From Mark Shea

• Ron Paul: war with Iran is unjustified.
• Orthodickery dock. True about nice Roman Catholics vs nasty online Orthodox and their anti-Western crap, but their one-true-church claim is a mirror of yours (that is, a good thing), minus the relativism Vatican II set off (but doesn’t actually say of course; the church can’t change doctrine), and where’s the good word for grassroots traditionalism (how the Holy Spirit works in the church?) vs wholesale rewrites of services and a culture? That, not highfalutin theology or medieval history, is what it’s about. (Even the only real doctrinal difference is only academic and an ex post facto rationalization.) Ignore that well-founded conservatism or worse put it down as some apologists do and you end up sounding just like the old liberals you’re battling in your own church. Pope Benedict gets it: he’s trying to make the normal Roman Rite Mass more like the Byzantine, again.
• Strange bedfellows. 1999: Bill Clinton adored by feminists. 2011: Newt Gingrich adored by Tea Partiers. Black is white. Freedom is slavery.
• War Party vs conservative foreign policy. Bob Taft should have been president. Nice to see sane conservatives standing up to the crowd of Big Government Corporate shills drunk on the blood of our troops who thank them by leaving a million of them jobless, trying to screw them out of benefits, and shoveling their remains into landfills. No wonder our troops are throwing all their weight behind Ron Paul while chickenhawks like Rush Limbaugh pull out the stops to destroy him.
• 93 Senators need to lose their jobs (for passing SB 1867). For attempting to reduce their subjects constituents to absolute and total naked defenselessness before an almighty and irresistible Leviathan who can jail them forever, without charge, and keep them there even when civil courts declare them not guilty.
• Morality, like art, consists of drawing the line somewhere. When you get rid of the Big Law, you don’t get freedom. You don’t even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

Of course Christians can be libertarians
The non-aggression principle is the golden rule. From RR.

Ron Paul and ideological categories
From Eunomia

Ron Paul not a racist
Making the rounds; even Andrew Sullivan posted it

Paul gaining among Iowa Dems and independents
From Ad Orientem:

I draw the reader’s attention to the comments on this article at the linked site. This is a British newspaper, editorially right of center, and it is quite interesting to see what at least some Brits think of Ron Paul, who if elected would radically alter our relationship with Great Britain and most of the rest of the world.

A cure for cancer?

From RR

• Britain’s future is with America, not Europe. Could be neocon at its worst (Airstrip One, the Coalition of the Bullied going to foreign wars) but a valid point for obvious reasons (a handful of well-known differences but the mother country and the old colonies are basically the same people).
• In defense of bourgeois civilization.
• One of my faves: WWII revisionism. America did not go in to save the Jews. I love the Greatest Generation but no longer buy the political propaganda. A rebuttal to another variation of ‘libertarians are selfish’. How’s not forcing you or your son into the Army by conscription and sending you/him off to die in a war nothing to do with the country’s safety selfish? (Flip side: nobody cares about our wars now – they’re not a campaign issue – because the well-off whites aren’t getting drafted and sent over there. The Wrong Kind of Whites and the non-white helots get to do the state’s dirty work.)
  
  Reminds me of Clint Eastwood’s quip about the current cartoony version of the official history: we sent the Tuskegee Airmen and the ‘Go for Broke’ battalion to save the Jews while the white soldiers guarded the internment camp at Manzanar.
  
  We ended up helping a far worse government win the war, handing it half of Catholic Europe and handing back its refugees.
  

  There would not have been a Holocaust in the first place had it not been for humanitarian war-making. Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in World War I – the war to end all wars and make the world safe for democracy – led to the toppling of Germany’s Kaiser and the liquidation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s hard to imagine the Kaiser appointing Hitler chancellor or an imperial Austria submitting to the Anschluss. Wilson’s well-meaning war cleared the way for the most virulent expressions of nationalism and socialism on the European continent. (Wilson didn’t use humanitarianism as his primary rationale for taking America into the conflict, but once involved the administration insisted upon regime change in Germany and stoked the nationalist flames that consumed Austria-Hungary.)

  Right. The mainline were hawks – turn Catholic Europe into good American Protestants – and the fundamentalists doves then (the Southern Baptist Convention as recently as 1936).
  

  As a rule, from a humanitarian perspective no less than a realist one, humanitarian warfare is a self-defeating proposition.

How to get yourself off the floor
James Altucher at LRC

Takimag on 2011
I say ‘two thousand and eleven’. ‘Twenty eleven’ just doesn’t click.

• Derb:
  

  April. Congress passed a budget deal to avert a government showdown. The deal was advertised as including cuts to federal spending. There was some trimming of programs in health, labor, education, and contributions to the UN and various international organizations for a total savings of $38.5 billion – only .002% of the federal deficit.
  
  November. The “Supercommittee” of six Republican and six Democrat congressfolk that was set up to resolve the nation’s debt problem failed to agree on anything and went home. The Democrats had wanted more taxes and benefit hikes; the Republicans wanted tax reform and benefit cuts. The last few sentient Americans who believed that anyone in Washington gives a fig about the national debt – or at least, a fig more than they give about political positioning – were disabused of that notion.

  Which probably wasn’t even really a spending cut but a slightly lower rise in spending. Only Ron Paul’s serious about cutting spending.
  

