Why Democrats lost the redneck vote
From Takimag

FWIW get ready for President Robot

Results for Michigan Republican Primary (U.S. Presidential Primary)
Feb. 28, 2012 (>99% of precincts reporting)
Mitt Romney, 409,899 = 41.1%
Rick Santorum, 377,521 = 37.9%
Ron Paul, 115,712 = 11.6%
Newt Gingrich, 65,016 = 6.5%
Other, 29,024 = 2.9%

Results for Arizona Republican Primary (U.S. Presidential Primary)
Feb. 28, 2012 (100% of precincts reporting)
Mitt Romney, 216,805 = 47.3%
Rick Santorum, 122,088 = 26.6%
Newt Gingrich, 74,110 = 16.2%
Ron Paul, 38,753 = 8.4%
Other, 6,875 = 1.5%

Why are neoconservatives so anti-Russian?

From antiwar.com

• War with China not inevitable if we follow Washington’s, Jefferson’s and the libertarian policy: trade with all, entanglements with none. But wasn’t the shift from British to American power cosmetic/an inside job? (The Rhodes Group/CFR.) Same empire, same people (ethnos), only the HQ moved west to the ex-colonies after WWI and definitely after WWII.
• The Mossad’s long given the marching orders to AIPAC. The US capital oughtn’t be Tel Aviv.
• Nebosja Malic on Kosovo.

Faiths and public affairs
From RR

Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz, ‘The Girl from Ipanema’

Dave Brubeck, ‘Take Five’
Paul Desmond on alto sax

Tommy Dorsey, ‘Marie’

Charlie Barnet, ‘Cherokee’

Kingship again

Where there is a split in the Catholic Church today is with respect to the practical import of the doctrine.

From Modestinus.

For the freedom and exaltation of holy mother church
Chris Johnson takes down the old libs of America. (Modernists who think they can change the church, not to be confused with Bad Catholics who vote liberal.) They’re back on Obama’s side like he planned but he’ll still lose (the depression, and white guilt only gets you one win).

20 things we can learn about America’s future from Detroit’s death
More from LRC

From Joshua

• By any standards a scientific genius and one of the most intelligent human beings that may ever have lived, Pascal never supposed that humankind’s problems could be solved if only people were smarter.
• Doctor who found cause of Down syndrome moves closer to canonization. Jérôme Lejeune.
• The more we look at the brain, the less it looks like a device for creating consciousness.

Nostalgia: a taste of the eternal
Charles Coulombe at Takimag. I’ve never seen ‘Downton Abbey’!

Three culture-wars stories
Part of libertarianism’s appeal is in it the so-cons and so-libs can get along, agreeing on the golden rule/do-no-harm principle, so it often takes a bye on the culture wars, but...

• Interview with Wendy McElroy on feminism in America. From RR.
• Marriage. One of the most bizarre things going on right now is the debate as to whether two men or two women can marry each other. We seem, in a strange fit of corporate mental illness, especially narcissism, to have forgotten what we are about. The purpose of marriage, from the beginning of human society, has been simple and straightforward. It is to ensure that men are responsible for the children they beget. Period. Should the state define marriage? It seems to me people will ‘do it’ (even educated fleas do it) regardless; humanity will go on. The libertarian answer: live and let live, don’t mind if you do (including joining or starting a church that claims gay marriage) but you can’t force us to play along. Libertarian duty alongside rights, for Mark: defending both the tiny gay minority’s right to live in peace and our right not to be forced to take leave of reality. From The Cavalier’s Commonplace Book.
• The teacher and the N-word. Well-meant PC charity (Christian ethics derailed from Christian theology) gone haywire, predictably in a state school; another Huckleberry Finn news story essentially. Principal: context, idiot. Teaching kids who are ready for it about that word and its place in history is of course part of education.

