Local man stalks obscure actress
Why? Sorry but next to Vince D’Onofrio you might as well have a mannequin in that part.

Seriously, I know, danger and all that and glad she’s unharmed.

Monsters from the American id?
Justin Raimondo on the Moscow metro bombings

From LRC

• From bucolic bliss to gated ghetto. The scam of selling people houses they couldn’t afford. The population will abandon remote McMansions for smaller homes closer to shops, jobs and the other necessities of life.
• The unreality of schools. Not really teaching but producing worker drones.

From LRC

• Market correction in academia.
• The Jewish ideal of freedom. Now this idea of individualism understandably worries the palæo-conservatives including drawbridge Catholics like the SSPX (‘error has no rights’): are classical liberals only one jump removed from the mainline, the modern left and the neocon right? Community, particularly family, they say, über alles. (The left, the ape of Catholicism, wants you to think that the state is your family and church and that libertarians are selfish losers.) I’m with what I understand about Burke. Many but not all traditions and small institutions are humanely good; somehow they have to answer to a higher standard.
• A success story of voluntariness: private animal rescues.

From RR

• Вечная память. ‘May their memory be eternal.’ Subway suicide bombers killed 38 in Moscow yesterday. Transit security is up. I’m surprised the London bombing happened a few years ago, remembering how hyper-vigilant the system was 20 years ago because of the IRA.
• Crybaby students want ‘Our Lord’ off diplomas. Some left-libertarian readers of RR like that; of course I don’t. This fake victimology is leftist. Sensible observant Jews et al. know they’re in a Christian-majority country and don’t begrudge us the free exercise of religion. And... hello? Trinity University! Nobody made you go there. If you’re that sensitive, spend your money and time somewhere else! As a libertarian I don’t get played in the culture wars but secularists are trying to stamp out Christianity and particularly Catholicism as the firestorm about the Pope shows. (The only reason the media give a damn about liberal churches is they’re fun toys to tease conservative Christians with, especially if outwardly they sort of ape Catholicism.)
• From a grand old man of the left: Obama delivers — for bankers.
• The health-care law will put more strain on primary-care doctors. My old one was so overworked he got out of that branch of medicine.
• FBI gives glimpse of most secret layer.
• US to sell its stake in Citigroup this year.
• Afghanistan: US tries to order Canada around but Canada says no. ‘American woman, get away from me!’
• NH: Free Staters harassed.
• Ron Paul: health care and economic realities.
• Hollywood’s unsettling view of the Iraq war. How much do you want to bet now that Obama’s president, they’ll start making it look like The Sands of Iwo Jima?
• Conservative intellectual bankruptcy.
• To thrive, the US needs skilled immigrants.

Waiting for the train
I’m reading English Reformations by Christopher Haigh, a gift from William Tighe.

Schoolhoming
From The Onion

From Joshua

• Questioning the long-war doctrine.
• Our entangling alliance with South Korea.

From LRC

• DIY U. Online learning vs the college swindle; a correction from the depression?
• Pick up your pen and write until your fingers go numb, submit an avalanche, cross your fingers, and hope for the best. If this union is to return to its progressive roots it will be not by the sword but by the writings of those dedicated to a philosophy of liberation, by the wide dissemination of radical thought into the op-ed pages and editorials of our newspapers, into the comments section to Internet news sites, into the mouths of the interviewed “man on the street,” into the intellectuals’ monthly journals and thence most importantly, into the minds of men. It is here where even the most humble advocate of liberty can make a difference, it is the necessary first step that, should we fail to take it, will bring any hard-earned advances to naught. A revolution today would be a decided step back as it would lack the ideological roadmap to go anywhere but deeper into the badlands. In the event of rebellion, the American people would lack any leadership with the ability, or even the urge, to guide them back to liberty.

Truth in real-estate naming
From Citizen Renegade

Detroit has become the poster child of government regulation, welfare systems and a population that has given up hope
From LRC

From Cracked

• Five miserable movie visual-effects jobs.
• Six badasses who lived as the opposite sex.

America’s Potemkin village

The commercial — entitled “A March to the Mailbox” — portrays an ordinary Joe getting off his couch (in a bathrobe) and marching out of his house — picket-fenced — where suddenly the streets fill with neighbors and friends, the names of whom he knows entirely. He states that by filling out the Census form, he’s helping Pete’s school and roads for his neighbors’ car pool and Risa’s health care and so that — I quote — “we can get our fair share of Federal Funding.” As I watched it (in growing horror), I saw it as the perverse fulfillment of Tocqueville’s analysis — that the very community spirit being portrayed in that commercial would itself obviate the need for that sort of ad. The ad portrayed a vibrant community of people who know each other and genuinely wish each other’s good, but in fact the need for the commercial at all was born of the widespread absence of any such reality. Rather, the reality is that each person is to fill out this form in the privacy of his own home in order to be relieved of the obligation to do anything further to help fellow citizens who are increasingly unknown to him. Having won the Cold War, our government is now producing and airing commercials that portray what can’t be described in any other way other than our very own Potemkin village — community for show in a nation of strangers, bound only by our common subjection to the State.

