Republican victory, conservative loss
From Eunomia
Don't apologize for things you didn't do, to people who don't believe in forgiveness or redemption.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
The Grand Old Plot against the Tea Party
Frank Rich is no fan of the Tea Party (or of liberty), but he understands better than the Tea Partiers do that their candidates are going to sell out any principles they have as soon as they get to Washington. ‘What the Tea Party ostensibly wants most — less government spending and smaller federal deficits — is not remotely happening on the country-club G.O.P.’s watch.’From the LRC blog.
Sunday
- My picks for ordinariate Masses and on thous and thees. I’m sure most English Missal users wouldn’t mind if the Cranmer options went away as most didn’t like Cranmer any more than we do, most didn’t use those options and those options were in the book only so Anglican priests whose bishops enforced Prayer Book use had something to fall back on to pray aloud while sneaking the Tridentine Mass around that. Again I’d be happy with the option of the old American Prayer Book framed by the Tridentine Mass, the American Missal and the Anglican Missal, American Edition. IMO it works because despite Cranmer’s heresy, he still shared with the Catholic Church a 16th-century Godward worldview. In the context of a Mass patterned on the Tridentine, by an RC priest, ‘our only Mediator and Advocate’ for example isn’t a problem (after all, it’s true – the saints and we are only mediators and advocates by participating in Christ). So my picks for ordinariate Masses are Ordinary Form in English as cleaned up by Pope Benedict and in Latin with traditional-like ceremonial, Extraordinary Form in English (Knott/English Missal), Extraordinary Form in Latin and the American Missal and Anglican Missal, American Edition for ex-Episcopalians who wants a catholicised Prayer Book (better than the Anglican Use now; less Novus Ordo and more Tridentine). Thous and thees: other than sentimental reasons I can take or leave them. Interestingly Protestants who have centuries-old traditions of praying in English often still worship with them, from Episcopalians’ Rite I option to the Baptist fundamentalists sticking to the King James Bible; RCs often don’t like them and think they’re Protestant except for prayers they’ve long done in English, those of the Rosary, so even the most liberal Novus Ordo parish reverts to thou to pray the Our Father.
- Common statement on baptism: why?
- Viva Cristo Rey.
The Beeb sucks up to pseudo-pagans
From Damian Thompson
Of course it’s really a modern made-up religion of Christian ethics without Christian theology, something apostates invented.
From Damian Thompson
Of course it’s really a modern made-up religion of Christian ethics without Christian theology, something apostates invented.
Economic law dooms the American dictatorship
Lew Rockwell: Just as it led to the collapse of Chinese and Russian communism. The state will lose. Society will win.
Lew Rockwell: Just as it led to the collapse of Chinese and Russian communism. The state will lose. Society will win.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Arturo’s take on the church
He says he doesn’t teach doctrine or want a following like ‘Catholic bloggers’ so on his own terms he’s a good read even if sometimes he’s wrong. One wag dubbed him the Etienne Gilson of Questionable Latin-American Religious Practices. My line as regular readers know is here at the Infallible Sportsmen’s Club and Pennsylvania Pierogi Festival I think I’m in the same non-modern spectrum as him and the SSPX (the self-conscious, self-righteous ‘100% Catholics’ he doesn’t like along with the conservative Novus Ordo culture warriors co-opted by the Protestant right and thus the mainstream Republican Party), north as in norteamericano of him (more self-consciously churchy) but south of them. Trad minus the ’tude.
The official church of course has its job: being 100% Catholic in its teachings and rules for practice. Arturo’s point: lay bloggers aren’t that official church and:
He says he doesn’t teach doctrine or want a following like ‘Catholic bloggers’ so on his own terms he’s a good read even if sometimes he’s wrong. One wag dubbed him the Etienne Gilson of Questionable Latin-American Religious Practices. My line as regular readers know is here at the Infallible Sportsmen’s Club and Pennsylvania Pierogi Festival I think I’m in the same non-modern spectrum as him and the SSPX (the self-conscious, self-righteous ‘100% Catholics’ he doesn’t like along with the conservative Novus Ordo culture warriors co-opted by the Protestant right and thus the mainstream Republican Party), north as in norteamericano of him (more self-consciously churchy) but south of them. Trad minus the ’tude.
The official church of course has its job: being 100% Catholic in its teachings and rules for practice. Arturo’s point: lay bloggers aren’t that official church and:
For the rest of us, Catholicism is what it always has been: the quaint religious obligations and signs that occasionally give us solace in a time of need. Having grown up in a Catholic world, this mentality does not separate religion from the values of the society in which it finds itself. Most Catholics do not have an “us vs. them” approach to the Faith, and it maddens the Catholic blogosphere and its allies that they do not. In the end, Catholicism is a religion of laws that try to bind a heterogenous mass of people together. At this point, those laws have a negative and not a positive effect: they do not so much tell you what to do in every circumstance, but often only let you know what you can and cannot think.Not necessarily how things ought to be but how they are. The Mexicans he knows best are here like the churchgoing Slavs and non-churchgoing Italians I know best. They’re not online yammering about holy mother church like me. The one true church is just assumed, like the post office or in times past the phone company; you use it for certain things like baptisms, First Communions, weddings and funerals and don’t obsess about how it’s run.
By Fr Andrew Damick in Emmaus. On a long drive yesterday I didn’t see an old church and churchyard but more or less the same with steep hills, curving roads, farm fences and cattle.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Tea Party not libertarian
I’m highly skeptical of this claim that 48% percent of tea partiers are libertarian. Add war and monetary policy to your criteria and then see what you have left. Or abolishing entitlement programs, the Department of Education, or the war on drugs. How many tea partiers are on board with even one of those things? I’m amazed at the great strides libertarianism has made thanks to Ron Paul, but they aren’t that great — yet.From the LRC blog.
