Men Cannot Predict Consequences

How many times have we stubbornly and ardently wanted something, and maybe got out of our way and moved heaven and earth to make it happen, only to realise in the end not only and not so much that it was not worth it, but above all that it was not for our benefit at all, and that it would even have been better if the opposite had occurred?

It is sufficient to think, furthermore, of the heterogony of ends, or the unintended consequences of intentional actions, of which the most macroscopic examples are the side effects of drugs and the laws of the state.

All this is telling us that often we are not able to foresee, understand and evaluate the medium- and long-term consequences of actions or events, in a nutshell we can't see beyond the end of our nose.

This is not the only but one of the fundamental reasons why any consequentialist ethical system, namely a system for which every choice of a moral agent must be guided by the evaluation of the consequences that will derive from each alternative choice, can only fail.

We have many examples of great historical significance of this disastrous, catastrophic failure to foresee the consequences until the total reversal of intent.

An example is offered - unintentionally, of course - exactly by a philosopher who is the representative of a consequentialist school of thought, utilitarianism, which we will discuss below: the contemporary Australian philosopher Peter Singer.

In his book One World published in 2002, Singer vigorously defends mass immigration from Third World countries to those of the First, arguing on a utilitarian basis that, while the possible inconveniences, if ever there are, for the peoples of the latter are mild, they are nothing compared to the good that immigration into rich nations brings to the poor of the world (Singer, an ethnic Jew, would perfectly agree with Pope Francis).

The Princeton professor arrives (or arrived, in 2002) to the point of saying that the European countries and North America should greatly increase the number of immigrants they welcome.

With the benefit of hindsight, which is 20/20, I do not know if Peter has changed his mind. I know however that the events that followed have completely refuted him, even from within his own viewpoint. That's because the type of immigration from poor regions to rich regions that he advocated has had - and is continuing to have on an ever-increasing scale - the consequence of spreading Islam in the Western world, once Christian and still preserving some traces of the virtues and attitudes arising from Christianity, including doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Once the ethnic, cultural and religious replacement of Christianity with Islam will to a good extent be accomplished - not only for the purely demographic reasons of the different degree of reproduction between Muslims and native Westerners but even more so because a society, especially as complex as ours, cannot exist without religion, and it would be destined to collapse (but this is a subject for another article) -, what will happen to us is what is happening in the rich Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which erect walls and close their borders to their Muslim "brothers" of Syria.

This is how Singer's pro-immigration recommendation, which would have the self-declared intention to help the world's poor, will result in the rich countries' changed nature - changed exactly thanks to the application of the precepts and prescriptions of this utilitarian philosopher -, which in turn will have the direct consequence of making them much more reluctant to help the poor.

Another clamorous example of miscalculation is that of another Jewish and atheist philosopher, Karl Marx.

All or almost all the predictions that Marx derived from his diabolical theory have been refuted by that giant laboratory that is history, proving that his theory is indeed scientific, as he called it, but at the same time false.

In particular, Marx thought that the only relationships that matter, the only dynamic relationships, were those between man and man, social.

The other relational aspect of the economy, that is the relationship between man and nature, this communist man par excellence saw as active only on the part of man, and purely passive on the part of nature.

Unlike for others of his ideas, Marx cannot be blamed for having had this idea.

In the nineteenth century it would have been very difficult, indeed impossible, to foresee ecological disasters, to think that the environment could, so to speak, "rebel". Certain phenomena needed to take place, events to occur, ideas to be developed and understood before we could make similar predictions.

But this is yet another demonstration of human incapacity for far-sightedness.

Finally, I mention only briefly - with the intention of developing it more fully another time - the so-called "sexual liberation", that orgy of promiscuity and libertinage that has engulfed and enveloped the West at least starting from the notorious sixties on.

It's only love, said Oscar Wilde. Make love not war, the hippies echoed. Who could think that something bad could come from "love"? That chaos could derive from "love"?

Well, there was someone who understood it. And he understood it precisely because he was going against the current, and his foresight came from far away, from very far away, from another world.