From Front Porch Republic via Jeff Culbreath.

In praise of the daily office
Partly patrimonial and partly of course going beyond Episcopalian particulars. From here.

From The Anglo-Catholic

• Quiet evangelism of the Real Presence. Fr Christopher Phillips on discovering the Catholic Church: What (or more correctly, Who) was there I did not know at the time, but my heart was touched in a way that it had never been touched before.
• Thinking Catholic. I’m not for treating Anglo-Catholic converts like Protestant converts either but I see the point of the tribal thing and ‘here comes everybody’.

Okinawa and the problem of empire
Why on earth is Japan an American protectorate? From Joshua.

Meritocracies of love
Soul mates exist and are great but it’s not about you:

I have come to believe the mantra my mother used to repeat to me as a child, though I resented it at the time: we’re not here to be happy; we’re here to change things for the better in the ways that we can.

I suspect that for many people, love is work, even backbreakingly, or heartbreakingly, hard work.

From here via here.

The Tea Party: fulfilling its potential or co-opted by the GOP?
From antiwar.com

Paywalls won’t save newspapers. What might?
Not being newspapers any more. My place’s plan is to change in five years from a suburban weekly with a website to a site updated several times daily mostly with lots of 1-2-minute videos... with a 10-second commercial tacked onto each video.

From Hezekiah Wyman

• America in decline.
• Heinlein, 4GW thinker who was ex-military.
• A battleground for liberty: marijuana.
• ‘Nothing outside the state.’ For the left and establishment right it’s a substitute church.

We all know that those who are gunning for the Pope are hypocrites

We know that they are in many cases dirty hypocrites whose own lifestyle is unmarked by any evidence of sexual continence.

We know that they are bigoted hypocrites who are only marginally, if at all, interested if a rabbi or a humanist gets ‘done’ for pedophilia or if an Anglican diocese is bankrupted by the compensation it has paid out to abused Inuit children. There is one organisation that they detest with a loathing curiously like Hitler’s dislike of the Jews. There is one man for whose downfall they have an insatiable bloodlust.

The fact that he gave an errant priest — even one whose lapse had been sexual — a second chance, seemed to us, back in the 1980s, the mark of a fine pastor. In that far-off decade, forgiveness and mercy were thought very highly of. In those days, forgiveness and mercy were thought of as characteristics of our blessed Lord himself. In those days, secular critics of the Church very commonly attacked her for being ‘unforgiving’ towards those who had fallen from her standards in sexual matters.

How very, very, appropriate that this malevolent evil should be reaching its climax in Holy Week. Satan has a real sense of liturgy.

— Fr Hunwicke

The death of math
From Taki

Lenten prayer

In the midst, between two thieves, was thy cross found the balance-beam of righteousness, for while the one was led down to hades by the burden of his blaspheming, the other was lightened of his sins unto the knowledge of things divine, O Christ God, glory to thee.

— Kontakion from the Ninth Hour (None) during Great Lent, Byzantine Rite

Photo from Owen.

Six baffling things every TV ad assumes are true
From Cracked

Is the Tea Party racist? Prove it!
From LRC

‘Progressives’
Hilary asks:

Have these people ever come clean about where, precisely, we’re all supposed to be progressing to?

Supposedly it’s us orthodox who are judgemental and want to run your life (a number of us don’t) but, as Marxism is crap, progressivism (SWPL) really means ‘I’m better than you so obey’.

From RR

• The snuffing out of liberty is a bipartisan affair. Déjà vu: I remember when the establishment right sounded like me in order to get back at Clinton, who, boxed in, made a serviceable quasi-conservative president.
• Had enough?
• The wrong way to reinvent media.
• War is not Nintendo. I’m not a pacifist so in a just war drones seem a good way to go. But... we’re not at war with these countries!
• Why Obamacare’s not Catholic.

Abusing the church
I didn’t get bent out of shape about the census but this is just wrong:

Mayor Nutter has enlisted the aid of dozens of community leaders to serve on Complete Count Committees. And just last weekend every spiritual leader in the region was asked to deliver a sermon about the importance of complying with the census request.

From here.