Sunday

• Occasionally halting Latin in a broad American accent, one of the best sounds in the world. It’s Not About Latin™ but it’s good to hear a typical priest learning how to say the old Mass.
• Good stuff at the town parish church. Walked there on Ash Wednesday. A big mission crucifix now on a 100-year-old column, on the epistle side. Fr Administrator, a Pope Benedict man, in cassock, Roman surplice and embroidered traditional stole. Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return. Sure, the wording and music were Novus Ordo-esque but it’s getting better all the time. The high altar’s reredos not only has six candles but reliquaries. I wouldn’t be surprised if the altar rail’s used again and you start seeing a biretta and some eastward celebrations.
• Carnival: classic Arturo on real Catholic culture and trads.
• Modestinus: development. The Catholic Church can’t invent new doctrine or repeal old so no problem.
• When Anglo-Catholicism was plausible. The stuff against the Pope, where you heard it, was as almost always an ex post facto rationalization (not so of Bob Hart and his friends) but after Vatican II, 20-40 years ago, when the local Catholics were doing a yucko impression of Protestants (Thomas Day explained it), you had charming little Anglican parishes (even an old immigrant schism or two doing a good thing, charming grassroots traditionalism: St Anthony’s, Hackensack) doing the ‘full faith’, pre-V2 ethos, as a kid you took the high churchmanship you experienced at face value and despite your denomination’s mainline Protestant craziness there were not only sound priests but more than one sound bishop (no Catholic bishops, no church), forming a church within a church, you could cobble together a case (and, as a layman, pretend the craziness didn’t exist/ignore the denomination). Now though, that mainline craziness inevitably is winning (that’s Anglicanism’s true nature; ACNA is Episcopalianism 1.0) and this Pope has Catholics being themselves again. I’m happy with organ preludes and postludes and processional and recessional hymns added onto a great high-church classical-music program (chant and polyphony, truly liturgical) and a big dose of Latin once a week in a lace-curtain Irish sanctuary just minutes from home, with Winfred Douglas’ Diurnal* at home taking care of any jones for Prayer Book language (while, in the best AC tradition, not using the Prayer Book). If the American ordinariate (here, looks like it’ll be Fr Ousley and St Michael’s now at Ivy Hall) is American Missal (American 1928 Prayer Book – 1500s-style Godwardness like the Tridentine Mass – fitted into the Tridentine Mass, in classic English), I’ll visit a lot. (Road trip to Baltimore’s newest Catholic church.) Trad, including idiosyncratic trad, or ordinariate: still a church within a church? (A Novus-free world. Modestinus: ‘Rome, particularly in America, is what you make of it.’) Sure. But Benedict’s Novus isn’t the mainline.
• *Modestinus: Unlike the Breviarium Romanum, which has undergone numerous changes over the centuries, the Benedictine Office remained, at least up until 1963, largely unaltered. Given its relative structural simplicity as compared to the Roman Breviary, the office is fairly easy for laity to pray. Right. More challenging than the Little Office but not as hard as the Roman Breviary.
• Bishop Williamson acquitted. Good. All he did was make a good argument questioning the magic number ‘6 million’.
• What’s wrong with the Benedict altar arrangement: a step in the right direction, better than just versus populum, but nowhere near as good as eastward. Thank you, Fr Blake, for articulating my thought on seeing it at the town parish church.
• Disagreeing with Fr L, the ordinariates are not an outreach to Protestant Anglicans, who aren’t interested and never will be, on principle. They’re for two kinds of ex-ACs, those who were Anglo-Papalists (naturally), who are British and Novus, and the American Tridentinesque ACs who despite that used to be un-papal in their beliefs. Bringing good things back into the Catholic Church for the good of the church. Not ecumenical. Not at all an affirmation of Protestantism. And that’s good.
• British ordinariate pilgrimage to Rome. From The Cavalier’s Commonplace Book. Video of Mgr Newton.

From LRC

• Dresden, Hiroshima and Soviet machinations. We committed atrocities and were saps for the Reds. Who killed more than the Nazis. Again, the truth about WWII: we helped the Soviets win. Long overdue, the John Birch Society’s The New American is in my feeds list.
• Do your best to cover your Google tracks.
• Pay it down. Because the more you own, the less government owns you.
• Gold.
• Any left in Fort Knox?
• Pat: bring the troops home and dismantle the empire if we want America to survive.
• The science of attraction. Balance it with Roissy (quote of the day: game’s a tool; a scalpel not a hammer). Fifty years ago, male surgeons married nurses; now they are as likely to marry other doctors. God made strong women but the man has to be stronger. What strikes me here is female hypergamy (women want strong men: natural but off-kilter) and more inequality (the class system getting worse: attractive people can always move up but for many, bye, bye, American dream).
• The anti-Lincoln abolitionist.

Maryland has the best flag of any US state
From Andrew Cusack

Paul: Santorum a fake

From @TAC

• Don’t blame the courts.
• A policy whereby the government has a right to anonymity on the net, but private citizens don’t.
• Leaner, meaner Marines. Bill Lind on the depression, right-sized foreign policy, 4GW and the Corps. The Navy hasn’t fought a real war since WWII in the Pacific, by its nature a Navy show; the Marines were last used as Marines at Inchon.
• Stone and the sly fantasy.

Contraception: profligate living + plunging birth rate = disaster
From Fr L

The Republican candidates

Rick Santorum is a neocon warmonger and big-spending corporate statist.
Newt Gingrich is a neocon warmonger and big-spending corporate statist.
Mitt Romney is a neocon warmonger, China-hating protectionist, and big-spending corporate statist.
Ron Paul is a champion of freedom, peace, free trade, and human flourishing.

