Monday, March 31, 2008

Groupthink
Daniel Nichols on what happened after “Congressman Ron Paul challenged the common wisdom about the Islamic militants who carried out the 9/11 attacks.” Rather than face hard truths, we choose to believe our “blindly self-flattering” lies that “madmen attacked America because they hate our freedom and our way of life” and “that we are hated because we are good, because we are free.”
McCain won’t stop abortion
As I was saying. From Taki.

From Joshua Snyder.
Muslims now outnumber RCs as world’s largest religion
A response from Archimandrite Serge (Keleher)
Divide et impera
The neocon white man’s burden or the US wanted a civil war in Iraq. Justin Raimondo’s latest at LRC.
Wall Street extortion
We’ll bring down the world economy unless you bail us out. Never mind that we paid ourselves huge bonuses using other people’s money while creating this mess.
From Joshua Snyder.
Most Americans oppose federal bailout for homeowners
Police back off on home gun searches without warrants
In Boston, Massachusetts

The eye in the sky looking at you
In Miami

From John Boyden.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Islam and ‘Sunday Christianity’
From Fr Timothy Kroh



Based on an entry in 3rd Blog from the Right. Here’s more on the man in the photo.

Greek Independence Day
Today was Philadelphia’s parade, which was marvellous: Orthodox church groups complete with banners and a bearded, riassa’d (cassock) and kamilavka’d (the stovepipe hat in the photo) priest and clubs representing every region from Pontus in Asia Minor to Cyprus to Greek Macedonia. The date is the feast of the Annunciation* (as in the banner photo) and the city’s parade is a compromise, on a Sunday between the Gregorian- and Julian-calendar dates.

Fun fact
Today is Julian-calendar St Patrick’s Day

*Tomorrow in the Roman Rite, transferred this year because of the Easter octave.


Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs
Clinton’s ‘3 a.m. ad’ girl did not approve that message
From Miguel José Ernst y Sandoval Moya

Saturday, March 29, 2008

How Obama milks race
I mean he’s had neither the typical white nor typical black American experience. That’s fine, but why is it this alone constitutes insight? If his history is so unique isn’t also true that he doesn’t quite share the experience of most Americans, black or white? I mean, why is it necessarily a positive? Because he says so in a hundred equally meaningless ways? Is this insight a genetic birthright? Because after the perfunctory bragging about his mixed parentage, all I hear are platitudes.

Imagine an indulgently guilty white liberal getting to actually be black. It must be exquisite. Continual bliss. To be able to resolve this angst in its glorious reversal, to indulge in the romance of oppression not as an outsider but as its subject — as both, in supreme sanctimony, over and over! But it is kind of weird when his white half condescends toward his black half. I think if it was me I’d call it a wash and get on with business. But I’m not the ambitious sort.

None of that for Barack; no grace, no generosity. No leaving anything on the table. Just a meticulous, thorough wringing out of any and all possible political advantage from this circumstance — and then some. He lays claim to all he surveys. He claims a unique perspective on all human suffering with those artlessly exhaustive rhetorical sweeps of his, those godawful geography name-checks. It’s a kind of greed. ‘From the family crossing the Rio Grande to the hillbillies in Appalachia’, he’s feeling you. Something to go with his response to the Wright controversy which, if I’m reading him correctly, is ‘if it offends, I condemn’; call it ‘if you’re sore, I’m your recourse’. If you’ve got a claim on the collective guilt of white America, Barack Obama is your man. Barack wants his cut. Isn’t it a little presumptuous of this guy that he thinks he can coopt the very idea of collective guilt and lord it over the nation?

Barry is to be understood not as a black man but as an ambitious white man realizing the potential of his African features.
He’s the best of the three contenders — which isn’t saying much and it’s in spite of not because of this game — but the game is so obvious. Who else sees a nought (zero) when they see his campaign signs with the big O?

From Steve Sailer.
Economics
Two things need to be considered here. First, that the welfare state in whatever form it exists needs constant economic “growth” in order to support increased taxes and social welfare benefits. This is why inflationary central banking is so important to the welfare state, and also why the welfare state is essentially corporatist, whether in its leftist or rightists forms. Increases in production, productivity, income, investment and profits are necessary for business to be the engine by which the excess can be skimmed off (or extracted) and redistributed. This commitment to constant economic growth is such that modern industrial mass economies have been thoroughly rigged to “deliver” such growth as measured by the state.

Second, the big investment banks are hardly creatures of private enterprise. They are inventions of the state. Those who invest the kinds of sums these big money machines invest have been, since the 19th century at least, heavily backed and subsidized by the state, which has underwritten loans, guaranteed repayment and even ensured collection through the use of military force. The British Empire was not so much built on war as it was on foreclosure.

The fear of the social democrat, either rightist or leftist, is that the economy cannot and will not function without the state. That unless there is guidance and oversight (though maybe not full-fledged planning), we will all starve. Or foment revolution. Or both.
From the LRC blog.
The world of words
And its Orwellian, corporate, political and PC subversion: hide something by going polysyllabic like Paul Fussell perfectly described the middle class. ‘I misspoke’ for ‘I lied’ for example, almost as good as Passive Voice™: ‘mistakes were made’.

Two Austrian Catholic heroes for peace
By Joshua Snyder

Das phoney Kapital

From LRC.
St Gregory of Nyssa Church again: a video

Dear Anastasios,

Happy vigil of the Sunday of the Veneration of the Holy Cross.

Thanks for the link.

I know of this parish church. (Huw Richardson of Sarx used to be a member.)

Every couple of years somebody sends me a link about them fully expecting me to join in hating them.

I don’t.

From the YouTube comments:
Looks like the Orthodox Church took a holiday and went on an acid trip in sunny San Fran!! lol

At first it looked very Orthodox...

Sort of an “Anglo-Afro-Orthodox-Flower Child” Eucharist. I’m a politically liberal, but liturgically conservative Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian, and you know what? This is pretty interesting. Even though it probably isn’t my cup of tea, I’d be interested to see what you do for Pentecost. God bless the people of St. Gregory of Nyssa, and may the Holy Spirit be with you.

Nothing says authentic “San Francisco Episcopal Church” to me like a room full of white people trying to act multicultural.

It seems to me that whenever white people stick to traditional white Protestant worship, they’re told they’re being “boring” and “stodgy.” When they try something different, they’re accused of “trying to act multicultural” (with the implication that it’s a failure or a fake).
Sure, they’re wrong (I wouldn’t join or be in communion with them), and I think along with the promiscuity of style the real beauty of much of the service is especially unnerving to an Orthodox: liberal Protestants — IIRC hard-core heterodox, really Unitarians dressed up (do they say the creed?), gay and communing the unbaptised, which is technically not allowed in the Episcopal Church — who are so good at putting on the airs of Orthodox worship when they want to (like in the first minute of the clip).

