venuleius on Greek Catholics and OicwRs

From LRC

• Is the church for or against capitalism? Neither? Canada’s National Post interviews Tom Woods.
• A nice overview: Ron Paul’s campaign promises.
• Jim Wallis supported by oligarchs.

Duffy’s Cut team gives up search for mass grave

From the catacombs of Palermo
From Paul Rodden

Classic-car Halloween
From Riverside, NJ



‘Get the sh*tters, Christine!’

Pomplamoose: ‘Monster Mask’

X-ray pinups
Happy Halloween. From here.

Photos



The great October snowstorm.



Guts of a radio.


Donna and a phone like mine.


Patton flag.

Revolution or reformation?
Long story short Vatican II was a mistake. From Fr L.

Pastor Alms on the Beatles
Interestingly they stopped being hip around 1974, around the time their contract as the Beatles was expiring anyway.

Also, a good word for Sir George Martin, from the older, better generation and the quintessential English gentleman, without whom the albums wouldn’t have been nearly as good. The fifth Beatle, a title he never claims for himself.

Long story short I’d trade their music and their charm for the ’50s back.

Lastly, all their movies stink except Yellow Submarine which wasn’t really them.

Героический русский против OWS дураки
Soviet-raised Russian vs American socialist useful idiots. I always wanted to listen in on this sort of thing if it ever happened. From Fr John Whiteford.


Сергей Григорьевич Кулиш
Mr Koolish on his 105th birthday this year
Born in the Ukraine, Sergei Grigorievich grew up under Tsar Nicholas. The revolution happened when he was 11. A WWII refugee who’s been here since 1952. He outlived the USSR. Cпаси, Господи, люди твоя... (‘O Lord, save thy people’, the victory song that starts the 1812 Overture).

Ardmart Antiques endangered
One of my portals to the past. Whole rooms furnished in ‘what I would do if I were really rich’ and a source of knickknacks. I understand the building was originally a bowling alley; no wonder I like it. I understand they have to move out by the end of the year; hoping they find a new home not too far away.

Iraq war’s lessons lost on US
From antiwar.com

It’s a mad world
Or as funnyman P.J. O’Rourke (met him once) said, it takes a lot of ‘therapy’ to agree with the left’s POV

An elementary-school principal in Somerville, Massachusetts is out to abolish Halloween, among other innocuous celebrations, because it is “insensitive” to witches or something. The school will, however, continue to teach six-year-olds how to put condoms on bananas. Extra credit if you can do it with your mouth.

The leftist mind is a curious and perverse thing. The same mindset that wants to teach children about fellatio before they can spell it wants that child to still be a tax write-off for his parents at 26.

Now that the progressive tax structure has pushed both parents into the work force, kids increasingly look outside of their parents for authority figures. Like, for instance, the joyless principal who takes away the one day a year many kids anticipate the most. Word is she’s got a petition floating around about canceling Christmas and has authorized a hit on the Easter Bunny.

From Taki.

Chesterton on asceticism
From Mark Shea

Sort of the Buddhist version of flagellants or penitentes. It also reminds me of that good article by a British journalist visiting Tibet and finding a normal country with a folk religion like Italy or Mexico and not like WASP New Agers.

Organized crime
From Ad Orientem

Delinquent finance
Bishop Williamson on fractional reserve banking

The imminent collapse of global finance, and/or the advent of global finance on the way to global government which that collapse has been designed to bring on, should be making souls think : how did we get into this mess, and how do we get out of it? If Almighty God has had no part to play in such a serious crisis, then obviously he is not serious but just a feel-good Sunday pastime. On the other hand if he is as important as once the builders of medieval cathedrals obviously thought, then neglecting him will have had a central part to play in today’s triumph of finance over reality.

Indeed one must go back to the Middle Ages to understand where today’s disaster has come from. As the Faith began to droop after the high Middle Ages, so men became more and more interested in Mammon, the other great motivator of their lives (Mt. VI, 24). Thus money, natured to be the servant of the exchange of real goods and services, was unhooked from nature to become modern finance, master of the global economy. A key step in this process, leading directly to today’s mountains of unpayable debt in all directions, enslaving the world to the visible bankers, or rather to their invisible controllers, was the post-medieval spread of fractional reserve banking.

When money serves the economy, a wise State will ensure that its total quantity in circulation goes up and down with the total quantity of real goods to be exchanged in that economy, so that its value will remain steady. Too much money chasing too few goods will mean its value drops by inflation. Too little money pursued by too many goods will mean its value rising, by deflation. Either way its changing value destabilizes all exchanging of goods. Now if banks, in which depositors deposit real money, need keep only a fraction of that real money in reserve to back a much larger quantity of paper money which they can put into circulation, then by putting too much or too little into circulation, they can play with the value of money and make fortunes by lending out cheap money and demanding back expensive money. Thus financiers can take over control from the State.