I'm talking about Paul VI and his encyclical Humane Vitae, in which, perhaps enlightened by the Holy Spirit and certainly on the basis of a true doctrine - predictive ability is the test of truth -, he was able to foresee, already in the now distant 1968 (so much water has passed under the bridge), those many and serious evils that we later saw.

Yet again evidence that are not men alone, without supernatural help, who are able to see far away.

Utilitarianism, founded by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) (also influenced by the Italian Cesare Beccaria and his treatise Dei delitti e delle pene), is a consequentialist moral theory of the kind described at the beginning of this article.

For it the right moral action in all circumstances is that which is expected to result in maximum utility, understood as the greatest pleasure and happiness for the largest number of moral patients - that is, all those who will suffer the consequences of such action - and the least pain and unhappiness for the least number of them.

What one feels, the feeling, both physical, as sensation, and psychic, as emotion, reigns supreme.

In fact what else can be the foundation of an ethical system that has been deprived of God, what other rational basis can it find? It is the triumph of the purest materialism.

There are other ethical systems without God besides utilitarianism, but the latter is perhaps the one that best represents the atheistic position.

Once the feelings of pleasure at the pillar of the whole moral system have been erected, and provided with a somewhat rational basis (the so-called "utilitarian" calculation), it has infiltrated European culture and, by extension, Western spasmodic research, not to say obsessive, of pleasure itself, by any means: "natural" - sex -, artificial - chemically, with drugs, alcohol, sweets, excess and excessive consumption of food -, possession of wealth, power, material goods, obsession with shopping, and so on.

This article is also in Italian, here.

There Is No Such Thing As Humane Slaughter

I'm not reproducing here the horrendous pictures of animals tortured in an abattoir by bored staff, filmed earlier this year by an animal protection group in (ironically named) Vigan, France.

You can see them by clicking on this link to an article in The Daily Express.

And don't think that these things don't happen in Britain. They do, as it's been repeatedly exposed in undercover reports by worthy organisations like Animal Aid.

The Animal Aid exposes have been covered by mainstream media, for example here in The Telegraph.

Make no mistake: both ritual (halal for Muslims and kosher for Jews) and nonritual slaughterhouses are horrifically cruel, although the former a bit more than the latter.

If you find even watching these graphic images hard to bear, think of the animals who must endure these ordeals on their own flesh and skin.

And, especially, think of that when you buy or eat meat.

There's More to Pumpkin Seeds than You Ever Thought

I love pumpkin seeds for their taste, and recently I started snacking on them in the late evening before going to bed.

After a while I noticed that I was falling asleep much more easily than had been the case for some time. A persistent cold and cough I had been suffering from had also disappeared.

The causes can be manifold, of course, but I noticed the strange coincidences and I decided to look up the health benefits of pumpkin seeds, if any existed: I wasn't even aware that they possessed them, for if you like the taste of a particular food you're not inclined to dwell too much on the question of whether it's good for you. Just in case you find out that it isn't.

From my research it turned out that the improvements I had discovered in myself could likely have been the result of consuming this great food, which, according to Nutrition Research Reviews, has indeed many medicinal properties.

The report of a study published in Research in Pharmaceutical Sciences and entitled "The effects of methanolic, chloroform, and ethylacetate extracts of the Cucurbita pepo L. on the delay type hypersensitivity and antibody production" starts in this way:

Pumpkin, as a dietary plant, has been used in traditional medicine around the world. In addition, during the last decade, antidiabetic, antihypertensive, antitumor, intestinal antiparasitic, antibacterial, anti hypercholesterolemia, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory and analgic effects of pumpkin has been reported.

The study in itself is performed on mice therefore, as is well known, the application to humans is extremely unsafe. But the essay's introduction indicates the scientific recognition of this plant's health benefits.

Pumpkin seeds contain the vegetable compounds phytosterols, as well as free-radical scavenging antioxidants, also useful.

The 2015 study "Evaluation of the potential of squash pumpkin by-products (seeds and shell) as sources of antioxidant and bioactive compounds" concludes:

This work shows that the residues produced from agro-food industries, like pumpkin shells and seeds are potentially good sources of antioxidant compounds like polyphenols, beneficial for human health. Therefore it is of high interest to develop low cost/effective methods of processing to transform them in added value co-products.

