Look7777777 – New Culture Watch – 2009.01.21


Sandro Magister
Faith By Numbers. When Ratzinger Puts on Galileo’s Robes
[faith & reason, mathematics, maths / wiara i rozum / matematyka]
[Benedict XVI: Mathematics, which we invented, really gives us access to the nature of the universe and makes it possible for us to use it. Therefore, the intellectual structure of the human subject and the objective structure of reality coincide: the subjective reason and the objective reason of nature are identical. / In the end, to reach the definitive question I would say: God exists or he does not exist. There are only two options. Either one recognizes the priority of reason, of creative Reason that is at the beginning of all things and is the principle of all things – the priority of reason is also the priority of freedom – or one holds the priority of the irrational, inasmuch as everything that functions on our earth and in our lives would be only accidental, marginal, an irrational result – reason would be a product of irrationality. One cannot ultimately 'prove' either project, but the great option of Christianity is the option for rationality and for the priority of reason.]
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/213210?eng=y


A legacy online: Tom Fahy on Jamendo

http://blog.jamendo.com/2008/09/04/a-legacy-online-tom-fahy-on-jamendo/

Tom Fahy @ Jamendo.com
[free download, free mp3, free music]
http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/Tom_Fahy


Stefan Blankertz
Has the State Always Been There? How Tribal Anarchy Works
http://www.liberalia.com/htm/sb_tribal_anarchy.htm

Święty Klemens Hofbauer
[kościół św. Benona w Warszawie]
http://www.cssr.com/polski/saintsblessed/sthofbauer.shtml

Jacek Salij OP
Znamię Bestii
[chipy, czipy, Apokalipsa św. Jana, Bestia, piętno Bestii]
http://www.mateusz.pl/wdrodze/nr424/18.htm


Mike Gogulski
You are not the bank’s customer
http://www.nostate.com/1478/you-are-not-the-banks-customer/

Roy Halliday
Vigilantes of Montana by Thomas J. Dimsdale
[private production of security, compensation for the victim]
http://libertariannation.org/a/f72h2.html

Theodore Dalrymple
Tough Love
[sexual revolution leads to violence, jealousy, wife beaters]
http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_1_oh_to_be.html


Kathleen Naab
Saying Yes to Life — 19 Times (Part 1)
[Interview on Parenting a Large Catholic Family, James and Kathleen Littleton]
http://www.zenit.org/article-24758?l=english

Kathleen Naab
Saying Yes to Life — 19 Times (Part 2)
[Interview on Parenting a Large Catholic Family, James and Kathleen Littleton]
[Kathleen Littleton: “We have found that love multiplies itself. In other words, the more one loves, the more one can love. With each new child, our love as parents has grown and multiplied. Our love has increased, not diminished. . . . The human heart is capable of an infinite amount of love, as it is created in God's image.”]
http://www.zenit.org/article-24764?l=english

Brainpolice
On The Relationship Between Libertarianism, Anarchism and Values
http://polycentricorder.blogspot.com/2009/01/on-relationship-between-libertarianism.html


Maciej Dudek
Porządek anarchiczny
http://libertarianizm.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/porzadek-anarchiczny/

Benjamin D. Wiker
The Meaning of Marriage
http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=71&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=100

Raniero Cantalamessa OFMCap
„When the Fullness of Time Had Come God Sent His Son Born of a Woman” – Father Cantalamessa’s 3rd Advent Meditation
[St. Paul’s and St. John’s routes in the discovery of who Jesus Christ is. Jesus “born of a woman”. The imitation of Mary. Interruptions of maternity. Spiritual abortions. “Fiat” and “Amen”.]
http://www.zenit.org/article-24619?l=english


Gold rush erupts amid financial crisis
http://www.gata.org/node/7078

Edward McNamara LC
Applause at Homilies (And More on Substituting the Sunday Liturgy)
http://www.zenit.org/article-24843?l=english

Maya Filipič @ Jamendo.com
[free download, free mp3, free music]
http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/Maya_Filipic


Elizabeth Lev
„Santa” at the Embassy; a Toast for Christ
[French cuisine & St. Thomas Aquinas]
http://www.zenit.org/article-24610?l=english

Benjamin Tucker
State Socialism and Anarchism
[from: Instead Of A Book, By A Man Too Busy To Write One (1897)]
[Josiah Warren, Pierre J. Proudhon, Karl Marx]
http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/state-socialism-and-anarchism

Emilia Żochowska
Solo na pile
http://solonapile.blogspot.com/


Stanisław Michalkiewicz
Tradycja herodowa
[człowiek nienarodzony, nienarodzone dziecko, aborcja]
http://www.michalkiewicz.pl/tekst.php?tekst=609

Kathleen Gilbert
Noted Atheist Says if You Believe, You Should Proselytize – Or do you Hate Enough Not to?
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/dec/08122207.html

Benedykt XVI
Papieska homilia z Pasterki
[Pasterka 2008, 24 XII 2008]
http://www.sanctus.pl/index.php?module=aktualnosci&grupa=&podgrupa=&strona=1&id=941&kategoria=3


Cory Doctorow
Scroogled
http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/09/google_fiction_evil_dangerous_surveillance_control_1.php

Maciej Dudek
Organizacje bez władz
http://libertarianizm.wordpress.com/2009/01/03/organizacje-bez-wladz/

Jacek Salij OP
Prawo natury
[prawo naturalne]

http://mateusz.pl/ksiazki/js-sd/Js-sd_22.htm


Vatican Filter of Italian Law Takes Effect
http://www.zenit.org/article-24708?l=english

The Seattle Catholic – A Journal of Catholic News and Views
Archives from 2001 to 2006
http://www.seattlecatholic.com/

Sue Ellin Browder
Why Condoms Will Never Stop AIDS In Africa
http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=182&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=12


Anarchia, Agora, Akcja – Wywiad z Samem E. Konkinem 3
[Wywiad: Samuel E. Konkin III, agoryzm, wolny rynek, kontrekonomia]
http://liberalis.pl/2008/05/18/anarchia-agora-akcja-wywiad-z-samem-e-konkinem-3/

Vincent McNabb OP
Fr. McNabb Speaks – Over-Production or Under-Consumption?
[production is for the sake of consumption]
http://distributist.blogspot.com/2008/02/fr-mcnabb-speaks-over-production-or.html

Carmen Elena Villa
What Parents of Sick Children Need Most
[Pietro Schiliro / Valter and Adele Schiliro / miraculous cure through intercession of Zelie and Louis Martin]
http://www.zenit.org/article-24782?l=english


Keith Preston
The 60s Radicals Have Won – Now What?
http://attackthesystem.com/2008/12/the-60s-radicals-have-won-now-what/

Terry Jones
Saint John Nepomucene Neumann
http://saints.sqpn.com/saintj08.htm

Mike Gogulski
Dear tool
http://www.nostate.com/1332/dear-tool/


giancarlo
You forgot to mention a few tools…
[A response to Mike Gogulski’s Dear tool; legitimizing tool of the State]
http://www.nostate.com/1332/dear-tool/#comment-1626

Terry Jones
Saint Lucian of Antioch
[copying, copyists, exact copy, Lucian Recension, “I am a Christian”]
http://saints.sqpn.com/saintl48.htm

Theodore Dalrymple
Beauty and the Best
[In a sense, everything that human beings do is original, for even if they want to they cannot exactly copy one another. / Beauty is a fragile and vulnerable quality, and moreover one that is difficult to achieve; ugliness, by contrast, is unbreakable and invulnerable, and very easy to achieve.]
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/30265/sec_id/30265


Matthew Alderman
„Free-Floating Molecules in the Vast Vacuum of Art”
http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2009/01/free-floating-molecules-in-vast-vacuum.html

Quote of the Week: Adrienne von Speyr
[Apostasy is the sin that forever generates new sin.]
http://vox-nova.com/2009/01/07/quote-of-the-week-adrienne-von-speyr/

Robert LeFevre
Autarchy
http://fair-use.org/rampart-journal/1966/06/autarchy


Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
A Military Chaplain Repents
[An interview with Rev. George B. Zabelka, a Catholic chaplain with the U.S. Army Air Force; the atomic bomb; Hiroshima; Nagasaki]
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/mccarthy5.html

enigmax
Happy Birthday Mininova, 4 Years Young Today
http://torrentfreak.com/happy-birthday-mininova-4-years-young-today-090115/

Bobbie Johnson
Richard Stallman: The high priest of hi-tech who shuns technology
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/17/richard-stallman-computer-programming


Nick Farrell
„Terrible” people get mobile phones
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/489/1050489/-terrible-people-mobile-phones

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Merrill Lynch says rich want gold bars, not gold paper
http://www.gata.org/node/7073

Stephan
‘We’ Did That?
http://democracysucks.wordpress.com/2008/12/20/we-did-that/


Kwartalnik “Pamięć i przyszłość” – rozmowa z Kornelem Morawieckim
[Kornel Morawiecki, Solidarność Walcząca]
http://solidarni.org/wolni_i_solidarni/opracowania/wywiady/wywiad_dla_kwartalnika_pip

Louis Beam
Leaderless Resistance
http://www.louisbeam.com/leaderless.htm

Markus Bergstrom
Israel and Palestine: A Statist War
[stateless society, Israel, Palestine, Jews, Israelis, Palestinians]
http://mises.org/story/3285


Mark R. Crovelli
The Catholic Church’s Confused Ideas About Stealing
http://voluntaryist.com/forthcoming/confusedideas.php

Royce Christian

The Counter Economy Lives!
http://urbandissent.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/the-counter-economy-lives/

Rob Costlow
Reconstruction
[free download, free mp3, free music]
http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/36218





Look7777777 – New Culture Watch – 2008.12.19

Kongregacja Nauki Wiary
Instrukcja Dignitas personae dotycząca niektórych problemów bioetycznych, 12 grudnia 2008
http://www.opoka.org.pl/biblioteka/W/WR/kongregacje/kdwiary/dignitas_personae_12122008.html

Samuel E. Konkin III
New Libertarian Manifesto
http://www.agorism.info/NewLibertarianManifesto.pdf

Benedykt XVI
Przemówienie do przedstawicieli świata kultury
(Paryż, Kolegium Bernardynów, 12 września 2008 r.)
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2008/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080912_parigi-cultura_pl.html


Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Autobiography
http://www.wikilivres.info/wiki/Autobiography_(Chesterton)

FSK
Agorist Philosophy Overview
http://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/2007/09/agorist-philosophy-overview.html

Neil Postman
Informing Ourselves To Death
http://www.frostbytes.com/~jimf/informing.html


Lawrence OP’s photostream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paullew/

Hallowedground – Traditional Catholic Visualism
http://hallowedground.wordpress.com/

Peter T. Leeson
An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization
http://www.peterleeson.com/An-arrgh-chy.pdf


Terry Jones
Saint Nicholas Owen
http://saints.sqpn.com/saint-nicholas-owen/

Shawn Tribe
35th Anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Death: The Liturgical Thoughts of a Prominent Literary Catholic
http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2008/09/35th-anniversary-of-jrr-tolkiens-death.html

David Gross
On The Picket Line: How I live up to my values by resisting federal taxes
http://sniggle.net/Experiment/


Carmen Villa
Atheist Looks to Christianity for Hope
http://www.zenit.org/article-24494?l=english

a_maciek
przemysł uspokajania
http://wolnekielce.blox.pl/2008/11/przemysl-uspokajania.html

Dale Amon
Real Money
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2008/12/real_money.html


Sławomir Jagodziński
Dialog to nie przykrywka dla hipokryzji – Rozmowa z ks. prof. Waldemarem Chrostowskim
http://www.bibula.com/?p=3870

Matthew Hadro
Catholic Bishop to Defy Freedom of Choice Act, if it Becomes Law
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=40075

Anarch
Chiński kapitalizm
http://liberalis.pl/2008/10/16/anarch-chinski-kapitalizm/


Paranoid Linux
http://paranoidlinux.org/

Terry Jones
Blessed John Beche
http://saints.sqpn.com/blessed-john-beche/

Terry Nelson
Servants of Relief of Incurable Cancer
http://terry58.stblogs.com/2008/09/30/servants-of-relief-of-incurable-cancer/


Ketil Bjørnstad
The Light – Songs Of Love And Fear
http://www.ketilbjornstad.com/musician/the_light_liner_notes.htm

ks. Józef Tischner
Rekolekcje z Antonim Kępińskim
http://www2.tygodnik.com.pl/wydarzenia/dni-tischner/dni10.php

Niccolo Adami
Anarchism, Terrorism, and the Question of Legitimate Violence
http://catholicmarketanarchy.blogspot.com/2007/11/anarchism-terrorism-and-question-of.html


a_maciek
WIOSNA [kamery, monitoring]
http://wolnekielce.blox.pl/2007/03/WIOSNA.html

Kent McManigal
Opening the „Borders”… Why?
http://kentmcmanigal.blogspot.com/2008/09/opening-borders-why.html

Terry Jones
Saint Jeanne de Chantal
http://saints.sqpn.com/saintj22.htm


IrishOutlaw
The Greatest Trick The Devil Ever Pulled…
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/irishoutlaw/archive/2008/04/01/the-greatest-trick-the-devil-ever-pulled.aspx

Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Beyond Distributism
http://www.acton.org/commentary/479_beyond_distributism.php

Wilton D. Alston
How Do We Get to Anarchist Utopia?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/alston/alston51.html


Msza Pontyfikalna w Zamościu
http://sanctus.pl/index.php?grupa=215&podgrupa=423&doc=373

Benedict XVI
Homily for St. Lawrence Jubilee Year
http://www.zenit.org/article-24430?l=english

Terry Jones
Saint Silvanus
http://saints.sqpn.com/saint-silvanus/


Mike Gogulski
Confrontation with bureaucracy, part 1
http://www.nostate.com/1171/confrontation-with-bureaucracy-part-1/

Mike Gogulski
Confrontation with bureaucracy, part 3
http://www.nostate.com/1201/confrontation-with-bureaucracy-part-3/

Mike Gogulski
I surrendered my US passport today
http://www.nostate.com/1206/i-surrendered-my-us-passport-today/


Mike Gogulski
Press Release – Bratislava resident renounces American citizenship, becomes stateless person
http://www.nostate.com/1227/press-release/

John Henry Newman
Ceremonies of the Church – Sermon for the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord
http://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume2/sermon7.html
(Fragmenty kazania w tłumaczeniu na język polski:
http://christianitas.pl/?sr=!czytaj&id=83&dz=6&x=3&pocz=0&gr=)

Joe Gould, Clare Trapasso and Rich Schapiro
Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2008/11/28/2008-11-28_worker_dies_at_long_island_walmart_after.html?print=1&page=all


Danny Shahar
The Glue Man
http://libertarian-left.blogspot.com/2008/02/glue-man.html

Danny Shahar
The Glue Man, Part II
http://libertarian-left.blogspot.com/2008/02/glue-man-part-ii.html

Chuck
St Nicholas and the Two Thieves
http://hubpages.com/hub/St_Nicholas_and_the_Two_Thieves


Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap
Life After Death – Gospel Commentary for All Souls
http://www.zenit.org/article-24129?l=english

St. John Roberts
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13098c.htm

Seven Martyrs at Samosata
http://saints.sqpn.com/def82001.htm


Franciszek L. Ćwik
Po wizycie w Lourdes rozstałem się z masonami – Rozmowa z dr. med. Maurice’em Cailletem
http://www.naszdziennik.pl/index.php?typ=my&dat=20081209&id=my31.txt

Zoe Romanowsky
Intriguing Bhutan gets a free press
http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Intriguing-Bhutan-gets-a-free-press.html&Itemid=127

Benedict XVI
Cappella Papale For The Opening Of The 12th Ordinary General Assembly Of The Synod Of Bishops – Homily Of His Holiness Benedict XVI, 5 October 2008
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2008/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20081005_apertura-sinodo_en.html


Stanisław Michalkiewicz
Co mówi Londyn?
http://www.michalkiewicz.pl/tekst.php?tekst=578

Bł. kard. Schuster: Liturgia a pobożność prywatna (cz. 1)
http://nowyruchliturgiczny.blogspot.com/2008/12/b-kard-suchster-liturgia-pobono.html

Julie Henry
Words associated with Christianity and British history taken out of children’s dictionary
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3569045/Words-associated-with-Christianity-and-British-history-taken-out-of-childrens-dictionary.html


Church Is a Body, Not a Corporation, Affirms Pope
http://www.zenit.org/article-24521?l=english

Gideon Rachman
And now for a world government
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7a03e5b6-c541-11dd-b516-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1

Cory Doctorow
Content
http://craphound.com/content/download/


Ernesto
The Pirate Bay Celebrates 5th Anniversary
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-celebrates-5th-anniversary-081126/

Что такое настоящий кризис (26 фото) (Inflation in Zimbabwe)
http://cityzone.ru/index.php?newsid=3546

Karty kredytowe – pytanie do specjalistów
http://www.libertarianizm.mypunbb.com/viewtopic.php?id=57033


Arnd Wiegmann and Lisa Jucca
‘People used to buy certificates. Now they want physical gold.’
http://www.gata.org/node/7005

Jacek Salij OP
Zerwanie zakazanego owocu
http://www.mateusz.pl/wdrodze/nr423/23.htm

Sandro Magister
And It Was Night. The Real Story of Original Sin
[Benedict XVI
Adam and Christ: from original sin to freedom]
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/212913?eng=y


Komunia Święta do ust i na klęcząco
http://www.fidelitas.pl/1940.html

Stephan
Personal preference regarding the State vs Anarchism
http://democracysucks.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/personal-preference-regarding-the-state-vs-anarchism/

Amin
Przed czym uratował mnie generał Jaruzelski
http://malleus.salon24.pl/106721,index.html


Fr. Jay Toborowsky
parish suggestion follow-up [Church & football]
http://youngfogeys.blogspot.com/2008/12/parish-suggestion-follow-up.html

Simon Dale
A Low Impact Woodland Home [hobbit house]
http://www.simondale.net/house/index.htm

Raniero Cantalamessa, OFMCap
“Spe Gaudentes – Joyful in Hope” – Advent sermon delivered in the presence of Benedict XVI, 21 December 2007
http://www.cantalamessa.org/en/predicheView.php?id=224


Terry Nelson
I knew this [Homosexuality]
http://terry58.stblogs.com/2008/12/06/i-knew-this/

Andrew Orlowski
Google cranks up the Consensus Engine
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/12/googlewashing_revisited/print.html

Avery Cardinal Dulles
The Population of Hell
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=488


Roger Young
[Strike The Root Blog] Image Review of the Week [December 14th, 2008]
http://www.strike-the-root.com/wp/archives/297

Morning’s Minion
“If You Are Going to Follow Jesus, You Have to Quit”
http://vox-nova.com/2008/12/03/if-you-are-going-to-follow-jesus-you-have-to-quit/

Kent McManigal
Conspiracy Theories
http://kentmcmanigal.blogspot.com/2008/12/conspiracy-theories.html


William N. Grigg
Leviathan Devours a Family
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2008/12/leviathan-devours-family.html

Royce Christian
A great tool and resource – A compendium of comebacks to common cliches [concerning anarchy / anarchism]
http://urbandissent.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/an-great-tool-and-resource/

A 2003 letter of Cardinal Ratzinger to Dr Heinz-Lothar Barth
http://catholicphilippines.blogspot.com/2008/02/2003-letter-of-cardinal-ratzinger-re.html

Look7777777 – New Culture Watch – 2008.11.30

_______

Dominacja w kościołach zreformowanej liturgii musiała w naturalny sposób wpłynąć na ukształtowanie postaw i oczekiwań wiernych. Gdy więc po latach tradycyjna Msza św. z powrotem zaczęła gościć w kościołach, uczestniczące w niej osoby niosły na sobie – świadomie lub nieświadomie, czy tego chciały czy nie – piętno liturgii narodowej. W tym znaczeniu możemy powiedzieć, że w tradycyjnej liturgii dokonała się jakaś naturalna zmiana, nastąpił pewien rozwój wraz z wniesieniem do niej doświadczeń przez nowe pokolenie wiernych. Można zaryzykować nawet stwierdzenie, że w tym sensie liturgia odnowiona przyczyniła się do wzbogacenia liturgii tradycyjnej. Po pierwsze, wierni, którzy zostali wychowani tylko na nowej Mszy, doskonale znają tłumaczenie tych samych części stałych Mszy św. tradycyjnej. Dotyczy to zwłaszcza Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei. Po drugie, w naturalny sposób czują oni potrzebę śpiewania tych części w języku łacińskim, gdyż śpiewali je w języku narodowym. Po trzecie, zainteresowanie tradycyjną Mszą św. wymusza zainteresowanie liturgią jako taką, prowadzi do pogłębienia wiedzy, szukania i analizowania różnic i podobieństw. Po czwarte wreszcie, zmusza do dokonywania tłumaczeń łacińskich słów, gdyż zreformowana liturgia rozbudziła w większości osób potrzebę poznania ich znaczenia w języku narodowym.

[N]ie ulega wątpliwości, że osoby, które inicjują dzisiaj powrót Mszy św. tradycyjnej zawdzięczają szereg dobrych nawyków długiemu udziałowi w zreformowanej Mszy św. Przyzwyczajenia te w realny sposób oddziałują na jakość, odradzającej się, tradycyjnej liturgii. Dodatkowo fakt ten wzmacnia okoliczność, że liturgia tradycyjna wraca do kościołów głównie dzięki ludziom świeckim, którzy o nią proszą. Summorum Pontificum Benedykta XVI zezwala każdemu kapłanowi na używanie Mszału św. Piusa V, gdy odprawia Mszę bez ludu, zaś z ludem w zasadzie tylko, gdy wierni zwrócą się z tym do niego. W przyznaniu takiej roli świeckim wyraża się zadziwiająca zbieżność apeli przedstawicieli ruchu liturgicznego o większe zaangażowanie wiernych w życie liturgiczne Kościoła oraz otwarcie się na nich Kościoła na Soborze Watykańskim II. Po pewnej burzy, wywołanej posoborowym zamieszaniem, liturgia tradycyjna ma szansę z powrotem zadomowić się w kościołach oczyszczona i odnowiona, stanowiąca jasno i wyraźnie – jak nigdy dotąd – prawdziwy skarb całego Kościoła.

Witold Dziedzic
Jak odnowiona liturgia wzbogaciła liturgię tradycyjną
http://nowyruchliturgiczny.blogspot.com/2008/11/jak-odnowiona-liturgia-wzbogacia.html

_______

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[Benedykt XVI w liście do Marcello Pery po publikacji książki „Dlaczego musimy nazywać się chrześcijanami”:]

[W] ścisłym słowa znaczeniu dialog międzyreligijny nie jest możliwy [...] [– istnieje] równocześnie konieczność dialogu międzykulturowego, który zgłębia kulturowe konsekwencje podstawowego wyboru religijnego. Podczas gdy prawdziwy dialog międzyreligijny nie jest możliwy bez wzięcia w nawias własnej wiary, należy zmierzyć się w publicznej debacie z konsekwencjami publicznymi podstawowych decyzji religijnych. W tym sensie dialog, wzajemne korygowanie się i ubogacanie są możliwe i niezbędne.

Martinus
Tłumaczenie listu Benedykta – w sprawie dialogu międzyreligijnego między innymi
http://forum.fronda.pl/?akcja=pokaz&id=2126781

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A major promoter of evolutionism in our days is the Englishman Richard Dawkins, the author of the book “The God Delusion.” He is now promoting a public campaign to put placards on buses in English cities that read: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life.” If I put myself in the shoes of a parent with a handicapped, autistic or gravely sick child, or a farm worker who has lost his job, I wonder how such a person would react to that announcement: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life!” “Probably”: He doesn’t even exclude the possibility that God could exist! But if God doesn’t exist, the believer loses nothing. On the other hand, the nonbeliever loses everything.

Raniero Cantalamessa, OFM Cap
Before Him All Nations Will be Gathered – Gospel Commentary for Solemnity of Christ the King
http://www.zenit.org/article-24323?l=english

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As soon as I entered a major Chinese airport recently, as a follow-up visit after the publication of my book „The Seven Sorrows of China,” and handed off a suitcase full of smuggled medical supplies to some guardian angels from the West who take care of God’s precious — and China’s most neglected — children, I was hurried away to a vehicle by an excited Catholic priest who was a native Chinese teaching in a seminary in a neighboring country.

As we drove away from the airport, the Chinese priest was quick to inform me that he had read my previous book, „The Seven Sorrows of China,” and, while complimentary and confirming of the value and accuracy of the text from an inside perspective, he was also adamant in stating that the book was in one way incomplete. “It is a beautiful book and has many good things,” he noted, “but now I challenge you to write something on the ‘Joyful Mysteries of China.’ If you give only the sorrowful side, it will not encourage the people. Jesus had the sorrows of his passion, but also his joys and glories. You must also write about the victories that are happening in the Church in China right now.”

