To which, the rest of the world asks, the British had cuisine?

Many left and right wingers believe the twin contradictory myths that voting third party is a wasted vote or a malevolent vote (in the first case, because the third party candidate can never win, in the second, because they think votes for a third party candidate mean that the mainstream candidate with the opposite view has a better chance of winning). Being the type of political Catholic with no home whatsoever in the major political parties (for instance, one of my pro-life views is that the children of a rape should be allowed to live, something the GOP has just come out AGAINST), I often get the argument from one side or the other for voting for their favorite lizard.

But an interesting theological argument I've been presented with from Mark Shea is that voting isn't about who wins the election- It is instead about integrity, conscience, and my ability to live with myself. Which puts an entirely different spin on my answer to such people- and gives me reason behind my historical tendency to NOT vote for the major parties in Presidential elections.

I still don't know if I should throw my vote to Virgil Goode of The Constitutional Party, whose only down side seems to be a bad case of anti-Mexican Racism, or Jimmy McMillan of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party, who seems to be a bit of a moral relativist (in that he's against gay marriage but is ok with gay civil unions saying that "A man should be allowed to marry a shoe if he wants to"). But I'm damned sure I don't like Obama/Biden's drone war and war on Catholicism, and I'm equally skeptical of Romney/Ryan's flip flops on major moral issues depending on who they are giving a speech to.

I've been told I post too many left wing stories. But The left wing isn't the only group warning about our excessive spending and our collective, government AND private, has created a civilization in bankruptcy. Pennies before people has created a civilization of material wealth that we cannot afford.
 
We are in a civilization that is bankrupt, both morally and financially. Our ONE possible solution here in the US is to build local economies, based on friendship, not national economies based on the federal government.
 
Oh, and that video will also tell you 5 other areas you really should be researching right now!

An interesting bit of anthropology suggests that it is indeed possible to have capitalism *without greed*.

âoeBut the reforms of communism are wrong, because they are inspired by the very errors they combat. Communism begins with the liberal and capitalistic error that man is economic, and, instead of correcting it, merely intensifies it until man becomes a robot in a vast economic machine. There is a closer relation between communism and monopolistic capitalism than most minds suspect. They are agreed on the materialistic basis of civilization; they disagree only on who shall control that basis, capitalists or bureaucrats. . . Capitalistic economy is godless; communism makes economics God. It is Divinity itself. Capitalism denies that economics is subject to a higher moral order. Communism says that economics is morality. The Communist solution of the problem is like the cynical way Oscar Wilde suggested a woman can reform a man: "The only way a woman can reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life."

"I'm going to plead with you therefore, not to be bored in Life. The reason we are bored is because we don't LOVE anything."

+Venerable, Fulton J. Sheen +JMJ+ [1948]

Centralization is the symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. The Austrians are quite right in the idea centralization sucks, but what they fail to diagnose is WHY centralization sucks.

Allow me to offer a few competing theories:

Centralization sucks because the needs of the few are met by the labor of the many, while the few do nothing. Solution- decentralize ownership and eliminate the concept of an employee- make every man his own business. Allow him to have apprentices to pass on how to run such a business to the next generation, but eliminate all other employees, make everybody independent contractors.

Centralization sucks because anonymous people aren't friends, and centralized economies of any sort have people you don't know making decisions that affect your life. Doesn't matter if it's the party committee (communism), shareholders and upper management (corporatism) or distant supply chain members (Austrian Capitalism), anonymous people making decisions for you sucks. Solution- geographically small markets with strong regulatory and protectionist but still geographically small government; tribalism.

Centralization sucks because when transactions are anonymous, the temptation for fraud becomes greater and advertising is used to spread fraud and create wants that replace needs in an individual's budget. Solution: better schools, more education in the scientific method to allow individuals to detect fraud and make advertising worthless.

There, three methods OTHER than capitalism for fighting centralization; based on different reasons OTHER THAN monopoly/oligarchy on why centralization sucks.

Finally a troll for the conservatives out there: While you were examining government for signs of communist infiltrators, the communists got smart and bought into the stock market. They have infiltrated it so completely that they now control most of the businesses in the United States.

I'll preface this by admitting that when it comes to cell phones, I am NOT cutting edge. My G2 has never been rooted, and is still Android Gingerbread 2.3 with whatever upgrades T-Mobile has seen fit to send down the line.

