From Joshua

• The history boys. More WWII revisionism.
• Limited government.
• Was the shift from jazz to rock inevitable?

Can’t even get their stories straight
From the MCJ

From RR

• Scotus affirms 2nd and 14th amendments.
• Turkey bans Israeli military flights from its airspace.
• China and Taiwan to sign landmark trade pact.
• Know-Nothingism: 500+ guardsmen heading for the Arizona border.
• UK promises not to torture any more.
• antiwar.com on the return of Bush’s general.
• Endless occupation?
• Ron Paul: There really is nothing for us to win in Afghanistan. Our mission has morphed from apprehending those who attacked us, to apprehending those who threaten or dislike us for invading their country, to remaking an entire political system and even a culture. ... This is an expensive, bloody, endless exercise in futility. Not everyone is willing to admit this just yet. But every second they spend in denial has real costs in lives and livelihoods. Many of us can agree on one thing, however. Our military spending in general has grown way out of control.
• Citizenship should remain a birthright.
• Economist to bloggers: shut up.
• Free association doesn’t need state sanction.

From LRC
Today featuring my WWII revisionism

• Japan’s gift to FDR.
• The greatest US war crime of WWII. Correction: Rasputin wasn’t a monk.
• A ‘kill switch’ for the state. Those seeking to direct the state’s coercive machinery against the Internet don’t even seem to have a clear grasp of how this system operates.
• Stimulus vs Austrian economics.
• Paul Krugman: the trouble is we’re not Soviet enough!
• Ron Paul: going back to the Constitution would be good. Contrast to Chuck Baldwin’s son: but the Articles of Confederation were better.

Sign seen on Sunday

RIP Robert Byrd

From LRC

• Libertarian Idaho.
• This is a depression.
• Suiting up for a post-dollar world.
• Which is teaching kids reality.
• Sirhan Sirhan in his own words. My guess is the Mafia killed the Kennedy brothers.
• America’s compulsory dependence on government.

From Joshua

• Justin Raimondo: colonialism, Obama style.
• When the high school teaches the faith better than the parish church. Which can happen if the school is honest and truly liberal (and not illiberal leftist/anti-religious) because among other things Catholicism is Western civilisation.
• A disorder not an identity. Sorry, readers from the left, but most of you know that’s what the faith teaches. Either way it’s none of the state’s business. Also, outing is a sin. (And way to fight the stereotype of imitating women at their worst, acting like catty gossips.)
• On that note, French dissing, or the revolt against the church wasn’t high-minded like common knowledge teaches.
• Rent a white guy. Like some Japanese hire white actors as ministers for fake Christian weddings, some Chinese companies pose as international big shots with ringers.
• FPR on taking back the word conservative.

Saturday vigil Low Mass at Mater Ecclesiæ
Because of geography and circumstances I was a ‘Seventh-Day Adventist’ this weekend

North Wildwood, NJ




I’d heard Abe Vigoda’s still alive but didn’t expect to meet him here.





The Bronx Wanderers including an original member each of Larry Chance and the Earls and of the Tokens (playing his old sax!).





Because Sometimes It’s Fun to Scare Protestants™. Sant’ Antonio da Padova, whose feast was two Sundays ago.

Storm damage at home and around town

What your print or Web font says about you
Tech-snob fun from Cracked

From RR

• Rand Paul’s underground electric fence. Why Michael Lawrence says Rand’s as libertarian as Attila the Hun. It may please the racists at Steve Sailer’s (I have no problem with his theories but with the way he wants to write the law to fit them, denying smart NAM people a chance and giving himself away: race is not determinative) but not me.
• Open borders.
• My changing biz: if you love newspapers, let them go.
• Working on a (temp) dream where workers are atomized, badly compensated and strangely optimistic. As you may have guessed, I’m old-school, have had more or less the same job for 15 years, enjoy working for a similarly minded gentleman and share in the enthusiasm of changing over from newspapers to online video (like the late Brian Brindley I’m anti-modernity not anti-technology; in the field I’m the 1962-looking reporter you see in my sidebar, in summer rig these days, but holding a Flip cam); then again our company almost went under about two years ago. There is no job security from the higher-ups. I’d like private business run by gentlemen who give you a pension for life (and don’t use 401ks etc. to try to weasel out of that) and a gold watch after decades of good honest work. That said, RR editor Steve Tuccille sees it as an opportunity: Yes, and it could mean an end to dead-end jobs, employee “benefits” (instead of decent compensation for jobs well done), disgruntled employees and tyrannical middle-managers. Where’s the downside? Folks must give up the delusion of cradle-to-grave security! Keeping more of my money without the middlemen? Can’t argue with that.
• History: Justin Raimondo hates Harry Truman. The little Mason who nuked civilians in Japan among other things.
• We really shouldn’t let the furor over President Obama’s firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal cause us to lose focus on three important points regarding Afghanistan: The U.S. government should never have invaded and occupied the country in the first place, it should have exited the country years ago, and continuing the occupation for any period of time whatsoever is the height of immorality and folly.
• Taleban’s time horizon’s longer than America’s.
• Guns save lives.
• Liberals hate freedom: Woody Allen has recently lamented that it is too bad that President Obama is not a dictator. “It would be good,” Allen said, “if he could be dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of things quickly.”
• Tea Party potential. As long as the red-state fascist element doesn’t take over/it doesn’t get co-opted by the Republicans.