["The Seven Sorrows of China"] recorded incidents such as the mandatory cremation of a neglected child who died after having been rejected by a federal Chinese orphanage and then cared for and loved by a private foreign orphanage, and my meetings with women who had to flee from government and family in order to have a child against the abortion policies of state and clan. I had interviewed a saintly underground Chinese bishop under house arrest following 20 plus years of imprisonment and house arrests, and learned about the documentable government persecutions of bishops, priests, and faithful who refuse to cooperate in any way with the government and its official “patriotic” church. I had related the story of an inspiring region where Catholic-style solidarity enabled a heroic Catholic community to effectually ward off the government’s one-child policy in their families of four, five, six, and even eight children.

I had been advised by certain Catholic watchdog organizations to avoid granting too many details about the powerful spiritual victories of the humble Chinese Church, lest it result in a new wave of persecutions by the regional religious affairs bureaus of the central Beijing government.

We now enter the company of a man of remarkable humility who perseveres under the most delicate of ecclesio-political situations. He is the Catholic bishop of a diocese in China that I must refrain from naming.

Let us call him Bishop “O” for “open” or above-ground church.

This particular bishop was appointed by the Vatican and is in complete conformity with and obedience to the Holy Father (Pope Benedict’s pictures are present throughout his diocesan offices, his seminaries, and even the home of his elderly parents). He is also registered with the government in what they designate as the “Catholic Patriotic Church.” Pope Benedict’s 2007 Letter to the Chinese Church and People made clear that Catholic bishops appointed by Rome could also register with the Patriotic Church Association without any intrinsic violation to the allegiance and fidelity to the Holy Father and the Holy See. This bishop has done just that. And in striving to hold the extremely difficult and sensitive balance between complete doctrinal orthodoxy and papal loyalty on the one hand, and cooperating (without moral compromise with local government authorities on secondary levels of dialogue and social programs on the other, this clever but innocent shepherd has been able to provide his flock with the spiritual access and social safety which is leading to thousands of adult baptisms throughout his diocese each year.

At this first encounter, the head official referred to the bishop with obvious respect in word and in manner. This puzzled us, because it seemed out of place in light of the two radically opposing ideologies that the official and bishop represent.

During the meal, rather amazing events unfolded. The head official toasted the bishop, and offered a brief oration on the respect of the bishop by the people of his region. Everyone then drank to this. Local custom called for all to down a small shot glass of what they referred to as „white wine,” which was in fact a hard alcohol similar to a form of grappa, the alcohol strength of which could probably propel several large trucks. Then the religious affairs officer (responsible, keep in mind, for the supervision and oftentimes suppression of unapproved religious activity in the county) stood up, proposed another toast to the bishop, and publicly witnessed to the fact that he had begun attending Mass at the bishop’s cathedral on Sundays, and that the bishop personally was teaching him how to pray! All drink to this.

At this point, you may have circling in your mind certain questions that I had in mine as all this was taking place. Wait a minute! Aren’t these the bad guys? Aren’t these the Communist party members who are implementing the Beijing policies of one child per family, forced abortion, and general persecution of the Church? Should we be cooperating with these guys and the government they represent? The temptation to pre-judge and to spontaneously condemn was great.

The answer: „Shi he bu shi.” Yes and No.

[T]he bishop commented at one point, „There is a saying here that each diocese in China is like living in its own country.” Every diocese in China has its own unique situation in relation to the local government. While it can be said that most dioceses experience consistent persecution from the local government as a logical application of the Beijing central government policies against religious freedom and personal/family dignity, (however slightly they may be improving on the federal level), nonetheless there are exceptions where local officials have providentially seen the social good effected by the Catholic Church’s presence in the region, and have decided to grant increased, though still restricted, liberty and even some form of respect to the Catholic presence in their county.

Is this a case of inordinate cooperation with an evil authority? In what way is the bishop’s approach different from an unacceptable form of moral cooperation with unjust authority — a cooperation embodying a consequentialist, the-end-justifies-the-means, type of activity, which St. Paul and the Church rightly condemn?

As St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us, we must always make key distinctions regarding matters of faith and morals. The bishop is not offering any proximate moral cooperation to anything intrinsically evil that may be enacted by the local government and its officers of religious oversight. Rather, he is cooperating in areas of dialogue between state and Church, coupled with encouraging the solutions to local social problems and legitimate civil advancements for the county, and this has earned the local authorities’ trust of the bishop — a trust which has led to unique opportunities for previously underground Catholics to worship in public and for other Chinese of the area to be exposed to the wonders of Catholic mystery and beauty, for the salvation of their families and friends.

[T]he level of respect and even praise offered by the local government for this particular bishop must be seen as exceptionally rare in China, particularly in light of this bishop’s refusal of any moral compromise of Church teaching or practice. But this bishop has used the local government’s providential honoring of his person and role to full advantage for the Chinese people of God in his diocese.

The array of spiritual fruits emanating from this diocese is nothing short of inspiring. Vocations are strongly on the rise. We visited a minor seminary with nearly 100 young men discerning the priesthood. An order of religious sisters numbered more than 70, with the vast majority younger than 40 years of age, and resplendent with smiling faces and joyful strides in their walk. These sisters as well as other religious of the diocese participate in medical outreach programs and educational services to the people of the region.

Several parishes have had more than 100 adults enter the Catholic faith at Easter, and the bishop has promised his presence at the Christmas and Easter celebrations of parishes with the greatest number of catechumens becoming baptized. The bishop also has an intense program of Catholic evangelization, where catechists are trained to go out two by two, door to door, following the Gospel instruction of the Lord with literal simplicity and profundity. And this, with the permission of the local Communist authorities!

How many dioceses in the Western world, free from any form of Communist domination or harassment, can boast this quantity and quality of ecclesial fruits?

The second joyful face of the Chinese Church is usually a hidden face. Hidden behind walls, behind bars, behind police blockades. He is an underground bishop, and his great offering to the Church in China is his „white” martyrdom, and what seems at times to be his approaching „red” or bloody martyrdom.

Let us call him Bishop „U” for „underground,” in contrast to the aforementioned Bishop „O” for „open” or above-ground church registered with the government.

In the specific case of Bishop „U” and his relation to the local government, registering with the Patriotic Association would mean direct moral compromise for him and for his people. This is because in his region it would be advancing an agenda that is counter to the teachings of the Church and independent from the Roman Pontiff.

We traveled to his diocese by train, a journey of several hours outside a major city.

I recalled that during my previous visit to this region, we had passed an old abandoned brick structure half in ruins and surrounded by a deserted set of farm buildings, and the underground religious with us had said, „That’s our seminary for the time being.”

An account of a recent ordination also helps to give flesh to the reality of what a vocation for the underground Church means. A certain seminarian, who actually had temporary access to partial, out of country theological instruction, had been ready for ordination for some time, but he had to await the release of his bishop from prison. Finally, the day came, and the seminarian was alerted to be prepared at any time for the call to come to a specific location for the ordination. Weeks passed, but still no call. Friends from his previous seminary had been writing for months, asking, „When is the date of your ordination?” The humble seminarian responded simply, „I do not know.”

Finally, the call came. The seminarian was instructed to go to a certain building, to enter the basement in the dark and to remain until the bishop arrived. The seminarian arrived early in the morning and waited and waited, and still no bishop. Finally at day’s end, the seminarian heard the upstairs door open, and someone walking down the steps. It was the bishop, accompanied by one other priest. And there, in the dark, in the basement, without any family members, friends, or even brother clergy save one, the bishop enacted the sacred rite, which transformed the seminarian into another Christ.

Weeks later, the newly ordained priest received correspondence from his previous seminary brethren. Upon hearing that he had indeed been ordained, they asked with jubilation for the young priest to send pictures of the ceremony and the subsequent celebration. But there was no public ceremony, celebration, community laud. The priest went to a designated spot and offered his first Mass the next day in service of Christ and in service of his people. His fellow seminarians in another land just did not understand. So, too, we often do not understand what it means to be a priest of the underground Church in China.

We were told by one his religious daughters that the bishop’s superhuman endurance of the never-ending persecution derives from his phenomenal prayer life. Rising early in the morning, he typically makes three holy hours a day (whenever, of course, he has access to the Blessed Sacrament and Mass — typically not granted him during his imprisonment periods), the offering of Mass, the praying of the divine office, coupled with several rosaries prayed throughout the day. He is ever beloved by his clergy, religious and people, and they would willingly offer their lives for his protection. Some of his clergy have indeed risked their lives to do so.

His serenity can only come from another world. One witness attested to the fact that even during an unexpected visit by police and high officials from the persecuting religious affairs bureau, Bishop „U” never lost his peace. During a brief sojourn of freedom when he returned to his people, witnesses state that, despite the frightening possibility that he would be immediately taken back to prison, he radiated a peace of heart with smile on his face that could only have come from a heavenly source.

Mark Miravalle
The Joys of China (Part 1): The Smiles of a Suffering Church Revealed
http://www.zenit.org/article-24205?l=english

Mark Miravalle
The Joys of China (Part 2): Bishop „O” Fosters Church-State Dialogue
http://www.zenit.org/article-24214?l=english

Mark Miravalle
The Joys of China (Part 3): Bishop „U” Builds Church From Prison
http://www.zenit.org/article-24223?l=english

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Iconclasm had lifted its ugly head around 725. Emperor Constantine V Copronymus (741-775) promoted the destruction of sacred images with great vigor, and sought especially to convert monks to his way of thinking. He harassed Stephen [the Younger] in particular; and when Stephen stood his ground, he sent him into exile on the Island of Proconnesus in the Sea of Marmara, meanwhile launching a campaign to defame the venerable hermit.

After two years, the tenacious ruler had the monk transferred to a prison in Constantinople. Still intent on breaking Stephen’s will, he had him brought into the imperial presence. He asked him this question: „Does a person who tramples on an image of Christ trample on Christ himself?” Of course not, Stephen replied. But then he drew out a coin bearing the image of Copronymus. „How should a person be treated who trampled on this image?” Constantine, furious at the thought, showed that he considered such an action criminal. „Well, then,” the monk replied, „if treading under foot the imperial image is such a crime, would not the treading under foot of the image of Christ be criminal, too?”

For that reply, Constantine ordered that Stephen be scourged. Such was his fury that he seems actually to have hoped the beating would be fatal. When Stephen survived, Copronymus was heard to say, „Won’t anybody rid me of this monk?”

Some of those who heard the ruler took him at his word. They sought out Stephen at once, and dragged him through the city by his feet. Then a mob gathered around the monk, pelted him with stones, and finally beat him to death with clubs.

In 787, 23 years after the lynching of St. Stephen the Younger, and in an era in which the Church was freer to counter the political heresy of image-breaking, the Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea assembled in that eastern city. In this ecumenical council, the gathered Fathers issued a dogmatic definition on the whole issue.

They agreed that it was sinful to give to any religious image the direct adoration that was due only to God. But it was permissible, they said, to venerate such images of Christ and the saints, and indeed, very helpful to do so, in that such images reminded the Christian of those depicted, and prayers addressed to them passed on to the heavenly persons themselves. This official definition has been called the „magna carta” of Christian art, in that it contains the doctrinal foundation on which all the glories of Christian art are based.

St. Stephen the Younger had died defending this legitimate and fruitful Christian practice. It can be said, in fact, that every statue or painting in our churches, and every medal we wear or rosary we recite, owes a debt to his blood.

Robert F. McNamara
St. Stephen the Younger, Martyr
http://www.irondequoitcatholic.org/index.php/St/StephenTheYoungerMartyr

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[St. John Bosco:]

In this lower cavern I again saw those Oratory boys who had fallen into the fiery furnace. Some are listening to me right now; others are former pupils or even strangers to me. I drew closer to them and noticed that they were all covered with worms and vermin which gnawed at their vitals, hearts, eyes, hands, legs, and entire bodies so ferociously as to defy description. Helpless and motionless, they were a prey to every kind of torment. Hoping I might be able to speak with them or to hear something from them, I drew even closer but no one spoke or even looked at me. I then asked my guide why, and he explained that the damned are totally deprived of freedom.

St. John Bosco’s Dream (Vision) Of Hell
http://www.todayscatholicworld.com/bosco_hell.htm

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According to his own testimony, the Pope who declared the dogma of the Assumption [Pius XII] saw the „miracle of the sun” four times.

This information is confirmed by a handwritten, unpublished note from Pope Pius XII, which is part of the „Pius XII: The Man and the Pontificate” display. The display opened in the Vatican to the public today and will run through Jan. 6.

Pius XII’s note says that he saw the miracle in the year he was to proclaim the dogma of the Assumption, 1950, while he walked in the Vatican Gardens.

He said he saw the phenomenon various times, considering it a confirmation of his plan to declare the dogma.

The papal note says that at 4 p.m. on Oct. 30, 1950, during his „habitual walk in the Vatican Gardens, reading and studying,” having arrived to the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, „toward the top of the hill […] I was awestruck by a phenomenon that before now I had never seen.”

„The sun, which was still quite high, looked like a pale, opaque sphere, entirely surrounded by a luminous circle,” he recounted. And one could look at the sun, „without the slightest bother. There was a very light little cloud in front of it.”

The Holy Father’s note goes on to describe „the opaque sphere” that „moved outward slightly, either spinning, or moving from left to right and vice versa. But within the sphere, you could see marked movements with total clarity and without interruption.”

Pius XII said he saw the same phenomenon „the 31st of October and Nov. 1, the day of the definition of the dogma of the Assumption, and then again Nov. 8, and after that, no more.”

The Pope acknowledged that on other days at about the same hour, he tried to see if the phenomenon would be repeated, „but in vain — I couldn’t fix my gaze [on the sun] for even an instant; my eyes would be dazzled.”

Antonio Gaspari
Pius XII Saw „Miracle of the Sun”
http://www.zenit.org/article-24149?l=english

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I doubt whether the tradition is reversible at all, but even if it were, the reversal could hardly be accomplished by an incidental section in a long encyclical focused primarily on the defense of innocent human life. If the Pope were contradicting the tradition, one could legitimately question whether his statement outweighed the established teaching of so many past centuries.

I believe that the Pope, without contradicting the tradition, is exercising his prudential judgment that in our time adequate punishment, including the moral and physical defense of society, can generally be accomplished by bloodless means, which are always to be preferred.

The fact that this is likely a prudential judgment throws cold water on the idea that Catholics must assent to a revised teaching on capital punishment that finds almost no cases in which it is acceptable.

I don’t hate the men who killed Mamie, nor do I want revenge. I have prayed for not only their capture but their conversion from the beginning. If they are sentenced to death, I am committed to praying for the repose of their souls. I do believe, however, that they should face justice in this life, with the hope of God’s mercy in the next.

Praying for those who killed my wife’s elderly mother is one of the bitter ironies of Catholicism that I am willing to accept. But wringing my hands and lobbying for their lives is not.

Steve Skojec
Face To Face With The Death Penalty
http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4191&Itemid=48

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[Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus] was the Bishop of Caesarea, a diocese with only 17 Christians at the time. Converted most of his bishopric; tradition says there were only 17 pagans left at the time of his death. Instituted the celebration of martyrs, teachings about the saints, and celebration of saint feast days as a way to interest pagans in the Church. During the Decian persecutions c.250, he and his flock fled into the desert. Worked among the sick when the plague struck soon after, and with refugees during the invasion of Pontus by the Goths in 252-254. Attended the First Council of Antioch in 264-265. Opposed the heresies of sabellianism and Tritheism. Used his legal training to help his parishioners, and settle disputes between them without taking their problems to the civil courts controlled by pagans.

Terry Jones
Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus
http://saints.sqpn.com/saintg40.htm

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Keith Humphrey, a representative of another conservative Christian group, the Christian Exodus Project, mentioned that members of his organization had relocated to various places, including South Carolina, Idaho and even Panama, with the goal of establishing independent, self-sufficient Christian communities. He also urged Christians to “purge themselves of the idolatry of statism” and practice what he called “personal secession” by depending on God and the Christian community rather than the state, and avoiding statist institutions through such practices as midwifery, refusing to obtain a Social Security card or birth certificates for children, establishing home schools and home-based businesses, using private currencies and engaging in barter, avoiding corporate jobs and training children in independent living.

Keith Preston
Secessionists, Unite!
http://attackthesystem.com/secessionists-unite/

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[Will Rogers:]

You can’t break a man that don’t borrow; he may not have anything, but Boy! he can look the World in the face and say, „I don’t owe you Birds a nickel.”

Bankers and Wall Street same as eighty years ago
http://www.willrogerstoday.com/weekly_comments/archive_issue.cfm?ID_News=341

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[Vincent McNabb OP:]

Buy boots you can walk in. Walk in them. Even if you lessen the income of the General Omnibus Company, or your family doctor; you will discover the human foot. On discovering it, your joy will be as great as if you had invented it. But this joy is the greatest, because no human invention even of Mr. Ford or Mr. Marconi is within a mile of a foot.

http://www.vincentmcnabb.org/prayers.html

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Individualism does not regard the individual as if they exist in a vacuum, it merely recognizes the individual’s sovereignty as co-existing with interpersonal relations, and that it is a fundamental building block of a society. It is erroneous to present a false dichotomy between uniformity and atomism, when neither of the two reflect the nature of an individual let alone a society. Society qua society is founded on voluntary cooperation, but this does not conflict with individual sovereignty. Voluntary cooperation is merely the net effect of people making use of their individual sovereignty, and competition is merely a reflection of the diversity of wants that people pursue as sovereigns. While interpersonal relations are something to take into account, the individual still retains their independence from the transgressions of others in an equilibrium, which aknowledges the competitive element of society that is responsible for creativity and innovation.

Brainpolice
Competition and Cooperation
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/brainpolice/archive/2008/11/19/competition-and-cooperation.aspx

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The Central American nation of El Salvador provides an excellent case study in how “actually existing capitalism” came about. The indigenous people of El Salvador, known as the Pipil Indians, were conquered in the early sixteenth century by the Spanish conquistadors. It was not until 1821 that El Salvador claimed its independence from Spain and subsequently became an independent nation in 1839. The system of land ownership in Salvadoran society was communal in nature as late as the end of the eighteenth century with ownership rights relegated to individual towns and Pipil villages. The primary agricultural products produced by the peasants were cattle, indigo, corn, beans and coffee. The Pipil were essentially practicing a type of collective self-employment.

As the international market for coffee expanded, some of the wealthier and more powerful merchants and landowners began pressuring the Salvadoran government to intervene into the economic structures of the nation in such a way as to make the accumulation of personal wealth more rapid through the establishment of larger, private plantations with a more greatly regimented labor force. Consequently, the government began to destroy the traditional system of property rights held by the towns and villages in order to establish individual plantations owned by those from the privileged classes who already possessed the means of acquiring credit. This change was implemented in several steps. In 1846, landowners with more than 5,000 coffee bushes were granted immunity from paying export duties for seven years and from paying taxes for a ten year period. Plantations owned by the Salvadoran government were also transferred to politically connected private individuals. In 1881, the communal land rights the Pipil had possessed for centuries were rescinded, making self-sufficiency for the Indians impossible. The government subsequently refused to grant even subsistence plots to the Pipil as the Salvadoran state was now fully under the control of the large plantation owners. This escalating economic repression was met with resistance and five separate peasant rebellions occurred during the late nineteenth century. By the middle part of the twentieth century, El Salvador’s coffee plantations, called fincas, were producing ninety-five percent of the country’s export product and were controlled by a tiny oligarchy of landowning families.

The phrase “means of acquiring credit” from the previous paragraph is a particularly significant one as the purpose of state control over banking and the issuance of money serves to narrowly constrict the supply of available credit which in turn renders entrepreneurship inaccessible to the majority of the population at large. Indeed, Murray Rothbard argued that bankers as a class “are inherently inclined towards statism” as they are typically involved with unsound practices, such as fractional reserve credit, that subsequently lead to calls for assistance from the state, or derive much of their business from direct involvement with the state, for instance, through the underwriting of government bonds. Therefore, the banking class becomes the financial arm of the state not only by specifically underwriting the activities of the state, such as war, plunder and repression, but also by serving to create and maintain a plutocracy of businessmen, manufacturers, politically-connected elites and others able to obtain access to the narrowly constricted supply of credit within the context of the market distortions generated by the state’s money monopoly.

Indeed, parallels can also be drawn between the structures of contemporary state- capitalism and historic feudalism. Since the High Middle Ages government has been transformed from its earlier identification with a specific person or persons into a corporate entity with a life and identity of its own beyond that of its individual members.

James Burnham [wrote in] “The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World” [...] that modern societies are neither “capitalist” nor “socialist” in the way these terms were historically understood. Instead, a new kind of politico-economic order has emerged in modern times where political and economic rule is conducted by a “managerial class” of bureaucrats presiding over mass organizations – governments and their bureaus and agencies, corporations and financial institutions, armies, political parties, unions, universities, media, foundations and the like. Membership in the upper strata of these entities is often rotational in that many of the same individuals shift about from the various sectors of the managerial class, for instance, from elected positions in government to corporate boards of directors to key positions in the media or elite foundations to appointed positions in the bureaucracy.

As for the question of what an economy devoid of statist, corporatist and plutocratic rule would actually look like, it can be expected that removal of state-imposed barriers to obtainment of credit, entrepreneurship and economic self-sufficiency (as opposed to dependency on state and corporate bureaucracies for employment, insurance and social services) will be one where Colin Ward’s ideal of a “self-employed” society is largely realized. No longer will the average man be dependent on Chase Manhattan, Home Depot, General Motors, Tesco or Texaco for his livelihood or his sustenance. Instead, he will have finally acquired the means of existing economically as a self-sufficient dignified individual in a community of peers where privilege is the result of merit and equal liberty is the unchallengeable prerogative of all.

Early in the twentieth century there were a variety of movements championing the independent small producer and the cooperative management of large enterprises including anarcho-syndicalism from the extreme Left and distributism from the reactionary Catholic Right. These tendencies still exist on the outer fringes of political and economic thought. One need not agree with every bit of analysis or every proposal advanced by these schools of thinking to recognize their visionary libertarian aspects.

An economy organized on the basis of worker-owned and operated industries, peoples’ banks, mutuals, consumer cooperatives, anarcho-syndicalist labor unions, individual and family enterprises, small farms and crafts workers associations engaged in local production for local use, voluntary charitable institutions, land trusts, or voluntary collectives, communes and kibbutzim may seem farfetched to some, but no more so and probably less so than a modern industrial, high-tech economy where the merchant class is the ruling class and the working class is a frequently affluent middle class would have seemed to residents of the feudal societies of pre-modern times. If the expansion of the market economy, specialization, the division of labor, industrialization and technological advancements can bring about the achievements of modern societies in eradicating disease, starvation, infant mortality and early death, one can only wonder what a genuine free enterprise system might achieve, and would have already achieved were it not for the scourge of statism and the corresponding plutocracy.

Keith Preston
Free Enterprise: The Antidote to Corporate Plutocracy
http://attackthesystem.com/free-enterprise-the-antidote-to-corporate-plutocracy/

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The split between life and work is probably the greatest contemporary social problem. You cannot expect men to take a responsible attitude and to display initiative in daily life when their whole working experience deprives them of the chance of initiative and responsibility. The personality cannot be successfully divided into watertight compartments, and even the attempt to do so is dangerous: if a man is taught to rely upon a paternalistic authority within the factory, he will be ready to rely upon one outside. If he is rendered irresponsible at work by lack of opportunity for responsibility, he will be irresponsible when away from work too. The contemporary social trend towards a centralised, paternalistic, authoritarian society only reflects conditions which already exist within the factory.

The novelist, Nigel Balchin, was once invited to address a conference on ‘incentives’ in industry. He remarked that ‘Industrial psychologists must stop messing about with tricky and ingenious bonus schemes and find out why a man, after a hard day’s work, went home and enjoyed digging in his garden.’

But don’t we already know why? He enjoys going home and digging in his garden because there he is free from foremen, managers and bosses. He is free from the monotony and slavery of doing the same thing day in day out, and is in control of the whole job from start to finish. He is free to decide for himself how and when to set about it. He is responsible to himself and not to somebody else. He is working because he wants to and not because he has to. He is doing his own thing. He is his own man.

The desire to ‘be your own boss’ is very common indeed. Think of all the people whose secret dream or cherished ambition is to run a small-holding or a little shop or to set up in trade on their own account, even though it may mean working night and day with little prospect of solvency. Few of them are such optimists as to think they will make a fortune that way. What they want above all is the sense of independence and of controlling their own destinies.

