It Can Now Be Revealed

Ted Kennedy died and made the long trip South. After his many years in the Senate, he expected as much. Beelzebub greeted him, and asked which sector of Hades he would like to enter.

“Whichever one has the hottest women and the coldest Scotch”, answered the Lion of the Senate.

“OK, but that’s a long way away, in the circle for Envy”, replied the Father of Lies.

Unfamiliar with the territory and unaccustomed to making his own arrangements, the liberal royal family member ordered “Call me a car”.

“Of course, Mr. Kennedy,” Satan said, and dialed his phone. “Oh Mary Jo … our bargain is complete. Your fare is here.”

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Sacrifice

Early in his term, President Obama stressed shared sacrifice as a means to correct the various problems with which he said we were beset. He has shied away lately from that terminology. Why is that?

Perhaps it is because having it called for it incorrectly, and then been stung with his own blatant hypocrisy, he now also incorrectly reckons it politically damaging to call for sacrifice at all. Or perhaps it's just incompatible with his new lifestyle.

Like Dan Perrin, I think Mr. Obama's slide in the polls is a self-inflicted wound, almost an own goal.

Americans understand sacrifice. If all virtue consists in risking something of known value for something of greater, but uncertain value, then some sort of sacrifice is inherent in all acts of virtue.

In our nation's past, we have rallied to the cry of shared sacrifice. In times of war, we have been willing to risk life and limb for the sake of a cause no more definite than putting down evil in some far off place. When presented with a clear goal -- defeating an enemy, sending a man to the moon -- we are inspired to greatness. When some are called on more than others, such as in Southeast Asia, we rebel.

And so it is with economic hardship. When asked to sacrifice to get the nation past economic hard times, we chafe. Such sacrifice is passive, and we are a people of action, immigrants all. To come to these shores we first had to leave somewhere else, and I think that's burned into our culture. Or perhaps we merely distrust that the sacrifice will indeed be shared.

And we are already sacrificing, thank you very much. With the onset of $4 per gallon gasoline in 2008, Americans quickly changed their consumptive ways, altering their lifestyles. More and more of us are turning away from living by credit. We're cutting back on spending now, and saving for later. We're responding to the crisis in a rational way, which happens also to be the virtuous path that got our parents and grandparents through Great Depression I.

We suspect that government policies forcing cheap and easy credit led us into the economic mess, and the only way out of the mess is to shun the cheap and easy credit.

And 10% of us are unemployed; even more underemployed, our talents lying fallow. In that situation no one wants either to sacrifice or to benefit from the sacrifices of others.

Even more fundamentally, we don't believe that such sacrifice would be required if we hadn't wasted our resources on foolish consumerism. We believe in the economic engine our personal liberty creates, and we don't think it ought to be controlled from Washington.

Mr. Obama conceives of sacrifice as shared sacrifice, a thing imposed on the People by the State. And it is not to all of the people that he calls, but merely the Haves. The Haves are asked to sacrifice their capital, the very thing most Americans believe will enable them to end our economic troubles. The Have Nots are not called to sacrifice, but to benefit from the bounty he will lay before them.

And at that, whether Have or Have Not, we chafe even more.

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Permissive Parents, Leftist Children?

I have an hypothesis. It is that children of permissive parents grow up to be liberals, while children of strict parents grow up to be conservative.

I'm sure, before I even start, that if my hypothesis is true it is only a matter of degree, a question of percentages and leanings.

What I know for certain is that liberals generally act like spoiled children, and never want anyone to suffer consequences for their actions (nor to be rewarded for hard work).

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A Put Down for the Ages

It's from a whole blue-on-blue essay.

You're not a coward merely because you're afraid to seek the truth when it might not conform to your views ... rather your chickensh** views are shaped by the fact you're a coward.

w/t the indispensable Moe Lane

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Nannyconomics

We have reached the point in the US at which pain is treated not as a useful spur for individuals to accel, but as a barrier to be avoided or defeated.

The trouble is that economic problems are not fixed objects. If the government tries to cure the problem of increased home foreclosures by borrowing money to give to lenders or borrowers, the only possible results are increased home prices and a worse problem in the future.

A collapse in home prices, or a glut of homes on the market, make homes more affordable. Isn't affordable housing what the liberals claim to want? Home prices will fall until people start to buy houses. They won't fall while the government is promising to subsidize prices.

