The Razor

One of the tenets of Buddhism is “Right Livelihood.” In a nutshell it means working at a job that doesn’t contribute to the pain and suffering in the world. This isn’t a problem for most jobs, although a few do come to mind. One that does is performing and assisting with abortions.

I am pro-Life as is my family. We live with and bear the cost of our ethics. Dr. Wife may be a liberal but she won’t work for an institution that performs abortions, and we have made decisions and helped others in tight spots when it would have been much easier for us to walk away. I wrap my pro-Life attitude in a pro-Choice mantel because I do not believe the Government has a right to tell a woman what to do with her body, and that ceding that right to the Government makes it much easier for it to grab other rights.  But the cloth of that mantel is thin; scratch it and you will find someone who values innocent life.

When I read about a Planned Parenthood employee who quit because she just couldn’t stomach it any more, I think about how important Right Livelihood is. Now I’ve read interviews with abortionists who claim they have no difficulty sleeping at night, which doesn’t surprise me in the least. I doubt any leaders of the Nazi Regime laid awake at night pondering their guilt, nor do those plotting the next terrorist attack. A Buddhist would say that such men and women have a long ways to go before they understand the error of their choices, but they will eventually. I am not a Buddhist. I don’t doubt Evil exists in the world and have no problem seeing these people for what they are.

It’s not just abortionists. There are those working at kill animal shelters who enjoy killing puppies and kittens, and there are those who lie to themselves until they reach a point where they can’t stomach it any more and have to find their own Right Livelihood. Ditto those who work in slaughterhouses. I’m sure some workers get off on killing cows and chickens just as Sadists fed the ranks of the Serbs who ethnically cleansed Bosnia and Croatia. For others its just a job, and they do their best to ignore it. Others get sickened by it and have to quit, and often do so after providing PETA or the ASPCA with videos depicting the horrors of the slaughterhouse.

At the end of the day with our consciousness about to fade we are left alone in darkness with our deeds and our conscience.  2,500 years ago the Buddha understood this which is why He taught the importance of Right Livelihood. It’s a lesson that is timeless.

I normally ignore any headline with a number in it, but the following article is an exception. 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person should be required reading for everyone, especially those new to the workforce. Alec Baldwin is a world-class @sshat, and while I disagree with the article writer that it’s the greatest scene in movie history (better than Roy Batty’s speech in Blade Runner? The Wagnerian assault on the VietCong outpost in Apocalypse Now? Any scene from Casablanca?) it’s an amazing scene. Now I want to close some real estate…

Everyday my wife deals with extremely poor people on medicaid who feel entitled to everything. They’ve got thousands of dollars in tattoos covering their torsos but they can’t afford the $3 office visit copay. The local free clinic has gone bust, and the local non-profit hospital is circling the drain because people won’t pay their bills. Oh but they are poor, right?

I’ve seen poor. I’ve walked the streets of Dar es Salaam and seen beggar children missing limbs, victims of the civil war in Mozambique, who are moved around the city by their pimps. I’ve been in smoky mud huts that people have lived in their entire lives who scratch out just enough from the soil outside to survive. Medical care was a fantasy for them because they couldn’t make it to the towns where it was offered by the NGOs or government. Trust me on this: compared to what you’ll see in sub-Saharan African, there is no poverty in America.

When I came back to America from living abroad for 5 years I remember riding the train into Philadelphia through Chester PA and being shocked by the rubble that passed for the city. That’s not poverty, at least as defined by the lack of money. The citizens in Chester were rich compared to the street families in Dar, what they were suffering from was a poverty of ambition. They were stuck in a hell all right, but not the one that progressives and liberals believe. It’s one that money can’t solve – as proven by the trillions spent on the War on Poverty that has led only to a complete surrender. Money can’t fix attitude nor can it light a fire within that compels one to better one’s situation.

I currently live in one of the poorest areas of the country. We moved here at least partly due to a noble cause. We wanted to make a difference in the lives of the less fortunate, and I figured that we would do what we had done in Africa. Not only would the Wife treat the sick, but we’d plow our incomes back into the community. While conducting research in the Bush we expanded the research payroll with our personal funds, knowing that each person we hired would then be able to support their families. We hired anyone who could do anything. If you could wield a panga you could cut trails. If you could walk you could earn money simply by walking around the forest listening for the chimps. We paid young men to dig trenches around the research camp. For a year the people of the Kasiha village in the Mahale Mountains had some security in their lives, and they appreciated it. They were hard workers and protective of idiot Americans stumbling around in the Bush like myself. We left with $20 and no regrets.

