From RR

• Luftwaffe Israeli air force hits Gaza.
• Sorry, racists; liberty for all means immigrants too.
• More money ≠ better schools.

Labels: libertarianism, Palestine

The futility of modern politics? Also, Italian vs Mexican folk magic.
Henry Karlson:

Modernity has made it seem as everyone must be into politics, and if you are not, you are “ducking the relevant issues.” However, for most of history, most people were not connected to politics in any major way — they were free to be their own person, to pursue their own proper place in the world and let the politicians deal with politics. Democratic states create the illusion that one’s political activity means something and so everyone must be active in politics or one is not doing one’s duty – in this way, politics has become a religious obligation, and a state religion. But as de Maistre among others show, this spectacle is ridiculous because it is based upon ideologies which are self-contradictory — when mobs rule, the individual is sucked up anyway.

I do know the rise of political activism has come hand in hand with the decrease in the general public’s connection with Catholicism. The state has its calendar – it becomes more important than the ecclesial ones with its festivals. The state has its laws – which become more important than canon law. The state has its leaders – who are seen as more important than ecclesial leaders. The state has its ideals – which are read into the church’s. The dream the positivists have of state religion is true, and I would say the bread and circuses (sports) are a part of the state religion too — it’s the folk aspect of it.

Labels: history, politics, the Catholic faith

antiwar.com’s week that was

Labels: peace, politics

Putt knot yore trussed in spellchequers
The Cupertino effect, nothing to do with saints who could fly. Yes, it should be ‘spelling-checkers’ even though it doesn’t sound as good. From Steve Hayes.

Labels: politics

Coming home at last?
From the wars. Pat Buchanan’s latest. From Joshua.

Labels: peace, politics

The prejudice nobody writes about
From Damian Thompson

Why have so few reacted to the WaPo series on the secret government?
From John Boyden

Labels: politics

I thirst

Words spoken 2,000 years ago come to mind reading this story involving the same players.

Labels: Palestine

Today’s hail of bullets from RR

• Little things mean a lot. Dutch quit Afghanistan.
• First ‘Mad Men’; now this. Doomsday shelters making a comeback.
• Is the Jordan River unsafe for baptisms?
• Know your enemy. NATO deliberately targeted power and water infrastructure in Serbia, in order to demoralize the civilian population. As NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said, ‘If President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity all he has to do is accept NATO’s five conditions and we will stop this campaign.’ And in Iraq, the death toll from two decades of strategic bombing, sanctions and infrastructure damage is into the millions. The United States unleashed the equivalent of two Haiti earthquakes on two defenseless countries.
• Forced to be free.
• Pathologising ourselves.
• Sex and the law. A word from Roissy: What the f*** is up with statutory rape? It’s a joke law made up by joke legislators without a scintilla of real-world experience with women. At the borderline of 16 to 18 years old, many women could easily pass for mid to late 20s. It is well known by neuroscientists and psychologists studying these things that women mature faster than men. A 17-year-old hottie who flirts with me knows exactly what she is doing and what she wants. And what about women who lie? They exist, lots of them. It’s time to end the charade. If the “underage” woman is physically developed, and she consents to the sex, there is no rape charge, period. For chrissakes, there are 14-year-olds in parts of the world getting married off and pumping out children of their own. BTW my theory for the moment about him is he’s a more aware version of the guys he’s trying to help: not (in his and other PUAs’ terms) an alpha himself (then he wouldn’t help the competition) but a Promethean figure, a wised-up greater beta helping a brother out. The Anti-Gnostic: Beneath the bluster and decadence is a very substantive, traditionalist message. Roissy is one of those people despised in turn by the Left for his reactionary opinions and by the Right for his (purportedly) dissolute lifestyle. Anybody demonized by all sides of the political spectrum is usually worth a listen in my experience. The fallen natural order described accurately... from Satan’s POV. Summing up his points: women are as evil as men, sex is fun and liberalism is bulls*** nobody really believes (even when they’re socialised to say they do, they act according to nature: women don’t like nice wimps).
• Let the markets thrive so people can. From Joshua’s bailiwick, after more than 50 years of North-South Korean tension, it’s time to end the socialist fantasy and restore markets and freedom to the North.
• Tea Party to rally on 9/11 anniversary and it scares part of the left, which recommends the rally to me. But I see the article’s point (no to the red-state fascists: the wannabe theocrats and anti-immigrationists), or why I don’t vote for the Constitution Party which seems more to do with regurgitated protty moral-majoritarianism than the Constitution. (But better Chuck Baldwin than mainstream pols.) But to be fair, to the Tea Party’s credit here I don’t see any sabre-rattling or anti-Arabism. No, the bolshies hate them because they, gasp, hate the government. Good.
• Col. Andrew Bacevich: the Western way of war has run its course.
• Answering a lefty whine to libertarians. ‘Under Bush, where were you?’ Where was I? Since 2002 doing what I’m doing right now. Under our Lord, God and Saviour Barack Obama, where are you?