Pumpkin seeds and their oil have benefits for postmenopausal women.

For men's health as well, pumpkin seeds have long been known to be important. Their high zinc content is beneficial for the prostate. Studies have shown that their oil can be used in the treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia, namely enlarged prostate gland.

Research results published in the Journal of Food Science and Technology show that pumpkin contains appreciable amounts of important nutrients, including calcium, iron, zinc, total dietary fibre and β-carotene.

Zinc, of which pumpkin seeds are rich, has many crucial functions, including sleep, insulin regulation, mood, eye and skin health, and particularly it supports the immune system. Zinc deficiency is common in our societies, and that leads to increased incidence of colds and flu, as well as depression and chronic fatigue. The boost to my immune system from pumpkin seeds could explain my better resistance to cold and cough.

And what about my own experience of falling asleep more easily? That link with pumpkin seeds too has found confirmation in scientific literature.

Pumpkin seeds are rich in the amino acid tryptophan (proteins are complex molecules made of amino acids), that the body converts into the highly precious neurotransmitter serotonin which in turn is converted into melatonin, called the "sleep hormone". Research has found that protein source tryptophan is comparable to pharmaceutical grade tryptophan for the treatment of insomnia.

In addition, pumpkin seeds are cheap, easy to eat, easy to carry, don't require cooking, etc etc.

In case you are thinking that I have invested in pumpkin seed companies' shares or otherwise have vested interests in them, I haven't. But now I may be starting giving it a thought.

Redefining Marriage in Italy Is Not so Easy

Published on Catholic World Report

By Enza Ferreri


Recently Catholic World Report published an article by Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci on how “Italy is the last remaining nation in Western Europe to hold out against the recognition of civil partnerships” and how the Church hierarchy, in particular the Italian Bishops’ Conference, has not always been as straightforward as desired on this theme.

It was followed a few days later by a piece on the website of the Culture of Life Foundation entitled Italy Debates The Definition Of “Family”…A Half-Century Too Late, by Steve Soukup.

First the facts. Is Italy the last stronghold of the Catholic family in Western Europe? We’ll have to wait until the result of the vote on new prospective legislation currently under discussion, but there are signs that in Italy the LGBT and similar lobbies are having a more difficult time than elsewhere.

There are two major innovative elements in the Cirinnà proposed law (named after the senator Monica Cirinnà who drafted it) that is now going through the Italian Parliament. One is granting official status to both heterosexual and homosexual civil partnerships, making them legally equal to marriages. The other is giving the civil partners in all these unions the right to adopt each other’s offspring, thus opening the door to same-sex couples’ adoption rights.

While the various parties in Parliament are negotiating and fighting over innumerable amendments and counter-amendments to the bill, the latest opinion polls have found that a small majority of Italians (between 50% and 60%, depending on the poll) favor the former but a strong majority (3 out of 4) oppose the latter.

Breakdown by political affiliation shows that the majority of Right-wing respondents oppose official status for civil partnerships as well, although individual Catholic members of Parliament across a broad spectrum of parties from the Right to the Left are also totally against this bill.

It’s interesting to see how in Italy, like in the United States, a public opinion that showed initial resistance to legal recognition of civil unions (or, in the case of the US, to same-sex marriage) has gradually changed over recent years, considering that in 2000 only 42% of Italians accepted it. The effect of mainstream media’s propaganda and the general feeling of fighting a lost battle (being “on the wrong side of history”) combine with changing demographics, as the 78% of supporters among the under-35s clearly indicates.

Italy is still the only country in Western Europe that does not have a law on civil partnerships.

Does this mean that Italy is lagging behind, and that countries like the UK and France are more advanced? This is what I used to think. If I was asked such a question years ago, my answer would have been “yes”.

But now I have different views and I wonder: advanced towards what? Our concept of "progress" entirely depends on the final destination we choose.

I now believe that the nations which introduced laws to give equal status to non-married couples and legalised same-sex marriage have advanced on the road to perdition, the road leading to Hell. Not to mention human unhappiness in this world as well.

Steve Soukup’s argument in the article mentioned above is that, since Italians are condemned (far from uniquely in the Western world) to demographic extinction, it’s pointless for them to worry about granting official status to civil partnerships, same-sex and non, stepchild adoption and similar matters.

