Older Doesn't Always Mean Wiser

Unless you're part of some very age-old, tradition-bound ancient culture (like the Confucian cultures of the Far East), people who tout their wisdom by means of their age, or by appealing to their rank in one line of work over a long period, might truly have limited wisdom is any classic sense. Authoritarians often appeal to their "wisdom" when they're out of cards in trying to impose their beliefs (rather than successfully convincing or persuading). In reality: Wisdom is knowledge attained through experience, not age. Indeed, age typically brings about more experience. But some experience matters more than other types. In other words, do people always acquire wisdom over long periods, especially if all they do is follow the lead of others? Why do senior citizens see physicians that are in their 30s, 40, and 50s, and not their 70s and 80s (usually)? Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard quoted one executive, in his book, Late Bloomers, as saying that wisdom is "how to manage ambiguity." Often, that's exactly what much of the retired-after-35-years-of-9-to-5-work crowd doesn't, or won't tolerate -- ambiguity. They should see the world as more complex, not simpler because they're older. Especially going into the third decade of the 21st century. To deny this is very unwise.  

Good Evening, This is 2020, and Men Are Tired

I first pitched a book for a journalist's publishing fellowship on a number of what the filmmaker, Gonzalo Lira, speaks about below. The year I won the fellowship was 2005. Commentators back then were claiming that feminism was on the wane, largely because it seemed more educated women wanted to stay home, and fewer coeds were joining women's groups on campuses. If anything, I thought that was crap (for many of the reasons you'll see in the next post). If anything, feminism was keeping a lower profile, regrouping for what was to come. I was barely 26, A LOT had yet to happen both in the outer world (like #MeToo) and in my own world, so as much as I hated to admit it and I wouldn't admit it for years to come, such a book about what we NOW know as MRAs, MGTOWs, and the like, published by me, wouldn't be forthcoming anytime in the 2000s, or the 2010s. I found another, more pressing topic to write about (see my other blog, The Practitioners' Truths, about that topic). But for conformist, gynocentrist America, full not only of PC feminists but also chivalrous, mama-boy Catholic henpecked white knights, Gonzalo Lira lays it out. For a major disruption to happen to a society, all it takes is for 2 percent of that society to do its own thing. In the 2020s, America and other Western pseudo-democracies should be on standby for an increasing number of men no longer willing to stand on the sidelines, waiting to pay their dues while overgrown teenie-boppers keep trying to whine their way up the ranks to the corner office. You can listen to the rest.

"For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open." LUKE 8:17

To certain prominent members of the Catholic community in Rhode Island and beyond, please make double note of these Biblical verses. Meditate upon these Scriptural passages with full consciousness of mind and soul. And think long and hard before labeling opposition to you and exposure of your ghastly hypocrisies as "persecution" because of your religion, as you reap what you sow:

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full."
Matthew 6:5

"The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher."
Luke 6:40

"Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"
Luke 6:41

"But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong."
1 Corinthians 27

The gay, alcoholic careerist bishop and the vain, eccentric old monsignor can scowl at me in public all they want. They look stupid and drunk with their faces turned beat red (and noses even more red). Failing Catholic publications can print whatever suits them. To be fair and just, I'll be making my own self-disclosures as I see fit. All of this in due time.

Then there's the sin of DETRACTION. According to Wikipedia: "In Roman Catholic theology, detraction is the sin of revealing another person's real faults to a third person without a valid reason, thereby lessening the reputation of that person..."

But let's factor in this often overlooked elaboration on the sin of DETRACTION (from the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia):

Finally, even when the sin is in no sense public, it may still be divulged without contravening the virtues of justice or charity whenever such a course is for the common weal or is esteemed to make for the good of the narrator, of his listeners, or even of the culprit. The right which the latter has to an assumed good name is extinguished in the presence of the benefit which may be conferred in this way...

Moreover:

Journalists are entirely within their rights in inveighing against the official shortcomings of public men. Likewise, they may lawfully present whatever information about the life or character of a candidate for public office is necessary to show his unfitness for the station he seeks. Historians have a still greater latitude in the performance of their task. This is not of course because the dead have lost their claim to have their good name respected. History must be something more than a mere calendar of dates and incidents; the causes and connection of events are a proper part of its province. This consideration, as well as that of the general utility in elevating and strengthening the public conscience, may justify the historian in telling many things hitherto unknown which are to the disgrace of those of whom they are related...

SEE: http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=3802

Rhode Island attorney general Peter Kilmartin's term is up in another year. Let's hope his replacement is someone who's actually intelligent and ethical, who truly understands the law. That means investigating Bishop Thomas Tobin for his non-full disclosure of allegations of priests' impropriety. Selectively turning over files does not cut it. And let me say this: if such allegations are "not important" because the pervert priest is long dead, but the Church still has to hide it, then guess what else they're probably still hiding.

A LOT'S HAPPENED IN 2 YEARS AND 2 MONTHS! I BEGAN WRITING A PERSONAL MEMOIR AND MANIFESTO, WHICH I'M INTENT ON PUBLISHING AS MY 1ST BOOK! (WHILE MY OTHER 2 MANUSCRIPTS ARE ON HOLD). A WHOLE NEW BLOG WILL BE DEVOTED TO THE SUBJECTS I FOCUS ON IN THIS NEW BOOK PROJECT, WHICH I BEGAN IN SEPT. 2015. THE FOCUS IS MORE PERSONAL, BUT DELVES INTO CERTAIN PUBLIC HEALTH AND POLICY MATTERS. OTHERWISE: I SHOULD BE BLOGGING HERE AGAIN SOMETIME NEXT MONTH. IT TOOK ME QUITE SOME TIME TO RE-DISCOVER MY PASSWORD FOR THIS BLOG, ACCOUNTING FOR MUCH OF THE LAG IN BLOGGING ACTIVITY HERE. BUT STAY TUNED, I'LL BE BACK SOON! HAPPY ECLIPSE WATCHING TOMORROW!!!

The False Dichotomy Between 'Social Justice' and Catholic Purity

Last November, Michael Voris, Catholic traditionalist media agitator (as many would say) produced this feature on the topic of social justice:



And Voris is not alone in this "thinking" among traditionalist, conservative, and orthodox counterculture Catholics in America today. According to Anthony Annett, who wrote in the Catholic left-of-center journal, Commonweal:

...I would contend that few American Catholics in the modern era have surrendered more to the spirit of the age—the age of Reagan and the resurgence of free-market liberalism and aggressive militarism—than George Weigel.

For decades now, Weigel has been a thorn in the side of authentic Catholic social teaching, seeking to baptize economic liberalism and American exceptionalism with the waters of the Catholic faith. Alongside fellow travelers like Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak, he has been peddling the idea that Centesimus Annus—John Paul II’s landmark social encyclical from 1991—represented a decisive break with the past, a significant development of doctrine that saw the Church fully embrace capitalism and free market economics. A simple reading of the encyclical itself exposes the hollowness of such a claim. Yet Weigel et al actually produced an abridged version of the encyclical, which managed to remove the passages that went against their radical reading. Not exactly the height of honesty.