More generally, any time the government offers money for people to buy something, look for prices of it to increase to match the offer.

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Of Envy and Admiration

Sometimes people are successful at what they do. Others are not. Sometimes people succeed, sometimes they fail. Having failed, we learn (or not) and try again.

When we see other people who are more successful, we have really only two options, though a third lingers: we can resent them, or we can emulate them. The lingering third is what most people end up doing, which is observing from afar and doing nothing. On some level we pass judgment, either in favor of or against the more successful. From the corrupt.org link above:

Some people assume that if any person they don't like is more successful than someone they like it is primarily or solely due to moral inferiority - a greater willingness to lie, cheat and steal. This mindset is common in underground subcultures, though some mainstream progressives also think this way. A more advanced version of this mentality adds the assumption that anyone who is successful in the "wrong" areas - for example dating or country music - must be a despicable and morally inferior individual.

There is a danger in giving up, in deciding that your sweat and diligence are no match for the world. But there is no higher virtue than working, being paid for it, and saving for a better future in which you no longer work for money, but money works for you. That, and not mere home ownership, is the American Dream.

When people decide that the only way they can get ahead is to lie, cheat, and steal their way to the top, they have one of two options: do it themselves, or vote for it. We call the first group criminals, and the second group liberals.

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I don't do stock tips.

And I don't play the market. I don't know anything about banks, except that they keep money there.

But these guys turned down TARP.

At least five banks said this week that they had decided against selling preferred stock to the government. They included United Bankshares Inc., which was approved for $197.3 million in aid, and Bridge Bancorp Inc., which was approved for $15 million

Buy their stock. You'll be glad you did.

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Limited Government and Social Conservatives

Over at Power and Control, M. Simon asks:

How do you enforce traditional values and at the same time promote limited government? Until Republicans resolve that question neither the traditional values people nor the limited government people are going to trust the party.

I reply:

The question presupposes that traditional values (a term I will use without scrutiny) need to be enforced, and that social conservatives by their nature want government to enforce their values.

However, most social conservatives want merely not to have laws which are opposed to those values, and possibly for the government to advocate traditional values, as opposed to advocating non-traditional ones.

That is what Prop 8 was all about, I thought. It's not that we care what other people do, really, it's that we don't want the government actively supporting, with legal protection, nontraditional values. That's very different from saying we don't want anyone doing nontraditional things.

It's true that on some level we don't want anyone doing nontraditional things, but since of course we recognize tolerance and pluralism and limited government as higher Enlightenment principles, it's best to keep government away from that area. [I add here that for "tolerance" to have any meaning as a Virtue, we must be forced to make some sacrifice to obtain a worthy goal. The sacrifice we make is to allow something we dislike in order to obtain permission for our own faulty behavior, for no one is perfect. Those who deny wanting to control the behavior 0f others thereby turn tolerance into a nonce.]

So the answer is that we should all oppose government action which would change social mores, rather than supporting government action enforcing them.

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Would Jesus Want Rape Legalized?

Over at Classical Values, Simon asks:

A Question For Christian Social Conservatives

Did Jesus promote government solutions to moral problems?

The answer I gave there doesn't stress enough the obvious point that He did promote the Commandments, and not just the Big Ten. He just wanted us not to lean on the Law for approval.

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Would Someone Please Tell Michelle Catalano That She is an Idiot?

Writing at PJM, Michele Catalano struggles valiantly against her horrible straw-foe, the idea that community service is the same as slavery, or variously, Marxism.

Another name for slavery is "involuntary servitude". Is "compulsory service" the same thing?

"Involuntary" is clearly a synonym for "compulsory".

Do I need to explain the link between "service" and "servitude"? I think I do, because while the root word is the same, the meaning is different, and it has confused you.

"Service" in this context means two things: performing duties at the behest of the government and for the benefit of someone who (it is hoped) will be helped by those duties. A connotation of service is one of learning by humility the positive blessing of helping others.

But learning by humility implies that a person lowers himself to perform some action or to be receptive to a teaching moment. That is not possible, or at least is contraindicated, when an outside force such as the government is mandating the action. Context in this case is indeed king.

Compelling service is also making the same mistake as when we take the personal virtue of liberality and apply it to government. Liberality is seeing the best in others and giving to them regardless of their worthiness, in the hopes that our selflessness will improve them, or at least show our own goodness and lack of greed. When government does it, the virtue is lost, if only because giving requires the government first to take.

