The graphic decline of my business
But I don’t work for a daily (one 26-hour marathon a week is enough, thanks). From CounterPunch.

From RR

• Rhode Island: idiot pols approve prostitution ban. Sorry, Quagmire.
• An opportunity for the Oath Keepers.
• Obama: drone planes of death are OK when we use them. Remember that excuse to invade Iraq? Hussein, who once worked with the US government, was going to move into the White House and ban Christmas (even though he was a secular Muslim and Christians had rights under his rule) using some balsa-wood things that couldn’t cross the Persian Gulf.
• No one man — not even a nice, articulate, charismatic one — ought to claim the right to suspend a person’s constitutional rights.
• No thanks, Net nannies.
• The only genuine way to support the troops.

From Taki

• Afghanistan: consensus for failure.
• Palæos: beautiful losers. But this effort at sober assessment does not mean that I’ve thrown up my hands and left the battlefield to our enemies. What I’m suggesting is that whoever (God willing!) brings down the neoconservatives and their mercenary empire, it will not be my generation.
• Liberals are so open-minded. Primetime Fox News regularly has guests with opposing viewpoints, whereas MSNBC does not.
• Babypolitics. Abortion in Russia.

Sure but Pius XII is a Yankees fan
At Our Lady of Lourdes

From Damian Thompson

• He’s not keen on American Halloween. I like it: of course it’s the anticipation of All Souls’ Day and el Día de los Muertos.
• The Anglo-Catholic move to Rome will take time — and cost a lot of money. But it’s going to happen.

From CounterPunch

• Witch hunt. An example of Calvinism curdling into PCness.
• Contrasting the US and Mexico. I think I can see things wrong with this, written by a leftist: the romanticism and there my side’s love of the work ethic. But I like it anyway.

The Internet turns 40
From T1:9

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Ecumenism exemplified. By the late, great Eric Mascall. More from him and other Anglo-Catholic humour.
• God doesn’t explain things; things explain God. From Fr Gregory Hallam via Huw.

From the LRC blog

• They died for a lie.
• They gave ‘the last full measure of devotion’ to what?

From RR

• Obama signs ‘defence’ bill with thoughtcrime provision. In a major civil-rights change, the law also makes it a federal hate crime to assault people based on sexual orientation. Assaulting anyone is already rightly a crime. Keep it that way.
• He still doesn’t understand blowback.
• Facebook users under cyberattack.
• On one hand there’s nothing wrong really with selling a product for better sex (there is when free or much less costly sex education works); on the other the critics have a point that Big Pharma is making up a problem that’s simply in the range of normality then conning you into buying the cure like much else manipulative marketing. Reminds me of a ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ where the couple get a bunch of catalogues with titles like ‘You’re Not Attractive or Stylish Enough’.
• On the government saving jobs.

From Rod Dreher

• Афганистан: мы были там, сделили это. Afghanistan: been there, done that or 1986 all over again. In English.
• Pro-market not pro-business? I see the appeal and am not necessarily agreeing with it, just bringing it out for discussion. Some on my side would say it’s romantic nonsense (with the criticism that Dreher’s crunchiness is socially conservative SWPLness, which he’s smart and honest enough to acknowledge); the most efficient business (at serving you and me) may be bigger.
• Moralistic therapeutic deism again. Not exactly deism (a God who isn’t active in the world any more) but demoting God to a sort of kindly spirit that does your bidding; you call the shots. What in practice has become America’s religion. They believe in a benevolent God unattached to a particular tradition who is there mostly to help with personal problems.
• How the left are oppressive to normal human desires and interaction. While working at ABC Television in NYC I see a co-worker, an attractive late-20s female, dressed to the nines. Turns out she was going to a black-tie affair immediately after work... My comment? “You look great. That’s a beautiful dress.” Monday morning I get called into my boss’s office, and a woman from HR is there, along with our Union Rep, because I’m being charged with sexual harrassment. Fortunately, I left the company 2 months later. The result of this experience has been to create a bias for me against hiring women. Unfair? Absolutely. Pragmatic, realistic and better for my fiscal health? Absolutely. Also, “diversity” tends to reduce social solidarity and social capital. Robert Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends... to huddle unhappily in front of the television. People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.” The SWPL do it too — witness places like Portland, Oregon, where they congregate: next to no blacks — but don’t admit it.
• A localist future.
• Is Pope Benedict taking the Benedict Option, getting Christians ready for a long night? One correction: his recent offer is in theory to all Anglicans but in practice not to Protestant Anglicans, who of course aren’t interested, but to Anglo-Catholics and specifically their English version, the Anglo-Papalists.

Remember the silent majority
Regarding our received image of the ’60s it’s time to question authority

Heading back to around 1960: want to join us?

Don’t believe what you’ve seen in the movies. Malcom X wasn’t friendly with Martin Luther King, most anti-war protesters were just looking “to get laid,” and plenty of Americans lived through the whole decade without seeing a hippie, save on TV.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: If ’60s radicals “were a small minority on college campuses and were often held in disdain by their fellow students,” why have they had so much cultural influence?

Jonathan Leaf: Because through Hollywood movies, TV shows, and books, they’ve managed to tell a tale that reflects their own narcissistic vision of themselves as central and heroic to the time.