– Lew Rockwell

WWs I and II revisionism
From LRC

Veterans for Ron Paul

From Mark Shea

• Ron Paul is quite right: “We’ve slipped away from a true republic. Now we’re slipping into a fascist system where it’s a combination of government and big business and authoritarian rule and the suppression of the individual rights of each and every American citizen.” That’s because it’s not left vs. right anymore. It’s our ruling class vs. the rest of us.
• The new contraceptive mandate for Catholic institutions isn’t really about equality for women, or religious liberty. Rather, it is about population control.
• The Church’s opposition to birth control is not that it is ritually wrong, like a Jew having to eat pork or a Muslim having to touch a dog, but morally wrong: something destructive to the human person regardless of religion, creed, or nationality. Even so, the Church does not go around trying to outlaw it for people who insist on damaging themselves. She merely says that she refuses to help underwrite it. And even that is not enough for the secular totalitarians of the Obama Administration.
• Santorum has effectively voted to support abortion. Meanwhile, that kerrrayyyzy Ron Paul strongly opposes federal funding for birth control. Why? Because it’s not the job of the Feds to provide birth control. So we have a non-Catholic candidate who opposes compelling people to pay for what other people choose to do in the privacy of their bedroom, and we have a Catholic candidate who is “personally opposed” like Cuomo but who chooses to compel people (including Catholics) to pay for what other people do in the privacy of their bedroom, even when it includes abortifacients. I don’t hate Santorum for the reasons the mainstream does. I understand his appeal. And he’s got the mainline’s number and has the b*lls to say so. But of course I’d never vote for him. I’m not the left nor a third-way distributist white knight (‘Catholic social teaching’: sanctified social democracy/welfare state with enlightened at least pro-Catholic rulers, a state like today but family-values and just-war; the SSPX version would have a state church). Classical liberal/libertarian. Because like there’s no such thing as Catholic physics, only physics, there’s only economics, not Catholic economics.
• The strategy of states seeking to dominate the Church is – as Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, the Nazis, and the Chinese Commies have all demonstrated – to foster a Patriotic Church, docile to the will of the Ruling Class, and then encourage devotion to that as “real Christianity” in contrast to the actual Catholic Church in union with the Pope and the bishops. We don’t live in a confessional country, so the state can’t actually make Obama the Head of the Church. But Obama can certainly help foster the perception of lickspittle bureaucrats, dissenting theologians, and sundry cringing suckups on the Catholic left as an alternative magisterium. That appears to be precisely the tactic he is taking with, of course, the willing and eager help of the MSM, who naturally portray the whole thing as Plucky Rebel Alliance of forward-thinking Catholics vs. Evil Empire of Sexually Retarded Bishops. I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama were that arrogant that he wants to take over the church. But I think at least in practice he and his administration and campaign are more modest and realistic. He doesn’t care about the small religious Catholic so-con vote because he never had it. So far with the fake compromise he’s got a big part of his base back on board, the Catholic left of Modernists and indifferent Bad Catholics who get their cue from the larger culture and voted for him last time. Mission accomplished. (The depression and Dinkins effect – you can only guilt white voters once – will still sink him; the Republican bozo, whichever one, will win by default.)
• It’s one of the odd ironies of history that we are just now, as the Church begins to really start feeling the consequences of decades of Woodstockized clergy, starting to get a lot of clergy who are orthodox and full of evangelical zeal and creativity.

Why the euro was always a bad idea
From Ad Orientem

From RR

• Clinton. Disappointing? To the left. Clinton’s time in office is now mostly remembered as the last time the country had it good – peace and prosperity, with nothing more dire than an Oval Office sex scandal.
• Fred Reed on book publishing.
• The HuffPo on Ron Paul.

Mark in Spokane’s right about swearing

My own view is that swearing should be used only rarely, otherwise it loses its effect. Deployed strategically and with deliberation, it can be a striking way of adding emphasis to language. Used repetitively and without thought, it becomes boring and juvenile.

Those who would immanentize the eschaton
Gnosticism, the neoconservatives’ disease. Reminds me of Harold Bloom on the American religion. From Joshua.

Rod Dreher on the passed Catholic Moment

• One.
• Two.

1962

‘Godspeed, John Glenn.’
‘Boy, that was a real fireball of a ride.’

• AP article on him today.
• Chatting with space station today.

I wonder what those little lights he saw just out the window were.

Descent into hell
One man and his family’s journey through the real-estate crash and bankruptcy

Luke 12:15: Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth.

From LRC.

The new normal: illegitimacy
But:

The cognitive elite remain downright old-fashioned: they marry, have children, and stay married as much as not. For the average and below however, the rate of bastardy has increased, now just breaking the 50% mark.

From the Anti-Gnostic.

From Cracked

• The US Navy’s most accident-prone WWII warship. The destroyer USS William D. Porter. Surprised I never heard of this. The Arnheiter affair – more or less the Caine mutiny for real – was record ineptitude by a captain but that was in Vietnam. Subs are dangerous: there’s the WWII story Cracked covered about the U-boat that sank when somebody flushed the head wrong and the American boats sunk by their own faulty torpedoes turning on them, the Tang (America’s top sub ace, Dick O’Kane) and the Tullibee. Arguably the PT-109 too: as the Kennedy detractors I like point out, he could have been court-martialled for losing his ship like that but his dad wangled a medal (for swimming to rescue a sailor) and good press for him out of it. This takes the cake for sustained bad luck and clumsiness. Don’t shoot! We’re Republicans! Love it! (Regular readers know I’m anti-FDR.)
• Hilariously inept spies.

Grace Kelly
From Liturgiæ Causa

Photos: Lambertville and New Hope



WWII: More from when the Air Force was the Army.


Autograph shop: these weren’t the most amazing, expensive ones either.


Philco.


Telefunken.




Jet-age ring. The big stone’s actually deep blue.


The bridge.


Like a trip to Milan, Sal Savioni and his staff make a woman feel like a million bucks.

The movies at home



It Should Happen to You, 1954
An OK spoof of celebrity hype (today’s complaint about people only famous for being famous). Jack Lemmon’s first movie.