From LRC

• Obama’s socialist chaplain. As a secular (not secularist) liberal (classical) I don’t care if O. goes to church. Here is the Social Gospel, in one sentence: “Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.” Liberals operate in terms of OPM: other people’s money. They also operate in terms of OPA: other people’s audiences. They have trouble surviving on their own. Theological liberals did not build independent churches with their own money, 1885-1960. Instead, they infiltrated the theological seminaries that trained the pastors. Then, decade by decade, the graduates took over the pulpits. Wallis’ outfit, Sojourners, is a typical example of this strategy: persuade conservative evangelical churches to adopt the Social Gospel. It isn’t working. His total audience is about the size of two big-city First Baptist congregations. Liberal mainline denominations have been shrinking since 1960. Liberal talk radio is an example of a liberal venture that is self-funded. Air America went bankrupt in January. It’s wonderful that Wallis seems anti-war but he trusts the state that starts the wars.
• You didn’t ‘mean’ to? Foreign-policy murder is still just that.
• Jude Law lets the cat out of the bag. In Great Britain’s health-care system, waits are long and doctors are overworked and underpaid. Oh yeah, rich actors can opt out.
• Ron Paul: Stupak deal unconstitutional.

From RR

• Californians to vote on legalising pot. Better to decriminalise it like Holland. No taxes etc.
• You need to grasp that the War on Drugs is a War on People, on your family members, your colleagues, your neighbors, but ultimately, it is a war on YOU, because even if you don’t condone drug use, your tax dollars are paying to keep non-violent people in cages.
• Wikipedia server meltdown. Blogging here has been slow because of work so I missed this. And so we remember Thursday, March 25, 2010 as the day every English-speaking student failed their research papers. BTW Wikipedia and Google are wonderful.
• Obama’s sop to pro-lifers? Not spending government money is a step in the right direction.
• How to fight pirates. Guns for hire!
• You knew it was a snake when you picked it up.
• No one is the US has the power to say no to Israel.
• Pretending to repeal the law of scarcity. Which will work about as well as Wile E. Coyote defying gravity. They will provide nothing. All they can do is coerce someone to provide medical care for someone else. Which however well intended is not charity but theft.
• Prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
• Killing citizens who switch sides. An idea of the Obama régime not Bush’s.
• Who’s your daddy? Or your other daddy? An answer: don’t get played by the culture wars and instead use good old-fashioned contracts. There’s the matter of the do-no-harm principle as this is about children; then again I don’t want to see kids raised Protestant either but it’s none of my business.

From Joshua

• Obamacare is corporatist not socialist.
• E.J. Dionne’s appreciation of conservatism.
• Paul Craig Roberts signs off.
• American Samoa’s congressman questions the empire.
• Low age of consent laws at least recognize young adults as young adults, rather than as infants. One has to wonder how many “victims” of sexual “abuse” were consenting young adults, who should go to the confessional rather than the courts of law. Not to deny that real abuse happens but yes.
• Music: Monteverdi’s Ave, maris stella.

More ‘gritty reboot’ ideas
From Cracked.

A lapsed Catholic visits Pope Benedict’s revival under way
At St Paul’s in South Philly. I met the writer a few times a long time ago. From John Boyden.

From RR

• AGs in 14 states sue to block Obamacare. New law is unconstitutional.
• The empire just ate your health care.
• The real cost.
• China: régime thwarts Google’s detour around censorship.
• Now we’ll find out if the Tea Party is real.
• Justin Raimondo: stop funding the Israelis.
• Israel’s ‘no renting to Arabs’ policy.
• Immigration as social engineering.
• Prohibition causes crime.

How’s that state-sponsored literacy campaign going?
From a press release:

Lower Merion Library’s are celebrating National Library Week, April 11th-17th.

From LRC

• Dr Leviathan will see you now.
• Obama’s Bill of No Rights.
• End the market and you end civilised conduct.
• The government’s Rent-A-Rambos.
• Rebuttal to ‘capitalism is racist’. The law of scarcity is colour-blind.
• Of course the government is infiltrating the Tea Party.
• The partisan agenda behind Obamacare.
• Why do these leftists want to save lives when they otherwise claim there are too many people on earth? I think it is simply because they want one thing: power. “The devil said to him, ‘I shall give you all this power and their glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me’.” Luke 4:6-7.

From The Anglo-Catholic

• The Pope: Let us learn to be intransigent with sin — beginning with our own! — and indulgent with people.
• There is no reason why Groups of Anglicans reconciled to the See of Peter should not reclaim this territory of being the natural fall-back position of Englishmen.

From Fr L

• The myth of pædo priests. In the Protestant culture many of us live in of course the common knowledge is the big, bad church caused this because of celibacy. I understand that schoolteachers have a far worse track record. If only women could be schoolteachers, if only schoolteachers could marry...
• Very few of these sad cases are pædo; most are ephebo gay but even that’s not the real problem. Sack trendy bishops and restore the faith.

