From Daniel Larison

• Birthers and nationalism.
• Maybe Icarus is a better comparison.
• What the right suffers from is a collection of deeply misguided policies combined with an excess of praise for the very communities their preferred policies decimate and change beyond recognition.

Murray Rothbard on the evil of bailouts
From the LRC blog

The Ukraine: Patriarch of Moscow says no to president’s schism

Monasticism and spiritual struggle

He said it’s an extraordinary environment, as you might imagine, but not the tranquil place you might expect. Rather, he experienced it as a place of great spiritual struggle — which, of course, it is. But I think most of us imagine that a monastery is a place in which men (or women) retreat to work out their salvation in an atmosphere of leisurely contemplation. This was not how my friend saw it; he said that yes, there was a certain peace present there, but it was palpably hard-won. These men are not, as some might think, spiritual leisure-seekers, but spiritual athletes.

From Rod Dreher.

Of course in spiritual warfare the Mass and office are the heavy artillery.

From RR

• The ‘Enlightenment’. I’m a classical liberal. Can one be that and Catholic? Many classical liberals say yes; the drawbridge integralists (SSPX) and mainstream common knowledge as seemingly repeated here say no. I think the problem in this article is the misunderstanding or deliberate misuse of the word reason which is not by definition ‘freedom from religion to invent your own truth’ or ‘demonstrable truths on earth and revealed religion are mutually exclusive, the latter mere superstition’ but ‘conforming yourself to objective reality’.
• The state says you’re just too dumb to take care of yourself.
• Although advances in understanding both mental illness and neurodiversity (more) are wonderful there are caveats. One is the mentally ill and autistic-spectrum people falling into identity politics, a kind of self-centredness: rather than meeting normal people halfway while standing up for the same rights normals have (like to hold down a job if you can do the work), demanding that the state force normals to cater to you: using the problem as an excuse. (Which the wrong kind of conservative, some talk-radio types, accuse them of doing: of making up the problem.) The other is this: the state has an interest in pathologising everybody to control them.
• The disappearing Palestinian.
• Minimum wage, minimum jobs.
• The hell of war comes home, part II.
• Teacher oversteps her bounds. Reading a pupil’s mail essentially. IMO this wasn’t in loco parentis, just wrong.

From Hilary

• Above: Photos of an Italian church.
• JP the Wonderpope’s likewise overrated new movements.
• Twilight in which she writes novelistically, potentially a good companion piece to all the truth Thomas Day has written, about the English-speaking (specifically North American) RC experience at least five to 20 years ago.

Five things movie trailers need to stop doing
From Cracked

From Damian Thompson
Two different stories from England relating to the Anglican row

• FiF talking to Rome.
• Barmy in Blackburn. I’m with Thompson. It unconsciously reduces comprehensiveness to the farce it is really, or as I like to say Catholicism reduced to a menu item isn’t Catholicism. These doings are incomprehensible to us and as he says rightly offend the other side!

From RR

• Officials say Obama will close Gitmo on time. Who else suspects that if he does it’s still just for show?
• ‘Birther’ rubbish. More. He’s a symptom not the problem and pace the Constitution I don’t care what country the president was born in.
• Something like the blue food dye used in M&Ms might treat spinal-cord injuries.
• Britain quitting Iraq for real.
• Death ship. A veritable Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa — not. She violates the harm principle so no sale. It takes some serious warping to think murdering the inconvenient is charity.
• The superpower conceit.
• The Paris Hilton of politics? I like that’s she’s pro-life including a frontier-sized lust for life that goes with her sex appeal but she ought never be vice-president or president and won’t.
• The hell of war comes home.
• Breaking the siege of Gaza.
• Trickle-down theology is not enough. He makes his point: echoes of the SSPX’s integralism and Paul Goings’ challenge to make the harm principle work.

Neurodiversity

• Pop autism.
• Myths.

Seven high-tech products and their cheap ingredients
From Cracked

‘War is a calculated and a condoned slaughter of human beings’
Harry Patch, who was the last British WWI veteran. The war began 95 years ago today. From Joshua.

From RR

• Texting raises crash risk 23-fold. With RR’s editor I say: well, duh.
• When ancient Rome tried stimulus schemes. A history lesson from LRC today.
• Palestine: real peace or a mirage?
• Gaza: on the right of resistance.
• Hawk in hock: Obama pretends to be frugal.
• Obama and the Guantánamo deadline.
• Real unemployment rate hits 68-year high.
• Separation of me and state: a rude but fair-minded left-libertarian. I can get on with him but not the religious left or right (they both want to take your freedom away) nor the secular(ist) left.
• More on the great college swindle. Paul Fussell says the real percentage of people who go to university is still low, the rest being ripped off by things calling themselves colleges.

From Rod Dreher

• Best intentions: Andrew Bacevich reads The Quiet American.
• Religion and Europe’s travails.

The evil of tax-funded abortion
Ron Paul, an obstetrician, knows exactly what it is. From LRC.

The Paul movement is the beginning of the post-conservative era for the American right
Filter out the nativism that has beset Taki and some of my other haunts on the right and you’ll find some interesting reading

Iconic American corporations such as McDonald’s, General Motors, and Coca-Cola fund far Left groups with hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants each year.

