Flourishing-Like-Ours and the Philosopher's Stones

Saint Jerome Extracting a Thorn from a Lion's Paw, second quarter of 15th century. Master of the Murano Gradual (Italian, active about 1430–1460). Tempera and gold leaf on parchment. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 106, recto.

Did you know that if you were a large and distinguished Roman Catholic educational institution providing health insurance to 1,700 employees and 9,369 students, and that insurance included coverage not just for family planning but also abortion, God might not instantly condemn you to an eternity of punishment?

Well, I thought so too (indeed I have sometimes thought it might be the other way around), but I didn't have any proof until I read in today's Times about Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, a great Jesuit school whose trustees are currently debating whether to eliminate that abortion coverage (not the contraception coverage, which they must provide by law, thanks to Obamacare and no thanks to the US bishops).

“Part of the university’s mission is to promote justice,” Professor [Christopher] Kaczor said. “And in the Catholic tradition, abortion is considered a justice issue. So to say the university supports justice and then also pay for abortions is a contradiction.”

That certainly sounds pretty Jesuitical to me; it's true, though, that the Catholic tradition considers abortion a justice issue, if by "the Catholic tradition" you mean Christopher Kaczor's 2010 book

The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice (Routledge Annals of Bioethics)

because according to the publisher's blurb the idea of making abortion a justice issue is not what you might call a tradition but a whole new thing Appealing to reason rather than religious belief"; and a short version of the argument is nothing but the symbol-soup of philosophical Ratzingerism:

I develop a rational justification for the view that all human beings, including the unborn, should be respected and accorded equal basic rights by virtue of sharing in flourishing-like-ours with other normal adult human beings, because of our genetic orientation to rational agency, and in light of the kind of being that we are rather than simply the sort of activity we are capable of at this time or that. 

Just saying, New York Times, that even when interviewing professors of philosophical ethics you need to ask whether they have an agenda.

I hope the school does keep its benefits as they are, but even if they don't, it was a beautiful experiment in how to be Catholic in the original sense.

Chart by Google.

I get briefly caught in the trollery

Christopher Hayes wanted to know what he should ask Diane Ravitch in an interview. Yglesias had a suggestion:

@mattyglesias @chrislhayes NO. Ending poverty is *a* key. Teacher pay is another http://t.co/MKNTgDyGfN (found in about 4 secs of googling).
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 5, 2013

Troll Bridge by Gido at DeviantArt.

Needless to say Yglesias did not respond. I personally doubt that teachers' salaries would provide enough money to make a significant dent in poverty anyway, in spite of the vast power of fanatical teachers' unions. But I'm not a famous economist.

We are polite to conservatives

@1101110112 @Chuckmeg @Yastreblyansky they are mean, selfish and hateful. so called patriots, pro-lifers, have the "family values" of Satan
— Chery (@CherySez) October 6, 2013

Somehow made me imagine a sitcom pitch for "The Satans Next Door", a cross among the Beverly Hillbillies, Donna's family in the That 70s Show (without Donna), and the Lannisters in Game of Thrones (obviously named for Lanny Davis, now working for the football team formerly known as the Washington Epidermises). But writing it up wasn't as much fun as imagining it, so I gave up.

A lighter Lannister moment, via.

Otherwise spent a certain amount of time trying to treat conservatives as I would like to be treated, with varying degrees of success, first with respect to a partially rational shutdown commentary by Jim Geraghty of the National Review: [jump]

News aggravators

Priests' hole, from Historic UK.

I can't believe RedAlert Politics hasn't done the latest SCANDAL about the Muslim Obama adminstration being determined to make all the Christians generally stomp on the Cross and spit on the sacred image of Reverend Gantry I mean Senator Sanctorum I mean.... But credit where credit is due, congratulations to them for resisting it. As for the rest of the rightwing noise machine...

Why is there Politico?

So the New Yorker Festival is on, and if you were a reasonably educated person of the Upper East Side with nothing better to spend $35 on this morning you could go over to Florence Gould Hall before Bloomingdales opened and hear Ken Auletta interview Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times. So Politico sent their Media correspondent Hadas Gold there—don't know whether she had to get a ticket or not—to apparently think she was reporting a story about Abramson by writing down excerpts from the interview and posting them to Politico in the afternoon, as if she had done the interview herself. [jump]

Horse and jockey by Willard Mullin (1902-78), via CartoonSnap.

Ross has his pride...

@dccc http://t.co/wtcYrt2MLV

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 6, 2013

Cheap shots and feuding cowgirls

Twerk not Twelfare. From baeblemusic.com.

@RedAlert Why would you expect Kerry and Putin to be familiar with twerking??
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2013

And below the fold, Cheney's women and much, much more!

Skeptic tank

Image from Reepicheep.

Glenn Greenwald (to be fair to a writer I'm about to disagree with in a pretty decided way) properly roasted the NBC News anchor Brian Williams the other day for his ignorance of the Iranian nuclear program—

"This is all part of a new leadership effort by Iran -suddenly claiming they don't want nuclear weapons! ; what they want is talks and transparency and good will. And while that would be enough to define a whole new era, skepticism is high and there's a good reason for it."

—as if the Iranian government had not been explaining very carefully and clearly for years and years that it has no intention of building a nuclear weapon. Not to mention no serious evidence to suggest that they weren't telling the truth (though the respectable media have been [jump]

Rough draft of history. I

It is not quite correct to say that "Journalism is the first draft of history." In a programmatic sense, they are really the opposite; journalism happens when people who (believe they) know what happened lay out the evidence; history, when people who know the evidence try to figure out what happened. I'm not entirely sure what I'm up to with the following, but it feels like fun, and I think I'll keep doing it for a while.