...Weigel sprung back into action with the release of Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate in 2009, which was a profound reflection on the maladies of the modern global economy. This time, Weigel found it too difficult to expunge the offending elements, so he invented his own “encyclical exegesis”—calling on readers to distinguish the authentic “gold pen” of the pope and the false “red pen” of the leftists associated with the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

...To add insult to injury, Weigel’s prudential analysis has so often been profoundly wrong. He fails to make the connection between the “liberationist” economic policies he espouses and the consequent breakdown in trust, social capital, and community bonds—to say nothing of financial instability and collapse. He fails to understand that the European financial crisis has little to do with the “welfare state”, and that the countries in northern Europe with the strongest social protections are also the healthiest economically. He fails to appreciate the gravity of the environmental crisis, and his free market zealotry and his nationalism preclude him from accepting that the government and the international community have vital roles to play. (emphasis mine)

...Nowhere has he been more wrong than with the Iraq war. This marks the true nadir of Weigel’s career. Completely ignoring his beloved John Paul II, Weigel engaged in mental gymnastics with the just war teaching, twisting and contorting it to defend the indefensible—the unprovoked “preventive” invasion and occupation of Iraq...This set in motion a catastrophic train of events, including the utter annihilation of the ancient Christian community in Iraq. Not only did Weigel once again provide cheap intellectual cover for his political overlords, but he has never taken any personal responsibility whatsoever for the evil consequences that flowed from his dreadful advice. Aren’t Republicans supposed to be big on personal responsibility? (emphasis mine)

...He also doesn’t shy away from getting nasty and personal. I’ve already mentioned his mockery of Cardinal’s Turkson’s office in the context of Caritas in Veritate. He did the same thing when Justice and Peace issued its financial reform document in 2011, opining that it came from the “lower echelons of the Roman Curia”. And in the context of the recent symposium on climate change, he refers to the distinguished chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences/ Social Sciences as “a third-tier Vatican official with a taste for gauchiste politics and self-promotion”.

This is offensive stuff, and it’s time to draw the line. It’s time to stop taking George Weigel seriously, because his analysis is profoundly unserious. He is a relic of an undistinguished time, a leading instigator of a terrible ecclesial experiment. It’s time to change direction, and chart a new—but actually more traditional—course.

Some strong words, both ways. But where does the Official Church stand on the much-maligned matter of social justice? Writing in the New Oxford Review, a conservative/traditional Catholic magazine, Thomas Storck provides this perspective:

One area in which such confusion has been created during these years is that of the Church’s social doctrine. There are many reasons for this, one being that the doctrine was not well known or well received in some quarters even before the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Another reason is that, as American society has become more politically polarized since the 1970s, in the minds of some Catholics anything that seems to call into question the fundamental justice of the American capitalist system is suspect. Take, for example, the term “social justice.” Pope Pius XI introduced this term into Catholic teaching in his encyclical Studiorum Ducem (1923). He later made extensive use of it in two landmark encyclicals, Quadragesimo Anno (1931) and Divini Redemptoris (1937). Subsequent popes have used it on a regular basis. But for some Catholics this term has the sound of an innovation, even a departure from Catholic doctrine. Of course, this is silly, for social justice is a legitimate development of the doctrine of the virtues dating back to Aristotle and is nowhere near being a new teaching. It is simply a new name given to a certain aspect of what was once known as “legal justice.” But for many who are not aware of the Aristotelian and Thomistic distinctions between the various forms of justice, “social justice” has a strange, foreign-sounding, socialist ring to it. Where did it come from, they might wonder. Unfortunately, there are too few around who can explain its origin or that it is simply a logical extension of age-old Catholic teaching on justice. Even among those who claim to champion social justice there are not many who could define it according to the mind of the Church

...Take another phrase, “preferential option for the poor.” Admittedly, this term does not have the pedigree of the earlier one, for it originated in 1968 and was coined by the superior general of the Society of Jesus, not by a pope. St. John Paul II, however, employed the phrase in his encyclical Centesimus Annus (1991), wherein he explained that the concept “is not limited to material poverty, since it is well known that there are many other forms of poverty, especially in modern society — not only economic but cultural and spiritual poverty as well. The Church’s love for the poor, which is essential for her and a part of her constant tradition, impels her to give attention to a world in which poverty is threatening to assume massive proportions” (no. 57).

...I can hear someone object, but almsgiving is voluntary, and that means one can give when one wants and however much (or little) one wants. No one can compel others to give, especially not the government. Too often, say these critics, present-day crusaders for social justice and a preferential option for the poor want to compel such aid, which surely is an act of theft.

As in the case of social justice, we must gently tell such critics that they are mistaken. Although voluntary almsgiving will certainly always be a necessary part of a Christian’s duty, both the duty and the justice of state aid to the poor have deep roots in Catholic history and doctrine, and have been expressly taught at least since Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), and even more clearly by Pius XI and later popes. One of the reasons the state’s duty of aiding the poor was not set forth in the same manner in earlier times was that the notion of the state as something separate from the monarch’s personal household was not fully articulated. Christian kings and nobles always gave alms, and no one questioned whether the funds they used belonged to them personally or to the government or to the commonwealth as a whole, as there was no clear distinction between these. The notion that money raised by the king through taxation could not be used for the poor would have been seen as preposterous to our Catholic ancestors.

...Today one can find Catholics with a zeal for social justice and for the poor who ignore most of the rest of Catholic teaching on faith and morals; similarly, one can find Catholics with a zeal for correct doctrine and good personal morals who ignore the Church’s heritage of care for the poor and her zeal for justice. Both camps might learn from each other, for to be an authentic and orthodox Catholic absolutely requires adherence to all that the Church sets forth for us to believe and do. The Catholic who ignores or belittles social justice is as much a cafeteria Catholic as is he who ignores or belittles teachings on sexual morality. When, one wonders, will the majority of Catholics finally learn that we cannot pick and choose among the Church’s teachings, and that the political divisions of the world have no place in the household of God?

Worth noting is Storck's reply to a letter to the editor further criticizing social justice in the July-August 2014 edition:

...Charity toward the poor and an apostolate for social justice are two distinct things, but the Church has generally been distinguished in both of these areas. With regard to the latter, from at least the 1930s on, Catholics maintained a robust apostolate of social justice, featuring labor priests (priests assigned to minister to the labor movement who in some cases actively aided unions in strikes), the beginnings of the Catholic Worker movement, and above all, the encyclicals of popes such as Pius XI, who were not afraid of harshly criticizing the capitalist economic system. How I’d love to see a return to those days! Today, on the other hand, many Catholics seem to think that we must choose between “religious exercises and devotions” or social justice, but our fathers in the faith knew better, knew indeed that they are intimately connected. The first without the second is a false and empty religion; the second without the first is mere social work or political activity...Mr. Borger [the letter writer] appears to have an incomplete understanding of Catholic social doctrine. It is not a matter of a “European preference for a planned, centrally controlled economy,” as he suggests... But unfortunately I fear that Mr. Borger’s difficulty goes beyond a simple misunderstanding. He seems determined to cling to his economic ideas, even if they can be shown to differ from those of the Church. He goes on to say that conservative Catholics believe that the U.S. has “done very well with economic freedom, and they oppose any scheme, even if it comes from the Vatican, that compromises that freedom. If that makes conservative Catholics like me who subscribe to this viewpoint ‘cafeteria Catholics,’ as Storck charges, then so be it.”

Well, at least Mr. Borger is honest. He makes no bones about his willingness to be a dissenting Catholic. Need more be said? For myself, I make no apologies for adhering to all the teachings of the Church. But for Mr. Borger, America, and not the Church, seems to be his primary loyalty. All I can add is that I hope Mr. Borger will not be too surprised when he is joined in his dissent from Catholic teaching by others — proponents of abortion and same-sex “marriage,” for example — who also delight in American freedom and who, like Mr. Borger, find their deepest identity as Americans, not Catholics...