That said I think it’s cooler than bog-standard Novus Ordo. This is the loving work of sincere, intelligent and educated people, a work of art.

I even like the modern music with the timpani only not in church. The way I like gospel music.

I’ve long seen a parallel here to my native tradition: ritualistic, aiming for the mystical, perhaps finding the Articles of Religion wanting and using much ritual and ceremonial not in the Book of Common Prayer, pinching them from another church!

So I'm not surprised an Anglo-Catholic, Bishop C. Kilmer Myers, gave his blessing to found this parish 35-some years ago.

From the SGN site:
Great Thanksgiving Prayer for the Millennium Development Goals
I’m sorry but I can’t help thinking of that 70-year-old Nazi ‘German Christian’ Lutheran church in Berlin and if somebody wrote and used a liturgy about politics I agree with — ‘it is very meet, right and our bounden duty: that we should at all times and in all places follow the platform of thy servant Ron Paul...’ — I would run screaming from that place and never return.

But rather than being made fun of these dear people ought to be encouraged in the right way, to be led to the truth, to be ‘churched’, to be rooted, to have a foundation...

Reminds me of what an Anglo-Catholic quoted by Peter Anson wrote about the Theosophists, the New Agers of his day 80 years ago, that they understood the mystical aspects of the Catholic religion better than uneducated Catholics, and what Abbot Aelred Carlyle said to one of their converts, that Catholic mysticism has everything they offer only on sounder lines.

They may end up like Chesterton, trying to create the most radical, outrageous religion only to find themselves out-radicalled by... orthodoxy.

How to tell Catholics from liturgical Protestants.
Larison on Bacevich and Kmiec supporting Obama
Bacevich is spot-on regarding abortion:
... only a naïf would believe that today’s Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe v. Wade or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of “family values.” GOP support for such values is akin to the Democratic Party’s professed devotion to the “working poor”: each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.
Neither Obama nor McCain
Rod Dreher quotes Alasdair MacIntyre on Kerry and Bush:
When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. Why should we reject both? Not primarily because they give us wrong answers, but because they answer the wrong questions.
And he writes:
I want the US out of Iraq. I don’t believe that a civil war is avoidable there.
Buying off the Sunnis whilst propping up a Shi’ite government can’t go on for ever.
Best thing we can do, I think, is to withdraw to enclaves and set up refugee zones, and let the violence play itself out. And offer passports to all Iraqis who helped us, and who would certainly be killed for that after we left.
Saigon all over again.
A Marxist criticises FDR
On the 75th anniversary of the New Deal. From James Hajduk.
... the New Deal failed to lift the U.S. out of the Great Depression. There’s also a rather shocking failure to come to terms with New Deal foreign policy with its Wilsonian arrogance, also now on display in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is no accident that George W. Bush invoked Harry Truman, FDR’s vice president [and the only world leader to use nukes, and on civilians], in a speech defending his “war on terror”.

Contemptuous of his superior, Navy Secretary
[Josephus] Daniels, a pacific Methodist from North Carolina, he chafed to thrust America into the First World War.

In 1941, the FBI arrested 19 leaders of the SWP
[Trotskyite communists] under the provisions of the Smith Act for having the temerity to oppose Franklin Roosevelt’s war. When asked by the prosecutor what form opposition to war to Europe would take, party leader James P. Cannon answered “we would not become supporters of the war, even after the war was declared”. For this thought crime, Cannon and the others were sentenced up to 16 months in prison.

Nazi Germany, FDR — although unwilling to offer any shelter to Jewish refugees — viewed as the resurgence of an unmitigated expansionist menace; much as did Churchill.
The bad and the good...
First the bad: my car was in the shop for a day and a half as German mechanic Erwin did needed repairs and the yearly required inspections, which meant at times waiting and waiting for crowded buses. The good: praying the office on the train, better than the Rosary in the car. A good book for the job: a sturdy, well-worn 1962 Short Breviary from the Benedictines in Collegeville, Minnesota (an All Saints’ Sister of the Poor had it before my priest gave it to me). If this area had decent, affordable public transport I’d use it to commute to and from the small-town newspaper office and get Canon Douglas’s Monastic Diurnal (with Coverdale’s psalms, beautifully made and the right size for travel), used by everybody from my priest to Fr Chris Tessone to Bishop Tim Cravens to Treat. Now that’s a good kind of ecumenism.

A mystery solved
After eight months so far at Runnemede I took a bicycle ride around town yesterday evening right before the beginning of the hour to find out which church is ringing it, which I can hear from home. I was right: it’s the Gothic one pictured, the Presbyterian church just a few blocks to the north.

Friday, March 28, 2008

When the old right and the new left found common ground
Just by looking at the things that those right-wing guys said... I always thought that principled conservatives had as solid a reason to oppose the Vietnam War and to oppose racism as anyone within the conventional left.
— Former SDS president Carl Oglesby

Fact thrown down the memory hole (by fake conservative Bill Buckley): the John Birch Society questioned the liberals’ crusade in Vietnam.

René Guénon
esque traditionalists like Fr Seraphim (Rose) saw that although they were wrong about many things (because they were just as rootless as their parents) the hippies had a point.

The s(pl)urge
Justin Raimondo’s latest. Here he is again at Taki on the Iraq body count.

Woodrow Wilson’s war on Catholic Europe
The world would have been better off if the Central Powers had won

In the last century’s ’teens the progressive Protestants were hawks because they were and still are anti-Catholic; the evangelicals and fundamentalists were doves and remained so as recently as the 1930s.
Wilson’s ideas in 1918 live on in the ideas of the neo-Wilsonians of our own time, especially in the worldview of President George W. Bush and his “neoconservative” supporters (who are not really conservative at all, but are rather some kind of hyper-progressive).
From Joshua Snyder.
Blame calcium not cholesterol for heart disease
But smoking really is bad for you. From LRC.


The need for creeds
... religious faith in general, prayer addressed to “to whom it may concern”, sentiment about some transcendent dimension otherwise undefined does not have any staying power. It’s OK to have that at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning when you’re out with your friends somewhere, but in the darkest hours of life you gotta believe something specific. And that specification is the task of the creed. Because, much as some people may not like it, to believe one thing is also to disbelieve another.
‘We don’t possess God; it is he who holds us’
I do not deny that there are differences between the Churches, but I say that we must change our way of approaching them.