It’s interesting, by the way, that the beltway types wanted nothing to do with the libertarian Ron Paul because his supporters supposedly weren’t “cosmopolitan” enough. Yet they embrace and want to claim as “libertarian” the tea party movement, which is loaded with Muslim-and-Mexican-hating warmongering bigots and promotes candidates who aren’t libertarian at all.
In some campaigns, Dems are using LP candidates to try to split the Republicans
Democrats go trick-or-treating as Libertarians
WASHINGTON – In Colorado, Indiana, Illinois, and Maryland, Democrats have spent money on mailers and other printed items to inform voters about Libertarian candidates.
Libertarian Party (LP) Executive Director Wes Benedict said, “We’re pleased to see Democrats spending their own money to promote Libertarian candidates. We hope Republicans will start doing the same thing soon.”
The ads have featured Libertarians Mike Labno, running for U.S. Senate in Illinois; Richard Davis, running for U.S. House in Maryland; Greg Knott, running for U.S. House in Indiana; and Gregory Gilman, running for U.S. House in Colorado.
Benedict continued, “Some of the Democratic Party funded ads have pointed out that Libertarians want to cut government spending and end programs that aren't authorized by the Constitution. Thank you, Democrats!
“The Democrats are obviously hoping to turn Republican voters into Libertarians. Their trick might turn out to be our treat.
“If the Republicans are smart, they might try a similar tactic. For example, Republicans could inform liberal voters that Libertarians want to end foreign wars and close foreign military bases; end the War on Drugs; reform immigration policy to make legal immigration easier; and we want the government to show equal treatment to homosexuals.
“Maybe Democrats and Republicans could have a contest to see who can promote Libertarians the most.
“During election season, Republicans and Democrats invent lots of ghosts and goblins to scare voters. Voters should remember that Halloween is just make-believe, put the fear-mongering aside, and vote Libertarian on November 2.”
Links to articles and samples of ads:
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4
From RR
- Neither ban nor celebrate the burqa.
- Torture, death and destruction in Iraq.
- Pelosi’s libertarian challenger.
- Three things progressives and Tea Partiers can agree on. Lame. Nothing about war or civil liberties; nothing that really challenges the status quo.
- Government kills businesses.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
It’s autumn in Pennsylvania.
Nice new storefront.
Rebuilding a mansard roof next to St Philomena’s School.
Mid-century.
1958-60 Rambler Super.
One of the few cool ones Nash/Hudson/AMC built.
I wonder if it still runs.
Loving Halloween.
Church
- Mary: Jesus saves and...
- The last things.
- From Dr Tighe: shock and horror as a Catholic bishop restates Catholic teaching. Melkite Bishop of Newton: no biblical rationale for modern Israel as a Jewish state.
- Tony Blair’s half-sister-in-law and some other Western women convert to Islam. Seems like a mix of legitimate reasons (wanting to find and please God: the ‘anything goes’ permissive society that I coveted had proved to be a superficial void) and exoticism (like about Tibet) and other feelings (initial highs: ‘I visited Qom and it was, like, totally awesome’). Everything is done to please God. But plenty of boring old churches try to do just that.
- History: Dr T on bad Queen Bess.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
From the LRC blog
- The kids are alright. Two photos: one from Damian Thompson of young Catholics; the other of Ron Paul’s audience at Indiana University.
- Post-election predictions.
- Conservative Christians will get played again.
- ‘Commies are cool’ even though they killed far more than the Nazis.
From Steve Sailer
- Art about the ’40s. Stan Vosburg: Norman Rockwell with warbirds.
- Can HBD trump PC?
- HBD’s fine; it explains many outcomes. It’s not racist if you don’t rewrite the law to force those outcomes — individual liberty trumps factors etc. — and two words, ‘on average’.
- I don’t blog to bash Muslims — they’re not the real problem. That said: So, in Europe, where there are many millions of Muslims, they must be much more popular than they are here in America. Right, Mr. Wright? My general impression from comparing areas that are home to Muslims and non-Muslims is that Islam seems to contribute to a chip on the shoulder attitude on the Muslim side. Armenians are pretty friendly, but Chechens, well, I’m glad a lot of Chechens haven’t started moving into my neighborhood ... yet. Western tourists prefer Bali, the Hindu island in Indonesia to the many Muslim islands. Are there other examples of this tendency?
- How Joan Jett reinvented herself. More psychologising about Obama. I don’t care about his daddy issues or what country he’s from (even though it’s the law; BTW the birthers are wrong) as long as he sticks to the Constitution, which he won’t.
- Fighting fire with quotas. Injustice and a safety hazard disguised as justice.
Joshua without the music or Korean news
- Raimondo: The left don’t mean it when they say they’re anti-war.
- Sobran fest:
- Being the most devastating of human activities, war would seem to be at the opposite pole from conserving anything.
- One of the baneful side effects of the Cold War was to make ‘peace’ sound like a left-wing cause and to identify conservatism with war.
- Patriotism and nationalism.
- Don’t hang Tariq Aziz.
- Blowback, blowup.
The LP on open borders
Libertarian Chair: Time to Re-Legalize Immigration
WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 – Amid controversy over U.S. immigration policy, Libertarian Party Chair Mark Hinkle says the proper way to end illegal immigration is to re-legalize immigration. Hinkle released the following statement today:
“In debate after debate, Democratic and Republican politicians have decried the problem of illegal immigration, called for more border security and employer sanctions, and eagerly searched for evidence that their rivals employed undocumented help. The Obama administration proudly touts the fact that it is deporting more undocumented aliens than George W. Bush, while many of the families they support remain stranded in the United States, and most of whom were guilty of nothing more than the inability to satisfy a nightmarish bureaucracy.