Here in North Carolina I have had trouble finding people willing to cut my hay fields. I bought a hardwood stove but then had to take it back because I couldn’t find anyone willing to install it. After one of my dogs was killed along the road I asked a local carpenter to extend the fencing, a $3,000 job. He blew me off and never showed. Other property owners have the same trouble finding anyone willing to work. One said, “No one wants to work when the government pays them to sit at home.” Some have taken to hiring illegals, but I refuse to do that because I have a moral issue with it.

Yet these same people traipse into the Wife’s office and demand MRIs and expensive tests and procedures without knowing what they are asking for. When she refuses they question her judgment, as if they had gone through 4 years of undergraduate studies, 2 years of pre-med prep, 4 years of medical school, 3 years of residency and internship and 4 years of practicing as an attending. She brings 17 years of training into the exam room, yet these people disrespect her and her staff.

Disrespect. Dis as the verb. As the article above points out, respect is something earned by what you can do, not your intrinsic qualities. My Wife earns respect because she knows how to tell the difference between a harmless common cold and life-threatening pneumonia. 17 years of training has honed her clinical skills to the point where she now has instincts that have saved people’s lives. Seriously saved lives. I know of a handful of incidents including one where she had to battle an insurance company for a test that proved a cancer diagnosis. What have her patients made besides children, and it takes two of them to do that?

Anyone who demands respect doesn’t deserve it. If you are feeling dis’d it’s because you’ve done nothing worthy of respect. If you want to be respect, do something deserving of it.

I love American football. As a kid I loved playing pick-up games of it in our suburban backyards and touch versions in the street. Our city was cursed with the St. Louis Football Cardinals who eventually took their stinking-on-ice team to Arizona where they still suck, and most of my friends were from outside the area so I took to supporting their teams. My friend Ron H. was from Philadelphia, so I started rooting for the Eagles. But this was the era of the Steel Curtain, so I found myself cheering for the Pittsburgh Steelers as well. In fact I liked almost all the football teams except for my hometown disappointments.

After my bohemian period during which I thought American football was jejune and bourgeois, I had fallen in love with a woman who rekindled my interest in the Philadelphia Eagles after we moved into the area. I’ve rarely written about the sport because I have nothing to say beyond the usual “Go Birds” and the attendant “Cowboys Suck!” that comes with being a Philly fan. After moving south of the Mason Dixon, I have paid hundreds of dollars to watch the Eagles and other NFL teams play on DirecTV every season.

But every season the game seems to lose some of its appeal. Maybe there are too many penalties in an attempt to make the game safe. Maybe it’s because I’m growing older and have seen some pretty bad things happen to people. Maybe it’s because I’m just turning into a big pussy. But there’s only so many times I can see a player get hit and lay motionless on the ground while holding my breath before I begin to think something is wrong both with the sport and my enjoyment of it.

I love the sheer athleticism on display. I revel in the impossible plays just like any other fan. And yes these men are paid millions to destroy their bodies, but does the lucre they are paid free us fans from guilt? We are being entertained by men damaging their bodies in ways we would not do ourselves, or allow our children to do. I didn’t let my son play football even when he expressed interest in the sport. At the time I was more worried about a broken neck or ruined knees. That was before CTE, Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disease that destroys the brain and is specific to the sports boxing and football. Soccer players don’t exhibit it, nor do baseball players or lacrosse players. CTE does not wait until players are in their 70s or 80s to exhibit signs; it has been found in the brain of an 18 year old football player.

I am no nanny. If you want to kill yourself with drugs or whatever, fine – do so just not in front of me because I have a conscience and I will intervene to stop you. That is the way I was raised. For the past few years my conscience has been stirring when I watch American football, and seeing this program on PBS pretty much seals the deal. The NFL has denied the existence of CTE the exact same way the tobacco companies denied cancer caused by smoking. Recently the league has pushed the problem into the future by calling for “more study” just as the cigarette companies called for further research on lung cancer when the Science behind the causative link between smoking and lung cancer was unequivocal. What they’ve done is criminal but not surprising given the amount of money league owners have invested in the game.

Many of my friends have turned to European football known as soccer here in the States, and while watching the game seems about as exciting as watching a cat lick itself, at least I can watch it without my conscience stirring.

Perhaps technology can someday come to the rescue. Imagine: no penalties, no guilt, and as violent as we can make it. We could watch a true Steel Curtain descend on the opposing robot team and pulverize them, sending bits of plastic, steel and oil flying. Then, and only then will I be ready for some football.