But I say, if the truth is the truth, we must not be afraid for it.
Two orthodox Orthodox quotations via Per Christum, the second from Eirenikon.
A note on the Episcopal row
Parts I and II

Thursday, March 27, 2008

There is no RC voting bloc
John Zmirak at Taki explains this and the three US presidential contenders. Don’t get played on abortion but he’s right.
What a rich tradition it is, that yields citizens who think and vote... just about like everybody else. As the Borg might say, “You have been assimilated.” Submission accomplished.

Of course it’s appalling that millions of church-goers who claim to believe that abortion is murder are sitting around dithering over which pro-abortion Democrat, Reverend Ike or Margaret Sanger, will offer them more bleeding chunks of pork hacked off from their fellow taxpayers.

The worst candidate is undoubtedly Hillary Clinton, who pretends to oppose neocon interventionism when it suits her, but shows her true colors in her votes and in the things she doesn’t say (for instance, she won’t rule out attacking Iran).

From a policy perspective, he’s
[Obama] probably the least damaging candidate. While his court appointments will be awful, they’ll be no worse than Hillary’s, and he’s much less likely (as Justin Raimondo points out) to try invading big, messy Islamic countries and bombing them into the Space Age.

McCain is the Erich Ludendorff of the race — the mentally unsound nationalist who helped us lose the last war, and promises to lose the next one on a vastly bigger scale. And I, for one, believe him. Although he claims to be “proudly pro-life,” you can almost hear him winking as he says it.
Buckley and the betrayal of conservatism
I know I’ve blogged on this before but this LRC article is a good summary. He seemed as if the US government and the establishment left created a character to try and appeal to young fogeys.
William F. Buckley was born into a republic that was fast becoming an empire. President Wilson arrived in Le Havre at the end of WWI. He came neither as a tourist nor a businessman... that is, not as an honest traveler. Instead, he came to sort out the Old World’s problems and brought 17 Points to help do it. The cynical, worldly Europeans laughed at him. Even God needed only 10 commandments, they said. Wilson was so humiliated he had a stroke and never recovered.

To their credit, the American people were slow to put on the imperial purple. The conservatives among them wanted to retain the old form of government, with its limited aims and limited means. Conservatism was a more innocent creed back then... The idea of trying to remake another country, half way around the world, into an American-style democracy, would not have been scorned; it would have been unimaginable. Back then, of course, there was no homeland. The idea would have made no sense. Americans’ interests stopped at the Rio Grande and the 49th parallel. The foreigners would have to take care of themselves. Even home-grown 100% Americans were expected to look out for their own kith and kin. “Balance the budget, protect the borders, and otherwise leave people alone” was the extent of conservative ambitions.

After the
[second world] war, there was no going back. America was the leading world power. “Isolationism” became a kind of insult. A few of the old conservatives — such as Frank Chodorov, Robert Taft and Warren Buffett’s father, a US Congressman — kept wearing their old starched collars. But the fashion had clearly changed. They could vote against government spending programs...and they opposed further military adventures abroad... but they couldn’t win national elections and they couldn’t participate in the great fun of having an empire — getting to boss people around all over the world. There was no glory in being a conservative. No power. No money. No style.

Then, with the Cold War, even the old die-hards went shopping for new clothes. In their minds, it was a contest between good and evil... freedom and communism... black and white.

Indeed, the Cold War played roughly the same role as the War on Terror would half a century later — it perverted the old conservative values.

The urbane, witty, charming and cosmopolitan William F. Buckley:
“We have to accept Big Government for the duration — for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged... except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.”
And thus was the fabric laid out...cut and sewn... for America’s new conservative outfits. Now, they could fight totalitarians by being totalitarians.

Buckley’s contribution to American political life was that he helped bring conservatives to the levers of imperial power — but at the cost of rejecting everything important they ever believed. Henceforth, conservatives — notably George W. Bush — would be America’s most activist presidents, adding trillions to Americans financial burdens, extending domestic programs, and projecting U.S. military power to places Americans had not even known existed. And henceforth, “conservatives” would distinguish themselves from “liberals” principally on cultural issues — such as whether gay couples could marry, when to pull the plug on a coma victim, and whether it was proper for a Southern state to use elements of the old confederate banner in its state flag.

The liberals and conservatives... all Keynesians at home... and Kennedys overseas... willing to impose any burden on their neighbors... and force the next generation to pay any price... in order to enjoy bread at home and military circuses abroad.

There was even some doubt about the real source of Buckley’s money and support for his money-losing magazine. Rumors said it came directly from the military industrial complex itself — maybe via the CIA... where Buckley had been an agent.

He came not to praise traditional conservatism but to bury it.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Why Ron Paul scares the Republicans
Paul’s leave-us-alone libertarianism hasn’t fit in with a party anxious to read our e-mail, improve our values, assert American power abroad and subsidize friendly industries at home. The party’s recent mix of ‘national greatness’ neoconservatives, evangelical theoconservatives and K Street careerists has had many goals, but leaving people alone hasn’t been one of them.
Read all of Michael Grunwald’s article in
Time, though parts of it reek with establishment disdain.
Bush’s approval ratings have been abysmal for years, but Paul was the only Republican who really campaigned for change.
Mike Gravel wants to be the Libertarian candidate

Death of the suburb

Interestingly, the modern ’burb is largely a creation of the federal government and its New Deal and post-WWII mortgage-subsidizing programs, which favored only a few house designs (ranch, etc.), and unnatural, anti-commercial, all-residential neighborhoods. The better to mold and control us, of course.
The last French WWI foot soldier
More than anything, he was appalled that he had been made to fire on people he didn’t know and to whom he, too, was a stranger. These were fathers of children. He had no quarrel with them. C’est complètement idiot la guerre. His Italian Alpine regiment had once stopped firing for three weeks on the Austrians, whose language many of them spoke; they had swapped loaves of bread for tobacco and taken pictures of each other. To the end of his life, Mr Ponticelli showed no interest in labelling anyone his enemy. He said he did not understand why on earth he, or they, had been fighting.
‘Humane, with a very reasonable and spiritual conclusion’
Every time I see Jeremiah Wright’s name, I think of Jeremiah the Prophet, who also gave his country a good tongue-lashing and was imprisoned for being ‘unpatriotic’ and correct about impending defeat by the Babylonians.
— Jerri Ward

From the LRC blog.

That said:
Wright’s creed, to the extent I can understand it on the basis of broad but not particularly deep research, is an Afro-centric variation of the socialist heresy called Liberation Theology... actually a form of idolatry: creating a “God” to suit his personal specifications, which in this case would be a variant of the Golem myth — a monster summoned to smite and destroy an enemy. It is a photographic negative of the neo-Nazi “Aryan Christ” heresy.