From Joshua

• Covering up American war crimes from Baghdad to New York.
• No more blood for Israel?
• Right, left and palæo on Obamacare.
• de Tocqueville on the tyranny of the majority.
• Counterfeiting conservatism. In the 1980s, it was barely noted as peculiar that one of Ronald Reagan’s intellectual heroes was Thomas Paine — Edmund Burke’s bête noire. Increasingly, political conservatism has stood less for a defense of the principles articulated by Russell Kirk — custom, variety, prudence, imperfectibility, community, and restraint of power — and has instead allied itself with national and even international objectives destructive to custom, variety, and community.
• War crimes in Korea.

Murray Rothbard on government health care
From LRC

More dumb criminals
From Cracked

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• The Pope’s Augean stable-cleaning including in Ireland (more).
• What he’s up against.
• Folk Catholicism: St Joseph’s Day in New Orleans.
• Me on that via media business. I don’t mind Protestants being themselves as long as I’ve got my liberty.

Roger Scruton: stealing from churches
From Rod Dreher

Review of The Devil Wears Prada

At least Gigi was offered a house and a diamond bracelet and dinner at Maxim’s before deciding to give herself body and soul to a man who had no interest in marriage. Why does Andy hold herself so cheap? I would have stayed in Paris.

I’ve not seen it but Elena Maria Vidal’s review grabs me as she makes two excellent points: the romantic myth of La Bohème, certainly in its slacker form, is rubbish, and who needs feminism as it’s understood today? (as opposed to old-fashioned fair-play feminism, which by the way was anti-abortion)... orthodox Catholic women are not doormats (Mother Angelica, anyone?).

Save us from the fires of hell
Owen on the Peter Hitchens story making the rounds

Religious liberty
Means defending people you don’t agree with as long as they respect your freedom. All I have to say on two recent stories.

Hard-core unreformed religion
Today in Eastern Orthodoxy is the Saturday of the Akathist Hymn to the Mother of God. Last night I went to a Russian service expecting just the akathist, about half an hour, and instead got a double-barrelled blast of old-school, two hours’ worth: Matins (really the equivalent of Roman Rite Lauds), complete with the two opening psalms (besides the six that start it in a Vigil service) and kathismata (assigned psalmody, when the congregation, if there is one, often go out for a smoke... see this and Brother Stephen on real old-school Catholicism), with its Canon (nine parts), part of another canon and the akathist (13 parts — the Litany of Loretto on steroids so it’s the size of a fully grown Russian), with the usual short form of Prime tacked onto the end. An enthusiastic choir of two American-born young people who grew up with the stuff. (This church is Russian not annoying anti-Western überfromm convert.) Not a word of English. Slavonic. As a longtime amateur Russian speaker I understand at least half of it, including reading the book well enough to know some hard-to-find parts were skipped (liturgical books often give just the first words of a verse and not necessarily with a page number to find it — it’s assumed you’ve memorised the verse!) and see/hear a few other goofs.

There was so much content, and a variety of it, that it wasn’t boring, and as there were several censings, in one of the parts where the lights in the church were on, the priest looked like he was standing on a cloud.

A big congregation wouldn’t necessarily stay for the whole thing, following part of it or just coming into the church to light a candle to one’s favourite saint.

By the way in 1746 Pope Benedict XIV granted an indulgence of 50 days to Roman Rite and Greek Rite Catholics for each recitation of this akathist.

Rejoice, O bride unwedded! (The Slavonic around Our Lady’s halo on the icon says this.)

Looking forward to all of Catholic Christendom celebrating Easter together.

From LRC

• Ron Paul in 2012 would galvanise the liberty movements, using the potential of the Tea Party for example. But of course these movements are not a leader cult.
• Reclaiming the word ‘capitalism’.
• The crime of the Iraq war. Eight years now. I marched twice before it started and a few times after. Obviously that doesn’t work. What now?

Two for spring: Babalú y Jingo

Supporting human rights doesn’t make me an anti-Semite (or does it?)
From Taki

When the great default pulls the plug on Social Security and Medicare, what will you do? Do you have a plan?
The same one as if socialism worked: hope I die in the state of grace. From LRC.

From RR

• The state as Helen Lovejoy: ‘Somebody think of the children!’ Sure. Encourage them to be promiscuous but preach that tobacco is evil. I don’t like Big Tobacco either (and the Mad Men used to lie about smoking being safe before they got busted) but circa-1960 got this right: do things at your own risk but nobody goes to hell for smoking, and broken homes and illegitimacy are far bigger social evils. The state should leave moral truth to religion.
• Vermont: man jailed for crossing street which happens to be the Canadian border. “I walked over to Canada on a Saturday night around quarter to nine to get a pizza,” Buzz Roy explained. Obviously a terrorist. Sure.
• Libertarianism and social justice.
• Might government health care buy off old Tea Partiers?
• How our entire economy became a Ponzi scheme.