Philadelphia storm story and two videos

From LRC

• Paul on his no vote.
• Why the US government will never have a balanced budget again.
• Don’t tase my granny.

Nasty weather!
Arguably the worst natural disaster I’ve actually seen; the worst aftermath anyway. (Once saw 100-mph winds in a thunderstorm; it was like someone turned a fire hose on the windows of the house and it nearly blew the front doors in.) At the office it just got dark mid-afternoon with some lightning and it rained very hard; around home it’s another story. Golf ball-sized hail and a 70+ mph straight wind (like the storm I remember) downed trees everywhere, blew leaves and branches all over the streets, broke windows, tore off at least two roofs, smushed an older house near me, pockmarked siding and left a couple hundred thousand people without electricity for a few days.

As far as I know nobody was killed or seriously hurt.

More pictures.

Two media fighting to survive
Today I recorded the last parts of a video to do with history and religion — the town’s old Protestant cemetery has the long-lost grave of the town’s first woman schoolteacher in the 1800s, and the ELCA pastor whose church has the cemetery did a nice dedication ceremony (with new headstone) complete with blessings in the name of the Trinity. Anyway I was doing this when one of the local TV news cameramen was right next to me (nice young fellow who tried mostly successfully to stay out of my shot). Guess who’ll have the story up tonight? We would have done if our online editor were here today. So I was scooped. This is a death match: TV’s still king but the ’Net will be soon, and we’re competing head to head now. (Our little newspapers will be history in a few years.) Got to get cracking.

Quincy: ¿qué? Segunda parte
More. Many of us already knew this (it’s Protestant with a reset point sometime before 1989 minus the Spong-y types) but more or more ACNA appears to be no sturdy barque: Dr Tighe has found a claim on the Web that Morales has been a episcopus vagans. Really.

The abbey.

American Missal 2010 reprint
By Lancelot Andrewes Press. An ecumenical book with a choice of five canons: Roman with rubrics in English, the English Missal translation of that, 1549, US 1928 and the Antiochian Orthodox version of 1928. From Benjamin Andersen.

Behold! The sound of WR priests everywhere whipping out the checkbooks! It is quite a sight to behold. What’s the clergy discount? It wasn’t vetted/published by the WRV. But I can guarantee it will be used on WRV altars and quickly become the de facto standard.

Ron’s the one no vote on Obama’s latest witch hunt, which the pro-dictatorship WSJ finds inexplicable, of course
From LRC

The end of our culture?
James Leroy Wilson on how little we’ve changed really in 50 years. From RR.

Point/counterpoint: McChrystal
It didn’t mean a real ‘change’ (ha) in the war plans so I wasn’t following it but here they are

• LRC’s Butler Shaffer.
• If Obama had any knowledge of the final years of the Vietnam U.S. Catastrophe, he would see McChrystal as Westmoreland on Steroids.
• Rod Dreher and combox. I’m not a pacifist/anti-military and understand that soldiers give up some of their rights thus Obama’s emulation of Truman.

Pope Benedict’s offer vs the Anglicans’
Fr Hunwicke explains:

This dear old Bavarian gent apparently trusts us in a way that even Rowan, for all his personal affection and best intentions, is clearly not free to. The best he thinks he can squeeze out of the bigots in the House of Bishops and the General Synod is a mean little scheme which leaves our enemies with their hands around our throats.

Tripp throws down a challenge from The Christian Century Mainline Protestantism Today
In a friendly way of course

As far as I can tell the author is in part taking the crisis du jour (the priestly underage gay sex scandal) and trying to use it to (gladly?) predict the demise of Catholicism in Europe. As a cardinal said to Napoleon when the general said to the Pope he would destroy the church (in a year), not even we have managed that! Europeans and Americans aren’t flocking to mainline Protestantism either, and the mainliners aren’t having lots of kids; more the opposite.

Compared to the ‘Enlightenment’ this is a bump in the road. Europe’s more secularist — anti-religious, not secular — than residually mainline/‘I’m spiritual not religious’ northern Americans. Ground zero for the ‘Enlightenment’.

In no sense is European religion dying — just witness the continuing popularity of pilgrimage and other popular devotions — but loyalty to the institutional church has weakened disastrously.

Not news really: many Catholics have long had a casual relationship with the institution, from Arturo’s Mexicans to, before them, Italians (I know second-generation folk from Brooklyn and their descendants). Such worldly-wise people aren’t at all surprised when priests turn out to be no good.

The number of priestly vocations has been in free fall since the 1960s, leaving many seminaries perhaps a quarter as full as they were in the time of Pope John XXIII.