Worse, if fractional reserve banking enables banks to disconnect money from reality and fabricate it at will, and if they can charge even slight compound interest on their funny money, then logically they can – and do ! – suck all real value out of an economy, reducing most depositors to borrowers and most borrowers to hopeless debt-slaves, or mortgage-slaves., taking care only not to kill off completely the goose laying the golden eggs for their benefit. The divinely inspired wisdom of the law-giver Moses was to put brakes on all lenders’ power by cancelling all debts every seven years (Deut. XV, 1-2), and by restoring all property to its original owners every 50 years (Levit. XV, 10)!

And why did Moses, great man of God and therefore man of deep “spirituality”, concern himself with such materialistic questions? Because as bad economics can turn men to despair, towards Hell, away from God – look around you, today and above all tomorrow – so good economics make possible a wise prosperity which in no way worships Mammon, but makes it rather easier to trust in the goodness of God and to worship and love him. Man is soul and body.

Moses would surely have smashed fractional reserve banking, like he smashed the Golden Calf!

Kyrie eleison.

Sunday

• Eastern Orthodoxy: The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is always celebrated with unaccompanied singing, because the human voice, the only instrument that God Himself created, is considered the sole instrument worthy to be used in His praises.
• Tchaikovsky’s Cherubic Hymn.
• In Turkey, Armenians descended from forced converts to Islam in 1915 convert to Christianity.

From RR

• Well, next time I hear about how vets fight to protect our rights, I’ll remember the one they shot in the head for actually exercising them. David Waldman, via Twitter. Quote from Wendy McElroy.
• The euthanasia of the saver. Given that the Fed’s official policy is to drive all interest rates to near zero, one may conclude that the Fed seeks to impoverish the widows, orphans, retired people, and all other financially untutored people who rely on interest earnings to support themselves in their old age or adversity. Can a crueller official policy be imagined, short of grinding up these unfortunate souls to make pet food or fertilizer? Might this sort of thing be part of the class war between whites the Anti-Gnostic and others like Steve Sailer talk about? The super-rich establishment left vs the small savings-and-loan so-cons in flyover country? (In this war non-Asian minorities are proxies/human shields the left uses – of course it doesn’t care about NAMs’ individual liberty like we do – or as some suggest the game plan is to exterminate the rival whites who don’t obey and have a grateful, dependent, compliant helot class replace them.)
• OWS’ famous lack of focus. The group doesn’t bother to be specific and fails, moreover, to go after the main culprits, for example those in Washington who urged the banks to make borrowing easy. In 1992 Bill Clinton’s administration did, in fact, implore banks to do just that, through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for example. So why are these not the targets of OWS? Of course there is another little thing that’s odious about OWS. This is the use of the term “occupy.” That term is used to refer to what huge, imperialist countries do with some of their neighbors, namely, send in troops to occupy them, to run roughshod over them, and to raid and pilfer them good and hard. Mad-as-hell revolutionary potential for good turns out to be spoiled rich kids partying or something more sinister (‘More government! Now!’ The government’s their daddy, with the little turds waving Communist flags and trashing college libraries), the same reasons to hate the New Left 40+ years ago.
• Marxists are good diagnosticians but terrible prescribers. Marx was ‘essentially correct’ in his theory of history and class analysis. His main mistake was his understanding of exploitation, which was based on a flawed understanding of the labor theory of value. As Hoppe argues, drawing on Rothbardian libertarian and Austrian insights, the only meaningful exploitation is aggression against private property. Once you understand exploitation in this light, a Marxian style class analysis and understanding of history makes sense.
• Flat-tax this: regulations are the boot on hiring’s neck.
• Finding believers in liberty in the strangest places. Another reason, besides pacifism being unworkable in our fallen world, not to be anti-military.
• An Ike monument? Another Washington temple, only modern? I meh Ike. Of course you look at me and know I love the era he presided over, a peak of prosperity with the old values intact so people made the most of it and loved it. (Pat Buchanan came of age then and loves early rock.) Global Communism was a threat. But a monster we helped create by getting into WWII and then handing half of Catholic Europe to Uncle Joe at Yalta. (The excuse for the war was to liberate Poland, and Poland ended up captive, to an empire worse than the Nazis.) He was right about the danger of the military-industrial complex. But... I’m suspicious. He seems shadowy in a New World Order way. Why did most likely Marshall catapult him in WWII from colonel to General of the Army? Why did the GOP steal the nomination from a fine man who should have been president, Bob Taft, and draft him in ’52? Probably all part of the betrayal of the Old Right as exemplified by that Cold Warrior and CIA operative Bill Buckley, who beneath the veneer of Catholic orthodoxy (‘don’t immanentize the eschaton’ is true) preached the way to beat the Reds was, for the time being, become like them. Rothbard, Chodorov et al. didn’t buy it.

Occupy Sesame Street
From Daniel Nichols

Huw: he’s gay. He’s Orthodox. But he’s not a Gay Christian.
Like Bad Catholics are still Catholics. ‘Who the hell am I to tell the church to change?’

