over the top that Gosnell targeted the children of poor women, immigrants and minorities for extermination?  That he plunged scissors into the necks of babies to sever their spinal cords?  That he was in the habit of finishing the job once they were outside the womb?  That he kept chopped-off baby feet around the office?  That he ran his "practice" amid conditions of unspeakable filth?  That he forced patients to undergo abortions after they had changed their minds?  That mothers died or were seriously wounded under his gentle ministrations?  That he employed a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore as part of a school work-study program to assist in actual abortion procedures?  That he got into the abortion industry in the first place?  

Or is it that Gosnell has committed the iniquitous crime of embarrassing the abortion industry by failing to maintain a facade of smiling, healthy, sanitary professionalism?  After all, Roe v. Wade was supposed to eliminate clothes-hanger abortions and put the back-alley butchers out of business.

The ugly truth is that this is what the abortion industry is all about.  An abortion mill can be cleaned and sterilized and cheerful and sunlit, with brightly colored curtains, friendly receptionists and a phalanx of the world's best doctors and nurses; but at least -- at least -- fifty per cent of all those who enter an abortion mill leave it as corpses.  Zero per cent leave unscarred.  Dead, mutilated babies and haunted mothers are what abortion is all about, with or without lab coats, antiseptics and medical degrees.  Abortionists themselves acknowledge that abortion means killing children.

No, the Gosnell blackout probably has to do more with how damaging this story is to the pro-abortion narrative, in which the murder of children in their mothers' wombs is portrayed as a women's health issue.  But it's high time Americans came face-to-face with the realities of this constitutionally protected rite of human sacrifice.

H/T Digital Hairshirt, who also brought us the real face of abortion:

Never forget this face.

We Cannot Tame the Spirit of Murder

As steady readers of this blog know, on the last day of every year, I publish a review of the year's events.  The first time I did this, I didn't actually come up with the idea until New Year's Eve; but since then, I have kept a running draft all year, updating it every few weeks until it's time for it to go up.

Since I have been doing these Year in Review posts, I have noticed one or two societal trends in America.  A particularly disturbing one is the large number of murder sprees that take place in this country every year.  Consider the ones we have seen during the calendar year 2012:

1. February 27th, Chardon, Ohio: a 17-year-old shooter kills three and wounds three at Chardon High School before being apprehended.

2. March 8th, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania: a shooter kills one and wounds seven at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic before being shot dead.

3. April 2nd, Oakland, California: an expelled former student kills 7 and wounds 3 at Oikos University, a Korean Christian college, and later surrenders to authorities.

4. May 15th, Port St. John, Florida: a woman shoots and kills her own four children, then turns the gun on herself.

5. June 10th, Auburn, Alabama: a shooter who later turns himself in to federal agents kills three and wounds three more at a party near Auburn University.

6. July 20th, Aurora, Colorado: a shooter sets off teargas grenades and opens fire inside a crowded movie theatre, killing 12 and wounding 59 before being apprehended.

7. August 5th, Oak Creek, Wisconsin: gunman murders 6 and wounds 4 at a Sikh temple, including one police officer responding to the scene, before being shot by police and then turning the gun on himself.

8. August 16th, LaPlace, Louisiana: in separate incidents, shooters murder two sheriff's deputies and wound two more, before being wounded themselves and/or taken into custody.

9. August 31st, Old Bridge, New Jersey: an employee at a Pathmark grocery store opens fire, killing two before turning the gun on himself. 

10. October 24th, Downey, California: three people are killed and two wounded at a business and a residence two blocks apart.

11. October 30th, Chicago, Illinois: a woman murders her own seven-year-old son and a five-year-old girl she was babysitting, ostensibly out of rage that her husband left her to do menial work she considered beneath her.

12. November 6th, Fresno, California: an employee at a chicken-processing plant shoots four of his co-workers execution-style, killing two, before turning the gun on himself.

13. November 30th, Casper, Wyoming: a killer using something on the order of a bow and arrow murders his father's girlfriend, then goes to Casper College and murders his father, then kills himself.

14. December 1, Kansas City, Missouri: Jovan Belcher, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker, murders his live-in girlfriend in front of his mother, then goes to Arrowhead Stadium and commits suicide in front of his coach and several others.

15. December 11, Happy Valley, Oregon: a shooter opens fire inside the Clackamas Town Center mall, killing two and wounding one before committing suicide.

16. December 14, Newtown, Connecticut: the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

Consider that the nation recoiled in horror at the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago, when seven thugs were murdered by some other thugs in a gang war between Al Capone and Bugs Moran.  Such was the public outrage over this butchery that the Massacre marked the beginning of the end for Capone.  Now, in addition to the criminal-on-criminal home invasions and drive-by shootings among gang-bangers in cities, we have a massacre nearly every month, sometimes more than one in a month, all over the country, and frequently at random.

We may well ask why.  But the better question is: why not?  In a country where the murder of babies in their mothers' wombs is enshrined as a constitutional right, where embryos are created and frozen and experimented on and mingled with the genes of animals, and where euthanasia is legal in several states, an explosion of violence was inevitable.  Did we really think we could make the spirit of murder our servant, drawing curtains and closing doors on it, imprisoning it inside clinics and laboratories and bending it to our will?  We were deluding ourselves.

Come, Lord Jesus!

I Am in the Wrong Line of Work

This:

Source.

...just sold at auction for $34 million.  This is the highest price ever paid for a...work?...by a living artist.  The creator of this alleged masterpiece, Gerhard Richter, is the same who is responsible for defacing Cologne Cathedral with a dreadful pixel-window, an unworthy replacement for a stained glass window destroyed during the Second World War.

