Scarlet seeps from the heart

Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son. 1819-23.

It appears that Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” got lost in translation to the Chinese.

To all the so-called “enlightened”. To the “moderns.” To the “light-bearers”. You know who you are. You who constantly are harping or tsk-tsking or clucking your tongues and shaking your heads in bewilderment at how in this the 21st century there could possibly be people like me who exist (while tripping over our dragging knuckles). People who hold to the foundation and growth of thousands of years of philosophy, theology, history, faith and reason. We who hold that the latter two tenets are not mutually exclusive. We who endure your snarky self-righteous all-knowing platitudes of condescension anyway.

To you I ask: This is “progress”? This is “evolving” humanity?

Next I suppose you’ll argue with me that these are just fetuses, and therefore only “potential” life. Don’t roll your eyes…I’ve had that actual conversation with one too many who say so to justify actions just such as this:

Thousands of smuggled capsules reportedly filled with powdered human flesh from dead babies were seized by South Korean customs officials on Monday, the AP reports.

The capsules are in demand because many believe they are stamina boosters that can cure any illness. In reality, they contain lethal bacteria and can be very harmful for health.

Officials say the capsules were made in northeastern China from babies whose bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder. They refused to say who was responsible, citing diplomatic friction with Beijing.

There’s more:

The grim trade is being run from China where corrupt medical staff are said to be tipping off medical companies when babies are aborted or delivered still-born.

The tiny corpses are then bought, stored in household refrigerators in homes of those involved in the trade before they are removed and taken to clinics where they are placed in medical drying microwaves.

Once the skin is tinder dry, it is pummelled into powder and then processed into capsules along with herbs to disguise the true ingredients from health investigators and customs officers.

There’s also evidence that these are not just aborted or still-born children being devoured.

There have been disturbing reports that some babies were those who had perished in China’s notorious ‘dying rooms’ where youngsters are deliberately left to die because they were born into families that already had the limit of one child in country areas.

In order to keep its population down, China performs 13 million abortions a year – mainly because mothers sacrifice their newborns to avoid punishment such as severe fines or even a beating by the authorities.

The Chinese authorities have confirmed that 38 per cent of women of child-bearing age have been sterilised – but the babies that are aborted do not go to waste because of the sickening trade in using their corpses for purported medicinal purposes.

Words fail me. Not because I’m so mortally horrified that I can’t think straight, although I’m close. They fail me because my mouth simply will not work fast enough to utter all of the things I wish to say right now.

Thirteen million per year is 35,616 per day. It’s a fact that the larger proportion of babies being aborted or killed in China are girls. Here is your real “War on Women”, not some political-party talking point designed to gin up fake outrage and fill the coffers with fundraising dollars. But do go on…keep telling yourself these things and making yourself feel good. Keep telling yourself how “right-thinking” you are and say so over and over again in letters to the editor or comboxes on your local newspaper’s website. It isn’t true. No matter how many times you do so, it just isn’t true. Period.

I admit that when I initially read this last night I thought there’s no way this story is true. The first source I saw was dubious at best, but I’ve now seen it reported here, here and here. And we are only a week removed from the underreported travails of Chen Guangcheng, and China has been in the news before regarding the harvesting of organs, and not always from the dead.

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The title of this piece came from a line in a poem by mecthespeck. It may be found here.

Harbingers

har-bin-ger (hahr-bin-jer)
noun
2. anything that foreshadows a future event; omen; sign: Frost is a harbinger of winter.

The news of the day:

…rapid transit, rapid communication, the densely populated cities are bathed in artificial light. A particularly health conscious populace abhors discomfort. Suffering is solved quickly by official euthanasia. A godless humanism has rejected traditional religion and morality. A highly socialized system moves quickly to a one world government. The new leader comes from an obscure background, but suddenly captures the world’s stage though no one seems to know anything about him. He is praised with an emotional wave as a universal peacemaker and hailed as the Savior of the world.