The fact that in the twentieth century the production and distribution of goods and services is far too complicated to be run by millions of one-man businesses doesn’t lessen this urge for self-determination, and the politicians, managers and giant international corporations know it. This is why they present every kind of scheme for ‘workers’ participation’, ‘joint management’, ‘profit sharing’, ‘industrial co-partnership’, everything in fact from suggestion boxes to works councils, to give the worker the feeling that he is more than a cog in the industrial machine while making sure that effective control of industry is kept out of the hands of the man on the factory floor.

For a lucky few work is enjoyable for its own sake, but the proportion of such people in the total working population grows smaller as work becomes either more mechanised or more fragmented. Automation, which was expected to reduce the sheer drudgery of manual labour and the sheer mental drudgery of clerical work, is feared because in practice it simply reduces the number of income gaining opportunities. It is a saving of labour, not by the worker, but by the owners or controllers of capital. The lucky few are destined for the jobs which are either created by or are unaffected by automation. The unlucky majority, condemned from childhood to the dreary jobs, find them either diminished or extinguished by the ‘rationalisation’ of work.

Can we imagine that in a situation where the control of an industry, a factory, any kind of workplace, was in the hands of the people who work there, they would just carry on production, distribution and bottle-washing in the ways we are familiar with today? Even within capitalist society (though not within the ‘public sector’ which belongs to ‘the people’) some employers find that what they call job enlargement or job enrichment, the replacement of conveyor belt tasks by complete assembly jobs, or deliberate rotation from job to job in the production process, can increase production simply by reducing boredom. When everyone in an industry has a voice in it, would they stop at this point? In his brilliant essay Work and Surplus, Keith Paton imagines what would happen in a car factory taken over permanently by its workers. ‘After the carnival of revolution come the appeals to return to work’ but ‘to get into the habit of responding to orders or exhortations to raise the GNP would be to sell the pass straight away. On the other hand production must eventually be got going on some basis or other. What basis? Return to what sort of work?’

So instead of restarting the assembly track (if the young workers haven’t already smashed it) they spend two months discussing the point of their work, and how to rearrange it. Private cars? Why do people always want to go somewhere else? Is it because where they are is so intolerable? And what part did the automobile play in making the need to escape? What about day to day convenience? Is being stuck in a traffic jam convenient? What about the cost to the country? Bugger the ‘cost to the country’, that’s just the same crap as the national interest. Have you seen the faces of old people as they try to cross a busy main road? What about the inconvenience to pedestrians? What’s the reason for buying a car? Is it just wanting to HAVE it? Do we think the value of a car rubs off on us? But that’s the wrong way round. Does having a car really save time? What’s the average hours worked in manufacturing industry Let’s look it up in the library: 45-7 hours work a week. What’s the amount of the family’s spending money in a week that goes on cars? 10 3 per cent of all family income. Which means more like 20 per cent if you’ve got a car because half of us don’t have one. What’s 25 per cent of 45 hours? Christ, 9 hours! That’s a hell of a long time spent ‘saving time’! There must be a better way of getting from A to B. By bus? OK, let’s make buses. But what about the pollution and that? What about those electric cars they showed on the telly once? Etc., etc.

He envisages another month of discussion and research in complexly cross-cutting groups, until the workers reach a consensus or eventual self-redeployment for making products which the workers consider to be socially useful. These include car refurbishing to increase the use-value of models already on the road), buses, overhead monorail cars, electric cars and scooters, white bicycles for communal use (as devised by the Amsterdam provos), housing units, minimal work for drop-outs, and for kids and old people who like to make themselves useful. But he sees other aspects of the workers’ take-over, voluntary extra work for example: ‘As work becomes more and more pleasurable, as technology and society develop to allow more and more craft aspects to return at high technological level, the idea of voluntary extra over the (reduced) fixed working week becomes feasible. Even the fixing of the working week becomes perseded.’ The purpose of this voluntary extra? ‘New Delhi needs buses, provide them by voluntary work.’The factory itself is open to the community, including children; – thus every factory worker is a potential „environmental studies” instructor, if a child comes up and asks him how something works.’ The factory in fact becomes a university, an institute of learning rather than of enforced stupidity, ‘using men to a millionth of their capacities’ as Norbert Weiner put it.

As we are frequently reminded by our own experience as consumers, industrial products in our society are built for a limited life as well as for an early obsolescence. The products which are available for purchase are not the products which we would prefer to have. In a worker-controlled society it would not be worth the workers’ while to produce articles with a deliberately limited life, nor to make things which were unrepairable. Products would have transparency of operation and repair. When Henry Ford first marketed his Model T he aimed at a product which ‘any hick up a dirt road’ could repair with a hammer and a spanner. He nearly bankrupted his firm in the process, but this is precisely the kind of product which an anarchist society would need: objects whose functioning is transparent and whose repair can be undertaken readily and simply by the user. In his book The Worker in an Affluent Society, Ferdynand Zweig makes the entertaining observation that ‘quite often the worker comes to work on Monday worn out from his weekend activities, especially from „Do-it-yourself”. Quite a number said that the weekend is the most trying and exacting period of the whole week, and Monday morning in the factory, in comparison, is relaxing ‘ This leads us to ask – not in the future, but in our present society – what is work and what is leisure if we work harder in our leisure than at our work?

When we talk of ‘doing our own thing’ we are not advocating going back to doing everything by hand. This would have been the only option in the thirties. But since then electrical power and ‘affluence’ have brought a spread of intermediate machines, some of them very sophisticated, to ordinary working class communities. Even if they do not own them (as many claimants do not) the possibility exists of borrowing them from neighbours, relatives, ex-workmates. Knitting and sewing machines, power tools and other do-it-yourself equipment comes in this category. Garages can be converted into little workshops, home-brew kits are popular, parts and machinery can be taken from old cars and other gadgets. If they saw their opportunity, trained metallurgists and mechanics could get into advanced scrap technology, recycling the metal wastes of the consumer society for things which could be used again regardless of whether they would fetch anything in a shop. Many hobby enthusiasts could begin to see their interests in a new light.

The funny thing is that when we discuss the question of work from an anarchist point of view, the first question people ask is: What would you do about the lazy man, the man who will not work? The only possible answer is that we have all been supporting him for centuries. The problem that faces every individual and every society is quite different, it is how to provide people with the opportunity they yearn for: the chance to be useful.

Colin Ward
A Self-Employed Society
http://www.theyliewedie.org/ressources/biblio/en/Ward_Colin_-_A_SELF-employed_society.html

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Randy Harless has declared sovereignty by renouncing his citizenship and claims his status prevents him from being held accountable for laws of a government he is no longer a part of.

When Harless bought Log Cabin Espresso, located on SR 532 near Good Road, earlier this year, and renamed the establishment Randy Lee Harless, he put his declaration of sovereignty to the test. At the end of July, Harless was notified by Island County Public Health of the suspension of his 2008 food service establishment permit. Failing to respond to notification of continued violations of health codes, Harless was notified he must immediately cease all food service operations.

“It’s my right to own a business,” said Harless. “I don’t need permission.”

According to Harless, his actions are a stand against tyranny. “Nobody stands up for their rights anymore,” he said. “The health department comes along, and they want to have power to control every move of what goes on here.” Harless said he has taken back that control over his establishment. “Under my sovereignty, I have granted myself a health permit,” he said.

Rick Wood
Troubles brew for island coffee stand
http://www.scnews.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=87&twindow=Default&mad=No&sdetail=121&wpage=&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=2790&hn=scnews&he=.com

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This thing that I shall bring to your attention is a existing example of counter economics, the process proposed by Samuel Edward Konkin in the New Libertarian Manifesto [...] as a strategy for action against the state. The plan? To build a new society within the shell of the old.

[C]ertain sections of Palestine are currently being blockaded by Israel. You have all the elements of statism here, an army, some politicians, stolen land and a few thousand people without many basic supplies. Stuff’s gonna happen. However, there are some courageous and entrepreneurial individuals who are fighting by creating smuggling networks by digging tunnels under the border between Gaza and Egypt.

[D]eep beneath the watchtowers and fences of Gaza’s 10-mile long border with Egypt, a sprawling warren of hand-dug burrows now supplies everything from food, petrol and designer jeans through to guns, drugs and black market Marlboro cigarettes.

“We bring through laptops, clothes, computers, medicines, mobile phones and even people,” said Hisham al Loukh, 23, another tunneller. “There was even a bride from Egypt who came through one recently to get married to a man in Gaza.”

Welcome, this is the counter economy in its most elegant form. These tunnels are 30 feet deep and run for 300 yards, a complex structure and organisation obtained by a group of individuals who have voluntarily cooperated in order to overcome the little problem of starvation. [...] These tunnels were originally used for destructive purposes, involving the importation of explosives to be used against Israel! Thanks to the counter economy, these tunnels have now been put to a productive use. They have provided employment and supply to “an area which currently has 80 per cent unemployment”. Further still, “Some local shops honour tunnellers in the same fashion as “martyred” local militants, displaying pictures of them clutching spades and drills rather than assault rifles.”

However, this tale is not without its villains. Like any good tale of good vs evil, the state has warped and twisted the market in its destructive lust for power and control, causing the counter economy to grow in retaliation. Beside the obvious effect of the Israeli military on the Palestinian people, there is pressure from both the Israeli and American adminstrations on Egypt to shut down the tunnels.

The threat is not just from earthfalls. The Egyptian government, which has traditionally turned a blind eye to the tunnels because of historic sympathy for Gaza’s Palestinian residents, is now under growing pressure from both Israel and the US to shut them down, and in recent months Egyptian border guards have started dynamiting any entrances that they discover.

“They also pump in water, poison gas, and even sewage,” said Mr Sazzar. “But they do not stop us. If part of one tunnel gets blocked, we just dig a new branch in a different direction.”

On the Gaza side, little effort is made to hide the tunnels, which lurk under a network of tents and jerry-built shacks along the border.

Israel, which withdrew its forces from Gaza in 2005, has occasionally sent warplanes to bomb the passageways, but has not done so since striking a cease-fire deal with Hamas three months ago.

[T]here are even rumours that Hamas, the ruling faction in Gaza, is imposing unofficial taxation on all smuggled goods. So much for governments protecting their people, right?

The moral to the story is that the counter economy is something that exists everywhere, in all circumstances, so long as there are people. Clearly, the counter economy is a productive force that works to improve the lives of individuals even in the most dire of circumstances. It’s a natural and elegant response to statism and coercion that forgoes violence in favour of economic revolt. You can’t try and crush a people, whether it be an entire nation or a small community, without them finding ways around your blockades, rules, taxes and legislation. To those sceptics who doubt the scope or the potential of the counter economy, I put it to you that the existence of the counter economy is intrinsically tied to that of the human species. So long as there is people, there is counter economic activity.

Royce Christian
To the Counter Economic Sceptics
http://theguerrillacapitalist.wordpress.com/2008/09/28/to-the-counter-economic-sceptics/

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To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the public interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolised, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”

– Pierre Joseph Proudhon

Keith Preston
Updated News Digest November 2, 2008
http://attackthesystem.com/2008/10/updated-news-digest-november-2-2008/

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I would suggest [...] that statists are fools with their heads in the clouds at best and blood on their hands at worst. The crimes that states have committed are so much vaster than the crimes they pretend to shield us from.

My fundamental view is that states are immoral and evil institutions and that they ought to be abolished [...] One does not compromise with evil if one is to be a moral person, and besides, a compromise with evil today will always be met with a request for further compromise tomorrow, increasing evil’s presence in the world. You don’t choose the “lesser” of two evils, and you don’t surrender to the apology that says that the state is a „necessary” evil. You also don’t try to reform evil by attempting to circumscribe it with paper nonsense like constitutions and treaties. So long as people give moral support to the evil institution that is the state, evil will continue to thrive at the core of our social existence.

There are a number of different narratives of how states might eventually cease to be. First of all, the state is emphatically not going to abolish itself, anywhere or at any time. The people who profit from state evil are not going to give up those illegitimate profits, having one day awoken with a moral conscience and newfound respect for their fellow human beings. They are going to fight very hard to hold on to those privileges.

Violent revolution to eliminate states and replace them with functioning anarchist societies is very unlikely to be successful in this generation or the next few generations. Where such is attempted, it is much more likely that the leaders of the revolution would in fact become the core of a new state, just as illegitimate as the last, though founded on different mythology. Bloodshed should not be our goal.

There is a beautiful vision I read of someplace, of people just gradually withdrawing their support for the state, first at the fringes and then spreading inward as generations go on, with the end result that one day, the very last state employee turns off the light at the very last state office and quits his state job. There are extremely powerful forces arrayed by states against society to ensure that this doesn’t happen, no matter how glorious the vision may be.

The only practicable strategy to contribute to the minimization and elimination of the state today that I am aware of is called agorism, a term coined (I believe) by Samuel E. Konkin III back in the 1970s. Agorism’s political philosophy is anarchism and its revolutionary praxis is what Konkin termed counter-economics. The revolutionary path, in brief, is simple: arrange your individual affairs such as to have as little contact with states as possible; avoid paying taxes where possible; avoid taking state services or engaging state businesses where possible; expand “gray” markets; establish enterprises and trading networks with like-minded people; develop non-coercive means to provide the services that states claim monopoly power over today. The seed of agorism, I believe, grows in the heart of nearly every person already.

Mike Gogulski interviewed: „The Seed of Agorism Grows in Every Person”
http://vlastnictvo.blogspot.com/2008/10/mike-gogulski-interviewed-seed-of.html

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[B]y the way, I didn’t ask Patri Friedman before posting a copy of the image here. His whole point is that we shouldn’t have to. We credit him and link back, of course, because credit is like time or money, in that when you take it from someone, that person actually loses something. Copying the image while still giving him full credit is exactly in the spirit of his post.

Karl Fogel
„Piracy Is Not Theft” graphic by Patri Friedman
http://www.questioncopyright.org/piracy_is_not_theft

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There’s a word for all the stuff we do with creative works — all the conversing, retelling, singing, acting out, drawing, and thinking: we call it culture.

Culture’s old. It’s older than copyright.

The existence of culture is why copyright is valuable. The fact that we have a bottomless appetite for songs to sing together, for stories to share, for art to see and add to our visual vocabulary is the reason that people will pay money for these things.

Let me say that again: the reason copyright exists is because culture creates a market for creative works. If there was no market for creative works, there’d be no reason to care about copyright.

Content isn’t king: culture is. The reason we go to the movies is to have something to talk about. If I sent you to a desert island and told you to choose between your records and your friends, you’d be a sociopath if you chose the music.

Culture’s imperative is to share information: culture is shared information. Science fiction readers know this: the guy across from you on the subway with a gaudy SF novel in his hands is part of your group. You two have almost certainly read some of the same books, you’ve got some shared cultural referents, some things to talk about.

When you hear a song you love, you play it for the people in your tribe. When you read a book you love, you shove it into the hands of your friends to encourage them to read it too. When you see a great show, you get your friends to watch it too — or you seek out the people who’ve already watched it and strike up a conversation with them.

So the natural inclination of anyone who is struck by a piece of creative work is to share it.

Cory Doctorow
Why I Copyfight
http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/11/cory-doctorow-why-i-copyfight.html

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[Hermann Goering said:] Of course people don’t want war. Why should a poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best thing he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Western Confucian
Hermann Goering Speaks an „Eternal Truth” at Nuremberg
http://orientem.blogspot.com/2008/09/eternal-truth-from-hermann-goering-in.html

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The unconscionable truth is that war makes a great business. As people are killed in war, there are always those who make big money killing in war trafficking. Just for the record, let it be noted that as the resources of others are destroyed by war, those however who make war their trade in effect, build up their wealth. But the question remains and begs for an answer: When is a war just?

The answer to this is curiously found also in questions: Was there ever a just war in human history? Was the 1st World War just? In other words: Was the holocaust just? Was the systematic extermination of the Jews just? Was the 2nd World War just?

In other words, was the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima just? Was the indiscriminate killing of many thousands of civilian men, women and children just? Is the Iraq War just?

In other words: Is it just to have thousands of invading soldiers killed and more thousands of locals sent to their death as “collateral damage” – with more people still to be killed as the days go on and as the war continues?

It is definite and defined that any and all wars are unjust. In other words, there is no such animal as a just war. Only fools say otherwise. Only clowns wear smiles during war. And only those whose business is war, rejoice when war is actually waged.

Everybody else – if still alive and well – think, feel and say that there are no winners in war. And those who want war, let them go to the front lines and do their war dance there until they stop a bullet at hitting somebody else in its way.

Oscar V. Cruz
Just War
http://ovc.blogspot.com/2008/09/just-war.html

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Anarchic Ireland and Iceland worked peacefully for very long periods of time (Ireland was ended by Britain, Iceland by Christianity) because of the common law, or points from which negotiations start, or Schelling points. People not subscribed to the same law/police/defense agency could interact with each other just fine because they all started from very similar Schelling points.

The Native Americans and the Europeans came into conflict on the local level because the groups had vastly different Schelling points as they pertained to property rights. And since property rights are emergent and based on nothing more than what everyone relevant to you agrees to, different views of property are demonstrably important. As in, differing Schelling points lead to war.

This is why the mild west was so mild. Upon embarking into the more or less „lawless” territories, settlers knew what they were getting into, and knew they had to define property rights and the law. And they started from the Schelling points of statist property rights, although the homesteading principle was used more in the anarchic west than the statist east, evidence that the US statist property law back east was suboptimal. And so the anarchic west saw property law syllogistically superior to that of the statist east, which in all likelihood also contributed to their lower per capita homicide rate.

However, whenever the US government took hold in an area, there was no opposition, there was no guerilla war. And from what little evidence we have, homicide rates typically increased when government was imposed on an area and the emergent legal systems disbanded.

An even starker example was seen in anarchic Pennsylvania. From 1684 to 1696, Pennsylvania had no effective governance. William Penn was granted governorship of what is now Pennsylvania by some sacred cow in England for who the hell knows what reason. Penn tried to raise various import duties in 1684, but some men offered to raise 500 pounds for William Penn instead so as to spare the colony from crippling trade, a proposal Penn agreed to.

Hearing of Quaker persecution in England, Penn left for England. He returned to find that the citizens of Pennsylvania simply weren’t paying the taxes and that the council, which originally existed merely to ratify Penn’s wishes, had virtually taken over. Pennsylvania was self-governing, though the council rarely met, and was no more effective at tax collection than Penn himself, and so Pennsylvania essentially fell into anarchy. In 1684, Pennsylvania had a population of 8,000, and in 1689 it was about 12,000, growth which occurred in anarchy yet with no apparent chaos.

However, in 1696 the new Governor Markham was able to get the council to agree upon taxation under the condition that the council would now have legislative powers itself. They were able to collect on the taxes by pitting Quakers against non-Quakers by raising property requirements for voting so that the typically well-off Quakers had more clout than the typically urban poor non-Quakers.

De facto anarchy was able to reign for 14 years in Pennsylvania, but was ended, just as it was ended in the western territories, because the council was still deemed as legitimate. The council, while ineffectual, was never dissolved outright. And while taxation was opposed, taxation itself in theory was seen as something that could be legitimate, and so Pennsylvania eventually consented to it once the Quakers were cut what they thought was a good deal. The legitimacy of government was still part of the Schelling point in the minds of Pennsylvanians, and so government always had a foot in the door.

While existing in functional anarchy, Pennsylvania had no systematic justification for their this „system” of anarchy, and so relapse was inevitable. And because the western territories weren’t an explicitly anarchistic society, a state was still in the trade space, the Schelling point, despite anarchy being the „system” that prevailed for quite some time.

In order for a stateless society to be maintained, the state must be pushed out of the Schelling point. Not only must anarchy occur, but the members of the stateless society must recognize the state as an UNnecessary evil in order to prevent a relapse, a relapse that can only occur with consent, and consent that can only occur if the population doesn’t have a systematic anarchist philosophy, or at the very least understand the horrible nature of states.

khydraa
Schelling Points
http://polycentricorder.blogspot.com/2008/11/schelling-points.html

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In terms of offering positive alternatives to the welfare state, I am very much for the development of non-state charities, relief agencies, orphanages, youth hostels, squats, shelters for battered women, the homeless or the mentally ill, self-improvement programs for drug addicts and alcoholics, assistance services for the disabled or the elderly, wildlife and environmental preserves, means of food and drug testing independent of the state bureaucracy, home schools, neighborhood schools, private schools, tenants organizations, mutual banks, credit unions, consumers unions, anarcho-syndicalist labor unions and other worker organizations, cooperatives, communes, collectives, kibbutzim and other alternative models of organizing production. I am in favor of free clinics, alternative medicine, self-diagnostic services, midwifery, the abolition of medical licensure, the repeal of prescription laws and anything else that could potentially reduce the cost of health care for the average person and diminish dependency on the medical-industrial complex and the “white coat priesthood.” Indeed, I would argue that the eventual success of libertarianism depends to a large degree on the ability of libertarians to develop workable alternatives to both the corporation-dominated economy and the state-dominated welfare and social service system.

What might be some “thick” [libertarian] values, while irrelevant to the coercive authority of the state per se, that might be helpful as part of a broader foundation for combating actually existing states of the kind found in the contemporary First World?

1. A defense of the sovereignty of particular nations against imperialism, multi-national nation-states, and international quasi-governmental bodies.

2. A defense of the sovereignty of local communities and regional cultures against the power of overarching central governments.

3. “Ethno-pluralism” or the view that each unique ethnic group should have a territory where it is a demographic majority and with a political system representative of its cultural foundations. The Swiss canton system may well be the most advanced model of this type of any system currently in practice.

4. The view that cultural differences are best dealt with according to the principles of individual liberty, voluntary association, pluralism and peaceful co-existence where possible, yet where this is not possible localism, decentralism, secessionism, separatism and mutual self-segregation are likely the most preferable alternatives.

5. A distinction between natural or voluntary hierarchies and authorities, and coercive or artificial ones.

6. Recognition of the iron law of oligarchy, or the view that elites are inevitable, and an emphasis on meritocracy, as opposed to simply tearing down all authorities, institutions, and organizations, thereby creating a power vacuum that allows the worst to get to the top.

7. Recognition of the legitimacy of Otherness, and an understanding that true “tolerance” is not simply tolerating people one likes, but tolerating those whom one finds personally repulsive. Just as toleration of the Other is not synonymous with approval or agreement, so does tolerance of one’s self by the Other not grant the right to demand approval.

8. Recognition of the inherent inequality of persons, groups, cultures, nations, etc. and that effort to impose artificial or unnatural equality can only result in tyranny, chaos or stagnation.

9. Adherence to what traditionalist Catholics call the “subsidiarity” principle, meaning that problems are best dealt with on a decentralized basis by those closest to them, rather than on the basis of abstract solutions imposed from above.

10. Application of the insights of modern social psychology, which indicates that most people are herd creatures, and inevitably get their sense of “right and wrong” not from any innate sense of conscience or a rational evaluation of available facts, but according to cues taken from leaders, peers and perceived sources of cultural authority.

11. Recognition of the value of intermediary institutions, such as families, communities, voluntary associations, independent business and labor organizations, charities, philanthropies, private schools and universities, cultural organizations, and even private citizens’ militias as a bulwark against the all-encompassing authoritarian presence of the state, and the need to defend the sovereignty and legitimacy of such institutions.

12. Recognition of Acton’s dictum that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Libertarians should aspire to be the elite leadership corps of a larger, broad-based populist movement that encourages the development of local sovereignty and secession movements in opposition to the central government and the empire. Given that the majority of the U.S. population lives in approximately one hundred large metropolitan areas, a class-based radicalism would essentially pit the urban poor and working classes and their natural allies (the so-called “red state rubes,” the lower to lower middle classes from the rural areas and smaller towns) against the urban liberal-bourgeoisie elite who staff and maintain the managerial bureaucracy on behalf of the plutocracy. The political arrangements likely to emerge from the victory of such a radical movement would involve a kind of cultural separatism. Culturally conservative rural communities, small towns, “red states” and elsewhere would be free to separate themselves from the perceived ills of “liberal” society as would socially conservative urban racial minorities, Muslims and others who might also have their own separatist enclaves. Yet independent metropolitan city-states would likely remain as cosmopolitan in nature as they are now, perhaps more so, as the expulsion of the state and the overthrow of the plutocracy should bring with it greatly expanded economic opportunities with urban areas becoming even greater centers of trade and cultural exchange than they are now. Minus the overarching authority of the federal government or the influence of socially conservative or religiously fundamentalist rural counties and small towns, urban centers could begin to experiment with many of the radically anti-authoritarian ideas favored by libertarians and decentralists, such as drug decriminalization, citizen militias, common law courts, restitution-based penal systems, the abolition of compulsory education, a free-market in health care (including alternative health care and prescription medicines), expanded rights of self-defense, non-state social services, alternative media, the elimination of zoning ordinances, the repeal of the drinking age and other “victimless crime” laws, urban farming and so on.