All of the most important leaders of the “anti-war” movement — Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Abbie Hoffman, Katherine Boudin, et al. — were very much in favor of violence and war. It’s just that they wanted our Communist enemies to win.

I’m not anti-rock music.

From Mark Steyn.

From TAC

• Anarchist’s playbook. On Murray Rothbard.
• Iraq-war hawk admits we can’t help Afghanistan. Use bugmenot to get in.
• What are we fighting for? US official quits.
• Getting the Vietnam analogy right.
• Cutting a deal with the Taleban may be the best path.
• ‘Independents have flipped negative. That’s not good for any party.’ Sounds good to me.
• The right reasons for liberty. Should libertarians care about cultural values? I think the right answer is in a truly free society those values take care of themselves; people go for what works, or age-old arrangements last for good reasons.
• Hollowing out the middle or how a certain mindset in education kills small towns. Good points as long as one really has the freedom to stay or go.

Touring TAC’s active blogs:

@TAC

• Operation Albion. Military expert William Lind on a successful German amphibious attack in WWI.

Post Right

• Fisking a bad WaPo article on Pope Benedict’s offer to the last Anglo-Catholics. Speaking of such, the Jon Stewart show’s predictable ignorant rant (‘clerical celibacy is doctrine so you’re hypocrites and besides you just hate gays’) had this good line from John Oliver about keeping AC culture under Rome: it’s like better phone service while keeping the same number.
• The good guys re: ex-Yugoslavia?
• Democrats and Republicans a generation from now?
• Warmongering is a bipartisan tradition.

From Taki

• Hate is not a crime.
• Serial TV: shows with ongoing storylines. I’ve never seen ‘thirtysomething’; just as well because I like the era and culture better that those people helped ruin.
• An island of atheists? As Holmes said, elementary: the country is haunted by Catholicism having been driven from it by force; the ruling class has a ‘creepy self-awareness’ (as an old friend said), knowing jolly well what the names of their old churches and schools mean and saying to all that ‘I will not serve’. More from Fr Hunwicke.

How St Pius X changed the Roman Breviary
From TNLM via Derek

I can’t complain really as it’s not one of my usual choices of:

• The horologion, in the morning improvising using Psalm 50/51 and one of the weekday canons from the main morning office (Matins, which is really the equivalent of Lauds), or Prime, Terce or Sext literally by the book, then None, Vespers or Little Compline by the book in the evening. Books: The Hours of Prayer from Morgantown and the Uniontown set for the propers but I make BCP translation substitutions à la Hapgood. (Both places are Slav coal towns in the eastern US.) Happy St Euthymius’ and St Lucian’s Day.
• The Monastic Diurnal as an alternative.
• And when I can’t get home in the evening, the Rosary in the car coming home from work late Mondays and late Tuesdays/early Wednesdays.

And if it were I’d be fine with the simplified 1960 rubrics (‘the new Breviary’). The Diurnal’s (more) a good fit: small, handy, more challenging than the Little Office and not as complicated as the full Roman Breviary (simpler saints’ calendar as well).

DEUS, qui nos per beátos Apóstolos tuos Simónem et Judam ad agnitiónem tui nóminis veníre tribuísti : da nobis eórum glóriam sempitérnam et proficiéndo celebráre, et celebrándo profícere. Per Dóminum et c.

Translation and the rest of the day’s Roman Breviary office here.

More.

Obama’s dirty war on immigrants
From CounterPunch. So according to the left one can trust the same government that snoops in employment records and otherwise harasses folk to run health care. No.

US continues quagmire-building effort in Afghanistan
From The Onion

From RR

• A left-libertarian throws down the gauntlet: are libertarianism and social conservatism incompatible? Yes, say he and the drawbridge Catholics (not all Catholics). No, say classical liberals. Why not? Because libertarianism favours whatever works (which is why the old ways have lasted) and libertinism and selfishness in the long run don’t. That’s why, even with fallen human nature, the magic of the market works to promote flourishing. Discuss!
• Two lanes on the road to freedom.
• Ehren Watada, hero. Free at last. Watada is not a pacifist, and he based his stand not just on the falsehood of the justifications for the war but on the usurpation of legitimate constitutional authority by the officials in the George W. Bush administration.
• Like any honest man, Joe is running under his own name. He happens to have been born with a fine Irish name, a name that many Massachusetts voters will find comfortable rather than unfamiliar. In Massachusetts politics, that’s a real plus, the sort of thing that will help voters hear his ideas and decide this is a man they can trust.
• From the sublime to the ridiculous: man threatened with year in jail and sex-offender status... for being alone naked in his own home. Thanks to a busybody cop’s wife using his property as a short cut (why not get her for trespassing?).

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Taylor Marshall on five myths about the Pope’s offer to the last Anglo-Catholics. Of course the answer to Myth No. 3 from well-meaning RCs is to find out who ACs are.
• Fr Hunwicke on St Vincent of Lérins, Newman and the hermeneutic of continuity: Development must take place eodem sensu eademque sententia (keeping the same meaning and the same judgment/opinion).
• Clergy who ‘poped’ years ago and are still sitting around being ‘discerned’ should have access to the new arrangements. They’ve suffered enough. We could be of use to bodies like FSSP. Or, if SSPX accepts its own Roman Offer, to them. Some Anglican clergy are Byzantinophiles, who might relish the privilege of ministering to Melkites or Ukrainians.

