A people’s philosopher:

Being a thinker concerned with questions relating to vital life during the positivistic twentieth century had major drawbacks.

Because Hoffer embraced a philosophy of commonsense values that addressed everyday life, the radicalized academic establishment has dismissed him.

Hoffer’s major crime, as it is easy to see today, is that he tried to wrest control of moral values away from nihilistic intellectuals.

By safeguarding basic truths and values—ideas that enable man to flourish in daily life—from becoming the domain of fashionable theories, Hoffer was made persona non grata by radical ideologues and opportunistic intellectuals.

Yet while being shunned by radicalized academics, Hoffer enjoyed tremendous success among his readers in the general public.

The book in question: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Perennial Classics)

Personal recollection: In the mid-60s at St. Ignatius High, Chicago, I assigned the book to my seniors, most of whom had resisted my pushing racial-justice books.

This one was different. At least one spoke of it with appreciation.

In retrospect, I’d have been better off (they too) if I’d gone with this kind of book. Those who worked at understanding it would have had got something that stayed with them, through thick and thin, you might say.

via an excellent site, by the way: The University Bookman

It’s not about gambling but all about what federal government can do.

“Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “Our job is to interpret the law Congress has enacted and decide whether it is consistent with the Constitution. PASPA is not.”

7-2 vote, by the way. Not even close.

Remember too that the Constitution itself is much about what government cannot do. 

via The New Republic

​Revolutionary: Give price competition a better chance than ever.

​The Adam Smith solution.

From the Pekin (IL) Daily times, a load of piquant advice to grads, to be savored, offering this very important item as windup:

And last, once again, the classic career advice from the great newspaper columnist Mike Royko:

“Bathe regularly.”

Dave has a brother in Oak Park, a prolific and articulate Wednesday Journal letter and opinion-piece writer, by the way.

via Simpson: Dave’s Swell Advice to the Grads

. . . and the youngest offspring:

Beatiful people I spend my time with.

(Photo by Maggie Bowman)

Well, well, well. 

via: CNN

This is the kind of comment that tells us more about the commentator than the commented-upon.

Who, by the way, is very much inside the commentator’s head.

via: Breitbart

It’s called cracking down on . . . persecutors of the church? defiers of the Ten Commandments? deniers of the Real Presence in the Eucharist?

Nope. The target is  a growing community of priests who pack worshipers in at Sunday masses.

Pope Francis’s personal intervention to dissolve a small but flourishing community of priests in Belgium has deep divisions seething below the surface of the Church.

Catholics in Belgium, an ecclesial desert where the practice of Islam is overtaking Christian church attendance, are angry about the pope’s shutting down a top level Vatican court case in which the Priestly Fraternity of the Holy Apostles was fighting for its life.

The group, established by the former Archbishop of Brussels Andre Leonard in 2013, had grown to six priests, with one about to be ordained and 22 more junior seminarians, an impressive achievement in a nation were applicants to train for the priesthood are rare.

The community was filling the churches in the two parishes it staffed in Brussels, at a time when fewer than 10 per cent of Belgian Catholics attend Mass and less than half the children born to Catholic parents are baptised.

The new archbishop, like Chicago’s Cardinal Cupich, is a protege of Francis, who elevated and cardinalized him. The new man in Brussels is additionally under the wing of Cardinal Danneels, who tried to convince the Belgian king to endorse abortion. Quite a crew, operating apparently under the same “new paradigm” embraced by Cupich. I’d call it runaway pragmatism.

Reeling from the new archbishop’s “ruthless crackdown,” because, as the cracking-down cardinal said, it had “too many French members,” the new community appealed to Rome. Francis himself ordered a squelching of their case, deciding the matter before it had been heard by the relevant Vatican court.

It was not a first for him as regards a successful religious community that did or does not fit into the paradigm. One other,

the Franciscans of the Immaculate, a growing international order with about 200 priests and 300 brothers, was placed under the direct control of a Vatican commissioner and its members barred from saying the traditional Latin Mass . . . . In 2015, the Vatican closed the Franciscans’ seminary outside Rome.

Church politics ain’t beanbag, you might say, but Francis and his minions seem to be carving out new dimensions for it.

via Pope Francis’s Belgium intervention sparks backlash

Strikes a VERY positive note here in typically folksy style.

The mark of Baptism is never lost! Francis told  his May 9 audience of pilgrims and faithful from all over the world].

“Father, but if a person becomes a brigand, of the most famous, who kills people, who commits injustices, doesn’t the mark go away?”

No. To his own shame that son of God [a baptized person] does those things, but the mark doesn’t go away. And he continues to be a son of God who goes against God, but God never disowns His children.

Have you understood this last thing? God never disowns His children. Shall we repeat it all together? “God never disowns His children.”

A bit louder, as I’m deaf and I didn’t understand: [They repeat louder] “God never disowns His children.” There, that’s fine

When Jesus says, “Depart from me, ye cursed,” he’s not disowning them? Or was that line added by some 1st-century sourpus?

Sometimes I wonder, where did the young Jesuit Bergoglio study theology?

via  Novus Ordo Watch