Sometimes post hoc really is propter hoc. Vatican II was a bomb.

Between a lively folk Catholicism and Pope Benedict’s renewal (a smaller, sounder official church than in the ’70s, a cadre of orthodox who are the institution, which after all has its place in all this: our Marines or Navy Seals) I’m not worried. The rumours of the terminal illness of the church are greatly exaggerated.

Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

What about societal/economic stuff like women working outside the home? Of course I don’t take the bait (‘Get back in the kitchen!’). The answer as with the other culture-wars red herring, gay marriage (which the faith says is impossible), is libertarianism, or the faith can and will flourish in freedom even amongst those who reject it. Want a career? Wonderful! (But how much of this is out of need — you don’t want to; you have to — or marketing more wage slavery as empowerment?) But not at the expense of harming others, the natural limit to freedom (or libertarians aren’t by definition selfish monsters).

‘Trad Men’
From Andrew Bartus.

True beauty vs æstheticism
From NLM

From The Anglo-Catholic

• Newman and conscience. Answering a trope of the left.
• Rome’s rumoured new ecumenical boss is part of Pope Benedict’s reforms. A strict-constructionist, literal reading of V2. Not bad!

From RR

• The US Supreme Court on Monday upheld the constitutionality of a federal law that makes it illegal to teach members of a foreign terrorist group how to use peaceful means to pursue political goals.
• Israel: plan to raze Arab homes approved.
• Wikileaks to release files about deadly US airstrike on Afghan civilians.
• From whom no secrets are hid: Facebook generation.
• Soft defence: how to help a kid defeat a bully.
• Congress: US military funds Afghan warlords.
• That ’30s mistake.
• Subliminal-advertising scare.
• Our own worst enemies? Sure; fallen human nature.
• Anti-statists today; torturers tomorrow? The party out of power does an impression of us.

50 statistics about the US economy that are almost too crazy to believe

The truth is that what we are experiencing is not simply a “downturn” or a “recession”. What we are witnessing is the beginning of the end for the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen. Our greed and our debt are literally eating our economy alive.

From LRC.

The last-ditch plan to keep Anglo-Catholics happy will separate the Anglicans among them from the Catholics
Damian Thompson gets it

Important things they don’t teach you in school

• How to spot a douchebag in which the writer rips on Roissy (more than a bit of truth... as told by Satan, funnier and more useful than all the Sunday-school teachers rewriting Screwtape) and friends. That should give you a hint that this article is not for the easily offended. No, you’re not Terrell Owens.
• How to get away from somebody who is trying to mug or rape you, why you can’t reason with a screaming drunk and why believing action movies are real will get you killed.
• How to figure out if the repair guy is screwing you.
• Randomly meeting the right people and not pissing them off. Example: He was just another ambitious, pretty face, in a city full of them. He got so fed up, he quit acting and became a carpenter. Then one day he got hired to install cabinets in the home of a guy named George Lucas. They became friends. That got him the role of Han Solo a few years later.
• This could be wrong about homeopathy: the AMA hate competition.
• Why losing weight requires some suffering.
• How to cook cheap food that won’t kill you: fat-free versions of fat foods are terrible so don’t bother and it’s hard to screw up spaghetti.
• Why talk radio is a terrible source of information.
• Social studies: life is hard and you will die; get over it.

From Cracked.

I’m always struck by how white people are constantly admonishing each other that they must lure more blacks into difficult, low-paying, low-chance-of-success careers
From Steve Sailer

I guess if mass murder doesn’t bother you, stealing will be a walk in the park
From the MCJ

From LRC



We were saps.



Just like Communist China. Isn’t that great?

Ecumenism then and now
When there was a biretta belt, people cared about union or not with the Presbyterians, the mainline, for good or ill, mattered and despite its heresies it still drew from Catholic theological capital (agreeing certain things were scandalous sins and not ‘affirming’ them). I knew that Bishop Manning in New York, not an Anglo-Catholic but friendly to them, led the opposition to the proposed 1940s merger but didn’t know of Bishop Conkling, ‘liberal’ but not by 2010 standards; more Catholic.

I’ve been told that some bishops similarly were blackmailed in 1976 (but in Bishop Conkling’s case it seems to have been revenge after the merger was scuttled).

I wouldn’t be surprised if Dr Tighe knows the facts about Bishop Conkling and shares them in the combox.

Al-Qaeda spokesman offers peace deal to US

Gadahn urged the US to withdraw “all soldiers and spies” from all Muslim nations, to release all Muslim detainees, and to end all support for Israel. He added that the US should bar its citizens from traveling to Palestine.

From antiwar.com.

The gnostic temptation
From Dr Tighe

Cats with attitude
Margaret met these in a Scottish street but they look like the pictures I’ve wanted to take of South Philly’s sitting on the rowhouses’ front steps being social with each other like the good honorary Italians they are.


Hey, cuz! (Eh, cumpare!)

You talkin’ to me?