During the Age of Reagan and conservative hegemony, the New Left decisively won the culture wars, by largely abolishing, often through state fiat, the previously existing culture.

The American Right won past electoral victories by appealing to Middle America, posing as its defenders against the left-wing radicals who spat on the society that gave them so much privilege. Beyond lip service though, the conservative movement didn’t actually do anything to conserve that society, never mind roll back the gains of the Left.

At a core level, we should ask ourselves seriously, “What is there going to be worth conserving in the America of the next generation?”

Orwell’s England is being eradicated, deliberately, consciously, and with staggering speed — even though Eton, Harrow, and the stock exchange still stand. The British upper class, which Orwell loathed for its jingoism and self-satisfied nationalism, now champions this dispossession, with the indigenous working and middle classes serving as the only resistance. Much the same is happening here: the once dominant WASP upper crust is about as likely to take back their America as are the Cherokees.

Even if they weren’t, they’re rich liberals and thus part of the problem so you don’t want them taking it back now.

The attacks on the liberty movement from the Left seem oddly divorced from reality.

A post-conservative and post-national right can maybe be a voice for a “revolution” that isn’t just rhetoric.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Arturo on OicwR and I suspect the anti-Western part of the Orthodox convert boomlet as well.
• Bully for General Convention. I try not to blog overmuch about these things but Brother Stephen is bang-on. This is not news: that church has been this way ever since the ‘Enlightenment’ routed English Calvinism. He’s a former ‘progressive’ Episcopalian so he doesn’t fall into right-wing cliché describing it. More on all that here and here but not too much.
• A row at Ave Maria University, part of a utopian Novus Ordo neocon project. Don’t miss the com-box. I’m not surprised. Picture. More. And Rod Dreher on the matter.
• End of the line for Mud Gorge priest. About time. Mark Shea: There are lots of real private revelations and apparitions. Why waste time on this dodgy stuff? More.

Three words every PR pro should ban

Playing the Jesus card
Why Israeli PM Netanyahu is courting the American Protestant right

From RR

• St Gabriel Possenti.
• Buy now, pay later.
• No exit for Ben.
• Opting out, the anarchist option. I can hear Paul Goings’ objections, and yes, fallen human nature and all that, but I still give anarchism a hearing.
• Abortion and eugenics: Nixon and Ginsburg had this in common or the establishment right and left are a Punch-and-Judy show.
• Affirmative action and related collectivisms.
• The fake party of compassion.
• Obama’s class war on the workingman.
• Maybe Obama’s a political realist like Clinton and won’t intervene at least large-scale to the chagrin of the left. Much of my side mobilised reacting to Clinton’s war on Serbia (the proximate cause of LRC’s founding) but ol’ Bill boxed in by a hostile Congress became a serviceable conservative president, the best in recent memory, compared to what came after. But I’ve not gone over to Obama’s side. He’s escalating AfPak and not really quitting Iraq, and as Ron Paul says the good news is he’s not invaded Iran but the bad news is he’s thinking about it.

The revolt of an élite
From Taki

WWII and the historical blackout
From LRC

Bush’s track record on reverse discrimination was as bad as Obama’s
From Steve Sailer

From GetReligion

• Who again is the world’s second largest Christian church? Two hints: not only no Vatican but not even a Lambeth and it’s not Protestant.
• Naming groups in religion reporting or when is an RC or Mormon not? Lots of both journalistic sloppiness (speaking as somebody in the field) and ideologically driven fibbing here.
• Sigh. The presidential religion again. Censored in the com-box: it shouldn’t matter in a rightly religiously impartial government other than his or her faith serving the common good which most religions promote. That said I still think Obama’s an agnostic (that’s how his grandparents raised him) who thinks ‘Paris is worth a Mass’ or the White House worth a ‘Praise Jesus!’; to cadge votes he’s willing to patronise Middle America and the largely, fervently Christian black America he’s always slavered to belong to by posing as a believer and churchgoer. Another cynical Chicago politician, something he chose to be. Rather like how Karl Rove successfully marketed easygoing oldline Protestant W as an evangelical.
• Gay weddings in all but name. Related: the Jake-ites on what they say they’re fighting for; well put. I’m all for their practising their religion and otherwise living their lives in peace. (Which includes not being murdered, beaten, robbed, deprived of a living or even of free expression etc. regardless of the crime’s motive — like bad Queen Bess claimed but didn’t do, the state ought not look into men’s souls.) Nicely put that’s the beauty of libertarianism including a truly free market (in which those who refuse others’ money and services hurt themselves): we can all get along! Leave people alone and they will come together. Bluntly put if a religion wants to pretend two men or women can marry each other, or Glen wants to pretend to be Glenda, that’s fine; none of my or the state’s business. Decriminalise polygamy as well. Equalise rights by getting the state out of the marriage biz. Leave it to the religions and the couples. Where the left become a problem here is the implied message: they want to force (that is, use the state to coerce) you to believe in their unreality. Because that class always knows what’s best for you. (I rather like the comment in this blog which said that class has the means to indulge in those lifestyles; they think they can create/change reality.) No thanks. As for religion, some of this class want to be the established church again (in England remain that church), this time of ‘post-modern syncretism’ as Dr Tighe says.

