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I Want My Global Warming

January 29, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Four of New York’s seven worst ever recorded snow storms have occurred since 2003.

This January has been new York’s snowiest since records have been kept, breaking a record that goes back to 1925. January 26th also broke the 1871 record for the most snow to fall in one day.

Records for cold and snow are being broken across the northern hemisphere. In Korea, for example.

Last year saw record cold in the Southern hemisphere. In Australia and South America for example.

But that’s just weather. It doesn’t mean anything. No one could have predicted it.

Except that Piers Corbyn did. Based on science. Against the global warming establishment.

So did the Farmer’s Almanac. Based on science. Against the global warming establishment:

And it’s going to keep getting colder.

Big Wind

January 26, 2011 / / 0 Comments

No, that is not my Native American name.

Gary Jason at Liberty Unbound draws attention to two recent WSJ articles about the cost of ‘green’ subsidies.

The first is about those annoying annoying and expensive energy saving light bulbs:

California’s utilities alone spent $548 million over the past seven years in CFL subsidies. In fact, California utilities have subsidized over 100 million CFLs since 2006. And on the first of this year, the state started phasing out incandescent bulb sales.

Of course, when I say that the California utilities have been subsidizing the CFLs, I really should say that the aforementioned hapless consumers have been doing so, because all the subsidy money — about $2.70 out of the actual $4.00 cost of the CFL, i.e., more than two thirds of the actual cost — is paid by the consumer in the form of higher utility rates.

Naturally, the rest of the country — and, for that matter, the world — is set to follow California’s lead on CFLs. A federal law effective January 1 of next year will require a 28% step-up in efficiency for incandescent bulbs, and bans them outright by 2014. One consequence of this federal policy — unintended, perhaps, but none the less foreseeable — is that the last US plant making incandescent bulbs has been shut down, and China (which now makes all the CFLs) has seen even more of a jobs expansion, and is able to buy even more of our debt.

But now — surprise! — California has discovered that the actual energy savings of switching to CFLs were nowhere near what was originally estimated. Pacific Gas and Electric, which in 2006 set up the biggest subsidy fund for CFLs, found that its actual savings from the CFL program were collectively about 450 million kilowatt hours, which is only about one-fourth of the original estimate.

And of course, they contain mercury, and you are not supposed to put them in the trash, they don’t last nearly as long as the manufacturers claimed they would, the light they produce looks artificial, and there are stories of their exploding.

So they cost jobs, are expensive, potentially dangerous, and don’t save much energy. Naturally perfect candidates for extensive government subsidies.

The second article is about the abject failure of big wind (the multi-billion dollar wind and solar power industry) to make any appreciable contribution to electricity needs, while consuming vast sums of taxpayer money:

The second Journal story (Jan. 18) reports that Evergreen Solar has closed its Massachusetts plant and laid off all the workers there.

This is deliciously ironic. Evergreen Solar was the darling of Massachusetts. Governor Deval Patrick, devout green and all-around Obama Mini-Me, gave Evergreen a package of $58 million in tax incentives, grants, and other handouts to open a solar panel plant there. In doing so, he simply ignored Evergreen’s lousy track record — a record of losing nearly $700 million bucks in its short life (its IPO was in 2000), despite lavish subsidies from federal and state governments.

Now Evergreen is outsourcing its operations, blaming competition with China, and whining like a bitchslapped baby about China’s subsidies of its solar energy and its lower labor costs. But Evergreen has itself sucked up ludicrously lavish subsidies, and it knew all along about China’s labor rates compared to Massachusetts’ …

It turns out that the wind industry — aptly dubbed “Big Wind” — copped a one-year, $3 billion extension of government support for wind power. It was part of the end-of-2010 tax deal.

Originally, this government subsidy was a feature of the infamous 2008 stimulus bill, under which taxpayers were forced to cover 30% of the costs of wind power projects. The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) begged for the subsequent bailout, because without it 20,000 wind power jobs would be lost (one-fourth of all such jobs in America). But despite the billions in subsidies, Big Wind is sucking wind; its allure is dropping like a stone. The AWEA’s own figures show a 72% decline in wind turbine installations from 2009, down to the lowest since 2006.