Libertarianism and unchosen obligations
From RR

History: Mascall in 1977 on WO
From Dr Tighe. Long story short: it makes sense if you’re Protestant. Some day I’ll be able to remember an important date: 1973, when the first Anglican Consultative Council paved the way for them nation by nation to put this up for a vote, a power we don’t claim. The relatively little pressure in our world to do it comes from a minority living in Protestant countries whence the idea came. BTW yesterday I learnt that the person who in England about 20 years ago gave me a first-hand account of one of the 1930s Anglo-Catholic Congresses has died, aged 95. RIP. Postscript from the Bovina Bloviator.

Sunday-obligatory religious entry: refuge with Greek Catholics
Going for a perennial topic while keeping it light. From Eric Sammons.

What online newspaper readers like
The LA Times vs the NYT. From Steve Sailer.

Today’s decrepit WASPs
Of course I don’t want to go back to when they said to Catholics and Jews, ‘This is our country; you’re just visiting’ (but isn’t PCness/SWPLness saying the same thing really?), but good points. From Taki.

American Pop
I’d wanted to see this for nearly 30 years and thought it was not bad. The critics didn’t like it which I can somewhat understand; some of the gimmicks may not work but I thought the animation (rotoscoped) good and the story interesting. My favourite characters and periods of course are Zalmie’s and Benny’s (circa 1900-early 1950s). Given the subcultures Ralph Bakshi is from, one shouldn’t be surprised to see the mainstream late ’50s (which at the time he made this had been bowdlerised and marketed to death as the Fifties: ‘Happy Days’, Grease etc.) almost completely overlooked; instead he’s interested in further romanticising beatniks (in popular fiction La Bohème is recycled again and again... I found Tony annoying but then again I would). I give him credit for showing hippie etc. squalor for what it was. Like I imagine audiences were when this was new, I was nonplussed by the song choice towards the end but he explains it wasn’t his idea.

P.S. I also recently heard a 1969 recording of one of my faves, Benny Goodman, and a big band covering ‘Aquarius’ and thought it worked. Whatever cultural baggage it might have, a good song is a good song and works across genres. (I’ve heard one of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé singing Soundgarden’s ‘Black or Sun’ and that worked.) The middle part sounds like he’s returning to his legendary solo in ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’; his playing relatively late in his life was as crisp as it was in the ’30s and ’40s.

Lebanon to bar aid ships to Gaza
From antiwar.com

From @TAC

• The right’s wrong turn. Agreeing with Rothbard and Rockwell on Buckley.
• What price Afghanistan?
• New boss same as the old: don’t question torturers’ sincerity.

From LRC

• The homeownership hustle.
• The USSR really is dead and Russia reborn. Pravda links to LRC!
• On my biz changing over: What the Internet is creating is a class of literate, gifted amateur writers, in an old tradition.
• Of course there is natural as well as divine hierarchy but: The state is no more capable of shutting down the Internet than it has been able to halt the flow of drugs. Do not forget that the Internet was created by the federal government, whose designers — consistent with the study of chaos and complexity — were unable to foresee where the system might lead. The vision of Joe Lieberman, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton holding a midnight session at the White House to “throw the switch” to end the Internet may gratify their delusionary minds, but has as much chance of reversing the forces of centrifugation as would bipartisan support for legislation mandating an end to the decentralizing processes of plate tectonics! The post he’s referring to.

Why a small and shrinking mainline denomination gets inordinate news coverage

A connection to a Christian tradition with apostolic pretensions is absolutely essential for the religious left. After all, what does it matter if the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) ordains women or the United Church of Christ ordains homosexuals and permits homosexual marriage?

But the fact that an “apostolic” church permits all these things carries considerably more weight for two reasons. Because it places in the public mind the idea that such innovations are legitimate “apostolic” positions to take. And it implies that perhaps the other two larger and far more influential “apostolic” churches might be, well, wrong.

— Chris Johnson

Huh?
This set off this a year later:

Draw your own conclusions.

Background.

Bye, Clem’s.

How will the ‘Mad Men’ characters react to ‘the ’60s’?
I’m sure this has been talked into the ground in many other places but here’s my take

Sayonara, America?
Japan can stop being a US protectorate and pay for its own defence

Hatoyama had no wish to break the alliance but affirmed his intention of normalising relations with the US and getting it to treat Japan like any other sovereign state. He also wanted to create an East Asian Community on EU lines. Did this indicate a slight shift away from the West?

The objectives of the 1930s empire minus the killing and other atrocities, and balanced by a strong China. Why not?

From CounterPunch.

Two church ones

• Rutler on Newman and the coming ordinariates. From here via Dr Tighe (and thanks for the Mascall book!)
• Video: Bishop Ackerman remembers the American Anglo-Catholic movement including the American Church Union and talks about his ideas for the present and future which one may not agree with, as Fr Rutler and I don’t, but this is a good man. I’ve met him (and Fr R) as have a few of my readers.