The rise of 20th century atheist Communism prioritized the focus on free markets for many religious people in the U.S. But even John Paul II was able to stay grounded as Communists had advanced, but were ultimately defeated in his native Eastern Europe. Before Communism was (Protestant) Calvinism, which ultimately flourished in the states by the 18th century. People were free, but were on their own to make their own way. The need for alms meant lack of work ethic, which was among the worst vices. This became part of the American spirit's DNA, and is prime to the libertarians and current G.O.P., thus, what's popularly "conservative." So in the "logic" of guys like Voris, Weigel, the letter writer above, and even certain younger "traditional" priests I've known, the suppression of social justice -- which is indeed more in line with today's Democrats (but also many European right-of-center groups) -- both in the Church and in society, will actually help restore the Church to her former glory. As Voris thunders, it's all about "saving souls," nothing else. But how do you save souls -- starting with your own -- if as a spokesman for TRUE Catholic teaching, you rip apart well-established Papal teaching -- that preceded Vatican II?? Truly thinking with the Church would be a start.

Conformity and Passivity Among America's Younger Generation

Dr. Bruce Levine is one of my very most favorite psychologists. You'll see why, as he wrote:

...Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said “No.” Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

1. Student-Loan Debt: Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt. Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.” Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy: Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed. The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”—in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action—is considered “ethical.” School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school—its demand for compliance—teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top”: The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously. In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in the United States. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.” However, the more schooling Americans get, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

6. The Normalization of Surveillance: The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s e-mail and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives. Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities?

7. Television: In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV—regardless of the programming—is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards). Television is a “dream come true” for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically. While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism: American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.

See the link here.

More status-quo conformity in the Sweet Land of Liberty, I guess. But what does this translate into, more or less? Here's one major aspect.
So what's the intellectual net effect on this generation? See for yourself.

The Proposed White House Council on Boys and Men

One facet of today's activism for equality between men and women is the campaign to establish a White House Council on Boys and Men. Warren Farrell, Ph.D., author of the seminal Myth of Male Power (1993) and Father and Child Reunion (2001) (among other works) is leading the formation of this council, to function in a presidential advisory capacity. It remains to be seen whether any major presidential candidate -- let alone any presidential administration -- will adopt this Council, as its eye is firmly planted on the wellbeing of the other half of society (since the White House currently has its Council on Girls and Women already set up). Since I'm not a part of the Council myself, I'll let Dr. Farrell do the explaining:



As Dr. Farrell recalls his few moments with President Johnson, I recall my relatively brief interview face to face with Dr. Farrell himself, seated in the very living room pictured in the video above, five years ago this month.

Should this campaign be about a competition between girls and women vs. boys and men? Obviously, no! And that's precisely why this proposal deserves more than a fair hearing. According to the executive summary on Council's web page:

"The Commission identifies problems at a crisis level in five areas: education, emotional health, physical health, father involvement and work."

That's right -- CRISIS LEVEL. Not decline, not areas of concern. But a crisis.
Now men's right's activism in general, and the less abrasive-sounding "gender equity movement" has disproportionally focused on father's rights (i.e., involvement) for the last 30 to 40 years. Campaigning against men paying alimony and child support to former wives who essentially "own" the children and have various levels of legal sanction to deny access to the fathers (thus leading to fatherlessness) has long been the movement's thrust. But it has not gained its well-deserved attention, by way of media attention and legal reform, in the decades that date rape, sexual harassment, and wage gaps were presumably weighing against women, and were all the craze for Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams (and a vast array of other major media and cultural figures). But even as men's activism (which seemingly hasn't quite gained the visibility in the U.S. that it has elsewhere in the Anglosphere) still heavily places its efforts into lobbying for shared custodial rights for fathers -- still a much unresolved issue -- decay in the lots of boys and men has taken shape in the other major life areas as well.

Given what has become this blog's populist bent, I'm going to hone in on the Council's fifth component, work, a lengthy excerpt enumerated on the Council's web page (and mostly listed below). Any of my further comments will be in italics at the bottom.

Item. One of every five men 25 to 54 isn’t working.

Item. Half of African-American young men ages 20-24 is jobless.

Item. Many of the jobs lost in the recession (e.g., manufacturing, construction) aren’t coming back.

The recession was dubbed a “mancession” because 78% of jobs lost were held by men. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men’s unemployment rate in September 2010 was 22% higher than women’s—one of the largest gaps since the government began collecting such data. And employment for minority men and male blue-collar workers without a college education has been dropping dramatically.

The future does not bode well for men’s employment. While women are more likely to hold jobs in stable sectors that are more recession-proof, like health and education (averaging 75% women), men are more likely to hold jobs in sectors that are outsourced overseas—such as computer technology and Internet-based jobs. In the past, the problem was a man’s job going nowhere; in the future, the problem is men’s jobs going elsewhere.

The good news is that the fields women dominate are in growth mode: healthcare and social assistance are expected to grow by 24%; employment in public and private educational services is anticipated to grow by 12%. The bad news is that the fields men dominate are either in decline or especially vulnerable to recessions—such as construction and manufacturing.

Theoretically, some would say it should make no difference whether a woman or man earns the family’s money. In reality, though, few women choose husbands reading Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus in the unemployment line. A man with little earning potential is less likely to find a wife, more likely to find himself divorced, and, once divorced, more likely to feel disconnected from his children. And as mentioned above, unemployed men commit suicide at twice the rate of employed men. An unemployed man is everyone’s loss. (emphasis mine)

Making Work Work: the Council’s Role

Those of our sons who might formerly have prepared for assembly line work are finding their skills are replaced not only by outsourcing but also by automation. In areas as diverse as advanced medical devices to wind turbines, a White House Council on Boys and Men can help these boys prepare instead for the type of demand employers need for the future: “people who can operate sophisticated computerized machinery, follow complex blueprints and demonstrate higher math proficiency than was previously required of the typical assembly line worker.” A first step is restoring vocation to education.

Restoring Vocation to Education. The decrease in vocational and technical education in high schools has left many boys who are less academically inclined feeling there is nothing they are good at. With no sense of purpose, and low self-esteem, they drop out of school—and life.

Two new Obama Administration initiatives look promising: the High Growth Job Training Initiative, which is designed to prepare more people for success in advanced manufacturing, aerospace, biotechnology, energy, geospatial technology and automotive; and the Green Career-Technical Programs initiative, a five-state pilot program that will prepare students for careers in wind and solar energy, transportation, and waste management.

The Council would co-ordinate these new efforts with the best of current programs such as The Green Hounds Academy at California’s Atascadero High School that prepares students for sustainability careers (while building their skills in math, science, and technology) and that of the Southern Regional Education Board’s Technology Centers That Work, where students learn academics in the context of a technology-centric career of a student’s choice.

Study Successes in Other Countries.

Item. In Japan, 23% of high school graduates study at vocational schools; 99.6% of them find employment after graduation.

Japan’s vocational schools are part of its higher education system, but many of its students enter the program without having completed high school.

Finland and Germany have also developed models that bear examining. In Finland, 38% of students go to vocational school after completing their compulsory education (usually around age 17).

More than two million German students attend its vocational schools. Germany’s program is distinctive in that students spend part of the week in school and part in an apprenticeship. It is a joint effort of government, unions, companies, and chambers of commerce. Students are paid a modest stipend.

The Council’s review of such programs might focus on creating a blueprint for their adaptation to U.S. culture and needs.

Expanding the Concept of Man’s Work. As the nation shifts from a manufacturing to a service/knowledge economy, health and education are growing sectors. Just as we have supported our daughters to enter STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers, a White House Council can co-ordinate efforts to prepare boys in what might be called HE (health and education) careers (instead of health and education being, in effect, “she” careers). Preparing our sons to be elementary school teachers, for example, serves four purposes: our children get a balance of male and female teachers; our sons are trained for more stable careers; our sons our trained for careers giving them more preparation to raise children; our children’s families will have more confidence to exercise the flexibility of a dad raising children.

