Making our ultimate end immediate…

"The missing element [in our age] is the philosophical and moral foundation that society needs overall, including in its economy. … [N]either making the greatest profit, nor getting the best deal, is the most important thing. Until we … put our ultimate end as the primary factor in all of our actions our society will continue to decline no matter how prosperous it may become. Unfortunately, the prevailing economic model separates morality from economics, and the most well known alternative [viz. socialism] seeks to correct the injustices … with even greater injustices."

-- David Cooney, "The Missing Element", The Distributist Review

You keep using that word, but I don't think "free" means what you think it means…

"Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term 'free market' in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate … [argument] that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because 'that’s not how the free market works'--implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of 'free market principles.'"

–– Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, p. 142

Finding the flood…

"Evidence shows that what is now the Persian Gulf was flooded by the waters of the Indian Ocean around 8,000 years ago. Dr. Rose thinks the new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf to escape the rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the water."

These aren't the errors you're looking for…

Nor are these the cells you're looking for. 

"In saying that the use of embryonic stem cells in experiments is 'immoral', they are tacitly claiming that such cells are taken from human beings, since that is the only possible grounds on which one could object to their use in experiments. And yet, at the same time, few on the Court seem to oppose abortion, which also involves the destruction of an embryo. So there is an error of judgment involved here, just not the one the editors of Nature imagine."

-- Dr. Scott Carson on the article below  

Error of judgment : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

www.nature.com

A warning to all you "info junkies" out there…

And to the three of you who still read my blog here.

"[According to Ellul,] modern propaganda cannot work without 'education'; he thus reverses the widespread notion that education is the best prophylactic against propaganda. On the contrary, he says, education … in the modern world … is the absolute prerequisite for propaganda. In fact, education is largely identical with what Ellul calls 'pre-propaganda'––the conditioning of minds with vast amounts of incoherent information, already dispensed for ulterior purposes and posing as 'facts'…. Ellul follows through with by designating intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda, for three reasons: (1) they absorb the largest amount of secondhand, unverifiable information; (2) they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information; (3) they consider themselves capable of 'judging for themselves.' They literally need propaganda."

–– Konrad Kellen, Introduction (Feb. 1965) to Propaganda by Jacques Ellul, p. vi.

Economics is not a value-free science…

“The Church's social doctrine has always maintained that justice must be applied to every phase of economic activity, because this is always concerned with man and his needs. … Thus every economic decision has a moral consequence. … Perhaps at one time it was conceivable that first the creation of wealth could be entrusted to the economy, and then the task of distributing it could be assigned to politics. Today that would be more difficult, given that economic activity is no longer circumscribed within territorial limits, while the authority of governments continues to be principally local. Hence the canons of justice must be respected from the outset, as the economic process unfolds, and not just afterwards or incidentally. Space also needs to be created within the market for economic activity carried out by subjects who freely choose to act according to principles other than those of pure profit, without sacrificing the production of economic value in the process. The many economic entities that draw their origin from religious and lay initiatives demonstrate that this is concretely possible.”

–– Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate (2009), §37.