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Javier E

Rush Limbaugh Knows Nothing About Christianity « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...ows-nothing-about-christianity

Christianity capitalism materialism market Pope Francis

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Limbaugh is onto something. The Pope of the Catholic Church really is offering a rebuttal to the Pope of the Republican party, which is what Limbaugh has largely become. In daily encyclicals, Rush is infallible in doctrine and not to be questioned in public. When he speaks on the airwaves, it is always ex cathedra. Callers can get an audience from him, but rarely a hearing. Dissent from his eternal doctrines means excommunication from the GOP and the designation of heretic. His is always the last word.
  • And in the Church of Limbaugh, market capitalism is an unqualified, eternal good. It is the ever-lasting truth about human beings. It is inextricable from any concept of human freedom. The fewer restrictions on it, the better.
  • The church has long opposed market capitalism as the core measure of human well-being. Aquinas even taught that interest-bearing loans were inherently unjust in the most influential theological document in church history. The fundamental reason is that market capitalism measures human life by a materialist rubric. And Jesus radically taught us to give up all our possessions, to renounce everything except our “daily bread”, to spend our lives serving the poverty-stricken takers rather than aspiring to be the wealthy and powerful makers. He told the Mark Zuckerberg of his day to give everything away to the poor, if he really wanted to be happy.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • the Church in no way disputes the fact that market capitalism is by far the least worst means of raising standards of living and ending poverty and generating wealth that can be used to cure disease, feed the hungry, and protect the vulnerable. What the Church is disputing is that, beyond our daily bread, material well-being is a proper criterion for judging human morality or happiness. On a personal level, the Church teaches, as Jesus unambiguously did, that material goods beyond a certain point are actually pernicious and destructive of human flourishing.
  • Could anyone have offered a more potent critique of current Republican ideology than John Paul II? Could anything better illustrate John Paul II’s critique of radical capitalist ideology than the GOP’s refusal to be concerned in any way about a fundamental question like access to basic healthcare for millions of citizens in the richest country on earth?
  • there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.
  • the Pope is not making an empirical observation. In so far as he is, he agrees with you. What he’s saying is that this passion for material things is not what makes us good or happy. That’s all
  • if the mania for more and more materialist thrills distracts us from, say, the plight of a working American facing bankruptcy because of cancer, or the child of an illegal immigrant with no secure home, then it is a deeply immoral distraction.
  • material goods are not self-evidently the purpose of life and are usually (and in Jesus’ stern teachings always) paths away from God and our own good and our own happiness.
  • Christianity is one of the most powerful critiques of radical market triumphalism.
julia rhodes

Japan to Form Own National Security Council - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...702303653004579210881381219784

politics history crisis policy national council security form japan wsj

shared by julia rhodes on 30 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • A bill to create a Japanese National Security Council is set to pass in the nation's parliament, as China's rising maritime assertiveness and North Korea's nuclear ambitions give Prime Minister Shinzo Abe greater leeway to tighten his grip on foreign and defense policies.
  • Seen as an important step in Mr. Abe's push for Tokyo to expand its role in regional security, the new council is also viewed as a backdoor for the premier to ramp up Japan's military, which is strictly bound under the nation's postwar constitution to a self-defense role.
  • The idea of creating a U.S.-style NSC has gained traction in recent years as Japan experienced a string of national-security related incidents that prompted it to boost its defense spending and capabilities. These policies have been viewed with caution by Beijing and Seoul amid tensions over historical and territorial issues.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • confrontation with Beijing over disputed islands in the East China Sea have created a series of testy situations that has underscored the importance of sound decision-making at the top of the government.
  • Pyongyang's pursuance of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs has also forced Tokyo to confront more urgent weapons threats, adding fuel to Mr. Abe's push to reinterpret the nation's pacifist constitution and lift the self-imposed ban on exercising the right to "collective self defense," or the right to aid allies being attacked.
  • By integrating the flow of information and providing speedy analysis, the NSC hopes to accelerate the prime minister's decision-making process on various issues involving national defense, including foreign military attacks and other serious emergencies.
  • Mr. Abe's plan has faced a fair amount of criticism. A state-secrecy bill that goes hand-in-hand with the draft legislation to enact the NSC has generated widespread concern by those who fear it could infringe on journalistic freedom and the public's right to information.
  • The bill, currently under discussion in parliament, toughens penalties against those who leak sensitive information related to defense, foreign policy, terrorism and other harmful activities, and has grabbed attention in the wake of Edward Snowden's leaking of classified U.S. intelligence information.
  • NSC will function properly and achieve its aims, or lose substance and become another ineffective bureaucratic institution.
  • The creation of the council also coincides with Beijing's plans to establish a similar state security committee that could boost President Xi Jinping's grasp over the military, domestic security and foreign policy as China flexes its military and diplomatic muscle in the region.
  • The NSC will be the control tower for Japan's diplomacy and defense," Mr. Yachi said during a speech he gave in Tokyo earlier this month, explaining that staff will be recruited from the foreign ministry, the police agency and the private sector.
Javier E

