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As we have seen, the British campaign for abortion emerged from the eugenics movement, whose members believed society was “breeding from the wrong end” and that the proliferating “unfit” should be sterilised; however, while eugenicists believed that the “fit” should have more children, and the “unfit” fewer, the equally secular Neo-Malthusians advocated the small “Malthusian […]

The post Religion and the abortion campaign (2) appeared first on Voice of the Family.

Unfortunately it will be on a Sunday rather than the preceding Thursday. Keep in mind that the symbolic meaning of having it on Thursday is to remind us of Holy Thursday and the Institution of the Most Holy Eucharist by our Lord. Hopefully Holy Thursday never gets transferred to the following Sunday like Corpus Christi and the Ascension have.

From Vatican News:

As the Church marks the Solemnity of the Body & Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi) on Sunday, June 22, Pope Leo XIV will preside at Mass at 5:00 PM in the Basilica of St. John Lateran and take part in the Eucharistic procession to the Basilica of St. Mary Major.

The following paragraph, courtesy of Amazon, reviews the book Death of the Dollar by William Rickenbacker.

Death of the Dollar by William F. Rickenbacker is a critical examination of the economic policies and monetary mismanagement that the author argues are eroding the value of the U.S. dollar and threatening financial stability. Rickenbacker contends that the actions of money managers, including excessive government spending, inflationary policies, and the detachment of the dollar from the gold standard, are systematically devaluing the currency. The book warns of an impending monetary disaster, highlighting how these policies disproportionately harm everyday citizens who rely on the dollar’s stability for savings and investments. Through a blend of economic analysis and historical context, Rickenbacker underscores the dangers of unchecked financial intervention and the potential for a collapse of the dollar’s purchasing power.

Plenty of books, articles, and social media posts herald the same grim forecast as Rickenbacker. For the most part, they rely on similar reasoning. Essentially, lax monetary policy and gross fiscal spending, both deemed to be inflationary, will result in dollar devaluation and ultimately the death of the dollar.

The difference between Rickenbacker’s book and other dollar demise forecasts is that  Death of the Dollar was written in 1968! Fifty-seven years later, despite, or possibly because of Rickenbacker’s justifications, the dollar is still the world's reserve currency, and no other sovereign currency, cryptocurrency, or precious metal will replace it anytime soon.

Given the topic's importance and the gross misinformation spread about the dollar’s imminent demise, we review Rickenbacker’s thesis to highlight that today’s warnings have been around for decades and why the odds of them coming to fruition this time are very low, as they were decades ago.

Removal Of The Gold Standard

Rickenbacker’s book was published in 1968, three years before President Nixon closed the gold window, essentially making the dollar a fiat currency. While his book accurately predicted that ground-shaking event, it did not correctly anticipate its impact.

He reasoned that without gold regulating the supply of dollars, unchecked monetary policy would result in reckless “money printing.”

He was correct that the Fed would have more flexibility in managing the money supply. Furthermore, with this added power, we have seen reckless behavior, as he theorized. However, Rickenbacker erred on the money printing allegation.

The Fed doesn’t print money. All money is lent into creation by banks. The Fed prints bank reserves, which allow banks to make loans, i.e., print money, if they choose. More importantly, even if the money supply increases due to Fed incentives to lend, it's unclear whether such activity is good or bad for the economy and how it impacts inflation and ultimately the dollar’s value. That is a function of the productivity of debt.

Simply, productive debt drives economic growth, increases the nation's prosperity, and reduces deficits as a percentage of economic activity. Unproductive debt detracts from economic growth and prosperity and worsens deficits. Weaker growth from unproductive debt tends to be disinflationary.

As judged by an increasing debt-to-GDP ratio, aggregate debt has been unproductive, leading to lower inflation growth rates. Thus, if the concern is that “money printing” would lead to inflation, it may lead to disinflation.

Fed Flexibility

In one respect, Rickenbacker correctly said that giving the Fed more flexibility was a curse. Easy money policy has led to periods of gross speculation and crises, such as in 2008.