American WASP nativists sometimes went after Orthodox immigrants too
From Orthodox History

We are now a banana republic: stupid, greedy and evil
From the Anti-Gnostic

Roissy vs Christian white knights (conservative traditionalists) about women
Hypergamy, or fallen human nature in women: lust and greed, or their natural attraction to high-status men (alphas in pickup-artist jargon) has gone wrong. (The sort of thing noxious trash like ‘Sex and the City’ celebrates.) As a reader recently reminded me, Roissy seems hard on nice-guy providers (betas in PUAspeak) but I think he actually writes to help them. His proposed best thing society can do for them, repeated here, is get rid of no-fault divorce.

Again underneath the foul-mouthed bluster he’s a stone-cold realist about human nature, which makes him profoundly conservative.

Reminds me of an event I went to recently in which I got to ask a female star in my biz about its future. She basically agreed with me that print will dwindle but not that it will essentially disappear. ‘I’m platform-agnostic.’ So am I. But the main point is the event was a rich private girls’ school opening some sort of think-tank/teacher-training scheme to better teach girls. Well and good. Not good was the ‘women are better than men’ song and dance accompanying all this, from the star guest speaker to the cute but by no means sweet verse one of the school’s younger pupils read. (Cue ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’ rightly making fun of this through its rich, white, doubtfully male hippie boomer teacher character swallowing it all.) Like the misguided justice that pushes racial quotas and excuses black-on-white crime. Just what the world needs, more princesses on pedestals.

Sincere white knights want fair play for women (individual liberty; amen – not group rights); well and good but this feminism isn’t about that. And they want to celebrate all the great things about the feminine, but pedestals aren’t the way to go.

Again, with the fall we sinned all.

From Taki

• Charles Coulombe: of course he and I love Halloween. It’s really Catholic.
• Gavin McInnes: legalize it; just don’t smoke it.

Today

• SS. Simon and Jude.
• A modern Greek victory, in WWII 71 years ago.

George Weigel on the Ukraine
Familiar talking points to regular readers

• Reminds me of the first East Slavs (broadly speaking, Russians) I knew, WWII exiles from Galicia. Same party line about the Ukraine. (Cyrillic, iconostasis and onion dome but they swore they weren’t Russian.)
• Weigel is a classic Russophobe, amped with the old Cold War scare?
• The UGCC over there was heroic.
• The Orthodox in that story were Soviet puppets.
• That said... a micro-state, UGCC majority, based in Lvov (old Galicia) would make sense.
• Because most of the Ukraine is Russia.
• The UGCC is negligible in most of the Ukraine. Most people, like in Great Russia, are Soviet-bred secular; the churchgoing minority is deadlocked between the Russian Orthodox and an opportunistic schism from the Russian Orthodox, not in the Orthodox communion, backed covertly by the US to attack Russia. (Former president Yushchenko is a member.)
• The western Ukraine, UGCC = Eastern Novus Ordo. No thanks.
• I hate Orthodox anti-Westernism but at the same time don’t want to see the mighty Russian Orthodox Church reduced to Eastern Novus.

From Ad Orientem.

‘The Screwball’
1943: well-drawn, Woody wasn’t cutesified and great big-band soundtrack

The rude multitude
Derb on Qaddafi. From Taki.

Ordinariate Masses probably will be eastward
Says Mgr Burnham. Good.

Complicated local Eastern church history: St Clair, Pa.
I’ve been in St Michael’s

The hidden history of American conservatism
Rod Dreher at TAC

Mount Calvary, Baltimore gets ready to enter Catholic Church

Last American nuclear super-bomb dismantled
The B53. From Ad Orientem

Editing down the Catholic core
Insidious because it’s a pretty good appeal to Bad Catholics (who don’t sweat the details but know not to try to change the church either) to come on over to the dark side and try to change the church, that is, turn Protestant.

Basically the whole leftist project is stupid

It is where WASPs of the 19th century had delusions of transcendence and Jews secularized their end-times philosophy and the two created a fusion project.

– RobRoySimmons at Taki

Church from NLM

• Dominican Use High Mass at Blackfriars, Oxford. Fulfilling the potential I saw many years ago when a Ronald Knox Society did conservative Novus Ordo there. The church of the holy martyrs never left England despite some people’s efforts. I could find it because I was looking for it. I think the establishment in that irreligious country still fears it.
• We wyll haue the masse. The English Martyrs. More to the point, since some non-Catholics have it or claim to, ‘we wyll haue’ the divinely instituted church, our holy mother, whose ‘masse’ it really is. The infallible church.
• In this computer era of mass production there is no reason liturgical books can’t be beautiful. Via Derek.

Sometimes the Vatican’s wrong
Like with Vatican II and the Novus Ordo. Another Tom Woods rebuttal of one world government. From LRC.

Dear Netflix: I told you so
From Ad Orientem

I like it
Marine veteran at the Occupy protest in Austin. Like I said, potential.