So even if we grant as totally positive the nature of the actual services to be performed, and ignore any possible negative consequences or side effects of this massive undertaking, being forced to give service to others is involuntary servitude, slavery by another name.

But here is some really sloppy thinking from Michelle Catalano:

It’s interesting how many right-leaning blogs are frowning upon the community service idea, though some are being thoughtful about it. Generally, people on the political right tend to belong to churches, and churches are big proponents of community service. So why the negativity? Many blogs are also equating Obama’s community service pitch with Rahm Emanuel’s:

When you choose to serve — whether it’s your nation, your community, or simply your neighborhood — you are connected to that fundamental American ideal that we want life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness not just for ourselves, but for all Americans. That’s why it’s called the American dream.

This is not socialism. This is not Marxism. This is the mark of a country that knows it needs to rely on those who can to help those who can’t. It’s the mark of a country that knows it needs to depend on its citizens to make their communities flourish. It’s taking the “ask not what your country can do for you” attitude and transforming it into smaller clusters, where we ask what we can do for those we live with and around, instead of waiting for people to do for us. It’s how communities become stronger, how they grow, and how a strong, giving community makes for a strong, giving nation.

So because we want churches to do it, we should be okay when the government does it? That is exactly the problem! We want churches and individuals to do community service, on their own, without the government being involved. If the government starts funding community service, no one else will do it. And individuals, of their own sense of charity and liberality, are the best judges of who should get the help -- and who should not.

Repeating: we like community service. We don't like the government to fund it.

As for the equivalence of paid community service and Marxism, let's first establish one thing: under Marxist/socialist regimes, there is universal paid community service. Under some hypothetical minimalist, libertarian anti-Marxist government, there would be no paid community service.

Rahm Emanuel pitches community service as the way to ensure the American Dream, but it's a total non sequitur. The American Dream is the any of us can start with nothing and succeed by our own merits, without the government's help. We don't need the government.

Needing the government is what Marxists do.

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48 are Happier

Thanks to Treacher, I do not need to explain why the 52 to 48 projectionism seems so shallow, but I will anyway.

A while back, Ace featured about an incredibly incurious study claiming to show that liberals are just better people than conservatives. When I read of that study, I wondered immediately whether our institutions of higher learning will soon reintroduce logic into the curricula of various disciplines which seem to have eschewed it in favor of Power Studies and Living Justice Seminars. In particular, the phrase Begging the Question leaps to mind, because the study proved not so much that liberals are better people, but that given the definition that "better people" are liberal, showed that liberals are better at it than others.

A commenter at AoSHQ pointed out that righties who aren't as successful as they think they should be can (somehow) rationalize their abject failure away.

As one who is not (currently) ruling his own country by personal fiat, I can vouch for this. I call it "optimism": while I'm (currently) not the benevolent autocrat of even a smallish country, I cling to the hope that someday I will be. Perhaps now that Barry has hit the jackpot, liberals will know that they too can create dictatorships, so everything will be fine.

I think it all goes back to not being spoiled as a kid. It just makes a person happier to have lower expectations, and to know that work and discipline are rewarded. We also know that when one fails to work or be self-disciplined, bad things happen.

We failed to work and be self-disciplined. We lost. Stuff happens. We will deal.

So there you have it, 52. Don't expect us to whine and throw tantra, and don't expect us to be impressed because yours has suddenly, and I predict briefly, subsided.

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Barack the Sophist Makes Personal Attack on Everyone

Quoth The One, alias Barack the Taxer:

"The reason that we want to do this, change our tax code, is not because I have anything against the rich. I love rich people! I want all of you to be rich. Go for it. That’s the America dream, that’s the American way, that’s terrific...

"John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic. You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness."

In the first place, Barack the Insufferable Sophist misrepresents both his opponent's position and his own. He has repeatedly railed against "tax cuts for the rich". His case has been one of playing the dissatisfaction and envy of those who have less against those who have more. He knows he isn't going to make anyone rich by giving them $500 or $1000 of someone else's money. The point is "fairness", not the creation of wealth, and it makes a lie out of your claim to love the rich.

It would be far too cynical a reading of that statement to accept it in the only sense in which it could be true. Barack the Five Year Planner wants everyone to be rich so that he can tax them all.