Better:



It Had to Be You, 1947

The Sunday called Quinquagesima: tempus fugit
Lent is almost here

• The Kyrie and Sanctus were familiar. Ludovico da Viadana’s Missa ‘L’Hora Passa’: the Kyrie from the wedding High Mass in the opening credits of True Confessions.
• Old school: the choir singing the Sanctus over the whole canon, breaking for the consecration and singing the Benedictus qui venit after.
• You know you’re at Our Lady of Lourdes when at High or Sung Mass the sanctus bell is in stereo! Two, one on each side of the altar. I love it of course.
• More of the best of Anglo-Catholicism: on top of the organ prelude and postlude and the processional and recessional hymns, before Mass, the (recorded?) bells playing ‘Daily, Daily’, and after, coffee hour in the undercroft.
• Mgr Steenson says no to small high Lutheran church that wanted to be in the ordinariate: no quasi-corporate reception or ordination fast track but they can join individually. Because they’re not ex-Anglicans. They can be ordained under the Pastoral Provision.
• SSPX boss Fr Schmidberger to official church in Germany: clean up your act. Quite right. Clown Masses are a largely imaginary conservative cliché complaint about liberals but in Catholic Germany (part of a Protestant turned secularist country) it seems some people got their cultural wires crossed, taking a nice non-liturgical thing related to the church (Fasnacht, their Carnival/Mardi Gras) and putting it in the liturgy where it doesn’t belong as has happened in some other places.
• If I ever make it to a Carnival/Mardi Gras, music I’d like to hear: Babatunde Olatunji’s ‘Jingo’ as played by Carlos Santana.
• Musician: insipid modern church music ‘karaoke’. See the Thomas Day factor and a recent NLM post. When faith and mainstream culture separated a few centuries ago, Catholic art went bad. The answer of course is to be liturgically minded again (Mass, office, chant) and things like the Other Modern (arts & crafts, art deco and jet/space age, but all Tridentine), not to adopt secular mainstream culture in church.

Ite, missa est.

The grand illusion that was the Great War
From @TAC via Joshua.

Cyril W. Koob:

There was significantly more tolerance, prosperity and mutual respect among creeds under the Autocratic Ottoman Sultan than under the Democratic Young Turks. Thanks again, Allies.

The last WWI veteran, an English woman, died this month.

Report: insider documents detail a March 23 Greek default plan
Gov to freeze bank accounts, eliminate euro and restrict capital flow. From LRC.

Television

• Comic libertarian character Ron Swanson. Sign that libertarianism is on the mainstream’s radar, like it or not? They can mock it (and inadvertently spread its message) but can’t ignore it.
• ‘Pan Am’ future iffy. A bad time slot (?) – Sundays, 10 Eastern (but do most people still depend on that?), talk of low ratings, an earlier rumour of cancellation, long lapses between episodes, and last week’s leftover episode shown out of order. It isn’t Emmy bait (‘serious’) like ‘Mad Men’ (which is supposed to come back March 25, for a couple more seasons) nor a bad depiction. It gets the period right most of the time (Dean, get a haircut), has pretty entertaining stories (sure, mostly soap opera – so’s ‘Mad Men’ really) and of course beautiful women. (The hip, sassy one they want you to like, Maggie, I like the least.) Best story line: Kate the spy; that sort of thing... really happened in the Cold War. (Second best: Darren Pettie, Lee Garner from ‘Mad Men’, as the smuggler rogue captain; right age, right background, a WWII Army pilot.) Like a great show set in the same period, ‘Crime Story’, it looks like its run is being cut short. The only ABC show I watch; take away the Clipper Majestic (by the way one of my hats has a picture of a 707 in the lining) and her crew, 1963-64, and it’s adios.

My ’40s Zenith works
At night like many radios in the US it picks up WGN in Chicago.

Of course I have to wait for it to warm up first.

Immaculate secularism
From @TAC

American idols
Dr Fleming:

These latter-day Americans must be among the most pious and reverent people who have ever lived. They adore celebrities while they are alive and virtually worship them when they are dead. The honors the ancient Greeks paid to their semi-divine heroes and medieval Christians to saints and martyrs are now lavished upon entertainers and athletes. Christmas may have been reduced to a shopping spree and Easter to an excuse to give ducks and rabbits to children, but we still have a liturgical cycle that includes the Grammys, the Oscars, the Emmys, and the Super Bowl.

The war on dads
Gavin McInnes at Takimag. Glad I missed the Grammys.

Good old-school liberals vs illiberal Obama
I knew in ’08 he’s a ghoul on abortion, and as his war on the church shows, he doesn’t care about the First Amendment either. From The Cavalier’s Commonplace Book.

Culture, liturgy, beauty and anthropology
From NLM

Ironic logos
And not in the self-conscious way of hipsters making fun of something by pretending to like it, or a company’s marketing trying to glom onto that. When half-educated corporate types rip off the classics. Funny, I thought the Starbucks logo was a mermaid (I was right about the allusion to Seattle being coastal). From Cracked.