Fr David Lewis Stokes on the Pope’s offer to Anglicans: by George he’s got it!
From T1:9

Chesterton’s fumble: dissing the Orthodox
A great man but fallible, he made the same observations against modernity that Fr Seraphim Rose did 40-50 years later but in a much shorter and funnier way

Byzantium slowly stiffened into a sort of Asiatic theocracy, more like that which served the Sacred Emperor in China.

Sounds like another, more widespread voice from about 40 years later: ‘give up that artsy-fartsy old-fashioned stuff and have nave altars and guitars’. No thanks, Gilbert.

But even the unlearned can see the difference, in the way in which Eastern Christianity flattened everything, as it flattened the faces of the images into icons. It became a thing of patterns rather than pictures; and it made a definite and destructive war upon statues. Thus we see, strangely enough, that the East was the land of the Cross and the West was the land of the Crucifix. The Greeks were being dehumanized by a radiant symbol, while the Goths were being humanized by an instrument of torture.

Hate to break it to you, old boy, but the other side uses the crucifix.

From Stephen Hand.

From RR

• The empty establishment.
• Rhode Island: another Kennedy spars with church over abortion.
• Legalised marijuana? We may already be on the way.
• How are some middle-class families coping with the recession? Growing pot!
• Economics. The best plan: no plan.

From Fr Hunwicke

• Newman and liberalism. Ties into this: religious liberalism seems humble but is really not.
• Tabletistas seem to think Anglo-Catholics don’t know what sacramentality is. As they say over here, ‘Whiskey tango foxtrot?’ If that’s true it points out to me 1) how parochial the RC liberals still are and 2) related to that, they never were directly imitating mainline Protestants; the mistakes of the 1960s just opened them up to the same errors. But they’re expressed through a different culture from the mainliners (the Thomas Day factor or why they’re low-church).
• Why the people fighting over church buildings often aren’t thieves at heart.

Rosemont and Pope Benedict’s offer
The NYT on a long-running local story (use bugmenot to get in). I’ve long been happily acquainted with Good Shepherd, Rosemont. (I was at Bishop Moyer’s consecration.) But isn’t it an outpost of old biretta-belt American Anglo-Catholicism, wonderfully Tridentinesque externally but Prayer Bookish and non-papal (a religion that Western Rite Orthodoxy is largely a revival of)? (Unlike English ACs who are would-be RCs: the people most likely to accept this offer and probably the only ones.) Isn’t it less Catholic-orientated than it used to be, going in for common cause with conservative Protestant Anglicans on credal orthodoxy and some moral issues? Of course if Pope Benedict really has ACs’ back like I think he does, I’d love to see Rosemont come aboard (with or without its buildings; the Episcopalians don’t need them really but orthodoxy is not a licence to steal — property rights mean the Piskies can evict Bishop Moyer and turn them into a carpark or store; see La Ronda, another beautiful landmark of the swellegant old Main Line) but given those two things I don’t see it happening. But Bishop Moyer’s denomination is the American branch of an anglican (not Anglican like the Piskies; former Anglicans) church committed to union with Rome so who knows? I don’t see a lot of the parishioners going along with it. Rosemont and Anglican Use RC under the old Pastoral Provision seem a fairly good fit as IIRC they’re not Missal but hybrid 1979, exactly what the AU is.

Indirectly I’m at my church of 12 years thanks to Rosemont. The then-priest-in-charge told me about Clem’s, where Larry Reilly told me of and walked me by the place.

More photos.

GetReligion on Rome and the usual suspects
On the media covering Rome’s offer to the last Anglo-Catholics. A.N. Wilson may not like the Pope but he understands Anglicanism and the Catholic/Protestant divide of infallible vs fallible church:

Hatched by Henry VIII and nurtured by his daughter Elizabeth I, the Church of England was an expression of that combination of tolerance and arrogance that marked the English governing class. It sat light to doctrine, and tried to accommodate many. But while that seemed a gentle thing to do, it did so because it actually laid claim to governing and controlling all.

Yuppie 911
Expecting the government to rescue them, people either make frivolous calls to rescue crews or take foolish risks in the wilderness

The private war of women soldiers
Jeff Culbreath writes of this: chivalry is dead

The GOP is adrift
From Daniel Larison

Maureen Dowd, catty Know-Nothing
Calvinism curdled into SWPL and they may have pigged out on granola but the KNs are still around. From Rod Dreher.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Viva Cristo Rey. More.
• Prayers for the conversion of England. Blessed English Martyrs, pray for us.
• Talking at AKMA’s about the Holy Father’s outreach to the last Anglo-Catholics. For breaking news and good commentary on all that read Brother Stephen.
• The Ochlophobist on this move and the Orthodox.
• Bulgarian Bishop Tikhon says something nice pro-union that needs finessing. On the lay level in the Middle East the two sides are the same church (following long-standing custom Orthodox and Melkites, of the same rite, intercommune all the time) but everywhere the clergy can’t concelebrate unless they agree on the scope of the Pope: the Orthodox would become Greek Catholics or the Roman Catholics would become Western Rite Orthodox (more — looks like Pope Benedict’s revival, doesn’t it?). I see neither happening so the two parallel Catholic churches are in a perpetual standoff.
• Icons: the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council.
• ROCOR Diocese of Chicago clergy decision: on the custom of having only one confessor.
• Fr Hunwicke: does the Roman Canon assume a universal bishop?