I will also admit to being the type of person who has filled up 20 GB of a 32GB microSD Card with free and sometimes not-so-free applications.

Still, I'm running into bugs that bug me, as a user and as a programmer, that I do not believe should exist in a modern operating system regardless of platform, but especially NOT in a ROM/Flash based operating system.

#1. User Input is not given priority. Ok, so while this is a pet peeve of mine in everything from Windows XP to Linux to Android, it's a biggie for me. I don't care what your platform is, User Input should *always* preempt ALL other jobs currently running. When you have a processor running at > 5Mhz (and all of them do, these days) there is absolutely no excuse for not interrupting whatever the processor thinks it is doing to respond to keyboard and touch screen input. None at all. Humans are slow enough that there are plenty of clock cycles behind the scenes to get all other jobs done.

#2. Random Reboots. If I am happily using my phone for a single task, *LIKE A PHONE CALL*, hold off on that upgrade reboot until you have *NO* user interaction for at least 5 minutes. Or at least give me a warning so that I can say to the guy I'm talking to that I'll call him back. Once again, this is about proper prioritization of jobs. The machine exists to serve the user, not the user to serve the machine.

#3. The weird thing I just noticed that prompted me to finally write this, and certainly a low priority item. In the Call log, if I leave it on that screen, at least update the times in the list every hour or so, especially if there is no user input (see #1) for a long period. I just glanced at my screen and saw a call I know I made two hours ago labeled as being made 2 minutes ago. The screen had not updated in that long.

Four planes attack buildings in our nation, with three of them being successful. Thousands die in the attack. Our military experiences a surge in volunteers to âoego punish the bastards that did thisâ.

Drones attack villages in Afghanistan, killing innocent people. Their people respond by taking up arms to âoego punish the bastards that did thisâ.

And we act surprised that they hate us for the same reasons we hate them. Go figure.

This has got to be the most simple-minded definition of distributism to ever come out of the pen of GK Chesterton, but I can put it even simpler:

Distributism is collectivephobia.
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Edit- link fixed. Since when is a gear and a circle the "edit post" icon?

I think we may have a few of This subspecies of human thought running around slashdot. A few, anyway. I don't think I quite caught the great man's humor, or charity for his enemies, but I think I came close. Final version will have the name of the girl from Rhode Island who slipped my mind, but is an excellent example of the stereotype of this heresy.

Are you better off than you were 4 years ago? While it is a bit early to ask this question of the Obama Administration- the tail end of the Bush Administration was bad enough that taken together these 35 indicators say most Americans are worse off.

Or at least partially. This certainly makes libertarianism more tempting- I'm for regulation of the free market, because it's obvious that an unregulated market will oppress people. But some of these regulations are just silly.

Taiwan is an example of distributism working in practice. Of course- they need to US Navy to keep them safe from Chinese invasion.

I'm leaving this a user journal instead of a submission for two reasons: One, it's not news, many people for the past 5 years have been talking about it. Two, it's a little too fantasy and not enough science fiction, despite the topic being a "truth is stranger than fiction story".

In 1968, at the end of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI was writing a bunch of documents. One in particular was pretty much laughed at by the world, and in America, became a cause to leave the church, dissent from official church teaching, or just ignore it. Almost NOBODY followed it's recommendations. But that paper, Humanae Vitae, made four testable predictions. If, it said, the contraceptive mentality was to take hold in any country, that country would see four effects:
1. An overall lowering of moral standards

2. A rise in infidelity and illegitimacy
3.
The reduction of women to objects for men's pleasure
4. Government coercion in reproductive matters
 
  Not only has every one of those predictions come true, but it's not just social conservatives who have noticed, but also run of the mill secularist sociologists.
 
In other words, Pope Paul VI went out on a limb saying "this is our faith, this is why, and this is an experiment you can try to prove it", and in our ignorance and laughing at him, we were stupid enough to try the experiment- and all four of his predictions were the result.
 
That's what you call verification of a theory.

He's a fascist, which can contain some elements of socialism, but only those that give more power to his crony capitalists.

I present the Actual Secret Catholic Teaching on why contraceptives are evil.

It must be secret, because in the last 20 years since this encyclical was published, I've never ONCE heard either a priest or a Bishop utter the word "Contraceptive" until the last 3 weeks.