Three cheers for the Pope!

Posted by on

Pope Francis has suddenly, and without the usual week’s notice, re-written the process of annulling a marriage within the church, issuing two apostolic letters aimed at making it easier to annul marriages that are deemed invalid by a church court.  Only one, instead of two, judgments will now be required before a marriage is determined invalid and annulled. And in cases where both parties agree, an annulment can be expedited by a bishop. Pope Francis also ordered that the courts waive most of the fees that in the past have regularly cost hundreds of dollars for cases in the U.S. Wow!

There are about 20,000 annulment cases a year in the United States, requiring a lot of evidence, an appeal, and confirmation by a second court. It can take six months to a year, or longer.

Only a month ago Pope Francis said Catholics who divorce and then remarry should be embraced and not be excommunicated.   Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center says that 60 percent of Catholics favor allowing divorced Catholics who then remarry to receive communion, contrary to current doctrine.   (NPR website September 2015) .

This is a great Pope!  His truly signature action, however, would be to declare that to have a number of children you cannot support or feed and who will have no jobs when they grow up is against the will of God and imperils the human race (God’s creation, yes?!); that “go forth and multiply” made sense on an empty planet during the Iron Age, but is no longer appropriate.  The follow-on implications of such a volte-face are pretty obvious.  But could the Pope personally survive it?

The Syrian refugees

Posted by on

For 250 years at least Britain was the go-to country for refugees from political and religious persecution.  Indeed, that is how my own forebears reached London, fleeing the regime of King Louis XIV. Now the country is becoming less generous and more little Englandish.  Here is what ought to be done to help the armies of Syrian refugees.

Up to 100,00 Syrian refugees should be allowed to enter Britain.  Each would be given an identity card (it’s about time Britain had the cards most other nation have).  The refugees would be told that they are welcome, but only until there is a resolution to the civil war.  Within 12 months of  a valid political peace agreement being signed ending the slaughter, all refugees would be expected to have returned home to help rebuild their country.  In this way political and religious objections would be overcome, and Britain would have done the decent thing and sheltered the desperate, hungry and homeless.  Temporarily.

This principle of a time limit could be used for all non-EU immigrants. Some would disappear into the woodwork, to be sure, but if identity cards this would be more difficult. There is land for this; the EU pays farmers not to farm it.  The practical problems of housing in a country with insufficient housing already were addressed with temporary buildings (pre-fabs) for bombed-out refugees during the Second World War.  If we could do that once during a war, we could do it twice.

 

Are all degrees of rape the same?

Posted by on

“Not all sexual assaults are equal. Violent rape is not the same as psychologically coercive sex, which is not the same as regrettable sex, which is not the same as fielding an unwanted kiss at a party. All of these experiences are bad, but they lie on a spectrum ‘ranging from truly horrific to merely annoying’. The official line now is that ‘sexual assault and victimhood exist as absolutes’. Thus, a drunk student who “has sex she neither exactly consented to nor exactly resisted” is said to be as much a victim as ‘the clearly brutalised woman’. And the student who continues to hang out with her alleged rapist long after the deed supposedly occurred is said to be suffering the same syndrome as a battered wife. It’s wrong, say campus activists, to ‘privilege’ one kind of trauma over another.

“What claptrap. It’s both insulting and counterproductive to confuse the fight against rape culture – a phenomenon that is all too real – with the petty complaints of grievance culture”.  (Meghan Daum, Los Angeles Times, reported in The Week)

I suppose  Meghan Daum is right, but I believe personally in the joy of wooing  an attractive girl (who even uses the word ‘wooing’ nowadays?).  A gentleman takes a genuine and flattering interest in her life, asks her opinion on the issues of the day, is charming, funny, respectful and tries to discover mutual interests. He is attentive, caring, unhurried, even a bit casual (not that keen). Above all, he  takes “no” for an answer. Period.

And when and if the young lady ever becomes his life partner he continues in precisely the same way as he began when he was wooing her.  An Epicurean treats others as he would like to be treated himself.

The UK’s productivity problem

Posted by on

The UK has a productivity problem, it appears.  Some of the least productive are senior executives in the City of London, who, I am told,  are  always on vacation. Blame private school holidays, Ascot, Wimbledon, Glyndebourne, Henley, which account for June and half of July. There are other excuses.

But the real reason that the City has long and longer absences “a la Francaise” is that these masters of the universe can earn in a week what the rest of us earn in a year. Incentives, incentives!   Why bother going into the office when you have half a million sitting in your bank account that you haven’t even had time to invest?   The ease of earning breeds both arrogance and laziness.  The untouchable-ness of the top jokers in the banks must make them despise the rest of us.  But mark my words, the reckoning cannot be indefinitely postponed.  The tumbrils will roll.   A former City trader, Tom Hayes, has recently been found guilty at a London court of rigging global Libor interest rates, and has been sentenced to 14 years in prison.  What about the bosses?  They authorise this sort of thing, yet they get away scot free. For how much longer?

Epicureans believe in moderation.  Moderation is not a concept believed in or supported in the City of London, where everything is big, especially egos.

 

Flashy offices are a sign of hubris

Posted by on

Facebook now has the world’s largest open-plan office, complete with a nine-acre rooftop picnic area; Google is seeking planning permission for an even grander campus than its existing Googleplex; and Apple’s $5bn “mothership” is two-thirds the size of the Pentagon. By coincidence, the tech-heavy Nasdaq index recently hit 5,000 for the first time since March 2000. As in every boom, the bulls say “this time is different”. Companies like Google, Apple and Facebook are realistically priced, highly profitable and likely to remain so. “Still, a New Yorker looking up at the Pan Am, Chrysler and General Motors buildings might recall wistfully that the same must once have been said of those titans, too”.    (The Economist, editorial)

What goes up usually comes down.  The shareholders, who supposedly own the company, don’t invest in luxury for the workers.  And luxury itself does not of itself guarantee good work.   The CEOs of Google, Apple and Facebook seem to be developing delusions of grandeur and may be losing sight of what they are there for,  normally the beginning of the end.  Thank you, Economist, for the timely reminder!