... unmistakably akin to every other version of the Civil Religion — that is, a theology that supports concentration of power in a political state and the punishment, through ostracism, banishment, or liquidation, of those who refuse to make the State the cynosure of their existence.
William Grigg
The Passion as waterboarding
Somewhere in the Middle East, Jesus Christ is strapped to a bench, his head wrapped in clingfilm. He furiously sucks against the plastic. A hole is pierced, but only so that a filthy rag can be stuffed back into his mouth. He is turned upside down and water slowly poured into the rag. The torturer whispers religious abuse. If you are God, save yourself you f*cking idiot. Fighting to pull in oxygen through the increasingly saturated rag, his lungs start to fill up with water. Someone punches him in the stomach.
The Revd Giles Fraser via Episcopal Café

Take away his modernist confusion of the Kingdom with secular utopia and redefining grave matter as not sins and it still works.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Obama the globalist
Never mind his identity and father issues: this matters, explains Daniel Larison. Say hello to ‘dignity promotion’. At least it doesn’t pretend to be conservative:
Usually, at least outside the Bush administration and its supporters, policies that involve violating allied states’ sovereignty and risking their internal destabilisation are considered unwise — not so with Team Obama.

Well, it’s pretty “graceless — an affront to your sense of dignity” to full-throatedly support the bombardment of a country, Lebanon, when the campaign kills 1,000 civilians and displaces a million more, putting hundreds of thousands into refugee camps for months and years afterwards, but that is what Obama did during the summer of 2006. His appreciation for human dignity is truly overwhelming.

Those who continually come back to his position on Iraq seem satisfied that Obama reached the right conclusion without concerning themselves very much with how he reaches conclusions and makes decisions. Taking the longer view, his assumptions about America’s role in the world are more significant than his view on any particular policy. Basic assumptions are more valuable for understanding what a politician is likely to do in a crisis than how he has responded to any one particular policy or event.
This is a lefty hawk not a peace candidate.
The “mindset” behind the Iraq war is the mindset that says the following: state sovereignty is irrelevant when Washington says it is, international law exists to be used as a justification for our policies and a bludgeon against other countries, and civilian populations of states that supposedly or actually harbour or support terrorists are essentially expendable. In his comments on Pakistan and his vote on the war in Lebanon, Obama has not only failed to repudiate this mindset, but has demonstrated his fidelity to it on occasion.
Conservative endorsement either active or passive is evidence...
of how awful the GOP has become. It is so deeply distrusted, so loathed, by a significant number of conservatives that even a Democrat whom they know to be on the far left and in disagreement with them on almost everything has a better chance of winning their vote than the Republican standard-bearer.
I cheerfully admit he’s the best of the three real contenders but that’s very relative.

Worth a honk but not a vote.
‘Pregnant husband’
‘Gender’ nonsense or why I say ‘sex’ when it’s not about grammar
“Woman With Plastic Surgery & Hormone Treatment Gets Pregnant.”

“How does it feel to be a man and to be pregnant?” Find someone with an XY chromosome set who is pregnant and you will answer that question! Get out your lamp, Diogenes — you will be looking for one honest man for a good long time.
From Per Christum.
Church nomenclature and ecumenical dialogue
More. From Eirenikon.


Why?
Breaking down Obama’s and Clinton’s support by religion
And talking about the politicians’ and America’s faiths. From Fr Methodius.

Monday, March 24, 2008



John Boyden in Rome
Thurifer on Palm Sunday. From TNLM via Tea at Trianon.
Why Easter stubbornly resists commercialisation
The most important feast of the Christian liturgical year ‘resists domestication as it resists banalization’. Like with ‘Holiday’ our holy mother the church wisely took pagan natural religion and ran with it: the Northern Hemisphere’s ‘let’s cheer ourselves up in the middle of winter’ fest became the God-man’s birthday party and its spring-equinox one celebrating renewed life appropriately now also celebrates his rising from the dead. Why don’t secular people care about it? From Slate.
As the old saying goes, the American economy is — year after year — driven by two great forces, the Pentagon and Christmas. Why isn’t the greatest Christian holiday of the year more of an economic force?
Terry Mattingly
More wit from Steve Sailer
We elected a pig in a poke as President in 2000 and are paying the price today. But with George W. Bush, we at least had the excuse for not making the effort to understand him that he turns out to be not very interesting to understand — he’s Peter Sellers’ Chauncey Gardiner from Being There with a mean streak.
Jena
We weren’t witnessing a revival of the Emmett Till Era of lynchings, as the pundits insisted, but another example of the O.J. Simpson Age of star athletes whose off-field misdeeds are excused until they finally go too far.
An observation about the US presidential election
Obama’s supporters like him being pompous and getting all furrow-browed.

Another problem for Obama is that his personal identity is all tied up with “race and inheritance,” and he’s too serious about himself to not be serious about race.
He’s Mr Spock! (What that means.)
He needs to get some jokewriters, then go on the Jay Leno show and laugh it off.

Dubya Two, Lady Macbeth and Barry Half-White.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Quotation
I like the idea that beauty and holiness are the apologia for Christianity. The beauty of Christianity needs to shine out more; this is where the celebration of the liturgy becomes central. And the goodness of Christianity, i.e. the holiness of self-giving love (the witness of charity) and of prayer, needs to be sustained and developed. And this too, certainly: that the one thing Christianity has to offer is Easter. Simply: Christ is risen!
Dom Hugh Gilbert

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Why did Obama join his church?
My tuppen’orth. From GetReligion.
The ant, the grasshopper and subprime securities
From LRC
What WWII bombers really did
Knew somebody who helped load the B-24s that hit Dresden and still had conscience problems

From the LRC blog.
‘The High Tide’



A computer-animated short video about Ron Paul.