Besides trying to make the 30% subsidy(!) permanent, the AWEA is pushing for a national “renewable energy” mandate that will force utilities to buy a large chunk of the power they sell from renewable sources (mainly solar and wind), irrespective of the fact that the price of renewable energy is sky high. The association has gotten more than half the states to enact such mandates, with higher energy bills for consumers as the result.

The cost of energy is the base cost of every mined, grown and manufactured item. So why are current administrations in both Australia and the US putting such enormous amounts of taxpayer money into schemes which make energy more expensive?

I don’t think there is any devious leftist plan to undermine primary industry and manufacturing.

It is just wanting to look ‘green.’ Sheer stupidity.

Of course, talking of big wind, President Obama in his STUFU address last night called for a massive increase in investment in remewable energy.

So we and the US are to follow where Spain and Germany have bravely gone before. On a short day’s journey into a cold dark night.

Grasp Your Flotation Device Firmly!

January 17, 2011 / / 1 Comment

This is one of those ‘only in Australia’ stories.

A young couple grabbed two inflatable women they had lying around the house and took them for a ride down the flooded Yarra River in Victoria.

The man and woman, both 19, were left clinging to a fallen gum tree in the middle of the river in North Warrandyte when one of the dolls snagged on the tree and their caper went horribly wrong about 4.30pm.

An SES watercraft came to their rescue not far from Bradleys Lane about an hour later.

While it is understood the blow up doll and several other inflatable items were salvaged from the scene, the bottoms of the rescued woman’s bathers were long gone down the river.

A blanket was required to protect her modesty as she exited the water.

Modesty Protected

Victorian Police issued a stern warning that inflatable women are not approved flotation devices.

Better Schools

January 16, 2011 / / 0 Comments

One of my close friends is a teacher with many years of classroom and administrative experience.

She came to KICE (Kangaroo Island Community Education) with a long history of developing positive relationships with parents, writing and implementing thoughtful and interesting programmes, and helping her students to achieve high academic standards.

She is one of those rare teachers who knows what standards are, and cares enough about her students to make them work to achieve them.

She has frequently faced hostility from both students and parents, hostility which has been replaced by respect and gratitude when students realise that they can do the work, and parents see that their children are getting results which they would not have thought possible.

At KICE she faced hostility from staff as well. On more than one occasion I overheard other teachers sniggering about what was being done to her. All the most difficult students put in her classes. Denied acccess to resources and to her own office space. Openly undermined with parents and students.

I was so disturbed by this that I wrote to the Head of Campus at Kingscote. I didn’t even get a reply.

Meanwhile, bullying is rife, academic standards continue to be appallingly low, and the school cannot stay within its budget.

It was reported to me by a parent that at the end of year assembly one of the finishing students had thanked the staff for their support. So far so good. But the student reserved special thanks for a staff member who had regularly rung them to remind them they should be at school, and who had finished their work for them if they were feeling stressed.

I was astonished. Surely that person could not really have thought this was kindness? Or that she was doing the students any good in the long term?

My impression is that (in many state schools, anyway) teachers who know what children should be learning, and try to teach, and maintain objective standards and mark to them (in other words, who do the things that are proven to build confident and capable students), are finding themselves more and more isolated.

This article by Katharine Birbalsingh tells of her similar experiences on the other side of the world.

A couple of excerpts:

For years, I soldiered on in the classroom, working hard to change the minds of children who were paralysed by a sense of victimhood. They found it impossible to believe that I had chosen to be their teacher, that I wanted to be there, that I loved being around them. Eventually, like any good teacher, I won them over by using all the tricks of the trade, from gold stars to phone calls at home with positive comments, to holding breakfast clubs in the early morning when I would spend my own money on croissants. My students felt grateful. Like me, other teachers give their life to the job, and we “succeed” despite of the shackles of the system.