From Daniel Nichols.

The Episcopal Church will go out of business in 26 years
Sayonara. Guess there’s no American market for mainline Protestantism with some of the trappings of the Catholic Church. In my town they closed three years ago after a century here. The future: the ordinariate or the Antiochian Orthodox Western Rite for those who want that. Healey Willan’s daughter (her dad wrote a staple of old Episcopal church music) has formally entrusted his legacy to a group in ... the Catholic Church. If you’re Protestant there are the nice folks in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod for example (but I like them because they’re half-Catholic).

When your church’s reason to exist was to give the king of England an annulment he didn’t deserve, it never had a future.

From venuleius

• American conservatism and libertarianism.
• Against indifferentism. Those rabbis should stop trying to tell the Catholic Church how to run itself and I have no problem with Bishop Williamson’s opinion, nothing to do with doctrine, that the Nazis ‘only’ murdered hundreds of thousands of people in the camps rather than the mystic number six million. ‘Never forget’? Fine. Looking forward to the monuments, museums and movies about the far worse evil, Bolshevism.
• Re: ‘Orthodoxy is ethnicism’.

Viva Italia

There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. There are some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia) that anthropologists call “ambivalent” drinking-cultures, where drinking is associated with disinhibition, aggression, promiscuity, violence and anti-social behaviour.

There are other societies (such as Latin and Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of cultures), where drinking is not associated with these undesirable behaviours – cultures where alcohol is just a morally neutral, normal, integral part of ordinary, everyday life – about on a par with, say, coffee or tea. These are known as “integrated” drinking cultures.

My impression of Italy from the week I spent there in 1980 was that Italian men didn’t need disinhibiting to get over their shyness so they could start hitting on women. That’s just what they did, at least in the touristy cities. It was like a country full of Silvio Berlusconis. Above is Ruth Orkin’s 1951 photo “American Girl in Italy,” and that’s what Florence was like in 1980, too.

By the way, the American Girl in the photo is 83 today and said in August:

“Some people want to use it as a symbol of harassment of women, but that’s what we’ve been fighting all these years,” Craig said in a telephone interview from her home in Toronto. “It’s not a symbol of harassment. It’s a symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!”

The girl in the picture and the photographer were out trolling for reactions. The photographer liked the reactions the American Girl got the first time she walked down this particular street in Florence, so she had her go around the block and do it again, which sent the hubba-hubba meter to eleven. (But that’s still pretty much what it was like in 1980, so this picture is merely exaggerating reality to convey reality, which is pretty much what photography is all about.)

P.S. The American Girl went back to America, then went back to Italy and married an Italian man.

From Steve Sailer.


Lodato sempre sia... SS. Cosmas and Damian, Conshohocken, Pa.

The Pope goes global
And a Tom Woods rebuttal. From Taki.

Dinah Shore singing about ’59 Chevys

The Vatican’s frightening call for an end to economic freedom

Tom Woods answers the Holy See
From LRC

McCain v. Buchanan
From Steve Sailer

Did modernism in the church make the liturgy disintegrate or did the disintegration of the liturgy produce modernism in the church?

I think modernism produced the disintegration of the liturgy, but the disintegration of the liturgy helped promulgate and distribute the modernism.

From Fr L.

From LRC

• The real Qaddafi.
• Popes are for one world government? And I’m not, which has had mainliners who used to come here and well-meaning Catholic white knights compare me to Modernist dissenters and bloodthirsty neocons, which would surprise anybody who’s read this blog over nine years. Sorry, Charlie. Not heretical but not doctrine either. ‘Catholic social teaching’ opinion: sanctified welfare state run by enlightened rulers who are pro-life and pro-family values, keeping the greedy capitalists in line and making them share with the poor. A One World Government is always promoted as something to “improve” peace and prosperity for the world, i.e, it’s never about an elite few (the International Banksters and certain royal families) to enslave the rest of the world for their own personal megalomaniacal, sadistic pleasures.

From RR

• Interim Libyan ruler has sharia agenda. That’s right: cheered by the US, one side over there killed Qaddafi, who in recent years had tried to play along with the US, and now... Islamism. Like essentially we’ve handed formerly secular Iraq to fundie Iran. Not a threat to us but you don’t want to live in such a country. Stay out of it!
• Bachmann’s NH state manager and staff walk. Meh. I don’t personally hate her but was never a fan. Rather like Sarah Palin but I like Palin a little more. Still not my thing politically: pro-war red-statism. Let me put it this way: I hate their haters more than them. Like how I feel about the Tea Party, even though I’m not one of them.
• Raimondo on our Lady MacDeath. A pro-war bitch trying to show that the establishment left is tough. Same reason they cooked up Vietnam 47 years ago.
• Stossel: What’s there to say about Occupy Wall Street? The answer isn’t so simple. Some complain about taxpayer bailouts of businesses. Good for them. In a true free market, failing firms would go out of business. They couldn’t turn to Washington for help. But many protesters say they’re against capitalism. Now things get confusing. What do they mean? Again it has potential – people rightly mad as hell and not going to take it any more – but essentially a bunch of clueless peer-pressure liberal kids. Locally the little poseurs tried to provoke the Philly cops (in 20+ years here I have nothing but good to say about them; suburban cops have a chip on their shoulder); the Roundhouse was smart and accommodated them. A few showoffs got themselves arrested in front of the cameras. Cui bono?