However, without the gold shackles, the Fed has incredible power to manage economic crises and avoid a currency collapse. In fact, despite the 2008 crisis having roots in the US mortgage market and the prospect of the collapse of the US banking system, the world flocked to dollars during the crisis, as shown below.  

Most crises have been accompanied by a stronger dollar, proving that the dollar is the port in the storm foreign investors seek when economic confidence is lacking, and liquidity is paramount.

Excessive Government Spending

The book criticizes massive federal expenditures, particularly on social programs and military efforts, which create budget deficits, drive up inflation, and ultimately devalue the dollar. The book was written while Lyndon Johnson spent heavily on the Vietnam War and domestic programs. Again, Rickenbacker was correct in worrying about inflation, a big problem throughout the 1970s.

Despite ever-increasing government spending and an increasing debt-to-GDP ratio, the globalization of trade has expanded rapidly since his book was published. With it, foreigners' demand for dollars has been growing, and in mirror fashion, so is their need to invest the dollars, which helps us fund our deficits.

Even today, with “runaway” deficits making headlines daily, the dollar remains in the upper range of the last 35 years.

Dollar Devaluation In Context

Rickenbacker believed that easy money Federal Reserve policies, such as low interest rates and expanding the money supply, would fuel inflation that would erode the dollar’s purchasing power. He was right, as evidenced by comparing what a dollar buys today versus yesteryear. However, the argument provides little context.

For instance, in the 1950s, a hamburger (15 cents), fries (10 cents), and a Coke (10 cents) at McDonald's cost less than 50 cents. Today, the same meal could run nearly $10.

Although decades of inflation have drastically eroded the dollar's value, our standard of living has risen appreciably. To wit, the purchasing power of one dollar in 1947 has eroded to 7 cents. However, as shown below, inflation-adjusted incomes have risen fivefold since 1947. The dollar buys less, but our incomes buy more!

Trade and Balance of Payments Deficits

Rickenbacker points to persistent U.S. trade deficits and dollar outflows abroad, which weaken the currency’s global standing. He is correct that trade deficits have steadily increased, resulting in more dollars flowing abroad. However, more dollar outflows are a result of more demand for dollars. Furthermore, those dollars ultimately return to the US through investments and loans to the government and corporations. The larger the global economy, the greater the need for dollars, and the more dollars that need to be invested in the US economy.

Rickenbacker Was Right

The author’s concerns are valid and, in many cases, have proven true. However, the victim has not been the dollar. The victims are larger deficits, lower productivity growth, hollowing out of manufacturing, and a growing wealth divide, to name a few.

While these are big problems, they do not necessarily threaten the dollar's status. As we wrote in Four Reasons The Dollar Is Here To Stay:

The pundits will be right someday. The dollar’s death as the reserve currency will come, and some other nation’s currency, cryptocurrency, gold, shells, or something else will take its place. However, that day is not coming anytime soon. The four reasons we describe in the article leave the world with no alternative.

While China is rapidly growing its economy and global trade footprint, it lacks the rule of law and liquid capital markets to sustain a global currency. It’s difficult to see how a communist country can overcome those challenges.

The Euro is the most viable competitor. They have the rule of law, but their capital markets are not nearly liquid enough to facilitate global trade. They also lack the military might to force the usage of the Euro. Let us also remember its finances are in equally bad or even worse shape than the U.S. There is no reason to suspect the euro could overtake the dollar.

Bitcoin? Forget about it! The government will never relinquish its control over the currency because, with that, they lose control of the nation.

Summary

Had Rickenbacker’s Death of the Dollar book solely focused on monetary and fiscal imprudence and its negative implications for the country, he would have been proven a seer. Unfortunately, he was wrong to insist that the dollar would lose its status as the world’s reserve currency.

The graph below, courtesy of the Federal Reserve, shows how the dollar's usage in global transactions has been stable for the last two decades. The index calculation, as detailed at the bottom of the graphic, is based on the primary uses of currencies.

The post Death Of The Dollar: An Eternal Tale appeared first on RIA.

