When I was growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the 1960s, my mother did lots of volunteer work for charities because raising me, an only child of rational and agreeable temperament, didn’t take much of her time, especially after we got our first dryer (mid-1960s) and dishwasher (late 1960s). I entertained myself at the local park and library, and she didn’t need to chauffeur me to a whole bunch of high-end after-school résumé-fillers so that I could get into college. Instead, UCLA was always wide open to me. Plus, traffic was lighter, so I rode my bike everywhere.
The question is how to bring this back and this time defend individual liberty; not ‘minority group’ rights, the rights of all including minorities.
Today, to afford a house in that same neighborhood, both parents very likely will have to work. And unless they can navigate the complex application processes to get into the small number of exclusive public school programs, people who live in that neighborhood will also pay to send their kids to private school (the number of Jewish private schools, both Orthodox and Reform, in the neighborhood has skyrocketed as Jews, who were ideologically committed back then to sending their kids to public schools, have since either got religion or moved to Portland). And to get into UCLA, the kids will have to be chauffeured to intensive after-school tutoring and activities. So, today, Mom will have to work 40 hours per week for pay and may still have more mom-jobs to do with the kids than my bridge-playing mother had a generation ago.
Also, in terms of actually helping people in need of charitable work, we’ve had this huge swing over the last generation from the charitable work being done by middle-class middle-aged women to their adolescent children trying to look good on college applications. Which demographic do you think was more productive at actually helping people who need help?
Ron Paul: get the state out of drugs and marriage.
On being and hiring independent contractors. As you can see I’m old-school. I’ve had more or less the same job with more or less the same people for more than 15 years (went to a competitor once but it all merged) but I know that can change literally tomorrow (survived an office closing more than two years ago). What began as a tax shelter for the rich has long been used by companies to screw people like me out of a pension.
Not been following it but happened to tune in. A few thoughts.
Nice to see the palæocons proved right that we are tribal/ethnic and natural monarchists as Jeff Culbreath for example has said, so it’s endearing when the left defend ‘their’ figures/leaders. Instinct.
On that note, nice to see Americans’ love of the mother country after all these years.
Hooray! Sir Hubert Parry’s ‘I Was Glad’ (Psalm 121/122). Last heard that at the Catholic cathedral here before Fr Magiera’s first High Mass. And ‘Jerusalem’.
19th-20th-century Anglican trappings (first thought: nice gold copes) in a mediæval church (stolen Benedictine abbey of course) I’ve been to a few times: patrimonial options for the new ordinariates if they have any Gothic churches. But Roman Rite. But hooray of course for the sonority of the old BCP.
Much of the ceremonial we associate with British coronations and royal weddings only dates from around the 1920s.
Pedantry: it’s ‘with my body I thee worship’ because worship doesn’t always mean λατρεία.
Of course the royals don’t cross themselves. Still the land of no-popery.
Everybody loves the Archbishop of Canterbury’s voice. Residual Catholicism at work here. People really don’t want to hear a woman’s voice officiating at these things.
Never saw the flag so much in London; Brits aren’t flag-mad. Wonder if it’s an Americanism.
Attractive people, both; natural celebrities. I wish them well.
Sailer on Obama. I know it’s the law but I don’t care what country he’s from. That said I’ve always agreed with Sailer that he’s not from Kenya: a pregnant woman flying/sailing from Hawaii halfway around the world to a Third World country to give birth, especially 50 years ago, would have been unthinkable. The only reason he’s president is he happens to look like American blacks, something he’s been working for years (failing at first: Chicago blacks knew he wasn’t one of them); an affirmative-action president. He’s mostly been honest about not being for peace but people ignored that because of this. That and his strongest support is not of the class that enlists and gets sent to Afghanistan. Half-Indonesian Barry Soetoro would not have gone as far as Barack Obama the younger did. I’ve heard the man in person: charming speechmaking... about nothing.
A site that does much of my job: changing stilted business lingo (that the dumb and/or insecure use to sound important) into plain English. From Lee Penn.
Easter. The most stupendous event in the history of the cosmos – the most terrible wonder in the elapse of time between the initial and final big bangs – is never actually described.
I care less than a fig for Democracy. I consider it unspeakably more important for a country to be governed in accordance with the Law of God than to have any particular political structure. If you recommend to me Hitler’s policies as having been approved democratically by the people of Germany, or assert that Abortion Law represents the broad and settled consensus of British Society, my instinct is to reply “So what? How horrible!”