Time travel according to Cracked

From LRC

• Whose idea was it to drill at 5,000 feet deep? Not BP’s.
• Like a cancer on the economy.
• The organs of international finance, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, use U.S. covert agencies to carry out what is essentially a global loan-sharking scheme.
• I don’t give Sarah Palin a second thought but I like this line about her trying to throw us a bone about the war on drugs: Sarah Palin, who would love to attract the Ron Paul constituency if she runs for dictator...
• My biz: paywalls don’t work, Mr Murdoch.

The end of men?
Scary. But like economic bubbles it can’t last: I don’t buy the evolutionary-change line. Makes me wonder how in this depression the (fallen) natural order will reassert itself: civilised Christian patriarchy or the barbarian kind (women and a few alpha men, bad boys, who use them, with provider men seen as losers and chumps: the world of blogger Roissy and ‘Two and a Half Men’) Jeff has mentioned elsewhere.

Praying for peace on the streets
Comment (as usual the mainline and their friends think the state is the answer). That and a parish priest both holy and tough (the Curé d’Ars and St John of Kronstadt meet St Gabriel Possenti, patron of marksmen) and a cadre of Guardian Angels-like laity? Like a benevolent version of the mob (policing yourselves): no petty crime in those neighbourhoods. Again: a parable against pacifism. Non-violence is an option for Christians not doctrine. From here.

Perfeshnul Edjamakayshkun takes aim at another Grave Threat™ to the health and happiness of Young People.™ Best friends.
As with much in political correctness I see a caricature of something in Catholicism: the warnings in monastic life against ‘particular friendships’ disrupting community life. Pulled out of context this seems sinister: the state wants no competition for your children’s affection. From the MCJ.

Reminds me of what Butler Shaffer wrote at LRC (cue Helen Lovejoy soundbite):

A few days ago, I participated in a “focus” group directed by a politically correct “liberal” organization. Each of us was asked to make a brief statement about five politically oriented groups. One of them was UNICEF. My statement was that it is “an international organization that uses children as an excuse for the expansion of governmental power; that whenever legislation is proposed to ‘help the children,’ you should run.” A woman sitting next to me — and who works for a state bureaucracy to “help” children — responded: “But that’s the work I do.” I replied: “Then you know what I mean.”

Who shot JFK and RFK and why?
By now of course everybody knows the official versions are lies but I don’t know who or why. (Arguably the Mafia wanted them dead for turning on them.) It’s nice to think as Joshua does that JFK was returning to his sensible America First roots and was about to quit Vietnam but my guess is Johnson (even though he and JFK despised each other) simply continued his policies as a liberal crusader/Cold Warrior. The Tonkin Gulf ruse still would have happened and Bill Moyers’ ‘daisy’ smear ad still would have helped a Dem landslide that year but the Dem still would have lost to Nixon in ’68. Nothing would have changed except a certain pseudo-martyrology would be missing from the national myth (which regarding the glamour of that family was largely a PR myth created by the elder Kennedy anyway). BTW I’m still reading Bobby and J. Edgar; the latter may have been a faker regarding fighting crime but he was a better civil libertarian than many think (he opposed interning Japanese-Americans for example). From LRC.

From RR

• Freddie, Fannie removed from NYSE.
• Turkey set to freeze ties to Israel.
• Want to have the police department chasing cats around for a million dollars an hour?
• Know-Nothings call for state nullification of citizenship.
• The longest lost war. Not learning from the British or the Russians.
• Helen Thomas: an appreciation.
• Regarding Obama and BP, unsurprising: rule of law out the window.
• Now that US taxes citizens abroad (which apparently other countries don’t do) and other countries’ banks don’t want Americans’ business because they don’t want to spy on Americans for their government, more such people are resorting to something occasionally used by the rich: giving up US citizenship. At some US embassies there’s a waiting list up to two years. I understand Campbell’s Soup heir John Dorrance did that, using Ireland’s grandfather clause (if a grandparent emigrated you can get Irish citizenship) because of the US death tax; a tax exile: ‘It’s not that I don’t love my country but my family come first.’
• From good to bad to worse. Next time you lament the loss of life and property — and in many ways, the loss of innocence — represented by 9/11, remember everything else we lost as a result. In much the same way, the next time you’re told you must respect the President and hope for his success just because he happens to be President, consider the damage he and his policies have already done. There may not be any horrifying video footage of collapsing buildings playing over and over again on television today, but the long term effects are just as much the stuff of nightmares.
• Wikileaks vs The Pentagon Papers. Today the media are on the government’s side. Not shocking really because they always were statists and just wanted their side in power.
• The criminalisation of business. Government often uses the threat of criminal sanctions merely to harass corporations or for publicity purposes.
• End the drug war. Which candidate wanted to empty the jails of largely black, mostly non-violent drugs offenders? Hint: his picture’s in my sidebar.
• And the gods laughed. Obama and the ruling class now can barely stir themselves even to offer a convincing appearance of genuine concern for the huddled, oil-slicked masses. And honestly, why should they? Whatcha gonna do, baby? Most Americans sleepwalk through their days. To the extent they’re awake, more and more they struggle merely for survival. That doesn’t leave time for other activities. One notable exception to this somnolence can and will be made operational from time to time: many Americans will enthusiastically support another campaign of destruction against largely defenseless, usually much poorer (and usually darker-skinned) “Others,” especially when they’re five or eight thousand miles away (unless they’re threatening the inviolable sanctity of our “borders” here at home).
• Jon Stewart on Obama’s executive-power record.
• Military cuts: let’s start overseas.
• The US war addiction: funding enemies to fuel a trillion-dollar addiction.