Labels: history, libertarianism, peace, politics

Labels: Pennsylvania

From Steve Sailer

• The most exquisitely fun part of controlling media is the sheer self-contradictory absurdity of what you can force people to squeal in apology for mentioning your control of media. Oliver Stone on Jewish power in the media and US foreign policy including distorting history: Stalin getting a free pass.
• The dirt gap.
• Why Europeans don’t like gypsies. To be fair most non-gypsies’ ideas about them are rubbish (Carmen-like fantasies); in ways like all traditional peoples this originally Indian one is socially including sexually conservative. (High birth rates which scare racists and young parenthood are if anything conservative.)

Labels: film, history, Palestine, Russia

Labels: humour, television

Derb takes a page from Sailer
The theory about average group intelligences is fine (no nice-white-guy posturing from me); the political solution its fans want (un-libertarian race-baiting) not. (Affirmative action, no; non-discrimination in this context, yes.) At least Sailer acknowledges there are smart people in Mexico; of course most of its all-stars are the ruling élite and don’t leave. (Who else smells on Derb here the Black Legend and its implied anti-Catholicism?) Individual liberty trumps both La Raza and what little’s left of the Klan.

There is even an extreme position — I don’t hold it myself, but you sometimes see it expressed on race-realist websites — that black Americans are too few in numbers and too helplessly dependent to matter at all, and that the race issue in the U.S.A. is entirely a status contest between different groups of whites, with blacks and Hispanics as passive tokens.

I don’t myself, as I said, believe this is the whole truth; but it is some of the truth. I am speaking here of “the narcissism of small differences.” It is my experience that among white Americans of all regions and classes, feelings about black people — much less Hispanic people — in the generality are never as strong as feelings about other white groups. The passion you can hear from a liberal college professor in Massachusetts when he is talking about, say, NASCAR fans, far exceeds anything he will exhibit in regards to black people, if he ever thinks about black people at all. And vice, to some degree, versa. This is the dark lie at the heart of all the babble about “racism.”

(Jared once told me that when he speaks to mixed audiences most of the angry vituperation comes from whites. Blacks more often listen to him with interested curiosity, and come up afterwards to ask thoughtful questions. I note that Ms. Hines, his Washington Examiner interviewer, is black.)

Divisions among whites matter, too.

America’s British culture

Labels: politics

Labels: humour

Labels: history

Labels: history, the Catholic faith

Labels: Anglicanism, history, the Catholic faith

State bureaucracy is stupid

Clearwater’s lifeguard station needs to be handicapped-accessible.

Labels: politics

Another Lower Merion School District webcam lawsuit
Check out its statement:

...continued litigation is clearly not the right way to proceed and not in the best interest of the students or the school-district community. While the results of that investigation reveal that mistakes were made...

Labels: libertarianism, Pennsylvania, the Internet

Nixon not only undermined himself...
... but, says Republican Jerry Scott, cost America victory in Vietnam

The Paris Peace Treaty, which was signed on Jan. 27, 1973, ended the Vietnam War. It was presumed at the time that, if North Vietnam violated the terms of the treaty, President Nixon would resume bombing Hanoi immediately. Once Nixon resigned to avoid almost certain impeachment, Congress cut off all funding to Vietnam. Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. We now have peaceful relations with Vietnam. We are their largest customer. Hanoi, in particular, is a beautiful city to walk around in, which I did a couple of years ago.

Labels: history

A local Tea Party
Not necessarily an endorsement. Again it has libertarian potential.

• Story.
• A founder.