Just as “man’s work” now includes more women as a result of pro-active efforts like scholarships for women in math, science and technology, so integrating men into female- dominated fields such as nursing and social work, may require parallel efforts for boys and men. The Council might devote special attention to fields such as social work in which the very mission of the profession—helping families—requires equal sensitivity to both genders. A starting place would be the balancing of social work programs with equal numbers of men— especially men with leadership experience in the communities they will be serving.

“Team executive positions.” “Men’s work” was built on the male-as-sole-breadwinner model in which the most successful men, whether CEOs or MDs, had responsibilities they fulfilled for to up to 90-hour weeks. Increasingly men want more time with their family, and many companies see that a good home life benefits work life. Companies that value these men— and their female equivalents— but that also want to compete globally, will need to re-invent the infrastructure of a top-level-executive position. For example, instead of one person handling global demands 24/7 until, as the Japanese say, he or she experiences “Karoshi” (“death by overwork”), the executive position is shared by a team of men and women, allowing each individual to work fewer hours but the team to be “on it” globally 24/7, using technology to communicate on selected overlapping hours. Such innovations would need the support of educational changes such as MBA courses in “teamwork training” educating teams to co- ordinate communication about one function.

Suicide Prevention. Whether in a hazardous job or a management position, when a man is in fear of losing his job he is often in fear of a domino effect—a job loss leading to the loss of his wife’s respect to the loss of his marriage and potentially the ability to see his children. When combined with his propensity to suppress these feelings rather than express them, it is apparent why unemployed men commit suicide at twice the rate of employed men. A White House Council can identify the best programs in progress, such as Working Minds, to, for example, expand their mission to help MBA programs teach future managers to look under men’s masks to discover the symptoms of suicide; work with Human Resource Divisions to detect the signs of depression and suicide; work with unemployment agencies to know how to handle signs of depression and suicide among unemployed men; and identify co-operative ventures with churches to help men have a safe haven and hope.

Communications Skills Programs at Work. Similar to the way in which male-dominated work places created Human Resources (HR) divisions to maximize women’s potential, in the female-dominated HE (Health and Education) fields, Human Resource divisions can assist women to maximize men’s potential. This is long overdue since the responsibilities of men in the workplace over centuries evolved methods of accountability (e.g., hierarchies) and communicating (sport analogies; sexual jokes as ice-breakers; wit-covered put-downs to test for humility) that, even when they served a purpose, were never properly articulated to women. The Council can provide leadership for the next generation’s HR mandate to include communicating what men didn’t: women can’t hear what men don’t say.

Beyond gender dialogue is the need for both sexes to be better trained in the handling of feedback that is not positive, so fewer workers feel they are “walking on eggshells,” and there is less need for gossip as a substitute for communication. The more complex communication becomes, the nation that is the pioneer of listening to criticism non-defensively will have a global advantage.

Examining Boys’ Motivation to Work. A White House Council would examine why young men are pulling back from the very essence of what used to be male: passionate motivation to succeed at work, school and life.

Coordinate with Women. Since families that succeed in the future will be more likely to have both our sons and daughters able to “row on both sides of the boat” (both sexes able to raise money and raise children) there is a need to co-ordinate the efforts on behalf of girls and women with the efforts of this Council on behalf of boys and men. This includes going beyond government programs, and finding the best of what exists rather than re-inventing the wheel. For example, the program Are You Man Enough to Be a Nurse? attempts to increase the number of male nurses; and programs at IBM and Deloitte & Touche help both genders communicate...

Conclusion: the Future of our Sons and their Work

Nothing has defined men more than work. Nothing has confined men more than work. Nothing has made men more worthy of women than work. And nothing has made men’s parents more proud than their son’s success at work. Men’s work has created monuments to men. Men’s work has created straight-jackets for men.

Perhaps the most significant human accomplishment in the U.S. during the past half-century is our new awareness that defining women in one way left women confined to one way. For women, that “one way” was being a mother. We replaced that with an era of multi-option women: married women with children had more permission to work full-time; be a mom full- time; or do some combination of both. Yet one of our great accomplishments has been to retain the value of mothering, expand its flexibility (child care at work), and use technology to support women’s flexibility.

Now it is time for the parallel process to take place for our sons. Replacing the era of the one- option man (being valued only if he works full-time) with an era of multi-option men: for example, if our son is married with children, demonstrating respect if he: works full-time; fathers full-time; or does some combination of both.

One of the great accomplishments of the next era must be to retain the high value of men as workers, and also use technology to support men’s flexibility as workers.

A Council would explore the impact of imparting to our sons that pay is not about power, but that controlling his life is real power. It would help parents, mentors and teachers to guide our sons to consider, prior to our son choosing a career, that few men say on their death bed “I wish I spent more time at work;” and few of their children will go to a psychologist saying “I didn’t get enough money from my dad.” The gift of giving our sons a glimpse of life’s blueprint is the gift of fewer male mid-life crises and more life long marriages; fewer alcoholic dads, and more devoted dads.

Being a great man, like being a great woman, is creating the work-life balance that is appropriate to his personality, cognizant of the trade-offs of each decision, and true to the commitments he makes as he takes the journey from boy to man.

NOTE: These concepts and areas will be greatly expounded upon in my own male-female/men's rights book (with my own insights). Over the years, Dr. Farrell has pointed to discrimination against men in areas of education and health care -- both generally female-dominated. I believe this discrimination may be expanding into other fields as well, as human resources agents are mostly women and see their fellow females as more obedient to orders, likely to follow rules, etc. Men have always been more likely to be more pioneering, which can cause trouble in today's hyper-conformist American corporate environment. As for VOC TECH: on its face, this seems to pose a contradiction. Voc tech programs are usually high school and/or apprentice-based, not so much a part of formal higher education -- and are already very male dominated in a number of technical/industrial areas. We read above that we need more voc-tech. But young men who are already in voc tech training are obviously not counted among the female-dominant four-year college population, and this is "bad" for men. Lower college matriculation is much the subject of the Council's "Component 1." (see its web page). So what gives? As broadly outlined above, this proposal would RIGHTFULLY raise voc tech education to a whole new realm, expanding it more into higher education with newer, more advanced, scientifically-based technical curricula (though perhaps not likely into a standard, four-year bachelor's degree format). Raising Voc Tech's status will likely mean diverting existing educational resources into it (hopefully away from useless college majors). If in Japan, men are expected to work and be providers, the necessary tools and framework are at their disposal. But not in female-centric America -- and that's exactly what a list like the one above demonstrates.

As David Wessel wrote in the Wall Street Journal back in May 2010:

Americans have worried for decades that the economy won't produce enough jobs. But the economy always provided. As farm jobs were eliminated by mechanization, factories hired more. As factories increased productivity and moved work offshore, more Americans got jobs in health care and other services. And the economists said to all those who had been worried about perennial, persistent unemployment: We told you so!

Yet nothing in the textbooks says that the supply and demand for workers will intersect at a wage that is socially acceptable. At the high end, demand for skilled workers and those who rely on their brains will return when the economy does. At the other end, jobs in restaurants, nursing homes and health clubs—the jobs that are hard to automate or outsource—will come back, too.

In the middle, there will be some jobs for workers without much education, for the plumbers, electricians and software technicians. But not enough to go around.