While waiting for a video to start at YouTube I was subjected to an ad that I couldn’t escape. Normally when forced in such a situation I open another browser window and minimize the window running the advertisement until it’s over, but something immediately caught my eye in this commercial so I kept watching it. I quickly realized I was watching History being made. Here’s the ad:

 

For decades Madison Avenue has treated men as buffoons in the laundry room and the kitchen, barely able to put two words together in a sentence without their wive’s condescending help. It’s as if advertising agencies are stuck in the 1970s while the rest of America has moved on.

In my household I do all of the cooking and most of the housework. I also did most of the laundry until I passed the task onto my teenage son when I got tired of doing midweek loads so that he could wear his favorite shirt twice in one week. And I happen to be extremely brand loyal to only a handful of products, and Tide happens to be one of those brands. I don’t think I’ve used another laundry detergent since returning to the States from abroad 16 years ago.

I’ve spoken to other men who have taken on what has been traditionally considered “woman’s work” for a variety of reasons. Some like me have done so because their wives work longer hours. Others do it because they like the independence that comes with keeping a household functioning. Still others, including myself, view it as yet another expression of a man’s mastery of his world. If I can replace the heating element of the clothes dryer, why shouldn’t I be able to properly launder the clothes that go into the appliance?

In the YouTube comments a commentator sees this advertisement as the continued feminization of men, but I don’t see it that way at all. I see a father sharing the joy of raising a child and building a bond with her that will last a lifetime and embodying the qualities of fatherhood. I see a man showing the masculine trait of being comfortable within his own skin and not worrying about what others think. I see a man who by extending the definition of manly to include what was once considered the domain of women underscores the independent spirit laying at the heart of what it means to be a man.

Being a man doesn’t mean taking on a role which has traditionally defined the sex; it means extending that role into new areas of living that prove the creative and positive nature of masculinity to women and to the boys who look up to them asking themselves what being a man in the 21st century means. It’s not switching gender roles with women but moving our identity to encompass new ground, and doing so quietly, with humility and confidence.

Yes it’s just a commercial, but its presentation was so different that not only did it keep me watching it in amazement, but served to give me hope that while men have been devalued and derided so often and for so long, perhaps attitudes are beginning to change. I’m cynical enough to not hold my breath, and in the meantime I’ve got to move a load of laundry into the dryer.

James Taranto writing in the online Wall Street Journal:

A more abstract form of this parochialism is the multiculturalists’ frequent insistence that “only white people can be racist.” In this view, racism is perhaps the greatest moral failing of which human beings are capable—but nonwhites are absolved of moral responsibility for their racial prejudices.

But moral responsibility is the essence of humanity. It is what sets Homo sapiens apart from other animals. Assigning moral responsibility to whites while denying it to nonwhites is therefore a way of dehumanizing the latter. Multiculturalism turns out to be a disguised form of white supremacy.

I’ve personally found multiculturalists to be incredibly intolerant while rural Southerners, pilloried by the media and intellectual elite, as much more laid back and accepting of all kinds of differences. I think it’s because the poorer rural people are forced by necessity to get along with those of different ethnic, religious and ideological backgrounds because they can’t afford to live in like-minded, monocultural enclaves like Cambridge MA where NPR reigns (Speaking of which: I would bet that NPR employs more minorities than actually listen to it. Ever catch the names during a public radio pledge drive? Not a Jackson, Patel or Dominguez among those donating cash for coffee mugs and tote bags.)

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson who said ““The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man,” except in this case, the multiculturalist prides him/herself as being more equal than others.

The Economist’s sister publication Intelligent Life has a fascinating article about stolpersteine, stepping stones memorializing those murdered in the Holocaust with stones placed in the pavement in the neighborhoods where they last lived. Artist Gunter Demnig has been laying the stones, each wrought by hand, since 1996. Each is handmade, he says, because “any form of mass-manufacturing would remind him of the mechanized and bureaucratic murder at Auschwitz.” His work has even earned him three death threats, proof that he must be doing something right.

It’s a fascinating read, and an even more fascinating memorial to view, with thousands of his brass plates embedded in streets throughout Germany. Just something to keep in mind on your next visit.