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If you have not yet read the recent First Things essay by the popular writer Freya India, The Right Has Forgotten Feeling, you should. 

Twenty-four-year-old India grew up in the dominant, secular culture of the UK without so much as a nominal religious bulwark against its amoral norms. Her female peers, she maintains, desperately need to know the right-coded truths that she now accepts: casual sex is a bad deal for women; religion organized around the traditional family is a good one.  

But according to India, the right’s attempts to persuade young women of these realities by way of intellectual argument are mostly futile and sometimes destructive. She counsels those who want to help girls eschew today’s amoral norms in favor of something better to embrace and fulfill—not ignore or condemn—the emotional and spiritual needs that are leading young women to uncritically embrace the secular left’s now-hegemonic lies in the first place. “The left,” India observes, “hears [young women’s] pain.” It “often has the wrong answers,” but “at least it listens.”  

I confess that I was skeptical when first saw India’s piece, with its provocative thesis of a title, pop up in my Substack feed. After all, it is one of my foundational contentions that women should eschew both mainstream feminism and “trad” antifeminism precisely because, far from forgetting feeling, each has essentially infantilized and patronized women by elevating emotion and identity to the vaunted place that we should reserve for truth and virtue.  

But India has convinced me that for all my harping on reality principles, I have largely failed to notice the only reality that matters here: the young women who most need to imbibe traditional values are constitutionally unable to do so. They cannot keep emotion in perspective, because they have no perspective. And they are not rejecting truth or virtue. A person cannot reject what she’s never seen, learned, or heard about.  

The hollow remains of an already amoral, leftist culture are all that today’s young women know. There is nothing left to push back on in youthful rebellion, and nothing left to embrace on the other side. India writes: 

Few try to understand what young women might be searching for in therapy culture, finding in liberal feminism, hearing from the left—what needs are being met that aren’t met elsewhere. Don’t we see that this world offers them no other sanctuary? Don’t we see that many young women haven’t “abandoned” faith, haven’t turned their backs on the sacred, but were born into a world already desecrated? That they haven’t forgotten their worth but were never taught it?  

India suggests a remedy: that we talk about and argue from feelings rather than statistics, research, and texts. Talk about, for example, “the wound of growing up between two homes” and “help young women see that there are things in this life that should be held sacred, and that includes young women themselves.” And maybe she’s right about how we should relate to today’s twenty-something women. Maybe we should create the equivalent of a Federalist Society for therapists to attract more people with conservative values to psychological counseling. Maybe we should flood the social media zone with as many charismatic traditionalist influencers as we can and see who catches on. For India’s peers, it might be too late for anything else; and these tactics might do some good, as far as they go. 

We have much more opportunity to steep the next generation of girls, the ones in preschool and grade school today, in truth, goodness, beauty, and wisdom before the culture lays sole claim on their attention.  We don’t want them to grow up amid this same desecration, such that we’re once again trying to find balm for their broken souls a decade from now. We don’t want to be always on the defensive, helping individuals heal from a lifetime of dashed hopes and nonexistent morals by out-emoting the left (which we’ll never be able to do). We want to prevent the souls of the next generation from being broken in the first place, even as they encounter this broken world.  

We may not know exactly how, but we can start by trying to fill the souls of today’s girls with worthy art, specifically, the kinds of great stories that address female formation in ways that subtly, and therefore deeply, steep girls in truth and virtue.  

The Power of Great Stories 

I am thirty-seven years old. I grew up in the dominant, secular culture of the US in the Sex and the City era. Things then were about as morally desecrated—though not as inhumanly pornified—as they are now.   

When I have considered why I was invulnerable to the mainstream feminist ideas about work, sex, family, and more while so many of my equally (and more) intelligent peers were felled by them, I have thought mostly of my dad. A Catholic university professor and nonpartisan public intellectual, he has made a career of dispelling popular myths and replacing them with hard truths. At his hands, as a tween and a teen, I received lasting inoculation against ideological illogic. So, when I breathed in the culture’s regnant feminism with everyone else—first the popular kind, as a girl coming of age among mainstream peers, and then the academic iteration, as an undergraduate and graduate student in the humanities—I was already inured to its flaws because I was disposed to question supposedly incontrovertible dogma.  