Keith Preston
Should Libertarianism be Cultural Leftism without the State?
http://attackthesystem.com/should-libertarianism-be-cultural-leftism-without-the-state/

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I believed that you could constrain the State, but since I’ve become a realist – I’m an anarchist. So if there is a little bit of a State, it will grow. So the only realist position is the anarchist one.

I think that, ultimately, every human being is interested in right – and especially in these very basic rights: do not kill, do not steal, to not assault and keep your promises. If you go to Patagonia or if you go to Mongolia, you are unlikely to find somebody who’d say “I don’t mind being killed, I don’t mind being raped, I don’t mind being robbed.” These are the fundamental prohibitions that libertarians see as being the fundamental human rights. Do not kill and so on. These prohibitions are human.

[T]he technology today is no longer one that will foster the State. Actually it is turning against the State. It is transborder, and it’s now becoming more and more difficult for a nation state to regulate its economy – because business moves – it’s more and more difficult to make claims about reducing unemployment, about giving more benefits to people and so on.

So more and more the ideology that has been dominant since, say, the late Enlightenment, or the French Revolution, until probably the 1980s – that ideology is on the way out. And I think that libertarianism is going to be the ideology that people will turn to simply because every day I look around and I don’t see any other competing ideology.

[I]n reality, I don’t think you convince people. You do not tell them “This is the way to think.” They discover it by themselves. But in order to discover it, our books, our publications, our websites, our blogs must be there. Then people will stumble upon them and they say “this is what I was looking for. This is what I sort of had in my mind, I could not put it into words. But now I realise this is what I was thinking.”

Jędrzej Kuskowski
Interview with Christian Michel
http://en.liberalis.pl/2008/09/12/interview-with-christian-michel/

(Wywiad w tłumaczeniu na język polski:
http://liberalis.pl/2008/09/13/wywiad-z-christianem-michelem/)

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„Neither business commitment nor social life should deprive a husband and wife of the tenderness of being together. Children should not come home to find their parents always away,” [...] cardinal [Joseph Zen, the bishop of Hong Kong] said.

„‘To live together’ is the secret to the success of a family,” he continued. „Husband and wife must use every possible means to spend time together and have time to be close to their children. Christmas and the feast of the Holy Family encourages us to strengthen or, if necessary, to revive the tenderness of the family.

„Christmas is a feast that gathers the family. Let us begin with Advent: The Church has a special liturgy encouraging us to make our homes churches.”

Cardinal Zen also encouraged the use of the Advent wreath, saying that lighting „one more candle on each Sunday of Advent can create a wonderful atmosphere.”

Put Family First, Urges Cardinal
http://www.zenit.org/article-24391?l=english

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The two roses at the bottom represent Mr. and Mrs. Martin. The two bigger roses above them the two eldest sisters, Marie and Pauline (also in the convent with Therese) the rose directly below the face is Celine – the last sister to enter the Carmel, after their father had died. Therese is the rose to the left of the face, and Leonie’s rose is to the right. She became a visitation nun.

The other four buds represent the four other children the Martins had, who did not live past early childhood. Helene was a little younger than Leonie, and Helene died about aged and a half. Melanie Therese was the child born before St. Therese, and she died about aged one or two. Two infant boys, who did not live very long were born after Helene, Joseph, and Joseph Jean. All the children had the first name of Marie, including the boys.

Karen H.
Chasuble by St. Therese of Lisieux
http://gemoftheocean99.blogspot.com/2007/12/chasuble-by-st-therese-of-lisieux.html

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On, Ludwik Martin, urodził się w 1823 r. jako syn kapitana armii francuskiej. Zdobył zawód zegarmistrza. W wieku 23 lat zapragnął wstąpić do klasztoru, ale przeszkodziła mu w tym nieznajomość łaciny. Osiedlił się w Paryżu, a potem wrócił do rodziców w Alencon. Tu otworzył zakład zegarmistrzowski. Swój czas dzielił pomiędzy pracę zawodową, ćwiczenia duchowe, dzieła miłosierdzia, łowienie ryb i czytanie książek. Zapewne tak toczyłoby się dalej jego życie, gdyby pewnego dnia na moście św. Leonarda nie zobaczyła go pewna dziewczyna i nie usłyszała wewnętrznego głosu, który jej powiedział: „To ten, którego przygotowałem dla ciebie”. Po trzech miesiącach od tego wydarzenia, 13 lipca 1858 r. 35-letni Ludwik Martin został mężem Zelii Marii Guerin.

Ona, Zelia Guerin (ur. w 1831 r.), córka żołnierza cesarskiego, a później żandarma, nierozumiana przez matkę, pozostawała w wielkiej przyjaźni z siostrą i bratem. Chciała zostać zakonnicą, ale rozmowa z przełożoną, osobą doświadczoną w kwestii powołań, sprawiła, że odłożyła swą decyzję na później. Nigdy jej nie żałowała. Nauczyła się sztuki robienia koronek i w wieku 20 lat założyła własne przedsiębiorstwo.

We wszystkich sprawach małżeństwo Martin podejmowało wspólnie decyzje. Pisząc o podjętych decyzjach, Zelia nie zapominała nigdy dodać: „Mój mąż zgadza się na to”. Wiedziała jednak doskonale, że potrafi wpłynąć na decyzje Ludwika i zawsze osiągała to, czego pragnęła „i to bez walki”.

Zelia miała jasny obraz roli kobiety jako żony i matki. Pisała o tym do brata, udzielając mu rad na temat wyboru żony: „Najważniejsze, by znaleźć kobietę o dobrych przymiotach, która by nie lękała się zabrudzić ręce w pracy, nie przywiązywała większej wagi do toalety, niż to wypada, która by umiała wychować swoje dzieci do pracy i pobożności”.

[W]arto oprzeć naszą małżeńską miłość na miłości Boga, który sam jest Miłością. Może wtedy łatwiej będzie pochwalić żonę za dobry obiad, powiedzieć mężowi, że nasza miłość do niego trwa nadal. Może wówczas miłowanie żony, jak siebie samego, nie będzie wyrzeczeniem, ale przyniesie radość. Może wtedy poddanie się mężowi nie będzie ofiarą, lecz wspólnym dążeniem do szczęścia.

Zelia uważała, że „zajmowanie się dziećmi – to praca przyjemna. Gdybym tylko to miała do roboty, uważałabym się za szczęśliwą kobietę”.

Podobne uczucia do swoich dzieci żywił Ludwik, który poświęcał im wiele czasu. Dużo radości dawały mu wspólne spacery z córkami. Gdy tylko pogoda sprzyjała, przechadzki a czasami wycieczki całej rodziny były stałym elementem niedzielnego wypoczynku.

Państwo Martin nie rozpieszczali swoich córek. Zelia nie ulegała ich kaprysom: „Nie rozpieszczałam jej, jak była maleńka i nic jej nie przepuściłam. Nie dręczyłam jej, ale musiała ustąpić”. Znała pragnienia swoich córek dotyczące spraw materialnych: „(…) mówiły mi, że pragnęły mieć torby podróżne, jakie mają wszystkie ich koleżanki”. Podchodziła jednak do nich bardzo rzeczowo: „Pozwalałam im mówić, ale ponieważ kupuję im tylko rzeczy konieczne i mogły się bez tych toreb obejść, więc nie uważałam za potrzebne spełnić ich prośbę”. Zdawała sobie sprawę, że po tak długim czasie oczekiwania „teraz jakaż to będzie dla nich radość”, gdy otrzymają wymarzony prezent. Bardziej pobłażliwy był Ludwik, szczególnie czuły na płacz dziecka: „wtedy zaczęła płakać i Tatuś ustąpił”.

Zgoła inaczej traktowano prośby córek związane z obecnością rodziców przy nich. Zelia przerywa pracę w warsztacie, gdy chora córka „nie chce, by prócz mnie ktokolwiek jej dotykał”.

Zelia i Ludwik zabierali dziewczynki na uroczystości religijne, zachęcali je do częstej modlitwy oraz żywo interesowali się ich życiem duchowym, gdy przebywały na pensji w Mans: „Myślę, że przystąpicie dzisiaj, w dzień Wszystkich Świętych, do Komunii świętej, jak również jutro, w Dzień Zaduszny”. Jednocześnie córki były świadkami udziału rodziców w codziennej Mszy św., wyjazdów pielgrzymkowych ojca, wspólnej modlitwy, działalności rodziców w stowarzyszeniach katolickich, poszanowania odpoczynku niedzielnego („…należy bardzo na to uważać, by nie pracować w niedzielę”).

Ludwik [...] uczył [dzieci] dobroczynności: „W czasie spacerów tatuś lubił dawać mi pieniążki, abym zanosiła je spotkanym ubogim”. Państwo Martin często udzielali pomocy osobom ubogim, interesowali się ich losem, występowali w obronie ludzi pokrzywdzonych, cierpiących.

Podstawową lekturą religijną w domu państwa Martin były książki: „O naśladowaniu Jezusa Chrystusa”, „Podręcznik chrześcijanina”, „Rok liturgiczny”, wiersze Wiktora Hugo, Lamartinne’a, gazeta „La Croix”. Być może w obawie przed złym wpływem prasy „Tatuś zabronił nam czytania jakichkolwiek dzienników”.

Żarliwość religijna Ludwika i Zelii Martin pozbawiona była wszelkiej dewocji. Zelia szczerze, bez ogródek wydawała swój osąd: „Mamy od tygodnia dwóch misjonarzy, którzy prawią nam trzy nauki dziennie. Według mnie, jeden nie mówi lepiej od drugiego. Z obowiązku jednak chodzimy ich posłuchać i, dla mnie przynajmniej, jest to jeszcze jedna pokuta więcej”. Uważała również, że nic złego się nie stanie, gdy czteroletnia Terenia pomodli się następnego dnia, gdy zapomniała to zrobić wieczorem. Nie jest również zadowolona, że Marynia codziennie o szóstej rano uczestniczy we Mszy św., gdyż uważa, że jest to zbyt wczesna pora dla młodej dziewczyny.

Podstawą wychowania, a szczególnie wychowania religijnego jest przykład rodziców. Nie można nakłaniać dziecka do praktyk religijnych, gdy nie czynią tego rodzice. Byłaby to obłuda, którą dziecko szybko odkryje. Takie postępowanie rodziców może prowadzić do ukształtowania postaw konformistycznych nie tylko w odniesieniu do życia religijnego.

[W]łaśnie szczerość, prostolinijność, brak sprzecznych komunikatów przekazywanych dzieciom może być dla dzisiejszych rodziców wzorem wychowania chrześcijańskiego w ogóle, a religijnego w szczególności.

[Zelia Martin w]ielokrotnie wspominała w swych listach, że musi przerwać pisanie, bo któreś z dzieci pragnie się z nią pobawić czy o czymś powiedzieć. Czasu dla córek nie żałował też Ludwik, odbywając z nimi częste spacery lub bawiąc się z nimi w ogrodzie, czy też wykonując dziecinne zabawki. Szczególnie dużo uwagi poświęcał im – zwłaszcza najmłodszej Tereni – po śmierci żony. Rytuałem staje się codzienna przechadzka „Króla” (Ludwika) i „Królewny” (Tereni), „w czasie której tatuś kupował mi zawsze mały prezencik za drobne pieniążki”. Czasami zabierał też dziewczynki na połów ryb. W czasie wakacji jechał ze starszymi do Paryża lub organizował im wypoczynek nad morzem. Poważne potraktowanie przez Ludwika Martin decyzji czternastoletniej Teresy o wstąpieniu do Karmelu świadczy o tym, że znał swoją córkę; wiedział, że pomimo młodego wieku jej decyzja jest dojrzała, a nie jest to jedynie zwykły dziecięcy kaprys.

Rozmowy z dziećmi, wspólne rozrywki, wycieczki, spacery to okazja do lepszego zrozumienia dzieci, poznania ich problemów, możliwość pomocy w kłopotach. Umożliwia to także dzieciom lepsze poznanie i zrozumienie rodziców, ich poglądów, wymagań, uczuć, norm moralnych, wartości, które cenią. A to z kolei pomaga w budowaniu właściwych więzi emocjonalnych w rodzinie. W rodzinie Martin nigdy tego nie brakowało. Obecnie zapominamy często, że dziecko najbardziej w swoim życiu potrzebuje obecności fizycznej i psychicznej obojga rodziców. W pogoni za środkami materialnymi, które mają służyć zapewnieniu lepszych warunków rozwoju fizycznego i intelektualnego dzieci, rodzice mniej dbają o ich rozwój emocjonalny i moralny. Sądzą, że najważniejsze są przyszłe sukcesy dziecka na polu zawodowym, społecznym itp. W rezultacie, jakże często spotykamy wspaniale wykształconych, rozwiniętych intelektualnie lubi fizycznie młodych ludzi, którym brakuje moralnego kręgosłupa. Wychowanie moralno-etyczne wymaga bowiem od rodziców poświęcenia dziecku czasu, odpowiednich kwalifikacji moralno-etycznych, budowania więzi w rodzinie, dojrzałości rodziców do pełnienia ich ról. W pogoni za złudnymi wartościami, wielu rodziców nie znajduje na to czasu, zapomina o tych zadaniach, uważa je za nieistotne lub przerzuca ciężar odpowiedzialności w tym zakresie na inne instytucje. Ludwik i Zelia Martin są tutaj przykładem umiejętnego łączenia tych powinności rodzicielskich; dbając o rozwój talentów córek, ogromną wagę przywiązywali do przekazu wartości.

Obecnie zauważa się często wśród rodziców dwie skrajne postawy. Jedni rodzice, idąc za modą wychowania bezstresowego, przyzwalają dziecku na wszystko. Inni, obawiając się zagrożeń, jakie niesie dzień dzisiejszy, przesadzają z dyscypliną i rozliczają dziecko z każdego działania. W konsekwencji w przyszłości młody człowiek nie potrafi ponosić odpowiedzialności za swoje wybory lub ma poczucie małej wartości. W swojej mądrości wychowawczej państwo Martin wiedzieli, że zakazy są konieczne, gdyż dostarczają dziecku wiedzy o tym, co dobre a co złe, natomiast rygoryzm odbiera wiarę w siebie.

Ludwik i Zelia Martin jako rodzice w pełni zaspokajali potrzeby fizyczne i psychiczne swoich dzieci. Z niezwykłym wyczuciem kierowali ich rozwojem moralno-religijnym, pomagali w dojrzewaniu osobowości. Byli niezrównanymi wychowawcami i jednocześnie przyjaciółmi córek. Stosowany przez nich system wychowawczy oparty był na wiedzy o człowieku i wiedzy o wartościach. Zdumiewające jest to, że ci ludzie, żyjący w XIX wieku realizowali w swojej rodzinie współczesne zasady wychowawcze: typ wychowania partnerskiego z zachowaniem autorytetu rodziców.

Hanna Zielińska
Zwyczajni rodzice (?)
(Część I)
http://www.opoka.org.pl/biblioteka/I/ID/9912V_05.html

Hanna Zielińska
Zwyczajni rodzice (?)
(Część II)
http://www.opoka.org.pl/biblioteka/I/ID/0001V_05.html

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There was hugely more sense in the old people who said that a wife and husband ought to have the same religion than there is in all the contemporary gushing about sister souls and kindred spirits and auras of identical colour. As a matter of fact, the more the sexes are in violent contrast the less likely they are to be in violent collision. The more incompatible their tempers are the better. Obviously a wife’s soul cannot possibly be a sister soul. It is very seldom so much as a first cousin. There are very few marriages of identical taste and temperament; they are generally unhappy. But to have the same fundamental theory, to think the same thing a virtue, whether you practise or neglect it, to think the same thing a sin, whether you punish or pardon or laugh at it, in the last extremity to call the same thing duty and the same thing disgrace—this really is necessary to a tolerably happy marriage; and it is much better represented by a common religion than it is by affinities and auras.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton
A Miscellany of Men
Chapter: The Sectarian of Society
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2015/2015-h/2015-h.htm#2H_4_0017

(Cytat w tłumaczeniu na język polski:
http://www.chesterton.fidelitas.pl/oudanym.htm)

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Jeffrey A. Tucker
Cooperation: How a Free Market Benefits Everyone
http://mises.org/story/3015

Karol Meissner OSB
Trudna droga do jedności
http://www.mateusz.pl/okarol/ekumenizm.htm

Murray N. Rothbard
The Origins of Individualist Anarchism in the US
http://www.mises.org/story/2014

Adam Duda
Jak się drukuje pieniądze
http://adamduda.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/jak-sie-drukuje-pieniadze/

Sandro Magister
Catholics and Muslims Have Signed a Charter of Rights. But Now Comes the Hard Part
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/209230?eng=y

Sławomir Cenckiewicz
Cisi sprzymierzeńcy reform
http://forums.v3v.org/viewtopic.php?p=215&sid=2ad41457c22c275974d9640eb9c8cb8d

Sandro Magister
Homilies. The Liturgical Year Narrated by Joseph Ratzinger, Pope
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/209107?eng=y

Adam Duda
Orwell, Huxley – zabawić się na śmierć
http://adamduda.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/orwell-huxley-zabawic-sie-na-smierc/

Jeffrey A. Tucker
A Man’s Biggest Fear
http://www.lewrockwell.com/tucker/tucker109.html

Jeff Geerling
Taking Pictures During Liturgies
http://web.mac.com/geerlingguy/articles/photography/liturgy_photography.html

Jesús Colina
Father Cantalamessa Evaluates Weekly Meditations
http://www.zenit.org/article-24324?l=english

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Look7777777 – Culture Watch – 2008.09.09

Anna Świderkówna opowiadała kiedyś o rozmowie ze znajomym komunistą: „W czasie rozmowy rzucił: – Jestem ateistą. – Aha – mówię – czyli pan wierzy, że Boga nie ma. – Nie, nie. Ja w nic nie wierzę – zaoponował zaskoczony. – A mógłby pan dowieść, że Boga nie ma? – zapytałam. Usłyszałam, że go zatkało. Bo on nigdy nie pomyślał, że jego światopogląd też jest formą wiary”. W każdym światopoglądzie, w każdej filozofii istnieją pewne zdania, które przyjmuje się na wiarę. Ich prawdziwość zakłada się po prostu jako rzecz oczywistą. Każdy człowiek ma jakiś zasób nienaruszalnych podstawowych tez, pewnych punktów odniesienia, które stanowią rodzaju filtru w jego patrzeniu na świat, na siebie, na życie.

Dogmatyzm kojarzy się z postawą bezkrytyczną, utożsamia się go wręcz z zakazem myślenia. Myślenie naukowe, dojrzałe, nowoczesne powinno być za myśleniem bez dogmatu. To mit. Punktem wyjścia wszystkich nauk ścisłych są aksjomaty, czyli tezy, których się nie dowodzi. Z tych „dogmatycznie” przyjętych aksjomatów wyprowadza się drogą wnioskowania kolejne twierdzenia. Nasuwa się jeszcze jeden przykład, nieco lżejszy. Czy można uznać grę w szachy za coś, co nie wymaga myślenia? A przecież szachy mają swoje nienaruszalne, niezmienne zasady. Gracze muszą je respektować, zgodzić się na nie. Inaczej nie będzie żadnej sensownej, intelektualnej rozrywki. Dogmaty są właśnie jak te niezmienne reguły gry. Nie są szlabanami zamykającymi drogę do refleksji, ale są raczej punktami wyjścia wyznaczającymi kierunek myślenia. Zapraszają do myślenia, ale we „wnętrzu” gry. Nie jest więc tak, że mamy wybór: albo myślenie, albo dogmat. Wybieramy raczej między takim czy innym zestawem dogmatów.

ks. Tomasz Jaklewicz, Dogmat w czasach niepewności, http://goscniedzielny.wiara.pl/?grupa=6&art=1219950754&dzi=1104764436&idnumeru=1219928104

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Pytanie o powołanie jest pytaniem, które ma sens w kontekście wiary, czyli relacji, jaka łączy człowieka z Bogiem. To przecież Bóg powołuje człowieka. Zrozumienie zatem pytania o powołanie zależy od rozumienia relacji z Bogiem, od rozumienia kim jest Bóg i jak On postępuje z człowiekiem.

Rozeznając powołanie bardzo często zakładamy, bardziej lub mniej świadomie, że Bóg ma już gotowy, szczegółowy plan wobec nas i że oczekuje od nas byśmy go zrealizowali.

[T]akie rozumienie powołania, powodowane nawet najlepszymi intencjami, kryje w sobie zupełnie niechrześcijański obraz Boga. Przedstawiając go nieco karykaturalnie, Pan Bóg, gdzieś w swojej tajnej kartotece, posiada ukryte akta każdego człowieka z zapisanym projektem jego życia. Do człowieka należy odgadywanie zawartości tej kartoteki. Jest to zadanie niezmiernie trudne, jeśli w ogóle możliwe, nie wspominając już o tym, że właściwie nie ma tu mowy o wolności człowieka, tak bardzo podkreślanej w chrześcijaństwie.

[T]akie wyobrażenie Boga i powołania otwiera furtkę dla niekończących się rewizji podjętych decyzji i stawia pod znakiem zapytania wierność wszelkim wyborom: bo zawsze można stwierdzić, że wcześniej nastąpiła pomyłka i dopiero teraz udało się nam rozpoznać wolę Boga. Paradoksalnie pod pozorem wiary można przemycać niewierność.

[W]olą Boga jest byśmy przez Chrystusa byli Jego dziećmi. Trudno wyobrazić sobie relację bardziej podkreślającą wolność niż ta jaka panuje pomiędzy Ojcem i dziećmi. Jedyną rzeczą do jakiej ona wzywa jest podobieństwo do Ojca i odzwierciedlanie Jego świętości. Natomiast konkretny sposób w jaki odpowiemy na to wezwanie, pozostawiony jest twórczej wolności człowieka. Właśnie odpowiedzialność i twórczość w budowaniu własnego życia jest najdoskonalszą formą realizacji podobieństwa do Stwórcy. Oczywiście w przypadku człowieka nie jest to tworzenie z niczego. Odbywa się ono na podstawie tego, kim jesteśmy, naszego temperamentu, naszych pragnień i uzdolnień, naszej wrażliwości na otaczający nas świat i wydarzenia, w których uczestniczymy. Wszystko to jest naszym udziałem w tworzeniu własnego powołania w dialogu ze Słowem Boga, które uzdalnia nas do stawania się Jego dziećmi (por. J 1,12). Wola Boga nie jest z góry szczegółowo zapisanym planem określającym kształt naszego życia.

[P]owołanie jest przede wszystkim obietnicą spełnienia głębokiego pragnienia ludzkiego serca: pragnienia życia spełnionego. To sam Bóg stwarzając człowieka składa w jego sercu pragnienie życia, jest jego Autorem, ale jednocześnie człowiekowi powierza określenie konkretnego kształtu tego życia. Abraham związał je z ojcostwem i potomstwem. Gdy ono pozostaje niespełnione, Bóg wskazuje Abrahamowi warunki jego spełnienia: wyjdź… i idź… Plan, jaki Bóg przedstawia, sięga o wiele dalej i obejmuje wszystkie ludy ziemi, ale w żaden sposób nie każe Abrahamowi rezygnować z własnego pragnienia. Przeciwnie, obiecuje jego spełnienie. W jaki sposób realizacja planu zbawienia ludzkości i spełnienie pragnienia konkretnego człowieka mogą wzajemnie się uzupełniać pozostaje tajemnicą wielkości Boga. Jedno jest jednak pewne. Nie znając własnego pragnienia, Abraham nie mógłby ani usłyszeć, ani zawierzyć wezwaniu Boga. Rozpoznanie woli Boga względem siebie, rozpoznanie własnego powołania zaczyna się od poznania i określenia własnego pragnienia życia.

Jeśli Bogu tak bardzo zależy na wolności człowieka, jedynym słusznym powodem kwestionowania dokonanego wyboru może być brak wolności w momencie jego dokonywania. Kościół w swojej mądrości uznaje za nigdy nie ważne małżeństwa zawarte pod przymusem, święcenia przyjęte bez wolnej woli. Oczywiście wolność człowieka jest niezmiernie delikatną dziedziną. Czasem bardzo trudno udokumentować rzeczywisty brak wolności, czasem bardzo łatwo postulować brak wolności, gdy tak naprawdę chodzi o trudność dochowania wierności. Nie są to łatwe kwestie i każdy przypadek musi być rozważany osobno z całą powagą i uczciwością. Jednak także ogólne rozważanie może pomóc uniknąć wielu nieporozumień.