Ron Paul’s last hurrah
Justin Raimondo at Chronicles

The Pearl Harbor myth: rethinking the unthinkable
From LRC

From RR

• Cheating in Maine. Should Ron Paul demand a recount? In addition to towns that hadn’t voted yet, others’ totals were not recorded.
• Stossel: we are on the road to bankruptcy. Because when a politician other than Ron Paul says he’s cutting spending, he’s lying. Because he really means he’s still raising spending only by not as much.
• This is what bureaucracy looks like.
• You might be a terrorist if...
• Progressive ideas discredited long ago.
• The missing peace dividend.
• Iran thinks it has the right to defend itself? Is the world going totally nuts? Lots of talk about the Strait of Hormuz. Ya know, Iran is right there on the Strait of Hormuz. I mean, right there. But okay. I guess the U.S. sends an aircraft carrier along with a battle group and even several U.S. choppers because those terrible Iranians have a fleet of warships floating right next to the southern tip of Manhattan. And then there are some of Iran’s bombers flying practice runs along the Atlantic coast. Like, all the time, for months and months! So yeah, I’m sure that’s the explanation.

A voice from the principled left
Glenn Greenwald. From Daniel Nichols.

Modestinus on the New Right

From Takimag

• The war of the cradle.
• Romance.

Why they hate us
From Cracked

Another angle on the illegals
Old war correspondent and expat Fred Reed, who lives in Mexico. He’s honest, neither with the racists nor the lefties using the brown to upstage other whites (thanks, Anti-Gnostic). From LRC.

Hypergamy, sluts and smart women
From Roissy

From LRC

• Hayek on abandoning rule of law: our dictatorship of the proletariat.
• We have fundamentally failed our young adults, and those failures are going to produce some very bitter fruit.
• Black social pathology’s on the rise in government schools.

St Valentine’s Day
Got Donna a retro dress so at this summer’s outdoor fests such as classic-car shows our styles will match.

Same idea; her purchase.

The Mediaeval Baebes

Education

• Free-market education.
• Online knowledge in the information age.

The American ordinary: as of yesterday it’s official
Ad multos annos, Mgr Steenson!

Cardinal DiNardo has released the Anglican Use parish of Our Lady of Walsingham in Texas to be Monsignor’s ‘cathedral’, officially the ordinariate’s ‘principal church’. Interesting. So far that’s one up on the Brits, who have not yet been given churches, but I think so far they have more people.

Maybe it’s not the best idea to be mega-dosing Americans with speed merely because they have short attention spans
ADD’s real but:

There’s no better time to question authority than when they make the very act of questioning authority into a mental disorder.

From Takimag.

Women need free birth control or we’re all going to die!
From the MCJ. My Roissyan read.

Syria

• Steve Sailer: the neocons’ ultimate enemy. I didn’t know about the Alawite religion. No wonder the Arab League’s against them.
• Taki: why Assad has survived.

Crack addiction
Damian Thompson weighs in on Whitney Houston

From ricochet.com

• American Catholicism’s pact with the devil.
• Economic and social conservatives, unite.
• A story I didn’t know about and a reminder that Britain’s not America. The first openly gay Republican candidate for president, another one being blacked out (wrong of course)? Doesn’t matter: he’s mainstreamish; I wouldn’t vote for him. Anyway, one man’s friends: Of the five most hardcore, ideologically pure, articulate, über-conservative friends I have in Britain, every one of them is homosexual. Don’t ask me why: I leave it to you guys to come up with some ingenious overarching theory. All I know is that for the conservative movement not to reach out to its natural friends in the world of gay (sorry: I just could bring myself to use the phrase “gay community”. It’s the sort of phrase which makes my right-wing gay friends vomit) seems as short-sighted, as, say, not welcoming blacks or Hispanics. Libertarianism can reach them.
• Vapid news coverage of Whitney Houston’s death. I read the news online last night. I didn’t blog about it then as I wasn’t a big fan and didn’t follow her career. I knew of her as another cautionary tale of drugs and wife-beaters: another very talented gospel-trained black singer but one ruined by her bad husband (not a bad entertainer), both has-beens from about 20 years ago. Not as gripping to me as Michael Jackson’s story, not that he was crazy but another black artist who worked his way up from poverty by putting on a top-notch professional show. So I appreciated the bio article. I learned reading there that in her heyday her music was criticized for not being black enough (not enough showy gospel melismas?) and her years of hard living cost her her great voice. Got hit this morning with the TV coverage described. The only useful bit: a few painful seconds of a concert showing that loss. All I can say is what a talent, what a waste and may she rest in peace.
• Credit to Santorum: women in combat is a dumb idea.
• That NC dad who recorded a video answer to his daughter’s bratty post including shooting her laptop at the end. He was right (unlike the Texan judge who literally beat his teen daughter: too bad the statute of limitations ran out; hope his career’s over) and entertainingly scrappy about it for most of it, but the world egging him on probably doesn’t help the situation (the awful job of disciplining her was a private matter), and he lost me when he lost his cool at the end and shot the laptop several times. The first bullet did the job and got his point across.
• Juan Perón: probably not what you think. The general was a well-meaning man of the left, which predictably hurt Argentina.
• A hospital’s mistake, an interesting riff on the ‘the sexes are just a construct’ nonsense.

External Solemnity of the Apparition of Our Lady at Lourdes
Commemoration of Sexagesima Sunday
The parish’s feast of title (really yesterday). A rare (?) case in the ’62 Missal when you get some extra propers (two collects and post-Communions) to commemorate something. (So the Seven Holy Founders of the Servites lose a turn this year outside the order.) Older missals do it more often (changing Last Gospel: sometimes the Gospel of the Mass of the outranked feast instead of John’s Prologue).

