Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. (Matthew 7:15)
Italy boasts one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe, at around 45%. Worker ‘protections’, a high minimum wage, and centuries of encrusted regulations on business make hiring inexperienced young workers risky and unprofitable. The more ambitious among them have abandoned their country of birth in search of greener pastures, including in the US, whose corresponding unemployment rate is under 20%. Nevertheless, the Pope saw fit to come here and and lecture us on the dangers of unbridled capitalism, and to extol the memory of Thomas Merton, a psychic and mystic, and Dorothy Day, a socialist who fought for greater worker protections. Continue reading Countercyclicals→
Ye have been rebellious against the Lord from the day that I knew you. (Deut. 9:24)
Cooties and alcoholism are two devastating scourges both characterized by denial, the persistence in which only ‘proves’ you are already afflicted. Whereas cooties is more likely to infect children, alcoholism and addiction tend to affect adults, especially by middle age, when they recount a long sordid history of substance abuse and mischief in AA drunkalogs, before coming to acceptance after decades of denial: the 12 Steps saved them from the deathly disease, which will surely be your own undoing. The strength of denial has a perfectly scientific explanation, as Nora Volkow of NIDA explains: ‘Addiction is a disease of free will’. She would know, as her own grandfather died of it. (As compared to say Bolshevism, which while just as deadly, has not yet been associated definitively with any dopaminergic pathways.)