American naifs bringing ruin to other lands
From Chronicles

Anglican history summed up
Schism + Erastianism (fallible church: the king’s whim is all that matters) + Calvinism (importing the ‘Reformation’) -> the ‘Enlightenment’ shattering most English people’s faith = deep freezer of latitudinarian moralism -> pigging out on granola = Anglicanism today.

Patrimony: superior production values (liturgical panache: Anglo-Catholic style) and stressing the daily office (what some call Benedictine). Pope Benedict and Patriarch Ignatius can take it from here.

Diversity training
As opposed to race-blind hiring: the racism of the left. Christian ethics without Christianity don’t work.

“Diversity training,” as featured in so many companies and non-profits, doesn’t work. Indeed, it causes resentment. Highly paid, self-righteous psychobabblers blaming the members of one particular group for all the world’s troubles, throughout history and today, and ordering them not to have thoughts unapproved by the Beltway, backfires. Imagine that.

The mover in charge of packing and loading his office was a fellow from one of the hilltowns near the Massachusetts border. This fellow had on a Robert E. Lee baseball cap, replete with Confederate flags, and the inevitable confrontation soon followed.

I arrived in time to hear one of the mover’s co-workers, an impressively large and muscular black man, come to his defense by saying, “He ain’t no racist; he just don’t like them motherf&$@ers in Washington that steal all our money.”

From LRC.

St Joseph

President of Detroit public skoolz kant rite veri goode
From Karen De Coster

Not NLM

I first heard Vespers in Cordova Cathedral on July 5th, 1907 : nor have I ever been more shocked at the behaviour of a choir. Neither boys nor men, nor the canons themselves made any pretence that they were doing anything else than getting through a tedious business as expeditiously as possible. When not actually engaged in singing or reading, they employed their leisure moments in pleasant chat or in strolling about the nave, ready to return to choir at once directly their presence should be needful. No one seemed to dream of staying to listen to what the others were saying or singing. Indeed, I even ventured in an unfamiliar tongue to reprove a knot of small boys in scarlet cassocks and laced cottas who were enjoying surreptitious cigarettes behind a pillar while a canon was reading from an ambo in the choir : after which I successfully evicted some touts and pedlars who were plying a vigorous trade in another corner of the Cathedral.

— The Revd Edward Forse via the Ship

From Cracked

• Half-assed scams that worked.
• Five ballsiest con artists of all time. Including Frank Abagnale of Catch Me If You Can.
• Bad Popes, bad Popes... whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
• Historic bad decisions as infographics.

Исторический урок: don’t mess with Russia!

Clerical celibacy
From Fr Hunwicke

From RR

• Kucinich toes the line. Editor Tom Knapp: Disappointing — Kucinich may be a socialist who favors “single-payer,” but he was correct and courageous in pointing out that ObamaCare as written is not much more than corporate welfare for insurance companies. BTW Michael Malloy notes, ‘Hey, look! A distraction!’: As long as this “Health Care” Bill is (forever) being debated... The continuing bank failures (and bailouts) are conveniently out of the spotlight!
• States’ rights gain ground.
• ACLU sues Vermont over phone tracking.
• Poll: most Americans OK with five-day mail delivery. Even the old who still use it.
• Some American RC nuns vs bishops over Obamacare. It’s an argument between statists/socialists really, both sides seemingly still reflexively Democratic, the liberal/Modernist nuns more so. The bishops are orthodox on abortion (the pro-lifers get played by the GOP as a subset of the Protestant right) but neither side questions stealing from some to give to others or defends liberty really. (Nobody here is questioning the good of helping the sick or the poor; the question is how to do it properly.)
• Turkey threatens to expel Armenians over genocide resolutions.
• National broadband plan creates FCC central planning.

‘The Extraordinary Journey’
The story of Slavs and other Eastern Europeans in upstate Pennsylvania. Just started watching it.

Is it fraud if there is more paper money than real wealth?
From Independent Country

How to defend a non-interventionist foreign policy
From Hezekiah Wyman

Cartoon
From Wendy McElroy

From Cracked

• Six ways journos disguise opinion as fact.
• Disney princesses’ dating advice.

Abortion: the state incentivises irresponsible sex
From RR

The gold in Fort Knox
As American money has been imaginary since Nixon took away its backing, is there still any gold there and why? The Greenspan story at the end says they know it’s all a game and want real money just in case. From LRC.

The poodle gets kicked
Pat Buchanan on Joe Biden in Israel. From Taki.

Torture and the imperial presidency
From truthout

The ‘Celtic’ thing

It’s linked to the long-standing English tendency to use the ‘Celtic fringe’ as sort of foil or mirror for their own society, sentimentalising or demonising it in the process. In the 19th century the supposedly poor, lazy Celts were the antithesis of modern industrial England. Now the supposedly spiritual, nature-loving Celts are the antithesis of modern, industrial England. What’s changed is how the English perceive themselves.