Pop quiz: what according to the early church/fathers does the ‘woman clothed with the sun’ in the reading stand for?

Tu gloria Jerusalem, tu lætitia Israel, tu honorificentia populi nostri. Tota pulchra es, Maria, et macula originalis non est in te.

The feast is not in Winfred Douglas’ Diurnal. The conservatism of the Monastic Breviary (they like their saint legends good and old), a simplified saints’ calendar in it, simply an abridgement as advertised or a rare Episcopal-ism?

Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou. Fun fact: St Bernadette didn’t speak French, at least as her first language. Lots more little languages back then. I think Provençal’s now extinct (the French seem pretty thorough about that like how Corso and Italian disappeared from Corsica; Napoleon was really Italian, Napoleone di Buonaparte). As you can see it’s like Catalan, alive and kicking in Barcelona: halfway between French and Spanish.

Private revelation has a funny place in the church. You don’t have to believe in it! The bishop’s approval* means you can believe in it because it’s not heresy and not proveably a hoax. That you can name churches after something and it has a Mass and office makes it look required. (*Medjugorje’s a fraud.)

Anyway hooray for Our Lady’s healing water.

After Mass: spumante and cupcakes in the undercroft.

Is the black/white cognitive and achievement gap smaller in the UK?

Class is the big divide in Britain rather than race. “Class” is a 1500-year-long project to civilize the Conan the Barbarian warlords who inundated the Roman Empire to act like “gentlemen.” By the late 20th century, all that politeness, all that studying, all that self-discipline, was striking young males of the lower classes as pretty gay. Thus, chavism.

Of course, today we all know that welfare couldn’t have dysgenic and/or dyscultural effects. In fact, Science tells us that welfare-state Britain couldn’t possibly wind up after a few generations with lots of anti-intellectual yobs who think that studying is only for toffs and poofters, that toffs are poofters. How pseudoScientific Keynes was! He must have been a poofter toff himself to be so pseudoScientific.

From Steve Sailer.

Seven theories on time that would make Doc Brown’s head explode
From Cracked

Paul versus Romney in Maine
From Ad Orientem

Update: Romney 39%, Paul 36%, Santorum 18% and Gingrich 6% with 95% reporting.

Not bad!

From Roissy
Beneath the bluster a substantial conservative message

• Female hypergamy, one of his big points. Women’s natural attraction to strong men + original sin and concupiscence/fallen human nature = chicks dig jerks + the Sexual Revolution + feminism = nice guys end up alone (chicks share the jerks instead) and society goes to hell. His answer for nice guys: game’s a tool, morally neutral; using it just a little restores the right balance of power between the sexes and both men and women are happier.
• It’s sad how society has beaten down male sexuality to the point where wanting sex is seen in the same light as being obsessed with sex.
• What, ultimately, is the cause of the decay happening in the West? Another challenge to libertarianism. America is dying. Unless the powerful divest themselves from their voracious egos and accept that they have been steeped in a mountain of lies for 60 years, perhaps 150 years depending on your point of origin, and until that day they reverse the path they have taken this country, America’s slow, asphyxiating dying will finally, unmercifully, reach closure... A criticism of libertarianism from the right (such as R.) and left is it underestimates human failings and the need to keep them in line (‘of course people will act rationally’). I’m a minarchist not an anarchist (but I listen to anarchists) but the law of God is written in every heart, and Calvinism is wrong about total depravity so I’m not for getting rid of freedom! I don’t know the answer to the problem but R.’s asking some of the right questions.
• The parable of the smart birds.

Recent non-news:

Chick digs jerk, 1962. Mimi Alford.

The Kennedy men. Immoral? Jerks? Alphas? Yep.

Confidence from inherited fortune -> a**hole attitude + chunky, handsome look, a side effect of cortisone treatment for Addison’s + dad’s bucks buying you good press and the White House = chick magnet.

The Church of Obama
His Act of Supremacy. America’s wannabe Henry VIII minus all the sex. (Like Henry and the ChiComs, Protestant America’s long wanted to cut the country’s Catholics loose from Rome.) Reminds me: Steve Sailer says before the first campaign O. thought his association with Trinity United Church of Christ (UCC: the mainliners’ mainliners*) in Chicago and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright would sell him to the evangelicals. (Credit: Wright’s right quoting someone about 9/11 being America’s chickens coming home to roost.) Maybe O. really is clueless about some things, including religion. The president’s religion doesn’t matter as long as he defends the Constitution but O.’s always struck me as a snooty agnostic. (Raised by irreligious white liberals and non-Christian Indonesians.)

*I read this week they, the New England Congregationalists as in the Pilgrims, had their first formal meeting with their 200-some-year-old offshoot the Unitarian Universalists, who are not Christians, which many don’t know. Fitting since they’ve just about caught up with them in that. When Calvinism falls, and Archbishop Robert Morse says it always does, it falls hard. Which is what the English and their upper-class American cousins (the founding fathers) did at the ‘Enlightenment’.