  October. The Occupy Wall Street movement, in situ at Zuccotti Park in Downtown Manhattan, forced city authorities to back down from a plan to clean up the camp. A mix of union agitators, professional anarchists, and middle-class kids disgruntled that their degrees in Art History hadn’t opened the doors of employment squatted in downtown Manhattan stating their intent to make the city spend more on public services by shutting down the financial sector, whose taxes fund most public services.

  There was that (hippies redux: rich kids partying and showing off, who can literally afford to drop out for a while because they can always drop back in), but also veterans and other reminders of the 1930s Depression.
  

  December. The Justice Department reached a settlement with Bank of America, under the terms of which BofA would pay $335 million to 200,000 plaintiffs for having done what the last three administrations had demanded they do under threat of Justice Department lawsuits: trash credit standards so minorities could be sold loans they couldn’t afford to service. Hey, somebody had to take the blame for the housing crash, and you don’t expect politicians to blame themselves, do you? Ha ha ha ha ha!

• Charles Coulombe:

  Osama bin Laden, the 21st century’s very own Emmanuel Goldstein, was at last packed off to paradise or wherever.
  
  Tellingly, Occupy San Fernando Valley was canceled after more reporters showed up than protesters; the Valley is a place people usually try to flee. Poignantly, Occupy LA’s leaders were outraged by the homeless moving in to gorge on the free food, shelter, recreational drugs, and women.

  Sailer wrote that this intrusion of reality ended the ’67 Summer of Love. Skid Row and the ghetto crashed the rich kids’ slumming party. Which is why Burning Man is out in the desert and has a high ticket price.

  The Republican Party paraded an extraordinary menagerie of presidential candidates. This election is theirs to lose, and I predict they will, thus giving John Boehner more reasons to cry. But Obama may yet prove he has what it takes to make whomever the Republicans nominate look good.

  No. Dinkins effect. The guilted whites have done their duty, the newsletters will probably sink my man Paul (but right now we’re second in Iowa and just snagged Bachmann’s chairman there; of course on C-SPAN I enjoyed the vets’ rally/Paul speech there) and mainstream America including the yuppie white women swing vote will elect a mainstream Republican, probably the Mormon robot. (Tall, good-looking WASP from central casting; let’s make him constitutional king, ornamental – Obama would be good at that too – and give the legislature to a libertarian coalition with Paul as prime minister.)
  

  The obituary columns were flush as ever in 2011, but the fallen celebrity I will miss most is the avuncular Harry Morgan. And I suppose Christopher Hitchens has finally had his questions answered.
  
  Pope Benedict XVI made some key appointments and decisions that will doubtless outlast his critics: He reinforced the legal status of the Tridentine Mass and saw the first (ex-) Anglican ordinariate erected.

  In England where most of the few Anglican would-be Catholics were. No parishes yet (the English Catholic liberals want to kill this of course) but a monsignor ordinary and about a thousand people. Part of Benedict’s program: roll back that damnable council. (I’m for the vernacular and religious freedom and am OK with ecumenism rightly understood but still.) Don’t forget his fixing all the real problems with the Novus Ordo in English.

From truthout

• Crackpot anti-Islam activists, “serial fabricators” and the tale of Iran and 9/11.
• I want to see Roissy rip this apart. I’ll start: girls are very well-spoken and good at rationalizing.

Thomas Knapp on Gary Johnson

Ron Paul’s 10 principles of a free society

1. Rights belong to individuals, not groups; they derive from our nature and can neither be granted nor taken away by government.

2. All peaceful, voluntary economic and social associations are permitted; consent is the basis of the social and economic order.

3. Justly acquired property is privately owned by individuals and voluntary groups, and this ownership cannot be arbitrarily voided by governments.

4. Government may not redistribute private wealth or grant special privileges to any individual or group.

5. Individuals are responsible for their own actions; government cannot and should not protect us from ourselves.

6. Government may not claim the monopoly over a people's money and governments must never engage in official counterfeiting, even in the name of macroeconomic stability.

7. Aggressive wars, even when called preventative, and even when they pertain only to trade relations, are forbidden.

8. Jury nullification, that is, the right of jurors to judge the law as well as the facts, is a right of the people and the courtroom norm.

9. All forms of involuntary servitude are prohibited, not only slavery but also conscription, forced association, and forced welfare distribution.

10. Government must obey the law that it expects other people to obey and thereby must never use force to mold behavior, manipulate social outcomes, manage the economy, or tell other countries how to behave.

From LRC.

Another Ron Paul person: Kelly Clarkson
Of course I hope the peer-pressure liberal reaction doesn’t scare her into backing down

GOP candidates step up offensive
So Gingrich wouldn’t vote for Paul. It’s official: I have no time for Gingrich. Romney tries an Iran-nuke scare. No sale.

From LRC

• Society vs the state. Libertarianism: the duty of defending others’ rights is the opposite of anti-social.
• The end of the road.
• Your wealth is eroding.
• How the GOP establishment might hijack the nomination. Like in ’52 when they stole it from the worthy Bob Taft at the convention and drafted Ike from the Army.
• How often do you need to change your car’s oil?

From RR

• Bradley Manning: hero or traitor? Hero, but the military has to keep its discipline to do its proper job so Manning has to take the punishment (as long as it’s not cruel) as part of his heroism.
• Libertarianism and Americanism.