“Our government has made it practically impossible for most would-be immigrants to work legally in America, a fact illustrated by this flowchart from Reason magazine.
“For most of American history, immigrants streamed into this country, found jobs, and either stayed to build a life or returned to their native country if they couldn’t. America was admired by the world and proudly displayed an ode to immigration on the Statue of Liberty, within sight of the major processing center at Ellis Island. We can and should return to that tradition.
“Every significant problem blamed on immigration in this country is either imaginary or caused by government. In Arizona, where illegal immigrants are being blamed for an increase in violent crime, violent crime has actually been declining for a decade, and declining much faster than the national average. Immigrants (both legal and illegal) commit crimes at lower rates than natives. If you’re worried about gangs, then end the War on Drugs which funds them, just as it did the gangsters under alcohol prohibition.
“Immigrants are often accused of overloading the welfare system. This is again the fault of a government program. But the idea that welfare is a magnet for immigrants is a myth. In an ingeniously designed study by University of Hawaii Professor Ken Schoolland, patterns of migration within the 50 states, which have no travel restrictions between them, were studied. Schoolland found that were was, in fact, a very strong correlation between welfare and immigration: it was strongly negative. All of the states with the highest levels of government welfare benefits experienced net emigration to other states, and all of the states with the lowest levels of welfare experienced net immigration. Arizona, the current focus of anti-immigrant fears, ranks 46th in welfare benefits.
“Immigrants come here to work. Anyone who works and produces makes others better off. And unemployment and immigration actually are another two factors with a negative correlation. There has only been one decade in American history in which we did not have net immigration: the 1930s. If that is your idea of a great decade, you can have it.
“One unintended side effect of border crackdowns is to increase the number of undocumented aliens who remain because of the difficulty and cost of leaving and returning. Another is to create an ‘underground railroad’ that makes it easier for terrorists to enter without detection. The overwhelming majority of immigrants would love to come in through the front door. It is our bad immigration policy that has constructed the back door.
“It is time we stopped scapegoating the people who represent what is most admired about America. When the Libertarian Party was formed in 1971, we selected the Statue of Liberty as our symbol. We’re the only political party that deserves it.”
The Libertarian Party platform includes the following:
“3.4 Free Trade and Migration
“We support the removal of governmental impediments to free trade. Political freedom and escape from tyranny demand that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders. However, we support control over the entry into our country of foreign nationals who pose a credible threat to security, health or property.”
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
From LRC
- Salamanca.
- London shows us how to cut spending.
- MyType says the Tea Party is fatally compromised; libertarians should look elsewhere.
- Ron Paul on the threat from the Fed (listen).
- How to get rid of NPR.
Church
- Liturgical principles and notions: the dialogue Mass. The author caught some mistakes by Fr Serge, quoted on one of my pages (I found one: at Low Mass the priest recites the Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei aloud) and sent me this link. Thanks!
- Interview with John Broadhurst.
- Another good one on converting from Anglo-Catholicism to Catholicism. The distinction between us and our Oxford Movement forebears is that they were kicking up a stink to remind the Church of England that it IS catholic. We are kicking up a stink to tell the Church of England that it is NOT catholic. If we want to be catholic and we are saying that the church to which we belong is not, what’s the point in trying to get a haven for ourselves within a church we believe is un-catholic?
A reader writes: ‘This was my daily driver until I had to sell her earlier this year.’
Monday, October 25, 2010
AS A NON-ECONOMIST, it seems to me that the socialist dream is only feudalism enlarged: instead of a small class of rich nobles exploiting the labour and lives of a large class of vassals and petty nobles, they want to make a huge number of nobles somehow enjoy the high life on the backs of the ever-more taxed middle class and profit-generating rich.From Free Mark Steyn.
No matter if it doesn’t work: the current Western governments will just keep heaping debt onto the future, and upping taxes until it’s 100% of all income. The current actual taxrate in Canada is in the 75%+ of gross income.. just add ALL the taxes everywhere in the system, including tax on tax, and tax on reselling, employment tax, gas-tax, goods & services tax.
The Boston Tea Party was over a 2% tax-hike; the ‘exorbitant taxes’ of the Romans were 10%. The entire system is based on growing the tax-rate, and on taxing both working parents, so nobody can afford to live on one income– and that’s besides the income-tax marriage penalties.
Victorians To The Rescue
Indeed, that great & merciful invention of the Victorian era – part of capitalism’s answer to child & family labour and dark satanic mills – was to pay a man enough for one family to live & grow moderately. Kids get to grow up & get educated, and wives get to homemake and raise kids and volunteer and create the future.
The feminist demolition squad still view this as horrible, regressive, discriminatory – even while women have become unwitting tax-cows in the ever-bloating growth of the state. As the breadwinner safety-measure has been removed, everybody gets to be taxed at 75%. Congratulations. Families suffer, kids suffer (or are aborted or never born), society is undermined, and– using our own sweat & wages against us – government intrudes ever more into our lives & wallets.
We tried living on one income– it’s called get another credit card. It’s called no spare money for emergencies. It’s called not much left after taxes for RRSPs, child education funds, or charity.
Hurray! We Broke It!
Feminists may have naively thought this a victory – by becoming mannish & greedy & powerhungry & independent – but the impossible costs of the nanny-state social safety-net and all-powerful gov are even now collapsing in Europe, and North America, although we’re only seeing the first wave, and the denial that our global village has a tsunami-wave of foreclosures & good debt & bad debt and impossible promises poised over it. France on strike? A splash in the puddle.
