"It was a sad day for the moonbat community"

Howie Carr sums up my feelings on the passing of the Venezuelan Dear Leader:

Moonbats mourn another Red thug

Say it ain’t so, Joe, or should I say Jose? 

Poor Joe Kennedy, mourning the loss of his grand amigo, “El Comandante,” the tinpot Latin American thug who put the “profit” back in “non-profit” for the Kennedy kleptocracy. 

How can Hugo be dead, Joe? He went to Cuba for medical treatment. They took him straight to the hospital from the airport in a DeSoto ambulance.

Let’s go right to the Joe K press release: 

“President Chavez cared deeply about the poor … while some of the wealthiest people on our planet have more money than they can ever reasonably expect to spend.” 

Damn right, comrade! Es verdad. For the 
record, according to 2011 tax filings, Comrade Joe made $901,236 from Citizens Energy and related corporations. His lovely bride, Beth, grabbed another $346,764. 

Total: $1,248,000. 

Now the jockeying begins. Who will lead the Massachusetts delegation to the funeral in Caracas? Who will get top billing, the congressional delegation or the Kennedys, or do I repeat myself? 

For some reason the sleazy Democrat pols around here have always had the hots for these Latin American Reds. Like his late boss Joe Moakley, Jim McGovern’s always had a crush on Fidel Castro. Maybe he’s jealous of all the hair. Joe K was always Chavez’s kept Kennedy, although Bill Delahunt gushed over him like a teenage girl infatuated with a mutant, pineapple-faced Justin Bieber. 

The local solons are all going to have to find some new rear ends to kiss.
It was a sad day for the moonbat community.
The People’s Republics of Cambridge and Amherst rushed to lower their flags to half staff first. A spontaneous candlelight vigil erupted in Muddy River. Funeral dirges played endlessly on the NPR stations, like Radio Moscow when Uncle Joe passed. Someone dimmed the lights at the Globe, causing an immediate panic in the newsroom, where the fops 
assumed the newspaper was finally being shut down. 

Yes, the media fell all over itself 
lionizing the Mussolini 

of South America. The AP hagiography was slightly longer than “War and Peace.” Talk about gushing: 

“Fiery populist ... 
socialist ideals … outsmarted his rivals … electrified … folksy … larger-than-life … master communicator and savvy political strategist … championing his country’s poor.” 

The only thing the AP forgot to say about El Comandante was that he kept the drugs out of Southie. 

Hey Joe Kennedy, when’s the next plane out to Tehran? I hear the mullahs are looking for a new shill.

What Chavez did to Venezuela is what the Left wants to do to us. They want power, and will step on anyone they have to to get it.

One of their hero thugs bit the dust, and they mourn.

Gangsters.

A.C. Grayling: 'Atheism is like not-stamp-collecting'

Atheist A.C. Grayling, in his book The God Argument, makes this argument:

“Atheism is to theism as not stamp-collecting is to stamp-collecting.”

 According to Grayling, 'not being a stamp-collector' merely

“denotes only the open-ended and negative state of not collecting stamps”. [By analogy, not being a theist] “does not even begin to enter the domain of discourse in which these beliefs have their life and content”.

Grayling recaps a perennial modern atheist argument: atheism entails no positive beliefs. It is merely the denial of the existence of gods.

Bullshit.

Atheism in the West (I will ignore atheist beliefs in the East) entails a very specific body of positive atheist doctrine.

All atheists believe:


1) Philosophical naturalism.

2) Darwinism (some variant of it).

3) Human beings are qualitatively no different from animals.

4) There is no transcendent purpose to life.

5) Human existence ends at death.

6) There is no individual personal accountability after death for evil committed in life.

7) There is no objective moral law (i.e. moral law that transcends human opinion).

The list can go on and on-- feel free to add to the atheist Nicene Creed. 

Atheists deny the obvious positive nature of their beliefs for rhetorical reasons: they wish to disparage religious belief as practiced in the world without having to explain atheist belief as practiced in the world. Tarring the Catholic Church with the Spanish Inquisition loses some of it's punch when the tar is applied by Pol Pot's bed-mates. 

It's fair to say that atheists probably share more positive beliefs in common than Christians do. A liberal atheist in Washington D.C. would ascribe to basically the same metaphysical nostrums listed above as a Marxist atheist in Moscow or a libertarian atheist in Silicon Valley. Atheists differ politically, but they march in metaphysical goose-step.

In contrast, a conservative Southern Baptist minister probably holds metaphysical views that are quite different from a liberal Anglican priest, including major differences on Christ's divinity, virgin birth, resurrection as well as on Darwinism and the nature of moral law and accountability after death. 

Atheism entails a remarkably consistent metaphysical cannon, shared without variation by Ayn Rand and Lucretius and Madelyn Murray O'Hare and Karl Marx and Martin Bormann and Richard Dawkins and the herd of 'freethinkers' of every epoch and at every point of the political and cultural spectrum.

The lock-step consistency of atheist metaphysical dogma is without parallel in any religion.

Atheism is most emphatically not merely the absence of belief in gods. Atheism is a very specific positive ideology-- a rigid dogma. No gods. No transcendence. No transcendent purpose. No life after death. No accountability after death. No objective moral law. No other religion manifests such consistency of dogma across cultures, nations and generations.

Atheist ideology has been of momentous consequence since it first gained control of a nation-state in 1792. The 20th century was the century of State Atheism.

Atheism is a much more tenacious system of dogma than Christianity. 