There are certain topics I can’t write about, and the trial of late term abortionist Kermit Gosnell has been one of them. If I did I’d have to add a category to my blog “pure evil,” but that’s not the reason. I haven’t been able to write about it because I haven’t been able to read about it. There are certain actions that are so heinous, so vile, and being at heart an incredibly sensitive person I have to protect myself. It’s the same reason why I’ve never seen Schindler’s List. I don’t have to. I have studied the Holocaust and seen enough films, photos and first-hand accounts of barbarism to not need to see historically-based re-enacted horror. It’s the same thing with abortion. I know how the procedures are performed and when, and I have seen pictures of trash cans full of dead children in the past. I don’t need to subject myself to the torment of Gosnell’s actions to appreciate their heinous nature.

Yet I believe cases such as his need to be publicized and the fact the mainstream media had to be shamed into covering it by liberal columnist Kirsten Powers at the Daily Beast only plays to the Right Wing’s narrative that the mainstream media is biased against anyone who holds opinions counter to the liberal orthodoxy, particularly in regard to abortion.

I am Pro-Life, but I am also pro-choice when it comes to first term abortions. I find the old view of pregnancy known as quickening whereby there isn’t any definitive line between when a baby becomes a baby; instead it’s a process where with each passing day a life-form becomes a human being. Where is the line between being a life-form and a baby? There isn’t one, just as there is no line between when a person is a child and when she becomes an adult. So using Plan B to prevent a fertilized egg from implanting is much less of a moral issue to me than vacuuming out a 3 week old embryo with a heart beat, which itself is preferable to other methods used in the later stages of pregnancy. Some murders are worse than others, and those occurring in the second and third trimesters are particularly heinous.

A poor analogy would be the difference between killing a mouse in your kitchen versus a stray dog in your backyard. Where the irony comes in is how many people who champion abortion rights would be horrified to stomp a mouse in their kitchen and would seek out a “humane trap” at the local Home Depot to catch and release the mouse at a nearby park, and call the Dog Catcher to catch the dog and perhaps work to arrange its adoption to keep it from being euthanized at the animal shelter. These are the modern Janists, vegans, animal rights activists and others who can’t kill insects or animals yet have no problem killing children they cannot see.

Everyone has contradictory attitudes and experiences cognitive dissonance as a result to varying degrees, and I am no different. I love animals yet I eat meat. I keep chickens because they are interesting to watch and I don’t eat them, yet that doesn’t stop me from whipping up a chicken stir-fry for dinner as I did last night with dead bird I bought at a local butcher. But when I have had to, I have killed animals. I have wrung the necks of chickens who were dying a painful death after being attacked by hawks, and provided quick and relatively painless deaths for animals I have found dying in misery. I have blood on my hands, but not on my guns. Although I have them and it might be easier to use them to put down a suffering animal, I do not want the guns to “taste” blood. I have Irish and Slavic blood, and both ethnic groups are known for being superstitious, and I want my metal, inanimate but dangerous things to remain “pure” unless I absolutely have no choice but to use them. Yeah, go figure…

I could never perform an abortion myself, and if my daughter became pregnant I would raise the child as my own, just as I have taken responsibility and fixed the (much lesser in degree) mistakes my son has made. But I do not trust the government with laws. The government cannot even handle a stamp drawing contest, yet Americans expect it to write laws that can guide and prohibit human behavior. Just as every drug has side effects every law has unintended consequences and someone somewhere someday will pay a very high price for that law, which is why I believe laws should be as few in number and well-written as possible.  Because of this I believe banning abortion outright is a very bad idea, although I support repealing Roe v. Wade, a poorly written law based on an imaginary constitutional right, and would rather see the states or even local municipalities decide on the legality of the practice. That solution doesn’t exactly fit my own personal world view, but it’s as close to consistent as I can make it and I am continuing to refine it as I go along.

Gosnell, a 72 year old  black man, has probably killed more black people than any Klansman, Confederate soldier or slave owner in history. I don’t know how many abortions he has performed in his career, but judging by what I’ve been able to stomach reading, the number would likely be in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands. A true racist would treat Gosnell as a hero: in their way of thinking he has has prevented tens of thousands of criminals and welfare recipients. In fact had he been white I suspect that mainstream media would have delved into his racist intentions because a white man killing black babies would be too hard for even the liberal media to resist.