Too many of those offshore baby-replacements we took on from the ’70s onwards are not serious wage-makers, tax-payers, or society-builders. Especially latterly, they do the joe-jobs that spoilt EUers won’t do – and you don’t build economies via low-wages & high-benefits.
Living wage? If all you America-haters out there get your – and Obama’s – wish that the U.S. be humbled and economically crippled, see what happens when the economic engine of the modern world chokes out, and there’s nobody there to buy stuff, make stuff, invent stuff, or rescue other nations & situations worldwide.
Cheer up! It’s going to get much worse.
 |  |
In 1933 they were celebrating the centenary of the Oxford Movement
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Sunday
- St Symeon the New Theologian on the Eucharist.
- Mt Calvary, Baltimore, votes almost 85% to convert to Rome. Hooray!
- The first acting head of the English ordinariate?
- A word from a cradle RC and priest to those considering converting.
- Compendium of the reforms of the Roman Breviary. The latest chapter.
So many so-called progressives, it turns out, are really just neocons with sandals
If decentralized power were a mere smokescreen for oppression, why have all the great tyrants, without fail, opposed it? Can nationalists of left and right — neocons with and without sandals – please answer this question?From C4L on FB.
Why did the corporations push for more centralized government? Why did corporations play such a key role in encouraging political centralization, when they would supposedly benefit from a weaker central government?
We have a very simplistic, comic-book notion of oppression and evil in this country. We see news reel footage of Hitler or Stalin, set to menacing music, and think that tyranny comes in a package labeled “evil and oppression.” What both sides, but especially the left, fail to realize is that evil typically arises from what is perceived to be a desire for something good: i.e., to “make the world safe for democracy” or to “declare war on poverty.” But as Mencken said, “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it.”
You cannot impose your vision of a perfect society without taking absolute power and discrediting (or imprisoning or eliminating) those who disagree with that vision. This is why ideology (including, by the way, the kind of anarchic vision advocated by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard [ouch!]), with its utopian delusions and absolutist prescriptions, is always a threat to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” A genuine and traditional conservatism is the antithesis and antidote to all ideology.
Why don’t corporations lobby me? Well, that’s because I can’t grant them special exceptions and competitive advantages via the force of government. The ONLY reason we have rampant corruption between business and the government is because we have allowed the government to assume powers which are then used to grant these special favors and competitive advantages to specific business/industry. If there were no federal income tax, federal regulations, federal bailouts, subsidies and other assumed authority by the federal government, there would be little need for lobbyist to seek those in DC. Each individual state “can” involve themselves in these if they would like, but instead, we have created a one stop lobby shop in DC which makes it very efficient and economical to lobby for competitive advantages via the force of the federal government.
The unfortunate part for real conservatism is that it gets a bad rap from phony conservatives pretending to be just that (i.e. Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich et al.). Very frustrating at times, the Republican party is what it is because of these Nixonian-Rockefeller elites that don’t really give a damn about the country, just about power and their own selfish interests. God forbid if you disagree with these types, because you will be on their “enemies list” and even if you won your primary election fairly, they’ll do what they can to undermine you in the general election.
Why do people think more laws will solve anything? Campaign reform? “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state.” — Tacitus
Laws from a central authority breed corruption! There is a reason the powers of the federal government were few and defined. Here is our problem folks:
“The states can best govern our home concerns and the general government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore… never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold at market.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Judge William Johnson, June 12, 1823
“The modern regulatory state has largely been created during Republican administrations.”
— The Cato Institute
Kindly cite a single federal anti-gun law the Republican Party seeks to repeal.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Two cultural myths
As Westerners, we are taught stories of King Arthur, the search for the Holy Grail, Beowulf, the Crusades... in other words our dominant myth is of the great quest, the noble cause. This is even better if the cause seems hopeless, but the only noble action that can be taken.From Fr Guy.
The dominant myth in Middle Eastern literature is the banquet.
From Mark Shea
- Beyond left and right. Commentary.
- No state gay marriage. Not ‘no attempted gay marriage’ (none of my business); no using the state to punish wrongthink (such as believing as the church and most of humanity throughout history do that there’s no such thing as gay marriage) like the left wants. So the so-cons happen to be right to oppose such unjust proposed laws even if not for the right reasons (they want to use the state instead). Get the state out of hetero marriage too and make it all a matter of boring old contract law, so the state stays out of marriage as such; complete freedom of religion.
- Why not overthrow the government? Right or wrong it’s what the American Revolution did.
California’s broke
Partly because of the burst housing bubble: the government making banks give mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, doing so because the people were non-Asian minorities (NAMs). (Trying to force equal outcomes for charity’s sake.) Pennsylvania seems to be doing relatively well because that didn’t happen here at least on a large scale. From Jeff Culbreath.
Partly because of the burst housing bubble: the government making banks give mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, doing so because the people were non-Asian minorities (NAMs). (Trying to force equal outcomes for charity’s sake.) Pennsylvania seems to be doing relatively well because that didn’t happen here at least on a large scale. From Jeff Culbreath.
Friday, October 22, 2010
They seem to teach Rome’s a denomination
Eccleston Square = the Magic Circle = English AmChurch. From Damian Thompson. Of course the correct answer is Protestants are in the church, thanks, for the most part, to their baptisms but not fully in the church (the church by definition is not a denomination). Rome says Protestants have non-churches; Orthodox have churches because they meet these criteria (essentially, consistently claiming apostolic succession and having the right teaching about the Eucharist: having bishops and the Mass) but are not fully the church; having the Pope, they say, makes one fully the church.