The regular dumbing-down of our examination system is obvious to any teacher who is paying attention and who has been in the game for some time. The refusal to allow children to fail at anything is endemic in a school culture that always looks after self-esteem and misses the crucial point, which is that children’s self-esteem depends on achieving real success. If we never encourage them to challenge themselves by risking failure, self-esteem will never come …

I had become indoctrinated by all the trendy nonsense dictating that if children are not behaving in your classroom, it is because you have been standing in front of them for more than five minutes trying to teach them. If only you had sat them in groups with you as facilitator, rather than teacher at the front, then you’d have the safe environment conducive to learning that we all seek. The basic ideology is that if there is chaos in the classroom, it is the teacher’s fault. Children are not responsible for themselves, while senior management fails to establish systems that support teachers and punish children for not doing their homework, whatever their home situation.

I argued constantly with my colleagues and bosses. Often, I won and, almost as if they were inextricably linked, as the innate liberalism within people waned, the department or the school would improve. In every instance, I could see for myself that a move away from liberalism was a step in the right direction, a step that brought calm out of chaos, learning in place of trendiness, and success instead of failure …

Incidentally, my friend was invited back to a school where she had previously been in leadership, and begins there in a couple of weeks. Good for them. But such a pity for KICE, that someone who could have been an invaluable resource, and could have made a difference, felt she could no longer stay on in an atmosphere of hostility and indifference.

Disguised as Compassion

January 15, 2011 / / 6 Comments

Wayne Swan and Bill Shorten met with representatives of insurance companies yesterday to encourage them to show compassion to flood victims ‘as anger grows over the companies’ “no policy, no payout” stance.‘

Labor wants the insurance companies to give payments to people who don’t have flood insurance.

Julia Gillard suggests that not paying out people who didn’t have policies is ‘playing hardball.’

What’s next? The government demanding that shops give goods to people who haven’t paid for them, and claiming supermarkets which don’t comply are playing hardball?

But then, why would anyone pay for groceries?

Some people who live in flood prone areas chose not to ensure against flood. They saved some money. And they are not insured against flood. That was their choice.

So why are they angry?

The insurance companies have no obligation to pay people who don’t have insurance.

The government might as well ask makers of haemorrhoid creams or jet skis to cough up. That would make as much sense.

This is typical of leftist governments. We have to be nice. Preferably with someone else’s money.

In this case, with money that belongs to policy holders (in other words, people who did think ahead) and to shareholders in insurance companies (primarily superannuation funds, ie, other people who are thinking ahead).

It is sad that some people whose homes were damaged, or who lost property in the recent floods chose not to insure against those risks. Especially when all of them live in areas which have flooded before.

Australia is a community. The suffering of one affects us all. It is great that the community rallies around to provide emergency help.

But the reason the community can rally around to provide emergency help is that most Australians still take responsibility for themselves, and put a little aside for hard times. The commonwealth and states have reserves we can draw on in hard times. Those reserves are accumulated through hard work over time.

If the government succeeds in forcing insurance companies to pay people who did not have policies, what incentive is there for people to take responsibility in the future? Why would anyone pay extra for flood insurance if the government can be relied on to pressure insurance companies to pay everyone anyway?

As a nation we used to be self-reliant, hard working, prudent. We knew we lived in a physically harsh country, where extremes of heat and flood were common. And we took care to be prepared.

Now there seems to be an attitude that we don’t need to prepare, because whatever happens, it is someone else’s job to fix it. If something unpleasant happens to me, well, I didn’t want it to happen, so someone else should pay for it.

This is now the standard way of thinking in relation to health. If I need to see a doctor, need to go to hospital, need an ambulance, or need medicine, someone else should pay. The gubmint.

But gubmint money belongs to the taxpayers. You want someone else (the taxpayer) to pay for the treatment you need if you break your leg, and to subsidise your income if you can’t work?

But how do you feel about your tax money paying for Mrs McGinty’s third set of dental work this year, when she has never cleaned her teeth in her life? Or paying for treatment for the Harris kids’ constant eczema and worm infections?