Pewnie większość prób ponownego rozeznawania powołania nie różni się niczym od kryzysów wiary, których doświadczył Abraham. Zamiast wyobrażać sobie, że nastąpiła pomyłka, że nie tędy droga, że może nieopatrznie zrozumiałem, czego Bóg ode mnie chciał, potrzeba bardziej przypomnienia (anamnezy) własnego, pierwszego pragnienia. Bo to właśnie na nim zaczęło się budować powołanie. Bo Bóg je potraktował na poważnie i zaangażował się, by je spełnić. To nic, jeśli nie było do końca dojrzałe i czyste. Cały czas długiego oczekiwania Abrahama nie jest niczym innym jak jednym procesem dojrzewania jego pragnienia. Ale nie zostało ono zawiedzione.

[P]onowne rozeznawanie powołania mające na celu zmianę drogi życia na pewno nie jest postawą wiary. Ponieważ Bóg nie oczekuje od nas odgadywania ukrytych Swoich planów wobec naszego życia, w sytuacji kryzysu chodzi raczej o powrót do własnego pierwotnego pragnienia. Bo to na nim zaczęło się budować nasze powołanie.

Tomasz Kot SJ, Zrozumieć swoje powołanie…, http://mateusz.pl/mt/10lat/tk-zsp.htm

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[O]ur surroundings determine not just what we think, but what we can think. We live in cities urban but not urbane, among screaming sirens, in air grayed by exhaust and wracked by the blattings of buses. The complaint is not invalid for being trite. I cannot imagine a Whitman composing in a shopping mall.

The rush and complexity of everything take their toll. As a people we might well be called The Unrelaxed. And, therefore, the Uncontemplative.

Other lives are possible, or were possible. Years ago I passed a summer in Hampden-Sydney, my small college on a huge wooded campus in then-rural Virginia. The students were blessedly gone.

Along the Via Sacra, as the only road on campus was called, under blue skies going on forever and forever there was silence, absolute silence, unless you count the twittering of birds and the keening of bugs in ancient oaks. These may be sounds, but they are not noise. They are not even music, but something before, older, earlier, better. . . . [I]t was quiet and warm and you were with your thoughts.

It was terribly unmodern. At night the stars shone in the black infinite and there was no noise. No noise. There a Thoreau could have written or Corot painted. I do not think this possible in clangorous suburban ugliness.

Scientists take things apart but, except for the greats, do not notice the whole.

People rush to Europe in search of the old, the quiet, and the pretty. Peddlers of real estate understand the urge, and hawk tranquil rural life while building the malls that will make it impossible. And so hurry comes to Arcadia. People then think of escape to the next small town. We spend a remarkable amount of time fleeing ourselves. Maybe instead we should build a place we like.

We cannot, because the nature of things is determined remotely, at corporate. We have little choice in where we live, not because we cannot move but because everywhere becomes the same.

So little remains of the local. Time was when two-lane highways wound through misty valleys in the Smokies with little towns scrunched onto the slopes of a wrinkled land and mom-and-pop restaurants, no two alike. Barstow was a desert town of desert people, and New Orleans was a city, not a theme park.

Now, no. Things are both uniform and ugly. Corporates everywhere have learned to stamp out stores, houses, developments, cheap because identical, because of the wonders of mass production, and who can tell them no? You can’t stop progress, boosters say, though I can’t see that we have had any.

And of course people want, or think they want, the noise and sprawl and franchisees. Construction does briefly provide jobs, Wal-Mart does sell power saws at low prices, and the food at Ruby Tuesday’s is good. The young like noise, and surely a store selling thirty brands of running shoes for people who don’t run cannot be a bad thing. It is only later that the boredom and emptiness set in for kids who have only the malls, never the woods. Hamsters have exercise wheels. We buy things.

Few precisely like what we have, I suppose, but how does one escape it? Perhaps they don’t sense exactly what it is they want to escape, and anyway there is nowhere else to go. In noise-ridden cities smelling of exhaust, crowded, where the stars languish obscured by smoke, the rivers run semi-poisonous and much of the populace can barely read, how can anyone think beyond the stock market and the next empty copulation? The Milnes and Donnes and Marlowes don’t exist because they can’t, and we don’t want them because we can’t want them.

Fred Reed, Other Times and Ways: Shoveling Sand Against the Tide, http://www.fredoneverything.net/Walden%20III.shtml

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Until quite recently, I had assumed that the extreme ugliness of the city in which I live was attributable to the Luftwaffe.

I discovered how wrong I was not long ago when I entered a store whose walls were decorated with large photographs of the city as it had been before the war. It was then a fine place, in a grandiloquent, Victorian kind of way. Every building had spoken of a bulging, no doubt slightly pompous and ridiculous, municipal pride. Industry and Labor were glorified in statuary, and a leavening of Greek temples and Italian Renaissance palaces lightened the prevailing mock-Venetian Gothic architecture.

The City Council—the people’s elected representatives it transpired, had done far more damage to the fabric of the city in the 1950s and 1960s than had Goering’s air force.

First among the reasons for this large-scale architectural vandalism was the prolonged revulsion against all things Victorian.

I witnessed a striking example of this revulsion in my own household. My father, a communist and therefore predisposed to view the past in a lurid light, especially by comparison with the inevitable post-revolutionary glories to come, had bought several Victorian paintings at Sotheby’s during the war for ten shillings each. (Communists are not necessarily opposed to taking advantage of a temporary depression in prices.) He kept them in the loft of the house. Then, one day in 1960, quite arbitrarily, he decided that they were taking up too much space—unlike the tins of fruit he had stockpiled during the Korean War in the expectation that it would escalate into the Third World War, and which were now beginning to explode, but which he kept forever. He took all the paintings except one and put them on a bonfire, an act which I knew even at the age of ten to be one of terrible barbarism. I begged him not to do it, to give the paintings away if he didn’t like them—but no, they had to be destroyed.

Then there was the modernist arrogance about not only the Victorian past but all the centuries that had gone before—my city swept away many eighteenth-century buildings along with Victorian and Edwardian ones.

The architects thought that modernity was a value that transcended all other virtues; they thought they could wake the country from its nostalgic slumber, dragging it into the twentieth century by pouring what seemed to them the most modern of building materials—reinforced concrete—all over it.

[W]hat was decent housing? A civil servant, Parker Morris, provided the answer: a certain number of cubic yards of living space per inhabitant. The Ministry of Housing adopted the Parker Morris standards for all public housing; they governed the size and number of rooms—and that was all.

Even allowing for the roseate glow that the passage of time lends to experience, what my patients tell me of the streets where they grew up does not vindicate the reformers.

[A] sense of community did exist in these streets of little red houses, to such an extent that people who came from more than a few streets away were regarded as strangers, almost as foreigners. No doubt the community feeling resulted in a certain small-mindedness, but it also meant that life was not then the war of permanently inflamed egos to be found in Corbusian housing projects—egos inflamed by the fact that the inhabitants have been, and continue to be, treated so transparently by social policy makers as faceless, interchangeable, passive ciphers that the only way to assert their individuality is to behave antisocially.

The idea that happiness and well-being consist of the satisfaction of a few simple physical needs, and can therefore be planned on behalf of society by benevolent administrators, is . . . bleakly mocked.

[T]he buildings themselves . . . are, with a vengeance, Le Corbusier’s „machines for living in”—though perhaps „existing in” would be more accurate. The straight line and the right angle reign supreme: no curves, no frivolous decorative touches, no softening materials add warmth to the steel, glass, and concrete.

The people who inhabit these apartments are utterly isolated. All that connects them is the noise they make, often considerable, which permeates the flimsy walls, ceilings, and floors. They are likely to be unemployed and poorly educated, socialized neither by work nor by pastimes. Single mothers are housed here, guaranteeing the impoverishment of their children’s social environment: and in Britain we are now into the second generation of children who know no other environment.

No civic or collective life is possible in such conditions, and so there are no standards of conduct: every man’s whim is law, and the most physically powerful and ruthless is the one who sets the tone and makes the rules. When a patient of mine was suspended by her ankles from the window of her 11th-floor apartment by her jealous boyfriend, no one noticed or considered it his duty to intervene. She herself was unaware that there was anything morally reprehensible (as against merely unpleasant) about her boyfriend’s conduct.

[N]o desert hermit was ever more alone than the inhabitant of an English housing project.

When I aired my thoughts about public housing to a British architect—to whom, in my heart, I ascribed some of the collective blame for the calamitous situation he at once shot back, „Yes, but do sties make pigs, or do pigs make sties?”

I suspect that there is, as my father used to say, a dialectical relationship.

Theodore Dalrymple, Do Sties Make Pigs, http://www.city-journal.org/html/5_3_a4.html

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Sacred architecture, like the faith it seeks to represent in three-dimensional form, should reflect its own tradition. Each church should be a work of art in which one finds references to and acknowledgment of previous greatness. The Church remembers the Council of Nicea and the Last Supper every time she celebrates the liturgy. Likewise, every time she builds a church she remembers the holy places of her tradition. The church building is an anamnesis, or a participation, in the representation of the holy mountain, of the tent of meeting, of the Temple in Jerusalem, of Golgotha, of the upper room, and of sacred buildings throughout the centuries.

[T.S. Eliot wrote:] „Tradition … cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense … the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. … No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone: you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”

This „historical sense” requires the architect to immerse himself in great architecture. He studies buildings the way the theologian studies texts: through careful analysis and interpretation. Like the disciple, the Classicist looks to treatises and paradigms that draw him into the architectural tradition and shed light on the present. Today the architect can cut his teeth on a wealth of information on great works of the past. He himself must be willing to investigate the deep and broad architectural stream, and relearn tradition before seeking to innovate. Poetry comes only after competence in prose. And architectural innovation comes only after competence in the language of architecture.

Classical architecture is a large extended family of buildings that bear a visual resemblance to one another. The classical architect, then, has it „in his blood” to design within a proven tradition, and he has excellent advisors. The great works of the past are his forbears and advisors. He bounces new ideas off these masterpieces and tries to learn from them how they solved similar problems. When he designs, it is not just for himself or for today; he designs for and in conversation with the Classical architects who have gone before him. He designs for the future, aware that others will come and continue the conversation.

Catholicism is an Incarnational religion and in its architecture there should be an appreciation of the human body. As people created in His image, aware of Christ’s willingness to clothe Himself in flesh and blood, we recognize the goodness of the body.

The traditional church building is anthropomorphic: modeled on Christ’s body in its general form, embodying the saints and martyrs in its elements, and expressing the Church and its beliefs through iconography. The analogy of the body in the church is an accessible and profound way to understand the meaning of the Universal Church. The analogy grows out of the early Christian tradition of building churches over the graves of saints or on holy ground where a saint lived or was martyred.

Figurative painting and sculpture are central tools for the aims of Classical architecture. The Hebrew and Christian saints are witnesses worshipping with us, and the church’s iconography makes us aware of their presence. The traditions of placing images of the four evangelists at the crossing, or sculptures of the saints on the facade or retable of the material church, remind us of the true construction of the spiritual Church. Paintings and statues of saints remind us we are part of the mystical body of Christ. The church as body is a beautiful way to conceptualize the building in which people are baptized into Christ’s body, partake of His body and blood, become one body with another, and finally have their body delivered by the Church into its eternal home.

The Roman Catholic Church is timeless, enduring and permanent. So the church building is a prolepsis, or anticipation of the future; a three-dimensional introduction into the heavenly kingdom. It promises us future glory, and is a place which should make us desire to „dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” In expressing the inexpressible, the mysterious, the beatific vision, the church is a place of eternity amidst the suffering and temporality of life. In liturgy and private devotion we partake of the heavenly liturgy in which we will worship eternally, the heavenly banquet in which we shall feast forever. Surrounded pictorially by the heavenly banquet, with saints and angels painted on the ceiling, in the decoration of the walls, or as icons in the side chapels we come in contact with the eternal. The building is an act of eternal worship, which participates in the worship of heaven. As a prolepsis of eternity it must be timeless, transcendent, beautiful and durable.

The Christian life is a journey towards the heavenly home. Our architecture is eschatological; it looks forward to the new heaven and the new earth. An architecture of journey should transport us out of ourselves and into God’s presence. The church can articulate this journey beginning with the siting and design of the exterior, which should call out to us. The facade is a heavenly ladder, or a gate of heaven through which we must pass. The colonnades of the nave line our procession towards the eternal. The dome of the crossing, the generous apse and the reredos draw us up into heaven and are decorated as such. The triumphal arch separating the sanctuary from the nave is a threshold towards the eternal. Our journey towards Christ is like our procession to the altar, the place where heaven breaks into our world. From the sanctuary we receive eternity in the Eucharist and in his word.

The church is eschatological. A place designed for the future, timeless and universal rather than stylish. A car assembly line must be retooled to stay competitive, but church architecture must speak to its time and beyond its time. It should seek to be undatable, the same yesterday, today and forever.

All cultures have sought to capture beauty in their art and architecture. While the concept of beauty is debased today, the Church continues to uphold the beauty of God’s house as the ideal. Beautiful things go beyond mere fashion or superficial interest. Architectural beauty should reflect God’s creation, particularly man created in his image. Classical theory defines beauty as the correspondence of the parts with the whole, from which nothing can be added or taken away.

Catholicism and Classicism are discriminating, with high standards of excellence. These standards are the perfection of the eternal. The architect is called to be perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect.

The church, a building for the eternal, seeks durability, so as to be used by future generations. It is an investment in the faith of our children and so should be built with great care. . . . The church building is an offering to the eternal, so we employ the best materials and the finest construction techniques. The House of God should, always and everywhere, be fashioned in a way superior to the best public buildings or houses. It should be a model building for the neighborhood or the town, and as it endures it will continually speak of eternity and transcendence. [John Cardinal Newman said:] „[T]hey remain, those holy places, where they were: for the Church abides for evermore, and her Temples, in their deep foundations, and their arching heights, are her image and manifestation.”

Duncan G. Stroik, The Classical Moment, http://www.stroik.com/pubs/pdf/TheClassicalMoment.pdf

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Political power – the capacity and legal sanction to aggress against others – is integral to political office. A State official, libertarian or not, has considerable power over defenseless citizens. It is disingenuous to claim that one aspires to political office but does not seek power. Power is a defining characteristic of political office.

A politician can get together with his neighbors (other politicians) and vote to rob people, and he can bring the force of law to back up this vote.

I don’t want anyone to have political power, regardless of his supposed good intentions. I object to the political office itself and to its legitimized power.

Should the wise maxim often quoted by libertarians, „Power corrupts,” now be amended to read, „Power corrupts – unless you are a libertarian?” It is not clear to me why libertarians are any less susceptible to the temptations of power than the ordinary mortal.

We should seek to abolish the mechanism whereby one individual, in virtue of political office, can employ legitimized aggression against other individuals.

„Elect me to office,” proclaims the libertarian politician, „give me enormous power over you and your property, but rest assured that I shall abstain from using this power unjustly.” I reply: You have no right to such power in the first place – and as a libertarian you should know this. You should be denouncing the very office to which you aspire.

[L]ibertarians must stand firm against all Senators, all Presidents, and so forth, because these offices and the legal power they embody are indispensable features of the State apparatus. After all, what can it possibly mean to oppose the State unless one opposes particular offices and institutions in which State power manifests itself?

The fight against the State is not merely a fight against naked power – the battle would be much easier if that were so. The essence of the State is not aggression per se, but legitimized aggression. The State uses the sanction of law to legitimize its criminal acts. This is what distinguishes it from the average criminal in the street.

We must strip the State of its legitimacy in the public eye. We must persuade people to apply the same moral standards to the State as they apply to anyone else. We need not convince people that theft is wrong; we need to convince them that theft, when committed by the State in the name of taxation, does not differ from theft when committed by an individual. We need not persuade people that murder is wrong; we need to persuade them that murder, when committed by the State in the name of war or national defense, does not differ from murder when committed by an individual.

To run for or support candidates for political office is to grant legitimacy to the very thing we are attempting to strip of legitimacy.

The vote sanctifies injustice. If the libertarian message is to be truly radical – if libertarians are to lead the fight, not only against this or that injustice, but against the political system that perpetuates and legitimizes injustice – then we must condemn voting altogether. A libertarian cannot use the vote for his own end, as if the vote were morally neutral. The vote is the method by which the State maintains its illusion of legitimacy.

I maintain, therefore, that no person has the moral right to vote. To vote a person into office is to give that person unjust authority over others. To vote for a presidential candidate is to grant to that person the legal sanction for injustice.

Hasn’t it ever struck you as paradoxical how libertarians who are innovative when it comes to free-market alternatives, can be so pedestrian and orthodox in the area of political strategy. I mean, libertarians never tire of outlining plans for free-market roads, sewers, utilities, charities, schools, police forces, and even courts of law. When our critics ridicule free-market education, for instance, we encourage them to expand their thinking and to reject the notion that just because government has provided something in the past, it must continue to provide it in the future. Fresh, imaginative thinking is the key here.

[I]t’s not true that laws have to be repealed in order to be rendered ineffective. There are thousands of laws on the books today which are virtually dead, because the public would not tolerate their enforcement.

[L]ibertarians should breed a thorough and uncompromising disrespect for the government and its laws. We should tell people, in no uncertain terms, that decrees of the government have no moral legitimacy whatever – that they are on par with decrees of the mafia. We must work to minimize and demystify the State. Of course, there is the practical problem of avoiding penalties, and individuals may choose to obey particular laws in order to escape punishment. But a government that must rely entirely on fear cannot long survive. All governments must cloak themselves in legitimacy in order to win the passive acquiescence of their subjects. Libertarians must seek to dissolve this aura of legitimacy. We must tell people: you have certain rights, period; and what the government does cannot change that. The government is a thug and a thief; be on your guard, watch it with caution, for it is powerful. But do not be awed by it. Do not grant it respect or moral sanction. Treat it as you would any villain.

George H. Smith, Party Dialogue, http://www.voluntaryist.com/nbnb/party_dialogue.php

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[The Lord of the Rings] is about the evils of power. More precisely, the book aligns itself against power – not „economic power” or „social power”, but specifically political power.

[J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:] „You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: and allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power.”

The Lord of the Rings is the epic journey to destroy the One Ring, which symbolizes power – and this is very clear when you understand that the Ring not only confers power but also imposes serfdom on the wearer. The man who wears the Ring becomes a slave at the same time as he is made supremely powerful.

This is an allegory for what actually happens in our world every day: rulers, even well intentioned and idealistic ones, are ruled themselves at the same time. They are ruled by consensus and by the spasmodic hunger to acquire yet more power than they already have. This is why the state has never been limited, as the classical liberal thinkers had hoped it would be – because the people in charge of keeping the power of the state limited never do so.

It does not matter what stirring words a politician uses to legitimize his actions; he is inside a vicious circle he can’t escape.

[J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:] „My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.”

In Tolkien’s vision, the power is always evil – a good power cannot even exist. Since the very beginning, the good guys own the Ring. Since it is the most powerful weapon in the world, many of them ask why it can’t be used against Sauron, the Dark Lord. Even though the Ring was forged by him and undoubtedly it is evil, yet it could help to pursue a good end, they suspect. This is an extraordinary way to ask the question: could the means be subordinated to the ends? Can a good end be pursued by evil means? Tolkien answers that no, evil means can only bring to an evil end – no matter if the original intentions are good.

[J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:] „If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and the process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to ‘King George’s council, Winston and his gang’, it would do a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy.”

Alberto Mingardi, Tolkien v. Power, http://mises.org/story/899

Look7777777 – Culture Watch – 2008.09.05

Trzeba, by osoby żyjące w małżeństwie zdały sobie sprawę z tego, że ich małżeństwo powstało wprawdzie na skutek ich decyzji, ale ta decyzja została podjęta w wyniku pewnego procesu, który zaczął się w nich bez udziału ich woli. Małżonkowie, którzy zastanawiają się nad tym, jak to się stało, że zainteresowali się sobą i zbliżyli się do siebie, przyznają, że to nie oni zapoczątkowali ten proces. On się „jakoś w nich wziął”. Na ogół analiza przeżyć kochających się małżeństw nie potrafi wyjaśnić, dlaczego właściwie te osoby się pokochały. Jest w tym jakaś tajemnica. Ta właśnie więź, która powstaje między małżonkami, mająca znamiona czegoś przedziwnego, zostaje przez moc sakramentu konsekrowana, wyłączona tylko z porządku doczesnego, oddana Bogu.

Karol Meissner OSB, Wiara i płeć, Poznań 2003, s. 94

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God is always involved with all aspects of our lives. It’s no different with the vocation to marriage. He influences the people we will come into contact with and how we come into contact.

But all too often, we human beings have a tendency toward self-destructive tendencies. In other words, we do stupid things. Unwise actions and decisions (or lack of making decisions at all) affect the vocation to marriage we are called to, just as these would affect any other important part of our lives. This happens because of selfishness. We want what we want. But what does God want? If He wants us married, then He wants to help make that happen, and wants it to happen sooner rather than later.

God does NOT have one set person for us to marry. Rather, He influences our coming into contact with potentially suitable partners. We must have our senses and our hearts open to who these potential future spouses are, and take the actions necessary to discovering which is the one that the mystery of love will work in our hearts. How God brings two specific people together is a mystery. But we are very much involved, and it is ultimately our decision.

It’s a mystery how God is both an influence and also a spectator. He is very much involved in helping you find someone, but He awaits the decision of the two he has helped. Therefore, unfortunately, it does happen that, because of free will, two people that God helped do NOT come together in marriage.

God is not going to just send someone „despite” our efforts, but rather in „conjunction” with our efforts.

Anthony Buono, How God works in bringing people together, http://www.6stonejars.com/index.cfm/2008/2/26/How-God-Works-in-Bringing-People-Together

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The other day I was reading G. Gordon Liddy’s book of conservative nostalgia, When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country. He paints a sunset picture of former times when America was free, farmers could fill in swamps without violating wetland laws, and guns were just guns. People were independent and had character, and made their own economic decisions. The market ruled as it ought, and governmental intrusion was minimal.

The picture is accurate. I lived it. I wish it would come back, which it won’t. It was a world certain to kill itself.

A real-estate developer buys 500 acres along the river from the self-reliant character-filled owner. He does this by offering sums of money that water the farmer’s eyes.

First, 500 houses go up in a bedroom suburb called Brook Dale Manor. A year later, 500 more go up at Dale View Estates. . . . The river now looks ugly as the devil, but this is a wacko issue.

At Safeway corporate headquarters, way off God knows where, the new population shows up as a denser shade of green on a computer screen.

Soon the mall men in the big city hear of the county. A billion-dollar company has no difficulty in buying out a character-filled, self-reliant farmer who makes less than forty thousand dollars a year.

[M]ost of the stores in the country seat [are put] out of business. With them go the restaurants, which no longer have the walk-by traffic previously generated by the stores. With the restaurants goes the sense of community that flourishes in a town with eateries and stores and a town square. But this is granola philosophy, appealing only to meddlesome lefties.

The county’s commerce is now controlled by distant behemoths to whom the place is the equivalent of a pin on a map.

People make more money, and buy houses in Manor Dale Mews, but have less control over their time, and so no longer build their own barns, wire their houses, and change their own clutch-plates. Prosperity is A Good Thing. Its effect is that the children of the hardy yeoman become dependent on others to change their oil, fix their furnaces, and repair their boats.

The new urban majority are frightened by guns. They don’t hunt, knowing that food comes from Safeway and its newly-arrived competitor, Giant. They do not like independent countrymen, whom they refer to as rednecks, grits, and hillbillies. Hunting makes no sense to them anyway, since the migratory flocks are vanishing with the wetlands.

The children of the hardy rustics do not do as well in school as the offspring of the commuting infestation, and are slowly marginalized. Crime goes up as social bonds break down. Before, everyone pretty much knew everyone and what his car looked like. Strangers stood out. Teenagers raised hell, but there were limits. Now the anonymity of numbers sets in and, anyway, there’s no community any longer.

And so the rural character-filled county becomes another squishy suburb of pallid yups who can’t put air in their own tires. The rugged rural individualists become cogs in somebody else’s wheel. Their children grow up as libidinous mall monkeys drugging themselves to escape boredom. The county itself is a hideous expanse of garish low-end development. People’s lives are run from afar.

What it comes to is that the self-reliant yeoman’s inalienable right to dispose of his property as he sees fit (which I do not dispute) will generally lead to a developer’s possession of it. The inalienable right to reproduce will result in crowding, which leads to dependency, intrusive government, and loss of local control.

I’d like to live again in Mr. Liddy’s world. Unfortunately it is self-eliminating. Freedom is in the long run inconsistent with freedom, because it is inevitable exercised in ways that engender control. As a species, we just can’t keep our pants up. But it was nice for a while.

