The left makes a point: Romney’s a dick Which explains the campaign commercial with the man crying because Romney helped him find his missing daughter. Whatever. Macht nichts since I’d never vote for him. Again if I were his Karl Rove I’d play up his business acumen as qualifying him as the country’s CEO. From Daniel Nichols.
A modest foreign-policy proposal. In light of the recent nearly unanimous vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to “enhance” our already incestuously close relationship with the government of Israel, I would like to make a modest proposal: move the entire U.S. military establishment, Pentagon and all, along with the U.S. Congress, to Israel and let the Israelis pay for it.
The war among women.Sailer’s got the mommy-war non-story sussed. Like with the beautiful Sarah Palin, lots of women are jealous of Ann Romney and were gunning for her.
Yes, I’m with the church on contraception but that’s not the point here. Roissy shoots and scores. Feminism is about power. Over you. Not liberty for women. Often again envy. In praise of feminine women.
The confusion is understandable: Mormonism has its roots in the Protestant revivalism of the 19th century and claims to worship the Trinity. Mormons use all the familiar Christian terminology. Mitt Romney, no doubt, can look you in the eye without mental reservation and tell you that Jesus Christ is his Lord and Saviour.
The problem is that when a Mormon says such things he means something entirely different from what the broadest Christian orthodoxy means. His “Trinity” consists of three separate physical beings, who are highly evolved men. There is no Supreme Being, no Creator who made all things out of nothing. What are eternal in Mormonism are matter and intelligences (souls), which are uncreated.
While using familiar Christian language, Mormonism teaches an entirely different worldview. It worships a different god, or rather, gods. This materialist gnosticism is so foreign to historic Christianity that no Christian church or ecclesial body recognizes Mormon baptism as valid.
Islam, on the other hand, preaches the God of Abraham, Who exists from all eternity, a perfect Spirit, Who created the world from nothing, Who will judge all humanity at the end of the age, Who spoke through the familiar Jewish prophets. It teaches, further, that Jesus Christ was born of a Virgin, that He was the greatest prophet and will return at the end of the world. Of course, Islam denies His divinity, but only the ignorant deny that Muslims worship the One God. Indeed, when you consider the traditional Jewish hostility to Christ and His Mother, and the blasphemies that have been uttered through the ages by Jews, it is apparent that Islam has far more in common with Christianity than does Judaism. (I do understand that many modern Jewish scholars approach Christ with a far more benign attitude.)
Five things most people don’t know are Catholic Pretty good. My readers know the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is not Eastern Orthodox, but very close to them, and like Rome and the Orthodox has apostolic succession. Like the Orthodox it doesn’t recognize the supremacy of the Pope.
How I would have voted, based on what most people thought they knew. Cardinal Spellman knew better about Kennedy. On the right, only smart outliers like Murray Rothbard knew better, and my problems with Nixon – his taking away the last of the dollar’s backing and starting affirmative action – are nothing to do with his getting caught trying to fix an election (which Kennedy got away with, probably why Nixon did it). The left didn’t and doesn’t care about the Constitution.
A Goldwater campaign button is on the desk where I’m typing this.
More ordinariate good news: the once and future Fr Hunwicke Old news now but of course I’m happy Mr H’s on the ordination list. He’s handled the past year well, taking the delay in getting on the list with stiff-upper-lip unflappability. A Tridentine Anglo-Catholic who meant it, has the smarts and toughness to stand up to the liberals, and, I understand, can run a parish: the kind of priest Pope Benedict wants.
West Virginia: ha ha! A convict carries 10 counties and gets 41% of the Dem vote in the primary. Of course they don’t like Obama. He thinks he’s better than them. From MCJ.
WaPo crash dive.The shills for the state can’t maintain their circulation thanks to the Internet and of course, Craigslist. Soon they will probably ask for taxpayer money.
I saw a car with two bumper stickers on it today. The first one said: “Don’t Tread on Me.” The second one said: “God Bless Our Troops, Especially Our Snipers.” What happens if foreigners say “Don’t Tread on Me” to the U.S. government? They get shot by snipers of course.
Blago conveniently silenced for 12 years. Anyone who thinks that all governors don’t require “pay to play” for appointments to the U.S. Senate simply doesn’t live in the real world. But in Blago’s case, why was he being targeted by the feds for doing what everyone knows happens regularly? Whom did he p*ss off? Maybe Rahm Emanuel. At any rate, these questions have of course never been answered.