From Steve Sailer

• The empty pantsuit.
• ‘Chicago, Chicago...’
• Testing99’s insight.
• Groupthink.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Умиленie icon above. The words around the halo say ‘Rejoice, unwedded bride’, from the kontakion for the Annunciation and thus a refrain from the Akathist.
• ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome’ part II.
• History: how the mainstream media in 1937 covered the Chornock split now ACROD. Poor journalism: anti-Roman bias and as Stuart points out a kind of racism among whites as well. Not mentioned is the non-enforcement of the original ban was a prudent reaction to the circa-1900 Toth split in which many Greek Catholic immigrants took off for the Russians. (It doesn’t tell you but that’s who the people in The Deer Hunter are descended from.)
• Our Lady, ‘Another Sun’. From Arturo.
• Withholding Communion is charity in truth.
• Note from parish notice board from Margi.

From Damian Thompson

• Last WWI British soldier dies. Harry Patch, aged 111. I see the appeal of publicly honouring him; the trouble is inevitably it would be the state glorifying itself, absolving itself of an immoral war.
• Obama has made a prat of himself over the Professor Gates affair. But considering the man’s obsession with race is that surprising? As a commenter at Steve Sailer’s wrote he preaches victimhood because of race to blacks but personal responsibility when talking to whites and is miffed when people catch on to the hustle. Gates didn’t just play the race card in the incident: he flung a whole pack of 52 race cards at a bemused police officer who — so far as I can tell — was just trying to do his job.
• Enforcing the law is not racist: The view of the Commons home-affairs committee that there must be “racism” in the police because black people are disproportionately stopped and searched and their DNA held on database. Questions. Is it possible that black youths commit a disproportionate amount of street crime? And that, if so, this might — duh — explain their disproportionate presence in the criminal justice system? Does it even occur to the BBC to ask these questions?
• The new Archbishop of Westminster: utterly orthodox on the Mass, not at all impressed with Kieran Conry’s suggestion that regular Confession is overrated, very enthusiastic about this Pope, but not an ally of serious traddies. At least he’s cleaning up some of his predecessor’s vandalism.
• Seeing sense at last over Harry Potter: The Church’s Potter paranoia is rooted in Italian unfamiliarity with British children’s popular culture, and is partly also a response to agitation by American fundamentalists. It’s counterproductive, because it suggests that the Vatican can’t discriminate between what is really corrosive and evil and what is harmless or mildly offensive.
• ‘Institutionalist enabling’ is not a problem limited to the few remaining conservative Episcopalians; clericalism is a caricature of Catholic sacerdotalism and it seems it’s still at work in the Legionaries of Christ quagmire: LC still honours late disgraced founder. Also, not from Damian Thompson, more revelations on Irish child-abuse scandal. The paradox of an infallible, indefectible church, more than the seeming sum of its parts, made up of fallible, sinful people, and the difference between clericalism and the faith, are what the anti-Catholic commenters don’t get. Shut the rotten order down and hand over the perps to have the book thrown at them.

Reservist deployments won’t slow down any time soon
New boss same as the old

Indeed, with the number of troops in Iraq staying largely flat through the rest of the year, the reservists are expected to bear an even heavier burden as the Obama Administration continues its escalation in Afghanistan. What was intended to be a part-time military auxiliary is, in a era of permanent war, forced into growing amounts of service in dangerous warzones.

From antiwar.com.

From Joshua

• Ethicist hopes new breakthrough will eliminate ‘need’ to destroy human embryos.
• But we are fast-forwarding to the era of designer babies.
• Video from T1:9.

Queen Mary I
As Protestantism reaches its endgame of secularism of course historians’ anti-Catholic bias remains

Mass layoffs: the continuing devastation
I believe it: my company has said it will make more cuts. From LRC.

From Taki

• On Biden’s trip to the Ukraine and Georgia, still pushing Nato and anti-Russianism.
• A conservative take on the Professor Gates furore. The professor certainly had the right to be a bit ticked off for being questioned while trying to get into his own home; however, Gates’s ensuring hysterical eruption — which occurred while the officer was just trying to leave — seems to reveal a man who was finally living out his wildest racial fantasy.
• The current communications campaign is simply an attempt to calm the markets.

Revaluing work
Filter out the site’s main message, anti-immigration with an undercurrent of racism, and this makes some points

antiwar.com’s Angela Keaton, parts I and II

The faith of Frank McCourt
He seems to have been a Bad Catholic. From T1:9.

Dems to elderly: drop dead
More. From the LRC blog.

From Joshua

• More cheapening of language: names that don’t mean anything or what happened when the narcissistic ‘self-esteem’ craze hit the poorly educated.
• From Iraq to Afghanistan US wars are not going as planned.

From RR

• The libertarian view on foreign policy. The difference between isolationism and non-interventionism, or answering the old charge that we libertarians are selfish.
• Nato no longer has a reason to exist. Justin Raimondo on anti-Russianism today.
• Blackwater seeks gag order.
• Constitution in full crisis.
• Do rights pre-date government?