Fred Reed, The Suicide Of Marlboro Man, http://www.fredoneverything.net/Liddy.shtml

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I grew up among English people, the oldest of whom were working and raising families . . . [in] the years just before World War I (or, as they always said, „The Great War”). They had a lot of social-conservative attitudes, and in that respect were at one with G. Gordon Liddy. In their young days, they would tell you, the beer was stronger, people looked out for each other, the country wasn’t full of foreigners, kids knew better than to talk back to their elders, murderers were tried, convicted, and hanged, all within a month, and so on. And yet, these oldsters were all socialists. On matters of public policy, you couldn’t give them enough government. Nationalization of the mines? State-provided old-age pensions? National disability insurance? Public housing? Free education? The National Health Service? Bring it on.

„Yeoman farmer” sounds very nice and Jeffersonian, until you think of Ethan Frome or the Joads. Liberty is a wonderful thing, but like every other good, it has a price, and the price for many people was too high. They traded in their liberty for some security, creating the America and the Britain we have today. Nobody twisted their arms about it. They accepted the trade gladly, willingly — indeed, many of them fought bravely, and some even died, so that the trade could be accomplished. The older, freer way of things was, as Fred puts it so succinctly, „self-eliminating.”

We have reached the stage foreseen by Tocqueville, in which „the supreme power… covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform… it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” And aside from a few grumblers like Fred Reed and G. Gordon Liddy, we are fine with it.

What about the future, though? Ours is not the kind of society that can stand still. Will liberty go on diminishing, till biotechnology and neuroscience land us in the state-controlled infantile hedonism of Brave New World? . . . Or is there a road back to a rebirth of liberty? And if there is such a road, do we want to take it?

That last question is the tough one, of course. I am sure, at any rate, that there is a road back.

We can live, and live well, with a lot more liberty in our lives and a lot less government, if we want to. The issue that will define this new century is: Do we want to?

John Derbyshire, Liberty, http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire122102.asp

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Nasza edukacja domowa właściwie odbywała się wszędzie, i można tak powiedzieć – mimochodem. Np. podczas jazdy samochodem, na dłuższej trasie urządzaliśmy konkursy, podczas których nasze dzieci, nie zdając sobie zupełnie z tego sprawy, przyswajały w zabawie duże porcje wiedzy szkolnej i „pozaszkolnej”. Często podróżowaliśmy po Polsce, zwiedzając ciekawe miejsca i ZAWSZE wynajmując indywidualnie przewodnika, który zupełnie inaczej mówił do dwójki dzieci, niż do szkolnej wycieczki. Robiliśmy podczas takich wypraw dużo zdjęć, które sami wywoływaliśmy, dyskutując i wspominając. Do klasy piątej szkoły podstawowej uczyłam dzieci wszystkiego sama. W szóstej klasie musiałam oddać mężowi matematykę i fizykę. Rozwijała się też swoista wymiana usług z innymi rodzinami, których dzieci też chodziły do szkoły, i też nie były tam niczego uczone. Moją specjalnością przez długie lata, do liceum włącznie, był język polski, historia, biologia i – oczywiście – nauczanie początkowe. Angielskiego uczył bardzo dobry lektor. Kiedy urodziło się nam w 1990 roku trzecie dziecko i okazało się być ciężkim dyslektykiem, jako zaprawiona w boju edukatorka domowa – po prostu „kontynuowałam proceder”. Różnica polegała wyłącznie na tym, że syn zapisany był do małej szkoły niepublicznej, z którą do pewnego momentu udawało mi się współpracować.

[D]obrowolne oddawanie swoich dzieci w ręce obcych, nieznanych i przypadkowych (nie mamy przecież najmniejszego wpływu na to, kogo „władze oświatowe” zatrudniają – jedynym kryterium są wymagane dokumenty…) ludzi, regularnie i na wiele godzin dziennie – uważam za coś nieprawdopodobnie dziwacznego. Mam znajomych wśród miłośników psów i koni (sama mam dwa piękne setery irlandzkie) i wiem, że żaden właściciel rasowego psa ani konia nie chciałby rozstawać się ze swoim podopiecznym tak wcześnie i w ten sposób. Obawiałby się, że inne osoby będą miały niekontrolowany, nieakceptowany i – być może – szkodliwy wpływ na jego cennego pupila. Wszystkie poradniki racjonalnego wychowywania seterów, dogów czy dalmatyńczyków zwracają uwagę na wielkie znaczenie wczesnej więzi emocjonalnej hodowcy i podopiecznego, kształtowanej w stałym kontakcie z jednym opiekunem oraz na nieodwracalne skutki zaniedbań i błędów w tej dziedzinie. Podkreślają konieczność regularnego przebywania właściciela ze swoim wychowankiem i organizowania dla niego sytuacji, w których – przez wspólną zabawę – można osiągnąć u pupila pożądane zachowania i umiejętności… Czy nie na tym właśnie polega, z grubsza rzecz ujmując, wychowanie? A przecież człowiek jest istotą o wiele bardziej cenną, skomplikowaną i – wrażliwą! Błędy i zaniedbania, popełnione we wczesnym dzieciństwie „owocują” szerokim wachlarzem przeróżnych trudności charakterologicznych i adaptacyjnych. Z mojego doświadczenia wynika, że większość tzw. nerwic szkolnych powstaje we wczesnym dzieciństwie, a rola przedszkola od 3. roku życia wydaje się tutaj niedoceniana i przemilczana. O żłobkach nie wspominając. Tymczasem coraz więcej osób dobrowolnie pozbywa się kontaktu fizycznego i emocjonalnego z własnymi dziećmi, posyłając je np. do przedszkola już w wieku 2,5-3 lat. Ludzie ci święcie wierzą, że „to dla dobra dziecka”, że „będzie miało lepszy start”. Pozbawiają się więc możliwości uczestniczenia w jego rozwoju, pozostawiając to obcym, nieznanym ludziom. Narażają je na silne, negatywne emocje, związane z ciężkim naruszeniem poczucia bezpieczeństwa oraz na przeżycia, o których na pewno nigdy się od tak małego dziecka nie dowiedzą, a które często „wloką się” za nim przez całe życie. Nie chcą, nie potrafią lub nie mogą być przewodnikami swoich dzieci w świecie, w odkrywaniu i interpretowaniu tego świata. Mimo, że są to często ludzie rozsądni, wykształceni i odnoszą sukcesy w trudnych, odpowiedzialnych rolach zawodowych – w sposób dla mnie niepojęty wierzą, że ich trzy-, cztero- lub pięciolatek nauczy się czegoś cennego i dobrego od trzydziestoosobowej grupy równolatków, dozorowanych przez jedną „panią”, od której władze szkolne oczekują tylko dwóch rzeczy: żeby nie było wypadku i żeby „został zrealizowany program”. Wiem, że dom, rodzina, przyjaciele to naturalne środowisko człowieka, i że liczenie rzędów pierniczków na blasze z babcią to lepsza (bo naturalna) lekcja arytmetyki, niż sztuczne sytuacje w klasie.

[Z]nam bardzo wiele osób, których dzieci, zgodnie z obowiązującym przymusem – do szkoły chodzą, przebywają tam codziennie po wiele godzin, a następnie, po powrocie do domu – są od nowa wszystkiego uczone przez domowników, tym razem skutecznie.

[M]oi Rodzice, choć nie byli sławni, mogliby [...] służyć za przykład takiej rodzinnej korporacji edukacyjnej. Oboje byli najmłodszymi dziećmi pośród licznego rodzeństwa. W wyniku „nikomu nieznanych procesów”, ot tak, po prostu i nie wiadomo, jak i kiedy, w wieku 5 lat umieli dobrze czytać, pisać i liczyć. Umiejętności te zdobyli bez żadnego wysiłku, towarzysząc po prostu starszemu rodzeństwu, które uczone było w domu przez tych najstarszych. W większości znanych mi wieloosobowych rodzin taka sytuacja jest powszechna. Tam, gdzie nie istnieją problemy rozwojowe – wystarczy wrodzona, spontaniczna ciekawość dzieci, żeby niejako mimochodem przyswajały wszelką wiedzę i informację, na jaką się natkną. Jeżeli to będzie zielony żuczek na spacerze w lesie, to zapytają o niego, a otrzymaną odpowiedź zachowają na długo, bo oprócz czystej informacji słownej, będzie ona miała dla nich i zapach lasu, i szelest liści i poczucie bezpieczeństwa, wynikające z bliskości zaufanej osoby i indywidualnego kontaktu.

W tym bliskim kontakcie można (i trzeba) dziecku przekazać swój światopogląd, a więc i system wartości, swoje przemyślenia, ale i wątpliwości. W dziedzinach, w których nie czujemy się mocni – możemy razem z dzieckiem, na jego oczach zdobywać tę wiedzę, podając ją następnie w formie przystępnej i zrozumiałej. Ja, jako dość doświadczona matka i babcia (troje dzieci i troje wnucząt) wiem, że przyznanie się do niewiedzy i poszukiwanie odpowiedzi razem z dzieckiem – nie tylko nie umniejsza autorytetu rodzica, ale wręcz przeciwnie, uczy dziecko szacunku dla rzetelności i uczciwości. Tak wychowywany człowiek ma też szansę być wolnym wewnętrznie, bez względu na zewnętrzne okoliczności.

Człowiek, nawet bardzo malutki, potrzebuje przede wszystkim poczucia bezpieczeństwa. Tę najbardziej elementarną potrzebę zaspokoić może tylko stabilny kontakt psychiczny i fizyczny z najbliższymi osobami. Aby móc opuścić swoją mamę choćby na moment, trzeba najpierw wiele razy przekonać się, że można do niej w dowolnym momencie wrócić, ponieważ ona nie „znika” np. za drzwiami. Takie pozytywne doświadczenia umożliwiają maluchowi coraz dłuższe przebywanie we względnej izolacji (chociażby pod stołem!), gdzie dziecko już ok. 2-3 roku życia, manipulując zabawkami – przetwarza swoją wiedzę i kontakty społeczne, klasyfikuje zdobyte doświadczenia i próbuje je „zastosować” wobec misiów czy lalek. Tak uczy się po prostu żyć. Uczy się też przebywania z samym sobą, co w przyszłości zaowocuje umiejętnością refleksji i autorefleksji, którą psychologowie nazywają „wglądem w samego siebie”. To niezwykle cenna i pożądana umiejętność, ponieważ w przyszłości gwarantuje optymalną kontrolę nad swoim życiem i postępowaniem, możliwości szybkiej autokorekty, a w efekcie tak osławioną i pożądaną „asertywność”. Cisza i spokój sprzyjają temu procesowi.

Jeżeli człowiek ma zaburzone poczucie bezpieczeństwa, to dominującym odczuciem staje się niepokój i lęk. Ten lęk jest najczęściej nieokreślony. Wtedy samotność staje się nie do zniesienia. Stale włączone radio czy telewizor mają zagłuszyć poczucie zagrożenia i odwrócić naszą uwagę od narastającego napięcia. W domach, gdzie takie urządzenia dominują, relacje między członkami rodziny nie mają się jak i kiedy rozwinąć. Ludzie ci nie rozwiązują swoich problemów, tylko np. żyją życiem serialowych postaci. Znam, niestety, takie domy, gdzie każdy (nawet sześcioletni!) członek rodziny ma w swoim pokoju własny zestaw, składający się z radia, telewizora i komputera. Każdy żyje swoim na wpół wirtualno-medialnym życiem, wpływ rodziców na dzieci jest tylko formalny, a treści, płynące z głośników i ekranów są traktowane jak prawdy objawione… Myślę, że człowiek, mimo postępu techniki, jest wciąż taki sam – ma określone potrzeby psychiczne: bezpieczeństwa, miłości, bliskości, uznania czy sukcesu. A do ich realizacji potrzebny mu jest – do końca życia – drugi, bliski człowiek. Właściwym miejscem dla takich relacji powinien być dom, w którym dziecko znajdzie i bliskość, i samotność i intymność.

Natalia Dueholm, Cisza, spokój, bezpieczeństwo – czy to właśnie nasze dziecko znajdzie w szkole?, Rozmowa z Barbarą Kozieł-Graczyk, http://www.edukacjadomowa.piasta.pl/koziel-graczyk.html

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[A]s fun as it is at times – and as exceptional as its cast is – the new Manchurian Candidate [the 2004 remake (by Jonathan Demme) of the 1962 original (by John Frankenheimer)] limps behind its predecessor.

The main reason is These Times of Ours.

Four decades ago, George Axelrod’s script for the original film, adapted from the Richard Condon novel, packed a fierce emotional wallop. Those were the days of Camelot and the New Frontier. But Candidate was paranoid. And it was prophetic. Within months of its release, JFK was murdered in Dallas. The war in Vietnam escalated. Then King was gone. Then Bobby Kennedy. Then came Watergate. Maybe The Manchurian Candidate was too prophetic. Shortly after the JFK assassination, the movie dropped out of sight and was withheld from public viewing for 25 years. People talked about it, but nobody saw it. It became, well, legend.

Today, though, we live smack dab in The Age of Paranoia. We’ve seen the Emperor without his clothes (literally, in Clinton’s case). When planes hurtle into the World Trade Center, we mechanically ask, “Did the President know ahead of time?” During Campaign 2004, we realize instinctively that already “the fix is in.” So when we watch the new Manchurian Candidate, which offers a scenario where multinational corporate greedheads surgically tamper with the brain chemistry of Gulf War vets, we shrug and say, “So what?” It’s old hat.

Wally Conger, Manchurian Candidate Redux, http://wconger.blogspot.com/2004/08/manchurian-candidate-redux.html

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[Warren Spector said:] Back in the fall of ’97, we were researching real-world conspiracies we could use as the foundation for the Deus Ex fiction and one of the designers found a reference to this place called Mt. Weather. „What the heck is that?” I asked, but after some digging, the obscure reference blossomed into a great story. It turns out the U.S. government has had plans in place since the Eisenhower administration to send members of the executive branch of the government into hiding in the event of national emergency (which, at the time, translated as „nuclear holocaust”).

An executive order authorized the creation of a secret, underground city at Mt. Weather in Virginia, to be manned at all times by several hundred people, just waiting for the end of the world. It was all tied up with FEMA (an agency about which conspiracy theories abound). Anyway, in the event of a national emergency, some government leaders would be moved to Mt. Weather, some to an underground base below the Greenbriar resort in West Virginia, and others to as many as 45 other secret bases scattered about the country. The idea was/is to ensure the continuity of government once the emergency ended.

There are a couple of things to bear in mind, however. Over the years, each successive president has expanded either the definition of „national emergency” or the scope of the powers granted the government officials who would move to these underground bases. I actually got copies of all the executive orders and it’s kind of scary, even for a non-conspiracy-guy like me.

Post-Reagan, the definition of „national emergency” means „whatever the president decides,” and the extent of the shadow government’s power is now truly mind-blowing — taking control of all cars, trucks, buses, trains, planes, telephones, radio stations, TV stations, newspapers, etc. for the duration of the emergency — as constitutional rights go out the window. And the REALLY scary bit is that there’s nothing in any of those executive orders that deals with how you END a national emergency and restore all those pesky rights!

The original DX plot had a series of missions involving the White House and Mt. Weather, but the whole scenario ended up getting scaled back for time and feasibility reasons (and the fact that some other plot changes made Mt. Weather unnecessary). It still makes for some neat DX backstory stuff, though. And, little did we know it would become real-world relevant! I mean, when the story about Bush’s shadow government broke earlier this year, Congress may have been shocked, but the members of the DX team were all, like, „Yeah, so what else is new?… „

Deus Ex Team, DX1 Continuity Bible, http://archive.gamespy.com/articles/april02/dxbible/dx3/index3.shtm

Look7777777 – Culture Watch – 2008.08.29

Moralną podstawą egzystencji ludzkiej jest [...] świadomość praw, wielkich i niezmiennych, tę egzystencję określających. Z tych praw wywodzą się wszelkie formy stworzone przez człowieka, wszelkie jego normy moralne, obyczajowe, ustrojowe, społeczne, gospodarcze. Człowiek napotyka opór, człowiek nie jest wszechmocny – w przeciwieństwie do boskości, do atrybutów Boga, który jest wszechmocny, który opory stwarza sam. I na tym systemie oporów, jakim wielkie obozowisko ludzkie na ziemi jest ze wszystkich stron otoczone, oporów zarówno materialnych (natura), jak i moralnych (wewnętrzny konflikt człowieka), polega najistotniejszy problem życia, polega ów wielki egzamin duchowy, jakim jest nasza doczesna wędrówka. Przechodzimy swój odcinek ewolucji duchowej, stanowiący naszą ziemską egzystencję, po czym nikniemy za zasłoną bytu innego – lecz naszymi śladami stąpają następcy – odcinek tej wielkiej drabiny ewolucyjnej, po której kroczy od wieków duch ludzki, odcinek ograniczony dla naszych oczu od dołu urodzeniem, a od góry śmiercią, zwany życiem ziemskim – tworzy w istocie obraz zawsze jednakowy. Jest to obraz mozolnie wspinających się do góry, udręczonych i spragnionych doskonałości dusz, obraz niezmienny, bo choć wspinający się przechodzą i nikną – na ich miejsce wciąż wstępują nowi.

W czasie straszliwie zmiennych kolei [drugiej] wojny [światowej] niejeden ze słabszych popadł w zwątpienie, niejeden bliski był załamania. Gdy brutalna siła odnosiła zwycięstwo za zwycięstwem, gdy padały jak domki z kart stolice, niegdyś bastiony wolności i kultury, gdy wszystkie – zdawałoby się – przepowiednie i groźby Hitlera realizowały się z nieuniknioną, przerażającą punktualnością – w niejednym mieszkańcu okupowanej Europy budziło się straszne przypuszczenie: a może ten człowiek odkrył ohydną prawdę, że nie ma na świecie nic poza materialną siłą, że cała podbudowa duchowa i dialektyka etyczna świata chrześcijańskiego, którą żyjemy od wieków, jest złudzeniem i kłamstwem, że tylko przemoc jest słusznością? Te myśli, prowadzące do granic obłędu, jedną tylko mogły znaleźć przeciwwagę – w oparciu się o filozofię chrześcijańską, o wiarę chrześcijańską, w zaczerpnięciu z tego źródła pocieszenia, jakie udostępniała wszystkim jedyna w czasie wojny i terroru niepodległa, nie ulegająca zmianom, lecz wierna swoim wiecznym założeniom instytucja – Kościół katolicki. Bo zważmy: gdy zbrakło sił, gdy zawiodły wszelkie rachuby i doktryny materialne, wszelkie obliczenia racjonalne, gdy na każdym kroku gwałcono bezkarnie kanony laickiego humanitaryzmu, gdy zdobycie przez Niemców nowej fantastycznej broni groziło przekreśleniem wszelkich ogólnoświatowych proporcji sił i potencji materialnych – wtedy nadziei i energii do walki zaczerpnąć można było tylko i jedynie z idei nadprzyrodzonej. Gdy materialna siła miażdżyła wszystko wokół, głosząc urbi et orbi nicość praw moralnych i swoją nieodpartą potęgę – wtedy prawdziwy chrześcijanin, żyjący w Kościele, był jedynym, który nie zwątpił ani na chwilę. Hitler zwyciężyć mógł każdą siłę, nie mógł jednak pokonać nadprzyrodzonej siły ducha, siły, która pochodzi z wiary. Przeciw tej sile rozpoczął walkę, przeciw jej istnieniu gardłował i pienił się, a oto dzisiaj z dzieła jego nie zostało ani popiołu, a Kościół jest nadal tym, czym był, instytucją o źródłach nadprzyrodzonych, stojącą na straży wiecznych praw normujących podstawy moralne naszej ziemskiej egzystencji. Nie zwyciężył Hitlera doktrynalny materializm, który wraz z całą swoją mechanistyczną koncepcją dziejów stanąłby bezsilny wobec Niemiec dysponujących bombą atomową, nie zwyciężył go świecki humanitaryzm, którego zlecenia i zakazy śmiesznie słabe się okazywały wobec zaraźliwego jak dżuma nietscheańskiego kultu walki i siły. Zwyciężył tylko i jedynie duch chrześcijański, czerpiący swą siłę ze źródeł objawionych, ugruntowany wśród narodów Europy od wielu stuleci – i to, a nie co innego jest ideowym sensem zwycięstwa. Kościół, jedyne schronienie dla kochających dobro i prawdę, oparł się ciosom brunatnych szaleńców ze swastykami. Wielowiekowa praca pasterska Kościoła ugruntowała europejskie poczucie moralności przez upowszechnienie bezwzględnych kryteriów dobra i zła: oparła się ona na wierze i objawieniu, z których dopiero wyprowadza się cały wielki, racjonalny i harmonijny system myśli chrześcijańskiej. Tych i tylko tych założeń nie mógł przeżreć trujący kwas faszyzmu – bo założenia te apelują do jednostki ludzkiej, do indywiduum – tkwią one w każdym człowieku i, chcąc je zniszczyć, trzeba by niszczyć każdego człowieka z osobna.

Kościół nie jest instytucją o celach doczesnych, przede wszystkim nastawiony jest na wieczność, na kryteria nieśmiertelne. Jest instytucją ponadludzką, jeśli interweniuje w sprawach publicznych, społecznych – poza indywidualną strawą duchową, udzielaną każdemu – to tylko wtedy, gdy narażone są na szwank te prawa moralne, które stanowią niezmienne, określone w dogmatyce i Piśmie Świętym zręby i ramy ziemskiej wędrówki człowieka.

Stefan Kisielewski, Krytykom Kościoła, http://www.stefan_kisielewski.republika.pl/felietony/krytykom_kosciola.html

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As the computer becomes the central tool for research and development, scientific knowledge takes on a new character. Like software, it becomes primarily functional rather than descriptive. During the age of the printing press — which brought with it dictionaries, encyclopedias, tables, journals, proofs, and the modern community of scientists — the project of science appeared to be the „understanding” or „description” of the natural world, which was conceived of as a clockwork set in motion by God. The engineer meanwhile peered into this vast, static field of knowledge and applied the insights that were useful for a particular problem. Now it seems that the project of science is not primarily to represent the natural world with language but to reconfigure the natural world as language, so that it can be composed, transformed, and manipulated in the ways our minds are equipped to operate upon knowledge itself.

Consumerism got a bad rap in the 20th century because our choices were so limited. We all ended up driving the same SUVs and thinking that plaid Bermuda shorts are a neat idea. In a few decades, consumerism might well mature into a fine art of self-expression.

In the near future, perhaps we will all use software like CADTERNS Pro to custom-design the clothes we wear — or we will go to online archives of millions of designs, pick what we want, and order a hard copy of the clothes from a print shop. Punk-ass teenagers will still choose to wear T-shirts from corporation-created rock bands, but conceivably they will have the option of downloading a file and modifying the imagery, the cut, the material. Even our mass-media-derived identities will acquire a personal flair. It will be the Age of Fashion, not because image-makers will rule the market, but because we will all be able to communicate our identities more exactly with customizable products.

If we must submit to a surveillance society, I think it is clear that an open network, in which no group, agency, or individual is privileged over any other, would lead to a society with a superior character than one in which the citizens remain separate from and observed by the government. Better for us all to be able to watch one another than for the „authorities” to monopolize this power and leave us with only the fear.

The legal line between speech and action will blur dramatically during this century. The new technologies, from nanotechnology to the online economy, will be created and implemented with computer language, which by nature is both „expressive” and „functional.” How the courts untangle these two aspects of „code” will define 21st century attitudes toward new ideas and their regulation.

What happens, in a police bureaucracy, if someone releases a nanotech plague into the environment? If the police can suppress information on the structure of the nanobots, then only a handful of government bureaus and hand-picked researchers may be allowed to work on a cure. Millions could die waiting for the bureaucracy to solve the problem. On the other hand, if the molecular structure of the pest is published worldwide, anyone with the expertise could help design defensive technology.

[M]ost people in the world, despite their differences, want stable, healthy lives. As we have seen with the Internet, .1 percent of the population may always try to throw a wrench into the machine, but the rest of us will scramble to fix the problem, punish the pranksters, and defend against wrench-throwing in the future.

Instead of regulating access to the engineering languages of the coming century, we should teach the languages to anyone who wants to learn.

[T]he average consumer of entertainment can easily be excused from learning to read, but those in the business of producing it will always need a chirographic means of managing assets, workflow, and logic.

[E]xcusing the next generation from learning to read and write will succeed only in sharpening the divide between rich and poor, producer and consumer. . . . Mass illiteracy would reduce the bulk of humanity to a herd of wait-staff and bus drivers, who would be easy to police by conventional means. Resources for truly transparent surveillance could be concentrated on the minority who receive a „dangerous” education. The Jon Johansens of tomorrow would be much easier to spot and guard against. We would have a clearly defined elite, not unlike the Party in „1984,” and they would have to meet rigorous ideological and behavioral standards in order to keep their privileges.