Men who in an earlier era would have been making good money on the assembly line are, and will be, working security or greeting at Wal-Mart, jobs that almost anyone can do and thus jobs that don't pay well. (emphasis mine)

I think that the Council's list (above) speaks for itself, including the item concerning boys' motivation to work (or not work). How much support is society giving to men to make a decent living? There seems to be somewhat of an emerging internal debate on this, however: Dr. Leonard Sax, author of the 2007 book, "Boys Adrift," devoted an entire chapter in his book entitled, "End Result: Failure to Launch." It was a summary of a 2006 Washington Post article he penned about male underachievement (and its echoes in pop culture), and a subsequent live chat between Dr. Sax and a number of readers: based upon his replies to many of the reader comments, it became clear that Dr. Sax believes that many young adult men (especially those who live with their parents for free past the age of 21 or so) CHOOSE the easy life, taking advantage of doting mothers who clean up and cook for them, and the fact that they no longer have to provide for women (who can attain careers and resources of their own). If these "boys" would rather play video games than do undesirable jobs (that theoretically would still provide a gainful enough living, with opportunities widely available in today's market) and be self-sufficient, as Sax postulates, wouldn't that render most of the Council's points about men and work as "excuses" for male underachievement? So men can make it working at Wal-Mart, after all? Unfortunately, Dr. Sax is on the commission for the Council on Men and Boys. Wouldn't the lack of adequate training opportunities, the discrimination, the sheer lack of gainful jobs, and sheer degradation by women objectifying men over their wallets more than suffice as explanations for men not fulfilling their potential in too many cases?

LATEST ARTICLE: Young Adulthood in the Catholic Church

In light of much other activity, I neglected to mention my latest article published in the Berkeley, CA-based New Oxford Review. It is entitled, "Who Are the Millennial Catholics?" and is found here. The journal's paywall is still up, but if interested in reading the entire article, email the editor, Pieter Vree, at pietervree@newoxfordreview.org.

Independence in Today's American, Status-Quo Authority Society

This past Independence (i.e. 4th of July) weekend earlier this month, I thought about the value and meaning of being in a free society. But my reflecting didn't go too far beyond reports and commentaries that we, as the people, and as the reputed greatest democracy on planet Earth, are trending AWAY from personal liberties, and towards a far more dense culture of conformity.

Let me be clear from the jump: I'm not saying modern America is comparable to life even in today's Russia under the regime of Alexander Putin, or China's continued controlling regime, and certainly not like Arab and Muslim societies under Sharia Law. But based on the premises of our own founding, the grounds have clearly shifted, according to this research:

The idea that personal liberty defines America is deeply rooted, and shared across the political spectrum. The lifestyle radicals of the ’60s saw themselves as heirs to this American tradition of self-expression; today, it energizes the Tea Party movement, marching to defend individual liberty from the smothering grasp of European-style collectivism.

But are Americans really so uniquely individualistic? Are we, for example, more committed individualists than people in those socialist-looking nations of Europe? The answer appears to be no.

For many years now, researchers worldwide have been conducting surveys to compare the values of people in different countries. And when it comes to questions about how much the respondents value the individual against the collective — that is, how much they give priority to individual interest over the demand of groups, or personal conscience over the orders of authority — Americans consistently answer in a way that favors the group over the individual. In fact, we are more likely to favor the group than Europeans are.

Surprising as it may sound, Americans are much more likely than Europeans to say that employees should follow a boss’s orders even if the boss is wrong; to say that children “must” love their parents; and to believe that parents have a duty to sacrifice themselves for their children. We are more likely to defer to church leaders and to insist on abiding by the law. Though Americans do score high on a couple of aspects of individualism, especially where it concerns government intervening in the market, in general we are likelier than Europeans to believe that individuals should go along and get along. (emphasis mine)

...The International Social Survey Programme, or ISSP, and the World Value Surveys, or WVS, are probably the longest-running, most reliable such projects. Starting with just a handful of countries, both now pose the same questions to respondents from dozens of nations.

Their findings suggest that in several major areas, Americans are clearly less individualistic than western Europeans. One topic pits individual conscience against the demands of the state. In 2006, the ISSP asked the question “In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?” At 45 percent, Americans were the least likely out of nine nationalities to say that people should at least on occasion follow their consciences — far fewer than, for example, the Swedes (70 percent) and the French (78 percent). Similarly, in 2003, Americans turned out to be the most likely to embrace the statement “People should support their country even if the country is in the wrong.” (emphasis mine)

But here's the upshot:

American individualism is far more complex than our national myths, or the soap-box rhetoric of right and left, would have it. It is not individualism in the libertarian sense, the idea that the individual comes before any group and that personal freedom comes before any allegiance to authority. Research suggests that Americans do adhere to a particular strain of liberty — one that emerged in the New World — in which freedom to choose your allegiance is tempered by the expectation that you won’t stray from the values of the group you choose.

Moreover:

The nature of individualism is complex, however, and there are at least a couple of ways that Americans in the ISSP and similar surveys do appear more individualistic than Europeans. For one, Americans are usually the most likely to say that individuals determine their own fates. What happens to you is your own doing, not the product of external circumstances. For Americans, things are the way they are because individuals made choices.

Yeah, in other words, take "personal responsibility" and don't have a "bad attitude" about whatever goes wrong for you. Don't think in any way of blaming the authority structure that has you under its foot. Things are the way they are -- period.

And what does this give us to celebrate as (a clearly emasculated) nation and society? Besides copious economic opportunity today and a wonderful free market enabling it, not a whole hell of a lot. Perhaps how there's less crime than there used to be, and how we're so much safer? While I'm on this anti-authority kick, consider this growing problem, outlined on The American Conservative blog:

Here are seven reasons why police misconduct is a systemic problem, not “a few bad apples”:

1. Many departments don’t provide adequate training in nonviolent solutions.

This is particularly obvious when it comes to dealing with family pets. “Police kill family dog” is practically its own subgenre of police brutality reports, and most of these cases—like the story of the Minnesota children who were made to sit, handcuffed, next to their dead and bleeding pet—are all too preventable. Some police departments have begun to train their officers to deal more appropriately with pets, but Thomas Aveni of the Police Policy Studies Council, a police consulting firm, says it’s still extremely rare. In the absence of this training, police are less likely to view violence as a last resort.

2. Standards for what constitutes brutality vary widely.

“Excess is in the eyes of the beholder,” explains William Terrill, a former police officer and professor of criminal justice at Michigan State. “To one officer ‘objectively reasonable’ means that if you don’t give me your license, I get to use soft hands, and in another town the same resistance means I can pull you through the car window, [or] I can tase you.” The special deference police are widely given in American culture feeds this inconsistency of standards, producing something of a legal Wild West. While national legislation would likely only complicate matters further, local or state-wide ballot propositions should allow the public—not the police—to define reasonable use of force.

3. Consequences for misconduct are minimal.

In central New Jersey, for instance, 99 percent of police brutality complaints are never investigated. Nor can that be explained away as stereotypical New Jersey corruption. Only one out of every three accused cops are convicted nationwide, while the conviction rate for civilians is literally double that. In Chicago, the numbers are even more skewed: There were 10,000 abuse complaints filed against the Chicago PD between 2002 and 2004, and just 19 of them ”resulted in meaningful disciplinary action.” On a national level, upwards of 95 percent of police misconduct cases referred for federal prosecution are declined by prosecutors because, as reported in USA Today, juries “are conditioned to believe cops, and victims’ credibility is often challenged.” Failure to remedy this police/civilian double standard cultivates an abuse-friendly legal environment.

4. Settlements are shifted to taxpayers.

Those officers who are found guilty of brutality typically find the settlement to their victims paid from city coffers. Research from Human Rights Watch reveals that in some places, taxpayers “are paying three times for officers who repeatedly commit abuses: once to cover their salaries while they commit abuses; next to pay settlements or civil jury awards against officers; and a third time through payments into police ‘defense’ funds provided by the cities.” In larger cities, these settlements easily cost the public tens of millions of dollars annually while removing a substantial incentive against police misconduct.