The new America in which the government can execute you without a trial
On the al-Awlaki killings. From antiwar.com via Daniel Nichols.

Cantius in Chicago starts Healey Willan Society
That’s what we’re talking about: the best of old high Episcopal (time was his music was an Episcopal mainstay, almost too much) – that is, a good copy of 19th-century Roman Catholic practice but in English and with Cranmer’s writing talent but not his theology – meets the fine Tridentine holdouts, brought together by Pope Benedict’s renewal. Patrimony. From Fr C.

Six parodies that succeeded because nobody got the joke
From Cracked

’58 Bonnie
1:18 scale. She’s on a pedestal for a good reason. Otherwise late at night her engine would gun by itself, her brights would come on and she’d go track down and run down my enemies. Watch it.

Fleatiquing yesterday: the Greatest Generation
Found lots of WWII Army including AAF jackets and Navy sailors’ blue shirts with the sailor collar and white piping. (And some USAF uniforms too.) Tried on the Army jackets. Everything was a 34 through a 38 for 20-year-olds who grew up in the Depression. I’m 45 and wear a 42. Nice to know though that like Audie Murphy in this instance size didn’t matter or God didn’t make all men equal but Col. Colt did.

But I buy things I can wear. Wearing a uniform one didn’t earn isn’t on and I hate to see these things, pieces of history with rank, patches etc. men earned, worn with jeans as a joke or something.

Got a dark grey-green USMC scarf.

I know: war is bad, government-issued costume, etc. etc.

I’m not a pacifist. And because.

Thanks, guys.



Might get a leather flight jacket some day.

Will dropouts save America?
From the Mises Institute

With the rise of militant secularism, Rome and Moscow make common cause
But:

The deepening relationship does not portend a union between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

Right.

Roman Catholics are more optimistic about unity because they are less aware of the historical animus that exists between Catholics and Orthodox.

That’s not why union can’t happen. This is. Sacramentally they’re the same but ecclesiologically the difference is an inch apart but infinitely deep: impossible to reconcile without one side caving. (Like Catholic infallible church vs high Protestant fallible church. Union will never happen. The Protestants have to convert.) I hate Orthodox anti-Westernism but don’t want to see them turn into Eastern Novus Ordo, which Greek Catholicism really is.

No. 1 on the charts today
50 years ago. Nice fellow, still with us.

Bosnia, Cyprus and Kosovo: America and Islamism in the Balkans
The New World Order powers that be, overt and covert, switch sides on Islamism when convenient: the terrorists are good guys when the NWO PTB are trying to bring part of Europe into submission; bad guys when the NWO PTB are trying to do the same in the US, even when the dictator, Qaddafi, did what he was told and gave up his WMD and terrorism, making him a sitting duck. (LRC: ‘Not good enough!’ His crimes? Doing business with the Chinese, being a non-fundamentalist, discussing gold money for Libya, and not praying to DC 5 times a day. Now the Chinese have been expelled, Libyan oil is the empire’s, fundie gangs are in power, and fiat money reigns.) Got that, kids? Fundies are bad guys when, p*ssed off about what we do in Palestine, they fly planes into buildings (most of the hijackers were Saudis but that country got away with it) but good guys when afterwards we give them Iraq and Libya. Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia.

Like they don’t care about mainline Protestantism (shrinking minority of dopey old liberals they own and thus take for granted – nobody cares what their presiding moderators say about Iraq or Palestine even when it happens to be right... not peace Christians but a bunch of radical-chic hawks; war prez Obama owns them; they get to feel like they’re marching with MLK), I think they don’t care about Orthodoxy (relatively small, ethnically based traditional Catholicism but with no Pope and a weak magisterium). Except maybe in Russia, which of course is smart enough to keep its nukes so the West can’t directly push it around. (I’m not forgetting that Communism was worse than Nazism, but Russia was strong enough to have won WWII in Europe and is still strong. Now it’s not Communist and it’s cool to be Orthodox there.) In the Ukraine as part of the US’s covert continuing cold war on Russia, the American government supported the Orange Revolution and then-president Yushchenko’s schismatic church (a Henry VIII and Chinese Patriotic-like setup not part of the Orthodox communion, an opportunistic schism that wants to be the state church), which probably succeeded in mildly annoying Russia (Yushchenko’s long been out of power).