Eccleston Square = the Magic Circle = English AmChurch. From Damian Thompson. Of course the correct answer is Protestants are in the church, thanks, for the most part, to their baptisms but not fully in the church (the church by definition is not a denomination). Rome says Protestants have non-churches; Orthodox have churches because they meet these criteria (essentially, consistently claiming apostolic succession and having the right teaching about the Eucharist: having bishops and the Mass) but are not fully the church; having the Pope, they say, makes one fully the church.
From the MCJ
- Currency war.
- How do you know when you have a bad national health-care plan? When you have to bribe people to like it.
- Ew: Procter & Gamble promo event.
From RR
- The depression’s so bad even Britain’s cutting public spending.
- Reasons not to vote.
- The big biz behind GOP ‘small gov’.
- Ain’t no lesser of two evils. Not a dime’s worth of difference.
Todd and Helen, the conservative/libertarian soap opera
I’ve met neither but she used to read and link here. Neither’s bad-looking (he looks like retired military and in this now-infamous clip has ’50s style; she’s got appeal I’m sure her intelligence boosts). I feel his pain. He seems to have embarrassed himself by going off-topic at a panel discussion on a book to complain about her (and writing long blog posts about her, a mistake some smart people make — not cool), saying she did at least one awful thing related to some weird ideas (some philosophies forming a kind of conservatism sliding into barbaric paganism where sadism is cool, which I see in some of the nastier sites I read; she used to write for Taki where it’s not the main thing but it’s there) he says she has. I have no idea if it’s true. To be fair to him, the wound was still raw. According to his blog, which he’s now restricted, they broke up three days before they found out they were to be on the panel together. He’s only human.
Sounds trite but prayers and good wishes for healing and peace.
I’ve met neither but she used to read and link here. Neither’s bad-looking (he looks like retired military and in this now-infamous clip has ’50s style; she’s got appeal I’m sure her intelligence boosts). I feel his pain. He seems to have embarrassed himself by going off-topic at a panel discussion on a book to complain about her (and writing long blog posts about her, a mistake some smart people make — not cool), saying she did at least one awful thing related to some weird ideas (some philosophies forming a kind of conservatism sliding into barbaric paganism where sadism is cool, which I see in some of the nastier sites I read; she used to write for Taki where it’s not the main thing but it’s there) he says she has. I have no idea if it’s true. To be fair to him, the wound was still raw. According to his blog, which he’s now restricted, they broke up three days before they found out they were to be on the panel together. He’s only human.
Sounds trite but prayers and good wishes for healing and peace.
Juan Williams
His feelings are understandable but irrational (but not crazy), like New Yorkers wanting to flatten Riyadh or Mecca on 9/11 (blaming Muslims not our foreign policy). Muslim-looking people on planes as terrorists would be like the CPUSA in the Cold War, too obvious for the other side to use. (You give Gus Hall medals and pat him on the head but do your real work by hiding agents among the right.) If the terrorists were smart they’d try to recruit neutral-looking and sounding people for that. That said, he’s being a man about it — ‘I said what I meant to say’ — while the woman in charge of NPR slipped and called him crazy (fittingly Soviet of her) but to her credit she apologised. NPR’s base: whites of a certain class who show off being nice to Muslims to be better than the proles.
His feelings are understandable but irrational (but not crazy), like New Yorkers wanting to flatten Riyadh or Mecca on 9/11 (blaming Muslims not our foreign policy). Muslim-looking people on planes as terrorists would be like the CPUSA in the Cold War, too obvious for the other side to use. (You give Gus Hall medals and pat him on the head but do your real work by hiding agents among the right.) If the terrorists were smart they’d try to recruit neutral-looking and sounding people for that. That said, he’s being a man about it — ‘I said what I meant to say’ — while the woman in charge of NPR slipped and called him crazy (fittingly Soviet of her) but to her credit she apologised. NPR’s base: whites of a certain class who show off being nice to Muslims to be better than the proles.
Israel seals unprecedented weapons deals with US
Why I didn’t go the Bacevich route in ’08; I listened to Obama and believed him when, after he had a lock on the nomination, he pledged his support of Israel. From truthout.
Why I didn’t go the Bacevich route in ’08; I listened to Obama and believed him when, after he had a lock on the nomination, he pledged his support of Israel. From truthout.
From Joshua
- Christian critics of modernity such as T.S. Eliot and Jacques Maritain insisted that the modern liberal régime was a deadly one. It promised earthly prosperity precisely by means of closing off the horizon beyond which lies not the good of this world only but the Good Itself, separate and universal.
- Velvet Underground drummer supports the Tea Party. Not a libertarian but pretty close.
- Baby-killing in Red China. The West including left-libertarians are OK with it if the mother chooses it. No.
- Why complex life probably evolved only once.
- Islam, women and us.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
From Roissy
- Rollo Tomassi: This is the essence of the male double standard, the male Catch-22: for a man to publicly chastise a woman’s infidelity he becomes less of a man, but a woman becomes a hero for doing so. The feminization of the past 60 years has built in the perfect Catch-22 social convention for anything masculine; The expectation to assume the responsibilities of being a man while at the same time denigrating masculinity. What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled patriarchy and oppressive. Essentially this convention keeps beta males in a perpetual state of chasing their own tails.
- David Collard: If you are a man and you act soft, you will be mocked. If you are a man and you act hard, you will be denigrated. After a while, you realise that you might as well say and do what you feel happiest doing. People will always complain. (This is the point of Aesop’s fable of the father, the son and the donkey). Women have a sneaking admiration for a man who behaves in a patriarchal manner and expresses “chauvinistic” sentiments. I do this most of the time at home, and my wife and daughter still seem to love me and hold me in respect. I have noticed this even on the Internet. Women respond well to a man who doesn’t mind being a man. The point of Roissy minus the abuse and the filth. Add ‘a well-formed Catholic conscience making you happy’ and Bob’s your uncle.