HT: Jerry Coyne

"Why we fight"

James Delingpole has a great essay explaining why he fights enviro-nazis with such vigor.

Am I angry with these scumbags? You bet I am. Do I think they deserve the unpleasant epithets I cast at them? Absolutely not – they deserve insults far nastier and more graphic than I could ever get away with delivering in a family newspaper. 

Yes, I know there are those who think I sometimes go over the top in the way I sledge the opposition. But this is not a criticism I'm going to buy – or ever will buy. Did Churchill ever issue a wartime directive that, following complaints submitted by the German embassy in Dublin, soldiers should refrain from singing hurtful songs about Herr Hitler's monotesticular status? Not as far as I can recall. In war, all is fair game. When the other side behaves badly, it deserves to be called on it – in the most explicit terms possible – not excused on the dubious grounds that if we're a bit nicer to the Imperial Japanese Army and don't draw any nasty cartoons depicting them with buck teeth and thick spectacles maybe next time they'll desist from tying wounded prisoners to trees and using them for bayonet practice. 

As I argue at the end of Watermelons, there's only one side in this debate which considers it acceptable or desirable to:

Rig public enquiries, hound blameless people out of their jobs, breach Freedom of Information laws, abuse the scientific method, lie, threaten, bribe, cheat, adopt nakedly political positions in taxpayer-funded academic and advisory posts that ought to be strictly neutral, trample on property rights, destroy rainforests, drive up food prices (causing unrest in the Middle East and starvation in the Third World), raise taxes, remove personal freedoms, artificially raise energy prices, featherbed rent-seekers, blight landscapes, deceive voters, twist evidence, force everyone to use expensive, dim light bulbs, frighten schoolchildren, bully adults, increase unemployment, destroy democratic accountability, take control of global governance and impose a New World Order. 

And it most definitely ain't the people on my side of the argument.

Delingpole has done a great job telling the truth about the global warming scam and about the deeply anti-human agenda of the green fanatics. His term "watermelons" is apt-- environmental crazies are green on the outside and red on the inside. Environmentalism is a veneer covering a quite classical far-left agenda of control over every intimate aspect of your life, including the air you exhale.

This fight really matters. There people are dead serious, and they want power. They are willing to sacrifice millions of lives-- they already have sacrificed scores of millions of lives-- to gain control over governments and economies.

Delingpole has been fighting the good fight for a while now. I wholeheartedly recommend his book Watermelons. It's a great expose of the green totalitarians, and it's available on Kindle!  

The Papables

Who will be the next Pope? It's a question of enormous importance, and Business Insider gives us a list of likely candidates, with odds!

One Of These Men Will Be The Next Pope

My guess would be Cardinal Turkson. He is a brilliant, energetic and holy man and he would strengthen the Church in Africa, where Christ is sorely needed among the strife and suffering.

Cardinal Turkson is charismatic and his communication skills are excellent, which is becoming very important for a media-age papacy.

Of course I thought Romney was a shoo-in, so...

"You don't need a cardinal to answer that."

Cardinal Arinze on "personally opposed but pro-choice" abortion politics:



Cardinal Arinze is considered highly papable-- he is certainly near the top of the list of candidates to succeed Pope Benedict in the Conclave in March.

Sometimes a picture helps

:-/

The media on Benedict's last day

The Media Research Center has a great post on Pope Benedict's last day at the Vatican.

A frail, ailing 85-year-old man announces he doesn’t have the strength to continue as the spiritual leader of 1.2 billion people. With the humility of one whose entire life has been in service to God and his Church, he says he will retire to quietly live out his remaining years. 

ABC, CBS and NBC have never been fans of Pope Benedict XVI. They saw the former Cardinal Ratzinger as a “hard-liner” for “strenuously condemning divorce, homosexuality, and abortion,” as ABC’s Dan Harris put it in 2008. But the broadcast networks’ coverage of Benedict and the Catholic Church in the weeks since he announced his retirement has been bizarre – relentless negativity punctuated by often inappropriate humor and personal attacks. 

From Benedict’s Feb. 11 resignation through the evening of Feb. 27, the day before it took effect, the networks referred to the Catholic Church as a troubled institution 122 times and aired the word “scandal” 87 times in 112 reports. Anchors and reporters suggested that the Church must modernize (32 times) and pressed for change in issues regarding women (7 times) and gays (13 times). At times, they trivialized the first resignation of a Pope since the 1500s as “worthy of a Dan Brown novel.”(ABC’s Harris again.) and sensationalized it by entertaining theories about other reasons Benedict might be stepping down. 

The night before the Pope’s resignation took effect, ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos said he was “known as God’s Rottweiler.”

For Catholics and all Christians, the understandable reaction to the media's reprehensible bias and obvious hated of the Church is deep outrage. It's my reaction.

But we have so much to celebrate here. Not only should we celebrate the Pope and his magnificent Pontificate, and the grace-filled Church-- institutional and mystical-- for which he provided such superb human guidance.

We should also celebrate our enemies.

The world hates us. The Church has no armies, and no tangible secular power. The Vatican is a nation of 110 acres surrounded by a world with powers that could crush it physically with only a wisp of effort.

But the Church obsesses them. They fight us continuously, in every venue, using every tactic. The purveyors of secular power and sin know that their only implacable enemy on earth is an elderly bishop and an institutional and mystical Church of a billion and a half Christians who love God and who strive, however imperfectly, to live in union with His Spirit.

The world hates us with such passionate intensity because we-- in service to the Lord we love-- are the only real limit on its power.