On the fate of the American religion

Propagandist or prophet?
From LRC

Reason the Republicans are suppressing Ron Paul?
They need a white bloc – yuppie women – to win?

How to further high-church the Ordinary Form Mass
Making it look like the Extraordinary Form. Nice.

From RR

• How Ron Paul should handle the embarrassing newsletters. More. Of course they’re gunning for him now that he has a chance. I’m not knee-jerk PC; I read Sailer. I understand the paleo strategy. Paul was politicking. In Texas. But race-baiting of course goes against everything libertarianism stands for. Paul’s principles, not the politicking, are all that have mattered to me. RR’s view: Paul should come clean, admitting the paleo play was his mistake and instead reminding people of his principles. ‘It was wrong and I’m sorry.’ No ugly collectivism, right or left.
• Make the payroll-tax cut permanent. By shrinking the government, not just slowing down the spending hikes, which is what the mainstream pols are doing.
• Merry Zagmuk. Keep the government out of Christmas so we can celebrate unhindered.
• Does a simple Firefox add-on make SOPA useless?

Anglican traffic

• Why do some Catholics convert? No surprises. Few do. Those who do are almost always slightly older (so they go to church) and do it because they’re divorced and remarried. (Fitting considering why the king founded Anglicanism.) Mainline Protestantism is ‘the spirit of Vatican II’. Why do so few switch? The Bad Catholic state of mind (‘I don’t follow it but I expect the church to be the church and I know I can’t change it; being Catholic is just what I am, regardless’; they have a point) and the Thomas Day factor. (Can you imagine old liberal priests and nuns celebrating Mass facing east with altar rails, maniples, and robed choirs singing chant? Exactly.) Father also refers to people who become evangelicals, who in England sometimes are C of E. Learn from the evangelicals? Maybe. Strong teaching and piety, sure, but don’t lose ‘here comes everybody’. In Catholic culture, few are zealots. And that’s good. The Catholic Church has something to learn from the beautiful little old Anglican parish church (a merry old England that once was) with the high churchmanship and the warm fellowship. (Lots of Catholic parishes’ people skills s*ck.) That’s what the Pope is bringing in through the ordinariates. Which leads to:
• Why do some Anglicans convert? Because they’ve been serious would-be Catholics (Anglo-Papalism, a few people, almost all British) for a long time and what they thought was Anglicanism really isn’t. (They thought they were in part of the infallible church; it’s a denomination that changes essentials by vote.) The very rare American version’s neat (the few Episcopal parishes that are switching over) because it’s a Tridentine/1928 Prayer Book fusion. (That BCP and the traditional Roman Rite share a general theological worldview so it works.)

Patrimony: small parish, the English language, maybe some married priests... otherwise pre-conciliar Catholicism. (Would have been considered liberal in 1960 and considered reactionary today, without changing.) Welcome home!

The MCJ: sometimes all you need for a real Christmas is a helping of egg casserole

From Takimag

• Mandolyna: happy holidays? Christmas with the Theodoracopuloses.
• Taki’s predictions from the Delphic oracle.
• My genocide’s bigger than your genocide.

On the feast of Stephen: Christmas wrap-up
Quasi-official day-off Christmas (as it was on a Sunday) or Boxing Day (in the free market, thanks to the countless people who do a fine job serving)




Christmas Eve a casa della famiglia Sorrentino: gli bambini e la festa dei sette pesci.

This part of NJ is south of the great dividing line where people start cheering for Philadelphia teams, not New York, but the Sorrentinos are 100% New Yorkers.


Hits with the kids this year: Lego kits, two of them, and Bratz dolls. I like what Donna got for one of her other nephews back home, Hexbugs.



Bob, renaissance man, the family’s last generation who can speak Italian, and spirit of Christmas this year (more below), serves the first course, linguine with mussels.

Had lambrusco, nearly synonymous with family dinner. And Pepsi Throwback, real cane sugar, not corn syrup.

There aren’t literally seven fishes here. No eel. Never had it. That’s OK.

For dessert with coffee, cannoli of course.

Bob was in the clothing business for over 30 years, ending up a suit designer. His job took him all over the world, including, starting out when he was 18, with his father to Havana right before Castro; just like in the movies. (Nastiest: Turkey. Most intimidating: ’70s Red China.) Virtually gave me the suit off his back this year. Turns out from his old business he had four suits that fit me, including two ’40s-style double-breasted ones, just what I was looking for. Now I’m set with clothes. Grazie.


Nice fake-out from Donna: the box was for Yankee Candle or something, the scented candles some women like (my candles are religious; unscented); inside was a replacement for my flaky camera (it kept saying the batteries were dead when they weren’t).


My shopping quest this year was fun: this coat for Donna. It was sold out in two big-mall stores I looked in.


Third Mass of Christmas, Sung with Fr Pasley at Mater. Good things happen there.


San Rocco. Like St Patrick, wholly identified with the country he lived in and not where he was from.


Outside church.
Donna also got episodes of the ’70s TV version of ‘Wonder Woman’ with Miss World USA Lynda Carter (arguably she couldn’t act but I don’t think anybody noticed). Lots of bad dialogue and anachronisms (WWII Army officers with ’70s hair?!) but a nice try at a ’40s comic come to life.