- There really is an underclass of less worthy people and an overclass of worthier people, just as there are sh*tty cultures and good cultures instead of a yippy skippy happy joy joy rainbow of multicultural relativity. Get used to it. No point railing against the brutal truth of this reality.
From Steve Sailer
- New Centrists, Ageing Leftists and nature vs nurture in education.
- California’s community-college problem doesn’t appear to have much to do with the community colleges, per se.
- Software that does much of my job but I’m still here.
- “Law & Order” has been the most successful drama in American television history. Counting its countless spinoffs, about 900 hour-long episodes have aired. L&O’s two-decade old formula has been to take a scandal from the news, add a murder, and then show that the richest, whitest, and most conservative character dunnit.
- Trusting family.
- Vladimir from Russia says it: Sailer tells truths everybody else is too nice to say. Again the disclaimer/answer: the law is colour-blind, neither apartheid nor affirmative-action. (Neither the swastika nor the sickle.) Equal opportunity but of course not equal outcomes. Individual liberty, balancing out the downside of the good and natural ‘trust family’.
Britain may pull troops from Germany by 2020
75 years is a long time for the troops to be there, and truthfully there has been little logical reason for keeping them.Now that Germany’s paid off its WWI debt (the war wasn’t Germany’s fault), it seems the depression and the end of empire may end Britain’s WWII occupation of it.
On disc: ‘Paradise Postponed’
Or ‘England’s Depressing’ but the show, made about 25 years ago, is educational (if you filter John Mortimer’s lefty bias) and entertaining in a soap-opera way, a very long miniseries peopled with English types (here are just a few), from the endearing old socialist rector from a rich capitalist family, doing orthodox middle-of-the-road services he doesn’t really believe in (seems the left and right agree the C of E’s essentially a well-meaning dodderer), to the neoconnish/Thatcherite social-climbing politician (who though cartoonish isn’t all bad), to the young upper-class twits slumming at a hippie fest put on by the pol, who doesn’t partake in the silliness, to the smoothie toff who gets great lines when he turns conservative in religion and politics as he gets older, to the rector’s sweet wife who zings his successor’s wife’s PCness (‘Our group, Women Against Rape.’ ‘Are there women in favour of it?’). Nitpick: if you’re setting scenes in the ’50s/‘good ’60s’ make an effort and cut and/or at least slick back the actors’ ’80s helmet hair.
Or ‘England’s Depressing’ but the show, made about 25 years ago, is educational (if you filter John Mortimer’s lefty bias) and entertaining in a soap-opera way, a very long miniseries peopled with English types (here are just a few), from the endearing old socialist rector from a rich capitalist family, doing orthodox middle-of-the-road services he doesn’t really believe in (seems the left and right agree the C of E’s essentially a well-meaning dodderer), to the neoconnish/Thatcherite social-climbing politician (who though cartoonish isn’t all bad), to the young upper-class twits slumming at a hippie fest put on by the pol, who doesn’t partake in the silliness, to the smoothie toff who gets great lines when he turns conservative in religion and politics as he gets older, to the rector’s sweet wife who zings his successor’s wife’s PCness (‘Our group, Women Against Rape.’ ‘Are there women in favour of it?’). Nitpick: if you’re setting scenes in the ’50s/‘good ’60s’ make an effort and cut and/or at least slick back the actors’ ’80s helmet hair.
None of Dr Williams’ business
Fr Crosbie’s right. Unless, as is very unlikely, Dr W wants to give the ordinariate some redundant churches that aren’t money sinks.
A good answer if Dr W really is trying to help run the Roman Catholic Church:
Fr C again:
Fr Crosbie’s right. Unless, as is very unlikely, Dr W wants to give the ordinariate some redundant churches that aren’t money sinks.
Aimed at Anglicans who were uncomfortable with the ordination of women and gay clergy.‘So they want to join those meanies who hate women and would have pushed Tyler Clementi off that bridge.’ (In three decades of consciously doing religion I’ve never met anyone speaking for Catholicism who would.) No. It’s for Anglicans who no longer believe in Anglicanism, a fallible denomination whose essentials are up for votes (‘where the Church of England was going’), and want to be in the church by more than their baptisms. I’m all for gay clergy — who teach what the magisterium does on the matter.
A good answer if Dr W really is trying to help run the Roman Catholic Church:
Did the Anglicans bother to “consult” Rome or the Orthodox about attempting to ordain women as priests and bishops?Of course not. It’s none of their business as the ordinariate is none of his.
Fr C again:
I would not be in the least surprised if the ABC has set up a group with his liberal RC chums to work against the Ordinariate. It is completely in character.More from the MCJ.
From RR
- A learning experiment.
- Separation of school and state.
- Polite Malthusianism.
- They drank to that. Why FDR was popular even though his recovery plans didn’t really work, he dragged the country into WWII and he gave away half of Europe to the Communists: he changed his mind and repealed Prohibition.
- End the drug war.
- Priest fairer than usual to libertarianism and the Tea Party.
From Hilary
- English is a clanking Germanic language that’s borrowed so many Romance words that Italian is one of those languages that, if you just stare at it long and hard enough, magically turns into English (albeit English with funny spelling). Like one of those optical-illusion picture things.
- I like ‘The Simpsons’ too but agree on L’Osservatore Romano trying to weigh in on pop culture: it’s an old person trying to be hip and cool. And there is nothing more excruciatingly, exquisitely embarrassing...