Because I am a devolutionary sort of person. I would rather see a Europe which was a mosaic of of statelets ... Scotland and Catalonia and Brittany and The Two Sicilies and Bavaria and the Papal States and Navarre and Provence and the County Palatine of the Rhine and the Dukedom of Burgundy ... you get the idea ... and say good bye to to the imperialist nation states of the modern era*.
*A character in Waugh’s Scott-King’s Modern Europe says:
I am a Croat, born under the Hapsburg Empire. That was a true League of Nations. As a young man I studied in Zagreb, Budapest, Prague, Vienna – one was free, one moved where one would; one was a citizen of Europe. Then we were liberated and put under the Serbs. Now we are liberated again and put under the Russians. And always more police, more prisons, more hanging ...
Lighting a candle at Our Lady’s and St Matrona’s shrine; a nun chants from the Acts of the Apostles; the tomb with the επιτάφιος/плащаница icon of Christ’s dead body, which the priest carries away during the Midnight Office; the midnight procession around the block (this year in the rain); the deacon at Paschal Matins; Liturgy (Mass); the miraculous icon of St Anne and the blessing of baskets of food in the hall.
Christ is risen from the dead trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.
Fittingly as I was out buying Georgian wine and Polish sausage for my Easter basket, I got into an argument in Russian with the man at the pump for overfilling my tank by mistake and trying to charge me for the extra amount. I didn’t pay the extra money and was told never to come back, which is fine with me.
George Carlin and Jim Carrey on Earth Day and environmentalism. Good old unpretentious conservation’s good but... The left may have been among Carlin’s fans but they didn’t own him. Also, from Michael D at the MCJ:
I live in Vancouver, where all of our electricity comes from hydro power. On Earth Day, a number of earnest Vancouverites turn off their lights (saving no greenhouse gases) and, ironically, light candles (made of paraffin – derived from petroleum). Have mercy upon them, O Lord, in this their annual ritual of penance.
The chickenhawk-in-chief is now using predator drones in Libya to blow up people the US hates – and plenty of civilians – as in Pakistan and so many other places.
I saw a sign at the Post Office yesterday that said: “USPS receives no federal tax dollars for its operations.” Then I remembered that Doug French recently posted something about the Post Office on the Mises blog: top 10 dying industries. According to USPS spokeswoman Sue Brennen, only 19 percent of post offices cover their costs. The Post Office lost $8.5 billion for fiscal year 2010. So I guess the question is: How does the Post Office pay its employees and vendors if it lost billions but received no federal tax dollars?
Sociologist Sam Richards on US occupation from the perspective of the occupied Arab Muslim.
32 brand names better known than generic terms Because the brand was the first on the market and/or brand names are of course catchier. Like how I understand in the South all fizzy drinks are ‘Coke’.
What benefit does America receive from membership in NATO to justify the cost of maintaining tens of thousands of troops, air and naval bases, ships, and planes defending a rich and populous continent that chronically refuses to provide the arms and men to defend itself?
Why are Americans still defending Europe 66 years after World War II ended and a generation after the Soviet Union disappeared?
Package deals in religion The Catholic faith of course is but what of related culture and politics? There are good package deals and bad/false ones. Featuring Owen White on the Ortho-convert boomlet and somebody else noticed online Orthodox are a lot like young men who become Muslims. From Dr Tighe.
Is the paleoanthropologists’ “great leap forward” the Abrahamic religions’ “fall”? Could it be that some four to five hundred centuries ago (not a long time at all, geologically speaking), our first parents were infused with that divine spark of reason that comes with the human spiritual soul and first endowed with the gift of language, bequeathing both reason and language, and all that come with them, to their progeny, even after that first sin? That divine spark is essentially what I believe; I don’t get into the how of creation.
Bacevich and Buchanan on Obama’s war. Seen on FB: Saw one of those bumper stickers for Obama with the O as a peace sign. Wanted to ask: ‘So, how’s that working out for you?’
With all due respect to these good-hearted patriotic folk, of course the best thing we can do for men like Jay Raffetto is bring them home from places like Afghanistan and not send them there to begin with.
It wasn’t about slavery. The South had the right to secede, Lee, no racist, was a hero, Lincoln a dictator and Sherman’s march to the sea a crime.