Turkey? No personal animosity (like about white Americans today re: American Indians, not their personal fault... Asia Minor’s been their home centuries longer than North America’s been ours) but historically I agree with the average Greek and Armenian. (They stole eastern Greece, that is, Asia Minor: Byzantium. Then when they turned secular in the ’20s, they ethnically cleansed it. Aristotle Onassis was a survivor as are the Pontic Greeks who settled near me here. Progress, or the 20th century was so much better with less religion.) That said, like the US in the 1800s wisely said about the Greek war of independence, not our fight. The only Turk I’m actually acquainted with is model-beautiful and married.

From Ad Orientem.

Gary Johnson reaches out to Occupy Wall Street

Fact-checking ‘Pan Am’

• Seriously, since when does a Kennedy-era pilot have long sideburns? Agreed: the captain needs a can of my pomade and a couple bucks to get a haircut.
• The Kate-the-spy storyline is not that unrealistic: it was the Cold War after all.
• I like Collette and Kate best.
• The PC revisionism isn’t too bad but: this show is produced by ABC/Disney for broadcast TV... they announced last week that none of the major characters would smoke. Believe me, the glamour was cancelled out by the eternal blue plumes of cigarette and cigar smoke. As a little kid, I coughed my lungs out on long flights.
• Pan Am’s characters are simplistic, outdated stereotypes, as if the show itself was written/made in 1963. I don’t dislike it as far as it’s true. A kind of realism. The snobs look down on it but better the period as it depicted itself than again preaching 2011 PCness. Fun and unapologetically nostalgic.
• Weigh-ins and make-up checks? Yes.
  
  Pregnancy = end of job? Yep.
  
  Grabby businessmen? No. She said that the businessmen were with a few exceptions, gentlemen. They DID hand the girls their business cards and hope they’d get lucky. They didn’t. The girls were in their 20s. The men were usually in their 40s, and married. Girls weren’t interested. Most of the cards hit the garbage can immediately.
  
  Pilots and stewardesses? Nope. Again, there was usually a big age difference. She said most of the pilots were WWII veterans, and married. As astonishing as it may seem, the girls weren’t interested in men their fathers’ age, and the pilots felt the same. The pilots on the show are too young-looking. Senior pilots (50+) would bid on overseas flights. They would ALL have been experienced WWII bomber pilots, making them about 45 years old on average I would guess.
  
  Did they know they looked good in their flight-attendant togs? Oh yeah! She said they adored strutting down the street in their uniform and matching Pan Am bag.

From the Fedora Lounge.

Peaceful globalists expedite Libyan dictator’s murder
I can do without making fun of his name but generally yes. From Taki.

Restoring the Lansdowne Theater’s marquee
Well and good but why is the government paying for it?

Getting out of Iraq: thanks but...
What about all your other wars? No sale.

From venuleius

• Occupied. My guess is the well-meaning but clueless kids will get bored and go home; nothing will change.
• Doxological misunderstandings.
• I find, in the American context at least, that 90% of anti-Catholic polemics “originating” from Orthodox are rehashed Protestant arguments which, with a few switching of the nouns, can be turned right back on the Orthodox.

OWS and the Tea Party
Both had/have potential. This person seems to get it: the enemy is crony capitalism, that is, the government, not real capitalism/the free market. Rather like Joshua’s idea that if Carl Oglesby’s early clean-cut SDS (back when the grownups were still in charge of the culture) and the rednecks had sat down and talked to each other, the cultural catastrophe about 40 years ago may have been stopped. The best of the New Left joining the Old Right. From Jane Ellen via Facebook.

From RR

• Nonprofit journalism such as online.
• Pinker’s statist gospel. Communism’s track record and that of its brown-shirted little brother should have put paid to all that Rousseauian rubbish.
• Why OWS will fail.

Decline and fall

• Kodak: buyback blowback, botching the change from film to digital.
• Las Vegas, done in by the depression.

From LRC.

Baptismal membership
From Energetic Procession

Nice. Like the sound stuff in Vatican II about being nice to non-Catholics but remembering the boundaries of the church. (V2 was a mistake but not heretical.)

From ‘How to really scare people on Halloween’ at Cracked

‘SNL’ ‘Mad Men’ skit
From John Boyden

Does Mitt Romney believe the Mormon myths?

Nine times out of 10, when a politician’s religious beliefs are “private”, that’s shorthand for “virtually non-existent”.

From Damian Thompson.

Per the First Amendment, the presidential (non-)religion doesn’t matter.

Hilary on bad Catholic art

If the Tea Party were any good it would support Ron Paul
And not just be rewarmed red-state Republicanism. From LRC.

From Ordered Liberty

• Steyn: American decline and fall. The whole thing: Crisis of decadence.
• Derb: The past. The whole thing.

Italian vs Italian-Canadian

Tolkien and the world historical disaster of Vatican II

From RR

• Trying to empathize with the Wall Street demonstrators.
• War breeds war. Peace breeds prosperity.
• Ron Paul wants $1 trillion in spending cuts.
• The dawn of late fascism.
• The new “mercantile system.”
• The downside of online education.