Russell Brand on revolution: "We no longer have the luxury of tradition" - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...russell-brand-on-revolution

revolution activism conservativism crisis politics spiritual

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
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  • The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.
  • This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Biomechanically we are individuals, clearly. On the most obvious frequency of our known sensorial reality we are independent anatomical units. So we must take care of ourselves. But with our individual survival ensured there is little satisfaction to be gained by enthroning and enshrining ourselves as individuals.
  • For me the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily political.
  • By spiritual I mean the acknowledgement that our connection to one another and the planet must be prioritised. Buckminster Fuller outlines what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: “to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone”. This maxim is the very essence of “easier said than done” as it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By teatime.
  • The price of privilege is poverty. David Cameron said in his conference speech that profit is “not a dirty word”. Profit is the most profane word we have. In its pursuit we have forgotten that while individual interests are being met, we as a whole are being annihilated. The reality, when not fragmented through the corrupting lens of elitism, is we are all on one planet.
  • Suffering of this magnitude affects us all. We have become prisoners of comfort in the absence of meaning. A people without a unifying myth. Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, says our global problems are all due to the lack of relevant myths.
Javier E

Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...science-says-revolt

climate change activism capitalism GDP

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.
  • in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary”, because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence”.
  • what Werner is doing with his modelling is different. He isn’t saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And indeed that challenging this economic paradigm – through mass-movement counter-pressure – is humanity’s best shot at avoiding catastrophe.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of overthrowing the present economic order in favour of one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.
  • Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies – all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned – that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else.
  • Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of developed countries are serious about hitting the agreed upon international target of keeping warming below 2° Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that the countries that have been spewing carbon for the better part of two centuries need to cut before the countries where more than a billion people still don’t have electricity), then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.
  • To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now.
  • a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval”, as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.
  • Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre
  • If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations”. Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).
  • in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).
  • there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists
  • If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.
Javier E

Puddleglum and the Savage - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...puddleglum-and-the-savage.html

transcendent modern Lewis Huxley Kennedy

shared by Javier E on 27 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • both Huxley and Lewis looked at a utilitarian’s paradise — a world where all material needs are met, pleasure is maximized and pain eliminated — and pointed out what we might be giving up to get there: the entire vertical dimension in human life, the quest for the sublime and the transcendent, for romance and honor, beauty and truth.
  • Two passages from their work illustrate this point — that comfort purchased by sacrificing transcendence might not be worth the cost. The first comes from Lewis’s Narnia novel “The Silver Chair,” in which a character named Puddleglum confronts a queen who has confined the heroes in an underground kingdom, and lulled them with the insistence that the underground world is all there is — that ideas like the sun and sky are dangerous wishful thinking, undermining their immediate contentment. “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things,” Puddleglum replies — “trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones ... We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.”
  • The second comes from the end of “Brave New World,” when a so-called “Savage” raised outside the dystopia confronts its presiding “Controller,” Mustapha Mond. The Savage lists everything that’s been purged in the name of pleasure and order — historical memory, art and literature, religion and philosophy, the tragic sense. And Mond responds that “these things are symptoms of political inefficiency,” and that the comforts of modern civilization depend on excluding them. “But I don’t want comfort,” the Savage says. “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
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  • in many ways the impulses driving the Kennedy nostalgists are the same ones animating Lewis’s Puddleglum and Huxley’s Savage — the desire for grace and beauty, for icons and heroes, for a high-stakes dimension to human affairs that a consumerist, materialist civilization can flatten and exclude.
  • “It is a serious thing,” Lewis wrote, describing the implications of his religious worldview, “to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would strongly be tempted to worship.”
Roth johnson