Writes Kathleen Johnson:
Every day I print out articles for my mom (89 years young). Recently she read Eric’s book War at the Top of the World and since then has become his number-one fan. I am under strict orders not to overlook any of his articles. This morning I gave her the one Eric wrote about Japan. This afternoon when I stopped in she mentioned that she had read the article. However, before she could continue the conversation she started to cry. She said she was so ashamed about what had been done to the Japanese people during WWII, and felt like such a fool for believing what the government had told everyone regarding the war in the Pacific. I told her that at that time the only information available was from the mainstream media. I told her that things were better now, that with the internet it is more difficult to keep people from knowing the truth. Now that people have all this information the kind of horrors that happened in Japan could be avoided in the future. This made her feel a lot better. I just pray that there is some truth in what I told her.
Affirmative action is the Orwellian name given to efforts to hire, admit, or otherwise promote people of certain racial or ethnic groups, merely because they belong to those groups.
The drug war is a race war. An LRC writer made a similar point: Prohibition was the holier-than-thou WASPs taking aim at Catholic immigrants, some of whom famously, happily supplied for customer demand then.
Roissy on feminist political street theatre As P.J. O’Rourke and Camille Paglia have noted, 40+ years ago girls were marching at university demanding dropping paternalistic rules meant to protect them when out at night. Now they’re having rallies complaining that it’s dangerous to be out at night. Life is ‘at your own risk’ and – this is the part the left hates and wants the government to take along with individual liberty – comes with responsibility.
Edited for, I imagine, the many readers who would be offended by uncensored Roissy:
Ostensibly, this march was about giving women the right to dress like sluts even though bad men with rape-y intentions roam the world. There’s no need to invoke blaming-the-victim like a kneejerk wind-up c*ntbot every time someone notes the obvious connection between action and reaction. Young women dressed in revealing clothing walking around late at night in shady hoods are more likely to get raped than old women dressed conservatively who are at home after 10pm. While rapists are to blame for their crime and should be strung up by their balls, women bear some responsibility for minimizing the odds that they will inspire a rapist to do the dirty deed. But of course women, paraphrasing Jack Nicholson’s character in “As Good As It Gets”, wish to be blessedly free of the fun-killing constraints of reason and accountability.
Women do need to be aware of their surroundings and the danger that men (particularly men of a certain caste), with their higher propensity to violence and sexual aggression, pose. This used to be common sense among womanhood for centuries. It is only in the past two generations that a bunch of put-upon dyke-lite broads in academia and the media have inculcated the opposite message in young women that they can do no wrong, have no obligation of personal responsibility, and should live in a world that caters to their need to behave however they see fit, free of consequence.
Isn’t that the essence of swippleness? Live off your trust fund and/or make the government, which takes the money from the rest of us, your trust fund and be a perpetual teenager. (The late ’60s: spoiled postwar kids having a party burning through the money the Don Drapers earned.) Better still when you are the government, have taken our liberty and can tell us what to do.
Money protects the upper classes from the earthly consequences of their vices, which is why it’s disastrous when lower classes imitate those vices.
Since it is a guarantee that some egregiously dumbass readers here will misinterpret the very clear line of thought laid out above, an analogy should help fix their muddled thinking. I make it a point to not blithely walk around at 2am in majority black, Latino, or otherwise poverty-stricken neighborhoods of whatever color, even if it would inconvenience me to practice this avoidance. I know, from simple observation and the collected wisdom of the masses, that doing so would increase my odds of getting mugged or killed. If I were mugged or killed, the perpetrators would bear full responsibility for their crime. I would hope they got the chair, pronto. Better still, bullets to the knees, followed by execution to the back of the head. And yet, I recognize that I can make smart or stupid decisions with regards to my safety, and that these decisions are solely within my power to effect.
Women, you, too, need to reaffirm the wisdom of your ancestors, your grandmothers, and your great-grandmothers. Men are different from you. They do not think like you on some important matters, they do not feel like you when the throb of sexual urgency pulses, and they do not behave like you when their emotions gear up for action. You need to act accordingly. This is not “blaming the victim”. This is a call to accept reality for what it is. Denying reality means reality will automatically work against you. And when that happens, no street march in the world is gonna save you.
On a related note to the slut march for freedom to pursue ridiculously easy feats of derring-do, here is an article in the New York Beta Times (all the beta that’s fit to cringe) which bolsters the Chateau maxim that women, not men, are the biggest misogynists.