But then, why should Mrs McGinty clean her teeth? Someone else will take care of it. Why should the Harrises wash their hands and keep their animals off the kitchen benches? Someone else will pay. It will be OK.

But it won’t be OK. Because if the government constantly acts in ways that are a disincentive to taking responsibility, eventually there will be no one left to take responsibility. There will be no reserves, and no one left who can pay.

Ah, but universal health care is compassionate. No it’s not.

Well, paying out people who don’t have flood insurance is compassionate. No it’s not. 

At least, it’s compassionate to let illegal immigrants into the community and help them become citizens. No it’s not.

It is compassionate to give home loans to people who can’t really afford them. No it’s not.

It’s compassionate to lower academic standards because it is too hard for students to learn and their self-esteem will be impacted if they fail. No it’s not.

All of these are laziness, or worse, the deliberate fostering of dependence, and the discouraging of honesty and responsibility, disguised as compassion.

Those who perpetrate and perpetuate these things may feel good about themselves and their niceness.

But the end results are always the same. More resentment. More entitlement. More suffering.

I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing

January 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

He, he.

‘We can give billions of dollars to green energy research.’

‘And that will enable us to replace gasoline with sunbeams?’

‘Nothing lost in trying.’

‘Except the billions of dollars.’

‘That is taxpayer money. If we don’t take it from them, people will just waste it on their own families, instead of it being put to good use by liberals.’ …

‘We’ll start with America.’

‘Won’t that devastate the economy?’

‘Yes, but it will be worth it.’

‘Will that stop global warming?’

‘No. But think of the moral superiority we will gain…  Also, being green is very trendy right now.’ …

‘So how would you disprove global warming?’

‘You can’t. That’s how you know it’s true.’

One gem after another!

Mossad’s Been Busy Lately

January 6, 2011 / / 0 Comments

With extensive shark and vulture training programmes, and bombing churches in Egypt and Iraq.

The scary thing is that some people really do believe these things, as the last link above demonstrates.

A brief quote:

Prior to the fascist, destructive, genocidal US-UK-Israeli occupation of Iraq, Sunni and Shia, Muslims and Christians, Arabs and Kurds lived together in a harmonious atmosphere of brotherhood and unity that paralleled that of occupied Palestine before the Zionist occupation in 1948. It is egregious, disgusting, despicable, ignorant, absurd and erroneous on every factual basis to assert that the aforementioned ethnic and religious groups are now massacring each other, when in reality, they are being massacred by the murderous occupation armies.

Dividing Iraq via partition and driving it into a hell of ethnic cleansing was a Zionist plot …

Of course. All that trouble between Iran and Iraq, and the murder of Kurds and Shi-ites by Saddam Hussein, and the brutalisation and torture of Iraqi citizens, that never happened, it was all just Zionist propaganda.

Just for a Laugh

January 6, 2011 / / 0 Comments

The 11 most painfully obvious newspaper articles.

Including:

About a plane crash:  ‘So far, investigators have determined that the crash occurred when the plane hit the ground.’

About a crime: ‘Police have two theories. One is that the victim knew the person who did this. The other is that he didn’t.’

About teen pregancy: ‘Statistics show teen pregancy drops off significantly after age 25.’

Sub-Prime Mortages Emit No CO2

January 6, 2011 / / 1 Comment

So how could they possibly be a problem?

Ann Coulter nails the sub-prime cause of the current recession (if you think it is over, think again):

Forget “stimulus” bills and “shovel-ready” bailouts (for public school teachers, who need shovels for what they’re teaching), the current financial crisis, which is the second Great Depression, was created slowly and methodically by Democrat hacks running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the past 18 years…

Goo-goo liberals with federal titles pressured banks into making absurd loans to high-risk borrowers — demanding, for example, that the banks accept unemployment benefits as collateral. Then Fannie repackaged the bad loans as “prime mortgages” and sold them to banks, thus poisoning the entire financial market with hidden bad loans.
…

In 2003, Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee wrote a bill to tighten the lending regulation of Fannie and Freddie. Every single Democrat on the committee voted against it.