Debt slavery: 30 facts
From LRC

Obama’s fake compromise in his war on the church
From the MCJ. Looks like it’s working for him: the Catholic libs are back in his pocket. Maybe he realizes the depression and the Dinkins effect (white-voter guilt only works once) are against him so it would be wise not to p*ss off a big part of his party’s old base. I still think he’ll lose though because of those two things. Of course he and the mainstream don’t care about freedom of religion, like they don’t care about peaceful foreign policy.

Of course, with the surprising exception of his going too far even for Catholic libs, the mainstream are on his side on this as this Protestant-bred culture (the New England colonists: people who wanted freedom only for themselves to rule you, still true of the SWPLs and the overrated Prot right, and who left England because they thought the king’s break with Rome didn’t go far enough) has always had an anti-Catholic streak and nobody remembers that, before mid-last century, opposing contraception and abortion wasn’t just a Catholic thing but a generally Christian thing.

Ad Orientem:

It’s as bogus as a $3 bill. Call it what you want. From my perspective it’s a cheap accounting trick that substantively changes nothing. The insurance coverage, paid for by religious institutions still has to cover all sorts of morally inadmissible things. The suggestion that the insurance companies are really footing the bill is risible on its face. If that were actually true it would be an illegal act since one cannot force people or businesses to provide goods or services at no cost. That’s pretty much elementary constitutional law.

I am inclined to agree with the usually overheated Bill Donahue on this one. Obama has just added insult to injury.

One can hope this is a wake-up call for the bishops, who, as others have noted, brought this on themselves with their many years (going back to before the Vatican II disaster?) of well-meant support of democratic socialism/the welfare state. Take money from the state and the state’s calling the shots (the government at least functionally runs the church).

Cracked hits

• Five kinds of people who always give terrible advice.
• Six insane but convincing theories on children’s pop culture.
• Four realizations that will ruin science fiction for you.

Answering an Episcopalian’s d*ckishness about the ordinariates
Stop ecumenical talks with that church.

Danby at the MCJ:

The Church has already notified the Anglicans that nothing more is going to be accomplished in any talks, but they will continue meeting if Canterbury wants to.

And Anglo-Catholicism has elevated official-church traditionalists’ music, at least here in Philly. The best of Good Shepherd and St Clement’s in that department is at Our Lady of Lourdes.

A good word for Romney
Not really about the election but an interesting take from Steve Sailer at Takimag on the culture wars. I’ll never vote for Romney but his life is in many ways a testament to 1950s values. Word going around, from a book by Charles Murray, is the top classes benefit from living conservatively; the lower classes are self-destructing. I’ve said before that those values are Mormonism’s real and only appeal to converts (one of the article’s points: adopting normal people’s culture 50-100 years ago was a smokescreen they made up to get non-Mormons off their backs; BTW the state had no right to pressure them to change their religion; if you do no harm, you can have as many wives as you want); the religion doesn’t stand up to scrutiny (so they keep their people busy and in their social net so they don’t notice). Messed-up 2012 society has a perfect way to demonize ’50s normality by associating it with the crackpot Mormons (Stepford, ha ha).

Challenges to libertarianism
Taking a break from election theatre, state-bashing and Ron Paul worship to hear out some smart arguments; I don’t claim to know the answers.

• Unlikely argument for integrism/traddie theocracy. My stab at an answer: religious freedom is right because although error in itself has no rights, people do (thanks, Jim C.); an atmosphere of freedom (separation of church and state) is best for the church, per Murray (that’s right, on paper Vatican II’s right*), as the church (apostolic, infallible), not the ultimate chaos/atomization/self-destruction in Protestantism. (In libertarianism, the so-cons such as Catholics can’t tell the so-libs what to do as long as the so-libs don’t overthrow the right order of things by trying to order the so-cons around. Hard as most so-libs are self-righteous.) *But in practice a disaster so Catholics are better off ignoring it.
• Are right-libertarians sawing off the branch they’re sitting on? Via man of the left Arturo: The recent ongoing spat between Joe Carter of First Things and The Front Porch Republic reveals a good deal about a certain kind of Free Market radical conservatism, which whines consistently about the slow death of art, music, literature and traditional mores, yet cannot abide the thought of solutions that may infringe upon bourgeois property rights, i.e., “economic liberty” or likely, plain ol’ “liberty”.
• Mark in Spokane (libertarianism’s great about rights but what about duties?): Does a conservative have to be a reactionary? Burke said no.

’60 Impala





Translation of the car’s sound: let’s cruise down the shore flipping off Priuses.



What should be playing on the radio.

Or like a recent night heading toward the lit Philly skyline with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran blasting.



A better look, at a stock version I like better.



Another close look, and on the road.

Yeah, a 283 survivor (original) car, a daily driver, not a racer. Perfect.








Today in 1960:

• Jack Paar, the host of “The Tonight Show,” had walked off the set on this day, in protest of censorship. NBC had started taping the show, and had begun editing out any segment that it determined was inappropriate for “live” television. NBC had cut out a joke about a “water closet” (bathroom), and afterwards Paar was so upset that he left the set and did not return to work for a month. From here.
• No. 1 on the US charts: ‘Teen Angel’, knocking down Johnny Preston’s ‘Running Bear’ and replaced by Percy Faith’s ‘Theme from “A Summer Place”’.
• Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi, Apostolic Delegate in the United States, announced Pope John XXIII’s appointment of Archbishop Celestine J. Damiano as the third Bishop of Camden.
• Cardinal Stepinac died.