One day last winter Margarite posed naked before her bathroom mirror, held up her cellphone and took a picture. Then she sent the full-length frontal photo to Isaiah, her new boyfriend.
Both were in eighth grade.
They broke up soon after. A few weeks later, Isaiah forwarded the photo to another eighth-grade girl, once a friend of Margarite’s. Around 11 o’clock at night, that girl slapped a text message on it.
“Ho Alert!” she typed. “If you think this girl is a whore, then text this to all your friends.” Then she clicked open the long list of contacts on her phone and pressed “send.”
In less than 24 hours, the effect was as if Margarite, 14, had sauntered naked down the hallways of the four middle schools in this racially and economically diverse suburb of the state capital, Olympia. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of students had received her photo and forwarded it.
Poor Margarite enshrined her love in a jpeg, and what was her punishment? The torments of her fellow sisters. A fusillade of female slut-shaming so cruel and unrelenting, Margarite was driven to living like a recluse. A quote:
Who deploys these words in vengeful anger and spiteful slander? Not men. For example, when men use the word “slut” it’s usually with their male buddies as an exercise in identifying the women most likely to put out on the first date. Men will almost never call a woman a slut to her face unless it’s a bitter, jilted ex-boyfriend looking to score points, nor will they tell the woman’s girlfriends that she is a slut.
Women use them against other women. It’s women whispering gossip and innuendo in the ears of whatever female node on their social network is willing to listen, subconsciously calculating that the souldiss will find its way to the intended target. Why do they do this? Because sluts, whores, and skanks make it harder for other girls to use sex as a bargaining chip to extract commitment from quality men and keep it once it is made. Sluts are traitors to the sisterhood, undermining the prime directive and making it more difficult for the commitment whores to get what they want.
The butt-ugly sluts in the Canadian march for slut rights should take heed: your worst traitors to the cause aren’t sensible policemen or those engaged in so-called anarchic thinking. It’s other women. Some of them even feminists.
No one would ever work at Burger King or in construction for free, even for a day. That is just a case of “blue collar” people being way smarter than their white-collar counterparts. And his definitions of today’s economic rhetoric. He doesn’t like us: tragic clown of the bourgeoisie.
Being a smartass on abortion ending with this successfully shocking sentence, later retracted: Wherein I have concluded that most “pro-life” rhetoric is dead-baby snuff porn in search of votes. We come at it in different ways but agree: don’t get played by pols who don’t mean what they say.
The most anxiety-producing jobs. Good point: although my job’s tempo is more stressful than a year ago or 16 for that matter (once relatively sleepy hometown print weekly tries to reinvent itself as a Web daily) it balances out because I can now do much of it at home or on the road thanks to wireless Internet and especially the back end of the website no longer being under only one or two people’s control; I can do what I wanted in the beginning, getting in and doing my thing there, technically much like this blog. Control. (Proofed stories from home yesterday, then was out from 6 ’til 10 last night recording videos and taking notes, then was at home up ’til 3 writing and uploading the stories and mixing and uploading the videos. The only reason I need to be in the office, which I was 9-14 hours each day this past Monday through Thursday, is to make pages for the three newspapers we still print.)
Illiberal composition From the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, now more or less mainstream conservative and not the libertarians Frank Chodorov founded it to be, but this is still good.
Tribalism or cosmopolitanism? Interesting fact: before WWII Czechoslovakia had more Germans (3.25 mil) than Slovaks (2.5); why the Sudetenland was an issue.
LRC: Watching the public debate on the budget, we are reminded of two boys on the floor playing with toys. One has a bear and the other has a dinosaur. They are forever threatening the other kid with taking the toy away. One warns he will take away the dinosaur (military spending) and the other says he will grab the bear (domestic spending). They pull and tug and eventually settle the dispute so long as each gets to keep his favorite. Oh, and one other thing: both toys belong to other children.
Broke? When someone gives you a check and the bank informs you that there are insufficient funds, who do you get mad at? In your own life, you get mad at the guy who gave you a check that bounced, not at the bank. But, in politics, you get mad at whoever tells you that there is no money. One of the secrets of the growth of the welfare state is that politicians get a lot of mileage out of making promises, without setting aside enough money to fulfill those promises.
What would you do? The upstairs room needs a new floor. It’s going to be laminate. I’ve found exactly the flooring I want for $1.89 per square foot at a tiny family-run business in my town. But. I can drive 90 miles to a chain store and get the same stuff for much less.