But India’s essay made me see that credit for my own invulnerability to the dominant culture around women’s issues goes not to my dad, but to my mom. Long before I was intellectually capable of his reason, I was emotionally and spiritually formed by her stories. Certainly, the books and ideas my dad provided taught me, on an intellectual level, how marriage and family formation benefit society. But more immediately important to me when I was India’s age was that, thanks to the books and films my mom introduced, I knew how falling in the kind of love that is likely to result in a happy, lasting marriage should (and shouldn’t) feel.  

This is the emotional and spiritual formation that today’s right needs to encourage for today’s young women. Arguments will not reach people who are fundamentally unaware that there is anything left to argue about. We need to seize any opportunity to plant the emotional and spiritual seeds that could help girls to see and long for a world before—and maybe after—these ruins.  

Here, in order of first publication or release, are five formational (sets of) stories that might help, or at least, serve as a starting point. 

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Eight Cousins (1875), and Rose in Bloom (1876): For men and women alike (I read Little Women to my sons, too), self-mastery and self-sacrifice constitute responsible maturation, not intolerable oppression. Unfettered freedom is empty. Seek in potential romantic partners the steady friendship and loyal devotion that make a good husband, not the fickle infatuation that often leads to a broken heart. (The 1994 Little Women movie captures the book well, but there’s no substitute for reading it, along with the other two.) 

L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Anne of Avonlea (1909): Imagination and passion are best deployed not to fantasize about a dream world that doesn’t exist, but to appreciate and improve the corner of the actual world that you inhabit. Perhaps more relevant than ever today: don’t be so intent on hooking some unattainable Prince Charming who checks all your predetermined requirements (or on living exactly the life that you conjured for yourself without the compromises that inevitably attend coupledom) that you overlook a more suitable match. (The 1987 miniseries is as good as or better than the books). 

Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968): True love does not set you free; it does the opposite. The idea of love and sex as separate from commitment and responsibility is now a technical possibility, but it is nevertheless an eternal lie. Real love looks outward, to a life filled with as much chosen obligation to others as a given couple can handle.  

American Girl’s original Felicity, Kirsten, Addy, Samantha, and Molly story sets (1986-1994): The timeless qualities of strength, bravery, and responsibility are for girls, too. The self-expression that we valorize today is actually infantilization, not empowerment. Growing up means growing past absolute beliefs about what should be, and into nuanced understanding about how to make the best of what is.  

Disney’s Mulan (1998) and The Princess and the Frog (2009): Your ambition, intelligence, and drive do not militate against marriage; the men worth marrying find women who demonstrate these Tocquevillian virtues attractive. Moreover, prioritizing and/or achieving romantic partnership does not make you any less ambitious, intelligent, or driven. But women and men do not typically express ambition, intelligence, and drive in the same ways or to the same ends, nor should they be expected to.  

This admittedly idiosyncratic set of stories is not didactic, moralistic, or antiquated. In fact, these stories are poised to fulfill the distinctly female craving for emotional authenticity and psychological intimacy with other women, fictional or otherwise. They do so in a way that militates toward truth and virtue, rather than against them. This—not argument, and not high art—is one powerful way that young women can establish a foundational sense of how a female life well-lived should feel.  

Right now, the dominant version of womanhood ostensibly well-lived is constructed by Tik Tok influencers and flimsily feminist-coded cartoon heroines with all the hollowness of Sleeping Beauty and (remarkably) even less worthy ambition. Most girls will encounter this content, and most of them will be influenced by it, and many of them will influence one another accordingly. This is doubly true in an era when ideas about what being a woman looks and feels like are transmitted ever more entirely by popular culture and peers, due to ever fewer intergenerational family and community ties.  