But back to the $34 million junk pictured above.  Who are the biggest suckers in this scenario?  The critics who praise this delerium tremens to the skies?  The anonymous party who forked over a king's ransom to get it?  Or the rest of us working slobs who bust our butts for peanuts, when we could be covering ourselves in paint, rolling around on a piece of canvas, and selling the product for eight figures?

I know I'm in the wrong line of work.      

What We Are Up Against, Part II

Times have gotten pretty tough in this country since Obama was elected.  Unemployment is up to 8.1%.  Gas prices have gone through the roof, and with them, the price of groceries.  (Seen tonight at my local Fred Meyer: $9.00 and change for a single 12-pack of root beer. !!!!)  Government has used billions in taxpayer money to bail out banks and take over the auto industry.  Government has taken over health care.  The administration has declared war on the Catholic Church.  The Democrat party has come out against God and in favor of abortion and gay "marriage."  But even all this doesn't mean we can count on Obama being voted out of office in November.

And our friends at Charleston Thug Life gives us some insight into why.  Study the outpourings of the children of the welfare state juggernaut.  And then consider that they, too, vote (felony convictions or not).  And they don't want anybody messing with their "free" stuff.

Children of the welfare state on Section 8

Children of the welfare state on EBT

What we have with some of the commentators featured in these posts is a major subset of the Obama constituency.  They know next to nothing about history or economics or any other aspect of how the world works, but they feel really good about themselves and consider themselves entitled to be supported for free, so they can devote all their time to hedonistic pursuits.  When people of their mindset get to be the majority in this country, we're done.  Kaput.  Finito.  If indeed we're not already done, kaput, finito.

The other major subset of the Obama constituency is the elitists who dole out the bread and the circuses to the first major subset, convincing them that they belong at the bottom, so that the elitists can more easily run their lives.  Their natural enemies are those who are productive and who own property, because these are still mired in the old-fashioned, "natural law" superstitions about the rights that flow from the ownership of private property.  The goal of the elitists is to accumulate so much power that they needn't care what the children of the welfare state or anybody else think or want.  At that point, they can just kill anybody who opposes them.

Before you get all mad and start throwing around accusations of racism, remember that it is unsafe to assume the following: (1) that the people who run Charleston Thug Life are a bunch of whites; (2) that blacks and other minorities are happy about having to bust their humps to so that those who don't work can have luxuries working stiffs must deny themselves.  And before you dismiss all this as hysterical right-wing ravings, consider the appalling things our culture is now full of that would have been unthinkable just a quarter-century ago: obscene language and soft-core pornography on prime-time television; same-sex "marriage" legalized in many states; the gay lifestyle being taught to grade-schoolers; child molesters lobbying to declassify pedophilia as a mental disorder.  Now that we have cut ourselves loose from our Judeo-Christian moorings, ours is a society in which the unthinkable quickly morphs into the commonplace.

And the time to begin reversing this trend is running out.  

"I Be Concubining" II: Supercharged

A girl must be like a blossom

With honey for just one man. 

A man must be like honey bee 

And gather all he can. 

To fly from blossom to blossom 

A honey bee must be free, 

But blossom must not ever fly 

From bee to bee to bee. 

-- "Song of the King," from The King and I

Five years ago, we heard from the convicted thief in Avondale, Ohio whose bid for leniency in front of the court included the plea that he had been "concubining" with various women and had six babies on the way.  Like the sentencing judge, we thought that was a pretty big jaw-dropper.

But that was because we hadn't yet met the Grand-babydaddy of Concubining, Mr. Desmond Hatchett of Knoxville, Tennessee.  Mr. Hatchett, who must be like the honey bee and gather all he can, has thirty (30) children by eleven (11) different blossoms.  "I had four kids in the same year.  Twice," he says by way of partial explanation.

But it's turning out that this honey bee, not being as wealthy as the King of Siam, is not in fact as free as all that, or gathering very much either, flying from blossom to blossom to blossom.  He's finding out the hard way that (a) the authorities are not going to let him get away with not supporting his children, but (b) you can't support thirty (30) kids on minimum wage, which means (c) half his wages (the legal maximum) are garnished, and (d) he's in constant trouble with the courts.  Yet (e) he fathered nine of these children within the last three years, proving that (f) it still hasn't occurred to him to keep his britches zipped.

Nevertheless, Hatchett is seeking a break on his child support payments.  Some of his kids -- ranging in age from toddler to 14 years -- are collecting the princely sum of $1.49 a month.

Are the taxpayers going to let these kids starve?  Of course not.  Nor should we.  It's not their fault that they were born to such rotten parents.  But thanks to the wanton irresponsibility of Desmond Hatchett and the idiot women who spread their legs for him, coupled with the immorality of the welfare state that encourages them to continue in their follies, these kids start life at great risk for living in poverty, being the victims of violence at the hands of the other jerks their mothers bed down with, getting involved in drugs and other criminal activity, and generally ending up as losers like their parents.

So what's the answer?  Contraceptives are not the answer.  This guy is the product of a society that has eaten, slept and breathed contraceptives for decades, as evidenced by his willingness to use numerous women as masturbatory aids.  Abortion -- the compounding of sexual abandon with murder -- is certainly not the answer.

The answer lies in the last place few people in today's world are willing to look.  Two thousand years ago, a Man born in a stable and crucified on Calvary gave us the perfect system for avoiding situations like Desmond Hatchett's and the dreadful plight of his thirty unfortunate children.  The only trouble with it, from the point of view of honey bees and blossoms like Hatchett and his concubines, is that it compels one to make sacrifices.  But a little self-denial goes a long way, and living a virtuous life is a great antidote to indentured servitude.

H/T Charleston Thug Life.