Delinquent finance has today a religious significance because it is playing a major part in the enslaving of the entire world by the conscious or unconscious enemies of God, the smartest of whom have to be well aware that their ultimate purpose is to send every single soul down to Hell. However, before we present any other piece of their financial machinery, it is necessary to understand the full delinquency of fractional reserve banking, first introduced in the “Eleison Comments” of October 29, last year.
Fractional reserve banking means that a bank need only hold in reserve, ready to be paid out to customers, a small fraction of the money they put into circulation. It arose in Europe in the late Middle Ages when bankers observed that if they took in as deposits, say, 100 ounces of gold and gave out 100 slips of paper certifying that the owner of the certificate could claim so much gold from the bank, then almost never at any one time would more than, say, ten customers ever bring in a certificate to claim back a deposit of gold. And as long as the people had confidence that the bank could and would always have gold to give in return for certificates, then these pieces of paper could happily serve as money, and as such they would circulate amongst the people.
However, the bankers realized meanwhile that in the normal run of business, they needed to hold in reserve only ten ounces of gold for 100 certificates, or, if they held 100 ounces of gold deposited with the bank, then they could issue 1000 paper certificates. Of these, 900 would have nothing at the bank to back them. They would be “funny money”, created by the bank out of thin air, but that would not matter so long as not more than a proportion of one customer out of ten wanted to cash in his paper for a piece of gold.
If they did, then the bank would not have the gold for all the certificates, and either it rapidly borrowed some gold from elsewhere to hand out, or the people risked realizing what a confidence trick had been played on them. If their confidence in the bank then vanished, everybody would want their money back at once – bank runs are only made possible by fractional reserve banking – and large numbers of customers would be left holding in their hands nothing but worthless pieces of paper. The bank would of course be bankrupt, and one could hope it would disappear altogether.
Thus wherever there is fractional reserve banking, the bank is intrinsically fragile, and it is, ultimately, playing a confidence trick on its customers. Extrinsically, it may protect itself by having a guarantee of support in case of need from, often, a central bank, but that guarantee is only as sure as the guarantor, and in the meantime it gives a dangerous power to any central bank. Thereby hangs another tale of financial delinquency, but that of compound interest must come first.
Venuleius is back as Opus Publicum As I said, the things I like about the Orthodox are the church as small parish/big ethnic family, grassroots traditionalism (no Novus), economy and Leonid Ouspensky’s view of icons (halfway between a picture or statue and God’s presence in the Eucharist). Beyond that, what Venuleius (now Modestinus) says.
When you turn on the television, you can flip to any channel you want without worrying that the show is going to break your TV. You can go through every radio station on the dial knowing that you’re not going to land on one that forces your speakers to play nothing but commercials and randomly switches back to that station without your input. No device or broadcast on the planet does that – except computers.
This is the problem with the modern, equalist society: nothing is wrong with anything
Hey, sweetcheeks, there is something wrong with you. Evolutionarily speaking, there is something very wrong with you. Instead of demanding people pretend you’re normal, embrace your wrongness.
World War II was not a straightforward death grapple between good and evil. America first: let the Nazis and Soviets destroy each other. The propaganda then: if it wasn’t for our boys we’d be speaking German. Now: The Tuskegee Airmen and Go for Broke soldiers singlehandedly liberated the concentration camps, the reason why we fought, while the white soldiers guarded Manzanar, which was probably the Republicans’ fault. Fact: We were supporting players who helped the Soviets win the war.
Here ends the Christmas cycle for the liturgical year 2011-12.
Time to change the Marian anthem after the office:
Ave regina cælorum Ave domina angelorum...
New to me: music including singing over the Last Gospel at High or Sung Mass, as done at Our Lady of Lourdes. Makes sense as it’s the priest’s devotion, put after Mass in the Middle Ages to fight the Catharist heresy IIRC. (My opinion: Mass starts when the priest opens the book and reads the introit, or at least unofficially when the choir sings the introit, and ends with the blessing. The prep office and Last Gospel are add-ons.) But it would be nice to hear the changing Last Gospel in missals older than 1962 for the liturgical day outranked/suppressed on some dates.
William Oddie (whom I heard preach in England once):
How come so many Catholics voted for him last time?
Rhetorical? The immigrant/workers’-union/ward-boss politics of the old Dems, theologically orthodox, socially conservative, cheerfully corrupt in practice, and in theory well-meaning leftists vs the WASPs keeping them down. In shorthand, on the left economically, on the right socially. (Like what third-way-ers believe in.) Throw in today’s peer-pressure liberalism and many/most Catholics still hit the D button except well-meaning culture warriors (they go to Mass and care about the babies) who vote with the pro-war Protestant right. (As part of that PC pressure, Catholics felt the same guilt as other whites for O. to use.) Which, together with Vatican II’s sellout in practice, gets to the article’s point, that the bishops had been funding local leftist causes for about 25 years; Obama’s slap is to try to get them back in line and keep the money coming.