Groups you didn’t know were badass
The Salvation Army were originally like the Guardian Angels, the Mounties are Canada’s FBI/national highway patrol (with spiffy dress uniforms), the Queen’s palace guards are real soldiers and cheerleading is the most dangerous sport. From Cracked.

From The Anglo-Catholic

• Papal infallibility, which Rome teaches is an application of church infallibility, something the Orthodox also believe about themselves.
• Cold feet. Bishop Barnes explains why remaining Anglican is not an option and is looking forward to the ordinariates.
• Dr Tighe: Prayer Book use in the Orthodox Church.
• Fr Chadwick: Newman, the laity and the church.

Liberal clericalism
At Derek’s, Paul Goings calls them on it: a trendy minister might show off for other clergy and upper-middle-class folk by knowingly giving Communion to the unbaptised but how many of them take that to its logical end and talk themselves out of a job? This stuff appeals to boomers, who lost their faith but were raised with the 1950s-early 1960s habit of churchgoing so they remade churchgoing in their own image. The kids either come to the conclusion from that and don’t go or a minority of them look orthodoxwards and eventually Catholicwards. The Protestants think we’re clericalists but as Fr George Rutler says we’re sacerdotalists:

In a world of rusty and broken clericalisms, he [the Curé d’Ars] restored a shining sacerdotalism; if a clericalist is a man who uses the priesthood, a sacerdotalist is a man who is used by the priesthood. And thus the hierarchical constitution of the Church is a bureaucratic artifact to the clericalist, while it is charismatic to the priest. The clericalist pursues a career of which mediocrity is the safeguard, while the sacerdotalist pursues a mission of which ardent love is the token. Consequently, the priestly soul is in the world but not of it, as the clericalist caste is of the world but not in it.

From Steve Sailer

• Why it’s OK to believe his theories (some ethnic groups on average are not as smart as others), grounds for being kicked out of polite society: because here he seems to admit that race is not determinative. Of course there are smart non-Asian minority people. If he means that and is not being sarcastic, well and good.
• Why I agree with the mainstream that his and VDARE’s solution is racist. Because it treats race as determinative: write the law to keep people who might be inferior out of the country, never mind the right of the smart NAM person to real equal opportunity.
• My answer: again meritocracy or a version of what here he calls the conservative approach to education. Be bright enough and work hard; we don’t care what colour you are. If you happen to end up with a white majority on that job, so what? As long as race is not the criterion either way, it’s none of the state’s business. An orthodox libertarian like von Mises would say go ahead and discriminate: turn down people’s business and by so doing eventually shut yourself down.
• Then there’s the point he, the Anti-Gnostic and others make: much white posturing on race is really a power/class war between white groups; the rich, high-IQ élite who don’t have to send their kids to ghetto schools look down on those who do and want to replace them with other people.
• The Bilderbergers are an invitation-only group of rich and powerful people who have been getting together secretly in expensive hotels since 1954 to discuss how to make the world a better place for rich and powerful people.

From Rod Dreher

• Sorry but you won’t retire. As Jeff Culbreath has said, not necessarily bad if your job is your calling but often it’s not. Oh man. I had better win the lottery, because I’m going to be intolerable as a septuagenarian employee.
• Media bias, media blandness. Religion coverage: The heroes in these stories are always the mushy-middlemen, or at least those who have learned how to speak the language of mushy-middleness persuasively to journalists.
• Life according to Seventeen. It’s a kind of brilliant analysis of how American teenage girlhood is constructed by the media. Like magazines aimed at grown women. Cracked nailed this: play keepaway with her self-esteem so she buys the sponsors’ products. I’m anything but anti-business but yes.
• Now it might cost up to $1 trillion to rescue Fannie and Freddie, in what one insider calls “the mother of all bailouts.” James Poulos says: It’s one thing for a government to spend more money than we have. It’s another to spend more than we can imagine. Cross that threshold, and people will start to ask: how imaginary is the value of this unimaginable amount of money?

The Tea Party goes global
Brilliant! I couldn’t care less about Sarah Palin. From the MCJ.

Cardinal Pell is the victim of a smear campaign
From Damian Thompson

A boomer/SWPL fantasy or a parody?
Hard to tell. Peace parks are a fine idea and I’m with him up to the Eisenhower quotation:

Some day the people are going to want peace so much that their governments will have to get out of the way and let them have it.

But can you see where he gives the game away?

Prosecute anyone or any nation that wages aggressive war against another.