And yet with all the tolerance and understanding and peace and euphoria, there is still an excuse to openly persecute and even kill Catholics and do everything possible to destroy the Catholic Church. Though the new Humanitarians regret the recourse to violence, they are nonetheless thankful for the results.

Sound familiar? It should. Would it also surprise you to know this is a part of the premise behind a book published in 1907?

Robert Hugh Benson

Orwell’s 1984 gets the most press acknowledgement. Huxley’s Brave New World is more chilling to me than 1984. But the best of the lot just may be Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World. I read all three back-to-back-to-back around four years ago (not something I would advise, by the way. A rather dark period of time that can be) and I thought Benson’s was the best of the three excellent books.

Dale Ahlquist brought Benson’s book back to mind when I read what he wrote here:

Robert Hugh Benson was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He converted to Catholicism in 1903, was ordained a Catholic priest, wrote 15 novels, and died in 1914 at the young age of 43.

Whether or not Monsignor Benson’s picture of our future is accurate, the fact is his picture of our present is chillingly accurate.

The author apologizes for the sensational nature of the book, but he says he chose it as the best means by which to make his point: a picture of what the world would look like as “the necessary culmination of unimpeded subjectivity.” In other words, relativism. But the term was not even yet known when Monsignor Benson wrote his book.

Relativism…hmmm, who have I heard a warning about that word before? Oh yeah, this guy.

How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph 4: 14) comes true.

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.

Lord of the World is free for downloading to your Kindle.

The Tolerance of Bullies

I have purposely tried to avoid bringing many so-called issues from the political arena here onto my blog. Years ago on my first blog I used to chronicle a lot of the events from that arena, and holding a degree in political science as well as history it is a part of who I am. However I had decided to stay out of that realm here at Dolce Domum because so many other people are keeping these issues in the spotlight and I didn’t want to further clutter the interwebs with my own two cents. However, it is clear that this is becoming more and more impossible for a Catholic of faith and of principle. There are political entities who have made it their mission to drag us into this arena whether we want to be there or not. Even if the matter has nothing to do with politics but instead with morality or faith, they have so polluted reason as to convince others that anything and everything that happens today has to do with politics. So even though I had hoped to avoid some of these matters, in posts to come I don’t think I will be able to avoid these anymore as I read literally dozens of stories every day that chronicle these types of events and agendas. I promise to do my best to keep it to well-thought out/reasoned responses.

*****

I had been considering a return to Facebook over the weekend when I read yet another story that chronicled yet another social media campaign waged by Planned Parenthood. Another week, another manufactured rage, and another reason to avoid the nonsense. I’m thankful to have deactivated my account before the Susan Komen/PP brouhaha of a few weeks ago. You surely recall what happened when a foundation that was founded to bring awareness and money towards research in battling breast cancer was bullied into a bloody pulp by an organization that made a name for itself in all things bloody. Nevermind that the SGK foundations total grant money amounted to .009% of all PP funding, or that PP quickly doubled that purported loss of grant money by private donations from the so-called 1% in America (Mayor Bloomberg accounted for $250K, another wealthy patron accounted for yet another $250K), any venturing off of the reservation by a group dedicated to helping women by the ONLY POSSIBLE ORGANIZATION IN ALL THE KNOWN UNIVERSE THAT CAN HELP WOMEN had to be squelched. Hence, we witnessed one of the most brutal and classic instances of bullying ever seen. All in the name of tolerance, of course.

Drunk with their victory over SGK, Planned Parenthood’s marketing minions have now set upon a course to show themselves as indeed the ONLY entity in all the land who cares about women and the poor. And they are once again using Facebook and other outlets in the social media framework to do so. Their latest target is biggest food pantry in Wisconsin.