The latest shiny object to distract the plebs. Sovereign debt crises, the brink of World War III, the coming American default, a stagnant economy, the police state, and more. These things are mere trifles compared to the great important issue of our time: gay marriage. At least that’s what the mass media will do its best to convince us over the election season as it makes this issue the great issue of the year. My Sailerian thought: Obama’s waffling was partly because he’s always wanted to be black, including politically. Many blacks are religious Christians who of course don’t believe in gay marriage, as the 2008 election in California showed.
Biden, Obama, Romney and gay marriage: ugh Regular readers know my libertarian line: don’t mind if you do; there’s no such thing as consensual crime. You can define marriage as you like, with the right to be wrong, but if the state does that for you and me, forcing you to go along with somebody’s delusion, that’s a problem. So I agree with the social conservatives that the president’s halting endorsement of gay marriage is a bad thing. Because the people pushing it don’t think individual liberty is good enough. They want to force you and me to believe in it. Something that’s impossible. So, however halfhearted and opportunistic this is (what struck me was Obama’s hemming and hawing and Romney’s wimpy pseudo-con weasel words defending real marriage — ‘that’s my preference’, etc., as if there’s no objective truth), and although it’s still not the law in most places, this shows mainstream politics have gone mad.
Another battle, like the one with the government forcing the church to pay for contraception, between the church (as in Pope Benedict, not old ‘We Are Church’, etc.) and the secular church, the state, which you can say is now at war with the church, not new in Protestant America.
A friend directed me to Matt Welch’s column, “Why Big Government Is Offensive.” While the article is a rehash of arguments which have been advanced in many different forums before, the thesis reminds me of some recent online discussions I’ve been having: Namely, that the use of state (legislative) power to enforce morality, and the size of government which is presupposed to carry these enforcements out, is a bad idea. For while your cause might capture enough votes to get your way today, the other side will come right back at you tomorrow. There’s an undeniable attractiveness to these sort of “live and let live” arguments, though they are often advanced for instrumental reasons in support of “libertarian values” – which are often minority values. But I can understand why Christians, particularly conservative ones, are attracted to these sort of arguments as well. After all, if there is no chance that your confession can hold the reins and keep them, why risk a values struggle where the force of law can so easily be used against you? But because there are still so many Americans – very many, in fact – who believe that this is still a “Christian nation” with something akin to a “moral majority” somewhere out there, there’s still a steady (and wrongheaded) belief that whatever advancements are made today in the name of morality won’t be undone tomorrow. Yes, if the church had political power I’d still be a libertarian.
I wouldn’t be surprised if both the House and Senate become Republican-controlled. That means we’ll be “treated” to at least two years of legislative deadlock, with a potential voter backlash in 2014, and then a lame-duck period for the President leading up to November 2016.
Worked well under Clinton.
During that time unemployment will hold steady at 8-10%, at least one minor recession (if not another major one) will kick in, and the polarization so many people lament over will reign supreme. Maybe we’ll see some sporadic “people movements” like the Tea Party and Occupy pop up, but I doubt they will be sustainable. People, for a laundry list of reasons, get bored with these sorts of things, and because of the aforementioned polarization, there’s always a countermovement waiting to expend its energy discrediting the extreme version of the other side; meanwhile the status quo goes unchallenged.
Those ‘movements’ are Astroturf anyway: fake grassroots. For example the local Tea Party is a mainstream GOP puppet taking advantage of well-meaning red-staters at heart.
I don’t have an idealistic bone in my body, and I always expect things to get worse, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But you asked if I thought “real change” was coming, and I don’t – not even if things get worse. In my view, things would have to radically deteriorate for drastic action to be taken at the top; the bottom-up approach of various movements have too poor a track record for me to place much faith in them (though I’m usually not very supportive of these things anyhow). I think the best we can hope for is the uncovering of a Midwest-sized oil deposit out West. That will save us.
The Libertarian Party went with another onetime Republican who’s held high office I wouldn’t go nearly as far as calling Gary Johnson a fakertarian like the last one – at first I thought Johnson had potential if Ron Paul quits – but my choice seems between writing in Paul and staying home again.
Generations: the Sarlos, Donna’s mother’s parents, probably in New York, probably in the ’40s. Relatively narrow-brimmed hats weren’t just in the ’60s. They’ve always worked well for certain builds.
