My spam filter couldn’t keep up with the spam comments coming in, so I’ve been forced to require pre-registration for posting in comment threads. I hate to do that, because anonymous comments are one of the best parts of the Internet, but I don’t have time right now to find a better spam filter.
The masthead up thar says this blog is about “civilization and public life.” Problem is, to date, the blog has been pretty much just “religion and public life,” which makes us a cheesy one-man knock-off of the inestimable First Things. So, as exciting as the political wars have been this year, I’ve been waiting for a chance to do a culture post. You know, some high and refined piece about Casablanca and the Nazi sensibility, or why diegetic music in stage musicals is the best thing since The Drowsy Chaperone.
This week, I finally found De Civitate‘s first important cultural commentary, and it is even more erudite than I hoped.
That’s right, audience: this week, you will learn the correct order in which to watch the six Star Wars films.
It’s the Machete Order: IV, V, II, III, VI.
For the rest, I’ll turn you over to Mr. Machete himself, at his blog.
Much talk lately of how the Republicans can only beat Obama if they nominate a moderate like Romney (and even then it’s a long shot). I know exactly why the media says this: because they are liberals, and they can at least imagine a living, thinking human being voting for Romney, but they cannot comprehend a vote for Santorum or Gingrich. What I don’t understand is why anyone still believes that nonsense.
Quick thoughts. Ten-minute post, before I get back to my work backlog for tonight. Mostly I’m posting this to show off our new Facebook comments system.
Romney won. Good for him. He proved himself electable in the Midwest, and electable not simply as a last-resort vote. Every time a passionate Romney guy (or gal) stands up online, they always get two or three comments (only one of which is snide) saying, “Wait, an honest-to-god pro-Romney voter? I didn’t know those existed!” Romney nearly won Iowa because voters thought he was the best of a bad lot. He crushed Gingrich in Florida because Gingrich scared the daylights out of Floridian Republicans. He won Michigan tonight because voters actually liked him.
In 2011, the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, published a routine paper analyzing religion and contraception use. During the past week, that paper has caused quite the little internet brouhaha, in light of the Obama Administration’s new anti-Catholic (it isn’t controversial to call it that anymore, is it?) contraception mandate. The Guttmacher Institute has been put on the defensive, while Nancy Pelosi and establishment Democrats and media organizations have mutated and wildly exaggerated the Guttmacher Institute’s already controversial findings. The Guttmacher numbers have been criticized for the sample populations they chose, the transparency of their computations, and for failing to discriminate within various demographics (for example, practicing vs. non-practicing Catholics, married vs. unmarried non-virgins, etc.)
We have long been curious about Catholics and contraception use, and this controversy finally nudged us into action. We decided to address the Catholic blogosphere’s concerns over the Guttmacher study the simplest way we could think of: we did our own study. The data AGI analyzed were from a major government survey, not a private polling firm, so the entire dataset was available for download on the website of the Centers for Disease Control. We grabbed it, spent a few days setting up and configuring some statistics software, then headed to the James J. Heaney Institute’s well-equipped computer lab for a week to pore over the numbers.
The full study is attached at the bottom of this post, and I strongly encourage you all to read it. Here are some of what I view as the key tables in the study (click to view full-size):
Some of our key findings:
The full study is here (PDF format):
“Countering Countering Conventional Wisdom” – The James J. Heaney Institute
A minor update to the study was released on 29 Feb 2012 at 2035 GMT. No findings were changed, but some typos were corrected, tables were slightly reformatted, and methodological issues were clarified. (The study as originally released can be found here.)
Thank you for choosing De Civitate and the James J. Heaney Institute as your source for information on religion and contraception use. Why not bookmark us, or subscribe to our RSS feed on the right side of the screen, while we’re on your mind?
FRIENDLY DISCLAIMER: Although we have some statistics training, we are not a statistician. We are a computer scientist. We just really think statistics are the bee’s knees.