The week at RR

• Mugged by reality: Virginia Tech students join Liberty University in fight for gun rights.
• Say hello to the Libertarian News Examiner.
• Escalation unopposed.
• Rethinking WWIII.
• Orwell’s statespeak: Department of Corrections.
• The is/ought fallacy. The assumption is that if the government doesn’t provide these services than nobody will, and that by opposing the government being the provider of these services one also opposes the services being provided at all.
• Reality’s a b*tch. The discussion began with our Left-leaning friend saying that we need stringent government regulation of, well just about everything, in order to protect the Little Guy from rapacious Big Boys with lots of power. To do this we had to give the State lots and lots of power to counter-balance the Big Guys out to hurt the Little Guy. It’s a pretty standard argument from the Left. My reply was what I would call Libertarianism 101. Simply put, I argued that history has shown that when the State is given such powers it is rarely used to protect Little Guy. Instead Mr. Politician conspires with Big Guy to use the new fangled powers in order to make life for Mr. Politician and Big Guy better at the expense of Little Guy.
• Cindy Sheehan on antiwar.com radio.
• The ’Net is a bicycle for the mind.
• Thieves harvest personal info from social-networking sites.
• 32 planets discovered outside solar system. [anorak] Including the Greek-god one, the ’20s-gangster one, the Nazi one (of course it had to be Nazi not Falangist or Peronista thanks to Roddenberry’s cartoony mainstream liberal politics and the sets and props available at Paramount — as a 12-year-old once said the whole franchise was ‘a pinko TV show’ about a military dictatorship pretending to be a democracy), the ‘1960s Roman Empire’ one (OK social satire but they’d be speaking Latin or Italian not American English — then again everybody in the universe apparently naturally speaks English besides looking suspiciously human) and Mr Spock’s home? [/anorak]
• Anti-war vigil marks eighth year. It obviously doesn’t work and we probably disagree on how to run the peace (they trust the same state that bombs Iraqis and Afghans to run your life) but I salute their intentions.
• Managing the economy is ridiculous.
• The Pentagon’s recruitment two-step.
• World’s gov-thugs not making dent in heroin trade.
• Good news? Rift between US and Israel.
• A Rumsfeld-era reminder of what calls terrorism.
• The race hustle.
• Poland ready to join US missile shield.
• The year the dominoes fell. “If you want a picture of the future,”’ says an official of the totalitarian government in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” which was published soon after the Stalinist night had fallen on Eastern Europe, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Of course the Stalinist night was a result of WWII.
• Copenhagen treaty: will the US cede sovereignty?
• Marriage privatisation.
• War is a racket.
• Is adulation of the military really patriotic?
• Stop blaming racism for the failure of black parents.
• Taking Burke’s name in vain.

UK: armed officers put on routine foot patrol for the first time outside Northern Ireland
Whole estates (American: projects) have become criminal no-go zones

From Taki

• Obama and Fox. Because you know censorship is, like, un-American except when we do it. See my remarks to Huw on rights for all.
• The folly of the state subsidising localism. The road to hell and all that.
• Why are women in bars? They do it because it’s empowering to be a man. Why do they want to be men? What’s so disgusting about being a woman? If you are one of the 5% that doesn’t want to enjoy the miracle of birth, you should have every right to do just that, but don’t drag the rest of the natural world down with you. Women earn less than men because they choose to. While men are happy to order pizza and go over the BNR Proposal all night for the big meeting tomorrow, women would rather go to their daughter’s dance recital. Good. That works. Why are you messing with it?
• Steve Sailer agrees the world was a better place when real-life Mike Torellos protected women on the streets: Women once made up the heart of the movie-going audience (my mother went to the show most nights in 1940 in St. Paul). Then, crime drove women off the streets after 1965, leaving younger males as the prime ticket buyers. The realization that they could make lots of money off young Baby Boom males’ tastes liberated slightly older male filmmakers in the 1970s (the decade that almost all current critics idolize). Contradicts Gavin McInnes above but McInnes is writing about New York hipsters. I didn’t link to Sailer here because I’m not on board his racialist campaign against Mexican immigrants (his argument here: blockbuster films are stupid because that’s how those people like them; they’re the ones who still go out to the movies so there you go).
• Nixon and Obama. For all his failings (mostly an understandable insecurity and he did indeed have enemies; he was anything but stupid) Tricky Dick came from the culture destroyed in the late 1960s that actually accomplished things; Obama is from the spoiled-brat hippy 1960s that gets awards it didn’t earn (like a kid getting a sports trophy just for showing up).
• As conservatives, or at least people on the Right, we obviously venerate tradition and conventional morality. However, particularly for those of us under 30 who have never known anything other than this remarkably stupid leftist world we inherited, we have no idea what a traditional conservative society even looks like. It is impossible for us to be reactionary, even if we wanted to be — we would just be making something up. It is one thing to fight in defense of certain institutions and moral codes having lived underneath them — it is another thing to rebuild them entirely once they have been completely destroyed and you have no firsthand knowledge of how they operate. I don’t think such an effort can win. I would love to be proven wrong. The vague temperament that is emerging at Takimag and certain schools in Europe which Richard Spencer calls the Alternative Right values tradition but cannot appeal to it for legitimacy. The legitimacy was stripped long ago by the attack from the left and by the corruption and cowardice of traditional sources of authority. Therefore, almost out of necessity, the Alternative Right gets inspiration from new sources. One is leftist writers whose writings on power, deconstruction, and cultural hegemony can easily be turned against the left wing establishment that rules “our” civilization. Another is right-wing writers who come from outside establishment conservative traditions in both Europe and America and who could serve as the beginnings of a new tradition. And finally, biology, sociobiology, and sociology are important influences. Because I’m barely old enough and thanks to unique circumstances I remember and actually lived through the flickering out of the old way as a kid. But good point: are YFs under 30 (about 15+ years younger than me) pseuds/poseurs? (Some old liberals say that to put down Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival; they know they’re through.) How do you avoid that? There are challenges not just from the left but the well-meaning drawbridge right (‘let’s go back to the feudal system!’) including well-meaning Catholics (Médaille to people like me: come on, John, stop following those Jewish atheist economists and drink the socialist Kool-Aid like a real Catholic. An answer: the state is a Protestant substitute church.) The answer is in the great tradition of Western civilisation, Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, of which classical liberalism is a fine flower. True open-mindedness as Kevin DeAnna suggests here, like Blessed Antonio Rosmini’s, which closes on something solid as G.K. Chesterton (a distributist, he was a great man but not necessarily an economist) said.
• Speaking of earnest leftists many Christians like, shut up, Bono.