Debasing the currency of words
By abuse: iconic in the colloquial sense is not the same as merely famous. Like them or not, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson were. The test: is the person or thing synonymous with a decade/era? From GetReligion.

Oscar Wilde and the faith
From Helen Rittelmeyer who’s returned to blogging

Historical perspective from Cracked

Paving the road to hell
Or more religious folk don’t understand economics. Rather than a job at a market rate how about no job at all or more people on the dole (the money for which comes from...)? The usual suspects seem to be out in force for this: Modernist RCs (whose average age is at least 60ish by now), self-hating Jews (Jews historically act economically conservative, which is why they made it big time, but vote left) and most of all (as Chris Johnson says) the National Council of Churches People Don’t Go to Any More.

Pat Buchanan on race, religion and Scotus nominations
Tricky Dick invented affirmative action but Pat notes that Democratic presidents haven’t nominated a white Christian since 1962, yet picking WASPs has backfired on the Republicans. Collectivism, identity politcs, left and right, is wrong. From Taki.

From RR

• How to argue against torture.
• Obama: destruction of US health care ‘has to get done’.
• New boss same as the old: Pakistan objects to expanded US combat plans in neighbouring Afghanistan.
• More promises: Obama says US on track to quit Iraq in 2011.
• Obama’s free lunch is over.
• Charity with other people’s money. UN wants $4.8bn for humanitarian aid.
• As I was saying. Obama régime: no grounds to try war crimes in Afghanistan.
• Delaying the recovery.
• Thucydides’ law. ‘Power always expands to control what it can.’ Power of course in itself is not evil and sometimes necessary as Paul Goings and other Catholics point out; that said I think he and others can agree with me at least on minarchism that the smallest possible government that governs least governs best.
• Control minus responsibility equals disaster or it’s easy to waste when stealing and spending other people’s money.
• Get whitey. The funhouse-mirror version of charity (what PCness is to Christian ethics) that kids are taught in school. It’s racist; never mind the rubbish that historically oppressed people/protected classes are absolved of that. No collectivism of the right or the left.
• Preaching salvation by breaking car windows or the left can get bent. Self-righteous rich folk want to take affordable cars away from the poor; they can drive Priu$es and tell the rest to ride the bus and train, only going where they’re told to go.
• Destructive ‘social justice’.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Private revelation. It’s not doctrine and the local bishop calls the shot.
• ‘Orthodox in communion with Rome’, a perennial topic on some message boards/fora, which seem a superseded online medium but some are still alive.
• Dr Tighe on modern Tory high churchmen: if you buy their premise they’re logical but like many of the King’s men of old not Catholic.
• It’s not about homosexuality but ecclesiology. A liberal RC magazine gets it. Fr Malcolm Kemp wrote elsewhere: Henry VIII was a silly boy who threw his rattle out his pram when he didn’t get his own way.
• Fr Hunwicke on possible kinds of Masses in RC national parishes for ex-Anglicans.

A business success story
RIP John Barry of WD-40. From the LRC blog.

The other modern

Innovative approaches to design that nonetheless fell within the bounds of tradition, and sought to expand them in new directions rather than simply forsaking them.

From TNLM.

From RR

• Sign of the depression: fewer Mexicans are entering the US and more are going home.
• Some food for thought on immigration. “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.” In other words, be careful what you ask the government to do because it may do it to you. Correcting the xenophobia that poisons my part of the right.
• Inspectors say retired US military spouting government propaganda in media didn’t break the rules but their ties to contractors might have done.
• Of course! English and Welsh governments’ anti-knife fight drive causes... more deaths in knife fights.
• Libertarianism is not authoritarianism nor is it the modern GOP. Oh, yes, the land of the free: more of our citizens are imprisoned than in any other country on the planet.
• The GOP’s democracy double standard.
• Hail the Austrians.
• If you love the Internet, fight for it.
• First steps taken to implement preventive detention and military commissions.
• Dillinger killed 75 years ago today. Steve Sailer and me on Michael Mann’s film: it’s obviously trying to glorify the bad guy (he’s got the hot girl; the cop is a dud) but Johnny Depp (BTW see Blow) can’t quite pull off the charisma required as Sailer says. Good to see Stephen Lang (David Abrams, Stonewall Jackson) working with Mann again.

From Hilary

• “One world government” organization that sounds like the usual mid-20th century “world peace”, “global village”, “human rights”, “world court”, The Day The Earth Stood Still crap: that’s all just code for “unelected liberal elites will rule your lives — presuming they let you live.”
• Rights. “I’ve got an idea: Suppose you agree that he can’t actually have babies, not having a womb — which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans’ — but that he can have the right to have babies.” “Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother... sister, sorry.”
• More. Ask the following questions: Is there a right to do something impossible? Do you, for example, have the right to flap your arms and fly? Is there such a thing as the ability to “control your own destiny”? Maybe a good person to ask would be a cancer patient.