He’s sensibly going back to Congress as the revolution is going local but:

McNeocon can forget about getting an endorsement

On the Clinton-Obama soap opera, the spectacle of a yuppie black couple complaining about being oppressed (coming off as both ingrates and clueless) and his apparently real angst about ‘not being black enough’ are mildly interesting but the real issue is:
There is no real philosophical difference between the two. I find it rather strange that so much animosity can be stirred up between two individuals who believe the same things. And the whole race issue bewilders me because we are talking about two Democrats who are not in the least bit racist. And yet race has become an issue, mostly stirred up by the media, who love this stuff.
On Ralph Nader:
I think he represents some of the Democratic principles better than the Democratic candidates themselves. And I actually believe him when he says he doesn’t want this war. Even though I disagree with him on some other issues, at least he stands for what he believes in. But he will be marginalized — he won’t be able to get into the debates, because we don’t have a true democracy in this country. The two parties are essentially the same, and a Libertarian candidate, a Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader — they are going to get nothing. Unless of course they are Ross Perot and have $10 billion, in which case they put you right in front on TV. The media isn’t really interested in issues; they are more interested in notoriety.
From the LRC blog.
Buckleyism, the harmless (to liberals) persuasion
I don’t share VDARE’s anti-immigration enthusiasm but this makes several good points and tells the truth about Buckley and his movement
Quotation
On something like the kind of Catholic traditionalism I’m trying to reach for in this blog, of which my Anglican background is a big part
Not all traditionalist [Roman] Catholics today are what a friend of mine calls “Leave It to Beaver”* stylized Catholic traditionalists. As I have written before, I consider folks such as Daniel Mitsui and Moretben to be, shall we say, neo-trads. These traditionalist Catholics, and others like them, are quite sympathetic to Orthodox theology and praxis in a manner which is substantial and serious. They are also men who are not living in an insular la-la land but who engage, each in their own manner, modernity in many facets. Read their blogs. Daniel Mitsui’s writing does not strike me as the slightest bit fearful; instead it carries the ethos of a solemn requiem, a holy remembering, even, to use Orthodox language, a joyful sorrow.
Owen White

Owen on Orthodox-Roman Catholic ecumenism and the Patriarch of Constantinople’s approach:
...in spite of all of the bureaucratic-love in the room, high ranking “pro-ecumenical” Orthodox again and again use rhetoric which signifies that the Orthodox Church is not going to budge on matters that divide.
Or all Orthodox agree on the limits of the scope of the Pope (man-made office for the good of the church like any rank of the divinely instituted episcopate but not with universal jurisdiction) but the nice ones don’t feel like they have to exaggerate the differences and go all over the Internet calling people graceless heretics.

*An allusion to 1950s American television: a ‘let’s re-create the ’50s exactly’ approach.
More bad religion reporting: on Gorbachev
Like on (the links are to entries telling the truth) ++Cantuar and sharia, applying traditional Catholic teaching on sin to modern problems (the media response: ridicule the Pope for ‘making up new sins’) or the Pope and Luther. Also: on devotion to saints of churches you’re not in communion with. Talking to Fr Methodius.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Fascinating
Can we be as precise as to say [the Crucifixion happened at] 3pm, the Jewish “ninth hour”? Four years ago, a pair of astronomers claimed to have scientifically verified this. Their computer programme looking at star activity between 26AD and 35AD found the first full moon after the vernal equinox was registered on Friday 7 April AD 30 and Friday 3 April at 3pm on 33AD. The solar eclipse, described in the Bible, was only visible in Jerusalem on the latter date.
From The Spectator.
At the Vatican today



Pope Benedict’s Catholic restoration is under way!

From TNLM.

Conversi ad Dominum
A Roman Catholic parish church soon will return to having eastward-facing Masses
Midnight at noon
John Zmirak on Good Friday
We like to attend a Byzantine Catholic service called the “Burial of Christ,” which ends with parishioners coming up in silent procession to kiss a burial shroud emblazoned with Jesus’s corpse.
Those using the Orthodox paschalion will do this on the 25th April this year (Orthodox Easter is always after the Jewish Passover).

Samer al-Batal writes from Beirut of his Melkite Church:
‘So is your church locally on the Western paschalion?’

Within Antiochian boundaries, yes; not so under Jerusalem or Alexandria (though there might be a chance that this is not the case everywhere throughout the Palestinian territories).
‘And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.’
Oremus et pro Judæis*: ut Deus et Dominus noster auferat velamen de cordibus eorum; ut et ipsi agnoscant Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum.

Oremus. Flectamus genua. Levate.

Ecce lignum crucis, in quo salus mundi pependit.

Venite, adoremus.

Popule meus, quid feci tibi? Aut in quo contristavi te? Responde mihi.

Quia eduxi te per desertum quadraginta annis, et manna cibavi te, et introduxi in terram satis optimam: parasti crucem Salvatori tuo.


‘Αγιoς ‘o Θεóς. Sanctus Deus.
‘Αγιoς ’Iσχυρóς. Sanctus fortis.
‘Αγιoς ’αθανατoς, ’ελεησoν ‘ημας. Sanctus immortalis, miserere nobis.
The only day of the year the trisagion and the Mass of the Presanctified are used in the Roman Rite.


An Iraqi Catholic

From Damian Thompson.

*This blog on the subject.
Pro-McCain media bias
From LRC
‘Dead or alive’ — not
Osama bin Useful:
The latest tape reminds, once again, of why Bush did not want to kill or capture him. Ming the Merciless is too useful. He scares the people into accepting endless wars, massive spending, Fed recessions, and the Republican police state — the whole neocon enchilada.
From the LRC blog.
Good Friday collection for Palestine
John Treat has put this online again

Thursday, March 20, 2008

RIP Paul Scofield
St Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons
I am the king’s good servant but God’s first.


Maundy Thursday
From Reverend Ref

Chanted Tenebræ at Clem’s last night — about 15 voices bouncing a traditional Roman Rite form of the divine office in Coverdale’s English off the stone walls of a little crypt chapel, the snuffing out of candles, a dramatic slam! and the white candle put back at the end. More.
Only a sliver, nothing more
Andrew Bacevich gets it right (it’s also more or less what Justin Raimondo believes):
For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one.
The other side won’t stop abortion. That said Mark Shea notes:
Unlike the GOP, he does give a shit about abortion: he wants to do everything possible to expand and export the license up to and including legalizing infanticide. I’ll take GOP neglect over that sort of religious zeal any day. However, that doesn’t mean I can vote for McCain, who seems to me to be quite aptly described by Bacevich as dedicated to the perpetuation of war and the growth of Leviathan.

The more I think about it, the more I think I may just write in “None of the Above” or Ron Paul or my pastor or somebody.
I’ll probably tick the box of the Libertarian again and rejoin the LP while I’m at it. Pennsylvania will go to the Democrat anyway and seeing how active Obama’s campaign is in Philadelphia’s black neighbourhoods (they don’t care who Ed Rendell likes) persuades me there’s no reason to strategically re-register and vote for him next month. (Paul is sensibly going back to Congress — televised or not the revolution is going local and grassroots where it has a chance.) That and what used to be called the yuppie vote should push him over the top.