No more offshore drilling since the disaster in the Gulf. Strict defense of endangered species. An end to logging in old-growth forests. There’s a hard ban on killing whales. Japan and Norway have actually shut down their fleets and dismantled their exploding harpoons. And the world’s rain forests are being preserved.

Tra la la.

Now who would be doing the prosecuting? Who would enforce all these hard bans and other lefty-utopian laws? That’s right: an a-r-m-y with g-u-n-s and b-o-m-b-s. In this old liberal’s dream world his side, his holy mother the state, would have all the weapons.

The Navy’s been prevented from using sonar because it affects the hearing of marine mammals.

Chortle. First, the Navy is a fighting force (see above on one side having all that) and second, one that’s this soft and PC would be fairly useless as one.

Also see why I’m not a pacifist. Neither is he but he almost doesn’t let on.

Unless he’s pulling our legs and this is tasty satire.

The sort of thing that would make The Onion’s readers misty and Cracked’s rightly, heartily laugh their asses off.

From RR

• Senators rap Obama régime on Afghan war.
• Why the treatment of Helen Thomas makes sense.
• Her Watergate scoop.
• Chuck Baldwin’s survival tips if it’s the end of the world as we know it.
• Irish gardai (police) order audit of country’s gun owners.

Gun myths from the movies
From Cracked

It used to be that men with ordinary intelligence and average skills could make a decent living

... if they were honest, had a strong work ethic, and had a desire to master their trade. But the blue-collar “masculine” jobs today — mechanics, construction workers, machinists, press operators, etc. — pay very little and are inherently unstable. Other jobs once staffed by men — office clerks, writers and journalists, factory workers, purchasing agents, draftsmen, contract administrators, etc. — are increasingly filled by women.

Or they’re outsourced abroad. My teachers say protectionism is bad but I understand. Also there’s the matter (the Soviets did it too) of marketing more wage slavery (something people are really forced to do for survival: the wife has to work outside the home not because she wants to) as female empowerment.

Jobs which are today capable of decently supporting a family require high intelligence, extraordinary skills, and what is more often the case, unscrupulous ambition.

But at least in some circles it was always so. For example ‘Mad Men’ is based partly on fact: men who lied for a living.

From Jeff Culbreath.

From Daniel Larison

• Hawks find NATO dangerous and outdated only when NATO allies act with any measure of independence and according to their national interests.
• An instructive glimpse inside the cocoon where Europeans are apparently all perfidious anti-Semites.
• Of course Iran would fight back.
• The social-issues ‘truce’ and 2012. They’re political red herrings both sides cynically use.

National parishes with clout
Brother Stephen on the ordinariates

Amnesty for the bankers, debtor’s prison for the serfs
From RR

From LRC

• The criminal legacy of Alan Greenspan.
• Fractional-reserve banking.
• The WaPo has a go at Paul. As World War II bomber-pilots will tell you: “when you experience flak, that means you’re over the target.” One dead-tree rag would never prop up another dead tree instrument of exchange for mutual benefit, would they? More here and here.
• Apple. Boomers and SWPLs love ’em but they’re really a capitalist success story the government is suspicious of. (I haven’t used Apple products in about 12 years since my job dropped them for some reason.) More.

Today’s libertarian articles
From RR

• The end of another make-believe country? Flemish separatists gain in Belgian elections. As I understand it the Flemings are Dutch and speak Dutch; the Walloons are Celts like the Irish and speak French.
• Somalia: is that all you’ve really got?
• Random thoughts on the war on drugs.
• Democracy vs liberty.
• Walking the peaceful path of von Mises.
• Silver lining: Obama’s failures create new libertarians.
• Carly Fiorina: don’t believe the hype. I remember the bad news stories from her days running Hewlett Packard.
• Moral nihilism and libertarian anarchism.
• Tribes and shared values.

Bad writing: sometimes the truth hurts
In my job I come across much of it and of course online as well. Yesterday I found this nasty line from Damian Thompson: ‘the leaden whimsy favoured by American devotees of C.S. Lewis’. Like we don’t need more Whitney Houston soundalikes from ‘Idol’, please, ‘Christian writers’, no more unfunny rewrites of The Screwtape Letters as imagined by Ned Flanders.

Quincy: ¿qué?
I know it’s none of my business and Quincy gets the standard line from me that I say about the Episcopalians: they have the right to govern themselves.

That said, I’m not sure what that abbey’s about: my guess is it’s like St Dunstan’s jointly under Bishop Grafton and the Old Catholics 100 years ago, broadly speaking orthodox (with an earnest corniness; the gin-and-lacers would eat them alive) but disgruntled with Rome about something or other (see also St Anthony’s, Hackensack’s history — my impression from reading a former curate there is it long was a nice free-for-all of Catholic folk religion).

I’m not at all clear why on earth these seemingly orthodox puertorriqueños became Episcopalians! Obviously not for the typical reason Miami’s Padre Alberto did — priests who wanted to get married. The Italians’ reason at St Anthony’s in the 1920s was understandable if muddled: they wanted a neighbourhood church they could walk to, the Irish bishop said no, they formed and built their own church, snagged a priest to staff it and were sort of under the Polish National Catholic Church until the priest ran off somewhere and they ran out of money so they became Episcopalians in name.