Labels: politics

Church

• The Anglican Church in Ghana is no longer Anglo-Catholic. I’ve long stopped being surprised or angry really. This stuff is now mainline old hat like another of their favourite subjects. (If one of their denominations quits Christianity like the Unitarians, that would be unsurprising but news.) Besides your bishop gets to chat with the Queen every 10 years, Anglicanism means everything’s subject to change by vote (and nobody tells us who we can’t sleep with, going back to a certain king). It’s not about the girls or the gays but a fallible church. Never been to Ghana but once knew a priest from there and Brother Stephen’s been. He said their services were still nicely high and many churches still treasured their English Missals. Solution: African ordinariates? I imagine there might be enough residual ACism in South Africa (where ACs and the British in general opposed apartheid — as many readers know, I was acquainted with a priest who was kicked out of the South African territory of Namibia in the ’60s... Brother says a young Fr Tutu used to pray the Rosary at demonstrations) to make it so. Reminds me a bit of another West African ex-colony now a country, Gabon, where Lefebvre served as Archbishop of Dakar (Senegal like Gabon was in French West Africa) and was so liked that the SSPX have a following there. Photo: Canon Victor Leon Acquaye in Ghana.
• Brother Stephen taught me of a bygone lay ministry in churches (like beadles and the people collecting pew fees): dog-whippers! Not because churches had anything against dogs but quite the opposite. I shouldn’t forget that dogs in church were quite common in the day and that one of the things that shocked Muslims about Christian churches was that dogs ran free in them. Which of course caused problems, hence this ‘venerable ecclesiastical office’. Bowrr!

Labels: Anglicanism, history

From @TAC

• Is Pakistan killing our troops?
• The answer is right in front of you. Perhaps if the Left can cross the Rubicon and start believing they can make more of a difference at the courthouse, rather than continually organizing marches on Washington D.C. – or thinking that they someday will control the center (which they won’t) – they might find it more productive and rewarding and also be joined by libertarians and conservatives who feel the same way. Then we can truly have a two-party system pitting the center of power against everyone else.
• Wikileaks and our weak-kneed Congress except Kucinich and Paul.
• Courage at 10 Downing. Britain’s newly elected Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, has just described Gaza – under Israel’s control – as an open air “prison camp”, and sharply criticized Israel’s attack on the Turkish organized humanitarian-aid flotilla. Who will be the first neocon to complain about British “surrender monkeys”? First commenter to guess correctly wins a small prize.
• Reading the tea leaves. So much potential but the red-state fascism is a problem. A lion’s share of GOP congresspeople with Tea Party ties signed on to an idiotic resolution endorsing an Israeli military strike on Iran.
• If certain Tea Partiers and Tea Party groups have come under fire for alleged racism, it may be due to the fact they’ve couched their opposition to the Obama Administration personally. They don’t just oppose the Administration, they oppose the man himself. This is what happens when persons, especially on the Right, still believe in the Cult of the Presidency.

Labels: England, Palestine, peace, politics

Islam may not be a cult but cult-like Islam is flourishing
Writes Damian Thompson

My rough and ready definition of a typical cult involves a charismatic leader, radical teachings that tend to alienate adherents from their friends and families, and therefore a high degree of tension between the group and the surrounding environment.

But some of this applies to Benedictine monasteries and the Church of England’s Alpha Course, too, so let’s not get too holier-than-thou about cults. Also, cult-like behaviour needn’t be overtly religious at all: think of the gurning faces of the bedsit activists trying to sell you Trotskyist newspapers on Tottenham Court road, or the Buddha-like gaze of the woman from HR as she repeats the company mantras.

Puppets of doom
More from me on this sort of thing. From the MCJ.

Labels: the Catholic faith

Labels: peace, politics

On the Modernists’ Jesus

Well, the comments on the article are certainly interesting. And they quickly get to the heart of the doctrinal unraveling that’s occurring in many churches today. For my own part, I can’t see the point. The pithy sayings of a long-dead carpenter from Roman-occupied Palestine are perhaps interesting as a historical curiosity, but nothing more. I certainly wouldn’t want to base my life on what he said, did, or recommended for others.

Labels: the Catholic faith

Why being pro-life is a Catholic thing
From Hilary

Labels: the Catholic faith

The spy who may have helped take down Communism
From Taki

Labels: film, history