From Rod Dreher

• New Orleans as a Caribbean city with a Mediterranean culture. Why the government do-gooders do harm.
• On fat and class, taking a page from Paul Fussell.
• America and the black experience. This from the linked Andrew Sullivan piece jumped out at me of course: It reminds me of the way in which Britain always defined itself as a Protestant country, even while, of course, it was deeply, deeply Catholic before it was ever Protestant — and for a much longer period of time. As a Catholic growing up in England, and having genealogical roots in both Catholic Ireland and in Domesday Book England, it took a while for me to appreciate the pied beauty of this identity. Tribalism is a powerful thing, especially for the Irish. I remember one day, as I was herded into the local Anglican church for my high school assembly, thinking: “This ancient building was once mine, ours.”
• Pope Benedict’s traditionalist ecumenism (title by Joshua) as part of his Catholic revival, or ecumenism for non-ecumenists, written reacting to his opening wide the doors to the last real Anglo-Catholics. Benedict knows that the only Christians who are going to survive intact over the coming decades are those communities firmly rooted in tradition. Liberal Anglicans simply aren’t going to make it, and not because they're bad people, but because there’s precious little solid ground upon which they can stand as a distinctly Christian community against the strong currents of modernity. Benedict is trying to gather in as many faithful traditionalists as he can. What a blessing it would be if he and the Orthodox patriarchs could come to an understanding that could pave the way for reunion. Personally, I don’t see how it could be done, given the wide divergence between Orthodox and Catholic theology since the Great Schism. But with God, all things are possible. Again I don’t think it’s a wide divergence but one insurmountable one separating two Catholic churches: the scope of the Pope not his office’s mere existence. Central high command (but on the ground in English-speaking lands often Protestant in most of its practice since/because of V2) or something juridically even looser than Anglicanism (and much older and not Protestant, save, on the ground, widespread selling out on contraception)? Parallel tracks. Close but never meeting.

Talking to Huw about hate-crimes laws

From Joshua

• The right kind of church inculturation. The De Profundis (Psalm 129/130) in Korean-style chant.
• In Western thought, sex is the means to an end; in secular thought, sex is an end, and the secular man will use any means to get to that end. Pig heaven for certain men disguised as empowerment for women; also from this link, ‘That’s your outlaw?!’ Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA and dated Henry Kissinger: second-wave feminism is a scam and conservatives aren’t conservative.
• An Obamacon on Obama’s war. Col. Andrew Bacevich, an Obamacon with honour.

From LRC

• Ron Paul on the recession: ‘None of this is behind us.’ The U.S. has moved past none of the core issues that brought the economy to its knees last fall.
• A song for the depression. Not ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ but satire.
• Israeli censorship on ethnic cleansing. Lines from a 1970s film: ‘Those are Gestapo tactics!’ ‘Impossible! I’m Jewish!’

If Anglo-Catholics can have something like a personal prelature why not the SSPX?
Two sets of shock troops in Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival. My guess is a bishop can block a personal prelature (Opus Dei doesn’t operate in dioceses where it’s not allowed) but not a personal ordinariate.

Science meets magic, sort of
This news is nearly 30 years old but you can change baser elements into gold only it’s far too expensive to make it worthwhile. From Cracked.

The Onion still has its moments

• A story about family and culture or their lack, in which I see some intelligence under the surface. It’s easy to judge this character, which this seems to do, but what strikes me is maybe much of it’s not his fault: the family aren’t particularly close and didn’t pass down a culture to him so he fills the void with a commercially made fantasy one.
• 65 per cent of all wildlife now used as gay-subculture signifiers.