5. Minorities are unfairly targeted.

“Simply put,” says University of Florida law professor Katheryn K. Russell, “the public face of a police brutality victim is a young man who is Black or Latino.” In this case, research suggests perception matches reality. To give a particularly striking example, one Florida city’s “stop and frisk” policy has been explicitly aimed at all black men. Since 2008, this has led to 99,980 stops which did not produce an arrest in a city with a population of just 110,000. One man alone was stopped 258 times at his job in four years, and arrested for trespassing while working on 62 occasions. Failure to address this issue communicates to police that minorities are a safe target for abuse.

6. Police are increasingly militarized.

During President Obama’s gun control push, he argued that “weapons of war have no place on our streets;” but as Radley Balko has amply documented in his 2013 book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, local police are often equipped with weapons powerful enough to conquer a small country. Police use of highly armed SWAT teams has risen by 1,500 percent in the last two decades, and many police departments have cultivated an “us vs. them” mentality toward the public they ostensibly serve. Although possession of these weapons does not cause misconduct, as the old saying goes, when you have a hammer everything begins to look like a nail.

7. Police themselves say misconduct is remarkably widespread.

Here’s the real clincher. A Department of Justice study revealed that a whopping 84 percent of police officers report that they’ve seen colleagues use excessive force on civilians, and 61 percent admit they don’t always report “even serious criminal violations that involve abuse of authority by fellow officers.”

This self-reporting moves us well beyond anecdote into the realm of data: Police brutality is a pervasive problem, exacerbated by systemic failures to curb it. That’s not to say that every officer is ill-intentioned or abusive, but it is to suggest that the common assumption that police are generally using their authority in a trustworthy manner merits serious reconsideration. As John Adams wrote to Jefferson, “Power always thinks it has a great soul,” and it cannot be trusted if left unchecked.

More American heroism to be proud of, I suppose. The above list refers to AMERICAN police forces, by the way, not those in New Zealand or Western Europe.

So I suppose we can just keep on celebrating ourselves with those burgers and dogs on the grill, and perhaps some fireworks (where you won't get cuffed and stuffed in a police cruiser for lighting them, that is).

Rhode Island Department of Health Director Dr. Michael Fine's Unexpected Crisis

This is unbelievable, and disgraceful.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Twenty-two people died of drug overdoses in Rhode Island during a 13-day period this month — far more than the average for that time period, health officials said Friday...Health officials offered no explanation for the spike in deaths, up from the usual three to four per week. The deaths involved a variety of illicit and prescription drugs and were scattered in 13 cities and towns around the state. Those who died from Jan. 1 through Jan. 13 ranged in age from 20 to 62.

What's more:

Among those who died of overdoses during the past two weeks is a 23-year-old man who was in recovery and relapsed, said Tom Coderre, chief of staff for Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed and chairman of RICARES, an addiction recovery advocacy group. Coderre was planning to attend his wake Friday night.“If you have people dying we should be addressing this a little more aggressively,” Coderre said. “It’s like we can’t do anything fast enough.” Of the 22 deaths, 19 were screened with blood tests that found evidence of an overdose. Three cases were presumed overdoses because of “history and things found at the scene,” said Dr. Christina Stanley, chief medical examiner.Of the 19 screened, 13 indicated the presence of the painkiller fentanyl, but not the acetyl fentanyl linked to deaths last June. Other drugs detected included cocaine, opiates, benzodiazepines, methamphetamine, oxycodone and carisoprodol.

The real mystery (if you want to call it that) is this: With all of the mental health/substance abuse providers in the Providence area, fanned out among many clinics but largely concentrated at Butler Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital, why these horrible results? Rhode Island was already becoming known as the number one state for drug use.

Ironically, Dr. Fine, a public official, may already hold the answers to this abysmal situation. The fact is that many of Rhode Island's numerous mental health/substance abuse professionals are inept and corrupt. Most likely, Dr. Fine's health department has received copious complaints about some of them, and inaction has been the result. It seems as though many of these drug abuse victims have been "treated," only for their deaths to result from continued, illicit substance use.

By this time next year, Rhode Island will have a new governor. Let's hope it gets a new health director as well.


CRITICAL UPDATE, April 11:

In the past two and a half months, the total dead from overdoses has risen to 72 as of a week ago. This has attracted national attention, as this San Francisco-based publication demonstrates. It states:

Rhode Island Emergency Medical Services administered the overdose antidote Narcan 328 times between Jan. 1 and mid-March, said health department spokesman James Palmer...Health and public safety officials have taken a number of steps in response. Fine last month issued emergency regulations to make Narcan, also known as naloxone, more widely available, including to law enforcement agencies. The regulations allow the antidote to be prescribed not only to a person experiencing an overdose or at risk of one, but to family members and friends in a position to assist.

Several police departments, including state police and some municipal departments, have begun assigning officers to carry and use Narcan, or have started training.

WOW. Who EVER imagined that, in the seminal hippie subculture land of Haight-Ashbury, that a small, Northeast Corridor enclave would become THE NEWS about THE LATEST drug overdose epidemic? This strongly suggests that not even the Bay area is going through an epidemiological episode quite like Rhode Island's.

A separate but tangential issue is this: while law enforcement officers here in Rhode Island are increasingly carrying and are able to administer Narcan, it wasn't too long ago that some of them dangled the handcuffs at the drug users instead. Beyond the continued failures of the Rhode Island health authorities (72 users dead now, up from 22, even when 22 was a crisis), this tragedy likewise represents a microcosm of failure for the Reagan-Bush-Clinton 'War on Drugs.' No?

Merry Christmas from Shock-Prof

We in Western Christianity have many Christmas classics. Some are sung everywhere, while others are a bit less known and performed. Having belonged to a church with a great choral program for many years, here are links to some of the great classics by various performers. Enjoy!


DARKE: In The Bleak Midwinter



MEDIEVAL CHANT: Gaudete



RUTTER: What Sweeter Music



SAINT-SAENS: Tollite Hostias



CARTER: A Maiden Most Gentle

American Men Boycotting Marriage: Pseudotraditionalist FNC Hosts Say To Man Up

Found this on YouTube. I'll let some of the viewer comments do the speaking from here:

xxxxxxpimptaddyone


"50% of women are obese, 50% of women are single moms, 52% of marriages end in divorce, 70% of divorces filed by women, The average woman has a partner count in the double digits. Women get child custody 90%, they get a free house and car courtesy of the husband. She can call 911 and lie about abuse and ruin your life, the church preachers take her side and don't hold her accountable. Lifetime alimony and child support. A Real Man doesn't take that deal. A real man goes his own way"


MNeilGri

"I think this video shows just how closely feminism and traditionalism are tied together. Kind of hard for feminism to claim they are fighting the patriarchy when patriarchal values, such as these traditionalists are spouting, are just as readily heard coming from the mouths of feminists themselves. They are two sides of the same coin."

"The reality is, there is nothing in the wedding vows that is binding for women anymore. Women offer nothing in modern vows... but modern vows for men still offers his wealth and property. Furthermore, any and all expectations and/or obligations on a wife are severed upon divorce, while a man's obligations (to provide) remain intact, and government enforced. In effect, when a couple divorces, the woman is released from the marriage, the man isn't"


ZephZhang

"You derive deep satisfaction for taking responsibilities for others".

"No. I am responsible for my actions TO other people. I am not responsible FOR other people. This man has a broken sense of priorities and obviously doesn't understand the value of allowing people free choice. That a human is born with a Y chromosome does not obligate him to live or deal with the choices of another simply because they weren't. Equality means equality for everyone."