Why Gosnell did what he did only he knows. He did not testify on the stand but it’s clear that he profited handsomely from his abortion mill. Perhaps he was a self-hating black man who felt he was doing yeoman’s work ridding the world of his own kind one snip at a time. I suspect he enjoyed his work as evidence by some of the mementos (like a jar full of baby feet) he kept around the office, and by the fact that people do not last long in a position where they are doing something they do not enjoy doing that goes against their principles. Perhaps like many people he doesn’t have any principles. After all he was originally busted for dispensing pain medications to addicts, many of whom killed themselves or others while high. Perhaps in his defense he never killed spiders he found around his house, instead putting them in the basement as I do. But I doubt it. And regardless History is replete with madmen and dictators of the utmost brutality who nevertheless showed a sensitive side. Stalin was a devoted grandfather and checked his granddaughter Svetlana’s homework nightly, but that shouldn’t erase the memories of the tens of millions he ordered killed.

The children who died at Gosnell’s hands have been ignored for a very long time, but not any longer. I pity the prosecution who had to build this case and the jury of common people like me who had to sit through it. Thanks to their effort Justice may be ignored, but it can never be silenced forever.

Six years ago I wrote about how conspiracy theories were alluring, thereby attracting attention of some conspiracy theory believers in the comments section of the post. In the days since the bombing attacks in Boston I have watched the conspiracy theories blossom into full flower, something that two of my friends noted.

D starts off the conversation (WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT AT LINK BELOW):

I can’t help myself. The whole thing seemed off from the beginning. Tell me I’m losing it?
http://buelahman.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/are-you-just-a-believer-or-do-you-think/

My response:

We have an administration that lies to the people and tells them their lives have never been better. You have a media that repeats these lies over and over. Yet people look around them and ask themselves whether or not this is true and realize that their lives aren’t better and that they are being fed a constant stream of lies. This is made worse by the administration’s trumpeting of itself as the most transparent in History when the opposite is the case.

Is it any wonder that conspiracy theorists are going crazy over this event?

I founded my blog to counter the conspiracy that thrived after 9-11. Today we are witnessing a similar blossoming of such theories made more potent by the toxic political environment Obama and the Democrats have created during his tenure.

People such as the poster of the article aren’t crazy, D, not with this administration in place. I still believe Occam’s Razor and even Carl Sagan’s statement that “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof” proves his/her argument is wrong, but he or she isn’t crazy and neither are you for considering such things in our poisonous political atmosphere.

My friend J chimes in:

The conspiracy theory is the perfect example of confirmation bias because if you’re looking for it you’ll find it. That being said, something still stinks about this whole thing. Did these guys shoot the MIT police or didn’t they? Did they rob that 7-11? If you just committed a terrorist attack why would you do either of those things, let alone stay in Boston? And what about the Saudi national that was in the hospital under armed guard that is suddenly being deported, especially since there are pictures of agents carrying a spool of det cord out of his apartment?

And another thing…Chechens? Since when do they give a shit about the US, they terrorize their own people (Beslan, opera house)..and its not like we’re Putin’s BFF.

These guys are some of the best analysts and managers I’ve worked with in the banking industry, and neither one of them is stupid by any stretch of the imagination. The three of us also read Zerohedge, and the comments over there remind me of the intellectual free-for-all that followed 9-11 when the attack became a giant Rorschach test. Anti-government libertarians and anarchists see the attack as a “false flag” operation with the Tsarnaev brothers puppets pulled by strings controlled by Obama (if you’re a Republican), the Koch Brothers (if you are a liberal), and the Jews (if you are an old-school asshat.) Some of these people are clearly nuts, but the vast majority of them don’t trust their government or the media.

It’s difficult to trust an administration that conducts “Operation Fast and Furious,” a program by which the federal government provides guns to Mexican drug cartels in exchange for dead border patrol agents and gun control in the USA. Or an administration that refuses to investigate the death of its own ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi Libya or even allow the survivors of the attack to speak to Congress. Or an administration that demands more gun control laws while refusing to to prosecute gun crimes in Chicago, one of the country’s most violent American cities. Or the billionaire mayor of New York City who states after the Boston attacks, “(Y)ou’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.” As one commenter put it,

“We’re going to suspend your rights to protest, bear arms, privacy, and trial by jury.”
“Why?”
“To protect you from terrorists.”
“Why do we need to be protected from terrorists?”
“They hate you for your freedom.”

Evidently Bloomberg forgot Franklin’s quote “Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” Perhaps since liberals long ago stopped teaching about “dead white men” like Franklin, Bloomberg never learned that.

Are people being paranoid when they question the official narrative when the administration is full of people who use terms like “narrative” to describe factual events? As if there was no Truth, just a made up story that everyone agrees upon. How very relativist.

