Garbanzos coated in bright red fertilizer, Fallon, WA, April 2014.
Hm.
“So the number of babies killed in the USA through abortion in four months is about the same number of Americans killed during the whole of the Second World War.”
One of several staggering statements in Augusto Zimmerman's Feminism and Gendercide of Unwanted Girls. Here are a couple more:
None of the early feminists believed that abortion was a woman’s right. On the contrary, they believed that women’s equality would end abortion for good. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), whose “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848) is credited with initiating the struggle towards women’s suffrage in the United States, explains in a letter to a supporter, in 1873: “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”
…
Because of sex-selection abortions, a survey of a dozen villages in India has found that out of a total population of ten thousand, only fifty were girls. In neighbouring China two-thirds of all children born are males because of selective abortion against female babies. In the countryside, the ratio of boys to girls is four to one. One academic source has suggested that there could be a ratio of 168 males for every 100 girls in Danzhou. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, by the year 2020 there will be 30 million more men than women of marriageable age in China. One in five young Chinese men will be unable to find a bride.
Andrew Bacevich on Taking Action in Syria | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com →
Essential watching/listening (or reading… here’s the transcript) for anyone interested in Syria and President Obama’s threats to get involved in that civil war.
A non-satirical article about the engineering behind the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco, one of the most successful satires of food ever unleashed on the masochists who eat at these f***ing places.
Some quotes:
“So we had to get that formula changed, then we had to find a way to deliver the flavoring, and then the seasoning. I mean, it was actually important that we left the orange dusting on your fingers because otherwise, we’re not delivering the genuine Doritos [experience].”
He gave his staff until March 2012—slightly under three years—to pull off a complete rethink of traditional Mexican cuisine.
In fact, the companies ended up creating a proprietary seasoner in the process, not least because for workers on the manufacturing line, the plumes of Doritos seasoning would create an almost Nacho Cheese gas chamber. “We realized pretty quickly that we had to seal that all in, because in the facilities, we couldn’t have all that stuff in the air,” Creed says. “It would’ve been too much seasoning and flavor for our workers…
Customers began blogging about their experience; a slew of video reviews hit YouTube; and one Taco Bell addict even drove 900 miles from New York to Toledo, OH for an early taste of the DLT.
Like Android is to Google or iOS is to Apple, Doritos-based flavors represent a whole new framework for Taco Bell to build on. "It’s not just a product; it’s now a platform–Nacho Cheese, Cool Ranch, Flamas,” Creed beams. “We’re going to blow everyone away in the next few years in terms of how big this idea and platform will become.”
“Pardon me for being so reactionary, but religion itself was never as shaming nor as degrading as this society we’ve built for ourselves. At least the Christian religion (in its original form) had a mechanism to cope with these pressures; you speak to a priest, you confess your sins, you do penance and are forgiven of those sins so that you may live your life. But nowadays we’re not just asked to be our own priests; we’re told implicitly by society that if we do anything wrong whatsoever, we’d better damned well keep it a secret, because if the public finds out, we will be forced into a kind of shame and self-loathing that will make life so unbearable that death will seem preferable. And every single person we know, everyone we meet, everyone we see will encourage this perception of ourselves. We tell ourselves that we’ve freed ourselves from morality and moralism, that we’re no longer held hostage by those ideas from the past; what we’ve really freed ourselves from is mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and love. And disturbs me in a way that I have trouble adequately expressing.”
Democratic capitalism is only a way station along the way of the destruction of the ancient world. →
Rich Bledsoe, “Christian Imperialism”, over at Trinity House Institute. A dense and at times opaque article studded with some absolutely thrilling distillations of what it means for Jesus to be King—the above quote is among the least of these.
The Moral of Pierre by one Timothy Burke →
I’m not sure who Timothy Burke is or where exactly he’s coming from, but this is a superb piece on how neoliberal societies try to get people to change:
“If you want an explanation of the meanness of 21st Century American public discourse, for the fractures in the body politic, this will do as a starting place. “Get that guy to wear his helmet, because otherwise he’s going to cost you money.” “Get that woman to lose weight, because otherwise she’s going to cost you money.” “Hassle that couple because their kid plays too many video games and might slightly underperform in school and not make the contribution to net productivity that we are expecting of him.”
Questions concerning how people treat one another, I believe, are ultimately theological. Whatever we think people are will determine what we think the problems are and why we must solve them. If we think of people primarily as gobs of material or units of economic activity, then we’ll get diagnoses like the above-quoted.
But what would happen if we acknowledged man as the image of God, as capable having his humanity completed and fulfilled in Christ, brought into the fellowship of the Trinity, and finally able to live at peace with himself and his neighbor?
“Tending to a sick woman in front of St. Mary’s Church on Washington Street.” Taken by Brandon Getty and found via American Guide.