The origins of Christmas
By Fr Methodius

Taki on Brussels boneheads and NYT hypocrisy

Just think how Belle Époque Vienna was infatuated with modernity, style, and glamour, then how by the end of World War I the place was full of starving veterans huddling outside restaurants looking for bits of food. The clowns in Brussels have come up with an aspirin and they expect us to believe it’s a cure. The fools have not learned post-war Vienna’s lessons. The euro crisis is threatening their dream of technocratic dictatorship, yet all they can come up with are more demands for harsher austerity. I cheered when David Cameron said no and will cheer even louder when Britain gets out altogether.

If Switzerland is by far Europe’s most successful country and is not a member of the Brussels gang, why can’t Britain leave? The clowns allowed the PIGS to go wild, and now the same clowns will make matters worse even for those who are not responsible for the mess. Hitler must be smiling – in fact, cackling. As is Stalin. And Mussolini. (Mao is too gaga even to begin to understand). The great economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter argued that capitalism meant “incessant innovation,” something these Brussels hemorrhoids do not comprehend. He called for creative destruction at times, as when one exploits an invention rather than sticking to the old game plan until the patent is long dead. The Brussels hemorrhoids do not possess the nous or the courage to change. Thus, 2012 promises to be an even worse year than 2011.

Leave it to The New York Times to find a front-page story unfit to print because it wasn’t anti-Catholic: The Brooklyn DA recently arrested an astounding 85 Jewish Orthodox men on charges of child sex abuse. Back in 1985 a Hasidic “therapist” was indicted for abusing five boys, but police suspected he abused more than a hundred. Avrohom Mondrowitz fled to Israel, where he remains to this day a free man. Those nice guys who shoot rock-throwing Palestinian children refuse to extradite him. Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes now has to tread carefully. Fifty rabbis have signed a public announcement in Yiddish denouncing the Hasidic family who went to the cops. They asked – now get this – for any believer to kill the family that informed “on fellow Jews.” So what will happen to the 85 perverts? All I know is the Times has not published a word, whereas when the Catholic Church sex scandal broke, it led the news in the front page for months. There is something very evil when rabbis who hate the non-Jewish world can dictate to an abused child’s parents whether or not to talk to the mostly non-Jewish fuzz. If some parent were to go and firebomb the Times, we might see it appear on the back pages.

‘The Spirit of Christmas’
From the golden era and a local Christmas tradition as WHYY (PBS) rebroadcasts them. Marionettes (the Santa doesn’t quite work), the gospel and one of those cut-glass announcer’s voices you don’t hear any more.

I like the thunder/gun/fireworks Annunciation.

Note that ‘Holiday greetings’ (politely including Jews) is nothing new, war-on-Christmas hype notwithstanding.





My plans: browsing the mall just for fun, la festa dei sette pesci (the Feast of Settling Things Like Joe Pesci) made by Donna’s dad, in his 70s, from Brooklyn, second-generation and the family’s last Italian speaker, and, for me and Donna, Tridentine Sung Mass. One gift I know of: something Don Draper would approve of. The rest will be a surprise.

Buon Natale/Merry Christmas!

And keep us mindful of the needs of others. Amen.

It didn’t work then. It won’t work today.
Leftist Catholic Owen busts on distributism

Ron Paul defended on NPR?!

But Paul cannot be dismissed as just another robotic Republican. Indeed, he is more inclined to challenge Republican orthodoxy on a host of foreign and fiscal policy issues than Barack Obama. He does so as something that is rare indeed at the highest levels of American politics: a conservative.

And if he wins Iowa, he could begin a process of transforming the Republican Party into a conservative party.

That scares the Republican bosses who currently maintain the party concession on behalf of the Wall Streeters. But it, if the polls are to be believed, it quite intrigues the folks on Main Street who may be waking up to the fact that the “conservatism” of a Newt Gingrich or a Mitt Romney is a sham argument designed to make the rich richer and to make the rest of us pay for wars of whim and crony-capitalist corruption.

Either they don’t take him seriously or we’re getting some traction, getting a beachhead on the left. From Karen De Coster.

Fr C and me on the Old Catholics
I don’t buy their rap but they have a point

From LRC

• Whether or not we are believers, all Americans have a huge stake in Christianity and Christmas.
• The World War I Christmas truce.

Pomplamoose: ‘Always in the Season’

The four kinds of Christmas articles you see online
From Cracked

They are: War on Christmas, Too Much Christmas Too Soon and For Too Long (Too Commercial/Shopping Horror Stories), Christmas Movie List and Desperate/Wacky.

BTW I’m not a big fan of A Christmas Story even though of course I love the period. Because unlike so many of the others it doesn’t even allude to what Christmas really means. (My pick is The Family Man. Implicitly Christian while not religious.)