Daniel Larison asks and AFAIK no-one can answer:

Why don’t anti-war people vote for peace candidates? Other than media bias why did Paul’s and Dennis Kucinich’s presidential bids fail?
Quotation
Summing up many of the aims of this blog:
Burke was liberal because he was conservative.
Russell Kirk

Printing money for Wall Street
When a central bank lowers interest rates, it engages in an activity that is loaded with moral meaning. The jargon of the macroeconomist can be misleading. Lower interest rates are achieved by increasing the money supply, which is basically equivalent to “printing money out of thin air,” and selling it cheaply to the banking community (although technically it is now achieved by creating fictitious accounting entries).

The moral dimension becomes plainer if we consider a private person doing that. It is called fraud. Counterfeit money enriches the fraudster at the expense of the rest of the society. Creating more paper slips does not bring about more economic resources (production or consumption goods), but only serves to redistribute them. The counterfeiter immediately acquires additional money at his disposal, whereas the purchasing power of the money balances of the rest is slowly eroded.
As William Grigg wrote earlier:
To create this so-called “money,” the Fed has to steal the value of what each of us has earned, saved, or invested.
Faith-based economy
No magic of the market for Wall Street

An administration of war criminals
From Mark Shea

‘The Iraq war is killing our economy’

The collapse of American power

...rely[ing] on the Chinese, Japanese and Saudis to finance America’s life beyond its means.
From Joshua Snyder.
The real problem with Jeremiah Wright
He doesn’t toe the line on Israel and ‘there is a lot in his sermons “that is true or closer to true than many people are willing to countenance”’.
I should preface this by pointing out an interesting definition that journalist Michael Kinsley gave years ago of a gaffe. A gaffe, he wrote, “is when a politician tells the truth.” The idea is that the truth is something few people want to hear because it upsets them.
Back when mainstream Republican pols sounded conservative:
I figured it up the other day: If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans — enough to fill the city of Detroit.
— Bob Dole, 1976
Virtually everyone attacked Dole the next day, but not based on whether what he said was true or false. Did he get the U.S. body count wrong? The critics didn’t say, although, as it happens, he got it right. Were the four major U.S. wars of the 20th century up until 1976 — World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War — not Democratic wars?
Wright:
We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.
‘Flak means you are over the target.’

The real meaning of PC
The PC brigades’ accusations of bigotry pretty much always boiled down to charges of not worshipping the state. If you oppose war, empire and the Fed, you’re a bigot.
From the LRC blog.
More on Iraq five years on
Rod Dreher’s lessons:
  • The human capacity for self-deception is boundless. Beware emotion in political reasoning.
  • Do not trust the government. Its leaders will lie, both to you and to themselves.
  • Culture precedes politics.
  • Liberal democracy is not universally the best way to govern societies, especially Islamic ones. Remember Otto von Habsburg: I am a legitimist.
  • Having a strong military is no guarantee that you’ll be a strong nation. America is much weaker than we think.
  • You cannot trust the Republican Party on foreign policy and national security. That’s not to say you can trust the Democrats either.
  • It is easy to look at a leader who is blindly, foolishly arrogant, and think you’re looking at confidence. It is easy to think yourself confident, but in fact be blindly, foolishly arrogant.
  • History matters. The temptation to think it doesn’t is constant — particularly among Americans, who are so ignorant of it, and who think we can defy its lessons.
Ron Paul

Laurence Vance

Justin Raimondo

The art(ifice) of war

Lies and more lies


The badge is from An Inch at a Time.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Secular not secularist
Conservatives who are mostly, but not exclusively, Christians insist that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that the founders wanted religion to be supported by government at every level. Liberal secularists point to the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom, the lack of an official state Church, and various ambiguous comments by the early statesmen to claim that religion should have no role in public life.
The country’s founding fathers were deists.
Steven Waldman, the editor-in-chief and co-founder of... Beliefnet.com, says both positions can find some support in the historical record. But each fails to account for the “radical new three-part creed” that early Americans actually hashed out. According to Waldman, figures such as Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and especially James Madison believed that “religion is essential to the flourishing of a republic,” that “to thrive, religion needs less help, not more, from the state,” and that “God gave all humans the rights to full religious freedom.”

“The Founding Faith,” summarizes Waldman, “was not Christianity, and it was not secularism. It was religious liberty — a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone.”
The really scary part of Barack Obama’s and Jeremiah Wright’s worldview is nothing to do with colour.
I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.
— Obama

The bland, meaningless and unthreatening religion of the ruling class
A standard liberal article that makes several good points. The answer of course is neither permanent revolution (including Wright’s racial hatred and the class warfare it’s modelled on, as in liberation theology) — Jesus (today is ‘Spy Wednesday’ in many churches) came to fulfil not abolish the law — nor the travesty of religion criticised here.
For “true” religion, according to Limbaugh, is all about love, and sweetness, and making goo-goo eyes at everyone. “True” religion is nice, and bland to a degree that renders religion offensive to precisely no one. “True” religion is utterly unthreatening. It shouldn’t upset anyone, but offer only comfort and succor.
A religion his kind, and the state, can use. Just like the Modernists and New Agers his fans might make fun of they believe they not God call the shots.

There are these two strawmen — Limbaugh’s and Arthur Silber’s distortions of Christianity — and then there’s Catholicism, which Chesterton found more mind-blowing than the most outrageous heresies he could make up.

Silber’s also noticed the bowdlerisation of MLK — the man who spoke against the Vietnam War is now used by the establishment so kids think his day is about sending care packages to soldiers in Iraq.

From Rational Review.
The fifth anniversary of a crime
From LRC

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

‘Celtic spirituality’
Distinguishing the real thing historically from what’s marketed to New Age consumers (just a more fanciful and egocentric version of no-popery). From Fr Liam Tracey via Joshua Snyder.
...a screen on which is projected many contemporary desires, anxieties and preoccupations, little to do with the past and more especially with the past of these islands.
Been saying that for years.

Archimandrite Serge (Keleher)’s test: he speaks Irish; the pseuds usually don’t.
Smearing Obama
Rod Dreher and Steve Sailer on the right offer interesting criticism of the man but Justin Raimondo’s correct
Defending the traditional Mass lectionary and pushing for more recitation of the office
Recovering from a life-threatening spider bite Derek has more good things to say about Mass-and-office Catholicism. As he knows I like to quote Fr Peter Robinson: a three-year lectionary means people hear three times as much scripture but know it only about a third as well.
The Mass lectionary is not supposed to be the only place where Christian people encounter Scripture. As I’ve ranted before, the Mass lectionary developed in conversation with the Office lectionary; the Office lectionary worked through the entire Bible every year while the Mass lectionary made selective engagement with the Scriptures to highlight the themes and theologies of the mysteries of redemption embodied in the Temporal cycle. We’ve lost that sense that the Mass lectionary is a pointed return to material that we already know and are re-examining from a different perspective...