Hmm. Rather than Al Green (that was cute; I’m not being sarcastic on that) he could fittingly sing Cee Lo Green (no relation, ha ha; actually I like his music) to that old constituency. ‘Well, f*ck you, ohhhhh.’
For now I still say the depression and the Dinkins effect will sink him anyway, no matter which mainstream puppet the Republicans run.
Catholicism and politics. Dan McCarthy: Readers deserve fair warning: today I am not a very observant Catholic. To hear the media tell it, Catholicism has only two categories, devout and dissident. Actually there are a lot of people who fall into neither set... A little over a generation ago there were enclaves of Catholic thinking within liberalism and conservatism – certainly the conservative movement once had an influential Catholic component. Now there are enclaves of partisan liberalism and conservatism within Catholicism. On the right, a political ecumenism has been pursued in the name of fighting the culture war, and while it may be necessary in some degree, it has politicized and protestantized many Catholic conservatives.
What’s good and bad about ‘Mad Men’. I understand it’s starting again on March 25 and Matthew Weiner’s hinted it will end in two seasons, near the present.
First the good:
The reason I watch – and I assume this is the case for many other fans – is the aesthetic. Regardless of the moral degradation and heavy-handed critique of patriarchalism on display, we like to see depicted an age when ambition was still rewarded, when men and women regarded their public appearance seriously, when good music was still the order of the day, and when the American dream was still a dream within reason. In short, everyone likes a well-dressed man.
IMHO it got good right around episode #6 when they finally stopped flogging the whole “aren’t we so much better now” meme.
One reason I was initially drawn to “Mad Men” was the moral complexity of its characters. Nobody was all good or all bad – just like life.
One thing I’ve appreciated about “Mad Men” is its exploration of the netherworld between ideals and reality.
Like Dan McCarthy speaking for the Catholics who are neither hyper-devout nor lapsed. I like the traditional version of that. Like... a lot of people around 1960.
But:
I noticed of course that Don Draper doesn’t believe in much. ‘There’s an essential nihilism at the heart of the series.’ For all the good still in the culture then, the rot had set in so the self-destruction of the culture isn’t that surprising.
LRC: This scandal is not that easy to follow, but it looks like a Big Sister was caught by Big Brother on a federal wiretap which revealed that she was going to use her Congressional influence to help two officials of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) get their espionage-related charges reduced. The irony is that Harman, whose bowels are in an uproar over this wiretapping, is one of the many proponents in Congress for the government wiretapping of us sheeple.
Boston Brahmin. They sound different from each other. The one on the left is definitely American with a couple of localisms; the one on the right more mid-Atlantic/partly English like George Plimpton and Bill Buckley.
They ‘sing’ (try to talk, halfway between barking and howling) like Mishka on YouTube. They had a sled demo running a lap pulling a practice sled on bicycle-like wheels in the grass and mud.
One of those year-round Christmas shops, in a little 200-year-old house.
Revolutionary War re-enactors.
Because the winners write the history, most don’t remember it was a civil war. Benedict Arnold (whom the British didn’t like because of what he did, though he had understandable reasons) was the exception. Many Americans served under the king based on principle.
1963 architectural detail, Moorestown Mall. An anchor store that’s now a Boscov’s.
The music at Sung Mass today reminded me of Martha Eischen’s description of it: I have been the beneficiary of great grace and blessing as I have journeyed in my new “home”. My parish is Our Lady of Lourdes, Philadelphia, PA. We are surrounded with so much of what I grew up with as a privileged Anglo-Catholic. The music – organ prelude and postlude, Anglican processional and recessional hymns, and Gregorian chant in Latin for the Mass – is really just as good as old-school Anglican including Anglo-Papalist and, like Good Shepherd, Rosemont (where Eischen came from) used to be, American biretta-belt Anglo-Catholic.
