Outside The Asylum

I recently made a bad comment which I then deleted off of a soldier's facebook page serving in Afghanistan. I agree that it was a bad comment. I agree that I shouldn't have done it. But it's a topic that we civilians need to get better educated on soon. Right now, the US Military is beginning to look a lot like organized crime- the only way out is to leave horribly wounded or dead. Stop loss means that a 4 year commitment made in the wake of 9-11-2001 could easily mean that against your will you're still in the military in 2009, and on your fourth, fifth, or even sixth deployment. That is NOT what I consider to be a volunteer military anymore, although I'll admit it's drafting from those who choose to serve, it's still enforced servitude for bad pay and a horrible return on investment considering the risk includes the ultimate sacrifice. I support the idea that one of the duties of government is the common defense. I understand that in Afghanistan, we ...

Some have recently, due to my positions on charity and Health Care, accused me of "compromising with evil" on abortion. Nothing could be further from the truth. I agree with the Roman Catholic Church that abortion is *always and everywhere* an intrinsic evil, and nothing can change that. But there are levels to evil. The number of people affected is one. Who is to blame is another. For abortion due to incest or rape- the full blame MUST fall on the man committing incest or rape. Any abortion the woman has to go through to maintain sanity, health, or avoid suicide, is his fault, and his fault alone. For abortion to save the life of the mother- this is triage. And while being forced into the choice is evil, ethical doctors in emergency room or battlefield conditions are often forced to make this very choice- there are TWO patients here, and if you do nothing, both will die. I don't even call this truly abortion- the ethical doctor in this case *MUST* do a cesarean bir...

This is a good one. From the land that long before Christianity brought us the Robotic Zeus and the very rarely used automatic doors on the Temple of Mars, the Swine Flu has inspired a new, very Catholic, invention: The automatic touch-free Holy Water Dispenser .

You know, the DC Sniper dude, that Virgina just killed for his monumental stupidity. Yes, that's right, I said stupidity. It has now been revealed that he had several other victims nationwide- victims he was not prosecuted for and now will never be prosecuted for. At the time, it was obvious that even three jurisdictions side-by-side were creating a massive clusterfuck of the investigation; imagine what would have happened if say, he had modified an SUV with a Thule car top carrier for his sniper platform, pulling a trailer, and had limited himself to one six-round set of potshots per state per month, usually at skyscrapers from the backwoods of some state or national park, always leaving the state directly afterwards. We'd still be *looking* for him today if he had done that. There's even a half a chance that the FBI wouldn't be called in yet. But no, he had to be stupid- an old car with a huge hole in the trunk, once he got across the country to the Washington DC ...

Deal Hudson has actually apologized for writing off the influences of pro-life Democratic Members of Congress, while praising the Stupak-Pitts Amendment. Unfortunately his followers there aren't pleased, for after all, he's often argued that this topic does not belong with the federal government at all, that under the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, the free market is a better place for health care. I disagree with Deal that subsidiarity means the free market, but I will concede that he has a point. Not because, as the Reaganites tell us, the federal government is incompetent. But rather because human bodies do respond to climate, and different climates need different health care. I believe the current proposal handles this by putting the exchanges in the hands of the states, with "public option lite": the public option only available after the free market has proven itself inadequate to cover the 90% target. BTW, this means that the current proposals from th...

Or at least, so says Sharon Thornberry of the Oregon Food Bank . She brought up things I didn't know about our free market system: like the small town of Fields near Steens Mountain in Southeastern Oregon, where the local grocer is often worse stocked than the food bank because he has to make a 400 mile round trip to get groceries for his store. Nobody will deliver anything to him, he has to go to Bend or Idaho to get food. Umatila County is the same way- plenty of beef, but not a single slaughterhouse, so getting ground beef for the grocery store or the food bank is very expensive. This gives me two things: One, when I start my roundtable at St. Clare's for Knights of Columbus, one of the first charity acts I'm going to propose is to use the money from our recruiting breakfast to buy/build window box gardens for St. Vincent De Paul's food banks at St. Clare's and St. Anthony's, to be given away to anybody who has a source of water and a south facing window...

yep, one of my famous "A pox on both their houses" posts. On the front page of the Oregonian today, I see a very interesting article about abortion coverage in the new healthcare plan (unfortunately, they seem not to have put "Abortion covered widely by insurance", an article from the McClatchy newspaper service written by James Oliphant, on the web). In there I find some very interesting ideas: 1. From an alternate article on the subject: "What the amendment, offered by Democrat Bart Stupak, really does is bars the use of federal subsidies to fund abortions. It bans the proposed new government health insurance plan from covering abortions in all but the most extreme cases (rape, incest and when a mother's life is threatened). And news reports say that policies purchased with federal subsidies from private insurers will have the same restrictions. Women could purchase an abortion insurance rider if they felt they needed the coverage (or pay out of pocket...