“In his 1939 lecture on Sacred and Secular in Art and Industry, Eric Gill compared the artist and the modern industrial laborer. They have much in common: “Both are normally engaged in making things. Both are normally workers with their hands. Both are normally paid for what they do and not paid if they don’t do it. (In this respect unlike either the man of business or the politician.) Both are commonly instructed as to what is required of them before they begin working.” Gill argued that the key difference is one of responsibility: “The artist is responsible for the form and quality of what his deeds effect; he is the responsible workman; he has responsibility and would be insulted if he were denied it; but the workman, the labourer, the hireling, the factory hand has been, as the theologian puts it, reduced to a sub-human condition of intellectual irresponsibility; he neither has responsibility nor does he now desire it. He is too deeply corrupted by his serfdom. The hireling flieth, because he is a hireling.”
Gill argues further that the detachment of labor from artistic responsibility for the products of labor distorts modern understanding of the “fine arts.” Fine arts are “very important and even enthralling,” he says, but “only as important and enthralling as they now are by reason of the fact that the common arts in our sort of mechanized society do not give any scope for the satisfaction of those specially fine feelings which our fine artists are now the special purveyors of.””
“If you understand your own place and its intricacy and the possibility of affection and good care of it, then imaginatively you recognize that possibility for other places and other people, so that if you wish well to your own place, and you recognize that your own place is a part of the world, then this requires a well-wishing toward the whole world.
In return you hope for the world’s well-wishing toward your place.
And this is a different impulse from the impulse of nationalism. This is what I would call patriotism: the love of a home country that’s usually much smaller than a nation.
”
The Geography of Stuck →
In which someone named Richard Florida opines that, “America can be divided into two distinct classes, the stuck and the mobile. The mobile possess the resources and the inclination to seek out and move to locations where they pursue economic opportunity. Too many Americans are stuck in places with limited resources and opportunities. This geography of the stuck and mobile is a key axis of cleavage in the United States.”
What about people who like where they live and are committed to those places? Are they “stuck”?
“Father George Zabelka was chaplain to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki squadrons that dropped the bomb, and administered the Eucharist to the Catholic pilot [who] dropped it. He later renounced his actions: “To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and as a priest as I see it… . I was there, and I’ll tell you that the operational moral atmosphere in the church in relation to mass bombing of enemy civilians was totally indifferent, silent, and corrupt at best – at worst it was religiously supportive of these activities by blessing those who did them.”
The most tragic statement: “Catholics dropped the A-bomb on top of the largest and first Catholic city in Japan… . One would have thought that I would have suggested that as a minimal standard of Catholic morality, Catholics shouldn’t bomb Catholic children… . I walked through the ruins of Nagasaki right after the war and visited the place where once stood the Urakami Cathedral. I picked up a piece of the censer from the rubble. When I look at it today I pray God forgives us for how we have distorted Christ’s teaching.”
”
Peter Leithart, “Priests Dropping Bombs”.
In light of this and this, the modern American church is, when considered in relation to its support of our current batch of illegal foreign wars, identical to Father Zabelka.
Alan Jacobs on Steve Jobs' oft-quoted Stanford commencement address →
Alan Jacobs’ comments are good. I would add this: for all the talk of the world-changing (or, even, universe-denting) stuff Jobs did with Apple, what fundamentally matters is how the man was to the people closest to him. Was he available to his children? Did he pour himself out for his wife as he did for his company? Did he have love? Or was he sounding brass and clanging cymbal? Of course, being apart from the Son of the God who is love—as Jobs was—no one can have love. And by all accounts, he was hard to be around. Many stories about Jobs indicate that he was personally irascible, hot-tempered, and an awful person to be around—but that’s all okay, they hasten to add, because he was an inspiring visionary.
From all accounts, he was sounding brass and clanging cymbal, a man in tune with the future (whatever that means), but out-of-tune with the people who had to live with him.
Abortions in New York City →
In my old neighborhood (the predominantly very poor 10301), for every 536 babies born, a relatively conservative—for NYC—346 were killed in the womb. In the neighborhood of my birth (10456), it’s a neck-and-neck 1672 live to 1575 slaughtered. In 10018, for every child born, two were killed before they breathed air. In the poorest areas of the City, well over half of all pregnancies result in in-utero infanticide.
Stark and utterly ghastly.
Found via First Things.
“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”
“The problem is that many larger corporations fail to give employees any sense of being part of a larger whole, and this is especially true when the employee’s employment is precarious. How is a worker supposed to experience the social satisfactions of labor when he’s never sure if he’ll be part of the team for the next project? It is like being in Egypt; it is like bricks without straw, labor without Sabbath.”
An abstraction of an abstraction at sunset, Genesee Valley Lutheran Church, Latah County, Idaho.
The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme →
“We often forget that the American pattern of suburban development is an experiment, one that has never been tried anywhere before. We assume it is the natural order because it is what we see all around us. But our own history—let alone a tour of other parts of the world—reveals a different reality. Across cultures, over thousands of years, people have traditionally built places scaled to the individual. It is only the last two generations that we have scaled places to the automobile.”
Fascinating article by one Charles Marohn over at Grist. HT to the Underpaid Genius.
Agribusiness.
“Childhood is plenty commercialized before we do anything to help train a new generation of consumers to be as greedy, materialistic, and self-centered as we adults are. Instead of supporting free play in the fresh air, or role-play that comes anywhere near teaching empathy or compassion, KidZania teaches children the importance of the next paycheck. It’s incredible that they can get it all so wrong. After all, it’s child’s play.”