If you support war, you are supporting big government, and if you support big government, you are supporting war

On the box: Dillinger (1973)
Better than Public Enemies

RIP Joseph Wiseman
Aged 91. To the world he was Dr No (from whom Dr Paul gets his nickname for saying no to the state and Mike Myers his Dr Evil character) but I knew him best as Manny Weisbord here. From the LRC blog.

From Taki

• The USA, a failed state.
• Middle American radicals.

It’s autumn in Pennsylvania

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• The latest RC-Orthodox talks.
• There will be a briefing later today in Rome about Anglicans; in London, Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster at joint press conference. More.
• Update: Fr Philip called this one. Just announced here in Rome: “In this Apostolic Constitution the Holy Father has introduced a canonical structure that provides for such corporate reunion by establishing Personal Ordinariates which will allow former Anglicans to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony.” More. Damian Thompson: This is clearly a historic gesture by Pope Benedict which will encourage thousands of disaffected Anglicans to become Roman Catholics. An extension of my idea of making English Anglo-Papalists RC national parishes. Not that dramatic a statement but good nonetheless. Gaudent angeli et Angli. Te Deum laudamus: te Dominum confitemur...
• Texts from Rome.
• Joint statement and FiF response.
• Brother Stephen’s wise observations.
• Dr Tighe and Fr Longenecker rightly predicted the joint statement. So... my guess is the C of E keeps the buildings (business as usual), reordination all round of the incoming clergy (same — of course) and, as envisaged by the Pope, the Anglo-Catholics wouldn’t be forced by the remaining local liberals (or similar resistance as described perfectly by Thomas Day... from Novus Ordo neocons) to give up being Catholic. (Fr Hunwicke: why don’t they and the local liberals just swap?)
• Fr H on declaring heresy.
• From the other end of the spectrum, Huw, one of the fairest-minded liberals. Of course I don’t agree with everything here but he understands that to embrace tradition is not oppression or self-deception (being closeted). Many also don’t get that libertarianism is not necessarily libertinism.
• Ex-Episcopalians who don’t want gay weddings in their churches ≠ Nigerian Pentecostals who torture children. To claim otherwise is like saying all mainliners (including credally orthodox moderates like the Revd Jane) are like John Spong and Ann Redding; they’re arguably on the same track but two or three stations behind all that from our Catholic POV but it’s not true and thus not fair.

Politically correct white flight
Rod Dreher takes a detour into SWPL (about something such people are loth to admit) and Steve Sailer country

It’s easy to have Scandinavian policies if you have Scandinavian demographics.

My libertarian commentary: hooray for freedom of association. Among blacks the feeling’s often mutual. Where many of Sailer’s fans (and the affirmative-action left) and I part ways is I don’t want to base the law on race as I am neither a determinist nor a collectivist. (Von Mises explained that businesses that discriminate — everybody’s money’s the same colour — only hurt themselves in the long run so in the market that’s self-correcting. No race laws including about immigration, end of story.)

Are the feds coming to their senses about medical marijuana?
Decriminalise all of it. From Brian Underwood.

Fox and CNN

I turned on the only channel in English I have after the president won the Nobel Peace Prize last week, and twice within five minutes the network pledged to follow the president as he “continues to work for peace.” I turned it off. The real problem is that both networks give us slight variations on the same theme; war propaganda with tough guy rhetoric or war propaganda with touchy-feely rhetoric.

— Joshua

From LRC

• Doom and gloom from Gerald Celente.
• Want to read something really radical from 1969?
• The golden calf of today’s conservative Christian. More.

Quotation

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debt.

— Henry Ford

From Roman Karl Franz.

More ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• First Tridentine High Mass at St Peter’s in 40 years.
• Altar cards come in four versions: traditional Latin, Novus Ordo, English Missal and American Missal.
• The Byzantine Rite altar.
• Anglican parody: Common Worship: Service for the Unfrocking of a Naughty Vicar.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs
Local edition

• Nunc vesperæ die dominica in ecclesia sancti Clementis lingua latina sunt. Sunday Vespers at Clem’s is now in Latin. (Like the silent Canon at Mass often is.) If Pope Benedict has their back, with a lot of legal legerdemain and a ton of money to pay off the Episcopalians this could be the RC national parish it should be. (Also English Anglo-Catholicism’s only future as something Catholic and as a distinctive group.)
• Weekly Sung Mass comes to Italian Market church.
• Dismantling has begun at ex-Transfiguration, 56th and Cedar.
• The Episcopal church practically in my back yard closed last week. A place about as old as the town, right in the heart of it, with a charming building of course. The late Bishop Manning of New York was once rector. More.

