A tornado in Indiana killed 22 residents of a mobile home community yesterday. It’s safe to say that given a choice, most people wouldn’t live in a mobile home, and so the residents lived there because of economic circumstances. My grandparents used to live in a mobile home due to the high cost of living in southern California, and it was quite nice, but probably not what they might have wanted.
The only way to prevent these tragedies, therefore, is to work for an ever-growing economy to make mobile homes obsolete. In economically advanced societies, houses don’t have thatched roofs or walls made of bundled sticks; people also don’t live in caves or mud huts. Those materials and structures are undesirable and often dangerous, so they aren’t used anymore.
The more economically productive the lower segments of society are, the more wealth they can create and hang onto — including the wealth in the homes where they live. Creating wealth isn’t seen as a social-justice issue, but it can frequently mean the difference between life and death.
Author: Eric Johnson
The Parisian riots: only the beginning
Members of the Religion That Dare Not Speak Its Name have been rioting in the Paris area for the last week. Perhaps they were upset about France’s support for the Iraq War, who knows?
The Left reflexively tries to explain such things in terms of “root causes.” Very well: France has marginalized Christianity and aggrandized the state’s power for two centuries; imported large numbers of unskilled or low-skilled immigrants for the purpose of exploiting their cheap labor; and tried to buy the immigrants’ loyalty with multicultural pieties and generous welfare benefits.
Far from being grateful, the immigrants figure that France is so enervated that it will probably not defend its own culture. If some reports are right, and these riots are organized by someone (or a loose network of groups), then these aren’t because of “frustration” — they are a show of strength designed to intimidate the French public into accepting Islam’s ascendance in their society.
Pushing multiculturalist relativism, giving welfare to the able-bodied, and pushing God out of the public square is a toxic mix for a culture. As execrable as France’s leaders are, let’s hope they take the hard steps necessary to regain control over their own country. And it should sober us to realize that the same conditions — relativism, welfare, de facto atheism — are alive and well in the USA, too.
Happy All Souls’ Day!
Don’t forget to pray for the souls of the dead today. Here’s a refresher on the doctrine of purgatory from Catholic Answers.
Far from being a medieval invention, praying for the dead was a Jewish practice that pre-dated Christ by at least a couple of centuries. The early Christian Fathers believed in purgatory, though they did not treat it in the detailed, systematic way that the medieval theologians did. C.S. Lewis believed in purgatory — “The Screwtape Letters” contains a reference to it in the final chapter.
What is the best Web-site blocking software?
I know some of y’all out there are parents, and that most of you care about what gets dumped into your kids’ souls. We gave the kids a hand-me-down computer a few months ago, and there are a few Web sites we let them visit. My question is this: What is the best Web-site blocking software? Our needs are simple: we want to block all sites unless my wife or I permit them.
Our oldest child is six, and I seriously doubt he can figure out how to defeat access-control software. The safest thing would be to filter sites at the router, which I could do, but it would be a pain for my wife.
Your thoughts?
Scratch a moonbat, find a bigot
It didn’t take long before the Moonbat Left started employing anti-Catholicism against Judge Alito. No sooner was he nominated to the Supreme Court, but the loons on Daily Kos started hyperventilating about a CATHOLIC MAJORITY ON THE SUPREME COURT!!! They didn’t notice that Scalia and Kennedy often find themselves at odds, and neither of the judges use their religion to justify their rulings, as well they shouldn’t. (In fairness, several commenters dissented from this display of raw bigotry.)
Alito would join faithful Catholics Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts. That would make a 4-1 ratio of decent Catholics to Judases on the Court. Not as good as the 11-1 ratio at the Last Supper, but for a secular institution, not bad.