In the House, Barney Frank angrily proclaimed that Fannie Mae was “just fine.”

Fannie was pressuring banks to write mortgages with no money down and no proof of income. What could go wrong?

In 2004, Bush’s White House Chief Economist Gregory Mankiw warned that Fannie was creating “systemic risk for our financial system.” In response, Barney Frank went to a champagne brunch with his partner “just because.”

Democrats saw nothing of concern in the Fannie debacle. Bad mortgages don’t contain sodium, do they? They don’t engage in “hate speech.” And they don’t emit carbon dioxide. There was nothing to catch a Democrat’s eye.

Until it all went wrong, and then it was George Bush’s fault.

I was in Glenelg on New Year’s Day. There was a juggler. He was from the US. He was quite good. But after ten minutes I had enough of the ‘George Bush is stupid’ jokes.

For heaven’s sake, the guy’s been gone for three years. Isn’t it time to start blaming someone else?

Prudence, Refugees and the NBN

January 3, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Firstly, apologies for the lack of posts over the last six weeks.

I won’t bore you by explaining what the problem was. Let’s just hope that 2011 is more restful year!

I have been thinking lately about the seven virtues, and in particular, the first of the cardinal virtues, prudence.

Prudence is sometimes portrayed as having three faces. This is because prudence learns from the past, and thinks about consequences in the future, in order to act rightly in the present.

Prudence does not mean refusing to take risks. Prudence is not fear, but a careful regard for right outcomes.

Prudence is a quality leftist politicians lack.

They do not learn from the past. They do not think about consequences in the future. Consequently they act in the present in ways that, however well intentioned, will not bring about desireable results.

The Clinton administration’s pressure on the banks to increase home lending to under-represented groups in the housing market effectively forced banks to make loans to people who could not afford to repay them.

The intention was good – more members of minority ethnic groups owning their homes. This would, if successful, have been a good thing. People are more careful of what they own, and have a greater stake in maintaining their local community and environment.

But it didn’t work. People who had been given loans they couldn’t afford, well, couldn’t afford them. So they didn’t pay them. So they lost their homes.

The people targetted to be helped were made worse off, because they lost the money they had put into their homes, and were now less likely to get a loan in the future, even one they could afford.

All this was easily predictable.

Consequences for the banks, and therefore the economy in general, and therefore people in general, were also dire.

That was also predictable.

The intention was good, but there was no prudence – no learning from the past, no thinking through of consequences in the future.

In Australia, refugees and the NBN are two obvious examples of a lack of prudence in government action.

Intending to be kind, the Labor party implemented policies which lead to a dramatic increase in the number of illegal immigrants arriving by boat.

‘We will be nicer to you,’ they said. ‘We will welcome you.’ We are not nasty like John Howard.

People who would not have made the journey to Australia except for these changed policies, and for their belief that things were different in Australia now, have died.

That is a bad, and foreseeable outcome. 

Large numbers of people (from three boats a year to 2-3 boats a week) arriving in Australia without proper identification need to be accommodated at taxpayer expense, either in detention or in local communities. This stressful for the immigrants, stressful for workers and communities, and means money has to be diverted from other projects – roads and hospitals, for example.

That is a bad, and foreseeable outcome. 

When people who arrive illegally are accepted as refugees, the number of those people accepted as residents is deducted from the number of people who will be accepted from refugee camps. People who are the poorest and most in need, who have provided identification and waited for processes to run their course, lose their places to those who have the money to bypass the safeguards and make their own way to Australia.

That is a bad, and foreseeable outcome.

Planning for the proposed National Broadband Network demonstrates a similar lack of prudence – of willingness to learn from the past and to think carefully about consequences in the future.

The NBN will cost a vast amount of money. At the planned cost of $43 billion, over $6,000 per household, plus the cost of connection and in-home cabling, plus of course, ongoing plan costs.

Even now it is clear that the NBN offers little advantage over cable or ADSL2+ to people living in metropolitan areas. Those are current technologies.