The quotable Fr Hunwicke

• On the destructive V2 game of having documents that praise something traditional then undermine it a few lines down by allowing something different as a local option at the discretion of the bishop. His solution is a literal, strict-constructionist reading of the texts; how academically unhip :). What the Council decided to permit universally is good, wholesome, “organic”, and should be embraced by “traditionalists”. What was left to the licentia Ordinarii should stay just that: a possibility which can be permitted in special circumstances. I would like to conclude with a historical fact well worth consideration. Mgr Marcel Lefebvre signed Sacrosanctum Concilium [the liturgy document] and did not obstruct its implementation. He was a moderate and practical missionary: at first his seminary at Ecône used the 1965 modifications to the 1962 Missal including the vernacular. (Traditionalism. Is. Not. About. Latin.) Like many bishops, he was part of a tacit agreement that what some of what the more “liberal” bishops desired could be allowed to them, while it would not be imposed on those who were looking for a more cautious reform. Even in every parish this could work: the first Mass every Sunday morning being Tridentine Low (rather like the Episcopalians’ Rite I option) and, where wanted, one experimental Mass versus populum with dopey modern hymns every Sunday as well.
• Prayer Book office pros and cons. Most of the few Western Rite Orthodox use Anglican-based services so they use the Prayer Book office... and the American Missal so essentially they’re good 1950s American Anglo-Catholics (Prayer Booky text and Tridentine ceremonial but non-papal). The approved Roman Rite office, only by historical happenstance and not theological reasons, is the Monastic Breviary/Diurnal; the Mass an edit of the Tridentine so in English an edited English Missal.
• I need help because I have just read, in an old RC newspaper passed on to me by my Head Server, a piece by someone called “Mgr Basil Loftus”. In it he defines the Eucharistic role of the priest as to “animate and energise” the congregation. As a poor schismatic, I know nothing about RC Theology. So of course I have to accept that this is in fact what the Council of Trent defined as sacerdotium. But it seems curiously like what we Anglicans would call “Extreme Low Church Nonsense”. Does this gentleman really hold a celebret from a validly consecrated bishop in full communion with the See of Rome? He would surely be much happier in the C of E. Should I offer to meet him secretly, in some sleazy pub somewhere, so that we can swap celebrets — and jobs? (But he can’t have my wife.) But, on reflexion, no. The congregation at S. Thomas’s would lynch him before he’d finished animating and energising them in the Asperges. For more than fifty years I have maintained an acquaintance with a very splendid priest called Mgr Anthony Stark. His churchmanship is much more sound. Now I have to assimilate the fact that he is presumably in cahoots with this “Loftus” chappie.
• Identity: I feel it is one of the characteristics of the last century and a half ... say, since the time of Disraeli ... why is it him that I mention? ... that we construct our sense of self-identity, not from our actual and family backgrounds, but from what we have discovered for ourselves; and not infrequently in reaction against our real individual inheritances. Is that something to do with the cultural disintegration of this period? I think I’m a Mediterranean man like Fr H.
• Gravestones: Somebody wants to put into my churchyard (I’m a coward, so of course I’ll agree) a gravestone describing the deceased as “Beloved Daughter, Sister, Aunty”. What I dislike is that the lady concerned was a very considerable person who was the parish’s Schoolmistress for decades and touched, for the better, innumerable lives. None of this apparently matters. It’s almost enough to make me a screaming feminist. The inscription desired seems to me to mean, translated into plain English, “She was a SPINSTER who DID VERY LITTLE”. Since I’m on about it: I also dislike the modern fad for seeing someone solely in terms of intra-familial relationships and without any reference to their role in the wider community. (One of the best inscriptions in my churchyard is that to Olive Gibbs, because it details her long stint as national Chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament [another Anglo-Catholic-formed peace person!], and her mayoral service to this city and county.) And I dislike the absence of any reference to the deep religious commitment of the person concerned, and the lack of any suggestion that we might pray for her or that Jesus might have mercy upon her or that she might rise again. And I don’t care for the hypocoristic Aunty. I think I must be out of sync with the Zeitgeist.
• The other day my wife was cornered by a gentleman who addressed her about his atheism and lifestyle. He concluded by saying “I live by the Nine Commandments”. Quick as a flash, she retorted “That’s an unusual name for a pub”.

Real men pray
A US Marine in Korea, circa 1951

The fourth sorrowful mystery: Jesus carries his cross... Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

A prayer that’s my late-night/early-morning ‘office’ in the car coming home after a long day on the job.

From Joshua.

Tough truth from Fr Longenecker on official ecumenism with theologically liberal liturgical Protestants
Not the same as my ecumenism

I know from my time in the Anglican Church that the theologians they send to Rome to engage in ecumenical discussions are those who are already friendly towards the Catholic Church and are very good at dressing up their Protestant beliefs in Catholic terminology. They’re a suave and slippery lot, and I expect the Lutheran ‘partners in dialogue’ are much the same.

Despite their smooth manner and diplomatic form and seeming admiration for Rome, mainstream Anglicans and Lutherans can’t really stomach the Catholic faith at all.

This is proved by the regular and repeated slaps in the face they give Rome.

Continued ecumenical discussions with mainstream Anglicanism and Lutheranism is not only a waste of time, it’s dishonest to all involved.

It’s more than a waste of time. It is helping people who only want to use their good relations with the Vatican as icing on their corrupt cake.

That and it’s only them and the RCs’ liberals sitting around agreeing with each other.

Truth, first casualty of war
Two on the subject

• TAC.
• Bishop Alan Wilson.

From LRC

• Ron Paul on Afghaniscam. Good points as always — he repeats this — but I’m still a WWII revisionist (two oceans with a strong navy, a continent-wide country with many natural resources and self-sufficient industry, and an armed citizenry were good enough defences, so trade with Hirohito, like with Red China today, and let Hitler and Stalin kill each other). Pay attention to the usual fear-mongering from the gunvernment puppet at the very end of the video.
  