From Daniel Larison

• ‘Firmly grounded.’ So Cantor means that he will offer support to opposition Maronites in Lebanon and work to realign U.S. policies in the Near East to favor Armenia, right? No, I guess that wasn’t quite it. When he says that policy should be “grounded in the beliefs of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” maybe he means that we should repudiate aggressive warfare, collective punishment and indiscriminate bombing, especially when those methods also adversely affect local Christian populations. Oh, that’s not it, either? Of course, it means exactly what you would think that it does, which is that we must support Israel to the hilt with support defined as the embrace of the most hawkish, counterproductive policies possible.
• National-security ideology is the same as ever. Obama always concedes grounds to entrenched interests.
• Non-interventionism and nationalism. Most nationalists do not and cannot accept non-interventionism because of the fundamentally aggressive nature of most forms of nationalism. Non-interventionists cannot credibly appeal to such people without ceasing to be non-interventionists. For the latter, the national interest is quite limited, definite and obtainable, while for nationalists it is expansive and virtually unlimited, because this is the only kind of national interest commensurate with their idolatry of the nation. To say that some foreign quarrel is none of our business is to impose a limit, which in the eyes of nationalists is to diminish the nation, and this they will never tolerate.

Three anti-moon landing articles

• Gary North.
• Derb.
• Dr Fleming.

From Joshua.

From antiwar.com

• Biden pushes Ukrainian entry into Nato whilst local support for the US-backed president is at what could be an all-time low. The Ukrainian economy is largely dependent on an open border with Russia. IOW the Ukraine is Russia.
• Israel and the nutbar factor. It’s eroding Americans’ support of what is essentially a settler colony that could not exist for very long if taken off US life support. Justin Raimondo’s latest.
• Obama maintains Bush policy on Gitmo Uighurs.

¡Viva la Ronda!
A local cause: trying to save a magnificent mansion some philistine wants to tear down

From RR

• Amman has started revoking Palestinians’ citizenship. Some Jordanians see the Palestinians as a burden Israel dumped on them. I don’t know enough to know what all this means or who’s really behind it all. Of course Israel would love to see the Arabs turn on each other.
• Gaza: killing everything that moves.
• Robert Gates says he’s expanding the US Army but no to more fighter planes. As Taki has noted doesn’t the Constitution say Congress not the defence secretary decides that? He’s supposed to be the defence minister but is really the war one.
• Health-care Never-Never Land. Also read/listen to Ron Paul’s a good not a right or you have no right to force somebody else to pay for your care.
• War without purpose. Afghanistan: repeating the mistake of the British and the Russians for what?
• Short the USA.
• Will you fight?
• CNBC hates saving.

The utopian temptation
Sometimes literally moving away is a good idea but here’s realistic (given fallen human nature) advice

Pure political freedom doesn’t exist anywhere on the planet, there is one place where we can seek and find our personal maximum degree of freedom — in our own attitudes and actions.

If you don’t think and act like a free person, then you’ll be unfree wherever you go.

If you do think and act like a free person, you’ll always find a degree of personal empowerment even if your home is a prison cell.

Being free means not only taking responsibility for our own choices. It means taking initiative so that we have choices.

It means we figure out what we want in life, then begin actively heading in that direction.

It means when we run into an obstacle we figure a way around it or we change our course. But we don’t just shrug and wait for a bailout.

Also:

New Hampshire partisans: New Hampshire is near Boston where we can get jobs! There are too few jobs in the west!

Western partisans: Boston... is a perfect example of what we want to get away from!

Based on what little I know about Boston that objection’s true.

From LRC.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Moves towards Russian Orthodox juridical unity in America? The Patriarchal Parishes have a temporary vicar bishop now.
• The Episcopal row: so what?

‘Gender’ madness
A libertarian conundrum? You have the right to live in peace without harm done to you (existing laws against murder, assault and battery, theft etc. not ‘hate crime’ laws really thoughtcrime laws) and to do whatever you want (wear certain clothes, take hormones for the rest of your life, have costly surgery) as long as you don’t harm others. A tiny percentage of people have this problem and deserve not condescension but charity in the full Christian sense. Honour your neighbour’s rights (my freedom ends where your nose begins) and live and let live. Not the same as using the state to force your neighbour to believe something he doesn’t (like, if you insist on pretending to be the other sex, demanding he believe that). Of course this case is simply denying reality (why I say sex not gender). A commenter here once wrote on a similar matter that it’s an indulgence practised by those living off the capital of ancestors with better values grounded in reality and who accomplished something (the affluence that makes such indulgence possible — a crisis for trust-fund babies). If I were a betting man I’d put down a gold sovereign that as the depression wears on, things lower on the Maslovian hierarchy will overtake this sort of thing. (When even the upper-middle-class snobs trying to force their unreality on the rest of us are looking for jobs.)

Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed bill has unanimous House Republican support
And 271 co-sponsors in all. The depression seems to have woken them up so they support this. Now to convert them on personal liberty and foreign policy... More.

From Joshua

• Threatening Iran.
• The decimation of Arab Christendom.

From Rod Dreher

• On righteous anger.
• RIP Frank McCourt.

