The Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis Is Dredging Up An Old Heresy

Many bishops come across not as vicars of Christ but as spineless,
wheedling bureaucrats, seemingly more concerned with their committees
and draft resolutions than correcting their brother bishops who have
gone astray. Some of them were even annoyed at protesters outside
calling for their resignation, as if the suggestion that some of them
should step down was ridiculous. 

As it is, I stand by Saint Augustine’s assertion that the validity of
the sacraments doesn’t depend on the worthiness of its ministers but on
Jesus Christ himself, who comes to us through those sacraments—whether
the man administering them is a saint, a criminal, or merely a jackass.

moral leadership has to come from some where. If not the church then where.

The Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis Is Dredging Up An Old Heresy

Stop the Bleed – Victory Girls Blog

I can understand these physicians. Their first priority is to save
lives. Unfortunately, they’re conflating their expertise in the
emergency room with expertise in public policy, but an initiative by the
American College of Surgeons aims to accomplish exactly what these
doctors, who are no doubt traumatized by the blood and gore they see
every day, endeavor to do every time they step foot into an emergency
room: stop the bleed.

Enter BleedingControl.org.

This is a national preparedness effort that works to actually
save lives. This is not a political project that aims to disarm
law-abiding citizens. It is an effort to educate the populace about how
to save lives should the worst happen. Because anyone can become a first
responder and save a life.

Stop the Bleed – Victory Girls Blog

The Two Paths To Collapse

The first is the gradual decline in the system’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Life’s
core asset is the ability to evolve and adapt, and organisms, species
and systems which fail to adapt fast enough and effectively enough to
rapid change disappear.

Today’s modern complex systems are typically optimized to specific conditions, meaning that they’ve evolved (or been designed) to maximize production and output given a certain set of inputs and processes.

If those conditions shift outside the expected parameters, the system’s efficiency and output are heavily eroded. To
take a real-world example: airliners are designed to cruise at specific
altitudes to maximize the efficiency of the engines and aircraft design
while maximizing the cruising speed.

Adaptability and optimization are on a see-saw: as a
general rule, adaptability requires flexibility, buffers and
redundancies that are costly to maintain. So in a world driven by
efficiencies in service of maximizing profits, these costs have been
ruthlessly eliminated from complex systems. The adaptability of
optimized systems is very low unless they have been specifically
optimized to be highly flexible and adaptive.

The second dynamic is the gradual rigging of the system to reward insiders, at the expense of its purported purpose and output. Insiders
will naturally vehemently deny this (while accepting pay raises, higher
benefits and bonuses even as the agency / institution fails), but this
dynamic is the direct consequence of the structure of our dominant systems, which are virtually all centralized hierarchies.

The Two Paths To Collapse

Liberal Education as an Antidote to Identity Politics | RealClearPolitics

But Trump’s impact on liberal and democratic norms has been small
potatoes compared to that of our colleges and universities. Those truly
concerned with preserving the norms crucial to freedom and
self-government should pay closer attention to the shibboleths of
identity politics that reign on campus as well as to the political
activism masquerading as pedagogy and administrative oversight of
student life that are transforming higher education into higher
indoctrination.

Liberal Education as an Antidote to Identity Politics | RealClearPolitics