Quote of the day. A very good reminder to me and many of my friends on the Right, perhaps especially my libertarian-leaning fellow Ron Paul supporters. We can, in our zeal against Big Gubmint, sometimes forget that one of the main reasons we need to get government out of the way is so that we, the People, within our communities, can step back into our lately-usurped proper roles — as the primary agents of charity.
I’m feeling better and better about the prospects of a Santorum candidacy — and a Santorum presidency.
Hat tip to HuffPo, which has the full article here.
From a reader (who really needs a blog of his own):
What is your opinion on showing graphic images of aborted fetuses in public?
Let’s split the difference:
From now on, the Catholic Church will pay for what its employees want to do in the privacy of their bedrooms. In exchange, all employees will give the Catholic Church a say in what they’re allowed to do in the privacy of their bedrooms.
Call the president, folks. I’ve just solved his problem for him.
If liberals need our hard-earned tithing money so they can have sex the way they choose, they give up their right to complete sexual autonomy. This whole battle is like when your dad threatens to stop paying for college when you get straight C’s and spend all your time partying, and you accuse your dad of violating your right to a free education, so you pass a law forcing his employer to collect your tuition money out of his paycheck and hand it over to you free of charge. You know, like kids do.
The ever-abrasive Mark Steyn gets it right unsettlingly often:
The U.S. economy is about to be terminally clobbered by $100 trillion of entitlement obligations it can never meet. And, as Chart 5-1 on page 58 of the official Obama budget ‘Analytical Perspectives’ makes plain, your feckless, decadent rulers have no plans to do anything about it. Instead, the Democrats shriek, Ooh, Republican prudes who can’t get any action want to shut down your sex life! According to CBO projections, by mid-century mere interest payments on the debt will exceed federal revenues. For purposes of comparison, by 1788 Louis XVI’s government in France was spending a mere 60 percent of revenues on debt service, and we know how that worked out for His Majesty shortly thereafter. Not to worry, says Barry Antoinette. Let them eat condoms.
Quite. (Full article here.) Mr. Steyn also reminds of us a particularly terrifying moment from last week’s Congressional question period with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, which I think is not getting nearly enough attention from anyone:
…at the House Budget Committee on Thursday, Chairman Paul Ryan produced another chart, this time from the Congressional Budget Office, with an even steeper straight line showing debt rising to 900 percent of GDP and rocketing off the graph circa 2075. America’s treasury secretary, Timmy Geithner,,, thought the chart would have been even more hilarious if they’d run the numbers into the next millennium: “You could have taken it out to 3000 or to 4000” he chortled, to supportive titters from his aides…
“Yeah, right.” replied Ryan. “We cut it off at the end of the century because the economy, according to the CBO, shuts down in 2027 on this path.”
Watch the exchange here. “Feckless, decadent rulers” is an understatement.
I was afraid I was the only conservative scratching his head that the House GOP seemed ready to make a tax increase the hill they wanted to die on. Money quotes:
While we welcome the newfound Republican hawkishness on the deficit, a salubrious result of the Tea Party’s influence, the GOP’s hesitancy in extending the payroll-tax cut was an odd thing. The arguments that some Republicans made against it — that temporary tax cuts have little or no effect on economic growth and jobs, that there were insufficient offsets to neutralize the revenue effects of the tax cut — might have been made against any number of tax policies that Republicans support with good reason, the extension of the Bush tax cuts prominent among them. This is not the moment, economically or politically, for a tax increase…
It is critical that Republicans remain energetically committed to both sides of the ledger-sheet fight: tax cuts and spending cuts. The main problem contributing to the deficit, as the tea partiers have been especially energetic in pointing out, is spending, not lack of sufficient tax revenue. In the long term, no workable payroll-tax rate is going to make Social Security or Medicare sustainable, and no combined level of federal taxation is going to render Washington’s current spending habits anything less than catastrophic. These are problems that are going to have to be solved, and they are going to have to be solved over the worst sort of Democratic demagoguery that one can imagine. If Republicans cede their historical advantage on taxes, the fight will be that much more difficult. Keep cutting taxes, whenever and wherever possible, and then remind voters in November of what is standing in the way of spending cuts and a return to fiscal sanity.
Full article here.
