In the Soviet Union about 1980 there was a giant warehouse containing hundreds of thousands of empty plastic circles, each about a yard across and containing about a quarter of an inch of solid material at the edge.

History does not record whether these hoops were finally destroyed, or whether, like so many Soviet-produced products, the warehouse is still standing there, collapsing in the open air and being overgrown with weeds.

Those hoops were put into the Five-Year Plan because Hula Hoops had become popular in America for a short time, tens of millions of them sold.

Marxism says that a socialist economy will plan how much of each good will be produced. What it cannot say is WHICH goods will be produced.

The ideal communist society which Marxism predicts as the end of its Scientific Historical Process is very similar to the Eden Adam and Eve habited in the Old Testament and which I described in “The Serpent Had a Point”. (URL)

A Marxist economy produces what market economies produce. When market economies put out millions of hula hoops, the socialist planners put millions of hula hoops into their Plan.

This is only an extreme example of a basic rule. Like the Garden of Eden, communism at its most ideal is sterile. It produces only what has been produced before. Things like the hula hoop or the automobile are not developed.

Like other religions, Marxism gives us a static Ideal.

We are regularly reminded that Moslem theocracies still live in the past. We know that the Papal States, before Italy annexed them in 1870, were stagnant and oppressive to an extent only matched by Czarist Russia.

What we are NOT told is that the USSR, under the Marxist theocracy, was unbelievably stagnant for three hundred million WHITE people at a time when consumer technology in the rest of the white world was moving steadily forward.

Hundreds of millions of white people did not produce one single new consumer product in the entire Communist period. In fact, despite the cheapest white labor on earth, they did not produce one single COMPETITIVE consumer product, old or new.

In other words, no one else seems to put Marxist theocracy right there in the category it belongs, with all the OTHER theocratic states of history.

A commenter said that I seemed to believe in some sort of “omniscience” in Catholic bishops, because in my firm opinion, every one of them was aware of boy molestation.

That is my firm opinion because a great number of bishops moved the molesters around, following Mommy Professor’s opinion back then that any crime was the fault of Society or the Church, not of the “so-called Criminal.”

I do not believe that men as smart as the average Catholic bishop would be unaware of something so well known. The point the Church makes, that this policy came straight from Mommy Professor is passed over lightly by the media and everybody else. This is a more important lesson than any other.

Another lesson here that MIGHT interest you is why I think Catholic bishops are smarter than Orthodox bishops:

In the Catholic Church, all priests in the regular rite are required to be celibate. Orthodox priests are allowed to marry, but only if they marry BEFORE they take their priestly orders. All of the few Greek Orthodox priests I know are married, and most of them finished seminary and waited a couple of years to get married before they accepted ordination.

In fact, a lot of priests in Eastern Rites who are affiliated with Rome, and are therefore Catholic priests, marry before taking their orders. There are, technically, a lot of married Catholic priests.

But in neither church can a bishop be married. So an Orthodox bishop must be selected from the smaller pool of priests who choose not to marry. So the pool from which bishops are selected is both smaller and probably qualitatively different in the two institutions

I am not as shocked as Catholics tend to be over this particular scandal, but as usual the reason I am not so shocked is not going to make anyone much happier about what I say about it. It will just get members of other denominations as mad at me as Catholics are.

Like any Bible Belter raised in a family that had a lot of people inside the churches, I was raised knowing that often those who think they know the world would be appalled if they actually realized what people get away with in the Name of God.

We found it amusing that New Yorkers thought that a Country Baptist like Jimmy Carter might be naïve about politics. We all knew that the two places where cold blooded politics and warm pretenses are most at home are in small Baptist churches, where the minister is elected, and in the Papal elections in Rome.

An occupation where one talks and worries endlessly about Sin simply cannot be a healthy place for an average human to have one’s spirit.

We all know that psychiatry is famous for producing or attracting mentally ill people and kooks, and anyone who has some experience with the world does not find this difficult to understand.

A Bible Belter who has been around a bit expects special sickness inside churches the way a city person expects it inside psychiatry. It may be necessary for someone to deal professionally with sin and for someone else to deal professionally with mental illness, but that doesn’t mean that their jobs won’t warp them.

Likewise, medicine was not discredited in the last generation when so many MDs worked themselves to death.

An institution is not what it SAYS it is. An institution is a result of survival in competition with other institutions. Every society has a religious institution, but if all you consider is its Wordist foundation with no consideration of this survivalist reality, You are living in La La Land.

If the two thousand years since the crucifixion teaches us nothing else, it makes it perfectly clear that there is nothing that has not been justified, nay, DEMANDED in the Name of Christ at one time or another.

There is nothing that has not been declared to be a Mentally Healthy Attitude by those who dictate mental health in society during that long period.

In dealing with institutions, reality has very little to do with the books they publish.

Profiling is not just part of law enforcement investigation, to a large extent profiling IS law enforcement investigation.

A profiler looks for a pattern. He does NOT look for fairness.

The profiler gives out a list of characteristic a perp has, height, weight, accent, locations where he tends to hang out, and every one of those characteristics apply to tens of thousands or even millions of other people.

That’s what profiling IS.

None of this is objected to, because the same public a profiler is being unfair to wants him caught, and is paying the profiler to help catch him.

If a serial murderer is the same size and weight and coloring as I am, it could make me some trouble at a roadblock.

I expect it to. I expect the cops to be on the lookout for people of my size, weight and color, and I’m all for firing the ones who don’t in such a situation.

You don’t have to be a regular watcher of COPS to realize that if a person’s skin is black, he is ten times more likely to have committed a crime. If a person of my general appearance has committed a crime, I expect it to cause me some difficulties.

I do NOT blame the police for that. I EXPECT, no, I DEMAND that in such a case people like me be stopped and checked out.

And I NEVER blame it on the cops.

I blame it on the felon.

On 9/11, Bush’s Secretary of Transportation was a Japanese-American. He declared that grandmothers of Scandinavian descent would be strip-searched every bit as much as foreigners in Arab garb.

The reason Mineta said he did this was his trauma at the treatment of his Japanese-American family in internment camps in World War II.

If a grown man has childhood traumas you put him in a nice quiet place, you talk to him and you give him sleepy pills.

You do NOT let his childhood traumas turn into national policy

Unless you’re a dumbass respectable conservative, of course. The reason people assumed that Moslems with a foreign accent were more likely to be terrorists is because Moslems with foreign accents DID all the 9/11 bombing.

So respectable conservatives demanded that tenth generation American grandmothers be strip-searched.

The reason police suspect blacks of committing more crimes is because blacks commit more crimes.

Nobody, but NOBODY, ever states flatly that that is why you profile blacks.

It’s the reason you profile ANYBODY.