Unholy alliance: Whatever their differences on domestic and other matters, the neocons and the Obama cult agree on one thing: their mutual disdain for the Constitution. The “progressives” sniff at “constitutional fundamentalism,” and the neocons regard Constitution-citing conservatives such as Paul and Lee as “dogmatists.” They hate the Constitution because it restrains their overweening (if often competing) ambitions, and holds them accountable – not merely every few years, at election time, but all the time.
The government does not hate you. The government does not like you. It is indifferent. The government is not an entity with feelings, remorse, ethics or conscious. It is a collective of individuals working according to rigid flawed guidelines. Like the Burkeans and unlike left-libertarians I’d say hierarchy is the divine and natural order of things but yes.
M. Night Shyamalan, famous for The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, some nonsense about Marky Mark talking to plastic plants, the overused “twist ending” gimmick and, subsequently, flushing a promising filmmaking career down the toilet. The toilet then turned out to exist only in the mind of ghost child aboard a spaceship or something.
Local row: union vs coffee shop A good libertarian would say the employer and employee can agree on a wage without anybody getting in the way. But the swipplish café seems to have traded a well-intended plank of the old left for one of the new: hiring a company because some minority owns it (a perversion of the right idea of defending minorities’ individual liberty and merit; being a minority doesn’t matter).
I never went to this place and miss the Wynnewood Pharmacy lunch counter where you could step back in time including with the prices. The town where I worked for 11 years before this had Joe’s Place; same idea. The kind of place where... you’re more likely to see union members than swipples.
1. Rights belong to individuals, not groups; they derive from our nature and can neither be granted nor taken away by government. 2. All peaceful, voluntary economic and social associations are permitted; consent is the basis of the social and economic order. 3. Justly acquired property is privately owned by individuals and voluntary groups, and this ownership cannot be arbitrarily voided by governments. 4. Government may not redistribute private wealth or grant special privileges to any individual or group. 5. Individuals are responsible for their own actions; government cannot and should not protect us from ourselves. 6. Government may not claim the monopoly over a people’s money and government’s must never engage in official counterfeiting, even in the name of macroeconomic stability. 7. Aggressive wars, even when called preventative, and even when they pertain only to trade relations, are forbidden. 8. Jury nullification, that is, the right of jurors to judge the law as well as the facts, is a right of the people and the courtroom norm. 9. All forms of involuntary servitude are prohibited, not only slavery but also conscription, forced association, and forced welfare distribution. 10. Government must obey the law that it expects other people to obey and thereby must never use force to mold behavior, manipulate social outcomes, manage the economy, or tell other countries how to behave.
Meeting living history Recently I did. Until then the oldest Russians I knew were WWII exiles, and I once got to talk to somebody who grew up in Ruthenia in the 1930s, but this man just turned 105. That’s right: he grew up under Tsar Nicholas II’s rule.
Поздравляю, Сергей Григорьевичъ! (Congratulations, Sergei Grigorievich!)
As you might expect I am utterly and totally opposed to this malignant little man being reimposed on the American people. And I oppose him for exactly the same reasons that I thought Georgie Junior was such a disaster. The policy differences between Obama and Bush are insignificant and minor.
Lætare Jerusalem: et conventum facite omnes qui diligitis eam: gaudete cum lætitia, qui in tristitia fuistis: ut exsultetis, et satiemini ab uberibus consolationis vestræ. Lætatus sum in his, quæ dicta sunt mihi: in domum Domini ibimus.More from Fr Z.
Photo: high altar, St Patrick’s, Kinkora, Ontario. From here.
Video: enthronement of new Metropolitan Svyatoslav of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, from last Sunday, commemorating the cross. They were underground during Soviet rule for 40 years: heroic. As you can hear, they now have services in Ukrainian, not Slavonic any more. They want to be a patriarchate. Note to other journos: there is only one Orthodox church in the Ukraine, the one that’s part of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate). The two nationalist schisms and other splinters are ‘in the family’ (same beliefs and practice) but out of communion for now. Anyway, the issues about trying to be a patriarchate: the UGCC is a minority in the Ukraine, in the far west that the USSR grabbed in WWII and, without giving up the one-true-church claim, Rome doesn’t want to offend the Orthodox in the hope that one day the Orthodox will join.
Some jottings about the news