- Nuns: the ones who have failed to keep up with the times seem to be doing just fine, thanks.
- What’s creepy about Massachusetts.
- The Catholic religion is a set of beliefs. The thing you have to do to be a Catholic is to believe those beliefs. It’s not an ethnicity. It’s not a nationality. It’s really that simple. Counterpoint: Bad Catholics are not Modernists.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
From Stephen Hand
- Video: The President does not choose the war-machine mindset; that mindset chooses the people who become President.
- Bono’s bad ideas. He epitomizes everything that’s wrong with Clinton/Blair style liberalism: an intense desire to appear to care about the world, matched only by a complete unwillingness to stand up to any of the corporate or militarist complexes that stand in the way of progress. On the issue that should stand as a minimal test of conviction — opposing the Iraq war (an issue on which most of the left at least talk the talk) — Bono failed.
- The “gay” agenda, which the media wildly obsesses on despite the radical disproportion to ordinary families and persons everywhere, is pure distraction, and it is demobilizing relative to antiwar and other major concerns. I see it as pure disinformation aimed at keeping TV addicts lost in hyperreality so that what really matters is lost in a flood of propaganda. What is of consequence, though, is the fact that homosexual ideology is pushed on our young people in schools.
- Beyond Political Left and Right. The Left only has to be told to never mind deeds, but to rather look at what President Obama “really” “wants” relative to our foreign wars, and they are duly distracted, lost in illusory, weepy sentiment. (They’re prejudiced: they just assume a black face is for peace.) Meanwhile the Right is largely concerned with “victory” and “America’s greatness,” as well as facilitating the unfettered march of the multinationals across the globe, as if this was “letting freedom ring”. It’s all very sad. We should be concerned with deeds (not mere words) and justice, as we seek to return the nation to decency and peace. If the Right is burdened by a tragic case of jingoism, the Left, while no less war-some, has been plagued by an embarrassing desire to constantly appear hip, the Lenny Bruce syndrome.
- Peter Hitchens: Is university really such a good thing? I spent three years learning to be a Trot... I think this debauching of the minds and bodies of the young is more or less deliberate. The horrible liberal Woodrow Wilson, who eventually became President of the United States, was originally an academic who once blurted out the truth as seen by many such people. He said in a rare moment of candour: ‘Our aim is to turn out young men as unlike their fathers as possible.’
- ‘House’ episode: I caught this rare pro-life mainstream-TV moment (hmm) as well, re-enacting the famous photo of the baby’s hand and with Jennifer Grey as another Gianna Molla. I like ‘House’ and recently saw some ’80s Fry (just another anti-Catholic snob but talented) and Laurie, and am amazed this actor, very English-looking as a young man, can disguise himself so well.
From RR
- Health care is not a right.
- Civic engagement is for suckers.
- Just say no. Can you go into a store, order thousands of dollars worth of goods, and then tell the clerk to send the bill to assorted strangers? Obviously, you cannot do such a thing, and, in fact, it would probably never even occur to you to attempt such a preposterous act. Yet your elected “representatives” do it regularly, with impunity, spending not thousands, but billions, based upon the power which, we are told, we have delegated to them, although in fact they somehow gave themselves the power they use.
- Three rules for good living. Never do anything to violate the life, liberty or property of another person. Take responsibility for yourself. Try to do some good for others.
White guilt
From LRC.
I was guilty of “democratic racism” – by which we apply ostensibly race-neutral principles such as “due process,” constantly demanding clear “evidence” of wrongdoing, rather than confronting prima-facie instances of racism head-on. “It seems we’re always looking for more proof,” said the instructor, an energetic left-wing activist who’s been teaching this course for several years. “When it comes to racism, you have to trust your gut.”That’s it; throw civilisation out the window and run on emotion; barbarism. Some of these swipple caricatures deserve dhimmitude.
All of the students were white (to my eyes, anyway).Class war trying to lord it over other whites including trying to one-up each other (holier than thou). Christian culture minus the Christian faith equals this self-righteous silliness.
From LRC.
From Taki
- The unexamined life is, we are told, not worth living. If, like Mr. Wideman, you are one of modern liberalism’s pampered pets with a plush affirmative-action sinecure teaching a made-up pseudo-discipline so that some university can darken up its brochures to the degree required by federal regs, the over-examined life is worth a neat 200 grand a year, plus tenure.
- I’m open-borders within the limit of the no-harm principle (mutilate or honour-kill and out you go, Akhmed) but why shouldn’t the Swedes for example like being Swedish? The irony is that those who wrote this rubbish live in New York buildings that wouldn’t allow Arab immigrants to hang about the premises or even on the sidewalk outside. They are the worst hypocrites and phonies imaginable, yet they daily preach to the rest of us how we should live. That’s just it: those who preach that are really engaging in a class war with other whites and don’t really care about or compete with nonwhites.
- These final payments to World War I’s nominal victors make me wonder whether Germany ultimately picked up the tab for both sides of both World Wars.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
From LRC
- The double standard: socialists and communists have produced the greatest evil in mankind’s history but Hammer and Sickle vodka is socially acceptable.
- Ethnic voting’s OK when they do it: Ed Schultz on MSNBC was, as usual, throwing around the liberal’s N-word: racist. But first he talked about the importance of getting out the black vote for the Democrats. Then he interviewed African-American Congressman James Clyburn about the absolute necessity of blacks voting for the Democrats in House elections. Imagine if anyone had urged getting out the white vote. But it is racist, said Ed, for Tea Party people to criticize Obama too unkindly.
- Sarah Palin says the Tea Party people are winning. The question is, what are they winning? To answer that question, I am doing a review of the nine US Senate Tea Party candidates identified by the New York Times. The issue? How many are proposing the elimination of a single federal agency? So far, none. Stay tuned.
