Heretics, Ch VII. Omar and the Sacred Vine:
Great joy does, not gather the rosebuds while it may;
its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.
Great joy has in it the sense of immortality; the very splendour
of youth is the sense that it has all space to stretch its legs in.
In all great comic literature, in "Tristram Shandy"
or "Pickwick", there is this sense of space and incorruptibility;
we feel the characters are deathless people in an endless tale.
It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly
in certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think
of them as passing, or enjoy them simply "for those moments' sake."
To do this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it.
Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.
Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure.
I do not mean something connected with a bit of enamel, I mean
something with a violent happiness in it--an almost painful happiness.
A man may have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love,
or a moment of victory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment,
but precisely not for the moment's sake. He enjoys it for the
woman's sake, or his own sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but not
for the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag.
The cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting;
the love may be calf-love, and last a week. But the patriot thinks
of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as something
that cannot end. These moments are filled with eternity;
these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary.
Once look at them as moments after Pater's manner, and they become
as cold as Pater and his style. Man cannot love mortal things.
He can only love immortal things for an instant.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
DESIGNERS AGAINST OBAMAMANIA
Came across a great, creative web site while surfing: Brad the Designer posted some wonderful counter-cultural, transgressive (to those who recognize the reactionary Left's penchant for clinging to old, failed beliefs) graphics and intelligent comment.
Among the gems, this may be the best:
Abortionists for Obama
"When I made the satirical "Abortionists For Obama" logo, I thought I was pushing the envelope...but I guess I was wrong. There's actually a fundraising group on the Obama website called "Abortion Providers for Obama".The fundraising page is here."
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Today's Leftist Lie: "No one is 'pro-abortion'"
The New Abortion Providers
The MiniTru at the NYT never fails to disappoint with the blatantness of its Progressive cant. In this case, an article in the NYT Magazine by Emily Bazelon celebrating the "heroic" efforts of people committed to making abortions 'mainstream' parts of medical practice. It is difficult to square Dear Leader's statement that 'no one is pro-abortion' with this paean to abortionists and their enablers. Clearly the Left understands that the NYT is an internal organ that no right thinking person wastes time reading, so they can openly discuss things they must obfuscate with euphemism and sophistry otherwise.
"This abortion-rights campaign, ...is trying to recast doctors, changing them from a weak link of abortion to a strong one. Its leaders ...hope that, eventually, more and more doctors will use their training to bring abortion into their practices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to integrate abortion so that it’s ...embraced rather than shunned."
The NYT celebrates efforts to have abortion 'integrated' and 'embraced.' Hmmm.
"“Some people like to live on the edge — I don’t,” said Emily Godfrey, a 40-year-old doctor who practices at a primary-care clinic at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she also does abortions. “I’m a Catholic girl from the suburbs."
She doesn't recognize the razor's edge she is treading... God help her.
"IN 1999, UTA LANDY, a former director of the National Abortion Federation, and Philip Darney, her husband and an OB-GYN professor at U.C.S.F., created the Kenneth J. Ryan Residency Training Program. The program gives medical schools two or three years of seed money for abortion training for OB-GYN residents. Through it, 58 campuses in the U.S. and Canada have received financing."
I think it is accurate to say that the Landys, who made their fortune from the abortion industry, led its lobbying association and have donated their wealth to facilitate the training of more abortionists are 'pro-abortion.'
"The money for the Ryan and the Family Planning Fellowship comes from one foundation and from one family. The donor has chosen to remain anonymous, which helps to explain why there’s been so little publicity about the pro-choice strategy of bringing abortion into academic medicine. It has been covered by a veil of semisecrecy."
John 3:20 For every one that does evil hates the light and comes not to the light, that his works may not be reproved. 21 But he that does truth comes to the light, that his works may be made manifest: because they are done in God.
"In the course of my reporting, two doctors who had not done the fellowship themselves, but who work in universities, volunteered to me that the money for the programs comes from the Buffett Foundation. They meant the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation.
Susan Thompson Buffett was married to Warren Buffett and served as president of the foundation that bears her name. She died in 2004. Two years later, Warren Buffett gave the foundation about $3 billion. He said that he expected the gift to increase the foundation’s annual expenditures by $150 million. And in fact, total giving by the foundation, where two of the Buffetts’ children sit on the board, increased from $202 million in 2007 to $347 million in 2008, according to tax returns.
The tax records also show that most of the foundation’s spending goes to abortion and contraception advocacy and research. According to Access Philanthropy, a research institute that focuses on the giving preferences of foundations and corporate donors, family planning is one of the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation’s main purposes. The foundation’s nonprofit 990 tax form shows that in 2008, Planned Parenthood and its affiliates in the U.S. received about $45 million; the international arm of the organization got about $8 million. There is no line item for the Ryan program or the Family Planning Fellowship. But the foundation paid out around $50 million to universities with one or both of the programs. "
and
"July 14 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama met today with Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s Warren Buffett "
Coincidence? Maybe...
"It has long been an abortion-rights selling point that almost 90 percent of the abortions in the U.S. are performed before 12 weeks"
The euphamistic sophistry of the abortion industry is galling. This statistic is an abortion selling point. Period. And who looks for selling points for what they don't promote?