My guess is these men were charismatic-tinged folk who really thought God and Our Lady wanted them to start a monastery but the local bishop disagreed. So like the Italians in Hackensack they found an accommodating flag of convenience with the Piskies until the Piskies took a hard left turn.

Recently rewatched: Catch Me If You Can
The real story

Sunday roundup

• On loving thy neighbour vs utopian schemes. Did Charles Schulz really come up with ‘I love mankind... it’s people I can’t stand’? Anyway it seems the kind of misguided charity that leads to the gas chambers as Flannery O’Connor said. From Fr Robert Hart via the Midland Agrarian.
• On what one looks for in a church and persuading the lapsed to come back. Try the latter by example and suggestion not nagging, says the Revd Jane’s common-sense answer. I’ll add regarding the first that public recitation of the office is arguably a patrimonial reminder of something to aim at. As I suggested last week I’m not looking for the perfect parish. ‘Good enough’ is fine in this life. Again my zone is north of pure folk religion, south of traddie idealism and like both not Novus (east is nice).
• The lost Thomist. RIP Bill Zuck.
• Hooray for the old breviary. The horologion is good too.
• Brother Stephen on the creative use of monotony.
• Dom Odo Casel and the liturgical movement.

The story of Israel

Imagine you are leasing an apartment. You wake up one day and your landlord is helping someone else move into your room. You ask your landlord about this guy, he merely replies, “This is my friend; he’s been having a rough couple of months, but overall, he’s a great guy and I think you are going to like him.” You are irritated by this act, understandably - it defies any property rights, but, you, being a nice guy, don’t start a lot of sh*t right away.

The first thing this guy does is crack out some duct tape. He uses it to segment the room. You realize his way of segmenting the room cuts you off from most of the bathroom, including the shower, half of your bed, and the entirety of the TV, all of which you bought for yourself. Furthermore, for some reason, this guy keeps the hot water running, like all the time. He says the steam’s good for his sinuses. This is leading Jordan, your downstairs neighbor, to become very angry. On top of that, he keeps parking in Egypt’s spot. You and your neighbors try talking to the landlord, but you all know that it won’t get you anywhere, after all, you are just tenants, and this guy’s a good friend.

Jordan lashes out, and punches the guy, and the guy goes to the landlord to grab a gun. The guy goes on to hold you, Jordan, and Egypt hostage for 6 days. (Though, to be fair to the guy, you did all gang up and were planning to put him in his place with violence.)

The landlord finally stepped in, got the guy to give up the hostage crisis by promising him more space in your room. Jordan and Egypt still pissed, he decides to pay off Egypt so if something like this happens again, it’ll be Egypt and the Guy vs. You and Jordan, though Liberia upstairs hates the noise that all this is bringing. To think, you just moved here because it was prime real estate for worshipping your prophet. Now it is the center of attenting.

Over the course of the next few months, the guy calls the cops on your for any angry look in his direction, and they constantly punish you by giving the guy more of the room to settle. It got to the point that he “allowed” you to have half of the portion of your bed, but he, for some reason, always slept on the other side of the bed, and would constantly roll into your side at night. He’s even got the entrance to the room, but he’d allow you to use it for work, because he’s nice like that.

You get fed up with him again. By this point, you have not had a night’s sleep free from this guy’s feet in your face. You lash out with a series of attacks, and go about the neighborhood proclaiming about the douchebaggery this guy’s been doing. You actively take on a philosophy that is Anti-ThisGuy. Your landlord’s not too happy, but a few of the older apartment dwellers are starting to take notice of this. The guy admits he was being unfair. He will now sleep in his bed from that point forwards. But he doesn’t allow you out of the apartment anymore, or off the bed at all. He will tell your friends that you are not home, and you are too afraid to make a sound because you are afraid that That Guy will kill your friends for trying to help you. Worse yet, in attempts to siphon more from your neighbors, he removed the drywall behind your bed, and is now running LAN cables over it. You are hungry. You are tired. You haven’t been able to change your clothes in over a year, and worse yet, since the guy is charismatic and has an “abused past,” very few people that actually know about your state can actually help you.

From Cracked.

Patrimony: the Anglican Service Book
The work of a sometime curate locally (at Good Shepherd, Rosemont), it’s now out of print but online for your partial perusal (hooray for Google) and Fr Alford is now Orthodox. (In the great tradition of Anglo-Catholicism it’s not an official Anglican book but a parish labour of love.) Interesting to compare to the RC Anglican Use’s Book of Divine Worship, another 1979-based hybrid, and the arguably better (no 1960s-1970s modernising) Antiochian Orthodox services based on biretta-belt practice (American Missal — 1928 fitted into the structure of the traditional Mass — and 1928-based offices).

It’s a relatively sturdy, handsome book, just like a pew BCP.

From John J. O’Sullivan.