Henry Kissinger is credited for the saying “Even paranoids can have enemies,” and while I still personally believe the facts will prove the Tsarnaev brothers are guilty of the attacks in Boston, the behavior of this administration, its media handlers, and the Wall Street kleptocrats that keep it in power makes me at least somewhat sympathetic to the conspiracy theorists’ seemingly outrageous plots and cherry picked evidence. The Tsarnaev brothers may have committed this terrorist attack, but there are other crimes that are being committed today in the halls of power that are going unpunished and ignored, and that behavior becomes the fertile soil in which conspiracy theories will continue to germinate and thrive.

Update: Questions about the attack linger. For example, it turns out the surviving Tsarnaev was unarmed while he was hiding in the boat. If so, then how did he shoot himself in the neck? And how could there have been a firefight? He hid in a fiberglass boat, one that was shot to pieces by authorities using .223 caliber ammunition. I own a .223 rifle, and its round can perforate tree stumps 2 feet thick. The boat offered as much protection as a newspaper. Either the authorities can’t shoot worth a damn or the Truth has yet to be exposed. As my friend J says, something still stinks about this whole thing.

Here’s my suggestion for pope: Father Guido Sarducci.

Well this is something you don’t see every day, or even every 500 years. When Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope after the passing of Pope John Paul II his age at the time led some to speculate that he was a caretaker figure while younger possible successors were vetted. It appears that such speculation was correct.

As an ex-Catholic my feelings towards the Papacy are… complicated as one might expect. On one hand the position stands in opposition to everything I believe in: transparency, accountability, morality, the corrupt nature of power. On the other hand the Church didn’t prevent me from turning away from it, leading me to the opinion that it’s dogma isn’t a buffet: you either accept that abortion is murder, divorce is wrong and gay sex is sinful or you do as I and countless others have done and quit the Church. I’d like to see the concentration of power in Rome spread out to the individual parishes, but at the same time I recognize that such centralization may have contributed to the overall longevity of the Church since decentralization would lead to the factionalization that bedevils Protestantism and Islam today. But it also contributed to the sexual abuses scandals throughout the Church, far outweighing the good the Church has done for the laity. Still, I would like to see the Church reform itself in a way that brought it in line closer to Christ’s teachings and made it more responsive to the needs of the Faithful without falling prey to fickle changes in morality as some protestant sects have done, selling out their core beliefs to match the politically correct ideas du jour.

To that end I have been pleased with the conservative pontiff’s approach, providing firm and principled opposition to abortion, capital punishment and euthanasia even as Western societies gradually accept and expand their practices. If you think it’s okay to whack people like Terry Schiavo or Timothy McVeigh then the Catholic Church isn’t for you and you shouldn’t expect or demand that a 2,000 year old institution bend to the prominent ideas of the day. After all it wasn’t very long ago that forced sterilization of the handicapped or the enslavement of African-Americans was considered morally acceptable. The Church should provide a moral compass for its believers and by its very nature should resist change longer than the society it operates in. The short reign of Pope Benedict XVI has followed that precept well.

That doesn’t mean that the Church shouldn’t change, especially when it comes to issues lacking a moral dimension. The prohibition of married priests is not rooted in apostolic life and wasn’t codified until hundreds of years after Christ’s death. While I don’t expect the Church to allow priests to marry after ordination as is currently prohibited, such a change would have much less impact on the core beliefs of the Church than say, removing the prohibition on euthanasia. Church teaching is explicit that life begins and ends with God, and that mucking about with the beginning and end of human life has a much greater moral dimension than married priests.

Likewise there is no moral justification for the slow pace of rooting out sex abuse in the ranks of the clergy; in fact morality demands a complete and thorough investigation of all incidents, acceptance of responsibility and full attempts at redress before the Pontiff prostrates himself before all 1 billion Roman Catholics and begs forgiveness for the heinous acts millions of innocents suffered under the Church’s authority. Such an unprecedented action would heal the damage caused by the abuse and contribute to the continued long-term health and relevance of the institution. Again, likely to happen? I doubt it, but then again, there are many reasons why I’m an ex-Catholic.

Pope Benedict XVI has served the Church well enough given the situation. While never as popular as Pope John Paul II, he has presided over a tumultuous period within the Church and has acquitted himself well in the protection of its core teachings. But the time has come for a younger face to continue the work of changing the Church to better serve its faithful while remaining true to the fundamental beliefs in the sanctity of life and the relationship between Man and the Divine. By resigning Benedict XVI has helped make the transition smooth and filled with hope for a laity that has suffered shock and despair from the moral failure of the Church.