But in the end it isn't to make someone rich that Barack the Disingenuous Windbag wishes to give them money; it's to make them dependent. Wealth comes from risk and work, and there is neither risk nor work when people vote themselves mammon from the treasury. There is only abuse of the democracy for the purpose of gaining and maintaining power.

Taking money from one group and giving it to another is socialistic. It just is.

Giving out checks is not the way to get people "rich", even as Barack the Slider variously tries to redefine richness down from $250,000 to whatever figure he needs at the moment. If by some perverted definition of richness he claims that he is bringing wealth to those who don't have it, he is engaging in a get rich quick scheme.

People get rich on their own, when the grubby little hands of government are kept out of their pockets.

But then comes the insult: Barack the Weasel implies that anyone who doesn't want to give him money to give to others is "selfish".

Government is not the best judge of how I should use my money. I am. Without Barack the Thief's stinking taxes, I would be in a much better position to give to others.

Barack the Tempter is urging others to be envious. Envy is a vice, not a virtue, and those who encourage others in vice bring peril on themselves. Better to have a millstone tied around one's neck, in fact. As Jeremiah Wright would say, "That's in the Bible."

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Obama: Those Who Are Against Socialism Are Just Selfish

Barack Obama, via Treacher and Hot Air:

“The point is, though, that — and it’s not just charity, it’s not just that I want to help the middle class and working people who are trying to get in the middle class — it’s that when we actually make sure that everybody’s got a shot – when young people can all go to college, when everybody’s got decent health care, when everybody’s got a little more money at the end of the month – then guess what? Everybody starts spending that money, they decide maybe I can afford a new car, maybe I can afford a computer for my child. They can buy the products and services that businesses are selling and everybody is better off. All boats rise. That’s what happened in the 1990s, that’s what we need to restore. And that’s what I’m gonna do as president of the United States of America.

“John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic,” Obama continued. “You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.”

What about Envy?

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The American Dream

Since well before the credit market crisis first hit, we've heard a lot about the American Dream. In the context of illegal immigration, the American Dream was expressed as coming to America to build a life for a family. Much of the discussion now focuses around home ownership, as if owing a mortgage is the pot of gold at our rainbow's other end.

But that isn't it at all, and the misguided effort to prematurely supply people with homes and mortgages outside their means I think is a direct result of misinterpreting the Dream.

Now Joe the Plumber has been supposedly pursuing the American Dream by wanting to own his own small business, making money rather than earning it.

All of these things -- supporting a family, owning a home, building a business -- are just stops along the way, and are neither necessary nor sufficient components of the satisfied Dream.

The American Dream is that anyone can start with little or nothing and become as wealthy, powerful, or successful in whatever endeavor desired, limited only by ability and willingness to work.

An essential part of the Dream is that there are no limits on it. Even more, the Dream seems hard to define precisely because no one gets to say what it is that we strive to achieve; that's our call.

It's different here because we don't rely on the government, charities, the god of luck, or anything else outside ourselves to fulfill the Dream.

American Idol captures the Dream and encases it in shiny clamshell plastic packaging, almost impenetrable but apparently worth the effort for those for whom fame beckons so strongly.

Barack Obama appeals to the American Dream, and in so doing reveals Martin L. King's other Dream to be one and the same with the American Dream: Dr. King dreamed that the American Dream would apply equally to all, regardless of skin color; Obama shows that it does.

Sarah Palin does, too, and her story resonates almost as strongly with her supporters as Obama's does with his.

The fundamental American myth, and one in which I believe, is upward mobility. We're limited only by innate sloth, folly, and poor discipline.

We've always idolized those who achieve on their own merits success in life, especially from humble beginnings: Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, and many others all started with the odds against them and are remembered for their journey as well as for their destination.

Now the barons of Wall Street and those of Silicon Valley are alternately idolized and demonized, in a budding national schizophrenia. Do we still believe the Dream, or does it somehow stop at $250,000?

And will the politicians stop pretending that they have anything at all to do with helping us to achieve it?

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Obama's ACORN Denial of Service Attack

Barack Obama knows ACORN from the inside. He trained them.


So now that ACORN is submitting fraudulent voter registration forms in over a dozen States, the reason his $800,000 campaign expense for front work went at least partially to ACORN is now clear.