Nun who once starred with Elvis needs miracle
To save her convent

The MCJ and me on Occupy

Ad Orientem on the military and liberty

• Awfulness, not from putative Christians in the mainline or Modernists supposedly in the church, but conservative Protestant buddies who hate Ron Paul and are distracted by Bradley Manning’s personal problems/sins. (His gayness is irrelevant.) Let he who is without... Anyway, longtime readers remember my view on the Manning/WikiLeaks case. Paul’s right of course. What Manning did was arguably heroic. That said, the MCJers and others have a point. Paul and I are anti-war, not anti-military. It needs its discipline to do its proper job (defending the people and Constitution against all real enemies, guarding the coast, not wars of conquest). USMC = you signed the motherf*cking contract, for example. So my line on Manning is the same as on principled deserters (hell, no, I’m not going back to kill for no good reason). They’re heroes, and part of the heroism is taking the due punishment: jail, being kicked out with a bad discharge etc. Self-sacrifice for a greater good. Greater love hath no man... That said, of course don’t torture Manning.
• I understand the conservative instinctive reaction to want to go Patton on Manning. Fallout from when society went to hell in the late ’60s-early ’70s. Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants used to rightly distrust the government and were anti-war (the Southern Baptist Convention as recently as 1936). (Before Francis Schaeffer politicized Jerry Falwell, a footnote in the 1980 election, they were largely apolitical. Mainliners were hawks: destroy Catholic Europe and replace it with American Protestant idealism, and defend their Protestant mother country.) After the big change, they started to see the spit-shined, yes-sir military as Christian knights. I understand it works both ways: evangelicalism is useful now for a military on the offensive, and it’s become the de facto religion in it. As LRC’s Laurence Vance, a conservative Protestant who won’t get played, points out, they’re being used.
• Another good thing about the military: many of them like Ron Paul, who if I recall rightly is the only candidate who was in the military (Air Force doctor).

From LRC

• ‘Malice towards none; charity towards all.’ With an implicitly Christian Lincoln quotation, Gary North starts an inauguration speech he wrote for Ron Paul. Repeal all executive orders and: I am not here to make America better. I am here to veto laws that will hinder American citizens from making America better. (Nod to Thomas DiLorenzo: Lincoln was a horrible ruler – a dictator – and probably not really a Christian, but a great speechwriter and self-taught cultured, a very smart frontier lawyer, so he knew how to draw on America’s Christian culture rhetorically.)
• Why he can win. A spoiler like Ross Perot in ’92? (My first Libertarian vote was that year: André Marrou.) Maybe. He might cancel out the Dinkins effect, giving Obama another term. But a mainstream GOP candidate like the Mormon robot doesn’t deserve to win, so, so what? Anyway: If he were to walk away for a third party, he would take at least 12% of the Republican vote with him. He would also take another 15% from the Independents and at least 11% from the Democrats. This would give him 38% – enough of the vote to win the Presidency in a three-man race. How about Paul/Johnson on the Libertarian ticket? Like we’ve been saying for many years, the Republicans and Democrats are really one party. (Obama: Bush’s third term. How’s all that hopenchange working out for y’all? He’d get away with it but for the depression.) Even if Obama gets re-elected, the Dems and the GOP will be gridlocked and thus nothing will get done. Like second-term Clinton vs Congress? I wish. Gridlock = no government = prosperity. Remember the late ’90s? Today it’s all theatre. The government doesn’t shut down and nobody but Paul is trying to cut spending. The GOP wants to raise spending a little less. The culture wars are a red herring.
• Worse than 2008, the year the depression almost took away my job of then 11 years.

The Occupy movement, if it wasn’t an orgy of self-pitying envy, would be protesting in front of the White House and the Capitol Building
From Takimag

Also:

Taki himself on the folly of disbelief.

If White House press briefings were honest
From Cracked

Also:

Why calling someone a nerd is now meaningless.

Non-interventionism wouldn’t have led to a Nazi century

From Venuleius

• de Lubac. Radical Orthodoxy sounds like a kind of mainline Protestantism.
• Bulgakov.
• Among other observations: The most apt description of the contemporary Catholic Church I have heard in the last year concerns likening it to one’s mother in a hospital with a dangerous, communicable disease: You don’t want to get too close for fear of catching it, but you can’t stay away because it’s your mother and you love her. No observation I have run across yet more accurately describes my relationship.

Trivia 10: ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’
A bit of American mid-century coolness (1965, just before things went to hell), back when among other things orthodox Christianity was still sort of mainstream (hooray, no effects of Vatican II, and the mainline was still sort of socially conservative). The main point: Sparky really was a talent with artistic integrity – keep the Bible passage, no laugh track and that’s final – even though ironically he didn’t care for Vince Guaraldi’s cool jazz, but was smart enough to use it. From Mark Shea.

Christmas nostalgia
Peter Hitchens, the nice brother, and Fr G on it, (Anglo-)Catholic Christmas and how the ’50s were better

Also, the contradiction/hypocrisy of pro-EU libprots. Moving away from Catholic Europe is good but moving away from secular Europe (a kind of fake church, like theirs) is bad. Got it. (Rather like, in American terms, Ron Paul and I are the real internationalists, wanting trade and peace with all. The warmongers, from lefty humanitarians to GOP democracy-exporters-by-force, the people sending soldiers the locals welcome with homemade road bombs, call us isolationists!) OK, they make some sense as the Europe that replaced the respublica Christiana and una sancta ecclesia is as anti-Catholic as they are.

al-Awlaki

Summary:

• The government dropped a bomb on a U.S. citizen,
• who, though a total dick and probably a criminal, may have been engaged only in propaganda,
• which, though despicable, is generally protected by the First Amendment;
• it did so without a trial or even an indictment (that we know of),
• based at least in part on evidence it says it has but won’t show anyone,
• and on a legal argument it has apparently made but won’t show anyone,
• and the very existence of which it will not confirm or deny;
• although don’t worry, because the CIA would never kill an American without having somebody do a memo first;
• and this is the “most transparent administration ever”;
• currently run by a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Merry Christmas!