I abhor that we seem to want to meld all of our traditions into some mushy whole...

I’d prefer the Mass selections that we used for centuries... The Sunday readings for the main seasons remained essentially the same from the 8th-century Comes of Murbach until Vatican II. There was an agenda — and it was Christ. Twelve centuries of millions of the faithful have been satisfied that they show us Christ.
And:
In 1940 a British officer on Dunkirk beach sent London a three-word message: “But if not.” It was instantly recognized as from the Book of Daniel. When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are commanded to worship a golden image or perish, they defiantly reply: “Our God who we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods.”

Britain then still had the cohesion of a common culture of shared reading.
Ordinary people in other times and places knew the Bible far, far better than most of us do or in all likelihood ever will.
Derek again:
One of the reasons that I love the Episcopal Church is because its liturgical intent as described in Cranmer’s preface to the 1549 book was to restore the balance of Mass and Office for the average Christian. That’s where we came from and that’s what our prayer book contains even if that noble goal wasn’t always met and if we’re in a period of amnesia now.
Cranmer and his friends hated the Mass, many places already had the daily office and literate layfolk already prayed it at least in the forms of the Little Office and books of the hours.

The ‘Reformation’ was evil... yet I read Coverdale. Services in the vernacular were the only good that came of it.

Speaking of which Fr Chris Tessone brought this to my attention:

breviary.org
A simplified office using Coverdale and the traditional psalmody for the little hours (like the Sunday one in the post-1911 Roman Breviary)
‘The Good War’ taken apart
Taking opposing sides gentlemen John Zmirak and Eunomia’s Daniel Larison (and Richard Spencer in Part IV) at Taki take on one of my favourite subjects, World War II revisionism (and its preamble, WWI revisionism) or as Larison and I agree (with LRC, which has an article today on the subject) John Flynn was right
...my [Zmirak’s] own reasons for celebrating the utter and complete extirpation of the satanic National Socialist regime, and the presence of U.S. forces to prevent an equally evil Stalin from swallowing the Mother Continent, were not those that motivated Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I’m not a Roosevelt biographer, or even an admirer. His own bias toward mild socialism no doubt made him found the Soviet system less repulsive than the Nazi. (His vice president, after all was Henry Wallace, not Joseph Kennedy.)

Fr.
[Charles] Coughlin told [Farley] Clinton that the Vatican order which scaled back his activities had nothing to do with Roosevelt. Cardinal Pacelli had brought this agenda with him from Rome, and wanted Coughlin off the air at the urgent request of Germany’s [Roman] Catholic bishops — who’d observed first hand the barbarism that had been unleashed in their country. (It was only the intervention of bishops such as Cardinal Clemens von Galen which brought a temporary halt to the mass murder of handicapped children.)

His condemnations of Hitler’s ideology were sterner and more explicit than even Allied propaganda broadcasts. Pius XII assisted the conspirators (many of them devout Lutherans) attempting to assassinate Adolph Hitler, even passing messages between them and an uninterested British intelligence.

Germany and Austria-Hungary were powerhouses culturally and scientifically; I think destroying them was simply eliminating competition to Anglo/US interest.

Of course, as the war wound down, Stalin’s propaganda machine did its best to spread the outrageous lie that Pius XII had been Hitler’s pope. This lie was popularized by a German Communist named Rolf Hockhuth.
A commenter with the unvarnished truth of how the American élite thought and thus why they supported the British before WWII:
...why we buried the hatchet with the British, our traditional enemy since the Revolution not long after they finished crushing the Boers over gold and diamonds.

It suited the United States to have a declining, non-threatening “free trade” British Empire ruling the world. In the nineteenth century, at least until 1898, we had a similar view of decrepit Spain. The British kept the sea lanes and markets of the world open to American business. They took up the “white man’s burden” of policing the natives in places like India, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia; the Antipodes they colonized with their own sons. They kept the Russians in check in Central Asia, the Chinese addicted to heroin and “open,” and swaggering Prussian upstarts on the Continent in line. Basically, the British were doing all the hard work, and American industry, which was a free rider, had a lot to lose (a gigantic subsidy) by having the likes of Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo “revising” the liberal international system which was the
status quo in those days, especially when domestic markets for American production were becoming saturated and new outlets would soon be needed. There was also that thorny problem of what to do about all those millions of angry, unemployed people mired in the Great Depression which had taken a fresh turn for the worse in 1937.

Irish and German Catholics were not all that interested in suiting up to get shot at for England (they wanted peace and employment).

George Washington was right. Americans have no business dying in Europe’s stupid wars.

Germany, Italy, Hungary, Finland, Romania, and Bulgaria were hardly ever in a position to be threat to us — none had a blue-water navy.

The
ONLY winners of World War II were Stalin and Communism, and a triumphant Left in the West that has been busy ever since imposing its paradigm across Europe and the United States.
Some of which is now called (neo-) ‘conservative’.
...while you attach some sort of Crusader ‘mother land’ ideology to it, people like you would have been perfectly OK to sign up for the Commonwealth forces if you felt that strongly about it. No sir, I am afraid they (Taft and Lucky Lindy) were right.
My late rector was a teen-aged fire-watcher atop the dome of St Paul’s during the Blitz and later a Royal Navy rating; I’ve also known (among many Russian refugees who fled after WWII) two Ukrainians who wore German grey to try and drive Stalin out of their homeland.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Science-fiction common knowledge about space travel debunked
Rubbish just like Communism working and nearly everybody in the universe looking suspiciously human and being native English speakers. From Fr Mark.
Liberalism
Democracy can be liberal or illiberal, but while an absolute monarchy cannot be democratic, it can be liberal. The monar­chy of Louis XIV, who allegedly said “I am the State,” was in many ways far more liberal than a number of modern democ­racies. He could not require an annual income tax or conscript his subjects for military service, nor could he issue a law banning champagne from dinner tables. Conversely, many of the horrors of the French Revolution were democratic (but not liberal).
Gold
Watching the dollar die

Sun Myung Moon
The next time somebody slates Barack Obama for Jeremiah Wright his supporters can bring up ‘one of the strangest and least scrutinised figures in the conservative media world’

From Joshua Snyder.
‘Another Irish Drinkin’ Song’
Making fun of all the stereotypes (not for the easily offended) that come out this month for a day celebrating immigration to America, an amateur night for drinkers that’s becoming confused with Mardi Gras, nothing to do with the saint or Ireland!