Planned Parenthood called Paul’s Pantry, part of the St. Vincent de Paul Society and the biggest food pantry in Wisconsin, and asked them to come and pick up donations, which may have been noble, but wasn’t something the Catholic organization felt comfortable doing — sending a truck over and perhaps giving the abortion provider a photo opportunity. The American Life League reports what the worker at the pantry said:

All I told the young lady from Planned Parenthood was that I couldn’t send a truck to pick up, and gave her a list of other food pantries that might want to pick up, I gave her no reason at all and she didn’t ask why. Soon after, I started receiving the hate e-mail and phone calls. I politely explained to callers that although we are non-denominational in regards to those we serve, we are a Catholic organization who shares a board of directors with our sister organization, St. Vincent de Paul. We adhere to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and to the Rule of St. Vincent de Paul. I also explained our Gift Acceptance Policy and how acceptance of the donation would compromise our core values and possibly damage the reputation of Paul’s Pantry.

What happened next? Why the campaign of bullying mock shock and anger commenced, of course.

“Within 20 minutes I was getting phone calls and emails calling us pieces of sh**. The calls that day came from the Milwaukee area, where Planned Parenthood is headquartered. We have caller ID.”

This is nothing more than PP trying to score a photo-op and boost its sagging image, and artfully using Facebook to further their aims. “Hey! Look at us! We give food to hungry people! How can you not like us? We feed the babies we don’t kill!” And as if on cue, the sheep blinded by ideology and propaganda service their needs on the knees by demonizing those organizations who have for decades and centuries served the poor without sucking off of the government’s teat.

I particularly enjoy the profile picture that states “Cancer Care Above Politics”. Irony much?

I’ve donated to our local St. Vincent de Paul food pantry. I’ve even helped stocked its shelves a time or two. These are good people, often woefully understaffed, with kind hearts who donate much of their time for free in order to serve the poor. The last thing they have is an agenda outside of that mission. Being blindsided by an orchestrated campaign of faux-rage by a government-funded entity looking to better its image is the last thing they need.

Full disclosure: I stopped donating to the Komen Foundation when I first learned of its funding to Planned Parenthood about four years ago. When I mentioned this to others I was told I must hate women and was crazy to think SGK would give funds to PP. Forgive me for saying I told you so, but…I told you so. But I also stopped donating because I have a general rule about giving to ANY charity or foundation that is so administratively top-heavy: I don’t. And before you tell me how much I hate women, get over yourself. I’ve been blessed with wonderful women in my life, from my grandmothers, my mom, my mother-in-law, my wife and my daughter. I’ve several friends who themselves who are survivers of (and sadly those who succumbed to) this terrible disease. Save your ignorant mud-slinging for another day.

In a well-researched article, a blogger doing the job that the mainstream media used to do shows that only 11 cents out of every dollar donated to the Komen Foundation actually goes towards the reason for their very existence: funding research and finding a cure for breast cancer. That’s right: for every dollar you donate to Komen a dime goes to research. The rest is all swallowed up in administrative costs, nice salaries for executives, lavish trips, and marketing campaigns to make everything in the world pink in October to make people aware of breast cancer. Not a dime of that marketing campaign actually cures that cancer (well, actually a dime is all that comes from it) but hey…look at the pretty pink bats the baseball players are using or the pink shoes on that wide receiver. It’s a shame they cowered to the bullies at Planned Parenthood, but even more than that it’s a shame they’ve lost sight of their original mission. Just as there is (for the moment) a choice in America that allows someone like PP to donate that food to any one of the other twenty food pantries in Milwaukee (which they did with much self-congratulations), there are other cancer research entities to which I can (for now) provide my funds towards the common goal of eradicating this terrible disease. Why do those who claim to be all about choice want to wage these social media campaigns against those who exercise choice?

To donate to Paul’s Pantry in Green Bay, visit their website.

Jill Stanek has more.

H/T to The Anchoress for bringing this to my attention originally.

For the most thorough investigation I’ve seen yet of the Komen Foundation, you’ll want to read this. It’s a long but thoroughly researched tour into the inner workings of how a large (and bloated) foundation functions.