Flea-market treasures:
Bought:
A jet-age sapphire.
My watch.
Anti-war but pro-troops and pro-Second Amendment.
Ever since the Pope reformed the Novus Ordo in English, while I like living Novusless I’d wanted to see how it’s playing in what’s left of liberal parishes. Had my chance thanks to the First Communion of one of Donna’s nieces. Run by an old religious order so there you go. A lot of the junk is still there, from the guitar music (at one point I thought they were going to break into the Beatles’ ‘I’m Looking Through You’, and the man who looks like an old rock star plays very well) to the women, older of course, serving at the altar and giving Communion, because after all, it’s a 40-year-old ‘tradition’, but now it’s Catholic in spite of them, thanks to the Holy Father. It’s not heretical or invalid so in a pinch you can go to it. (You can make a case for invalidity because of lack of Catholic intent – they even use a silver classical Anglican Communion cup, deliberately not shaped like a Catholic chalice, one of the ways Cranmer flipped off the church when the king let him – but I won’t push it here.) Benedict means business: do it or else. Deo gratias. Credit: the priest sang the real chant, in English, for ‘Ite, missa est, alleluia, alleluia’ so, the only time I sang, I sang back the chant response. (Most Sundays at Sung Mass I only sing the Credo and responses like that and enjoy listening to the two Anglican hymns. It’s my day of rest.)
I’m guessing it used to be the town’s Polish national parish, now merged with the old territorial parish downtown (which has a charming little 1800s church no longer a church and a big postwar building; interestingly the downtown one is in an area now very immigrant Portuguese). Some nice shrines:
‘I am the lady of the rosary.’
Ite ad Joseph.
Taz the Italian greyhound’s paws are gnarled by arthritis.
Santa’s little helpers. This brother and sister are half-Italian greyhound, half-miniature pinscher.
Razor blades don’t dull from cutting your soft doughy face, nor even your food-encrusted whiskers – the dulling effect actually comes from water and air corroding the metal. You can greatly limit that corrosion by simply drying the blades after each use – blotting them on a towel is the easiest technique, but other people have had success with dipping them in alcohol.
Some jottings about the news
A May day.
So nice that Aslan the crazy cat enjoys it.
How I would have voted, based on what most people thought they knew. Cardinal Spellman knew better about Kennedy. On the right, only smart outliers like Murray Rothbard knew better, and my problems with Nixon – his taking away the last of the dollar’s backing and starting affirmative action – are nothing to do with his getting caught trying to fix an election (which Kennedy got away with, probably why Nixon did it). The left didn’t and doesn’t care about the Constitution.
Generations: the Sarlos, Donna’s mother’s parents, probably in New York, probably in the ’40s. Relatively narrow-brimmed hats weren’t just in the ’60s. They’ve always worked well for certain builds.
A jet-age sapphire.
My watch.
Anti-war but pro-troops and pro-Second Amendment.
Ever since the Pope reformed the Novus Ordo in English, while I like living Novusless I’d wanted to see how it’s playing in what’s left of liberal parishes. Had my chance thanks to the First Communion of one of Donna’s nieces. Run by an old religious order so there you go. A lot of the junk is still there, from the guitar music (at one point I thought they were going to break into the Beatles’ ‘I’m Looking Through You’, and the man who looks like an old rock star plays very well) to the women, older of course, serving at the altar and giving Communion, because after all, it’s a 40-year-old ‘tradition’, but now it’s Catholic in spite of them, thanks to the Holy Father. It’s not heretical or invalid so in a pinch you can go to it. (You can make a case for invalidity because of lack of Catholic intent – they even use a silver classical Anglican Communion cup, deliberately not shaped like a Catholic chalice, one of the ways Cranmer flipped off the church when the king let him – but I won’t push it here.) Benedict means business: do it or else. Deo gratias. Credit: the priest sang the real chant, in English, for ‘Ite, missa est, alleluia, alleluia’ so, the only time I sang, I sang back the chant response. (Most Sundays at Sung Mass I only sing the Credo and responses like that and enjoy listening to the two Anglican hymns. It’s my day of rest.)
I’m guessing it used to be the town’s Polish national parish, now merged with the old territorial parish downtown (which has a charming little 1800s church no longer a church and a big postwar building; interestingly the downtown one is in an area now very immigrant Portuguese). Some nice shrines:
Ite ad Joseph.
Taz the Italian greyhound’s paws are gnarled by arthritis.