LP to OWS: blame crony capitalism not real capitalism

From LRC

• We don’t hear much about Herman Cain’s other 9-9-9 plan: 9 countries with U.S. military boots on the ground, to include Iran if possible. 9 years in prison for partaking of drugs the government says you shouldn’t. 9-foot moat filled with alligators in front of a great wall between the U.S. and Mexico with an electrified fence on top.
• Ron Paul’s views on abortion and same-sex marriage seem to me entirely consistent with libertarianism.

‘SNL’ skit has Ron Paul stuck in a garage

Music: ‘Bust Your Kneecaps’

Herman Cain is a government insider
Even though he’s never been elected

The cost of government is not what it taxes, it is what it spends, and Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan does nothing to rein in federal spending.

A Fed fraud.

How men can dress like a million bucks for under $200
How I got much of my vintage stuff. From LRC.

Why the New World Order isn’t happening
Pat Buchanan at Taki. I’m all for a propositional country, one based on principle (very basic libertarian ground rules to get along: the golden rule; don’t start fights) rather than blood/soil/race, but not leftist social engineering. The Germans for example have the right to like being German/prefer to live with other Germans but of course no race-baiting. Work hard and play nice, and you are welcome.

McD’s fight: they asked for it
What Ad Orientem says

The libertarian non-aggression principle (not pacifism/non-violence but not starting fights) agrees with street smarts.

Far too many years ago when I was a fresh kid in the Navy I got some important tips from a salty old boatswain’s mate named Jimmy Sandsbury on how to survive a bar-room brawl. His first advice was to walk away if I could and run away if I had to. But if neither was possible he told me to deal ruthlessly with the first SOB who came at me. Go for the throat, the eyes and the family jewels. (He did not use the words “family jewels.”) His point was that a bar-room fight was not a boxing match and Marquis of Queensberry Rules do not apply. Once I had the aggressor down he told me to beat him, stomp him, and kick him until I was 300% sure that there was no possibility of him getting back up to resume hostilities, and that everyone in the room, including the bloody lump on the floor, understood exactly and without doubt who had just won and who had lost the fight and that the fight was now over.

A make-believe mass movement
Guy Somerset at Taki on OWS

The city of Harrisburg is broke
From RR

Government-generated plots
From LRC

From LRC

• The government army explains government inflation to government conscripts, in 1944. You see, inflation is all the fault of soldier-consumers, who punish the people of occupied countries by raising prices and diminishing supply through their purchases. Instead, conscripts should put their depreciating greenbacks into government-approved banks, so they can get blondes and convertibles later. Charming cartoon from the time but not really about saving. War’s not the only racket.
• Conservatives deserve to lose.
• America’s royally messed up.
• You know your city has become a hellhole when...

Gay posthumous thought police out to get John Updike
From Steve Sailer

There are no more churches in Afghanistan
From Daniel Nichols

Mark Shea and friends take apart the OWSers

We, the people; what a crock
From LRC

Why still no London church HQ for the English-Welsh ordinariate?
Damian Thompson suggests the Magic Circle (British AmChurch = Modernists) is trying to strangle the ordinariate

A passing
One of the few newsroom people I liked died early this morning. (The other, like most talented folk, has moved on to better things.) She was one of my living links to mid-century, covering society parties and galas since 1961. I like to think we understood each other. She wasn’t warm and sweet; like me she defended her turf. I bent over backwards to try to help her; the change to making pages with computers was hard for her but she tried hard. (Used to work with another society lady from the same era who never made that change; I did all her pagemaking.) I don’t think she would have survived the end of newspapers and the change over to videos on the Web that’s happening now (I love it). Most thought she was a spinster but she told me she was a widow; her husband died of Lou Gehrig’s disease a long time ago.

I’ve had other living links, at the paper the depression killed a few years ago: the old owner I’d talk to on his walks around town; the paper had been a Catholic family business. We still got Good Friday off, carried over from that time. He used to write editorials in the ’60s about Vietnam and the Red menace, and still picked up his free copy of his old paper. At the same paper, at the other end of the spectrum, was the reporter who started in ’63 and quit the Unitarians for not being liberal enough. But she came from a time when even the liberals were ladies and gentlemen and we got on famously.

The Web killed newspapers but my videos are in part for these people. Keeping it going.

OWSers: go to your room
Like the Tea Party, the bastards of us libertarians, who turned out to be only more red-state Republicans, this had potential: people mad as hell and not going to take it any more. But it lived down to my expectations.

Predictably Romney and Cain defend big-government TARP outrage
Sure, Mormonism’s a non-Christian cult and a hokey one at that (they keep themselves too busy to notice – I understand their missionaries predictably don’t convert many people – and their selling points are community and family values, not their theology; they want you to think they’re another conservative Protestant church) but I wonder if the media attention to arguments about Romney’s religion is a smokescreen for things like this. Doesn’t Cain know better? Part of his appeal is he’s supposed to be this bootstraps businessman who turned Godfather’s Pizza around (it shrank but didn’t go out of business), a black man who doesn’t need your pity. (Wicked smart; ex-consultant to the Navy.)