Call me an old cynic if you like, but I suspect that quite a lot of our modern ‘Celtic stuff’ would be dismissed as sentimental rubbish or dangerous syncretism if we were to preach it to a congregation of 5th-century Christians.

From the Ship.

St Patrick prayed in... Latin.

Pope Benedict XVI himself will beatify John Henry Cardinal Newman this September in England
Perfect for launching the ordinariates.

Five reasons the Internet could die at any moment
From Cracked

‘Rome, Italian Style’
SCTV spoofed Fellini.

‘Postcards from the Wedge’
Worth seeing: framing the episode, ‘Springfield of Tomorrow’, today as imagined in the ’50s

From RR

• Social Security to start cashing Uncle Sam’s IOUs.
• A reason why you don’t want to live in a Muslim country.
• Probe highlights widespread US fraud in Iraq.
• On the GOP infiltrating the Tea Party.
• Asia’s war on baby girls.
• The truth about terrorism.
• Texan textbooks: left or right bias?
• The world’s richest man.
• The free market of ideas.

From Steve Sailer

• Alternative Right, a new site much like Taki and TAC.
• An article from it: Robert Taft revisited or he may not have been the hero we thought.
• Depression vs nervous breakdown. I’m not the kind of conservative who denies the reality of mental illness but good points here.

Few Americans know that their state-school movement began 150 years ago as part of an attack on the Catholic Church
From LRC

Recession takes away jobs for returning veterans

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Photo: Just for nice as Fr L says, an Orthodox church in Sibiu, Romania, from TLM.
• Last year Fr Lawrence Barriger made a point about Orthodoxy and liturgical revision (why essentially there is none): we have seen the almost total reformation of worship in the Roman Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council which with few exceptions has been accepted without questioning by the majority of Roman Catholics. Such a fast-paced and complete reformation would be almost unthinkable in the Orthodox Church. In upstate Pennsylvanian parishes essentially it’s still 1962, which is great!
• East/West again.
• On the practice of going to confession. Of course not one jot of Catholic doctrine is changeable; V2 was a massive tactical mistake. Anyway, the distinction between venial and mortal sins, examination of conscience... Roman Catholic moral theology is the gold standard. Private confession and absolution of mortal sins before worthily receiving Communion almost defines a Catholic.
• St John Climacus. Commemorated in the Byzantine Rite today.
• Happy Lætare Sunday sounds redundant. (Pink is beautiful.)
• Patrimony: American Missal discussion on the Ship. What they’re talking about.
• On gossip and its Christian disguises.
• The sad story from Germany. Comment.
• For the Church to try to compete with the secular world in promoting modern music, climate-change awareness, fair trade or gender equality is merely playing someone else’s tune badly. By branching out into areas that are not its province religion soon loses its footing and ends up appearing ill-informed, struggling to catch up with the very secular society it is meant to be guiding – particularly if it falls in with the latest fad only for that fad to disappear or be exposed as misconceived …

Does the market cause sprawl?
From @TAC

The Tea Party’s libertarian potential
Some of the Protestant right worry that they can’t be played with culture-wars hot buttons. Good. More.

From LRC.

Taking God’s name in vain: Obama adviser tries to sucker Catholics
The ones with some theology, not just the tribal ones who’ve always voted Democratic anyway

The most obvious reason to be skeptical here is that the previous administration had any number of willing helpers who were happy to dress up whatever injustice or error it was committing as being either entirely consistent with Catholic teaching or an expression of Catholic moral theology. Whether it was George Weigel re-inventing just-war theory to approve of preventive warfare or Michael Gerson declaring Bush’s immigration policy to be the embodiment of solidarity, we have been inundated with people appropriating Catholic teaching for very bad or questionable causes. Marc Thiessen is the most recent and perhaps most egregious example of this, but he is hardly alone. Those are admittedly extreme examples, but they serve as a warning whenever administration allies begin claiming theological guidance for their policies.

Obviously, McDonough wasn’t going to be able to dictate the content of Obama’s speech, but I do find it odd that the two speeches he did help to write are remarkable for their failure to say anything meaningful about the gross injustices that have occurred in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza.

From Eunomia.

Gazans struggle to keep farming a family tradition
From truthout.

French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment

A 50-year mystery over the ‘cursed bread’ of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.

So it wasn’t ergot poisoning after all.

The state, looking out for you.

From John Boyden.

Everybody against empire
From Joshua

Seven celebrities who had careers you didn’t know about
Today’s Cracked hit

Here’s another: before he was a famous comedian, the late Phil Hartman was a successful graphic artist designing album covers and logos for rock bands.