It’s in Holy Week for the first time since 1940.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

RIP Metropolitan Laurus (Škurla)



First hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, born in Ruthenia on the 1st January 1928. After the fall of Communism he oversaw his church’s reunion with the Russian Church.



Eternal memory.
British teachers’ union says military trying to rewrite history of Iraq war
In a week in which it is estimated that the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi-American War has passed 1 million...

...the lesson plan is a “propaganda” exercise and makes no mention of any civilian casualties as a result of the war.

In a “Students’ Worksheet” which accompanies the lesson plan, it stresses the “reconstruction” of Iraq, noting that 5,000 schools and 20 hospitals have been rebuilt. But there is no mention of civilian casualties.

Five years after “liberation”, Baghdad still only has a few hours of intermittent power a day. Children are kidnapped from schools for ransom and families of patients undergoing surgery at hospitals are advised to buy and bring in blood from sellers who congregate outside.

In the “Teacher Notes” section, it talks about how the “invasion was necessary to allow the opportunity to remove Saddam Hussein”.
Why?
The WMD allegation, central to the case for war, proved to be bogus. David Kay, appointed by the Bush administration to search for such weapons after the invasion, found no evidence of a serious programme or stockpiling of WMDs. The “coalition of the willing” was the rather grand title of a rag-tag group of countries which included Eritrea, El Salvador and Macedonia.

Saddam was regarded as an ally of the West while he was carrying out some of the worst of his atrocities. As for democracy, elections were held in Iraq during the occupation and have led to a sectarian Shia government.

The cost of military operations in Iraq has risen by 72 per cent in the past 12 months and the estimated cost for this year is £1.648bn.

The Iraqi security forces have been accused, among others by the American military, of running death squads targeting Sunnis. In Basra, the police became heavily infiltrated by Shia militias and British troops had to carry out several operations against them. On one occasion British troops had to smash their way into a police station to rescue two UK special forces soldiers who had been seized by the police.

Union members say they are also worried that armed forces recruitment fairs in schools glamorise the job by citing exotic countries that recruits will visit but fail to mention that they may be required to kill people.
From Fr Methodius.
Pueri Hebræorum
...portantes ramos olivarum, obviaverunt Dominus, clamantes et dicentes: Hosanna in excelsis.

Pueri Hebræorum vestimenta prosternebant in via et clamabant dicentes: Hosanna Filio David, benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.

Hosanna Filio David, Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Rex Israel: Hosanna in excelsis.
A sermon from Fr Robert Hart.

Icons
No-one could describe the Word of the Father;
but when he took flesh from thee, O Theotokos,
he accepted being described,
and restored the fallen image to its former beauty.
We confess and proclaim our salvation in word and images.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Has Obama unloaded Wright?
Tibet
Reliable information is a bit hard to come by, but it seems as if the policy of increased Han Chinese colonisation in Tibet has finally run up against a violent popular backlash.

The Economist’s correspondent reports that repression and violence against a number of monks helped spark the rioting.
From Eunomia.
French and Saunders as Abba!



From The Rose Maniple.
Economics
The Federal Reserve’s most recent wealth redistribution plan, through which hundreds of billions of “dollars” will be created in an effort to stave off bank failures — an effort that will not succeed...

To create this so-called “money,” the Fed has to steal the value of what each of us has earned, saved, or invested.
From William Grigg.
Playing by Obama’s rules
The race card, or Geraldine Ferraro wasn’t being racist but telling the truth. But:
It is certainly hypocritical for Ferraro and other liberals, who have been advocating affirmative-action policies for their entire careers, to suddenly criticize Obama as not having adequate experience and only being selected because he is black.

The American people (or significant activist portions of them) are notorious for engaging in major potential self-damaging actions, to preserve perceptions (or in certain cases illusions) of their view of themselves as progressive, fair-minded, idealistic, etc. Witness (1) an eminently avoidable and massively destructive civil war, with destructive resonance which continues to this day; (2) expeditionary forces in WW1 when only dim notions of self-interest justified it...
‘Progressive’ Protestants were hawks keen on destroying what was left of Catholic Europe.
(3) the Abraham Lincoln brigade as leading edge into the WW2 European theatre, to orchestrated mass-media cheer.
The mainline mainstream favoured Communists over Catholic Spain, then the same people cheered and worked for the USSR in WWII. Why I am not surprised?
The racial/diversity/etc. card is always played by both parties (hardly only Democrats or liberals) when the idealism tag can easily be wedded to it.
Then again silly identity politics can work for me, or why I don’t have to change my registration again and strategically vote next month for the empty suit (the ‘tolerably blank tabula rasa’) over the witch (and indirectly against the mad bomber) instead of the principled vote for Paul I’ve promised to cast:
Black Philadelphians will likely vote for Obama against their leaders’ choice.

The only way that Hillary Clinton will become president is to persuade Democratic superdelegates that Obama can not win an election against John McCain. The Democratic primaries have pretty much shown that Obama garners scant support from whites over fifty years of age, even those who are Democratic in allegiance. This is Queen Hillary’s only shot and the stilleto is drawn.

Although Hillary Clinton is a repulsive woman, one should admire her audacity and willpower.

Buchanan actually differs from your typical conservative in that he tried to appeal to the average person for support and was attacked to no end. In fact any person who does so is sneered at as a populist. And its no accident that the liberals constantly pick elitists such as Will, Gergan, Hewitt, Brooks, and Kristol to represent conservatives in the media. These men are harmless since they have zero appeal to the average person.
Looking on a possible bright side if the Dems win in November:
Is it better to send McCain down in flames this November at the risk of some racial trumpmanship by Obama?

So many common white folk undoubtedly are being screwed far more by our War Regime than they are by any sleight-of-hand on race issues.

The neo-conservatives now in charge of the executive branch and the Republican Party might scurry back to their sewer holes along K Street and their Texas “ranch” houses, whichever the case might be. The current Wilsonian foreign policy might end. The troops may trickle home from Iraq. Fox News and
The Weekly Standard might be shuttered in the manner of Detroit. Maybe [it] isn’t so bad to contemplate.
Better than the mad bomber.
The presidential race is a farce and a joke, all fluff without substance, concentrating on some ideological, non-real world, left-wing abstraction that we have been brainwashed into believing is important. We live in the non-sensible fantasy world of TV.

As for the larger political sphere, blacks are only 12 percent of the population and a shrinking segment at that.
Identity politics are ridiculous but I can see the Hispanic vote becoming the more courted one in future.

Obama’s pastor is also capable of telling unpopular truth:
On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies.
I knew that on that Tuesday morning when I realised a Cessna hadn’t hit the building by mistake. That part of the world doesn’t love the American empire.

From Chronicles.