But if we believe in the sanctity of the human spirit—and we must, if we are to have any hope at all—then we have to bet that exposure to all the nonsense will damage a young woman far less if she is also exposed to quality stories that provide her with a deeper, broader, less presentist and more universal perspective. Imbibing quality art despite living in a decadent age is the mental and spiritual equivalent of eating nutritious meals despite also consuming junk. If the alternative is eating only junk, even some nutritious meals make a big difference to your general health.  

There are many possible ways to increase adolescent girls’ exposure to such healthy content. Perhaps a reprint of the original American Girl books by a conservative publishing house with deep pockets is in order, or a prefab book club to encourage reading them in schools and libraries. Or, we might benefit from excellent live action films of Mulan and The Princess and the Frog or new film adaptations of those other old books—ones that honor rather than undermine their life lessons. These are all mere starting points, but they are a start, nonetheless. None of these measures, standing alone, will restore our fallen culture on any scale. But repeated exposure to spiritually gripping, emotionally evocative stories of female formation in truth and virtue might at least open the eyes of some girls to the possibility of creating something better over their own horizons. Then those girls may encounter the dominant culture with at least the knowledge that alternatives—including ones providing different ways of accessing similar kinds of girl-coded emotional succor—can and do exist. And if, for even one woman, that seed of knowledge blossoms into a tree of truth and virtue, we’ll already be doing better by tomorrow’s young women than we are today.  

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.

The coroner’s inquest into the euthanasia death of Normand Meunier continued last week in Saint-Jérôme, Québec.

The inquest examined how Meunier acquired the horrific bedsore that resulted in Meunier dying by euthanasia (Medical Assistance In Dying—MAID).

Coroner’s inquest into Québec euthanasia death of man with a bed sore.

On May 13, Leora Schertzer reported for the Montreal Gazette that:

Geneviève Paradis, a nurse who cared for Normand Meunier during his time in the ICU, testified Monday that she did not check Meunier’s bedsores, noting that the hospital was short staffed. Another nurse, Rachel Lanthier, testified she thought one bedsore was significant, but did not see any records of it in Meunier’s hospital file to make a comparison and track the wound’s growth.

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Meunier’s decision to seek MAID, she wrote,

was a last resort for a patient who had been systemically neglected by Quebec’s health-care system, Patrick Martin-Ménard, the lawyer representing Meunier’s family, explained in an interview.

“The crumbling health-care system allowed the pressure wounds to reach a point at which there was no possible recovery. And that in itself, I find it to be extremely shocking,” Martin-Ménard said.

Schertzer explained the extent of Meunier’s bed sores.

Meunier, 66, was brought to the ER for a respiratory issue in January 2024 and was left on a stretcher for 96 hours. When he was admitted to the hospital, he had three bedsores that were at risk of worsening without proper care. By the time he chose to end his life two months later with MAID, the wounds spanned nearly the entire width of his buttocks, exposing his internal organs.

The Canadian Press reported on May 15 that Sylvie Brosseau, Meunier’s wife, advocated for his care but was ignored:

Brosseau says Meunier loved the outdoors and had many dreams and plans despite being quadriplegic.

All that changed after he was left on a stretcher at the St-Jérôme hospital for 96 hours and developed a severe pressure sore that never healed.

Brosseau says she repeatedly asked for Meunier to be given a special therapeutic mattress that prevents sores, but she says she felt ignored by hospital staff.

Meunier requested medical assistance in dying two months after developing the sore and died March 29, 2024.

Meunier’s lawyer, Patrick Martin-Ménard, said:

although it’s tragic Meunier had to turn to MAID because of Quebec’s crumbling health-care system, the option at least let him die with dignity.

Martin-Ménard is missing the reality that euthanasia (MAiD) is used to cover up the crumbling health-care system. Th death of Normand Meunier is one of many tragic euthanasia deaths.

So it’s not that – at least he could “die with dignity” but rather that, he was driven to die by euthanasia.

Euthanasia adds to the tragedy, it is not some sort of consolation.

LifeNews.com Note: Alex Schadenberg is the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and you can read his blog here.

The post Canadian Man Euthanized Because He Had Bedsores appeared first on LifeNews.com.