Trying to force equal outcomes in LA schools
From Steve Sailer

From Hilary

• Britain today. On a Saturday night from a cop’s point of view.
• Pro-lifers: don’t play the other side’s game by turning on the water works.

The dark side of minority religions
The SWPL think they’re cute and ‘vibrant’ when they’re out of power so the media give them a free pass. From Rod Dreher.

Celente: prepare for the worst
From LRC

The ordinariates explained
From Bishop Peter Elliott via Damian Thompson. Although Anglican without a modifier means Lambeth, Anglican Catholic is a logical name for the ordinariates even though a Continuing group of high-church Protestants already uses it.

Also, patrimony, sì, Anglicanism, no. From an e-mail conversation:

I confess my lack of understanding why these archeologians persist in trying to recreate some supposed golden era of Christianity in some place and in some time.

As Catholics we’re sometimes misunderstood like the Amish as trying to live in the past. Rather we live with the past, based on precedent, and don’t destroy and reinvent ourselves to follow the times.

One of the most eye-opening things for me when working through Roman Catholicism vs ‘Anglo’ Catholicism (whatever that may mean to whomever) and the Branch Theory and all that, was that to each person it meant a recreation of some golden moment in the Christian history in some geographical place (usually pastoral, medieval England) that really only exists in their minds. And they never agree with each other as to what that will be, except NOT Roman Catholicism.

This, together with the fact that I was growing in understanding and in prayer, helped lead me to agree with Fr Hunwicke: the sooner that Anglicanism (as an ‘ism’) is thrown into the trash bin of history, the better.

As an -ism it’s a kind of Protestantism either of the Evangelical or liberal kind, both of which I see being absorbed by their Protestant neighbours.

From RR

• Five lies about the American economy.
• Sadly, predictably, Congress says no to Kucinich and Paul and continues Afghan war. More from the left. The RR editors: why does Hayden get imperialism right and domestic liberty wrong? The hippies destroyed much and were of no real use.
• The military-industrial complex: cost of white-elephant fighter plane has doubled since 2001.
• ‘Reagan test’ exposes Texan textbooks’ bias. Nice man Reagan but no fiscal conservative and in the end von Mises was right: Communism collapsed under its own internal contradictions.
• The road to hell is paved with them: Somalia food aid waylaid.
• Reason I stayed home in November 2008: Biden says US is ‘shoulder to shoulder with Israel’. More from Justin Raimondo.
• A bit about bourgeois libertarianism.
• Politicians fail the simple economics of prosperity.
• War without death? The RR editors: It would be far more valuable if societies were to stop starting wars in the first place, but as long as the thirst for empire and “We’re Number One” continues, it’s unlikely to occur.
• At Guantánamo symbolism trumps substance.
• Why not universal car insurance?
• Ron Paul: putting the Constitution back into the Oval Office.
• The Tea Party still has potential. Romney to them: sit down and shut up. Them to him: go to hell.
• Your retirement funds to bail out failed banks?

In vino veritas
From The Onion

Are you or have you ever been a lawyer?
The NYT rightly rubbishes the rubber-hose right

Andrew Cusack on how to save newspapers
My situation has at least three of his five checklist points: a niche, quality that appeals to the wealthy (which is why I work 15-24+ hours on a Tuesday) and a virtual monopoly

From Hilary.

Kucinich and Paul take on Congress about Afghanistan
From the LRC blog.

Six movie monsters that just wouldn’t work
From Cracked

Another story on the end of newspapers

One tea party too late

Obama administration promises to make state schools even more dysfunctional
From Steve Sailer

Quit Iraq
From Joshua

From my paper

• Jim Bunning. Hooray for his financial realism but to give his liberal critic credit, where was that when his party was in power?
• The ’60s and today contrasted. The optimism of the time, or the future isn’t what it used to be.
• A conservative I won’t vote for. One of the rubber-hose right making small-government noises. I won’t be fooled again.

A torture apologist’s flawed theology
From Sojourners

The few remaining people in Centralia fight eviction, claiming massive government fraud
About Centralia (more)

Fountain pens for ever
From AKMA.

From RR

• Ex-spy chief: US lied to allies about prisoners.
• Obama’s Potemkin Afghanistan.
• Tennessee: bill would stamp income tax unconstitutional.
• Apologise now for the burden future generations will bear.
• J. Neil Schulman on war.
• More blowback?
• Obama and lobbyists.
• Rove and Bush lied.
• Israel jailed him for talking too much.
• Markets and culture.
• The Scandinavian welfare myth revisited.
• Don’t be conned by the conservatives regarding Afghanistan.

Talking to Canon Reid about the Pope’s offer
Starting here

Predictably, American RC bishops go for Obamacare
Well-meant charity etc. LRC’s Christopher Manion explains.