From Arturo

If I disparage those who disparage “cultural Catholicism”, I do so because their idea of religion borders on Pelagianism. While effort is always to be exhorted, the strength of a faith, like the strength of many things, is based on its weakest link. “Cultural Catholicism” has historically been that link. If the only act of Faith a prostitute or a drug smuggler can muster is wearing a medal of the Virgin or St. Jude, I fail to see how this is any worse than those who would turn Christianity into the civic religion of “decent folk”. If anything, at least the person who wears such religious symbols is more likely to acknowledge that how they live is wrong. I am not so sure about those who would turn Catholicism into a culturally Calvinist ideology of the salvation of “upstanding citizens”.

But such prejudices also underestimate how powerful such symbols really are. The Virgin is powerful, her image is powerful, and even the smallest act of love towards her can save a soul. (Read Trochu’s biography of the Curé d’Ars on this one.) No, it is not ideal, but do any of us deserve to get saved in the end, really? Perhaps the slow death of “cultural Catholicism” in the developed world is thus the most tragic phenomenon of all. If we are turning Catholicism into a mature faith of churchy busy-bodies, we are going to end up with half-empty pews filled with tightly wound, unpleasant partisans. And is that how the Church is supposed to look like?

Israeli Arabs feel the heat
This article suggests why

Nazi eugenics in the 21st century
Gattaca for real

From RR

• Government is not society.
• The fake party of small government.
• GOP, we owe you nothing.
• Back to Iraq? If President Obama is serious about getting out of Iraq, and if he truly respects Iraqi sovereignty – if his ascension to the presidency is really all about changing our imperial foreign policy – then Gen. Bolger should be called on the carpet and summarily canned. It hasn’t happened, and it won’t happen, for the simple reason that Iraqi sovereignty is a myth as long as the U.S. occupation force remains. The fact that a single U.S. commander can unilaterally decide to break the SOFA and essentially tell the Iraqis to go screw themselves indicates that the American Raj is not ready to withdraw just yet. Was withdrawal from Iraq just another campaign promise, made to be broken – like Obama’s pledges on government secrecy and other civil-liberties issues? The president’s record, so far, does not bode well for an answer in the negative.
• Measuring inequality. It’s very definitely true that income inequality has risen in recent decades: but much much harder to insist that consumption inequality has done. As an example, there are certainly differences in diet between the rich and the poor in the UK: but it’s only in the last 50 years or so that all, of whatever station in life, are financially able to eat a full and balanced diet. We no longer have the height inequality we did (reflecting again nutrition, where the rich were substantially taller than the poor), nor the health care inequality and while education is rightly a bone of contention we’ve certainly advanced from the medieval idea that only the male rich or the clergy might be literate or numerate. What makes this oversight from certain on the left so puzzling is that they are exactly the people who have been telling us for years that there is much more to life than simply grabbing for the filthy lucre.
• End the monopoly in education.
• Many predict US financial collapse in September.

Too many (other) people
From William Grigg via Joshua

Leave people alone and they will come together

The great virtue of a free market is that it enables people who hate each other, or who are from vastly different religious or ethnic backgrounds, to cooperate economically. Government intervention can’t do that. Politics exacerbates and magnifies differences.

From LRC.

Self-defence

Most people have the deluded opinion that law enforcement will protect them. But even law-enforcement professionals will tell you it is not their job to protect citizens; it is their job to apprehend and bring those who have committed crimes to justice. In other words, after you are dead, the cops will try to catch the guys who killed you.

From LRC.

From Taki

• Tricky Dick invented affirmative action. Far from being an alternative to racism, affirmative action institutionalises racial discrimination, a kind of divide-and-rule policy that lets federal agencies control the racial mix in the workplace. Only at the point that the forward momentum of the American economy stalled did the idea of positive discrimination come to the fore... The ideas of redistributing the rewards (and by implication, redistributing the misery) were part and parcel of a generalised sense of despair at economic progress, as exemplified in the growth of apocalyptic green screeds... The belief that resources were running out suggested that a smaller cake had to be shared out more evenly. Someone once told me that Nixon’s real reason for instituting race preferences was to piss off blue-collar workers and union types so much that they’d break away from their coalition with blacks in the Democrat Party and join the Republicans. Such plans within plans strike me as a bit too Nixonian even for Nixon. He also turned American money into something entirely imaginary, taking away all backing. The establishment conservatives aren’t conservatives.
• Yup: from America came the charity ball, a euphemism for rich social climbers getting their names in the papers.

Occupiers’ propaganda

Think of it for a second: If a gang invaded your home, set fire to several rooms, killed several of your family members, and then decided to stay for a while, would you refer to such people as “guests”?

From the LRC blog.

A complete Sarum Missal in English online
Scanned from an 1884 book. From TNLM.

‘Hey there, Obama’
From Mark Shea

Note that the kid who made it is only 16, which means that the BS detector in the teenage nose remains as strong as ever.

LRC on Walter Cronkite
The well-meaning world-governmenters assume they or people they like would be in charge

‘The Most Trusted Man in America’? In one sense Cronkite was indeed that: he could be totally trusted by the oligarchy, did an effective job for them, and was plushly rewarded for it. But here’s what’s funny: no one under 30 watches TV anymore, and people under 50 know him as at most a name. So this media canonization has to do with the solipsism of an increasingly irrelevant industry. “And that’s the way it is.”