The purpose of an Internet Denial of Service attack is usually not (just) to disable the particular computer or network under direct attack, but either to draw response resources (troubleshooters) to the attacked system, or to force secondary systems to be used. Sometimes the DOS attack is merely designed to create the appearance of poor performance, so that users of the system turn to competitors or in any case away from the service it provides.

And so it is with the ACORN attack.

Rather than merely registering new Democratic voters, ACORN so clogs the system with phony registrations that it becomes nearly non-functional.

This is a result of ACORN employing people of questionable character (e.g., felons) to strong-arm and wheedle ordinary citizens into registering -- whether or not they are already registered voters (in the same district or another). Further, ACORN assigns to these unvirtuous employees quotas, making it virtually certain that the employees will submit fake registrations, en masse.

So across the country in battleground States, voter registration has ground to a halt, or limps along with demoralized staff and tarnished public image. ACORN is doing direct damage to confidence in the sanctity of our electoral process, in an attempt to destroy its overall integrity. Rather than being content to register new voters, perhaps ACORN wants to make the registration process unnecessary. After all, if the system cannot be trusted, why use it?

And remember, Barack Obama trained them.

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Voting For Economic Self-Interest

Benjamin Franklin said"When the people find they can vote themselves money,
that will herald the end of the republic."

Commentators are astonished that middle-class conservatives seem to vote against their economic self-interest by voting for Republicans. Let's break it down.

First, we believe that, as the cliche goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. The economy is not, as Marxists believe, a zero-sum game, in which some get rich only when others get poor. More often, either everyone prospers or no one does.

Suppose two people acquire wealth at different rates, one becoming only a little better off while another becomes filthy rich. The social justice crowd would have us believe that the people who are only a little better off are actually worse off, because their envy blinds them to reality. The gap has widened, which they take as conclusive evidence of injustice.

If you have no car, and someone sells you his clunker at a bargain price, you are happy. Then, when the former owner of your clunker drives up in a Certified Pre-owned Lexus, you're envious: you have a clunker, and he has a Certified Pre-owned Lexus. When is your car going to break down? Yet before you had to walk to work in the snow and rain, and now you can drive. You're not driving a Certified Pre-Owned Lexus, but you're not driving Certified Pre-Owned Nikes, either. You're better off, not worse off, and the circumstances of that other fellow are irrelevant except to your own envy.

And thus is it in general.

But back to voting: a person's vote indicates his mindset: is he voting for what's best for him, or is she voting for what's best for her country? To the extent that a single vote matters, a person ought to cast it in favor of something larger than his own petty interests, if that is defined as what the government is going to give him.

We have public schools. They should be teaching that Franklin quote, and from it the principle it conveys, which is as old as democracy. Perhaps then the people would know that their vote is an important choice between the health of the Republic the satisfaction of their own envy.

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Obama's False Hope

Yes, it's a struggle to raise a family, pay the bills, do right by our neighbors, and keep the bottom line of net worth going up. But I do not think that our struggles are anything like those of our forebears who tamed a continent, fought world wars, and passed it all on to us.

Barack Obama, more than most politicians, is making his name on the scurrilous notion that only the government can provide for us. Rather than providing hope, he is actually crushing the hopes of those who follow him. He offers a block of government cheese, when a seven-course meal is waiting for those who will but learn to shop, cook, and set their own tables.

The fact is that while a "sluggish" economy may be a more difficult environment in which to succeed, there are always places that are booming in the midst of the bust. There are always people who need services, and things which need to be made. So even in a tough economy, the will to succeed and the right plan can overcome the obstacles.

And it's supposed to be a struggle. If it were easy, or if success were as simple as choosing it, with no more effort required than for failure, then everyone would do it.

But in this world, and not that fantasy one, the rewards of success, on whatever scale we measure it, are usually in some way proportional to the amount of work, luck, skill, or determination put forth to achieve it. "Get rich quick" schemes usually only enrich the early adopters at the top of some pyramid, and then only until those at the bottom find out. Wealth is built by hard word, saving and investing. Every successful entrepreneur has to face the question, at some point, of whether to spend now to make his life easier or to invest in his business.

And the decision to invest for the future is the essence of virtue. While failing to feed one's family is not virtuous, choosing to plow profits back into the business rather than buying the family a fancy car or new television is.