This argument has a very strange logic. For it’s exactly by reaffirming the value of the true marriage and family, and therefore by opposing those who wish to equate marriage with other forms of union while at the same time by explaining the need for Christian ethics and natural law, that we can hope for society’s recovery, including demographically.

Furthermore, to say (or imply) that Italy is lagging behind (by expressions like “a half-century too late”), despite its having one of the lowest birth rates, a sure indicator of a “developed” society, just because the country doesn’t easily accept to be dominated and subjected to homophile and sexual relativist ideas, is tantamount to neglecting an objective sociological indicator and paying attention only to a subjective ideological preference of the commentator.

What is very lively in Italy, although largely ignored or vilified by the media, is the large grassroots movement of opinion against the Cirinnà bill and what it represents.

An example of the tactics used by the media to attack this movement is the coverage of the Standing Sentinels. All over Italy, in hundreds of towns and cities, silent protests are being held by the Sentinelle in Piedi to protect the natural family founded on the union between man and woman.

They stand in a square or other public place they have been authorized to use, usually reading.

These peaceful people generally attract the attention of various Left-wing, anarchist, LGBT and other groups, who stage unauthorized counter-demonstrations around them, harassing them with shouts, insults, spits, pushes and all sorts of violence, verbal and physical, to which the Standing Sentinels don’t respond.

The media reports, not unlike those talking about “sectarian violence” between Christians and Muslims in Islamic countries where the former are persecuted, tortured and slaughtered by the latter, describe “conflicts between opposing groups”, one of which, for good measure, is defined as “ultra-Catholic” (whatever that means).

The Family Day is another spontaneous movement of laity that has organised protests. On January 30th a huge pro-family demonstration, dubbed “Family Day”, was held in the Circus Maximus, one of the largest open spaces in Rome, estimated to have been attended by over a million people and said to have been the biggest demo of all time, in a country long used to big demos.

I conclude with what the Family Day spokesman Massimo Gandolfini, a neurosurgeon and psychiatrist, declared:

On these issues I have specialist knowledge. The entire world literature, from Freud to today's studies, says that the harmonious growth of the individual requires the essential presence of the so-called "parental triad" (child, mom and dad). There is no dissenting voice, except some theories from the ‘80s supported by the gay lobby, like the studies of the homosexual researcher Patterson, who recounted the development of some children of same-sex couples through their self-reports. In reality they are not really scientific investigations but opinion surveys carried out by her. There is no scientifically valid study favorable to the adoption of children by gay couples.

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A Tale of Inequality: Sex, Rape, Alcohol, Anonymity

In the UK there is a two-lane system of law: one for women and one for men. And guess which is the faster, broader, more comfortable lane to travel in.

Last August an unnamed (to protect privacy of those involved, all names are withdrawn here) middle-aged top woman lawyer had a business lunch with a male colleague, a senior City lawyer, suggested by her, followed by a "long boozy afternoon" together.

The pair were then seen outside the very busy Waterloo Station, in London, during rush hour, engaged in indecent and intimate behaviour.

They were arrested and spent the night in a cell in a South London police station.

The following morning, the man denied any wrongdoing and was charged with outraging public decency by engaging in a sexual act during broad daylight. The woman, a QC (Queen's Counsel, namely an especially eminent lawyer) and high-profile barrister, accepted a police caution for the same offence as the man.

Six weeks later the QC changed her story, and said that she should never have accepted the caution because she had, in reality, been the victim of a sexual assault. That claim guaranteed her anonymity for life, while the man, as the defendant, has had his name splashed all over the papers.

Media reports say that six weeks later, after returning to the same police officer who gave her the caution, the woman said she was intending to make an application to have the caution quashed, claiming she was unwell at the time of the incident.

Instead of asking her why she didn’t say all this before accepting the caution, the police officer took her statement and contacted the man, who was told he would be arrested if he didn’t go for a voluntary interview about it.

So, after getting totally drunk and having sex, she claimed she had been sexually assaulted so that, as a "victim", her identity would not be disclosed, her reputation would not be trashed and she would not risk jeopardising her brilliant career. A man cannot have that "opportunity" open to him to protect his name.