Well-meant, misplaced nostalgia much like the ‘Greatest Generation’ kind in general (who fought the War to Save Stalin) for people with better values and for a shared culture (such as back when there were fewer media so when most people watched the same tele). As destructive as the late ’60s were, the palæos are right that the rot set in long before.

As for peace the history speaks for itself: the left, the one-worlders, are the biggest enemies of it dating back to Woodrow Wilson pushing the US into World War I. Or ‘it’s not aggression when we do it’.

The isolationist, local-sovereignty folk are the greatest friends of peace.

Yesterday’s 40th anniversary

Although Americans are still capable of great achievements, they no longer seem part of our birthright. How many watching as Armstrong took his famous step would have believed that, 40 years later, America would essentially be broke, deeply in debt to a country whose citizens spent 1969 adulating history’s greatest mass murderer and actively trying to destroy their country’s traditions and culture? And one of the reasons for this stunning reversal of fortune is the American cultural revolution that was raging even as the Apollo astronauts were landing on the moon.

Yes but as a palæo will tell you that Yankee idealism/American exceptionalism (Calvinism, bad to begin with, gone secular) carried in it the destruction Mr Piatak decries.

The moon landing was really an accomplishment of the other 1960s (really an extension of the 1950s), of civilised people capable of the required discipline and focus. ‘The ’60s’, which Charley has defined as ‘at university between 1968 and 1972’, didn’t accomplish much of anything.

From Taki.

From RR

• July deadliest month for occupation forces. Learning the hard way like the British and the Russians.
• Report: IDF used civilians as human shields.
• A history of blogging.
• Sotomayor vs Ricci.
• Why the depression hasn’t ended.
• The lowdown on crude Keynesianism.
• US helped ChiComs interrogate Uighurs at Guantánamo.
• ‘Nixon goes to China’ in reverse. That is, the modern left are Obama’s regardless so he is in a good position to sucker the country into another war, says Justin Raimondo, who thinks O will have a go at Iran. Then again the left always were for war ‘for your own good’.
• Big Tobacco’s evil as far as I can tell but ‘smoking bans have everything to do with the political classes exerting control over their populations’.
• School competition begets greater quality.
• The marijuana closet. Legalise decriminalise it.
• The defeatism of the British anti-war movement.
• Desertion. One more time, my take: those who do it on principle are heroes. (For example while in the service they changed their minds and applied to be conscientious objectors but were turned down.) But at the same time I’m not a pacifist. (I’m all for a strong defence and one with spiffy uniforms at that.) If you signed a contract you have to honour it. Part of their heroism is taking the punishment.
• A young Canadian libertarian thinks about social conservatism. If a Muslim can’t handle hearing a Christian word then he does not belong in a country of (supposed) free speech. Not all social conservatives want the government to control speech to fit the Canadian heritage mold. I would argue that most, like me, would probably prefer everyone to be culturally Canadian and value traditions but would rarely want the government involved.
• Trying to rent prosperity.

Anti-war in the UK
From @TAC

How to breed terrorists
Killing children in Gaza. From Fr Methodius.

There is no economy left to recover
Says former assistant US treasury secretary Paul Craig Roberts

High Mass at Philadelphia’s Carmel
Tridentine on the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Drove through a big thunderstorm to get there which fitted the epistle (3 Kings 18:42-45)! (Saw downed tree branches and a flooded manhole go up like a geyser in North Philadelphia.) It was so crowded there was overflow in the courtyard: the man in grey holding the child is friend of the blog dcs.

More photos.

Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival is under way.


Lodato sempre sia il bel nome di Gesù e di Maria.

The push for state gay marriage is anti-liberty
Or property issues aside (orthodoxy is not a licence to steal) the liberal Protestants suing conservative congregations out of buildings are anti-freedom, which is what annoys me about them not their views on or practice of sex, which are their business (as long as it’s not a public health hazard, go ahead, knock yourselves out)

From Mark Shea

• The itch to crush free speech.
• If you claim to care about the earth and “nature” while doing something as fundamentally anti-natural as artificial contraception, you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.
• The basic rule of thumb to understand in Catholic/Protestant conversations is that it is not the case the Catholics rely on Sacred Tradition and Protestants don’t. Rather, Catholics rely on Sacred Tradition and know they do, while Protestants rely on (parts) of Sacred Tradition and (usually) don’t know they do.

Modern liberalism was barbaric to begin with
Remembering the Vendée: long before Stalin there was this. Posted at Tea at Trianon for Bastille Day yesterday.

About 250 years earlier English Catholics gathered under the similar Five Wounds banner to say no to the state’s ‘Reformation’ abusing the church in their land: we wyll haue the masse.

All this talk about using laws and societal pressures to get rid of moral evils

... is a bunch of hot air. Not that I think the opponents of “Christian conservatives” will ever get the opportunity to call our co-religionists’ bluff, precisely because I speculate that they will never have any real power. And even if they did, such people often harp on some evils at the expense of tolerating others, using the “hierarchy of goods” to veil their own, rather questionable agendas.