The self-replicating, scriptable technologies are here and still arriving. Progress will continue. We aren’t choosing whether or not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. We are deciding whether to put a fence around it and ration the fruit. The choice is not between a perilous freedom and a secure tyranny, but rather between fear and trust. We might even find it easier to trust one another if each of us takes a bite out of that genetically engineered FLAVR SAVR tomato and gains the same knowledge of good and evil.

Sheldon Pacotti, Are we doomed yet?, http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/03/31/knowledge/print.html

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Nawet źli ludzie w głębi ducha często pragną dobra. W gruncie rzeczy większy urok ma śmierć w obronie dobra niż w obronie pełnego żołądka. Władza to deptanie słabszych, tej władzy podległych. Deptanie słabszych to zło. W istocie libertarianie nie tyle walczą o wolność, co walczą o dobro. To nie jest starcie nowoczesnego systemu społecznego z system przestarzałym. To jest kolejna bitwa w prastarej walce dobra ze złem, jasnej i ciemnej strony człowieka. Używanie pojęć „dobro” i „zło” to jak wprowadzenie mundurów we własnej armii, by odróżnić przyjaciela od wroga.

Taka czytelność jest niezbędna – nie można być człowiekiem dobrym a jednocześnie domagać się deptania słabszych. Człowiek dobry nie może propagować zła – ani w wersji maksimum, ani w wersji minimum. Gdy tylko człowiek uzna najmniejszy okruch zła za niezbędny – natychmiast trafia w tego zła szeregi.

Z jasną stroną natury ludzkiej wiążą się też używane środki. O ile kiedykolwiek, gdziekolwiek w imię libertariańskiej rewolucji popełniona zostanie niegodziwość – rewolucja w tym zakresie libertariańska być przestanie. Cel środków nie uświęca, a jeśli ktoś tak twierdzi, to w tym zakresie głosi idee antylibertariańskie.

Maciej Dudek, Rewolucja nomów, http://liberalis.pl/2007/09/29/maciej-dudek-rewolucja-nomow/

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It seems to be a near-universal compulsion for those interested in ethics to attempt to find situations where ethical rules contradict themselves, therefore introducing an element of irrationality or subjectivity to ethics. “Lifeboat” scenarios (cannibalism-is-wrong-but-what-if-you’re-starving), “desperation” scenarios (all-starving-men-will-steal-so-how-can-stealing-always-be-wrong) and so on all seem to be endlessly obsessed over.

It is certain that the ethical propositions accepted by most thinkers – the nonaggression principle, property rights and the validity of voluntary contracts – would solve or prevent almost all the institutional evils that the world currently suffers from.

I will do my best to eliminate at least one of the challenges posed by those who wish to find the limits of property rights.

I am hanging by my fingernails from a flagpole outside the window of someone’s apartment. My choices are to either (a) kick in the window and clamber to safety, or (b) fall to my death.

I will take it as a given that just about everyone on the planet would choose option ‘a’ rather than falling to his death. In this situation, clearly we have an abrogation of property rights (breaking someone’s window and entering the apartment) which is considered the most sensible, right, proper and rational thing to do.

[T]he exercise of property rights is voluntary. If my car is stolen, I am not morally obligated to assert my property rights and report the theft to the proper authorities, or go hunting for my car myself. I can quite easily shrug, blame the will of the gods and go and buy a bicycle.

[O]ne-sided contracts created without permission are perfectly valid if the permission can be achieved voluntarily after the fact.

If I come home to find policemen in my apartment, who introduce me to a man who had kicked in my window in order to save himself from falling to death, I would be thrilled and fascinated, and entirely pleased that he had found a way to prevent his own demise. I am quite sure that the man would be more than willing to compensate me for my broken window, but even if he did not – if he were homeless, say, or utterly broke – I would still be pleased to have played even a tiny role in saving his life.

Thus we can see that kicking in someone’s window to save your life is not a violation of his property rights at all, but rather a use of his property based on a reasonable assumption of how he would want his property to be used if permission could be sought ahead of time, or in the moment.

If I guess wrong, then I am liable for the consequences.

[I]f you would have preferred that I fall to death my rather than kick in your window, then of course I am liable for the property damage that I have incurred.

Stefan Molyneux, Hanging By A Thread: Flagpoles, Lifeboats and the Edge of Ethics, http://freedomain.blogspot.com/2008/04/hanging-by-thread.html

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A Virginia family was shocked but relieved when their mother, Val Thomas, woke up after doctors said she was dead. 59-year-old Mrs. Thomas, while being kept breathing artificially, had no detectable brain waves for more than 17 hours. The family were discussing organ donation options for their mother when she suddenly woke up and started speaking to nurses.

The problem is time and the rapid deterioration of most vital organs after the cessation of heart function. After death, corneas and bone marrow can still be used but soft vital organs such as the heart, lungs, pancreas and kidneys rapidly deteriorate and are unusable within a few hours. Traditional medical ethicists contend that soft and easily damaged organs such as the heart are impossible to obtain morally since they deteriorate more quickly and must be removed when a patient’s condition is still disputed.

The procedure . . . known as donation after cardiac death (DCD) . . . typically involves a person who requires a ventilator and, while having measurable brain function, is determined to have no hope of recovery. After this judgement is made, doctors remove ventilation from the patient and wait for the heart to stop beating. If the heart stops for five minutes, death is pronounced and the organs are harvested by another surgical team.

Doctor John B. Shea, medical advisor to Canada’s Campaign Life Coalition told LifeSiteNews.com that DCD does represent a potential threat to comatose patients.

Donors for DCD are chosen, he said, not because they are dead, but because their organs are particularly desirable for transplant. Dr. Shea said in a 2006 interview, „The typical scenario for such organ harvesting is a young person between the age of 5-55 who is in good health, is in intensive care due to an automobile accident and is on a ventilator. The doctor makes an arbitrary decision that treatment is futile.”

„Those donors are known not to be brain dead but are usually first in a coma and the doctor decides treatment is futile.”

Hilary White, Woman’s Waking After Brain Death Raises Many Questions About Organ Donation, http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/may/08052709.html

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Gdyby całkowity porządek w sferze seksualnej był łatwy do osiągnięcia, prawo Boże obowiązujące w tej dziedzinie zapewne uznawano by powszechnie. Stawia ono bowiem cele, do których dusza człowiecza dosłownie się wyrywa. Cóż piękniejszego, niż być w pełni panem samego siebie, popędy uczynić doskonale posłusznymi sługami miłości i uszanować w pełni ich fundamentalną celowość? Dopiero gdy okazuje się, że w realizowaniu tego programu trzeba pokonywać swoją grzeszność i zaznawać różnych goryczy, jakie wynikają z naszej słabości, wielu ludzi odrzuca prawo Boże i tłumaczy sobie, że ponieważ popęd seksualny stanowi cząstkę naszej natury, więc należy okazywać mu posłuszeństwo. A przecież popęd seksualny a jego nieuporządkowanie to naprawdę dwie gruntownie różne sprawy.

[C]óż to takiego jest rygoryzm? Przez rygoryzm rozumiem utrudnianie życia za pomocą niepotrzebnych przepisów, a także stawianie przepisu ponad człowiekiem, wierność przepisowi, skądinąd pożytecznemu, również w takich przypadkach, kiedy nie broni on już żadnego dobra, a nawet wówczas kiedy jego przestrzeganie przyniesie szkodę.

Jednak nie nazwiemy rygoryzmem nakładania przepisów, choćby uciążliwych, które mają niewątpliwy sens. I tak chirurg, a nawet dentysta, mają ścisły obowiązek starannego umycia rąk przed przystąpieniem do zabiegu. Pilot czy saper, i w ogóle każdy, kto obsługuje jakiekolwiek wysoce skomplikowane lub niebezpieczne urządzenia, musi z całą skrupulatnością podporządkować się drobiazgowo ustalonym zasadom postępowania. Ba, także pracownikowi wylęgarni kurcząt nie wolno pozwolić sobie na dowolność przy ustalaniu temperatury w inkubatorze. Nawet jeśli tego rodzaju wymagania niekiedy nazywamy rygorystycznymi, to w każdym razie nie jest to rygoryzm jałowy i bezduszny. Wręcz przeciwnie, właśnie pedantyczne przepisy pozwalają w takich sytuacjach osiągnąć pożądane dobro i chronią przed szkodą, niekiedy nawet przed katastrofą.

Otóż celowość zasad moralnych, porządkujących przeżywanie naszej seksualności, dotyczy dobra szczególnie wielkiego. Chodzi przecież o porządek w tym wymiarze naszego człowieczeństwa, w którym poczynają się nowi ludzie. Warto zauważyć, że cały rzekomy rygoryzm katolickiej etyki seksualnej ma swoje źródło w bardzo wysokim myśleniu o człowieku i o jego godności. My, chrześcijanie, wierzymy, że człowiek jest osobą, kimś niepowtarzalnym, przyszłym dziedzicem życia wiecznego. Toteż nasza płciowość stanowi świadectwo niewiarygodnego wręcz zaufania, jakie nam okazuje Stwórca: oto ja mogę stać się ojcem lub matką nowego człowieka, niepowtarzalnej osoby, godnej miłości samego Boga, miłości posuwającej się aż do Wcielenia i Krzyża!

Dla wielu małżonków i rodziców najbardziej skutecznym argumentem, który przekonuje ich do pełnego realizowania w swoim pożyciu zasad etyki katolickiej, jest myśl następująca: „Naszym dzieciom należy się to, żeby miały czystych rodziców!”

Staraj się […] w taki sposób doświadczać swojej płciowości, żeby zakazy się w tobie uniepotrzebniały. [...] Otóż duszą [katolickiej] etyki [seksualnej] jest przeświadczenie o ponadziemskiej godności człowieka oraz o niezwykłym zaufaniu, jakie okazał nam Bóg, stwarzając nas istotami płciowymi, zdolnymi dać początek nowym ludziom, podobnie jak my wezwanym do przyjaźni z Nim i do życia wiecznego.

Jacek Salij OP, Rzekomy rygoryzm katolickiej etyki seksualnej, http://www.opoka.org.pl/biblioteka/T/TD/poszukiwania/rygoryzm.html

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Brit Ex-Pat NEWS (fast acting news for the discerning British exile, delivered straight to your inbox)

Khazai ready to act without new UN resolution

The Iraqi president, Ali Khazai, today announced that he would be willing to invade Britain without global backing. He said he believed „passionately” that Emperor Blair II must be stripped of his weapons of mass destruction, with or without a new UN resolution.

Mr Khazai said he „could not be constrained” by the possibility of a country imposing an „unreasonable block” or proviso that would hinder a fresh UN resolution.

He added: „I want to make it quite clear, and I believe this to be the position of all the main security council members, that if there is a breach [of the first resolution] we would expect the United Nations to honour the undertakings that were given and make sure that the will of the UN is upheld. We cannot stand by and let the British continue to create and trade weapons of mass destruction. And that is not to mention Blair’s barbaric treatment of ethnic Scots and Welsh. We have a moral duty to intervene. The world may choose to remain silent but Iraq, the global guardian of peace and prosperity, shall not.”

To cancel subscription to Brit send a message to britexile@newscorp.co.eu

From Deus Ex Zodiac, a Deus Ex mod released in 2004.

Look7777777 – Culture Watch – 2008.08.18

Pan Bóg ustanowił małżeństwo, aby wypełnić swój plan miłości. Małżeństwo jest zadaniem do spełnienia. Toteż należy zawierać małżeństwo z osobą, która to zadanie może spełniać. Małżonkowie mają być dla siebie darem, mają być sobie nawzajem oddani. To wielkie i odpowiedzialne zadanie.

[...] największym wrogiem małżeństwa są oczekiwania, jakie narzeczeni z nim wiążą. Ktoś mógłby zapytać: jak to? Czy nie wolno mi mieć żadnych oczekiwań? Wolno, oczywiście! Problemem jest, czy są warunki, aby te oczekiwania zostały spełnione. Tymczasem oczekiwania bardzo często są budowane na wyobrażeniach, które nie mają odniesienia w rzeczywistości.

Człowiek zawsze jakieś oczekiwania ma. Rzecz w tym, że w pojęciu oczekiwania nie mieści się osobisty wysiłek, aby te oczekiwania się spełniły.

Nie chcę dawać rad. Po prostu mam prośbę. Pomyślcie o waszych dzieciach. Pamiętajcie, że będą się one uczyły czwartego przykazania! Warto sobie uświadamiać, że chłopak jest możliwym ojcem i że jego dzieci będą miały takiego ojca, jakim jest on dziś chłopakiem. Dziewczyna jest możliwą matką. Jej dzieci będą miały taką matkę, jaką jest ona dziewczyną. Wszystko, co dziś robicie, robicie na rachunek swoich dzieci. Czy będą mogły być z was dumne? Proszę, byście tak się zachowywali, by mogło to być wspaniałą drogą dla waszych dzieci.

Chęci to za mało, Rozmowa z o. Karolem Meissnerem OSB, http://www.opoka.org.pl/biblioteka/Z/ZR/km_zareczyny.html

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People think they know what they want but they generally dont. Sometimes if they’re lucky they’ll get it anyways. Me I was always lucky. My whole life. I wouldnt be here otherwise. Scrapes I been in. But the day I seen her [my wife] come out of Kerr’s Mercantile and cross the street and she passed me and I tipped my hat to her and got just almost a smile back, that was the luckiest.

People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they dont deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things. I dont recall that I ever give the good Lord all that much cause to smile on me. But he did.

Loretta told me that she had heard on the radio about some percentage of the children in this country bein raised by their grandparents. I forget what it was. Pretty high, I thought. Parents wouldnt raise em. We talked about that. What we thought was that when the next generation come along and they dont want to raise their children neither then who is goin to do it? Their own parents will be the only grandparents around and they wouldnt even raise them.

Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that’s a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.

I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics. Maybe he did. I told that to somebody at breakfast the other mornin and they asked me if I believed in Satan. I said Well that aint the point. And they said I know but do you? I had to think about that. I guess as a boy I did. Come the middle years my belief I reckon had waned somewhat. Now I’m startin to lean back the other way. He explains a lot of things that otherwise dont have no explanation. Or not to me they dont.

These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldnt even understand, well, they just flat out wouldnt of believed you. But what if you’d of told em it was their own grandchildren? Well, all of that is signs and wonders but it dont tell you how it got that way. And it dont tell you nothin about how it’s fixin to get, neither.

Where you went out the back door of that house there was a stone water trough in the weeds by the side of the house. A galvanized pipe come off the roof and the trough stayed pretty much full and I remember stoppin there one time and squattin down and lookin at it and I got to thinkin about it. I dont know how long it had been there. A hundred years. Two hundred. You could see the chisel marks in the stone. It was hewed out of solid rock and it was about six foot long and maybe a foot and a half wide and about that deep. Just chiseled out of the rock. And I got to thinkin about the man that done that. That country had not had a time of peace much of any length at all that I knew of. I’ve read a little of the history of it since and I aint sure it ever had one. But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasnt that nothin would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know bettern that. I’ve thought about it a good deal. I thought about it after I left there with that house blown to pieces. I’m goin to say that water trough is there yet. It would of took somethin to move it, I can tell you that. So I think about him settin there with his hammer and his chisel, maybe just a hour or two after supper, I dont know. And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intentions of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that’s what I would like most of all.

Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men, 2005

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Let me begin with the definition of a state. What must an agent be able to do to qualify as a state? This agent must be able to insist that all conflicts among the inhabitants of a given territory be brought to him for ultimate decision-making or be subject to his final review. In particular, this agent must be able to insist that all conflicts involving himself be adjudicated by him or his agent. And implied in the power to exclude all others from acting as ultimate judge, as the second defining characteristic of a state, is the agent’s power to tax: to unilaterally determine the price that justice seekers must pay for his services.

The market demand for intellectual services is not exactly high and stable. Intellectuals would be at the mercy of the fleeting values of the masses, and the masses are uninterested in intellectual-philosophical concerns. The state, on the other hand, can accommodate the intellectuals’ typically over-inflated egos and offer them a warm, secure, and permanent berth in its apparatus.

However, it is not sufficient that you employ just some intellectuals. You must essentially employ them all, even the ones who work in areas far removed from those that you are primarily concerned with: that is philosophy, the social sciences and the humanities. For even intellectuals working in mathematics or the natural sciences, for instance, can obviously think for themselves and so become potentially dangerous. It is thus important that you secure also their loyalty to the state. Put differently: you must become a monopolist. And this is best achieved if all educational institutions, from kindergarten to universities, are brought under state control and all teaching and researching personnel is state-certified.

But what if the people do not want to become educated? For this, education must be made compulsory; and in order to subject the people to state-controlled education for as long as possible, everyone must be declared equally educable.

The overwhelming majority of state supporters are not philosophical statists, i.e., because they have thought about the matter. Most people do not think much about anything philosophical. They go about their daily lives, and that is it. So most support stems from the mere fact that a state exists, and has always existed as far as one can remember (and that is typically not farther away than one’s own lifetime). That is, the greatest achievement of the statist intellectuals is the fact that they have cultivated the masses’ natural intellectual laziness (or incapacity) and never allowed for the subject to come up for serious discussion. The state is considered as an unquestionable part of the social fabric.

The first and foremost task of the intellectual anti-intellectuals, then, is to counter this dogmatic slumber of the masses by offering a precise definition of the state, as I have done at the outset, and then to ask if there is not something truly remarkable, odd, strange, awkward, ridiculous, indeed ludicrous about an institution such as this. I am confident that such simple, definitional work will produce some serious doubt regarding an institution that one previously had been taken for granted.

Assume a group of people, aware of the possibility of conflicts; and then someone proposes, as a solution to this eternal human problem, that he (someone) be made the ultimate arbiter in any such case of conflict, including those conflicts in which he is involved. I am confident that he will be considered either a joker or mentally unstable and yet this is precisely what all statists propose.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Reflections on the Origin and the Stability of the State, http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe18.html

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[T]he United States is already a police state. Every state law, no matter how petty or important, has as its final punishment your imprisonment or death – should you decide to resist it to the bitter end. This is true of all states, everywhere, at any time.

If a state cannot convince its subject population to comply with its laws, it must initiate violence to enforce its will. The failure to use force will ultimately lead to the breakup of even the most monolithic state.

The reason that I argue that „every state is a police state” is that it is inherently the nature of the state to establish a compulsory monopoly of defense services over a given geographic area. Property owners who prefer no protection, or prefer to protect themselves, or prefer to hire other protective agencies are not allowed to do so. It is also in the nature of the state to obtain its revenues from taxation – a compulsory levy on the inhabitants of its territory. Every state depends on taxation to finance itself. If you don’t pay your taxes you will be imprisoned and/or your property will be confiscated.

All you need to know about states is that every state is a police state. Some have more edicts than others; some have fewer – but they all have laws that you must obey or suffer the consequences.

Even the most benign states violate the rights of peaceful people to be left alone. Even if there is no income tax, there are import and excise duties, sales and use taxes, and property taxes. If you want to opt out, you can’t unless you want to face the barrel-end of a gun. If you birth your children at home, the state wants to get involved. You are required to register their births. If you want to erect a building dedicated to your religion or your business you are required to get a building permit. If you want to homeschool your children you are required to report to governmental authorities.

. . . common sense and experience teach that if one takes care of the means that the end will take care of itself. The only way to avoid the police state is not having a state at all.

Carl Watner, Every State a Police State, http://www.voluntaryist.com/forthcoming/policestate.php

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Mały ma 11 lat, ale wygląda na 9. Pierwszy raz pojawił się półtora roku temu. Przychodził do sklepu napraszając się o ulotki do rozdawania za pieniądze. Najczęściej zarabiał myjąc szyby, trzepiąc dywaniki samochodowe albo sprzedając jagody. Pewnego dnia zaczęliśmy rozmawiać.

Rozmowa 3:

– Aaaa, miałem tu u pani kupić coś na walentynki mojej jednej mamie, ale kupiłem już takie serce co się składa i białą różę. A drugiej mamie to chyba… no właśnie nie wiem.. chyba jej nie kupię…

– A z którą mamą mieszkasz?

– Z przybraną teraz, z prawdziwą to kiedyś mieszkałem, ale nie pamiętam tego, bo mnie od niej szybko zabrali. Babcia mi opowiadała… że ona dawała mi alkohol jak byłem bardzo mały… No i jeszcze, że jak miała mnie w brzuchu, to tłukła brzuchem o kant stołu, żebym urodził się martwy…

Postaliśmy tak przez chwilę cicho.

– Mimo wszystko fajnie, że się urodziliśmy i żyjemy, co nie? Niektórzy nie mogli się urodzić… – odpowiedziałam.

– Hmmm, no tak… A czy to prawda, że mamy dwa życia?

– A kto ci tak powiedział?

– Ksiądz.

– W pewnym sensie miał rację.

– I to następne życie będzie lepsze??

– Na pewno.

– To po co jest TO życie?!

Rozmowa 7:

– Wiesz Mały, mnie nikt nic nigdy w życiu nie dał – moralizuję.

– Naprawdę nic nigdy pani nie dostała???

– No… To znaczy w sensie, że na wszystko musiałam sobie ciężko zapracować.

– A to zaraz! – woła Mały i wybiega ze sklepu.

Po chwili wraca i wręcza mi… tabliczkę czekolady.

– Teraz już pani coś dostała!

– Dziękuję!

– A teraz już muszę lecieć, bo mama kazała mi być w domu o 19.00!

– No widzisz! Mama się o ciebie bardzo martwi! Chyba jednak nie jest taka zła!

– No nie jest… – śmieje się Mały.

Izabela, Niechciane dzieci: „Rozmowy z Małym”, http://notoryczna.salon24.pl/28381,index.html

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Morgoth is not ‘invoking’ evil or calamity on Húrin and his children, he is not ‘calling on’ a higher power to be the agent: for he, ‘Master of the fates of Arda’ as he named himself to Húrin, intends to bring about the ruin of his enemy by the force of his own gigantic will. Thus he ‘designs’ the future of those whom he hates, and so he says to Húrin: ‘Upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom, and it shall bring them down into darkness and despair.’

The torment that he devised for Húrin was ‘to see with Morgoth’s eyes’. My father gave a definition of what this meant: if one were forced to look into Morgoth’s eye he would ‘see’ (or receive in his mind from Morgoth’s mind) a compellingly credible picture of events, distorted by Morgoth’s bottomless malice; and if indeed any could refuse Morgoth’s command, Húrin did not. This was in part, my father said, because his love of his kin and his anguished anxiety for them made him desire to learn all that he could of them, no matter what the source; and in part from pride, believing that he had defeated Morgoth in debate, and that he could ‘outstare’ Morgoth, or at least retain his critical reason and distinguish between fact and malice.

[Morgoth said:] ‘I am the Elder King: Melkor, first and mightiest of all the Valar, who was before the world, and made it. The shadow of my purpose lies upon Arda, and all that is in it bends slowly and surely to my will. But upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom, and it shall bring them down into darkness and despair. Wherever they go, evil shall arise. Whenever they speak, their words shall bring ill counsel. Whatsoever they do shall turn against them. They shall die without hope, cursing both life and death.’

But Húrin answered: ‘Do you forget to whom you speak? Such things you spoke long ago to our fathers; but we escaped from your shadow. And now we have knowledge of you, for we have looked on the faces that have seen the Light, and heard the voices that have spoken with Manwë. Before Arda you were, but others also; and you did not make it. Neither are you the most mighty; for you have spent your strength upon yourself and wasted it in your own emptiness. No more are you now than an escaped thrall of the Valar, and their chain still awaits you.’

‘You have learned the lessons of your masters by rote,’ said Morgoth. ‘But such childish lore will not help you, now they are all fled away.’

‘This last then I will say to you, thrall Morgoth,’ said Húrin, ‘and it comes not from the lore of the Eldar, but is put into my heart in this hour. You are not the Lord of Men, and shall not be, though all Aida and Menel fall in your dominion. Beyond the Circles of the World you shall not pursue those who refuse you.’

‘Beyond the Circles of the World I will not pursue them,’ said Morgoth. ‘For beyond the Circles of the World there is Nothing. But within them they shall not escape me, until they enter into Nothing.’

‘You lie,’ said Húrin.

‘You shall see and you shall confess that I do not lie,’ said Morgoth. And taking Húrin back to Angband he set him in a chair of stone upon a high place of Thangorodrim, from which he could see afar the land of Hithlum in the west and the lands of Beleriand in the south. There he was bound by the power of Morgoth; and Morgoth standing beside him cursed him again and set his power upon him, so that he could not move from that place, nor die, until Morgoth should release him.