Heading into the church: St Timothy’s, Fort Worth

The Cardinal Egan interview: yicch
From the MCJ. Another reason not to expect jack socially from the institutional church. (I’m not talking about church-run charities/social services.) Just take in the Mass, office, rule book and sacraments and be on your way: ite, missa est. Catholics don’t do coffee hour (except in the ordinariates: Anglicanism’s eighth sacrament; can be upgraded to drinks). That’s OK.

Catholicism is not clericalism: throw the book at the jerks. Partly for the sake of the many priests who are good.

Predictions about Catholic Americans
Photo from here

25+ years ago I was fairly sure, as a smart friend then explained, that the liberalized Roman Catholic Americans would go into schism (‘the American Catholic Church’), which American Protestants have always wanted. (‘Cut your apron strings to Rome and be real Americans like us.’) Didn’t happen. (Just more little vagante fringe churches, which have been around for about 100 years and nobody has heard of.) From the self-inflicted wounds of the priestly underage gay sex scandal (but that hurt the real Catholics in Protestant America too: ‘Maria Monk’ revisited) and the same demographic suicide and theological contradictions as the mainline Protestants putting themselves out of business (the kids: ‘We don’t need your crappy “Christian community”; if this religion isn’t really true, cut out the middleman and stay home!’), that is, assimilation (not the good 1900-1950s kind that kept Catholic teachings and practices, which got other Americans’ respect, like in The Bells of St Mary’s etc.), AmChurch is slowly dying off, going out with a whimper of parish and school closings. (If you think that’s bad now, wait ’til the boomers, the last generation of habitual churchgoers, start dying.) Sad of course because, often, real Catholics built those institutions 50-100 years ago. Pope Benedict’s smaller, sound church, real Catholics (of course I hope not sanctimonious or a cult like the trads at their worst), has a fighting chance (small is beautiful: little diocesan religious orders for a vocations boomlet as the the big old liberalized dinosaur orders die) but watch it. Jesus’ promises to the church, ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it’ and ‘I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world’, meant on earth, not necessarily in Philadelphia. How many of St Paul’s New Testament churches are still around and not the stomping grounds of Mohammed?

Ron Paul on the feds’ latest attack on the church: ‘You Catholics need to unite and listen to your Pope.’

Modestinus:

Rome, particularly in America, is what you make of it. I’ve never seen anything approaching a unified conception of “American Catholicism,” though I suppose it’s possible to distill some idea of “normative Catholicism” in these lands (though such enterprises run the risk of selection bias).

That can be bad or good of course. There’s the protestantized liberals’ ‘it’s whatever I say it is and no celibate old man’s gonna tell me no’. (Falling in step with the larger culture, like Komen caved to Planned Parenthood; very brave, kemosabe.) Good in that it’s so big that you can keep your nose in your missal and breviary, show up for roll call once a week, say your prayers and, thanks to Pope Benedict and the late Archbishop Lefebvre, live in a Novus Ordo-free world*, staying out of diocesan/parish politics and away from Modernism and minding your own business. The freedom of the laity. (Interestingly like Bad Catholics and lots of ethnic Orthodox: there’s only one church; we don’t want to reform it; it’s for certain events; otherwise stay out.) *Now that Pope B’s fixed English Novus, being in communion with it isn’t a problem anymore. He won the worship war for real Catholics.

Jesus saves. Mary prays. Ratz is Pope. Carry on.

The other EU
The Eurasian Union, commonly called Russia. Fine with me. Better than fine: a Russian empire, no longer Communist, again culturally Orthodox-based (not sanctimonious but easygoing in an ethnic cultural-Catholic way), as a counter-power to the US and Western Europe? Очень хорошо. (Kiev and the eastern Ukraine are Russian like Belarus; Lvov and the rest of the far western Ukraine – the Polish/Austrian Greek Catholic land the Soviets stole during WWII; the first Eastern Slavs I knew, 30 years ago, were from there – can go be its own western Eastern European country like Poland.) From Takimag.

Rebellion, resistance, renewal... or war?
LRC’s Karen Kwiatkowski (pronounced ‘Kitowski’), retired Air Force lieutenant colonel:

It occurs to me that when we speak of war, we often confuse justifiable resistance of people to evil with the propaganda-driven fiascos pursued by governments in order to consolidate or expand power, or to satisfy the corporate demands placed on politicians by the organizations, industries or cabals that helped elect them.

Good stuff here, including things familiar to ACBfP readers, of the banksters’ wars and the Protestants’ American exceptionalism (city on the hill, new enlightened chosen people... where SWPLs come from) and war, literally, on Catholic Europe and, virtually, on Catholic immigrants and their families (such as the president’s and HHS sec’s war on the church now).

I never knew this:

German socialists, fresh to America by tens of thousands as they fled their failed 1848 socialist revolution in Germany, were key in the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Their philosophy and statism demanded Lincoln’s prosecution of the war between the states. Lincoln’s efforts to redefine federalism, to nationalize, to stand above the Constitution, and to politically satisfy both his industrial monopolist and European socialist backers created that deadly war, where none was desired by the vast majority of people, in either the North or the South.