We have here another of the many absurdities of the victimhood ideology and culture: women, as pre-labelled "victims", have the privilege of getting plastered and claiming they were raped, men don't. But these women can decide to become unconscious through stratospheric alcohol consumption, and they were conscious when they made that decision. Also: why can't the same thing be said of a man? That a woman sexually assaulted him because he was too drunk to be able to give consent?

Why should a man not be allowed to sue a woman because she had sex with him when he was too drunk to give consent? Reflexes are not a sign of voluntary reaction.

Violence is not claimed to have occurred in these cases of alleged "rape" when the woman was under the influence, because obviously violence was not necessary. So, if there was no resistance, the disparity in physical strength between the sexes - which is anyway general but not universal, true in most cases but not in all - cannot be adduced as an excuse for such unequal treatment of men and women.

To prevent these travesties of justice from happening, the law should be changed so that either both accuser and defendant in sexual crime cases are protected by anonymity or neither is.

Similarly, either both men and women can use being drunk while having sex as grounds for a rape claim or neither can.

Lord Bramall Is Innocent, Like So Many Others

Tatchell and Dawkins are opposing an ideological enemy, not paedophilia

Lord Bramall, a UK former armed forces chief dubbed a "war hero", has launched a serious attack against London's Metropolitan Police Service (Met for short, aka Scotland Yard) for "failing to speak to witnesses who cast doubt on the claims made 10 months earlier by an alleged abuse victim called Nick".

Almost a year ago the 92-year-old was accused by a single witness, a man in his 40s known as "Nick", who alleged that he had been abused as a boy by a powerful "VIP paedophile ring" (as it came to be called), which included Lord Bramall, former (and late) UK prime minister Ted Heath and the late former Tory MP Harvey Proctor. Among the accusations was that he had raped and tortured young boys in the 1970s.

Bramall was immediately subjected to a heavy-handed police investigation which included a 10-hour raid on his home in Surrey, in the south-east of England. Among other things, Lord Bramall aims to challenge the legality of the search warrant on his property, questioning if the police followed the letter of the law in obtaining the warrant.

The former army chief has always denied the allegations, saying: "I know I have only had sex with someone other than my own sex" and calling any suggestion he was involved in child abuse "absolutely a load of rubbish."

The D-Day veteran criticised a senior police officer named Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald for having appealed for boys who might have been abused to come forward, adding that, if people who had been abused came forward, "we will believe you". Lord Bramall correctly commented that it was not the police's role to accept allegations as true, but the prosecutors' task to prove them.

"We will believe you" seems to me a remark more suitable to a counsellor or psychotherapist than to a policeman. Empathy is required from the former, investigation from the latter. What happened to innocent until proven guilty?
The claims against Lord Bramall were part of "Nick"'s allegations, under investigation by the Met, of having been abused by prominent men in the military, politics and law enforcement.

Despite what Det Supt McDonald said, that the police regarded the allegations as "credible and true", Bramall has recently been told that he faces no further action as "following a thorough investigation officers have concluded there is insufficient evidence to charge him with any offence.

Yesterday the ex-director of public prosecutions Lord Kenneth Macdonald (not to be confused with the officer MacDonald quoted above) criticised the new police stance of “we believe the victim”, adding that it could lead to miscarriages of justice and that police had got the balance wrong. He said officers risked being “manipulated by fantasists”.

In an interview with Radio 4’s Today programme he commented: “The worst miscarriages of justice I have seen have resulted from blinkered investigations in which police have believed a theory at the start of the case and gone on to try to prove that theory. We need the police to conduct impartial, objective and professional investigations.”

This is at the end of about a year in which the peer had to live under suspicion of one the most despised crimes. Isn't a man whose reputation has been damaged a victim too? Quite unprecedented, even the Queen expressed her support for the ex army-chief.

The investigating detectives failed their duty when they did not interview key witnesses for 11 months and did not check some of the case's most basic facts for over 5 months.

A lot can be said about this, which is unfortunately similar to many other cases.

But I want to trace it back to where it all started on a big scale: this modern form of persecution dates back to the time when the mostly Left-wing mainstream media had a field day with the so-called "Catholic Church abuse scandal".