Those last two long (late 1800s-mid-1900s) looked alike, looking like the Roman Catholic Church before Vatican II, but are based on different ideas. The first, a small minority, really were what most people took ACs to be, would-be Roman Catholics (they wanted corporate union). They were mostly British (but most Britons weren’t and aren’t among them) and after V2 went Novus Ordo, which they are now as the British ordinariate. (No problem now that the Pope’s fixed it in English.) They don’t need a course about Anglican vs Catholic doctrine to be ordained because they never believed in Anglican doctrine! Once they’ve been nulla osta’d, all they need is a semester or speed course to get acclimated. (Freshman orientation, not plebe summer or boot camp.) The other also took many/most of their practices from Rome in the good old days but used more of the Prayer Book and took the position that they didn’t need to convert because they believed in something they called Anglicanism, pieced together from their spin on the classical English divines, that they said was just as much a ‘branch’ of the Catholic Church as Rome and the Orthodox; better, they said, because it didn’t innovate with the post-schism doctrines Rome defined. That’s right: rather like (other) Protestants accusing Rome of unbiblical doctrine, they thought their church was more conservative than Rome! They seem best represented now by the Bob Hart Continuers. Of course I don’t agree but I respect them.
Then there’s the liberal version of the latter: many Episcopalians now and the mainliners who now run the Church of England. (The C of E also has Evangelicals.) ‘Affirming Catholics’: they believe nearly the same things about the creeds, the Mass and the sacraments as we do, and they love our liturgies and those liturgies’ gear, but it’s on their terms, not the church’s. Or to put it better, on the Anglican Church’s terms, not the Catholic Church’s: they don’t believe in an infallible church backing those creeds, that Mass and those sacraments but think their denomination’s power, by vote, to change any teaching is ‘the authority of the church’. (Doctrine is unrepealable in church infallibility.) Considering they’re now in communion with non-episcopal mainliners, it seems to me their logical conclusion isn’t the old branch theory based on claiming the historic episcopate but that the whole mainline, like the World Council of Churches, is the true church. I’m not angry at them. What’s the point? Out of respect I don’t blog about their business. I’m describing it here only to distinguish it from its Anglican relatives and from Catholic belief.
Sort of like the difference between the few high-church Greek Catholics, who do what Rome wants – loving Orthodox liturgics and theological expression, so they don’t latinize the churches and services – and Orthodox and OicwR anti-Westernism hating the graceless Latin heretics. (Traditional Roman Catholicism doesn’t order or pressure you to hate Orthodox practices.) They look alike – so a Roman Catholic might mistake an unlatinizer/delatinizer for an anti-Westerner/schismatic – but are very much not.
Off the top of my head, the things I like best about the Orthodox are the church as small parish/big ethnic family, grassroots traditionalism (no Novus), economy and Leonid Ouspensky’s view of icons (halfway between a picture or statue and God’s presence in the Eucharist).
It’s a blessing to live in a city big enough and Catholic enough that Sung Mass is a quick trip from home. That (weekly Mass, just enough) and with Winfred Douglas’ diurnal at home (Benedictine breviary using the old BCP psalms and canticles), to echo Eischen, you have the best of ACism to live in a Novus-free world.
Gay: Cynthia Nixon, born that way or choice. A tiny minority, maybe about 3%, are born with that problem and deserve understanding. But the acts are still a sin. None of the government’s business.
...when Paul has said what he has said in these debates, when he has walked into the lion’s den of a GOP primary and attacked the criminal justice system for racial bias, lacerated the war on drugs, and cut to the core of the delusions behind American global aggression, he deserves to be judged on his recent history as well as his increasingly distant past.
I acknowledge this newsletter incident is ugly, indefensible and, above all, cynical. I don’t think it is all that matters in the remarkable late career of congressman Paul. And that hunting for heretics rather than celebrating converts is a losing political strategy.
Man who would empty jails of mostly black drug offenders ≠ race-baiter. The platform matters, not a questionable campaign strategy 20 years ago. He still has all my support. Finito.
Well, when dealing with a Catholic believer, it is one thing to say that he died with no regrets. No one said that. What they said is that the elderly Paterno died with a “clear conscience.”
In other words, one can assume that he said a final confession and received last rites. The contents of that confession, any regrets or mistakes that were discussed, are between the dying man, his priest and God. It’s hard to put that in a news story. I know that. However, could journalists have done a bit more to set the context of that statement?
I don’t even follow football, let alone know much about the man other than, again, Penn State threw him under the bus for their lapse, arguably killing him. (Was he a Catholic believer?)
Italians often have an interesting relationship with the church partly because that relationship is so long. Churched, some say primally Catholic, but not necessarily churchy like the Irish used to be and many Poles still are. But considering the teachings of the church, GetReligion is being logical. It wouldn’t take too much prying to find out if what they said was in the context of the church.
Some jottings about the news
Kilroy was here.
Friendly husky.
Hooray for La Vita’s Pizzeria.
One of those year-round Christmas shops, in a little 200-year-old house.
Revolutionary War re-enactors.
Look familiar?