– From Lowering the Bar

Ad Orientem:

Of the seven Republicans and one Democrat currently running for President of the United States, all but one think this is just fine. Guess which one thinks it’s bull$&^#?

Wrongful-birth lawsuits
On one hand, yes, the selfish consumer approach to being parents, meddling with nature, sliding into Nazi eugenics: ‘you should never have been born’. That said, compensation for the real hardship of taking care of a disabled child is fair. From Joshua (please update your RSS feed away from your old blog so I don’t lose track of your new one).

Second period of Muslim power
Of course I agree with Ron Paul on Michele Bachmann (just another, sorry, dumb right-wing pol... another Palin... not joining in the left’s hatefest but I’d never vote for her). I don’t hate them and am not out to get them... as long as they play nice here and with me, following the do-no-harm/non-aggression rule (the criterion for immigration: I don’t care what race or religion you are; welcome, but if you don’t play nice, out you go). That said, speaking of that rule (individual rights), you don’t want to live in a Muslim country (Not Without My Daughter... pre-war Iraq was secular with a Muslim population; big difference)... Pat may be fear-mongering/race-baiting but if they are on average not that smart (which may well be), are they really a threat? Don’t want them hijacking planes and flying them into buildings? Stop propping up Israel. (Jeremiah Wright, quoting somebody on our own foreign policy biting us in the ass, was right.) From Takimag.

Gerald Celente’s new-year’s predictions
From LRC

Ripoffs and the minority mortgage meltdown
Steve Sailer on Bank of America’s Countrywide Financial

The GOP establishment is terrified of Ron Paul

Gary Johnson’s quitting the GOP race to go for the LP nomination
Great. If Ron Paul doesn’t make it and Johnson’s on the Libertarian ticket, there’s my vote in November.

From GetReligion

• Reporting on secular Christmas. Neat ad of course, and I like the concept being reported on. Went to the local super-mall once this season, looking for something (sold out); it was fun. Huge fake tree with lights and mechanical toys. Loved it.
• The Scrooge of Hudsonville. The old New Englanders thought that way too. What with ‘holiday tree’ and attacks on commercialism (see above) etc., they still do.
• Macy’s employee fired after asking ‘transgender woman’ not to use a women’s changing room. There’s politeness, including treating people as they want to be treated, and chances are this person wasn’t a pervert who was any danger, but what about the saleswoman’s and other customers’ right to acknowledge reality? (Not necessarily about religion.) No one can force you to go along with somebody else’s play-acting.

From RR and Thomas Knapp

• Looks like Saab Automobile is about to go under.
• Knapp is a libertarian non-Ron Pauler, which can be good because he doesn’t write about him like a fan. His mild defense of Paul.
• Paulitics 101. I’m neither PC (I read Sailer) nor a race-baiter (Takimag is sometimes rude). I don’t think it’s blind fandom that Paul’s position seems, to me, about individual liberty, not race, left or right. That’s as it should be and all that matters. Interesting about pork. As another writer online pointed out, that’s part of Paul’s job as a congressman. I don’t necessarily care, on principle or emotionally, about my stories’ subjects or the pages that get printed, but on my word I do the best job I can on them as long as I’m paid to be responsible for them. (Three 10-plus-hour days a week, starting at oh-dark-hundred, so my real hours are at least 50-some. No overtime.) Paul might not really believe in pork but that’s what he’s paid to do. He’s a man of his word, but, as Knapp concedes, how many libertarians are successful politicians? Paul’s aced that. Also, because of the Dinkins effect and the depression, I don’t think Obama’s a shoo-in this time (he was last time: white guilt + Bush backlash). Either vote in a real change candidate or business as usual with the Mormon robot.
• Crony college capitalism.

Not to condone bullying but...
So my headline isn’t outrageous like Kathy Shaidle’s. From Takimag.

’Tis the season
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Sen. Toomey defends vintage street signs
To give credit where it’s due: a mainstream Republican conserves something for a change and gives at least some lip service to small government and subsidiarity. Possible fun: the left, whose granolas often seem to love nostalgia and historic preservation as much as I do (but they really don’t?), having to thank him.

The media are talking about Ron Paul
From Ad Orientem

From Cracked

• Five battlefield screw-ups that accidentally won the war. Best: The Finnish rout of the Russians made Hitler overconfident and invade Russia, which cost him the war.
• Five badass teams of famous people. Best: Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla. I knew that British spies used lies and seductions to sucker the US into WWII.

From Roissy
Fallen human nature uncensored

• Street smarts, game and the white underclass.
• Should game be taught in school?

Game’s a tool, not a whole worldview like a religion. A smidge of it is all you need.

Christianity goes global as world’s largest religion
From T1:9

From CounterPunch

• Eugenics in America. I read Steve Sailer. He explains likely outcomes based on races ‘on average’. Biology is not destiny (good HBDists – human biodiversity – agree); denying equal opportunity, denying individual liberty, is racist. Also: individual rights, not group rights (no collectivism/quotas/spoils, right or left).
• Greece in chaos.

North Korea’s future: the cyber angle
Interesting how underneath all the Commie rhetoric that wretched state’s a monarchy

Picture: North Korea at night. Failure.