It remains unclear whether the "Conservative" movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in the then United States of America deliberately meant to restore the British constitution of the mid-18th—or whether Lord Cruz, the first Prime Minister, simply found himself in a position in the autumn of 2013 where the restoration was inevitable, and took advantage of it.

Proponents of the latter hypothesis point to the language used by the early Conservatives as evidence that they aimed at nothing more than reinforcing the terms of the 1787 American Constitution: they spoke of the Founding Fathers and the document [jump]

Fighting for freedom of money

Portrait of entitlement, peering somewhat myopically into the future. Photo by Cary Norton for the New York Times.

I was interested in the arguments of Shaun McCutcheon, whose lawsuit against the Federal Elections Commission will be heard in the Supreme Court next week, with [jump]

Looking for a 2% turnout...

Oh, New York? Before I forget, don't forget to cast your votes in today's runoff for the Democratic nomination for the public advocate position, between Letitia "Tish" James and Daniel Squadron. The latter is endorsed by the Times, and apparently pronounces his name in English, stress on the first syllable, instead of Spanish, which I regard as unfortunate, but outside of those details I don't know anything bad about him. On the other hand James, as I have mentioned before, is my candidate.

Johnny, we hardly know you

Weepy Irish drinker Speaker John Boehner grew up in one of those petit-bourgeois Catholic households, dozen kids, no doubt around the time he was in high school a photo of our martyred John F. Kennedy over the mantelpiece next to John XXIII:

“Growing up, we were probably Kennedy Catholics because we were a strong devout Catholic family,” said Bob Boehner, the congressman’s older brother, who like all his siblings eventually switched party allegiance. “But the first time you get a real job and get your paycheck, you look down and you wonder, where’s the rest of your money, and they explain to you that that’s the tax you have to pay to the government, you start thinking more and more about becoming a Republican.”

Of course some of it you get back in the refund of the following summer, and a great deal more you get back when you turn 65, and you can enjoy more of it when you use

Partisan Party Time

IDEA: Congress, but sober. RT @jbendery: About every other House lawmaker I just talked to smelled like booze. It's only 9pm. Wheeee!

— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) October 1, 2013

Getting them smashed before giving them the clean CR? I say make it roofies!

Mazel Tov, America, on Your Adorable New Program!

Via.

Atrios:

Except for the fact that he beat them twice, conservative really don't have any reason to hate Obama. "Obamacare" is just the Heritage Foundation health care plan, aka Romneycare, and otherwise, uh, what?

With all due respect to the Sweet Sage of the Eschatonic—and that's more respect than you want to be carrying around most of the time—I think we need to rethink that piece of received wisdom: [jump]

What did I tell you?

Chertoff's Gut Terror Alert System. By James Joyner, July 2007.

What I told you, at the beginning of August, was that if reports of a "conference call" or whatever among senior Al-Qa'eda officials planning some kind of massive strike on an unnamed US embassy were true, it was not necessarily true that they were planning

Follow the money

Sergei Svetlitsky. No Police State Campaign. Kiyiv, 2011.

Well, that explains something.

Really interesting: NSA Internet Spying Sparks Race to Create Offshore Havens for Data Privacy http://t.co/GrWBXMVaDN
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 29, 2013

I'm that idiot Obot who can't understand why he's supposed to feel terrorized by the revelations of NSA collecting data on the communications of American citizens, I haven't been [jump]

Infinite Friedman Recursion Syndrome

Mondoweiss offers a hilarious competition: readers' predictions for Binyamin Netanyahu's appearance at the UN on Tuesday. This one from Jamal Abdi:

Plane crazy

A Japanese view. Japan Self-Defense Forces are going to buy the F35 too, if it ever exists, so Lockheed is manufacturing parts in Japan, enabling the Japanese government to up its own costs for the thing by 50%. Membership has its privileges, and you have to pay for them.

Pilots on the Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, F35, don't look out the window. Or at their instrument panels. As Adam Ciralsky writes in the current Vanity Fair, their helmets are equipped with something like Google Glass on steroids, giving them a continuous [jump]

Adventures in marketing

I do not think "Honey  by Marc Jacobs" is a good name for a perfume, unless it smells like honey, in which case it is a good name, but not a good idea. It will attract ants, and possibly bears and honey badgers. Also, the container makes me think of Hello Kitty.

An "artisanal egg sandwich" would be one assembled by artisans, a kind of folk sculpture if you know what I mean, in which the ingredients took second place to the totality; or perhaps one made with an artisanal egg, an idea I would prefer not to contemplate. Whereas what they surely meant to focus on was the (bogus) artisanal quality of the bread, "natural" Asiago cheese, and applewood "smoked" bacon. As to calling it an "artisan egg sandwich", I can say only that I had no idea artisans were oviparous.

Cheap shots, hot shots, screen shots

I'm not even going to try to explain what I was doing on the above web page except to say that it was a totally legitimate part of my job, for which I get sort of paid, unlike these Blogspot effusions, to find out something about one of the Xu Xiaoping award winners  (I was actually trying to find out where a particular essay had been published, not whether it got a prize).  But I loved the somehow Russian pathos of that banner ad.

Mark Halperin below the fold, and much, much more!