Two things we learn from the past are that new technologies double the speed of internet access every five years, and that large projects are almost always slower and more expensive to implement than first thought.

On present planning/costing, the NBN will make back the taxpayer’s investment if 70% of people take it up.

In Tasmania, where need was considered significant, the take-up rate has been about 1%.

So the NBN is needed, and will succeed, only if there are no developments in internet technology over the next five years, if competition is stifled, if the price of constructing it does not increase, and if people are coerced into paying more for internet plans that are only marginally faster.

In effect, the government is spending over $6,000 of your money on a plan that will deliver no improvement over likely commercial plans which would have cost the taxpayer nothing.

There is an argument for government subsidy of better satellite based internet access for people in remote areas where commerical provision of fast internet is not viable.

That would be prudent. The NBN is not. Nor are our current policies on illegal immigration.

‘Green Fuels’ Aren’t Green

November 23, 2010 / / 1 Comment

via Small Dead Animals:

The ETC Group, an international organization supporting sustainability and conservation, has just published its newest report, an 84-page document that presents a lengthy criticism of “the new bioeconomy.” In it, principal author Jim Thomas argues that using biofuels for energy and resources isn’t green — in fact, he says, it’s even more harmful to the environment than coal.

“What’s being presented by the government as ‘the green way forward,’ is this idea that we can use plant matter from crops, trees, or algae and convert it into fuel, plastics or chemicals,” Thomas told FoxNews.com. “And it’s just assumed that it’s carbon neutral. But when you burn something like a tree, you release as much, if not more, carbon dioxide than when you burn something like coal.”

Not to mention the fact that besides not reducing ‘greenhouse emissions,’ large scale diversion agricultural land from food production means (doh!) less food produced, which means higher food prices, which means more hungry people.

All these pious schemes which do more harm than good but which make wealthy Westerners feel good about themselves remind me of the following exchange from the Poirot story The Kidnapped Prime Minister:

Sir Bernard Dodge: You don’t seem to realize, Poirot, this is a national emergency. I do not intend to sleep until the Prime Minister is found!
Hercule Poirot: I am sure it will make you feel very virtuous, Sir Bernard, but it will not help the Prime Minister! For myself, I need to restore the little grey cells.

In any case wasteful and expensive ‘green fuels’ are just not needed. It is now clear we have vastly more energy reserves than was imagined even two years ago, which means enough cheap fossil fuel to sustain steady growth in the West, and rapid growth in developing nations for many generations to come.

And just for the heck of, and in case you missed it earlier this year:

African Crops Yield Another Catastrophe for the IPCC (but fortunately, not for Africans).

Oh Sarah, You’re So Dumb

November 23, 2010 / / 2 Comments

Or maybe not.

Sarah tweeted that she wasn’t happy with low-life leftist website Gawker (no link for them!) quoting large passages of her new book out of context, and without her permission.

This was Gawker’s reply:

“Did you catch the excerpt we posted yesterday from Sarah Palin’s new book? Sarah did. She tweets with rage: “The publishing world is LEAKING out-of-context excerpts of my book w/out my permission? Isn’t that illegal?”

[Sarah: If you’re reading this—and if you are, welcome!—you may want to take a moment to familiarize yourself with the law. Try starting here or here. Or skip the totally boring reading and call one of your lawyers. They’ll walk you through it.]

Oh Sarah, you’re so dumb. Reading that legal stuff will be too hard for you, so just get a lawyer to explain it to you, slowly.

Except…

From Gateway Pundit:

Unfortunately for Gawker, they don’t seem to have read their own links.  Or perhaps they simply didn’t comprehend them as explained to them, no doubt, by their attorneys. Harper Collins, Palin’s publisher, promptly asked for and received an injunction against Gawker Media, asking that the site be banned from what it termed “further copyright infringement.”  The injunction prohibits Gawker from “continuing to distribute, publish or otherwise transmit pages from the book” pending a hearing on Nov. 30.

