Today's links

• From RR:
  • Not news if you were paying attention: Obama’s an abortion ghoul. Planned Parenthood's latest annual report shows it performed a record number of abortions in the fiscal year 2011-2012 and received a record amount of taxpayer funding.
  • US open to complete Afghanistan withdrawal after 2014.
  • EU launches public consultation on aspartame. The stuff so bad that ants won’t eat it.
  • Military judge to rule on motion to dismiss Bradley Manning case. Regular readers know my line. The military has its proper job, defense. He signed a contract. IF he’s a hero, part of that heroism is taking the punishment for breaking the contract. Not torture but jail and a bad discharge.
  • Bank of America Corp. is looking to sell collection rights on at least another $100 billion of mortgages after announcing similar deals for more than $300 billion.
  • Is Social Security welfare?
  • There is nothing free about American markets today.
• From LRC: Social Security, Ponzi schemes and leprechaun economics.
• American Anglo-Catholic alumni: why we cross ourselves at the elevations. It’s something somebody saw in 19th-century France. Other markers besides that and crossing yourself before receiving: bowing as the processional cross passes by, and a smaller bow for the celebrant in the procession? Somewhere somebody mentioned saying the creed from the old Prayer Book from memory at the Novus Ordo, easy since the new improved translation’s so close that the BCP version’s not disruptive. The few times a year I’m at Novus? Yup.
• The benefit of the ordinariates for the rest of the church. A kind of traditionalism that shows It’s Not About Latin™, pulling out the rug from under one of the liberals’ selling points (most Catholics don’t want Latin).
• Re-post from Hilary: the good in goth, or the Addams Family as Catholic aristocrats.
• Living on the dark side of the Cartesian divide: a reflection on the Gnosticism of our times.
• Mark Shea: For years I have foretold that the day would come when the Church will be damned by the world, not for failing to prevent pedophilia, but for trying to prevent it. Pedophilia was a useful club for the Manufacturers of Culture to feign outrage at the Church and land some solid punches because, luckily for them, bourgeois opinion and the actual moral teaching of the Catholic tradition aligned and priests and bishops were guilty of real sin. Accordingly, the Lord permitted our Manufacturers of Culture, like the Assyrian who cared nothing whatever for God, to be a punishing rod in the hand of God against a Church that richly deserved his chastisement. But the fact remains that our Manufacturers of Culture, like the ancient pagan Assyrian, are enemies of God, not people who care about children. The proof of this was seen a couple of years ago, when our elites made abundantly clear that molestation was just ducky — if you are the right sort. Damian Thompson’s fished out of the memory hole that around the time of the sexual revolution the left was defending sex with children.
• Srdja Trifkovic: Albanian travelogue.
• At Dreher’s:
  • Erin Manning: Most religious traditions have some kind of take on what Christ called the two great commandments: that we love God first and foremost and then love our neighbor as ourselves. These commandments may sound simple, but if taken to their logical ends they involve a prescription against the radical autonomy and radical selfishness that make up the twin pillars of modern secular living. The sexual revolution’s a symptom, not the problem. A libertarian reply? Capitalism isn’t selfishness but simply how the economy works to promote flourishing, yours and others’.
  • I support the Chuck Hagel nomination for Defense Secretary, in large part because I think we should have a smaller military footprint around the world, and invest that money at home. But I’m not confident that that money will be used prudently at home. Instead, it will go to pay the doctor bills of old people; there won’t be much for anything else. This is not, of course, a good thing, but it is better than borrowing money we don’t have to pay for things we can’t afford, until the whole damn thing collapses.