This should be no surprise to guys who treat women the way they say they wanted to be treated and then lose out to the macho guys who treat them like dirt. I’ve even heard women say there is nothing more sexy than a man cleaning a bathroom, but the guys I see cleaning toilets in the airport don’t look oversexed to me.

“Couples in which men participate more in housework typically done by women report having sex less frequently. Similarly, couples in which men participate more in traditionally masculine tasks—such as yard work, paying bills, and auto maintenance—report higher sexual frequency,” says lead author of a study Sabino Kornrich, of the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid.

Now I don’t see why guys can’t do both: clean their guns and their baseboards, or fix dinner as diligently as their cars, but I’ve often wondered whether the “payoff” besides clean floors and well-cooked meals was there. This study proves it’s evidently not.

The household is in grief over the death of our alpha dog, a chihuahua we rescued almost six years ago. He was old and epileptic when we found him, but he packed a lot of personality in that little body of his. He was loyal to everyone but like most chi’s he devoted most of his time to a single individual, and for us that was the Wife, usually sleeping behind behind her knees. He was extremely active and playful, running with us as we walked the upper field in the cold air yesterday evening. He was fearless, and crept off into the night while we weren’t looking after dinner, traveling an eighth of a mile for reasons unknown in the cold and dark to the road where he was hit by a car. I found him laying beside the road, alive but severely injured. A hair-raising drive to the emergency vet was for naught, and we had to put him to sleep.

2012 was a year of brutality. It started for us with the execution style slaying of a man nearby, followed by the killing of a rescued dog that had somehow had slipped our protection and was leapt upon by some of my upper-ranking females and died at the vet. The Wife’s sister was found dead in a Las Vegas parking lot. And now this. Friends have also suffered similar tragedies this year with pets and loved ones. Then there’s the local tragedy where a woman moved into a home and ran a portable generator in the house, killing her two children and almost dying herself. Expanding outward there is Sandy Hook of course and Aurora, and abroad the horrors of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali and Syria. The Buddha taught that Life means suffering, and for some reason 2012 demanded more suffering both great and small than most years. I am amazed, stunned, horrified, disappointed and disgusted with the world, and I only wish the New Age Doomers had been right about the Apocalypse last week.

With my last breath of the year I am left speechless except to say, “2012: F*** You.”

I normally don’t pay much attention to religion. On my best days I follow a Buddhist philosophy and on my worst I slip into the pit of nihilism that comes with atheism. Yesterday I was chatting with a coworker of mine who seemed surprised to learn I wasn’t Christian and didn’t celebrate Christmas. “Are you Jewish?” He asked – a pretty good guess given the odds. I explained that I left the Roman Catholic faith I had been born into during my teens and never looked back, and that the issue I had the most difficulty with, the one preventing me with accepting even the possibility of the existence of a Judeo-Christian G-d was the Suffering of Innocents.

I’ve heard a lot of excuses for the allowance of such suffering in my time. That G-d has a plan and suffering is part of the plan. That G-d gave us free will, and suffering of innocents derives from our choices, or that G-d will reward us in Heaven for the suffering we endure on earth. Honestly, they all suck. I personally can conceive of an all-powerful G-d who can create a universe and independent beings populating it having free will and the ability to learn whatever lesson G-d wants them to learn without requiring the innocent to suffer. I am therefore left with three choices: G-d exists but He is not all-powerful, He exists and is all-powerful but is a sadist, or He doesn’t exist at all. None of these are intellectually satisfying, leaving me struggling in a no-mans land between hope and nihilism.

Then there’s atheism. Atheists seem to enjoy tormenting people of faith especially the Christian and Jewish faiths that spawns atheists the way pot mixed with college freshmen spawns the mistaken belief Dave Mathews is a misunderstood genius on par with Jim Morrison. I’ve never understood why atheists are so smug towards believers. There is no 100% conclusive proof that they are right and a Christian or Jew is wrong. Atheists thrill themselves pointing out the suffering caused by religion, whether during the Crusades, the religious wars of the Renaissance in Europe, or the persecution of women and gays today. But they seem to conveniently ignore the 7 million killed by Stalin in the Ukraine and an additional 1-2 million killed five years later during the purges, and the 36 million killed by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, as well as the 2 million victims of Pol Pot’s Killing Fields. All these men were great atheists, and killed many, many more than all historical religious leaders combined. Add in your petty communists like Tito, Castro, Ceaucescu, Kim Il Sung and the death toll creeps even higher.