Just to see how politically self-serving in order to settle old scores with ideological enemies the furore was, and how absolutely nothing this fake self-righteousness had to do with concern about children, one has to observe the total silence and absence of outrage at the allegations of abuse by politicians and entertainment industry members (or anybody unconnected with the Church) of those professional anti-Christians like Richard Dawkins and Peter Tatchell who so vociferously, venomously and unjustifiably called for the arrest of Pope Benedict XVI when he visited Britain in 2010 (see picture above).

For some reason, sexual offences have such a powerful emotional impact that, unlike criminal claims of other nature (like robbery or embezzlement), whenever accusations of sexual misconduct are made there is a presumption of guilt, when in fact there should always be - both legally and morally - a presumption of innocence until proof of guilt is provided.
The onus of the proof is on the accuser.

From the mere claim of an accuser (who may have all kinds of motivations and personal problems) to the evidence of guilt there is a vast distance, similar to that between saying and doing, speculating and demonstrating, fantasy and reality.

The so-called "sex abuse scandal" of the Church has been largely a political campaign by the mainstream media, whose journalists are mostly on the far-Left, anti-clerical and atheists with a vengeance. There were plenty of episodes of false and misleading headlines which were plainly contradicted by the article below, if anyone bothered to read it.

The fact that the Church in many cases chose out-of-court settlements was seen as an admission of guilt instead of, as it should have been seen, as a sign of the Church's desire not to be dragged into a shameful headline war by a hostile media establishment, which thrived on court cases.

Since then, some people have realised that making allegations of sexual abuse (no matter how well or, rather, badly founded) was a way to win money infinitely more reliable than by buying a lottery ticket.

And so the ball of paedophilia or rape charges against men in the public sphere, preferably rich and famous, has kept rolling.

The historic abuse charges are the best because, in the absence of physical evidence after decades, mere acquaintance with a celebrity or politician may be enough to jump on the bandwagon, or even better the gravy train.


By www.CGPGrey.com, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11534384

The Amorality of Atheism, Great Book

The Amorality of Atheism (Amazon USA)  (Amazon UK)  by Giorgio Roversi, an Italian author living in Britain, is a slim book that says everything that needs to be said.

Atheism is full of illogicalities both from an ethical and scientific viewpoint.

This book deals with the ethical aspect of atheism's self-contradictions, and it does it brilliantly.

The only consistency of atheist "morality" or rather of atheism in general is with the requirements of a society that simply wants to follow its own wishes and urges without any constraints.

But this is also a society which was founded on Christianity, therefore the remnants of the ethical system that has dominated it for almost two millennia still echo in the hollow chamber of even the most entrenched atheists.

And here is the origin of another contradiction: modern secularists want their cake and eat it. They don't want an external source of their morality so they can forge it the way they like it, but at the same time they want to feel to be self-righteous and doing "the right thing". So they claim that those qualities and acts that we consider good only in virtue of their adherence to the Christian values can find their grounds on something else. But what?

The options offered are all wanting.

Science. One of the most irrational claims of many atheists is that science can guide morality. Hume's principle is here an invincible obstacle: you cannot derive "ought" from "is".

Subjectivity. But that, as Roversi says, is the opposite of morality, which must by its own very nature be universal and therefore objective.

"Nice, good" feelings, like empathy and compassion. But we also have nasty, bad feelings, destructive and harmful to others. If we are only a conglomerate of atoms and cells bent solely towards survival and self-interest, on what rational - not emotional - grounds can we choose which are better between those two competing groups of feelings?

This book should be read by everyone because the subject it deals with concerns all of us in the most fundamental and vital way. A society cannot survive without ethics and, therefore, without God.

The West is trying on itself an experiment that is bound to fail and is already failing, as we can see, for example, from the devastation of the family, the race towards primitivism, the erosion of civilisation and all their consequences, like multiculturalism, destructive immigration and the growing power of Islam.

Giorgio Roversi's The Amorality of Atheism is the antidote to the poisonous misconceptions and deceptions spread by Hollywood, the mass media and the elites (political and intellectual) every minute of every day.

This book is very highly recommended.