May 13, 2015

Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga

The Vatican

Rome, Italy

RE: The weather and why Vivaldi is still the gold standard when it comes to climate change

Eminenza,

Mater si. Magistra no.

I thought of using Dante as my guide and begin by saying “Because your ass is wrapped in purple it doesn’t make you a maven”. 

Ignorance, both invincible and its ugly twin, vincible, has plagued Western man long before Ptolemy ruled the world of Astronomy. I daresay that there are more than a few gaps in your otherwise astonishing academic background.

The scientific method and reasoned discourse are more than just old chapters in the History of civilization.

The Trivium is the crown jewel, not just of critical thinking, but of man’s quest to ask where am I from and where am I going. Logic is the capstone of it. Two of its bedrock rules are still both valid and truthful.

One of the first rules of logic is that no matter how many particulars you have you can’t make a universal out of them. If a bearded man who sings in the choir is also a murderer it doesn’t make all hirsute top tenors killers. The other, Hoc Post Ergo, Propter Hoc is the centuries old “trap set by knaves for fools”.

“After this, because of this” is a facile substitute for thinking. It is as if the Devil himself offers Man the forbidden apple of mental sloth. Its hand maiden, tautologies, condemn Man to the circular reasoning that goes nowhere.

My country had a President in 1998 who told a national TV audience that it was very hot in Washington, DC in August. He then said it was hot because of Global Warming. Further, he said with no hint of sarcasm or wit, that Global Warming was caused by hot summer days in Washington, DC. [I have been in DC in August. There are 3 kinds of weather. #1 – Very hot - #2 – Unbelievably unbearably hot - #3 – A heat that Dante would have been intimately familiar with because of his journey when “halfway through his journey he found himself in the dark wood of error”.

How simple it is to substitute feelings for ideas!

Your bosh balderdash on politics and the economy make your gibberish on  science seem majestic.

If I may be so bold as to posit a thought on why you and the Holy Father think, when it comes to our daily bread, that rocks are not hard and water is not wet.

You are both from a culture that has no regard of the Rule of Law and for the acquisition and disposal of real property. Thus it is easy to believe that since the “fix” is always favoring the rich that if good people who care for the poor are in control all will come right in the end. At least Peron gave us some good soccer players

It has never happened. It never will.

More than 50 years after Los Hermanos Castro took over Cuba it still has 3 unsolvable problems: Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. As my friend, the legendary Big Mike form Bayonne, always say, “That’s why you never see anybody swimming TO  Cuba”.

Do you favor the traditional Bulgarian method of economic reform or the gravity defying nonsense of Hugo Chavez? God surely has a sense of mirth in that He has allowed Maduro to succeed him. If you find a bigger buffoonish ohmadahn in charge anywhere else let me know. 

If you swim to get out of Venezuela the first place is Cuba. If the tiburones don’t get you the Castros will. Worse than Hobson’s choice.

“The problem with Capitalism is Capitalists. The problem with Socialism is Socialism.” On a more moral note – if that is still permitted – “The trouble with Socialism is that it is an attempt to make a system so perfect that on one will have to be good”.

The subject of GlobalCoolingGlobalWarmingClimateChangeClimateDestruction requires a passionate preacher for whom truth is the first casualty. It also demands a choir filled with equally passionate willing disbelievers of self-evident fact.

When the Pope prepares his encyclical about the weather please remind him that it took a long time to get over the Galileo fracas. Meantime, Ego te absolvo 

Kevin Smith

St. Mary’s Grammar School – 1957

Marist High School – 1961

Seton Hall University - 1965