Nairby L

"These guys will understand when their wives divorce them and they have to start paying alimony and not see their kids and pay child support under threat of incarceration."


goose1077

"Its' not just child support, it's that child support is not tied to what the child needs but to what the man makes. They can take huge sums of money from a man. Of course a man should support his child but it's not up to him to support the woman who dumped him."


postwardreamz

"I finished undergrad back in 94. Grad school in 96. Every woman I met, tried to get to know wanted either perfection, or guys who thought everything was a joke. Time rolled by...the decades wore on. I used to get very depressed about this. As I crested into my forties. All of my college friends divorced and financially raped. Guys who are still married it's a cheating spouse. A loveless marriage. Everything that is wrong is "his" fault. Man, I dodged a bullet. I really did. Glad I never married."

Keeping it Real With Pope Francis: The Catholic Neo-conservative's Sticky Dilemma

In the wake of two revealing interviews with the current pontiff in recent weeks, Catholic "conservatives" are both rationalizing, and reeling over, Francis' off the cuff comments. The central matter is well summed up here:

"To be sure, many Catholics wholeheartedly embraced the change in tone and spirit in which the pope discussed difficult questions like abortion. Unfortunately, some deeply involved in the prolife movement have taken those remarks as a rebuke. That is an overreaction and misinterpretation of what the pope said. Obviously, Francis was objecting to the uncompromising and confrontational rhetoric of some Catholic activists. Why? Because that approach is simply not working. Worse, it is preventing the larger gospel message from being heard both within and beyond the Catholic community. With a third of all baptized Catholics abandoning the church, and those who remain increasingly divided on ecclesial, cultural, and political questions, the pope’s diagnosis is hard to refute. Is it not time, as Francis urged, to “find a new balance” in presenting the church’s teaching to an often doubting flock and a sometimes hostile secular world? “Otherwise,” the pope warns, “even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the gospel. The proposal of the gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.”

"Even more refreshing was the pope’s insistence that “thinking with the church” does not mean thinking only with the hierarchy. “The church [is]…the people of God, pastors and people together. The church is the totality of God’s people.” It has been a long time since that bit of orthodox wisdom has been heard from Rome..."

The original interview can be seen here.

The American Catholic right (as distinguished from traditionalists) has had a scattered response to Francis' comments, to say the least. Just consider this initial, bang-up analysis from the online Catholic World Report..

"Hours after the interview was released, the dissenting group Catholics United (see the August 2012 CWR article, “The Catholic Con Continues”) released a press statement penned by the CU communications director, Chris Pumpelly. The statement opens by claiming that “Francis articulates his vision of moving the priorities of the Catholic faith away from divisive social issues, like what he calls an 'obsession' with gay marriage, abortion and contraception, while refocusing on core Gospel teachings relating to poverty.” That statement is misleading at best, as “the priorities of the Catholic faith” have always been focused on proclaiming the gospel, even if many individual Catholics—laity, clergy, and religious alike—fail to do so. Pumpelly, like so many “progressives”, seeks to create a faulty “either/or” approach that seeks the silencing of those who uphold the clear and consistent teaching of the Church about sexuality, morality, and marriage.

"...Pope Francis has his own style, which reflects his unique personality and background, but it is also evident that he has the same central goal as his predecessors: to “proclaim the word; be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient; convince, reprimand, encourage through all patience and teaching” (2 Tim 4:2)."

He's still on our side, you guys!!! But NOT SO FAST. According to this write-up by Catholic right-wing writer and scholar John Zmirak:

"The pope’s most controversial statements seem to arise from a single motive: He doesn’t like “right-wing” Catholics, and wants to make it clear to all the world that he’s not one of them...I have met this kind of smug zealot up here in the U.S...who joke about burning heretics or who condemn the American founding because so many Founders were Freemasons...Some right-wing Catholics embrace a hardline agenda because they feel weak and irrelevant, and prefer magnificent fantasies of wielding power over their neighbors to the slow grunt work of evangelizing.

Zmirak, though, ultimately concludes:

"We are not living in fascist Argentina. The Culture of Death does not answer to men like General Galtieri, but to the likes of George Soros and Barack Obama. The bitterest traditionalists are not serving as tools of a grasping government which seeks to impose an anti-Christian ideology. Angry conservatives are not the cat’s paws of a potent political movement that seeks to marginalize the Church. The mass murder occurring throughout the West is not happening with the connivance of the Catholic right, but of the Catholic left, which pretends a moral equivalence between fundamental issues like abortion and prudential disputes over poverty programs and immigration totals, as a pretext for supporting candidates who oppose the natural law and the sanctity of life...

"Holy Father: Absurd as some of us are, we on the Catholic right are not your enemy."

Francis is clearly not their friend, either. That's going to become painfully apparent in the weeks and months ahead. Francis had this to say to La Repubblica as well: "It also happens to me that when I meet a clericalist, I suddenly become anti-clerical. Clericalism should not have anything to do with Christianity. St. Paul, who was the first to speak to the Gentiles, the pagans, to believers in other religions, was the first to teach us that."

Now, the pope's the "dissenter," and what are we to do? The absolute foolishness of the neocon ecclesiology has been laid bare, as now we can't just blindly follow all that Pope Francis says. So let's "guard the office" from the tainting of his unscripted, off the cuff interviews, and try to filter what he says ourselves to suit our agenda. JPII disliked left wingers because of the political history of his homeland. Francis dislikes right wingers, also because of the political history of his homeland. This translated into JPII's embrace of right wingers from other countries as well, and looks like it will mean Francis casting them aside. He's got their number, well beyond the secular politics he finds objectionable. The neocons are heavily clericalist, and like many Jesuits today, Francis loathes clericalism.

This could mean the complete undermining of entities like E.W.T.N. and its popular lay surrogates. They've always been tacked on to the papacy, but now what? Dissent from it? Save the papal office from the current pope, when all popes before him in the last century were 'saints?' The attempted integration of Catholicism into the public square (per the late Father Richard John Neuhaus and First Things) has been a disaster...former First Things editor Joseph Bottum now endorses gay marriage. Why? because there's no way back now. Rather than enforcing the Church's points of morality through the secular government (via the G.O.P.) onto non-Catholics, it's now high time to follow the REAL mission of this pope, and fix the Church from within, from the top-down. Now not only curia figures are being tossed out, but ordinary bishops (like Archbishop John J. Myers in Newark) are as well. Stay tuned there.

"The War Against Boys" second edition: Where were Dr. Sommers' G.O.P. and conservative comrades after the first edition?

For more background on The War Against Boys, please see this.

Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers has been a guiding luminary in the quest to combat the excesses of the women's liberation movement for many years now. She is one of just a handful of scholarly researchers and authors - including Dr. Warren Farrell and Cathy Young - who have persistently and thoroughly exposed and debunked the politics of radical "gender feminism" for what is really is. In completing my own non-academic journalism fellowship on male-female relations (and its tragic condition today), I first met Dr. Sommers at least eight years ago at a D.C. conference, hosted by a well-known right-wing women's group. She and I subsequently chatted over the phone the following spring. But she was never quite available to have a full, on-the-record discussion. The thrust of my concern for Dr. Sommers, a resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, was then and remains the same:

"You first published The War Against Boys in 2000. Following that was eight years of the Republican George W. Bush administration-led Department of Education. Laura Bush even said repeatedly that she wanted to help our nation's boys. In that time-span, the G.O.P. held Congress for six years. You now write that it's 'inconceivable that reports on the US boy gap would emanate from US Congress.' Why is it that one of radical feminism's central dogmas, which is that girls continue to suffer from massive disadvantage -- held dear as a cause by left-wingers -- is being sidestepped in such left-leaning countries as Canada, the U.K. and Australia? As you now point out, their governments have been intervening on behalf of males in schools for years. Why is it so different here in America, especially during and after lengthy conservative and Republican leadership, where the situation for boys is getting worse?"