Something on the order of 100% of the people who have ever lived have had life very much worse than the most desperate American of today. People are capable of surviving and thriving without many things considered essential by moderns. Television, computers, lawnmowers, and even indoor plumbing are not essential to survival, though to one degree or another each is considered so.

Deciding what is a luxury and what is essential will reveal how a person views the future. If the future is seen to contain rewards for which a person needs to work, then he will turn aside from acquiring the nonessential items of personal recreation but will insist on having the items which are required to achieve his goals. A mobile telephone is a frivolous toy in the hands of the slothful, but the link to a future empire for the industrious.

Parents need to instill in their children the belief that success is in their power to achieve if they follow the rules and work harder than the next person. Reward success, and children learn that to get the reward they must work and achieve. That is the wellspring of true self esteem. That's real hope. And it has nothing to do with whether the overall economy is booming or busting, because people succeed in bad times and fail in good ones.

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Barack Obama is a Fake

And he's not even a good liar. A good liar keeps his story the same. It's much simpler that way, Barry, because you only have to keep track of two realities, not two for every version of the story. By the way, when you don't make stuff up at all it's even easier, as there's only need to keep track of the reality the rest of us inhabit.

Despite what the Obama campaign is saying, none of the men in Barack Obama's family tree, not Barack Obama's great uncle (his grandmother's brother), his grandfather, nor his grandfather's brother were in the 89th Infantry, General Patton's Division that liberated Buchenwald.

Stanley A. Dunham, Obama's grandfather, enlisted in the Army on 18 January 1942, but is not listed as being part of the 89th Infantry Division.

Ralph Emerson Dunham was inducted (that is, drafted) into the Army on 11 September 1942, but likewise did not end up in the 89th Infantry Division.

Charles W. Payne is not listed in the WWII Kansas veterans (nor in the 89th).

So not only did Obama micturate all over the memory of a veteran on Memorial Day, revealing (or at least saying) that "he just went up into the attic and he didn't leave the house for six months" after the war, but either Obama was misled about, he invented, or all evidence has disappeared for his family's involvment in liberating the Nazi concentration camps.

Given that Obama didn't know that the Soviet Red Army had liberated Auschwitz and that no one had liberated Treblinka, it seems likely that he made up the whole thing, thinking no one would check. We'll be waiting for the evidence to appear, typed up dutifully in Times New Roman.

(w/t streiff)

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Best Wishes for the Senator

When a political opponent suffers a personal crisis, especially one of health, we have a choice to make. When that opponent has been a powerful foe, strident and even demagogic at times, it's tempting to express pleasure. I, of course, am not above such low sentiments. I wish that I were, but it's one area where my humanity makes me appear inhuman.

But now it appears that Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy has not suffered a stroke, but a seisure brought on by a malignant brain tumor.

Those saying "It couldn't happen to a nicer guy" or "Serves him right for doing X for Y years" need only know that they, too, will have an end, leaving behind people who love them.

My own father and I disagreed politically. He was a lot more liberal than I am, and an atheist. He contracted cancer and died after a long illness. Our disagreement on politics and religion didn't harm our relationship, as far as I know, and in his later years we would have discussions that we could not have had without our differences.

He was a good man, and Senator Kennedy reminds me of him. Dad was a hearty drinker, and never lost his small-town ways. Arrogant and something of an intellectual snob, he regularly bent over backwards to help those less fortunate than himself.

Though I think his policies are misguided, Senator Kennedy is at least genuine, and believes in what he professes. In a government full of windsocks, that is something to respect.

Now, those rejoicing over the Senator's pain may be convinced that they themselves are better people than he, and so are more deserving of health and life. Then surely their own loved ones will be all the more disappointed when those now rejoicing do themselves begin the universal struggle at the end of life.

For those who love us do not necessarily agree with us. Senator Kennedy may be loved by people who agree with you in every detail except for their affection for him. And you rejoice when they are stung by the news of his illness.

If you cannot think of those affected by his eventual passing, of which this hospitalization is a stark reminder, think of those who will be affected by your own. Who will weep? Who will miss your patronage?

If no one springs to mind, then I wonder who indeed has the better of whom?

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Remember Librescu

While the bullets struck his body, Liviu Librescu held closed the doors to his classrom so that the young people in his charge could escape. His was the ultimate virtue, offering his own life to save others.

w/t Jeff Emanuel

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