  
  
  
• Be very afraid: ‘A Global Force for Good’. Try again. How about ‘Guarding the Coast and Minding Our Own Business’ of trade with all and entanglements with none? Like, at the other end of pop culture, ‘Imagine’, it’s even more evil because it’s beautifully made; this appeals even more to people’s good intentions because it’s not an anti-God screed in disguise. (See above on a strong defence: I’m not a pacifist.) LRC writer Laurence Vance (an evangelical who’s not having this) has pointed that well-meaning cultural conservatives (from Southern Baptists to rust-belt Catholics) have bought into this idea of American soldiers as Christian knights since the evil of the late-1960s upheaval. But as recently as the 1930s the fundamentalists were the peace Christians with a healthy distrust of the state including the military whilst the liberal Protestants then and now are hawks ‘for your own good’. (Catholic pro-military feeling was always a little different: the honestly grateful immigrants as super-patriots trying to show the hostile Protestants they’re good Americans.) From the sickle and the swastika, good Lord, deliver us.
  
  
  
  
• Academic dishonesty. Grade inflation, related to (feeding?) the boomer/SWPL (affluent whites and their kids) arrogance that believes all their kids are gifted (the lie of egalitarianism, or arrogance disguised as humility!).
  

  After all, it’s dishonesty when a professor assigns a grade the student did not earn.
  
  An article in the Wall Street Journal (1/30/97) reported that a “bachelor of arts degree in 1997 may not be the equal of a graduation certificate from an academic high school in 1947.”
  
  The percentage of college graduates proficient in prose literacy has declined from 40 percent to 31 percent within the past decade. Employers report that many college graduates lack the basic skills of critical thinking, writing and problem-solving and some employers find they must hire English and math teachers to teach them how to write memos and perform simple computations.

  Short term: hooray, more work for me! Much of what I do is rewrite things. Long term: scary as fewer people think this skill matters.
  

  Academic dishonesty, coupled with incompetency, particularly at the undergraduate level, doesn’t bode well for the future of our nation.

  I don’t think AKMA reads this blog but as an independent thinker on education he’d probably have a few good things to say on this.

From RR

• Being pissed-off is not enough. Imagine it’s over. The state is gone. No big boss is telling you what to do any longer. There’s nothing to be angry about except some intermittent, garden variety crime. Now what do we do? I hope you are not drawing a blank, but most of us do when presented with this scenario. Here’s the big point I’m trying to make: Whatever we would do after the celebration ends is what we should be doing now.
• Hundreds detained by Israel without charge. So propping up an artificial country because of WWII guilt makes this OK?
• Robert Byrd: ‘How much more American blood?’
• Peace poor. The twist that free trade makes is to allow just about any disagreement to become an agreement. You think you ought to have my land? Without free trade, we must fight, and one of us will end up poor. With free trade, you can offer me something in exchange, and we are both better off. Ironically, the democratic process of voting to allocate resources does the opposite.
• Economics and the drug war. when there is less of something
  that people want, that item will become more expensive. Because drugs are illegal and their supply restricted, their price rises. The drug war creates drug lords and drug cartels.
• Dems take a pass on civil-liberties reform. Or bogus Peace Prizes (and stupidity like arguing over what country the president was born in) are the least of our worries.
• The global-warming consensus cools.
• Zero-tolerance idiocy. Political posturing at good people’s expense. Show you’re tough on crime: pick on Boy Scouts.
• Our Nobel Prize-winning immigrants.
• Health care and Catholics: true and false arguments.
• When we respect our rights as equals.
• What is a religion?

Windows 7 party!
That ‘WTF?’ infomercial with a funny voiceover and two other good parodies. Apparently Microsoft meant it: I read they actually send you a ‘party pack’ with the software. Of course. Would you like to come to my party and hear me talk and talk about my computer? I’ll have balloons (Stewie: ‘What are you, f*cking five?’). The stupidest, most out-of-touch and most condescending idea they’ve had since Melinda Gates came up with Microsoft Bob (a cartoony interface because they thought ordinary Windows was too hard for home users).





The three commonest reactions I’ve seen in the few weeks this has been around: Are they serious? This might work as porn. Let’s see, you’ve got the hip-geek computer-expert stereotype, the older person, the attractive woman (doing this: yeah, sure) and the token black (who else agrees that Mr Hip Glasses’ remark around 5:47 in the top one would likely in reality have him leaving by ambulance?) but no Asian (East or South) in something meant to sell a computer product?! (Could be a compliment: they thought Koreans or Indians are too smart for this but look down on all their other customers.)

BTW I’m not an Apple person. (At least they gave their new OS a cool name and left it at that rather than patronise you.)

‘Mad Men’ in 60 seconds

From LRC

• The end of an age.
• I’ve long thought Oswald was an American agent since an editor 12 years ago explained it to me. I’m just not clear why part of the government wanted to kill Kennedy.
• Afghanistan: I’m starting to feel a draft.
• Photos of Afghanistan military deaths banned.
• For one Reaganaut down is not up.
• War crimes, deformed babies. The sort of story the Republican “pro-life” organizations ignore. Like the people who heckle Mark Shea. Fr Frank Pavone: just shut up and hit R, kiddo.
• Putin blocks the Amero-Anglo-Franco-Israeli-neocon drive for murder-sanctions against the Iranian people, and then their nuking.
• Camilo Mejia, hero.