‘Sit now there,’ said Morgoth, ‘and look out upon the lands where evil and despair shall come upon those whom you have delivered to me. For you have dared to mock me, and have questioned the power of Melkor, Master of the fates of Arda. Therefore with my eyes you shall see, and with my ears you shall hear, and nothing shall be hidden from you.’

Now when Túrin learned from Finduilas of what had passed, he was wrathful, and he said to Gwindor: ‘In love I hold you for rescue and safe-keeping. But now you have done ill to me, friend, to betray my right name, and call down my doom upon me, from which I would lie hid.’

But Gwindor answered: ‘The doom lies in yourself, not in your name.’

J.R.R. Tolkien & Christopher Tolkien, The Children of Húrin, 2007

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Schoppe był coraz bardziej zdenerwowany, to się dawało wyczuć.

– Nawet słowo „ciąża” nie przechodzi panu przez usta! – krzyknął cienko.

– Hm? – zdziwił się dziadek. – Ależ przechodzi, i to gładko. Ciąża. Ciąża. Widzisz?

Babcia omal nie roześmiała się w głos. Józinek mógłby się założyć, że ona teraz wbija sobie paznokcie w przedramię – już dawno zauważył, że zawsze tak robiła, kiedy trzeba było koniecznie zachować powagę.

– Natomiast – ciągnął dziadek, a po jego minie widać było, że się rozeźlił – z pewnym trudem przechodzi mi przez usta zwrot „ciąża mojej wnuczki”. Zwłaszcza gdy go uzupełnię określeniem „nieślubna”. Ale to pewnie dlatego, że jestem taki staroświecki.

– Chyba jesteś – wtrąciła Babi. – Dzisiaj wiele jest samotnych matek, które dzielnie sobie radzą, skoro nie mogą liczyć na pomoc ze strony swoich mężczyzn.

– …a jeszcze trudniej przechodzi mi przez usta – dziadek nie dawał się sprowadzić z raz obranego szlaku – taka oto fraza: „nieślubna ciąża mojej wnuczki, której zaufanie zostało dotkliwie zawiedzione”.

– Ja niczego nie zawodziłem! – zakrzyknął nerwowo Fryderyk. – Odwrotnie! To Róża mnie nie uprzedziła, że może zajść w ciążę!

– Ta możność nie należy do szczególnie wyjątkowych w świecie kobiet, o ile mi wiadomo – odrzekł na to Ignacy Borejko, sztywno i z godnością. – Przy dopełnieniu, rzecz jasna, pewnych niezbędnych warunków.

Babcia zacisnęła mocno usta i roziskrzonym wzrokiem spojrzała w sufit.

– A jeśli mowa o słowach, których tu się nie używa – atakował dalej Fryderyk Schoppe – to wspomnę o słowie „seks”.

– Już jest obowiązkowe? – zainteresowała się babcia.

– …Może gdyby częściej się tego słowa używało w domu Róży, nie byłoby teraz tej niespodzianki!

– Czy sugerujesz – zapytał dziadek lodowato – że owa niespodzianka spotkała cię dlatego, że nie dość często używamy tu słowa „seks”? Mój Fryderyku, przyczyną ciąży, jak uczy biologia, nie jest niedostatek określonych słów, lecz zgoła co innego.

Słowna szermierka była specjalnością dziadka. Schoppe został zapędzony w sam róg planszy. Umilkł jak idiota.

Dziadek natychmiast dostrzegł swą przewagę i wykorzystał ją bez ociągania.

– Dlaczego mielibyśmy – zastanawiał się dalej z wyraźną przyjemnością – chodzić po domu, i to przy gościach, wypowiadając słowo „seks”? – w dodatku częściej niż dotąd? Co właściwie kryje się pod tym określeniem – czy życie płciowe homo sapiens? Jeśli tak, to, nie trudząc się bynajmniej nazywaniem rzeczy po imieniu, zyskaliśmy w tej dziedzinie życia wiele dobrego: nie tylko trwale nas uszczęśliwiło, ale i poważnie wzbogaciło. Mamy cztery córki i dziewięcioro wnucząt, a teraz urodzi nam się pierwsze prawnuczę. To będzie wielka radość.

– Małe dzieci tak ślicznie pachną – przypomniała sobie babcia.

– Lecz oczywiście, nasza satysfakcja nie manifestuje się na co dzień bezustannym wypowiadaniem słowa „seks” – kontynuował dziadek ku wyraźnej uciesze babci. – Czytałem, że im częściej ktoś wypowiada słowo „seks” lub jego synonimy, czy też określenia tematycznie zbliżone, tym więcej wzbudza wątpliwości; obsesyjne nawracanie do tego tematu świadczy bowiem najczęściej – a potwierdzi ci to każdy lekarz – o dotkliwym niedosycie w tej dziedzinie.

Babcia miała spiżową twarz i dłoń zaciśniętą na przedramieniu.

– Media – rozpędzał się dziadek – nadużywają dzisiaj twojego ulubionego słowa, zaspokajając gusta masowej publiczności, co jak zwykle przekłada się na czysty zysk. Lecz, Fryderyku, życie płciowe, wbrew powszechnej opinii prostaków, nie jest jedynym ani nawet najważniejszym celem naszego bytowania na tym globie. Nie będę rozwijał tego nowego wątku, bo zabrnęlibyśmy zbyt daleko w filozofię, dodam jednak, że jeśli mielibyśmy w tym domu potrzebę częstszego nazywania tego, co nas łączy, używalibyśmy raczej słowa „miłość”. Lecz, naszym zdaniem, dyskrecja jest jedną z oznak dobrego wychowania i miłą zaletą, zwłaszcza w tej materii, którą poruszyłeś. – Spojrzał spod oka na Fryderyka Schoppe i dorzucił: – Choć chętnie przyznaję, że nie wszyscy na świecie są tego zdania.

Schoppe milczał, zmiażdżony.

Józinek był szczerze dumny ze swego dziadka: puścił on tekst może przydługi, ale za to skuteczny. Potęga wymowy! – to jednak jest coś. Miło było popatrzeć na jej efekty.

Ale to jeszcze nie był koniec.

– Nie byłeś przesadnie entuzjastyczny, gdy ci Róża wyjawiła swą nowinę – prawda, młody przyjacielu? – zapytał dziadek po okresie dźwięczącej w uszach ciszy.

Amant Róży momentalnie ożył.

– Entuzjastyczny? – krzyknął. – Czy byłem entuzjastyczny?! Właśnie przyznano mi stypendium w Stanach! Zrobiłem dwa lata studiów w rok i co?! – miałbym teraz to wszystko poświęcić?! Przecież ja nawet nie zarabiam! Mieszkam kątem u rodziców, w bloku! Nie mam teraz czasu i możliwości na zakładanie rodziny.

– Mój drogi – wkroczyła babcia. – Jeszcze tego nie rozumiesz, ale ty już ją założyłeś. Nie ożenisz się z Różą, wyjedziesz do Stanów, lecz cóż z tego? – twoja rodzina i tak będzie na świecie.

Małgorzata Musierowicz, Język Trolli, Łódź 2004, s. 179-182

Look7777777 – Culture Watch – 2008.08.05

The Lew Rockwell Show, Podcast 8: Hans-Hermann Hoppe & Lew Rockwell, The Scam Called the State, http://www.lewrockwell.com/podcast/?p=episode&name=2008-07-29_008_the_scam_called_the_state.mp3

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Kościół, ukazując powołanie małżonków do przeżywania aktu seksualnego jako spotkania z Bogiem, w wyjątkowy sposób podnosi jego godność. Ludzki akt miłości staje się święty obecnością Boga. To sakramentalne spotkanie z Jezusem Chrystusem wynosi małżonków ku niebu: uszlachetnia, oczyszcza, uświęca miłość ludzką.

[P]ożycie seksualne nie jest tylko aktem biologicznym, bo tak myślą ludzie przesiąknięci laicką kulturą. Akt seksualny małżonków angażuje również duchowy wymiar człowieka. [...] Staje się aktem w pełni ludzkim, gdy wyraża miłość coraz bardziej będącą darem z siebie, gdy odbywa się w małżeństwie „na dobre i na złe”, aż do końca życia.

Znak obecności Boga pośród kochających się małżonków jest bardzo konkretny i wyraźny i, co najważniejsze, pokazuje, że Bóg może działać w każdej chwili małżeńskiego życia. Taki znak tworzą sami małżonkowie poprzez swoje ciała. Jest to znak żywy. Cielesna bliskość małżonków tworzy widzialny znak ich wspólnoty, która jest powołana do stania się znakiem miłości i jedności. Małżonkowie tworzą znak obecności Boga, gdy są cieleśnie razem – gdy razem żyją pod jednym dachem, a nie są rozdzieleni przez wyjazd jednego z nich do pracy za granicę, gdy razem się modlą, gdy rozmawiają ze sobą, gdy pomagają sobie w codziennym życiu, choćby sprzątając mieszkanie, gdy się wspierają, pocieszają, gdy obdarzają się czułością, pieszczą się, współżyją seksualnie (śpią w jednym łóżku). Ten znak wymaga wypełnienia duchowego, aby był znakiem miłości, aby cielesne bycie razem stało się komunią – wspólnotą prawdziwej jedności małżeńskiej – duszą, sercem i ciałem.

Gdy małżonkowie umieją w wierze zinterpretować swoją miłość, wtedy jej różnorodne przejawy wyrażone poprzez ciało (pomoc, modlitwa, rozmowa, pieszczota, akt seksualny) stają się dla nich znakami sakramentalnymi, czyli znakami, poprzez które mogą rozpoznać obecność Boga przychodzącego do nich. Gdy żona czuje się kochana przez męża, może powiedzieć, że przez jego miłość (wyrażoną poprzez jego męskie ciało) sam Bóg przychodzi do niej i objawia jej swoją Miłość. Jeżeli mąż czuje się kochany przez żonę, to może uznać, że jest ona dla niego prawdziwym darem Boga, poprzez który Bóg zapewnia Go o swojej miłości i trosce. Miłości towarzyszy często krzyż, ale i on staje się drogą oczyszczenia człowieka i nauczenia go miłości.

Gdy patrzymy na małżeństwo z perspektywy odkupienia, wierzymy, że odkrycie tak rozumianego powołania jest zamysłem pełnego miłości i mądrości Boga. Tylko ta perspektywa budzi szacunek dla najstarszego powołania na świecie, objawionego ludziom już w raju.

Ksawery Knotz OFMCap, Obrona wiary katolickiej czy negacja sakramentu małżeństwa?, http://www.mateusz.pl/wdrodze/nr418/04.htm

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I always want to add a prefix to this scrawl. „EDUCATE THE MASSES AND THEN smash the state”.

I always come back to the phrase „IDEAS ARE ALSO WEAPONS” which in this context is best summed up in this excerpt from Voluntary Resistance (By Carl Watner) „Public buildings may be destroyed, public officials murdered, but such efforts will never bring about the destruction of the idea of the State. The State is a state of mind, an idea which cannot be harmed by violence. Ideas can only be attacked with better ideas.” And we desperately need to use our public spaces to communicate such ideas.

Russell Higgs, Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will, http://www.flickr.com/photos/russell-higgs/227156040/

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My blog gets its name from 1984, where Orwell painted perhaps one of the most fundamental necessities to freedom. „Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” Why is this important? Because it encompasses three necessities to freedom – the freedom to think the truth, to speak the truth, and to act on the truth.

How can one understand anything, for example, in a world where every answer is considered possible, and there are no wrong answers to questions, only different perspectives. Well, here’s what I have to say: the freedom to be wrong is worthless without the freedom to be correct.

[J]ust because the majority has been convinced that 2 + 2 = 5, doesn’t mean that I will silence my protests. I will continue to fight for 4 that I may remain free, and that I may inspire others to speak for the truth, and to act on it.

Alex Ramos, 2 + 2 = 4, http://freedom224.blogspot.com/2007/01/2-2-4.html

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This document is intended to summarize the key backstory information behind the Deus Ex universe. It is comprised mostly of excerpts from the design documents of Deus Ex 1, with a few additions and modifications for the sake of maintaining consistency with the final game.

[M]uch of the backstory detailed below never made it into the final game. Some of the events described were intended to be missions (Texas, the space station, moon base, Mt. Weather; etc.), and a lot of that content either doesn’t appear in Deus Ex or does so in glancing, fragmentary ways.

The year is 2052 and the world is an even more dangerous and chaotic place than it is today. Terrorists operate openly, killing thousands; drugs, disease, pollution and, of course, El Nino kill even more. The world’s economies are close to collapse and the gap between the insanely wealthy and the desperately poor has grown to the size of the Grand Canyon. The media openly encourage the worst in mankind. Still, this is not just Another Grim Dystopic Post-Apocalyptic World™. Deus Ex is set „10 minutes before the apocalypse.” There is still hope.

In the largest urban areas of the world . . . life is grim. A growing variety of drugs offers pleasure and ensures suffering to an ever larger user-base. Crime has become a larger problem than ever. At street level, cities like New York and Paris are little more than armed compounds where drug dealers and users prey on the powerless and vie with the poor for access to scant resources. The most committed among the urban rich have moved up or in, to the tops of whatever skyscrapers remain standing or to protected enclaves in places like New York’s Central Park.

The government’s main role seems to be to prevent the chaos of the streets from reaching the wealthy elite. The police become more and more aggressive (and less concerned with individual rights) with each passing day. . . . Supermarkets still offer food (though the selection may be limited and barter may work better than paper money).

Increasing terrorism is a matter of serious concern to both the urban rich, who look down on the world from on high, and to the suburbanites, who live in blessed isolation. In small, gated communities of luxurious single-family dwellings, life is good. These communities are often surrounded by somewhat larger developments constructed for support personnel. The gated communities are well-defended and tough to get into (unless you have appropriate clearance) and tougher still to survive in if you don’t belong. Though most of the luxury communities are ultramodern, some are constructed to resemble medieval castles (which is, basically, what they are).

The key thing to realize about the world is that it is very much a world of „Haves” and „Have Nots.” There’s almost no middle class left. There’s little left of the American Dream anywhere in the world. The rich and powerful are on top of the world. The poor and downtrodden live largely without hope of bettering their lot. The shrinking middle class lives under the control of governments (and conspirators it doesn’t even know about).

[In the world of Deus Ex there are] three types of humans:

  • Total humans consider themselves purse and are at the top of the heap. They need augmented humans but fear and distrust them. Most total humans don’t even know nano-augmented humans exist.
  • Mechanically augmented humans have their own airport security systems and have to register with government authorities. They are second-class citizens, looked down upon even by the non-augmented poor. There’s no way a mechanically augmented human can pass for normal for very long. They’re not allowed in certain locations and have separate facilities, ostensibly tailored to their unique needs but really as a way of controlling them.
  • Nano-augmented humans are resented by their mechanically augmented brothers and sisters. They’re as powerful as mechanically augmented humans but suffer none of the stigma associated with augmentation. They can pass through airport security and mingle with humans freely.

America is in a constant state of tension. The borders are guarded by the Armed Forces, customs is deadly serious, immigration laws have been tightened dramatically, and nationwide martial law seems imminent.

For well over a hundred years, Europe had been under the economic influence of the Illuminati (through the Bilderberg Group) and later became a financial satellite of Majestic 12 (think the European Monetary Union happened spontaneously?) Control of Europe’s finances became a reality in 2003 when, following national elections, the UK adopted the European standard currency. With that event and the fall of NATO, the leaders of the conspiracy were able to turn economic control into political control.

Still, Majestic 12′s influence is not all encompassing. Despite the collapse of NATO, the powers that be are still in the process of assembling a new coalition of nations. Meanwhile, the rise of chaos and civil war has fragmented the nations of Europe and made Majestic 12′s goal of unification under a single coalition umbrella more difficult to achieve than expected.

Other than Mexico . . . South America hasn’t changed much since the turn of the century. If anything, the continent is, as a whole, more prosperous than in the past. Though business is booming (much of it illegitimate) South America remains as fragmented in the 2050′s as it was a hundred years earlier. Governments turn over regularly, through coup or election, but the average citizen who survived the ravages of disease hardly notices the difference. The poor remain desperately poor, the rich obscenely rich. It’s as if government is irrelevant, as if some other force remains consistent though politicians come and go.

The African continent is beginning to emerge as a place of growth and change.

Over the last fifty years, many Hong Kong expatriates have moved to Africa, resulting in the establishment of thriving Afro-Asian communities. (Afro-Asian chic is spreading rapidly through the worlds of pop culture and fashion). Though it will never displace Hong Kong, the New Hong Kong section of Lagos, Nigeria, is one of the continent’s most active, successful and chaotic cities — not unlike Casablanca during World War 2.

Aside from a few small pockets of freedom (described as „anarchy” in Majestic 12 propaganda), like Lagos, Africa is almost entirely under the thumb of the conspirators as the game begins.

Essentially untouched by world events, China has emerged as a world leader, supplanting the United States and Europe as centers of education and industry.

Hong Kong, though a part of the Chinese/Majestic 12 empire, remains more chaotic than one might think. Though repression is extreme, the urge for freedom is strong and thriving black markets keep Hong Kong’s tradition of free trade and entrepreneurism alive and well.

The Middle East has long been under the control of the Illuminati, and later, Majestic 12. These groups held the reins on international terrorists based in the region, and the Bilderberg Group controlled the oil companies that had a stranglehold on the regions finances.

With the successful pan-Arab invasion of Israel in 2022, Majestic 12 control of the region is total.

As far as life on other planets goes, we still haven’t encountered any, at least none that can be acknowledged publicly — rumors continue to abound that we were visited by aliens a century or more ago and the governments of the world are keeping it secret.

For centuries, the Illuminati pursued a plan to bring the world to its knees, and at long last, create One World Government. Over those hundreds of years, it grew, changed, added arms, subtracted arms, adapted to changing times, and made itself a driving force behind nearly every major event.

The Bilderberg Group controlled financial matters around the world through vast mining operations, control over the Federal Reserve Board, the Eurobank and the World Bank as well as through its stranglehold on the world’s supply of gold.

Majestic 12 was the Illuminati’s technology and communications leader. It doles out technological advances and stores those the world is not yet ready for (or those too powerful to give to potential enemies). It controls the supply of drugs — licit and illicit and can introduce new diseases as it wishes (diseases for which it already has a cure ready and waiting, of course). Majestic 12 is also charged with influencing and, where possible, managing the world’s intelligence organizations.

Satellite communications (phones, intercontinental computer links, television, etc.) proved little challenge — other than some pirates, all of the media are under the control of Majestic 12. The Internet, particularly Internet 3, proved dicier. In this arena, Majestic 12 set up vast monitoring operations and used inefficient, old-fashioned strong-arm techniques to shut down content providers large and small who posted things they didn’t want posted. Many a poster simply disappeared after a handful of dangerous messages.

These methods were effective only when Majestic-12 was prepared to expend significant resources over extended periods of time. They needed something better, more automated, more fundamental to the underlying communications grid. To this end, they created the Aquinas Protocol, a TCP/IP-like low-level packet-routing scheme. Through great media fanfare and government backing, they were able to build Aquinas into the backbone of almost every digital network on the planet, allowing them to physically route all global communications through a massive monitoring station underground at Area 51. Morpheus (still functioning at Everett’s hideout in Paris), Daedelus, and finally Helios are successively more advanced manifestations of the automated surveillance, prediction, and enforcement made possible by Aquinas.

When Daedelus [A.I.] began sifting through the information on the Majestic 12 net, it quickly discovered two things of significance:

  • It learned how grim a place the world was for most people — what with war, disease, famine, poverty, crime — and it seemed these problems were getting worse, not better, despite the existence of the secret societies theoretically in charge of the whole mess. In fact, the ruthlessness of world leaders — their willingness to sacrifice millions of people, if that’s what it took to achieve their goals — seemed less than human to the inhuman Daedelus.
  • It learned that the most recent and most deadly threat to mankind — the Gray Death — was of human origin. It wasn’t a natural thing.
  • Daedelus determined that solutions to these problems existed. Some of them depended on convincing or coercing the masses to curb their less noble impulses.

As similar as they are, J.C. and Paul have very different personalities — Paul’s more flamboyant, more out-going and far less serious. J.C. Denton worries a lot that his older brother, sharp as he is, will get himself in trouble someday because he isn’t paranoid enough.

Deus Ex Team, DX1 Continuity Bible, http://archive.gamespy.com/articles/april02/dxbible/

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Msgr. Camille Perl, Vice President of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei (PCED) has recently responded with a letter dated May 23, 2008, to questions I invoked regarding the official canonical status of the Society of St. Pius X and those Catholics who attend their chapels to fulfill their Sunday obligation.

[Msgr. Camille Perl wrote:] Statements made by Cardinal Castrillón need to be understood in a technical, canonical sense. Stating that the Society of St. Pius X „is not in formal schism” is to say that there has been no official declaration on the part of the Holy See that the Society of St. Pius X is in schism. Up to now, the Church has sought to show the maximum charity, courtesy and consideration to all those involved with the hope that such a declaration will not eventually be necessary.

[T]he Masses offered by the priests of the Society of St. Pius X are valid, but illicit, i.e., contrary to Canon Law. The Sacraments of Penance and Matrimony, however, require that the priest enjoys the faculties of the diocese or has proper delegation. Since that is not the case with these priests, these sacraments are invalid.

While it is true that participation in the Mass at chapels of the Society of St. Pius X does not of itself constitute „formal adherence to the schism” (cf. Ecclesia Dei 5, c), such adherence can come about over a period of time as one slowly imbibes a schismatic mentality which separates itself from the teaching of the Supreme Pontiff and the entire Catholic Church. While we hope and pray for a reconciliation with the Society of St. Pius X, the Pontifical Commission „Ecclesia Dei” cannot recommend that members of the faithful frequent their chapels . . . We deeply regret this situation and pray that soon a reconciliation of the Society of St. Pius X with the Church may come about, but until such time the explanations which we have given remain in force.

As we already stated to you in our letter of 4 July 2007: „This Pontifical Commission does its best to transmit responses which are in full accord with the magisterium and the present canonical practices of the Catholic Church. One should accept them with docility and can act upon them with moral certainty.” We would further add that no dicastery of the Holy See will give other responses than those which we have given here.

Brian Mershon, PCED confirms officially: Society of St. Pius X within the Church, not in formal schism; Catholics commit no sin nor incur any canonical penalty for Mass attendance, http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/mershon/080711

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I want to state that I do not condemn the position of the SSPX since it was our own position for 20 years. During most of these years, it is my opinion that I, personally, and traditional Catholics in general, tended to live a ‘Practical Sedevacantist Catholicism’.

This means living the Catholic faith as if there were no Pope or hierarchy to whom we were bound to be submissive and from whom we were bound to receive authorisation for our activities. It is when we accept that he is the Pope in name alone, but practically we reduce his authority over us to nearly nothing at all. For example, when the Archbishop consecrated the four bishops against the explicit will of Pope John Paul II. I think that this was ‘Practical Sedevacantist Catholicism’ in action. When Catholic life had come to this state, jurisdiction is not even an issue. The issue was living to survive the madness that was infesting the Church. Was ‘Practical Sedevacantist Catholicism’ right or wrong? I cannot answer and I do not judge it. It was the way many of us survived.

From the moment one recognises Benedict XVI as truly the Pope, ‘Practical Sedevacantist Catholicism’ gives way to ‘Practical Papal Catholicism’; it is inevitable. Even though there be a war raging about us in the Church, we still have to make the move towards the Barque of Peter by abandoning ‘practical Sedevacantist Catholicism’ for ‘Practical Papal Catholicism’ where the Pope has primacy of jurisdiction over each one of us. We join ranks with him for our own salvation; and after that, we join ranks with him in the battle for the life of the Church. . . . however one understands the last 20 years, something new has begun with Pope Benedict XVI and the tide has turned.

For 20 years we have been living in a state of necessity where we lacked authorisation for what we needed, particularly for the Heavenly Bread, confessions, marriages and religious professions. We did as we could. We presumed authorisation for everything we needed. It was not the best situation, but we did what we did because we could not see any other way of surviving.

Then Pope Benedict XVI noticed us and in a clear voice he announced through the Motu Proprio that the old Mass was authorised and that he would give us all that we need and more: Mass, Ritual, jurisdiction for Confessions, marriages, religious professions and the exclusive use of the 1962 Missal in our communities. It is clear that he knows that the war is not over since he is himself working at restoring all things in Christ. He calls us to answer his call and accept the bread he offers us in abundance from his open arms.

Fr. Michael Mary FSSR, Supplied Jurisdiction or Fresh Bread Through the Back Window, http://papastronsay.blogspot.com/2008/07/supplied-jurisdiction-or-fresh-bread.html