Then of course there’s the problem that any true atheist should rationally kill himself or herself to avoid suffering, or perhaps go to the other extreme and turn the world into your personal playground like a psychopath, but that merely delays the suffering. Camus, Sartre, and Nietzsche did their best to provide answers to this conundrum but nothing works. A true atheist should be a dead atheist, which is why I suppose they have to entertain themselves by banning creches or prayers at high school football games.

It would seem that there has never been as of yet a true secular code of morality, and the existence of such may even be an impossibility. We may not be born with a sense of right and wrong but without religion it may not be possible to instill a conscience or similar repository of moral values that are we are able to rely upon through all of life’s circumstances. So instead we are stuck with religions that are thousands of years old to navigate our increasingly complex modern lives. Yet aren’t absolute truths timeless? If we respect long-dead Greek philosophers for their astute observations on human nature regarding politics, why shouldn’t we trust a bunch of wondering tribes in the desert to set our moral compasses by?

Which leads us back to the suffering of innocents. The closest that any major religion has come to explaining it is Buddhism which elevates suffering to the first of the Four Noble Truths. But it’s the 2,500 year old equivalent of “it is what it is,” a saying I hear a lot more as I get older and struggle with. I can’t accept that answer. It doesn’t feel right and isn’t intellectually or emotionally satisfying.

What else is there? For agnostics like me there’s nothing except a yearning for a better answer, and the hope that if there is indeed an afterlife I can at last learn the reason why innocents suffer and the wicked prosper in our world.

I’ve only been on the planet a few short decades but during that time I’ve run across probably 15 or 20 end of the world predictions, some more popular than others but all wrong. Some, like the Heaven’s Gate cult were destructive, others like Y2K were expensive (or lucrative if you were a cobol programmer), but all were treated with derision and scorn by the masses. Today again the masses are right and the believers wrong as has been the case since the first End of the World declaration was made and failed to come to pass. In a year our two another prediction will become popular and the cycle will start anew.

Some believers will be dispirited, others will be relieved that we dodged a bullet somehow, and that reminds me of one of my favorite Winston Churchill quotes: “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.” For believers and non-believers alike I don’t think it hurts to allow some of that exhilaration to seep in by taking a moment to look around and appreciate Life. Of the 100 billion or so souls that have lived on this planet, we are members of the 6% alive today. For some 150,000 of us, today will in fact be the end of the world (or at least this world) and another 350,000 will be born to take their places. Our vantage points are unique and ephemeral. One of these days we are guaranteed to experience the end of the world first hand.

So the hippies were wrong today, and the Mayans, well don’t blame them: they weren’t the ones predicting the end of the world in the first place although hopefully they sold lots of t-shirts for the event. Instead of wasting time laughing at  the misguided believers in prophecies, enjoy the world a little more today than you would otherwise.

And since music is an important part of my life, and this song has been stuck in my brain for weeks now, I’ll share it with you as I wish you and yours a Happy End of the World! Oh, and Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and Happy New Year! Sorry Kwanzaa but you’re a racist holiday created by a misguided Marxist so no soup for you.

After 9-11 it took me weeks before I could write about it. Days after the Sandy Hook Massacre, I still find it difficult. I feel that the world is a horrific place, and there is nothing that I can do to help it. Worse, I feel that evil is the default condition of the world, and that good is fleeting and powerless to stop it. Yes I believe – KNOW - that evil exists, and that as a result good does as well. But where I differ from my Christian, Jewish and Muslim friends is that I do not believe G-d is all powerful, that good is in control. No, I believe the Devil rules and we exist in his fiery realm. The glimpses of goodness we get in our existence are just the shattered remains of Heaven that he long ago destroyed. So when John R. Coyne, Jr says “There is evil in the world. It’s beyond mental illness, beyond gun control. It is evil,” I disagree slightly: Evil is not the exception it is the norm. Evil is to be expected, what should surprise us or challenge our beliefs is when something good happens.

Ben Stein says what I feel best, writing, “There is plenty of blood of all kinds on our hands, especially of the most innocent and blameless among us… real babies, truly innocent. God help us. Man is made of such crooked stuff that it is impossible to set him straight, said a famous philosopher. God help us.”

If only G-d could, but He can’t because He is vanquished, destroyed, reduced to mere shimmers of Grace in the heat of our hellish existence.

Update: Jed Babbin suggests forcibly incarcerating the mentally ill should be considered. Since a paranoid schizophrenic threatened to kill my wife (and she refuses to arm herself), I’m all for it. It would have also saved the poor soul who was pushed in front of a subway train in NYC. Would it work in all cases? Perhaps not but the option should be on the table.