— Arturo

The real unemployment numbers
From Jeff Culbreath

‘Doorway’ by IO Echo
Listen to the whole song

Anti-awareness campaigns
From Steve Sailer

From Rod Dreher

• Freedom, obedience and religious life.
• I cannot foresee any enthusiastic mass movement coming together.

A good Protestant
The Revd Richard Kew:

This whole exercise is not about sexuality or sexual behavior, but is fundamentally about what we believe the Christian faith to mean and be about. When it comes down to it, it is about our attitude toward Jesus as God’s Son, the nature of the Trinity, divine revelation, Christian obedience, and holiness of life. The cavalier attitude of the [liberal Protestants and Modernists] to the creeds and their recitation is evidence that [they] consider the likes of me as pedantic has-beens rather than those who are on the cutting edge — but the cutting edge of what?

Yet the truth really is, as you look around the world, that those who are pushing this worn-out postmodern mélange and calling it Christian are increasingly the has-beens. They seem to have tied themselves to the coattails of the last dribblings of the least attractive side of the Enlightenment, and it is entirely likely that they will disappear down the drain with them.

The church in England is wrestling to adapt to an altogether more secular and hostile climate than exists in most of the USA, and what is interesting, I don’t see postmodern Christianity standing up very well in such an environment. It is a limp and aging rag. The creative scholarship, for example, is coming from a far more theologically orthodox direction.

Healthy progressive liberal and theologically to-the-left congregations are few and far between, while it the theologically more conservative who are creatively evangelistic that have become the majority of stronger centers of the faith.

This isn’t to say that the English church doesn’t have a belly-load of problems and challenges, some of which it is refusing to address; but it is illustrative that so-called progressive faith is not flourishing well in an environment which affirms and celebrates many of the values and attitudes it endorses.

The churches in England that are healthiest are those who approach their Christian witness in a missional manner: which means trying to ask and answer how we take the gospel message and enable it to speak in an environment where the church is a bit of a joke — or worse. Some of them are making whopping mistakes, but at least they are trying! The intelligentsia in Britain will generally take every opportunity to denigrate religious people of all flavors... There is little or no social or intellectual kudos to be gained from being a believer in England, and the bulk of the general population doesn’t have the vaguest notion of what the Christian faith is all about. There are too many uncanny parallels to the 1st century.

Yet, there are Anglican churches (and varieties of others) that are packed to the doors. There are some fascinatingly creative experiments being undertaken. The theologically orthodox seminaries are the ones enrolling the majority of new students. The House of Bishops is becoming increasingly orthodox (although they may not want to label themselves that way), and so on, and so on.

All of which is going on at the same time as Pope Benedict’s (no has-been he) Catholic revival and the Orthodox convert boomlet.

From RR

• Cheney linked to concealment of CIA project.
• CIA lies.
• 2084: Justin Raimondo tries writing dystopian fiction.
• Palin wasn’t the answer.
• Donations from ‘the people’ didn’t help Obama win. What really happened is that the people who controlled the financial sector of the economy saw a massive train wreck about to happen and they needed someone malleable and ambitious enough to work with them to clean up the mess that would follow.
• Nukes: offence, defence...
• When ‘it’s OK because it’s part of my culture’ doesn’t cut it. Which goes back to the debate on defining and applying the do-no-harm principle. (In which I assume good old Anglo-American rule of law and anything injurious and non-consensual is out.) The trouble is the self-righteous left, just like the self-righteous right, would try to use this — and use state power — to shut down anything they find objectionable, like people and religions who teach the sexes are innate and gay marriage impossible. As opposed to the libertarian view: most vices are not crimes so live and let live.
• A reason to fear nationalising US health care. Goodbye, advances in technology and treatment.
• Can’t we all just get along? It reminds me: I’ve been to a lib-Prot blog with peace and stop-the-Iraq-war banners and been run off over gay weddings, which they’d talk about nonstop (see the bullet point two up from this); I’m always welcome at a conservative Protestant blog whose owner disagrees not only with my ecclesiology but with my politics from Palestine to Ron Paul.
• Hate-crime legislation would backfire. The answer is to revert to existing laws against murder, assault and battery, theft etc. (again the do-no-harm principle) and scrap the notion of thoughtcrime.
• US pols’ overspending tops $1 trillion.
• Germany: Demjanjuk indicted. I think the Israelis just want to save face.
• Thank the Lord for small mercies: McCain backs Obama on F-22 cuts.
• Alaska: Palin’s PAC raises nearly $1m. This seemingly populist phenom (dissatisfaction with the status quo) has potential if it can be persuaded away from red-state fascism to libertarianism.
• More Puerto Ricans live on the US mainland than in Puerto Rico.
• Promises, promises: Sotomayor says she’d be impartial. Given that she obviously buys into group identity politics over rule of law, I don’t think so.
• A very inconvenient truth. The climate-change scare as a power grab. Usually from the same class who wish the Wrong Sort of White People — their conservative Protestant cousins and Catholics — and Trig Palin would just go away. Again, as in medicine, if you want progress look to the market — and you keep/regain your freedom as well.