The Singular Waste of America's Healthcare System in 1 Remarkable Chart - Matthew O'Bri... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281782

shared by Roth johnson on 26 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Roth johnson on 26 Nov 13
     
    This is an interesting graph. It shows how big of a problem healthcare is in our country,
julia rhodes

Iran reaches nuclear deal with world leaders -- now what? - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...iran-nuclear-deal

US politics history crisis policy obama economic iran deal nuclear nuclear weapons israel congress

shared by julia rhodes on 26 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • A day after Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for lighter economic sanctions, the difference in the moods on the streets of Tehran and Jerusalem couldn't be starker.
  • We hope all the world knows we use this nuclear (power) just for peace, not for war
  • most Iranians are extremely happy with the deal, especially after many rounds of negotiations that yielded no results.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Benjamin Netanyahu, who slammed the deal as "a historic mistake."
  • "I'll find us new friends" -- an apparent jab at the United States and other allies that supported the deal.
  • This deal doesn't represent the fact we're dealing with the most thuggish people in the whole world."
  • Netanyahu said, "must lead to one result: The dismantling of Iran's military nuclear capability. I remind you that only last week, during the talks, the leaders of Iran repeated their commitment to destroy the State of Israel, and I reiterate here today my commitment, as Prime Minister of Israel, to prevent them from achieving the ability to do so."
  • Iran has stumbled from one economic crisis to the next under the sanctions, and unemployment currently runs over 24%. But not every country is following suit. Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird said his country will maintain its sanctions on Iran. "People of #Iran deserve freedom & prosperity denied them by regime's nuclear ambitions," Baird tweeted. "Until then, Canadian sanctions remain in full force."
  • It's also unclear whether Congress will agree to the deal. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a prominent Republican on the Appropriations, Armed Services, Budget, and Judiciary committees, called Monday for a new round of sanctions that can be relieved only if Iran dismantles its plutonium reactor.
  • Even though it's only a six-month deal, world leaders hope it'll pave the way to a long-term guarantee that Iran won't produce nuclear weapons. And Iran hopes to recoup some of the billions of dollars it's lost as a result of international sanctions.
  • "Its success hinges on whether or not it leads to a bigger agreement to "put Iran's nuclear weapons program to rest."
  • "We are pleased after 10 years that an agreement on this level has been reached," he said.
  • Now that sanctions are working, Netanyahu wants to see them tightened, not loosened, until Iran shuts down much of its nuclear capability.
Javier E

Bitcoin Is the Segway of Currency - Matthew O'Brien - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281625

virtual currency

shared by Javier E on 25 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • the idea behind Bitcoin is to create a decentralized currency that central banks can't inflate and governments can't tax. Basically, digital gold. And like actual gold, the only way to get new bitcoins is to "mine" for them. That involves running a computationally-taxing program on your computer that mostly generates gibberish, but maybe, just maybe, some bitcoins too
  • The key, though, is that mining for more of the virtual currency doesn't create more of it. That's because there's a predetermined number of bitcoins. Specifically, there are around 12 million today, and there will be 21 million in 2040—and no more after that.
  • this limited supply means Bitcoin should tend to increase in value against the dollar. But only tend to. See, its deflationary bias means Bitcoin prices will go up and down quite violently. Think about it this way. The supply of bitcoins can't increase much to meet increased demand, so increased demand will make prices soar. And soaring prices will make early adopters try to cash out their winnings—which will send prices crashing back down.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • it's nice to be able to get your money back if things go wrong, but that's not free. The middlemen take their cut. Bitcoin, though, has no middlemen. It's just a decentralized peer-to-peer system. So you can't get your bitcoins back if things go wrong, but there won't be any transaction fees.
  • the question is whether anyone will actually use bitcoins to buy things at all. It's not clear why they would when its value can go from $500 to $900 in a matter of hours. Nor when so many people treat it as an inflation hedge. They think of Bitcoin more as an investment than as money. Indeed, researchers from the University of California-San Diego and George Mason University found that 64 percent of all bitcoins are being hoarded in accounts that have never been spent.
Javier E

H-Net Reviews, Harlow: Longman, 2002. xvi + 297 pp. $25.00 (cloth), - 0 views

www.h-net.org/...showrev.php

Italy unification risorgimento history historiography

shared by Javier E on 25 Nov 13 - Cached
  • The new edition, co-written with Eugenio F. Biagini, Reader in Modern British and European History at the University of Cambridge, covers a much wider range of relevant issues for the unification of Italy. New chapters have been devoted to questions such as the Italian language and the role of women in the process of unification, as well as to a series of relevant issues after 1861, such as the Venetian situation from 1862, and the problem of brigandage in the south once the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had been annexed by the Kingdom of Sardinia. This much enforces the original project, as a complete unification of Italy had, of course, not yet been reached in 1861. Moreover, Beales's original chapters have been completely overhauled to include recent historical scholarship on the subject. The original set-up of the Historical Problems series has been maintained in this new edition. All the original primary material is reprinted, while the new topics are illustrated by further documents, which now grow from sixteen to twenty-three. A brief chronology of events between 1748 and 1876 has also been added.
grayton downing

BBC News - Huge Ukraine rally over EU agreement delay - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-europe-25078952

ukraine rally agreement crisis

shared by grayton downing on 24 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • More than 100,000 people in the Ukrainian capital Kiev are protesting against the government's move to delay an association deal with the EU under pressure from Russia.
  • Kiev police said they had fired tear gas after protesters threw a smoke grenade at officers in an attempt to break into the Cabinet of Ministers building.
  • The Ukrainian government says it is now looking into setting up a joint commission to promote ties between Ukraine, Russia and the EU.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • People arrived at the rally, on European Square, with families and children, many holding banners with slogans like "I want to live in Europe" or "Ukraine is part of Europe".
  • Ukraine depends on imports of Russian gas, but recently the supplier, Gazprom, complained that Ukraine had fallen behind in payments. Pipelines transiting Ukraine pump Russian gas to many EU member states.
  • It had been planned for the run-up to the key "Eastern Partnership" summit between the EU and several ex-Soviet states, which will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 28 and 29 November.
grayton downing

A Step, if Modest, Toward Slowing Iran's Weapons Capability - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ack-irans-nuclear-program.html

iran weapons capability US politics

shared by grayton downing on 24 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • At the beginning of Mr. Obama’s presidency, Iran had roughly 2,000 kilograms of low-enriched uranium, barely enough for a bomb. It now has about 9,000 kilograms, by the estimates of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
  • True rollback would mean dismantling many of those centrifuges, shipping much of the fuel out of the country
  • There is also the problem of forcing Iran to reveal what kind of progress it has made toward designing a weapon. For years, its leaders have refused to answer questions about documents, slipped out of the country by a renegade scientist nearly eight years ago, that strongly suggest work on a nuclear warhead
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Even then, a single weapon would do Iran little good next to Israel’s 100 or more and the United States’ thousands, as Mr. Zarif, the foreign minister, often points out.
  • After all, his stated goal has always been to prevent Iran from getting a bomb, not to prevent it from getting the capability to do so. He knows he cannot destroy, by bombs or deals, whatever knowledge Iran has gained of how to build a weapon. It is too late for that.
grayton downing

A Step, if Modest, Toward Slowing Iran's Weapons Capability - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ack-irans-nuclear-program.html

iran weapons capability US

shared by grayton downing on 24 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The interim accord struck with Iran on Sunday interrupts the country’s nuclear progress for the first time in nearly a decade, but requires Iran to make only a modest down payment on the central problem.
  • The most immediate risk to the interim agreement comes from hard-liners in Washington and Tehran who, after examining the details, may try to undo it.
  • The Saudis have been equally blistering, hinting in vague asides that if the United States cannot roll back the Iranian program, it may be time for Saudi Arabia to move to Plan B — nuclear weapons of its own
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Such warnings are part of the expected theater of these negotiations, in which the United States must look simultaneously accommodating enough to a new Iranian leadership to keep fragile talks
  • Lengthening that period, so that the United States and its allies would have time to react, is the ultimate goal of President Obama’s negotiating team.
  • “Rollback may be a step too far for the Iranians,”
  • “because he can’t been seen at home giving up such a huge investment or abandoning national security.”
  • The North Korean example has become Exhibit No. 1 in Israel’s argument that the deal struck on Sunday gives a false sense of security. “There are two models for a deal: Libya and North Korea,” Israel’s minister of strategic affairs and intelligence, Yuval Steinitz, said in an interview during a recent trip to Washington. “We need Libya.”
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