Other than that I don’t care about the presidential religion, per the First Amendment. Ron Paul’s a casual Protestant churchgoer.

Work video

Ordinariates

• Ordinariate liturgy. Fr Phillips is sympathetic to the idea of bringing back the old missals, which I want besides Tridentine and Pope Benedict’s improved English Novus Ordo as options. Don’t make up a new one and don’t try to bring back Sarum. Interestingly he gives an official reason why the old missals weren’t approved for the Pastoral Provision 30 years ago. Besides the general hostility to tradition, the anti-high churchmanship, after Vatican II (Thomas Day factor meets Modernism), the materials from outside the church had to have been official Anglican ones, which was crazy. (Dunderheaded ecumenism?) Why should the church care about official Anglican anything? (Except property rights, not a religious matter.) As Father notes, the whole point of the missals, which is why they weren’t Anglican-approved, is they are Catholic, with the Roman Rite as their source! Tweak the Cranmer here and there for the Americans like the Antiochians did, put imprimaturs on them and you’re good to go.
• Fr Barnes at St Agatha’s, Portsmouth. More or less what the ordinariates should look like: 19th-century Roman Catholicism on steroids. Again like Fr Phillips’ point about liturgy, it’s not Anglicanism but something some Anglicans invented some time ago entirely meant to be compatible not with Anglicanism but with the church, and it is.
• Not just convert priests: the English-Welsh ordinariate has a seminarian with plans for more.
• St Luke’s, Bladensburg is now in the church. An ordinariate in the making but no American ordinary yet.

Six BS myths about America’s ‘enemies’
From Cracked

From RR

• Why oppose interventionism.
• Occupy your ownself. It’s interesting theater. It’s good comment-fodder. It’s certainly a sign that otherwise unemployed people are fed up and furious. It’s an encouraging sign that many are beginning to grasp that politics as usual is a game ordinary folk can’t win. It’s a discouraging sign (per interviews with some of the participants) that even fed-up folk still imagine that government can or will save them from banksters. OMG, will some people never get it?
• Explaining 10 years of war to a child.

A Philly parochial school goes private
In ways typical. Ghetto parish, no longer Catholic majority of pupils, older habitless nun principal. No longer a parish school directly under the archdiocese but a privately funded academy. But while this blog and other libertarian sites have warned that once the church takes state handouts, the state calls the shots, and while of course this could be abused in worst-case scenarios state-school teachers might throw at you (corporate sponsorship corrupting the curriculum), it probably wouldn’t and might even end up more Catholic; who knows? Plus it p*sses off the peace-and-justicers.

From LRC

• Not voting.
• 100 signs of US financial trouble.
• The greedy protest the ‘greedy’.

From Taki

• Eminent domain and: Boomers love to pretend they created a black middle class, but blacks rose out of poverty in the 1940s when left to their own devices. They continued to grow wealthier in the 1960s’ urban-renewal boom, but at a drastically slower rate. By the 1970s, when urban renewal had become a fixture of American life, black poverty stopped declining. Every time the government moves in to save the poor from themselves, we see more crime, more teen pregnancy, and more riots.
• In contrast to their predecessors, today’s newsreaders lack not merely gravitas and style, but maturity. Maybe the fragmenting of entertainment and news via television and the Internet into a million specially interested sites is a good thing, slowly eating away the false and stifling consensus of ages past. But there were standards that transcended opinion.

What’s wrong with OWS and the rest of the left
The trendy weenies want government to be their daddy

Steve Jobs didn’t waste money trying to close ‘The Gap’
From Steve Sailer

Celebrating the Italian who started Spanish America
South Philly (South Broad) style








Seemed smaller this year.

Ironically I didn’t see the K of C.

Missed the IHM sister passing out holy cards too.


Ferko?! That’s not Italian! But it’s Catholic. Good enough.

Siete tutti benvenuti.



My Geator moment.

Jerry Blavat gave me this glare before saying ‘Give me my hat back!’




South Philly Italian stars’ pictures: Frankie Avalon (Avallone), Fabian (Forte – saw him once; can’t sing to save his life) and Bobby Rydell (Ridarelli – saw him; he was OK), who still lives here.

The movie The Idolmaker is loosely based on them.

This man could sing.



Church and shrine of St Rita of Cascia.


Padre Pio.

Roissy hits the Occupy Wall Streeters upside the head

Angela Keaton: towards a new peace movement
A left-libertarian says to reach out to Middle America and the right (Ron Paul’s the man to do it). On what’s wrong with the main, non-libertarian anti-war movement (reasons I don’t march now), silly Obama worship (he was never about real issues), a republic not an empire, why Christians should oppose these wars, why ‘they’ hate us and how we’ve lost our freedom.

Moorestown, NJ