If Ron Paul wins Iowa, the GOP campaigns will get downright ugly

Eight gadgets that lie to you
From Cracked

Ron Paul in fighting trim on Leno
From LRC

More on the Crystal Cathedral sale

30 things you learn from commercials

A Christmas poem by St Robert Southwell
‘The Burning Babe’

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorchëd with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
Alas, quoth he, but newly born in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defilëd souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.
With this he vanished out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I callëd unto mind that it was Christmas day.

From Tea at Trianon.

Ordinariate news
Mount Calvary, Baltimore, is coming into the church Jan. 22. Mass will be Anglican Use Book of Divine Worship (1979/Novus Ordo mix). Well, if Pope Benedict’s translations are used it shouldn’t be that bad. (The options I’d like to see: American Missal, which is 1928/Tridentine fusion; and English Missal, straight-up Tridentine in thou English; alongside the options throughout the Roman Rite: Pope B’s fixed English Novus, which the British ordinariate uses, Latin-original Novus and Tridentine Latin.) Ordinations will be in June.

Ron Paul on Leno

The government v. everyone
From Takimag

NYT on Gingrich’s being Catholic
It’s great that he’s in the church but regarding the presidency, so what? I won’t get played by the culture wars or tribalism. He’s just another mainstream Republican. No, thanks. The casually churchgoing Protestant congressman from Texas (he’s really from western Pa.; you can hear a little accent) gets my vote. Liberty and peace!

From Fr L

• Gentle Jesus, meek and mild?
• On not lying about Santa.

A Lutheran pastor in Australia calls Orthodoxy ‘Eastern-rite mainline’
He’s on the Missouri Synod side of Lutheranism, the good guys, not mainline.

Interesting. He wants something like the leaner, sounder church Pope Benedict is said to call for.

There are lots of Bad Orthodox, lots of badly/never-catechized Orthodox. Basically the same as Bad Roman Catholics (and Bad Greek Catholics). The church is part of the ethnic culture and while they don’t get their worldview from it (Roman Catholic apologists: can the Orthodox even teach a worldview?), rather taking that from secular culture, my guess is they expect the church to be the church. (So they don’t want to change the services or do the impossible like vote in women priests or gay weddings.)

Catholicism east and west is both confessional and big-tent. It has its set of teachings, non-negotiable, but it’s not a cult either. Lots of nominal/marginal people on a very long leash.

The Orthodox sellout on contraception is just like Protestants: they sound plausible and relatively conservative like ’50s mainliners and modern evangelicals. Paul VI stunk but he kept the faith on that.

The big questions are, thinking back to Adrian Fortescue’s attack on the ignorance of the Orthodox clergy, according to Venuleius... does Orthodoxy have the right stuff to keep it together doctrinally and liturgically whereas the mainline by its nature is fungible? (Despite Orthodoxy’s faults, Communism didn’t destroy it.) Is this communion of churches, little to do with each other but amazingly alike, and officially very conservative compared to the West, really fatally flawed ecclesiologically like Pastor Henderson and Roman Catholic apologists suggest, or is it just a case of, again, lots of Bad Orthodox? Can Orthodoxy go under the Pope without turning into above-average Novus Ordo like the Greek Catholics did?

The magisterium’s great; Roman Catholic moral theology’s the gold standard. But... why Vatican II and what it started? That can’t happen in Orthodoxy thanks to its disorganization. So... can the church have the best of both? Teaching church and grassroots traditionalism?

Reminds me: Owen once wrote that real Orthodoxy, old-country and ethnic, is like American East Coast big-city Roman Catholicism. Convertodoxy, the folks blogging about shopping at Whole Foods to keep the fasts, is... more like confessional Lutheranism, good and bad?

The big question for all Protestants is ‘On whose authority?’ That is, confessional Lutheranism just like the mainline is man-made.

From LRC

• Unlimited military detention of Americans. You read that right.
• Fascism. Thinking of my Occupy moment in which a young man yelled to me that Ron Paul’s a fascist. Individual liberty and the do-no-harm rule ≠ collectivism of any kind (identity politics; affirmative action/quotas/spoils; blood and soil/‘white power’; scapegoating), lots of war spending and de facto government control over business. Just like a fundamentalist is something specific in Protestantism, not just a conservative Christian who won’t buy into your agenda, fascism isn’t necessarily social conservatism/political incorrectness you don’t like. There are right-libertarians and left-libertarians.

Five badass soldiers... who were dogs
And as you can see, not German shepherds or Dobermans. From Cracked.

A good word for Ron Paul from Andrew Sullivan
Can Paul win? Sullivan says never say never and tells the neocons to stop the smears and give the man a fair chance.

I just found Thomas Fleming’s blog at the Daily Mail
I don’t agree with everything – teenagers have a right to free speech online – but pretty good

The early Soviet space program
At first they were winning the space race, scaring the world with Sputnik and Gagarin. The US won (landing on the moon) because the best Nazi scientists had the sense to run west to surrender to them. From Steve Sailer.