Apparently, much didn't happen in the U.S. that should have, and Obama's and Biden's radical feminist sympathies have compounded the problems, thus calling for a second edition of this classic narrative. But with all their railing against excessive feminism among their most noted members, what have the G.O.P. right, including academic icons like Bill Bennett, ever done for boys? I can appreciate the change of the book's subtitle between editions, now omitting "misguided feminism." But I was hoping that this would allow for an elaboration of the way the modern right, and the G.O.P., is in some ways just as gynocentric as the left.

Surely, some who are right-of-center agree with much of modern feminism in general. But more of the political and cultural right seems to be based in misguided chivalry, which is equally paternalistically protective of females -- but in different ways. Just attend one of those conservative women's group conferences down in the D.C. area sometime to see what I mean. While emphasizing sex differences, as does Dr. Sommers, they'll lay bare their expectations of being wined and dined by male suitors, of women being able to "marry well," and then "stay home" as wives and mothers. As such, they'll rail that women being "driven to work outside the home" is more of a conspiracy by unmanly, non-committal sex-seeking men than any choice or cause carried out by women. This has been proven to be drivel many times over.

Of course, they'll give Dr. Sommers (and a few others like her) a time slot to give a breakdown of just how badly boys are treated in the American education system (including higher ed), the appeal being Dr. Sommers' arguments based on sex differences. But, as Dr. Sommers certainly makes clear by outlining the vast male underachievement in this new edition, the sorts of "manly, good providers" these ladies so desperately seek are going the way of tag games at recess. Of course, some of the pearl necklace G.O.P. ladies will give speeches reassuring themselves that most real men can still "make a decent living" without four-year degrees (at now-mostly liberal dominated campuses), or in some cases, without even two-year voc-tec programs past high school. If that's the case, a war against boys in formal classrooms, leading to their academic underachievement, wouldn't matter so much.

The War Against Boys (2013) shifts some of the focus off of organized, institutional feminism's warped, anti-male campaigns (that have received plenty of coverage) onto every day, local level, garden variety initiatives, including the scaling back of recess (for either more formal academic time or to curb aggressive behavior), zero-tolerance policies (to presumably curb at-school violence), and against single-sex schooling (that feminists once championed to improve girls' outcomes). Much of Sommers' original 1990s research illustrating boy-averse patterns remains in the new edition, and unfortunately remains relevant. The re-do of Chapter 1 is profound in itself: while the 90s figures pointed to several gaps, these latest figures depict more of a rift between the sexes. Test scores for boys are evermore lower than girls, on average, but now men's wages are falling off the cliff, with younger female workers in large metropolises out earning (after out learning) their peer males.

Many skilled, technically-based, decently-paid jobs are going unfilled today. The now-untrained, potential workers for many of them would otherwise be younger men. The economy and society simply cannot sustain this course. But Dr. Sommers describes some of this in the future-tense, as problems still yet to come IF we don't implement solutions. But it seems to many that they're already here. The White Knight-ism of some right-wingers sentimentally and indignantly declares that, no matter, what, "men and women aren't competitors," as though gender feminists comply with this view on some level. Women, these right wingers say, study humanities in college more often, while men are more likely to go to college and study the much higher-paid STEM fields, and they figure that this (along with eternal sex differences) is enough to combat any "imbalance." Otherwise, they would have lined up with Dr. Sommers ten years ago, and Congress would have acknowledged and explored this dreadful achievement gap between girls and boys.

I think it would be beneficial for Dr. Sommers to address the role of conservatives (or lack of), as the problems she keeps writing about remain partly due to them.

Blogger's Note

In the past year of blogging, I have posted much about the Catholic Church. However, I do NOT want this blog to be mistaken as a "Catholic Blog." I am an individual in practicing communion with the Catholic Church, who believes there exists much misguided understanding about it, both from within, and on the outside. It is an entity that somewhat predominates the religious landscape in much of the Western world, and love it or hate it, and cite whatever trends, but it is not going away anytime soon. Understanding it is integral to both current political and cultural literacy, regardless of what emotions Catholicism make evoke.

This is a blog on sociopolitical themes and trends (this includes religion, as just explained), and should be considered somewhat anti-establishment. The "establishment" generally refers to the ruling, political elite of the day. For our purposes, it includes those in lockstep with corporate, as well as government interests. But it also pertains to certain predominate social interests, like political correctness, which can be rather amorphous. On the political front, my fervent opposition to the G.O.P. establishment -- which hinges on corporate primacy,government statism, and interventionism -- is unmistaken.

You Might Be In a Neo-con Parish If:

Our friends at the National Catholic Register have done it again with this one:

You Might Be In a Liberal Parish If…

...your family has to split up to find the tabernacle.

...the pastor wears an Izod shirt and introduces himself as "Steve."

...there's maraca's in the band.

...your pastor's last name starts with "Pf".

OR HOW ABOUT

..."Steve" quotes Hans Kung in his sermon.

...There's more Eucharistic ministers than parishioners receiving Communion.

...The sign of peace last twenty minutes and includes bear hugs.

...The scariest four letter words to your parish council aren't H.E.L.L but EWTN.

...the DRE is a female Episcopalian priest.

Absolutely classic. But what's really the prevailing alternative? How do you know you're in a "faithful," modern-day, EWTN-oriented American neoconservative Catholic parish? You know, truly devoted to the pontiff, to insulate your immortal soul from all this now-disappearing dissent? Each point is a little more detailed, but here are a few clues to look for at your church.

You might be at a neocon parish if:

...they play "traditional" music, that is, by the St. Louis Jesuits and David Hass, or "On Eagles Wings," but on the pipe organ accompanied by a violin. Sometimes even with bagpipes. How solemn, at least no guitars and drums, though!

...Every Sunday Mass includes a meditative post-Communion rendition in Latin, alternating between either Franck's "Panis Angelicus" or Schubert's "Ave Maria" ONLY. That is, with a synthesizer backdrop.

...the pastor is 35 years old, and really does look like he's wearing a black skirt while prancing around the parish center in his cassock.

...Father Connell, the young pastor, prays in Latin with a lisp.

...Father Connell's best friend, Gary, is a layman. But he's always at the church helping out, also wearing a cassock.

...The tabernacle is in the center of the sanctuary alright, behind the altar. But it's bronze and the size and shape of a mini-refrigerator.

...The incense Father uses smells like frankincense with a mothball preservant.

..."John Paul," not "Francis," is Pope.

...When Pope Francis is referenced, it's about "how much like" John Paul II he really is.

...No social justice committee here. Pro-life dominates.

...But we don't want to degrade younger women with the Pro-life message. So the pro-life committee mostly talks about how younger, potentially impregnating men just need to "man up" and "find jobs."

...Air-conditioning the church was so costly, that those new Mary and Joseph statues are both made of Styrofoam.

..."The Crusades" refers to Bush's War On Terror.

...The votive candle stands in the narthex are electric.

...The pastor is always saying how all 20 teenagers in the youth group constitutes a "huge faith revival."

...There's incredible preaching about True Mortal Sin. That is, believing anything "negative" that the secular media says about the Church.

...The DRE (Director of Religious Education) is an ex-Legion of Christ seminarian who scratches out all reference to Fr. Maciel, the true author of his photocopied handouts to the students.

...Father's vestments aren't the 1970's tie-dye ones at all. Rather, they look like they're made of actual fancy Italian restaurant tablecloth fabric.

Now the stereotypical liberal parish (as described) has been fast disappearing since the 1990s, along with the clapping and banjo-guided singing. But what's been replacing it is a bunch of sanctimonious, hyper-sentimentalist, clericalist drivel. Hyperbolizing the liberal parish as anything "typical," nowadays, only steers attention away from the new set of problems now in place.

Even some "liberal" parishes evolve: