Why Obama’s cracking down on the church: follow the money
Via Mark in Spokane

William Oddie (whom I heard preach in England once):

How come so many Catholics voted for him last time?

Rhetorical? The immigrant/workers’-union/ward-boss politics of the old Dems, theologically orthodox, socially conservative, cheerfully corrupt in practice, and in theory well-meaning leftists vs the WASPs keeping them down. In shorthand, on the left economically, on the right socially. (Like what third-way-ers believe in.) Throw in today’s peer-pressure liberalism and many/most Catholics still hit the D button except well-meaning culture warriors (they go to Mass and care about the babies) who vote with the pro-war Protestant right. (As part of that PC pressure, Catholics felt the same guilt as other whites for O. to use.) Which, together with Vatican II’s sellout in practice, gets to the article’s point, that the bishops had been funding local leftist causes for about 25 years; Obama’s slap is to try to get them back in line and keep the money coming.

Hmm. Rather than Al Green (that was cute; I’m not being sarcastic on that) he could fittingly sing Cee Lo Green (no relation, ha ha; actually I like his music) to that old constituency. ‘Well, f*ck you, ohhhhh.’

For now I still say the depression and the Dinkins effect will sink him anyway, no matter which mainstream puppet the Republicans run.

Again why Christians and everybody else should vote for Ron Paul
LRC yesterday addressed Christians (relayed by Joshua)

• If Catholics adhere to their traditions...
• Let God sweat the small stuff.

Takimag’s Kathy Shaidle on culture-wars stuff

• Inconvenient truths about Sundance.
• Girl Scout kooky.

From RR

• Stossel: what SOTU should have said.
• Church fights HHS order.
• A real foreign-policy debate.

Cracked facts

• About an acting career.
• About fistfights.

From Rod Dreher

• Catholicism and politics. Dan McCarthy: Readers deserve fair warning: today I am not a very observant Catholic. To hear the media tell it, Catholicism has only two categories, devout and dissident. Actually there are a lot of people who fall into neither set... A little over a generation ago there were enclaves of Catholic thinking within liberalism and conservatism – certainly the conservative movement once had an influential Catholic component. Now there are enclaves of partisan liberalism and conservatism within Catholicism. On the right, a political ecumenism has been pursued in the name of fighting the culture war, and while it may be necessary in some degree, it has politicized and protestantized many Catholic conservatives.
• Re-creating the Catholic ghetto.
• Obama’s f*ck-you to the old Democrats, the immigrant working-class Catholics. People I like, such as the Reagan Democrats and John Murtha. More from Pat Buchanan.
• What’s good and bad about ‘Mad Men’. I understand it’s starting again on March 25 and Matthew Weiner’s hinted it will end in two seasons, near the present.
  
  First the good:
  

  The reason I watch – and I assume this is the case for many other fans – is the aesthetic. Regardless of the moral degradation and heavy-handed critique of patriarchalism on display, we like to see depicted an age when ambition was still rewarded, when men and women regarded their public appearance seriously, when good music was still the order of the day, and when the American dream was still a dream within reason. In short, everyone likes a well-dressed man.
  
  IMHO it got good right around episode #6 when they finally stopped flogging the whole “aren’t we so much better now” meme.
  
  One reason I was initially drawn to “Mad Men” was the moral complexity of its characters. Nobody was all good or all bad – just like life.
  
  One thing I’ve appreciated about “Mad Men” is its exploration of the netherworld between ideals and reality.

  Like Dan McCarthy speaking for the Catholics who are neither hyper-devout nor lapsed. I like the traditional version of that. Like... a lot of people around 1960.
  
  But:
  
  I noticed of course that Don Draper doesn’t believe in much. ‘There’s an essential nihilism at the heart of the series.’ For all the good still in the culture then, the rot had set in so the self-destruction of the culture isn’t that surprising.

The capital of the US is not Tel Aviv

• Raimondo: Putting Israel first. The Achilles’ heel of the War Party.
• LRC: This scandal is not that easy to follow, but it looks like a Big Sister was caught by Big Brother on a federal wiretap which revealed that she was going to use her Congressional influence to help two officials of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) get their espionage-related charges reduced. The irony is that Harman, whose bowels are in an uproar over this wiretapping, is one of the many proponents in Congress for the government wiretapping of us sheeple.

From Takimag

• Crimethink and thinking ability.
• Wag the turban.

Accents


Boston Brahmin. They sound different from each other. The one on the left is definitely American with a couple of localisms; the one on the right more mid-Atlantic/partly English like George Plimpton and Bill Buckley.


Like that Italian TV sketch about 40 years ago: how American English sounds to people who don’t understand it. The British actors get the ‘music’, the characteristic sounds, of the accent.

Photos
Fire and Ice Festival, Mount Holly, NJ.




Kilroy was here.

Friendly husky.
They ‘sing’ (try to talk, halfway between barking and howling) like Mishka on YouTube. They had a sled demo running a lap pulling a practice sled on bicycle-like wheels in the grass and mud.

Hooray for La Vita’s Pizzeria.


One of those year-round Christmas shops, in a little 200-year-old house.


Revolutionary War re-enactors.
Because the winners write the history, most don’t remember it was a civil war. Benedict Arnold (whom the British didn’t like because of what he did, though he had understandable reasons) was the exception. Many Americans served under the king based on principle.


1963 architectural detail, Moorestown Mall. An anchor store that’s now a Boscov’s.

Look familiar?

The movies at home: two retro, one old



Canadian graffiti.



A good teen-party movie.



Good one.

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

• The do-no-harm rule/golden rule again. Today’s epistle, Fr James’ sermon jumping-off point.
• The music at Sung Mass today reminded me of Martha Eischen’s description of it: I have been the beneficiary of great grace and blessing as I have journeyed in my new “home”. My parish is Our Lady of Lourdes, Philadelphia, PA. We are surrounded with so much of what I grew up with as a privileged Anglo-Catholic. The music – organ prelude and postlude, Anglican processional and recessional hymns, and Gregorian chant in Latin for the Mass – is really just as good as old-school Anglican including Anglo-Papalist and, like Good Shepherd, Rosemont (where Eischen came from) used to be, American biretta-belt Anglo-Catholic.
• Those last two long (late 1800s-mid-1900s) looked alike, looking like the Roman Catholic Church before Vatican II, but are based on different ideas. The first, a small minority, really were what most people took ACs to be, would-be Roman Catholics (they wanted corporate union). They were mostly British (but most Britons weren’t and aren’t among them) and after V2 went Novus Ordo, which they are now as the British ordinariate. (No problem now that the Pope’s fixed it in English.) They don’t need a course about Anglican vs Catholic doctrine to be ordained because they never believed in Anglican doctrine! Once they’ve been nulla osta’d, all they need is a semester or speed course to get acclimated. (Freshman orientation, not plebe summer or boot camp.) The other also took many/most of their practices from Rome in the good old days but used more of the Prayer Book and took the position that they didn’t need to convert because they believed in something they called Anglicanism, pieced together from their spin on the classical English divines, that they said was just as much a ‘branch’ of the Catholic Church as Rome and the Orthodox; better, they said, because it didn’t innovate with the post-schism doctrines Rome defined. That’s right: rather like (other) Protestants accusing Rome of unbiblical doctrine, they thought their church was more conservative than Rome! They seem best represented now by the Bob Hart Continuers. Of course I don’t agree but I respect them.
• Then there’s the liberal version of the latter: many Episcopalians now and the mainliners who now run the Church of England. (The C of E also has Evangelicals.) ‘Affirming Catholics’: they believe nearly the same things about the creeds, the Mass and the sacraments as we do, and they love our liturgies and those liturgies’ gear, but it’s on their terms, not the church’s. Or to put it better, on the Anglican Church’s terms, not the Catholic Church’s: they don’t believe in an infallible church backing those creeds, that Mass and those sacraments but think their denomination’s power, by vote, to change any teaching is ‘the authority of the church’. (Doctrine is unrepealable in church infallibility.) Considering they’re now in communion with non-episcopal mainliners, it seems to me their logical conclusion isn’t the old branch theory based on claiming the historic episcopate but that the whole mainline, like the World Council of Churches, is the true church. I’m not angry at them. What’s the point? Out of respect I don’t blog about their business. I’m describing it here only to distinguish it from its Anglican relatives and from Catholic belief.
• Sort of like the difference between the few high-church Greek Catholics, who do what Rome wants – loving Orthodox liturgics and theological expression, so they don’t latinize the churches and services – and Orthodox and OicwR anti-Westernism hating the graceless Latin heretics. (Traditional Roman Catholicism doesn’t order or pressure you to hate Orthodox practices.) They look alike – so a Roman Catholic might mistake an unlatinizer/delatinizer for an anti-Westerner/schismatic – but are very much not.
• Off the top of my head, the things I like best about the Orthodox are the church as small parish/big ethnic family, grassroots traditionalism (no Novus), economy and Leonid Ouspensky’s view of icons (halfway between a picture or statue and God’s presence in the Eucharist).
• It’s a blessing to live in a city big enough and Catholic enough that Sung Mass is a quick trip from home. That (weekly Mass, just enough) and with Winfred Douglas’ diurnal at home (Benedictine breviary using the old BCP psalms and canticles), to echo Eischen, you have the best of ACism to live in a Novus-free world.

From Steve Sailer

• High-rise slums (the projects): maybe it wasn’t all Le Corbu’s fault.
• Why are SAT scores rising on the high end?
• Women socially dumb down.
• Gay: Cynthia Nixon, born that way or choice. A tiny minority, maybe about 3%, are born with that problem and deserve understanding. But the acts are still a sin. None of the government’s business.
• The forgotten. Everette Lee DeGolyer.

Croatia joins the EU
From antiwar.com

Reuters: Germany wants Greece to surrender control over its budgets
More. From Ad Orientem.

The Ron Paul newsletters
Andrew Sullivan seems to get it.

...when Paul has said what he has said in these debates, when he has walked into the lion’s den of a GOP primary and attacked the criminal justice system for racial bias, lacerated the war on drugs, and cut to the core of the delusions behind American global aggression, he deserves to be judged on his recent history as well as his increasingly distant past.

I acknowledge this newsletter incident is ugly, indefensible and, above all, cynical. I don’t think it is all that matters in the remarkable late career of congressman Paul. And that hunting for heretics rather than celebrating converts is a losing political strategy.

Man who would empty jails of mostly black drug offenders ≠ race-baiter. The platform matters, not a questionable campaign strategy 20 years ago. He still has all my support. Finito.

Paterno’s clear conscience

Well, when dealing with a Catholic believer, it is one thing to say that he died with no regrets. No one said that. What they said is that the elderly Paterno died with a “clear conscience.”

In other words, one can assume that he said a final confession and received last rites. The contents of that confession, any regrets or mistakes that were discussed, are between the dying man, his priest and God. It’s hard to put that in a news story. I know that. However, could journalists have done a bit more to set the context of that statement?

I don’t even follow football, let alone know much about the man other than, again, Penn State threw him under the bus for their lapse, arguably killing him. (Was he a Catholic believer?)


Italians often have an interesting relationship with the church partly because that relationship is so long. Churched, some say primally Catholic, but not necessarily churchy like the Irish used to be and many Poles still are. But considering the teachings of the church, GetReligion is being logical. It wouldn’t take too much prying to find out if what they said was in the context of the church.

RIP.

Moving pictures

• I like this casino commercial. Of course. Arty and old-style, down to the music.
• I haven’t been to a movie in about three years but Red Tails looks worth paying to see on the big screen. (Skip the commercial before the trailer.) I’ve read the critics including the predictable stuff at Takimag, and they have a point. It’s not history. Propagandistic as the flag-waving films from the period and exactly the kind of pseudo-history that white liberals would make up or pass along. (Clint Eastwood on the current cartoon history of WWII: the Tuskegee Airmen and Go for Broke soldiers singlehandedly liberated the concentration camps, the reason we the good guys were fighting, while the white soldiers guarded Manzanar. Fact: we were supporting players who helped the Soviets win WWII.) That said, it’s got the ’40s, a good message about black individual rights (just know ahead that the movie’s not fact) and, worth the big-screen ticket: CGI Mustangs, Messerschmitts and Flying Fortresses.
• Another one I’d like to see but worth waiting six months to see through Netflix: The Artist. The music in the trailer is 10 years ahead of the setting.

Five famous late bloomers
From Cracked

From the Anti-Gnostic

• Weaker members of Western society have to rely on predominantly white men with unfashionable attitudes to protect them, or even to help them down some steps. The truth in Jack Nicholson’s ‘You can’t handle the truth!’ witness-stand speech in A Few Good Men, even though it’s part of a setup in the movie.
• Obviously we do women a great disservice by forcing them into roles for which they are so manifestly unsuited, like being a riot cop. This is pure gnosticism: that the biological gender differences can be transcended through the force of correct, feminist ideology. Brian Mitchell’s Flirting with Disaster point: women in combat is dumb and dangerous.
• Again, the feminized social-democratic elite relies on men with the capacity to do ugly things, and the corresponding reactionary attitudes, to protect them from barbarism. Then they exploit their cocooned existence by demeaning the very men who keep barbarism at bay, mocking their values and blaming them for every social ill. When such men decide that the current elite are no longer worth the pay to protect them, female government officials will become pretty scarce.
• Real industry is sometimes dirty: Christopher Roach on SOTU ’12.
• What the Left left behind. The working class, ethnic nationalism, environmental advocacy, anti-war and economic populism.

On entrepreneurship and file-sharing
Takimag on the Kim Dotcom case. Reminds me of the Julian Assange and Bradley Manning cases: not necessarily the nicest guys but that doesn’t matter.

Have you noticed a strange undertone of snark on “60 Minutes” every time they feature an entrepreneur? Conversely, they grovel at the feet of pompous bureaucrats.

Standard lefty stuff. As Christian Lander wrote back when he was writing SWPL, the site, the way to shut them up is to bring up a corporation they like, like Ikea or Apple; the way somebody wrote on a photo of OWSers pointing out all the corporate-made gear on them. IIRC distributists/third-way-ers like neither big biz nor bureaucrats but you know my line: make a good product that benefits millions/that millions want to buy and we’ll talk.

This represents a deep divide in the American psyche. The right sees entrepreneurs as job machines who create wealth for everyone, and they view the government as a parasite thwarting both rich and poor. The left, in turn, portrays entrepreneurs as the parasites. In this instance, the left is wrong and I think it’s because they don’t understand the pie analogy. They think a rich person has taken more than his slice of the pie, which leaves less for the rest of us. They didn’t take math in college and don’t understand that “greedy” entrepreneurs keep creating more pies. While the left scoffs at the idea of more than one pie, they have no problem with Obama trying to synthesize the process by printing more money. They don’t mind the government having infinite cash, but when it comes to an individual having money to burn, they’d rather torch it all.

Big Business and Big Government, who still haven’t officially announced that they’re married, have been seeking to get even bigger lately.

It’s not about the artists.

The federal government’s three biggest lies
About banking, war and debt. From LRC.

Ordinariate news

• It’s not just for recent converts.
• No ban on age 70+ ordinations.

Who gave us the right to remake the world?
Pat Buchanan at @TAC

Homicide drop while gun ownership rises shows anti-gunners wrong
From RR

The US government’s war on Catholicism
Venuleius:

Any Catholic who fails to recognize that the United States Government, and the Obama Administration in particular, is at war with the Church is a fool. Last Friday’s decree from the Department of Health and Human Services that the “religious exemption” from the federal mandate that employers cover contraception — including abortifacients — in their employee health-care plans will toll out in August 2013 is not, as some pundits will tell you, a “compromise” with religious liberty; it is, rather, a smokescreen intended to distract voters this November from the fact that our President, and a bulk of the political party which supports him, has no regard for conscience or Catholicism.

My guess: most of the laity in what’s left of the church (after Vatican II) will remain Democrats like Joe Biden.

Adelson, Gingrich and the selling of America
From antiwar.com

How they taught us to hate home
From Rod Dreher

Daniel Larison on SOTU
Sign of a country running scared, or at least its government: a whiff of fascism

Like many others, I found the attempt to compare national unity to the discipline of a military unit to be unnerving and strange. Unfortunately, if the military is one of the very few institutions that the public trusts and respects, the idea that everything else should be more like the military might start to catch on, which would be a far worse mistake than the more common error of thinking that the government should function just like a business. The idea that “we” should all put aside our differences for the sake of “the mission” assumes that “we” all know what “the mission” is, and it also takes for granted that none of “us” can opt out of “the mission” but must simply do our part in making sure that “the mission” is successful.

Those sections of the speech were quite illiberal.

To the mainstream conservative, the economy is the smoke, not the fire
From RR

Daniel Nichols on ethnodox, converts and Greek Catholics
Largely true about ethnic vs convert.

Generally I like ethnic better.

The convert approach to fasting is off-putting. Spiritual pride, or a hobby/boutique religion for well-off folk who can afford to shop at Whole Foods (Whole Paycheck) or at least, like the old-school ethnics, are good cooks.

My impression is in practice the ethnics balance their church’s impossibly strict rule with ‘economy’, sort of like dispensations in the Roman Rite but less formal. (They’re not all scrupulous/Ned Flandersy with their parish priest like the convertodox and their ‘spiritual father’, playing monk.) So the fish and mac and cheese in Lent aren’t a big deal to people born into it.

I didn’t know that most of the OCA’s bishops are converts. Nice church: Slavs, Ruthenians, who were pushed out of the Greek Catholic Church 100 years ago for no good reason (the Roman Rite bishops didn’t want married priests in the US), going under their Russian cousins. Still very ‘Catholicky’ (a good thing) like Johnstown but non-Novus Ordo thanks to their isolation and with that grassroots conservatism that’s good about the Eastern churches.

I’ve never met a Greek Catholic, ethnic or convert (born Roman Riter), who was fanatical about the fasts, which in their church are really the modern Roman Catholic rules (not a putdown, just an observation). The high-church non-latinized minority (almost always converts) including the OicwRs may do the Orthodox rules but again they’re a minority of Greek Catholics.

My impression: a really holy person who happens to do all the fasts doesn’t talk about it.

The church can lower the bar on fasts. It’s just a rule.

Which approach is better: impossibly strict rule rarely enforced, an Eastern way that looks hypocritical to many Westerners, or changing the rule as happened to Greek Catholics? I don’t know.

There was the libs’ game at Vatican II as happened to meatless Fridays: praise a practice, then make it optional, which in practice abolished it.

My likes: high-church, non-Novus Ordo liturgy but moderation about fasting. The Mass is for everyone; the office available to all. Super-strict fasting is something I think few are called to.

Refugee conservative (sometimes ex) Roman Riters after Vatican II have been a mainstay and lifesaver for a few Greek Catholic parishes.

IIRC at least one such parish, in the Southwest, not in the Slavic-American home base of the Northeast, has been majority born Roman Riters. I’ve been to one Southern city where the Greek Catholic parish was a conservative Catholic magnet, under a non-ethnic, Rome-trained, high-church (non-latinized) priest. Good folks.

My guess is the convertodox boomlet was a flash in the pan 20 years ago. The number-one reason the few converts switch is still marriage. The Orthodox and Greek Catholic numbers will keep going down as are the Roman Catholic real numbers (seemingly steady because of counting Mexican immigrants).

Prayer beads: older than the rosary and Christianity; the East were the first Christians to have them; no St Dominic in the Balkans or Russia so no native devotion of the rosary. Crossover where East and West meet? Sure. Rite controls what you do in church. Devotion is free.

Derb reacts to SOTU
Pretty good but my rule of thumb about immigrants is: Welcome. Play by our do-no-harm rule. Otherwise out you go. From Takimag.

A Binks mega-post

• A tribute to Byzantium, long the front in the war against Islam. Regular readers know I don’t Muslim-bait/bash (mainstream pols’ scare tactic/Two Minutes’ Hate – it’s not ‘they hate our freedom’ bullsh*t; stay the hell out of it in Palestine etc. and leave them alone) but it’s a false religion. (I think Binks and I are 180 on Israel.) Turkey is really Greece.
• Leftard bullying, or the Niceness Police versus a schoolkid over nothing. The road to hell and all that, or from well-meant lefty charity (Christianity minus Christ or common sense it seems), good Lord, deliver us.
• O tempora over the Costa Concordia. Don’t blame Italians (evviva Commandante Gregorio De Falco). The same cowardice happened aboard the Estonia.
• Adolescence is only a marketing campaign as Frances McDormand wonderfully said at the start of Almost Famous. Something guys like Roger Sterling made up during the postwar economic and baby boom to sell stuff. Until the Victorian era and modern nanny-state, there were no teens. There were children, then young adults. Children might work in the household, farm, or family business. No extended immaturity via baby-sitting schools & party-hearty universities. Heck, these days some folks can even make it into their mid-thirties on the big baby plan.
• Evil Google? For all the good it’s done, watch it. Big Brother.

And much more.

Redmond vs. Palo Alto over Yale or jail
From Steve Sailer

Neither Darwinism nor creationism
From Hilary

Ron Paul answers SOTU
From Lew Rockwell’s Political Theatre

Just copping a negative or cynical attitude ≠ shortcut to being cool
From Cracked

Reaction to snippets of SOTU
Bullsh*t. He makes it sound like this country is running scared and going down.

Cutting the government? Great! Giving the president more power to do it? Not so much.

Subsidiarity
Right, the two Catholic candidates don’t get this at all. (And I don’t care that they’re Catholic. I’d never vote for them.) It reminds me of the ‘200% American’ super-patriotism of the immigrants’ kids especially during the early Cold War, around the same time mainstream America nearly fully accepted Catholics. The exceptionalism/national greatness/interventionism both candidates buy. A powerful cultural-national myth hard for Catholics to break free from and a temptation for well-meaning social conservatives. Mix that with Catholics’ residual working-class politics and the Catholic social-justice left (the secular left with Jesus talk) saying welfare is the corporal works of mercy and it’s even harder.

Another Ron Paul person: Oliver Stone

In “Our History” you ask if there’s “a potential wild card in an internal economic collapse of the empire”? Is America an empire? And if so, do you foresee the fall of the empire?

Yes. Yes, both. I don’t think it’s a wild card; I think it’s a given. There’s no way that we can continue this spending spree. In fact, I think in many ways the most interesting candidate – I’d even vote for him if he was running against Obama – is Ron Paul. Because he’s the only one of anybody who’s saying anything intelligent about the future of the world.

Why is it necessary for every candidate – except for Ron Paul – to pay obeisance to this hypocrisy that the U.S. is a good force in the world, and that it is the dominant force, and can be the policeman of the world? Since when? What gave us that right? The right of empire, the right of force?

They’re based on this idea, this myth, Woodrow Wilson passed on when we entered World War I that we’re exporting democracy and freedom.

I’m still rooting for some element of capitalism to come through and be fair...!

Of course Stone’s right about empire and not learning from history being wrong.

No sale: Henry Wallace was a Communist traitor. As, in practice, was his boss. Yalta. Want to prevent the Cold War? Stay out of WWII and let the Nazis and Soviets destroy each other. Imperial Japan = Red China today.

A literal coup for LBJ? I don’t rule it out.

Jim Morrison: Musical minimalist cool. Nothing more. Epitomizes the self-destruction in the culture he’s identified with. A romanticized bohemian; what else is new? Steve Sailer would have something to say about the son of well-bred folk (admiral father) being a natural leader of the artistic élite (looked it up: he had a 149 IQ, a literal genius).

High Mass at Baltimore’s newest Catholic church
Mount Calvary

That’s life

• Padre Tex on decisions and vocation/state of life. There is a romantic notion that Christians must always choose the road less traveled and then romantically mourn the loss of the other. It’s quite silly, of course, but there you are. Sometimes we must indeed take the road less traveled, but not usually.
• And that’s not life: four flawed life lessons from movies.

Five forms of mind control you’re exposed to daily
From Cracked

They forgot corny, effective soft sell such as: ‘Ungh! Hot lady next to wheel! Make me want wheel!’ (Seth MacFarlane, ‘Family Guy’.)

A natural explanation for much of church:

You emotionally bond with people you sing with: Scientists have discovered that when we perform synchronized activities such as singing songs, reciting chants or even as simple an act as walking together, we end up feeling more connected to the people we’re performing these activities with. Because it turns out it’s not what you’re saying or singing or chanting that matters. It’s just the fact that you’re performing these activities in unison with other people.

From Steve Sailer

• Of course, dentists really can fill cavities, but teachers can’t actually make everybody equally smart so that, as the federal law demands, no child is left behind.
• Judging from the small bits of modern Cuba I’ve seen in movies over the last decade, there’s an even greater irony here. Castro’s Cuba is something of a time capsule of mid-century America. As I wrote in a review of the 2004 movie-in-verse Yes by doctrinaire English leftist Sally Potter: “Ironically, Cuba turns out, due to Castro’s stultifying tyranny, to look like a well-preserved slice of the Eisenhower Era, full of ’57 Chevys and Hemingway-worshipers.” If Raymond Chandler, Robert Heinlein, James M. Cain, and Mickey Spillane decided to come back to life for one day in 2012 to take a taxi to a bar for a couple of drinks, they might well choose Havana as the place that most reminds them visually of the good old days.
• Education majors are dumb.
• Dumb: Olympic women’s boxing.
• Men dominate professional comedy.
• False flag.
• Cruise-liner captains. Why the Costa Concordia story gave me déjà vu: the Oceanos. The John Jacob Astor story. This understated but memorable incident didn’t even make the 1997 movie Titanic, presumably because it didn’t fit the Celtic Good v. WASP Bad and Feminist (but Hot) Women v. Male Chauvinist Pigs dynamics that James Cameron suffused the movie with. Obviously, Cameron knows a lot about what contemporary audiences want to pay to see.
• French backward in treating autism.

Easy ways to get rich you wish you’d thought of
From Cracked

Thomas L. Knapp thinks it’ll be Gingrich

How to destroy the education racket
Roissy:

In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., in the first and most famous of the disparate impact theory cases, that the use of broad-based aptitude tests in hiring practices was a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Racial spoils instead of merit. So that’s when the rot set in.

The answer to busting the hyperinflationary tuition cost curve is to overturn the Griggs ruling.

RIP Joe Paterno
I still say they threw him under the bus

When I saw this I thought of what Elena Maria Vidal wrote:

I lived in State College for thirteen years and I could write tomes about the crap that goes on in that town, the injustice and corruption. JoePa is not just king in State College; he is god in State College.

Sure, it’s screwed up that those people worship football. But he still deserved better.

Not a bad guy.

Reminds me of the folk Catholicism/unofficial saints Arturo Vasquez used to write about.

Third Sunday after Epiphany
Sung Mass ‘Adorate Deum’ at Our Lady of Lourdes

I don’t think SS. Vincent and Anastasius were commemorated: not done in the 1962 Missal?






1957 Maryknoll Missal with Cardinal Cushing’s imprimatur.

The gospel: Domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum.

Fr James quoted Chesterton.

Yicch

Results for South Carolina Republican Primary (U.S. Presidential Primary)
Jan 21, 2012 (100% of precincts reporting)
Newt Gingrich: 243,153 = 40.4%
Mitt Romney: 167,279 = 27.8%
Rick Santorum: 102,055 = 17%
Ron Paul: 77,993 = 13%
Rick Perry: 2,494 = 0.4%
Other: 8,192 = 1.4%

Our man won’t get the nomination. The Mormon robot will get it (he’s better-looking and voters are that dumb about that; people still hate Gingrich from the ’90s and the gossip about his personal life will sink him like Herman Cain) and the presidency. Obama will lose because of the depression and the Dinkins effect (he can’t guilt white voters twice). I’ll vote LP or if they run another dog like Barr (Johnson’s good enough) I’ll stay home a second time.

Of course I don’t want Romney but if I were his campaign manager:

• Pour on the family-values corn syrup. He’s perfect for that. Squeaky-clean Mormons and attractive couple. (The yuppie-woman swing vote’s yours. He’s the handsome good husband.)
• Not that the dopey Prot right matters (Santorum appeals almost only to them; most Catholics are still Dems) but just in case, do what Mormons always do with outsiders: don’t tell the whole truth about their goofy, stupid theology and by so doing just about convince everybody it’s only another conservative Protestant church, one that made a mistake about multi-wives a long time ago. Hell, compare it to mainstream churches being OK with slavery way back. That’ll shut ’em up.
• Take Bain and greed and make them a positive. He’s as shrewd as he’s handsome: if he could make a killing in business, just think how he’ll turn the country around! (Which might work because most people think the government = the country = them.)

What if I were Newt’s Karl Rove?

• Sell him as the alpha bad-boy maverick of American conservatism (‘charisma’, which Romney doesn’t have). Again, spin the bad press to good, or any press is good press. (Or that should be ‘any Web is good Web’, Twitter etc. since next to nobody still reads newspapers or magazines.) That Callista’s not unattractive for her age helps.

Gingrich’s contribution to American history: he held Clinton in check, helping a boom time with less government. An accident.

...even though he’s not as good as his dad, Rand in ’16?

I don’t care

• Any candidate’s religion.
• Gingrich’s love life. None of my business.
• That Romney speaks French. That’s nice.
• What country Obama’s from.
• What race he is.
• What the First Lady is like.
• Don’t mind if you do but I don’t follow sports.
• The gays as long as they respect my rights in turn.
• Online Orthodoxy.
• The Anglican Communion.

About 1-1½ inches of snow with a crust of ice today
Mild winter so far

Baltimore’s newest Catholic church
As of tomorrow: Mount Calvary. As you can see, at heart it’s long been with the church, part of the magic of real Anglo-Catholicism, a charming variant of pre-Vatican II; a transfusion by Pope Benedict. Ad multos annos.

From LRC

• The Titanic effect. The main problem with the Costa Concordia wasn’t just Francesco Schettino (to be fair he’s understandable and all too human but had no business being a ship’s captain) but people acting like they were on the Titanic when the ship had only run aground just offshore. The safest thing to do was stay/hold onto the wreck and wait. Sick-joke idea: a YouTube of the capsized ship (compare those cruise ships to the Queen Mary, the United States, moored here in South Philly, or even the elegant German-built Pacific Princess on ‘The Love Boat’, now holed up in Genoa after its new owner went broke: I always thought those top-heavy modern floating hotels were a disaster waiting to happen; didn’t anybody watch The Poseidon Adventure?) with clips of Capt. Gregorio De Falco (the hero of the week and the answer to all the putdowns about Italians this week) chewing out Schettino with Celine Dion’s Titanic song playing over it all. The blog’s resident naval officer: if Schettino knew what he was doing he would have counterflooded the port side righting the ship and getting all the passengers safely off.
• The professional ‘pro-life’ crowd. A substitute for Catholicism after all that Vatican II crap and as useless as the Tea Party.

The Kerbaugh Mansion
Tudor-style, designed by Trumbauer.

The home of Rosemont School of the Holy Child, Mother Cornelia Connelly’s order.

Tom Woods on whom Catholics should vote for
Sure, Santorum has six kids and knows gay marriage is a leave-taking of reality. Irrelevant.

Hooray for the Italian coast guard
May the few victims rest in peace and God have mercy on Schettino

Reasons never to vote for Newt Gingrich
From the Ron Paul campaign

I am going to describe a candidate for you right now, and I want you to think about whether or not you would support him.

This candidate was for the individual mandate that served as the model for “ObamaCare.” He was originally for the TARP bank bailouts before he was against them. He joined with Nancy Pelosi to promote the anti-business “global warming” agenda.

He slammed Paul Ryan’s budget plan as “extreme,” calling it “right-wing social engineering.”

You might think I am talking about Mitt Romney. Heck, you might think I’m talking about a liberal Democrat. But I’m not.

That candidate I’m talking about is Newt Gingrich. He is what I like to call a “counterfeit conservative.”

And I have barely even scratched the surface!

My campaign team has put together a great video that tells you more about Gingrich and his liberal positions over the years. It tells you how he flip-flopped on a host of important issues.

And it shows, despite his claims, he is simply not a conservative.

I don’t care about his marriages or that he’s in the church.

BTW I’ve read one of his books, 1945 (obvious appeal: period), a flag-waving fantasy in which a non-interventionist America gets its comeuppance but bounces back, doncha know, when the victorious Germans cross the Atlantic and invade. No sale.

What Obama hath wrought

How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

(1) Codify indefinite detention into law;
(2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process;
(3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens;
(4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets;
(5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible;
(6) enter and prosecute such a war;
(7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports;
(8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots;
(9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy;
(10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits;
(11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries;
(12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed);
(13) reauthorize the Patriot Act;
(14) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

I submit that had Palin or Cheney or Rumsfeld or Rice or Jeb Bush or John Bolton or Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney proposed doing even half of those things in 2008, you’d have declared them unfit for the presidency and expressed alarm at the prospect of America doubling down on the excesses of the post-September 11 era. You’d have championed an alternative candidate who avowed that America doesn’t have to choose between our values and our safety.

So how’s all that hopenchange working out for you?

From Daniel Nichols.

On those Marines peeing on corpses
Takimag doesn’t race-bait for a change and takes the high road for peace

From Mark in Spokane

• Margaret Thatcher on socialism. On the floor of the House of Commons.
• What’s wrong with Scottish independence.
• Yikes! Buchanan fired. I’m not really on board with nativism/anti-immigration but still. I like Pat.

Slide show: first anniversary of the English/Welsh ordinariate
For now the British one including Scotland. Mgr Newton does Solemn Evensong and Benediction at St James, Spanish Place, London. Too tired to do a real blog post so here’s some NLMish church porn. Enjoy!

Description from Fr Barnes.

From Deborah Gyapong at English Catholic.

The temptation to command a social system is present in Christians
From Ordered Liberty (different from Mark in Spokane)

MLK rundown
By which I don’t intend to run him down (philandering, plagiarism and radical leftism, the last being why principled conservatives opposed him in his day, not racism – you can read all about those elsewhere online).

• Saying you admire him is de rigueur, especially if you’re a conservative running for office? That said, it’s not necessarily politically correct pusillanimity. Regardless of the man’s own politics, whatever they were, hooray for individual liberty, the rights to sit where you want and sit for any exam and get any job you qualify for. Not black rights. Individual rights. I have a dream today.
• Someone explained to me years ago that 1) not all blacks in King’s day were poor (he was top-class, vacationing in the Caribbean to unwind; there was a segregated black professional class: doctors, lawyers... and ministers; both King and Jeremiah Wright come from that) and 2) his real effect was to open white society to his class: smart people able to take a place in it. Steve Sailer would agree: most didn’t. So yes, I both agree with King as far as he was pro-liberty (real equal opportunity, not racial spoils) and with Sailer on the reality I’ve seen all my life (the Man’s not keeping them down; a lot of people just aren’t very book-smart).
• One reason I like this holiday is it’s a trip back to ’63. Which reminds me: the dog work for this movement, good, bad and well-intended, was done by ‘mid-century’, that is, the ’50s and ‘good’ ’60s. (IIRC, blame Nixon for affirmative action, in the ’70s, but he was mid-century.) The hippies didn’t do jack. Just relatively well-off white kids partying on Daddy’s dime. (In a boom economy like the one the Greatest Generation and Don Drapers built you could go slumming then drop back in any time.)
• I think mainstream society is as afraid of freedom (they’ve been brainwashed) as it is of radical race-based collectivism so it’s funny to see, year after year, how the holiday, the image of the man, is neutered/bowdlerized. What the f*ck do kids making pillowcases for hospital patients or old-folks’ homes, let alone care packages for soldiers sent to wars, the kind of which King rightly opposed, have to do with liberty for blacks (and all people) or with King’s message? Been saying for years the next degeneration will be service projects in his name for homeless pets. It’s happened.

Aslan’s story
From ham-fisted Jesus metaphor to bewildered kitty. (Not an atheist taunt: the sound Catholic Tolkien thought Narnia was Lewis’ dumb ripoff of his work.) He lives in the basement of the house I live in. His person left him behind after a breakup so the ex had to put up with his nervous breakdown, peeing on things (‘he’s mad’ – of course!). So he seemed to have been banished to the unfinished basement, though Ollie says he’s happier there. Doesn’t look it. His parents were outdoor cats – feral? So it seems he’d be happier as a barn cat than a house pet (he’s unsocial but not vicious) but as he’s crazy and never lived outdoors (he’s always trying to get out though), he can’t hunt.

Looks like Morris if he starved himself to Mr Bigglesworth’s weight.

Mormons and Episcopalians
What do they have in common besides whiteness? Both arguably are English Calvinism far worsened at the ‘Enlightenment’, one heading into unbelief tolerated in practice under an orthodox shell of creed (it’s still Christian for now) and Catholic order, the other on what looks like a drug trip or at least Joseph Smith’s fertile imagination (it’s not Christian; it’s a new gnostic religion that uses the name of Jesus; latter-day Islam minus the Arabs).

Nobody joins either for truth reasons.

Mormonism is obviously crap to anybody who really reads it; their big draw isn’t their theology but a healthy nostalgia for family-values churchianity (why the chattering left hate Mitt Romney, not for the good reasons never to vote for him). They deliberately misrepresent themselves (lie) as just another conservative Protestant church. Even their famous missions (during which young Romney almost lost his fiancée back home), which don’t really work to convert people (do you listen to door-to-door evangelism? Me neither) but like most of that social matrix (cult), keep people so busy that they can’t see the religion is a made-up bunch of hooey.

(Libertarian religious-freedom shout-out: as long as you don’t go all Warren Jeffs and hurt people, like most fundamentalist Mormon churches do, the real Mormons should be free to practise their doctrine and have multiple wives. No state interference. Islam’s sensible on that too: a man may have up to four if he can support them. So besides the law of God being written in every man’s heart, the normal way of love etc., AFAIK only the very rich like the king of Jordan do. Same for Episcopal gay weddings: even though it’s a leave-taking of reality, as long as you respect my religious freedom, don’t mind if you do!)

I’ve heard of only one Catholic, semi-famous in church circles, in at least 40 years who converted to Anglicanism for truth reasons, the late Rev. Louis Tarsitano. And he was conservative. As a seminarian apparently he read the classical English divines and thought they were telling the truth, so he became an Episcopalian and then for many years a Protestant-minded Continuer. I don’t think he did it just to be ordained and married. Just like to Bob Hart’s crew, respect.

Next to no Catholics switch, century-old Episcopal wishful thinking (let’s americanize the immigrants, now in the form of political correctness) notwithstanding. The few who do almost always do because of marriage: the boulevard of broken vows as Luke Evan recently put it. Divorced and remarried. The occasional priest or nun who wants to keep doing the only job they know but on their terms (they had to leave because they fell in love). Not that many homosexuals do because there just aren’t that many homosexuals.

Romney not only could be a central-casting president but a central-casting society-wedding Episcopal minister or the second lead in The Bishop’s Wife opposite Cary Grant.

The article Bill Tighe sent me that got me thinking about this.

Sunday: More good signs of Pope Benedict’s reign
Walked to Mass at the town parish church in good old-school fashion (fedora, suit and topcoat as it’s wicked cold: a dusting of powder snow overnight and a clear sky now so no insulation to keep the heat from buildings etc. close to the ground).

• Father Administrator, a six-foot-something vocations recruiting poster, wears a cassock! He’s a Pope Benedict man. Hope to see a biretta soon. I’ve spotted a fiddleback at a big city church so one should show up here. (Not today. Plain modern Gothic but all according to the rules.)
• As Fr African Assistant (his English is hard to understand) celebrated (the earliest, lowest Mass, most orthodox Catholics’ lifeline during the 40-year novusordism winter), Fr Administrator preached, in cotta (Roman surplice really: long) and old stole! Good riddance, ’70s vestments.
• The parish patron had a feast this past week. Fr Administrator had a Latin High Mass (I assume Novus).
• Fr Administrator is big on that patron, someone who arguably never existed but is OK for private devotion. (1800s devotion based on an archæological find that was misread; turns out there is no evidence this person was real. Expunging this person liturgically – done at the end of the good old days – was nothing to do with post-conciliar calendar-cleaning, much misunderstood. People – St Christopher for example – are not de-sainted. They just don’t clutter the Roman Rite universal calendar any more.) Same rules apply as for private revelation: church approval means the legend is not heresy and there’s no proof it’s a hoax. You don’t have to believe in it! (Even though you can name churches after it: confusing.) I can take or leave the legend and its devotions but of course I defend the principles of the invocation of saints and the rule I quoted on private revelation. Like a Catholic Anglican or Catholic Lutheran, my thinking’s Christ-, Eucharist- and liturgy (Mass and office)-centred. (Mary is the Mother of God so her image is here, much loved, but I’m not Mary-crazy. The rosary is my default office substitute, often while driving, as my job in a dying industry runs me into the ground.) But the legend, at least in Fr Administrator’s practice, comes in an orthodox ‘package’ so as long as we’re clear on the teaching, may the devotion thrive!
• A treat: real chant, in English, for the Agnus Dei, from the sweet little old lady who’s probably been a cantrix for 40 years. (She kneels for Communion! So she’s on board with Benedict’s renewal.)
• Ugh! The lady Eucharistic ministers, two of them at a well-attended Low Mass, and Communion in the hand the finger-grabbing way are still around. Like I wrote, the Pope and Fr Administrator have to choose their battles. As long as the Mass text is fixed, and it is! So 40-year-old ‘traditions’ stick around for now. Wise toleration. Churchy people (liturgy geeks and heresy-hunters like us bloggers and some of the simply shellshocked trads) see the agenda behind the EMs but I imagine the unchurched don’t: it just looks like appropriate lay participation like glorified altar boys. (Speaking of the chierichetti, none showed up for this Mass.) This attempt by the libs to soft-sell women’s ordination will always stall because the church’s mind and heart seem to say WO is impossible.
• Anglo-Catholic extra: After Mass the sweet lady cantrix sang a new hymn to the parish patron, to the tune of ‘Jesu! my Lord, we thee adore’.

In other news:

• Fr Catania and Mt Calvary, Baltimore, will be in the church by the end of the month.
• Bill Tighe brought this to my attention. The Neocatechumenate. I don’t know what to say. Seems like a cousin of that other devout, well-meant low-church post-conciliar phenomenon, now on the wane, the charismatic movement. I’ve met a lot of nice older folk in pro-life activism, WWII and Korean War generation, who dove into that because it was the only doctrinally sound, non-skeptical game in town from their parishes 30-40 years ago. With that you had the weird occurrence of so-con imitation evangelicals, even orthodox doctrinally (charismatic Catholics love Communion, Mary and miracles), and old Modernist priests and church workers working together. (All they had in common besides ‘in Jesus’ name’ was this anti-high church, anti-pre-conciliar mentality. The Thomas Day factor.) But yeah, weird cult-like church-in-a-church stuff, militant anti-high churchmanship (from Spaniards?!) and iffy on doctrine (anti-transubstantiation: sound general quarters). Like those charismatic covenant-community cults and their rulers, these two Spaniards are basically their own Pope. Obviously the church, the bishops, should watch these folks like a hawk. Nip it in the bud if need be like the Bishop of Mostar did to the charismatic ninnies at Mud Gorge, case closed.

Why teleportation won’t happen
Today’s Cracked hit

From Roissy

• Facebook hamsters. And his reply, not for the squeamish.
• Sexy quotes and lurid links. Lots here.

From Ius Honorarium

• Americanism.
• Election thoughts.

RC-Orthodox dialogue: quotation from an e-mail

My experience of the “Orthodox in union with Rome” and of the Catholics enamored of the East is that they always vague and noncommittal about the real problems in reconciling the Catholic Church with the Orthodox. The hopes they usually express in their conclusions have little basis in the description they’ve offered.

But boy, do they get shirty when you point this out.

There’s only one real problem but yeah.

NH: 2nd
Not bad

Results for New Hampshire Republican Primary (U.S. Presidential Primary)
Jan 10, 2012 (85% of precincts reporting)

Mitt Romney 81,634 = 39.2%
Ron Paul 47,777 = 22.9%
Jon Huntsman 35,105 = 16.8%
Newt Gingrich 19,812 = 9.5%
Rick Santorum 19,509 = 9.4%

Feminism and affirmative action: the road to hell and all that
The American College just did a little survey of small-business owners and found that most prefer a financial adviser of the same sex.

So what’s the experts’ answer? Try to get more women to be financial advisers to please women clients. It’s about financial companies’ making more money by pandering, not trying to give the best service.

Reminds me of learning from Cracked that one condescending company thought it would be a winner to sell hammers and screwdrivers to ladies by painting them pink.

Please. Any owner with a brain doesn’t care which sex you are but if you know numbers.

Folk wisdom: most men are better at math. Maybe not as many women want to be advisers and that’s why. No conspiracy against them.

Of course women who can do the work should have the chance to do it.

But this is ridiculous.

From Roissy

• Japan’s glorious stagnation.
• Seven ways feminism is destroying American women.

Consumer culture’s top five failures
Including why vintage clothes are better besides looking good and keeping an era alive. They’re better made.

Cheap clothes that fall apart. I’ve got a pair of 60-year-old cap-toe oxford shoes that are near-perfect after decades of hard use. I had a modern pair of the same shoes from the same company that dissolved into a puddle of minced cow product within a year. The old pair of shoes cost a lot more when new; Americans built them. The new shoes were constructed by slave labor somewhere in China. I’m happy to pay extra for stuff that won’t turn into dog food in a year or two, but obviously there is a market for walking around in shoe-like potted meat product.

Thought of product flops recently as Donna got a 1:18 model car like the ones I have, this one (shown above) of a ’58 Edsel. Never understood why people hated it. Not at all a dog like the Pinto or Yugo. It’s a nearly typical sharp design of that year, with a V-8 giving it a lot of power. Sure, not the best styling like the Pontiac Bonneville, Plymouths and DeSotos for example (those Chryslers had cool fins but not over the top like the ’59 Cadillac). Then again I don’t think the iconic (the ‘Happy Days’ ’50s) ’55-’57 Chevys are particularly good-looking.



A ’59 Edsel Corsair we spotted in Medford, NJ.

The best-looking of the three years of Edsels.
From Takimag.