From Fr Z

• Gratiam tuam quæsumus. It’s actually ‘we beseech thee, Lord, pour thy grace into our minds’. The translation Pope Benedict ordered has lined it back up with traditional piety. The few prayers Catholics have a tradition of praying in English, such as in the Rosary and, though you don’t hear it much, the Angelus, have resisted dumbing down and even keep ‘thou’. The liturgical texts don’t have ‘thou’ but no matter; standard English now has only one form of ‘you’. ‘Thou’ only has sentimental value for some people. BTW I think the Angelus originally was a way to mark curfew times, with a nice religious lesson added.
• Looks like Sodom and Gomorrah really happened.
• The Catholic Church does not manufacture what is true, but looks at the way things are, the way God has given them to us. How everybody from Aristotle to classic Anglicans, who retained this from the church, understood reason.
• Recordings of the Latin responses.
• RIP Christopher Hitchens.

From RR

• Laissez-faire.
• Capitalism and socialism.
• Class-consciousness. Paul Fussell’s good reading (much of my philosophy as an editor is from him: getting rid of stilted copy and rewriting it simply), equal opportunity not equal outcomes and the problem is mid-century equal opportunity (the American dream) is going away; we’re turning into the Third World. Not a crack about immigrants (I don’t care where you’re from; play by our do-no-harm rule and you’re welcome) but saying there’s no more middle class; you have a few very rich and many very poor.

Six things movies love to get wrong about the workplace
From Cracked

Rhodesia was not South Africa
From Helen Rittelmeyer

From LRC

• On unions and getting good deals online.
• ‘Sulu’ on where no man or woman should ever have gone. FDR’s government (can’t blame the Old Right) put him, an American, in concentration camps during WWII for ‘looking like the enemy’. (Who didn’t have to be an enemy. All Japan wanted was an Asian empire. Nothing to do with the US including a kid from Los Angeles.) Fact: J. Edgar Hoover opposed it. Because he thought his FBI could deal with any sabotage (there wasn’t any from Japanese-Americans, and in Hawaii, where there were many, I think they were left alone because moving them was impossible) and he was enough of a gentleman of the old republic to know it was wrong. No, the progressives used blatant racism to get what they wanted.

BTW, strange how Admiral Kimmel was scapegoated for Pearl Harbor but General MacArthur, then a government fave, wasn’t for the attack on the Philippines.

Reasons not to take the Libertarian Party or Tea Party seriously
LP ’08 presidential candidate Bob Barr (the fakertarian: I left the LP because of him but still vote for LP candidates I like) endorses Newt Gingrich (just another mainstream Republican I won’t vote for) and local Tea Partier/hate target Christine O’Donnell (Delaware’s Sarah Palin, just another pretty GOP shill) Mitt Romney (he looks presidential, as if one were casting an actor to play the part: so what?).

No, thanks.

From the Mail

• Vocal fry. The white American girl voice (of a certain class on up) is changing or at least has a new fad. Young girls are imitating the stars, toughening up their voices so the Valley Girl tones (I remember when that wasn’t) now have a creaky growl to them. Talking like Ke$ha. This might surprise you but I don’t dislike it like I do Valley, and I like Ke$ha’s vocal hook. (Another one I like who might surprise you: Cee Lo Green. He’s basically in the Motown tradition vocally.) A thought: it sounds like a whiskey voice or somebody who smokes. Reason I don’t hate it though I like a pure, Valley-less tone best: unlike Valley, which seems to be trying to sound juvenile (grown women who sound like spoiled 11-year-olds), vocal-fryers are trying to sound grown-up. Fun fact from Cracked: Moon Unit Zappa recorded ‘Valley Girl’ 30 years ago to make fun of that type, which she went to school with and didn’t like. Promoting that style was the opposite of what she wanted. (Like her dad on disco with ‘Dancin’ Fool’.)
• Respect and the Greatest Generation. Pearl Harbor vets flip off obnoxious TV crew.
• Trout pout. Plastic surgery gone bad. Long story short, ladies, don’t have your lips done.
• Auctioning off the last stunt General Lee. Not my thing but nice. I’m sure at least one of the non-stunt cars is in a collection or museum. Yee ha.

Ad Orientem endorses Ron Paul

The SSPX
Again I’m fine with religious liberty and ecumenism rightly understood. (It’s Not About Latin™.)

Every interpretation of doubtful Conciliar texts, which contradict the Church’s teaching office, must be discarded. This is what the Society has always said, maintains Msgr. Fellay. The problem: The Vatican’s practice is in contradiction to this principle. “They say, everything, what was done in the Council is good.”

This Pope is backing off from that. He’s fixed the Novus Ordo in English!

The Orthodox tradition

• Rare but it happened: the Greek Catholics in America have a new nun who looks like an Orthodox nun (not very many of those here) and not a member of a Novus Ordo religious order. Regular readers know my line: most Greek Catholics are a kind of ethnic, above-average Novus.
• Venuleius reads Fortescue on the Greek Catholics and the Orthodox. Long story short, as nasty as it gets, he and Fr F have a point about the Orthodox’ faults. Counterpoint: the Orthodox’ cultural matrix is a grassroots traditionalism making a Vatican II impossible.

Myth-busting the unions
From Takimag

More seriously loving Christmas
East Lansdowne, Pa.

Sailer on style

• The decline in generational style changes.
• Are styles stagnating? It’s not just me getting older or my tastes. The past 20 years have been more or less alike.
• The second revolution in menswear, or the illusion of modern credit could be why so many dress down.

The only people I see dressed like me are black men who remember the ’50s.

And:

• Great moments in invade the world. Ew.
• Rhetorical question? Would TVs with subtitles improve reading among the poor?