"The abortion providers I talked to ... see the moral complexities up close. Two years ago, a young professor at the University of Michigan named Lisa Harris wrote an academic article about performing an 18-week abortion while she was 18 weeks pregnant. Harris described grasping the fetus’s leg with her forceps, feeling a kick in her own uterus and starting to cry. “It was an overwhelming feeling — a brutally visceral response — heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics,” she wrote. “It was one of the more raw moments in my life.”"
There are no moral complexities here. One life is instrumentalized and held without value relative to the convenience of another in a felicific calculus of subjective moral relativism in an attempt to justify an objectively evil act. The moral clarity cannot be starker than in Prof Harris' story. The amazing thing is that Prof Harris persists in aborting children even after the revelation afforded to her. (More commentary on her article at Abortion and the Malleable Conscience on the Stand to Reason blog.
The MiniTru at the NYT never fails to disappoint with the blatantness of its Progressive cant. In this case, an article in the NYT Magazine by Emily Bazelon celebrating the "heroic" efforts of people committed to making abortions 'mainstream' parts of medical practice. It is difficult to square Dear Leader's statement that 'no one is pro-abortion' with this paean to abortionists and their enablers. Clearly the Left understands that the NYT is an internal organ that no right thinking person wastes time reading, so they can openly discuss things they must obfuscate with euphemism and sophistry otherwise.
"This abortion-rights campaign, ...is trying to recast doctors, changing them from a weak link of abortion to a strong one. Its leaders ...hope that, eventually, more and more doctors will use their training to bring abortion into their practices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to integrate abortion so that it’s ...embraced rather than shunned."
The NYT celebrates efforts to have abortion 'integrated' and 'embraced.' Hmmm.
"“Some people like to live on the edge — I don’t,” said Emily Godfrey, a 40-year-old doctor who practices at a primary-care clinic at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she also does abortions. “I’m a Catholic girl from the suburbs."
She doesn't recognize the razor's edge she is treading... God help her.
"IN 1999, UTA LANDY, a former director of the National Abortion Federation, and Philip Darney, her husband and an OB-GYN professor at U.C.S.F., created the Kenneth J. Ryan Residency Training Program. The program gives medical schools two or three years of seed money for abortion training for OB-GYN residents. Through it, 58 campuses in the U.S. and Canada have received financing."
I think it is accurate to say that the Landys, who made their fortune from the abortion industry, led its lobbying association and have donated their wealth to facilitate the training of more abortionists are 'pro-abortion.'
"The money for the Ryan and the Family Planning Fellowship comes from one foundation and from one family. The donor has chosen to remain anonymous, which helps to explain why there’s been so little publicity about the pro-choice strategy of bringing abortion into academic medicine. It has been covered by a veil of semisecrecy."
John 3:20 For every one that does evil hates the light and comes not to the light, that his works may not be reproved. 21 But he that does truth comes to the light, that his works may be made manifest: because they are done in God.
"In the course of my reporting, two doctors who had not done the fellowship themselves, but who work in universities, volunteered to me that the money for the programs comes from the Buffett Foundation. They meant the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation.
Susan Thompson Buffett was married to Warren Buffett and served as president of the foundation that bears her name. She died in 2004. Two years later, Warren Buffett gave the foundation about $3 billion. He said that he expected the gift to increase the foundation’s annual expenditures by $150 million. And in fact, total giving by the foundation, where two of the Buffetts’ children sit on the board, increased from $202 million in 2007 to $347 million in 2008, according to tax returns.
The tax records also show that most of the foundation’s spending goes to abortion and contraception advocacy and research. According to Access Philanthropy, a research institute that focuses on the giving preferences of foundations and corporate donors, family planning is one of the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation’s main purposes. The foundation’s nonprofit 990 tax form shows that in 2008, Planned Parenthood and its affiliates in the U.S. received about $45 million; the international arm of the organization got about $8 million. There is no line item for the Ryan program or the Family Planning Fellowship. But the foundation paid out around $50 million to universities with one or both of the programs. "
and
"July 14 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama met today with Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s Warren Buffett "
Coincidence? Maybe...
"It has long been an abortion-rights selling point that almost 90 percent of the abortions in the U.S. are performed before 12 weeks"
The euphamistic sophistry of the abortion industry is galling. This statistic is an abortion selling point. Period. And who looks for selling points for what they don't promote?
"The abortion providers I talked to ... see the moral complexities up close. Two years ago, a young professor at the University of Michigan named Lisa Harris wrote an academic article about performing an 18-week abortion while she was 18 weeks pregnant. Harris described grasping the fetus’s leg with her forceps, feeling a kick in her own uterus and starting to cry. “It was an overwhelming feeling — a brutally visceral response — heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics,” she wrote. “It was one of the more raw moments in my life.”"
There are no moral complexities here. One life is instrumentalized and held without value relative to the convenience of another in a felicific calculus of subjective moral relativism in an attempt to justify an objectively evil act. The moral clarity cannot be starker than in Prof Harris' story. The amazing thing is that Prof Harris persists in aborting children even after the revelation afforded to her. (More commentary on her article at Abortion and the Malleable Conscience on the Stand to Reason blog.
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