- Possible? In order for the power elite to attempt to maintain control over a slowly simmering proletariat, they are going to have to give up one of their favorite levers of control — the abortion issue.
- Some history of the US staging attacks to start wars. It almost happened with Cuba.
Today’s hail of RR bullets
- Do we worship the market?
- From self-reliance to servitude.
- Macroeconomics.
- Is the military feeding traumatized soldiers in need of counseling to proselytizing evangelical chaplains, instead of mental-health professionals? Evangelicals and fundamentalists used to be dovish and apolitical — true of the late Jerry Falwell for example until Francis Schaeffer sold him on activism in the ’70s. Evangelicalism being the unofficial religion of the US military is very recent. Mainliners have always been more likely to abuse religion this way.
- Gridlock.
- Not a dime’s worth of difference.
Convert now, then join the ordinariate after it’s started
Gordon Reid’s right about John Broadhurst. Like how some converts like John Saward have been ordained under the Pastoral Provision years after converting.
Gordon Reid’s right about John Broadhurst. Like how some converts like John Saward have been ordained under the Pastoral Provision years after converting.
Bishop John Broadhurst, Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of London with the title of Bishop of Fulham, has just announced that he has decided to become a Roman Catholic. He is going to do this by joining the new Ordinariate set up by the Pope for unhappy Anglicans.
I wish him well in his new Church, but cannot understand how he can with a clear conscience take any more confirmations or ordinations in the Church of England. The Bishop of London should have accepted his resignation the day he made his announcement (during which he described the C of E “fascist”, while saying he was leaving because it had become too liberal for him).
He must know that in the eyes of his new Church he is a mere layman and that if he wants to be a Roman Catholic priest he will have to be reordained. So is he already exercising that prized Anglican right of private judgement and saying Rome is wrong about his Anglican orders? Maybe that is one of the “treasures” that the Pope has said he hopes Anglicans will bring with them into the Ordinariate — and here was I thinking it was just their wives!
Nader on ‘conservatives’ and the ‘liberal’ media
Another way of putting it: not a dime’s worth of difference or the establishment conservatives (Ann Coulter) aren’t really conservatives (Andrew Bacevich). Even two-minutes’-hate target Christine O’Donnell is for the warfare state and cracking down on immigration, and as David Lindsay says, nobody questions socialised medicine (which in Britain has long been a given, left or right); it’s just that the Tea Partiers seem to want it only for themselves. From Joshua.
Another way of putting it: not a dime’s worth of difference or the establishment conservatives (Ann Coulter) aren’t really conservatives (Andrew Bacevich). Even two-minutes’-hate target Christine O’Donnell is for the warfare state and cracking down on immigration, and as David Lindsay says, nobody questions socialised medicine (which in Britain has long been a given, left or right); it’s just that the Tea Partiers seem to want it only for themselves. From Joshua.
Monday, October 18, 2010
From the LRC blog
- Another Republican phony: Carly Fiorina.
- If California legalises pot, the feds will lock you up anyway. Nullification! Tenth Amendment.
- The late Joe Sobran: If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate. If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.
- It’s the new frontier in shrinkdom: now we’re told that almost everyone is an unconscious bigot needing remediation, as shown by the words and acts of little children and old people. Psychiatry and its little brother psychology have always been agents of the state, as Thomas Szasz has shown, and this new theory gives them even more leeway to remake you. Need I mention that disliking groups not represented in the official victimological hierarchy doesn’t count as bigotry? That is, the whole thing is political, just another excuse to empower the state, left-liberal prejudices, and the psycho-babblers. BTW, the 18th-century notion of an unconscious mind, as popularized by Freud, is highly controversial.
- A libertarian comedian, Rich Stein, provided some good humor at a dinner my wife and I attended last night. His funniest line involved a man who was so depressed over current political and economic troubles that he called a suicide hot-line for help. As with so many of our telephonic communications, his call was routed to someone in Pakistan. After explaining his sense of despair and of his desire to commit suicide, the man at the other end of the line asked: “Can you drive a truck?”
- ‘Oh, stewardess! I speak jive.’ RIP Barbara Billingsley. She explained why her iconic American mother character dressed as she did (practical reasons for filming!)
Chris Johnson on Tyler Clementi
If you think that suicides among one particular group are more tragic than other suicides, than I have nothing more to debate or discuss with you.
If it had been me, I would have taken all of roomie’s computer equipment (along with his clothes and everything else breakable that he owned) to the top of the dorm, filmed myself throwing it to the sidewalk below and posted it to YouTube.
Then I would have shown Rooms the new and really heavy baseball bat I had just purchased and informed him that he really ought to transfer to another dorm yesterday if he knew what I mean and I think he did.
From LRC
- The bullying state at the airport. The TSA has never abused me the few times I’ve flown in the past 10 years. Again if the terrorists were smart they’d recruit ‘John Hansen’ not ‘Abdul Akhmed’ so I see the point of not profiling but the main point is the admitted repeal of civil rights. 9/11 Changed Everything™.
- The Fed’s a reverse Robin Hood.
- The US recruits child soldiers in Somalia.
- From 1964: I, Pencil. The day romantic, well-meaning Catholic third-way folk (distributists), Jim Wallis and his yuppie/swipple buddies, the few such who still go to mainline churches (how exactly does the reverend think his benefactor George Soros made his millions?), or a hippie commune successfully mass-produce and sell pencils is when I might start to take their criticisms of capitalism seriously.
- The most likely SHTF event.
- How old will you be when the American war state goes down?
Sunday, October 17, 2010
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