From Joshua

• Libertarianism: it’s the real thing.
• A Republican is someone who thinks that...

Owen White on the irony of those who criticise book theology

LRC picks

• Lew Rockwell: ask not what your country can do for you; ask what your country is doing to you.
• Conservatives are running on empty.
• Murray Rothbard on the Oscars. Steve Sailer was on the right track: Dances with Giant Smurfs (which I didn’t bother seeing) was too popular so it seems that something more pretentious won.
• You’re not free. Having had a night encounter last summer with law enforcement (headlight and taillight out, unknown to me: $56) I understand. Unlicensed beer? Please.

Mysticism debased
From Rod Dreher

Government health care is not about health care; it’s about government

The mainline denominations are only interesting to the media as foils for conservative religion
Obama can take you for granted just like the Republicans do conservative Protestants and pro-lifers. More.

He can take Bad Catholics (like his veep) for granted too.

Five creepy ways video games are trying to get you addicted
Flipping the switch in the part of your brain that works like a hamster’s.

According to everything expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don’t even have two of them:

Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day);

Complexity (so it’s not mind-numbing repetition);

Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).

Check, check and check.

If you haven’t got these, the video game is supposed to make you feel like you do.

From Cracked.

Sensible people see through Keynesian economics
From LRC

Obsolete occupations
From Rod Dreher

Clarity on ecumenism or more obnoxiousness doing business as orthodoxy?
An Orthodox blogger likes the way an in-your-face trad blog denounced the way Pope Benedict wished the Patriarch of Constantinople a happy birthday.

A one-true-church claim is part of what defines a Catholic church; it’s not a denomination. Which is why the Orthodox understood and respected Dominus Iesus while the mainline complained; the Pope was speaking their common language!

The matter at hand: Rome while in no way compromising its claim seems to acknowledge never-RC Orthodox bishops as having not only holy orders but jurisdiction over their never-RC people. (What it means when it says the Orthodox are churches; Protestants are non-churches, ‘ecclesial communities’ being the polite term for church-like collections of Christians.) The same benefit of the doubt that makes venerating post-schism Orthodox saints possible, even liturgically among the highest-church of the Greek Catholics (the Melkites and St Gregory Palamas; the tiny Russian Catholic Church and all the Russian Orthodox saints). Which sounds fine to me and in their usual unwritten customary way is mirrored by the Orthodox, who venerate pre-schism Popes as Popes and have never appointed an Orthodox replacement Pope. Even with the difference over his scope as the one real division between the two sides, it’s understood that the reigning Pope is who he says he is.

This benefit of the doubt given to people born on the other side is how I interpret the old-school condemnations, as applying not to them but to people who switch.

Of course I do hope that generosity doesn’t mean I’m one jump removed from the old relativists of Call to Action (wannabe mainliners who don’t like high church).

Aggressive secularism
Damian Thompson reports:

“An assault on natural law”, which imposed “unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs.”

As clergymen are warned they could be sued if they refuse to carry out homosexual “marriages” in church, what will the Equality Bill mean for religious doctrine?

The unique feature of Gordon Brown’s government is not its economic incompetence. Rather, it is doctrinaire secularism. For the first time in British history, no one sitting around the Cabinet table holds traditional Christian views that defy the liberal consensus.

From here.

What life have you if you have not life together?

There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.
Even the anchorite who meditates alone,
For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of GOD,
Prays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate.

— T.S. Eliot

From here.

Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Patrimony: Bishop Barnes on differing British and American Anglo-Catholic attitudes to the Prayer Book. More here and here.
• An e-mail conversation about the Telegraph’s coverage of the ACA saying yes to the Holy Father’s offer. We also talk about the underreported story of most of an American diocese (including the bishop, who was behind the move) of the Nestorian Church (the native church of Iraq) converting to Rome a few years ago.
• Talking to Fr Robert Hart and company. I don’t reflexively bash them but their long-standing position (Grafton’s) is an earlier version of Episcopalianism — so what’s to stop history repeating itself? — not Catholicism.
• Fr Laurence Wells on American RCs. 1. Real social justice (not the modern left) + the legit liturgical movement + orthodoxy = Catholic. 2. The old immigrant-labour-Democrat tie is hard to break (why many American churchmen think the party line is doctrine) but you’re right that the party line is not doctrine. 3. As I say, Pope Benedict had better have the ex-ACs’ back; they’ll need it!
• Scratch a libprot and find a nativist. But I appreciate the point about the inconsistency of hiring and giving benefits to the divorced and remarried. A counter-argument from my libertarianism: the divorced and remarried are consenting adults. Not so an orphaned or abandoned child the state tries to order the church to put into a homosexual couple’s home, against the church’s teachings.