The Other McCain has a copy of the court order.  He adds: The judge found probable cause that Gawker violated copyright and ordered Gawker to pull the leaked pages and appear in court to defend themselves and explain why this wasn’t a violation of copyright and why the leaked pages shouldn’t be permanently removed. This temporary restraining order prevents Gawker from potentially further violating copyright by keeping the pages up until the court date. Date set for Nov. 30th. This is a huge victory for HarperCollins’ lawyers.

And..

MacRanger at Macsmind is reporting that under US copyright law each page could cost Gawker up to $500,000 in penalties. (Gawker excerpted from 14 pages.) A spokesperson for Harper Collins told me that “Substantial Damages will be sought”. “We intend to put them out of the business of printing protected material ever again.”

I am not a vengeful person, but there is a certain satisfaction in seeing the self-righteous smuggery of professional mockers like those at Gawker get their come-uppance.

Pope Changes the Rules – Not

November 21, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Oh my goodness, the legacy media really are a laugh a minute.

Three examples:

Pope changes view on condom use.  No he hasn’t.

Pope Agrees Condom Use Can Be Justified. That’s not what he said.

Pontiff Blesses Condom Use. Did you even read what he said?

OK, then, what did he say?

Basically, that in some circumstances, the use of a condom by a male prostitute might indicate an awakening of a moral sense, or at least a recognition that sexual pleasure is not the highest good.

So condoms are OK?

Hardly.

What Pope Benedict said was that, possibly, for a male prostitute to use one might be an indication of the beginning of a journey towards the development of some responsibility, of concern for others.

See the last paragraph in the excerpt below.

From Jimmy Akin’s blog at the National Catholic Register:

Seewald: . . . In Africa you stated that the Church’s traditional teaching has proven to be the only sure way to stop the spread of HIV. Critics, including critics from the Church’s own ranks, object that it is madness to forbid a high-risk population to use condoms.

Benedict: . . . In my remarks I was not making a general statement about the condom issue, but merely said, and this is what caused such great offense, that we cannot solve the problem by distributing condoms. Much more needs to be done. We must stand close to the people, we must guide and help them; and we must do this both before and after they contract the disease.

As a matter of fact, you know, people can get condoms when they want them anyway. But this just goes to show that condoms alone do not resolve the question itself. More needs to happen. Meanwhile, the secular realm itself has developed the so-called ABC Theory: Abstinence-Be Faithful-Condom, where the condom is understood only as a last resort, when the other two points fail to work. This means that the sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves. This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.

Note that the Pope’s overall argument is that condoms will not solve the problem of AIDS. In support of this, he makes several arguments:

1) People can already get condoms, yet it clearly hasn’t solved the problem.

2) The secular realm has proposed the ABC program, where a condom is used only if the first two, truly effective procedures (abstinence and fidelity) have been rejected. Thus even the secular ABC proposal recognizes that condoms are not the unique solution. They don’t work as well as abstinence and fidelity. The first two are better.

3) The fixation on condom use represents a banalization (trivialization) of sexuality that turns the act from being one of love to one of selfishness. For sex to have the positive role it is meant to play, this trivialization of sex—and thus the fixation on condoms—needs to be resisted.

So that’s the background to the statement that the press seized on:

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality. [EMPHASIS ADDED]

There are several things to note here: First, note that the Pope says that “there may be a basis in the case of some individuals,” not that there is a basis. This is the language of speculation. But what is the Pope speculating about? That condom use is morally justified? No, that’s not what he’s said: that there may be cases “where this [condom use] can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way to recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed.”

In other words, as Janet Smith puts it,

The Holy Father is simply observing that for some homosexual prostitutes the use of a condom may indicate an awakening of a moral sense; an awakening that sexual pleasure is not the highest value, but that we must take care that we harm no one with our choices.  He is not speaking to the morality of the use of a condom, but to something that may be true about the psychological state of those who use them.  If such individuals are using condoms to avoid harming another, they may eventually realize that sexual acts between members of the same sex are inherently harmful since they are not in accord with human nature.

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