Our culture war: Tutsis vs. Hutus

• Two big groups of white people who can’t stand the sight of each other. Derb gets it. Paula Deen, George Zimmerman, and more. The Anti-Gnostic: I don't think there is any other population group that hate their underclass kin more than Anglo-American elites. It also goes back to settlement from Britain: the southern English elite North (New England) vs. the Scotch-Irish South.
• WND: Mock marriage and the death of freedom.
• 25th anniversary of SSPX bishops. We have our Mass in the official church because the saintly Archbishop Lefebvre sacrificed himself. The Novus Ordo neocons have been slandering the SSPX for decades as having left the church or being the same as the Nuns on the Bus (who are heretics). I don't have to go as far as the SSPX has, where I am, and I agree with the council on religious liberty and ecumenism, but they are not and never were schismatic in principle and I understand their suspicion of mainstream churchmen, who have done a lot of harm to the traditional faith. Happy feast of SS. Peter and Paul. P.S. It’s Not About Latin™ (but I happen to worship in Latin while being tame devotionally: Mass-and-office, pre-conciliar’s version of high-and-dry churchmanship).
• Anniversary this past week of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. The evil and folly of World War I. The world would have been better if the Central Powers had won.
• WSJ: In search of Grandfather’s style. I’m accidentally part of a trend.

DOMA, American Catholics, HBD, and more

• DOMA. My answer so far: I hate that the feds, in this case the Supreme Court, are declaring war on reality again (the trouble began when they stamped on states’ rights), and yes, they are out to get conservative Christians, still really hating Catholics. That said, short of the hardcore libertarians’ tiresome ‘You’re not the boss of me!’ articles (there is such a thing as social order and there’s a place for the government), I’m for keeping the government out of it. Most of the 97% of sexually normal people would keep marrying and having children without the ‘benefit’ of holy mother state (the Cathedral), as in most of history, obviously, and the deviants would have the right to be left in peace.
• The other part of that is the place of Catholics in American public life, such as the Catholic Supreme Court justices, what should have been a Catholic moment in America. Some American churchmen reportedly have gotten angry at urgings to excommunicate scandalously pro-abortion politicians, whose name seems to be legion, from Vice President Biden, Secretary Sebelius, and Congresswoman Pelosi (another example that the council’s a disaster: for a while, she was America’s most powerful Catholic; we’ve gone down from Al Smith or Cardinal Spellman to this) on down. (I say excommunicate them.) They say if the church manned up and cleaned house, there’d be no more Catholics holding office. In the ’80s, the sound among us wondered if the liberal American church would stealthily go into schism. The Anti-Gnostic has suggested American churchmen will do something like that in order to keep their high profile they earned in America before the council. (So Cardinal Dolan still gets his picture taken with people like Obama and Romney, and there are more Bidens, Sebeliuses, et al.) My guess has been as the old churchy liberals (Modernists) die, the American church will stay on Pope Benedict’s course, naturally becoming smaller and much more conservative, not schismatic. Too soon to call.
• Roissy: the Cathedral controls the media.
• The Anti-Gnostic: I don't think there is any other population group that hate their underclass kin more than Anglo-American elites. They moved the factories offshore, then they imported replacement workers for the non-tradeable sectors. They bussed in more violent blacks into their school districts, exiling much of the white working class from the city centers. They fed them godless entertainment, and they taught them that any notion of organic community was hateful and bigoted. Then they gave them welfare, which is proving as toxic and dysgenic to lower-class whites as it has been to lower-class blacks.
• Sailer: the abolition of racial and ethnic preferences. I have a dream today.
• The faith: What’s my line (of succession)?
• The non-story of women priests: Vagante sensationalism on a slow news day, and Jimmy Carter theologizing again. Me.
• Sunshine Mary:
  • What women want.
  • LAMPS and the Bible. A checklist for men. Be honest, and if you fail any of these, either work on them (Roissy’s message: you CAN change) or lower your expectations finding a woman.

A ROCOR priest apostatizes to the Cathedral

Ex-Fr Nathan Monk, a celebrity in his part of Florida for his charitable work. (Showing off?) He and his cute wife have dumped Christ to stand up for homosexualism. (If the secular world cared about the Orthodox, it would stand up and cheer.) Surprising news since the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia is, among Orthodox, famously extremely conservative, to its credit (but they’re nasty to Catholics); mostly Russian exiles from right after the war. To be fair, he was ROCOR in about the same sense that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an American. Not an ethnic Russian born into it, he was Orthodox for about eight months! (He tried to get into the Antiochian Orthodox Church first.) Readers of Peter Anson aren’t surprised. A classic case of an Eastern church being too trusting of a vagante (would-be) priest (wacko ‘independent Catholics’), using him as a priest too soon and getting burned. (‘You hate Pope too? You now our priest.’) Happened before to ROCOR with Blanco (pervs into boys set up a bogus monastery with a fake miracle icon). (And, related, with the fanatical Greeks they took in, radicalizing ROCOR, who eventually left.) Typical: when ROCOR is in the middle of canning the troublemakers, they leave. Word from some Orthodox is recently ROCOR’s hastily taken in many such priests for its Western Rite, as happened here. Delusion of grandeur: a church, with, really, just a few thousand people, desperately tries to compete head-on with the Catholic Church (or at least get some of the ex-Episcopal market) and look what happens. So desperate they took in a typical vagante liberal without really checking up. Anyway, this incident reinforces an idea of mine that the anti-Western (anti-Catholic), exotic-fetishist (anything but the old America and anything but Rome) convertodox, shopping vegan at Whole Foods, and SWPLs, the Cathedral’s most devout communicants (it’s a Christian heresy), are more alike than you think. (He even looks like one of them.) Maybe this will wise up some of the real Orthodox (the nice ethnic second-generation Americans, from the old America, who are the majority in American Orthodoxy): in American society from now on, you have only this choice: join the Cathedral or stand with us if not join us.

I’ll give him credit for not trying to change Christianity.

He even likes the rosary too. What a waste. Then again, like Episcopalians and unlike Catholic liberals, vagantes are usually high church (they believe the creeds and love our stuff).

Franky Schaeffer and now this guy. Who’s next?

Update: A reader writes:

He was not western rite. He was originally received with the western rite, quickly closed his western rite parish and became an assistant priest at a Byzantine rite parish. He, at least then, strongly condemned the western rite in the Russian Church. I am surprised no one has mentioned this, but has instead simply attacked the western rite tying his name into his personal shenanigans.

Duly noted. Still,

He was originally received with the western rite.

Ecumenism, Sarah Palin, and white knights

• Ecumenism’s played itself out.
• Sarah Palin annoys all the right people. And they envy her for being hot. Nobody, thank God, has made porn about Joe Biden.
• The white-knight marriage salesman.

The case for liturgy, from a conservative Anglican

Neat! Discussion.

The Conciliar Anglican, Fr Jonathan’s blog.

Cherry Hill Veterans' Car, Truck and Bike Show

I think this Chevy’s a ’49, the first postwar design.

Road-warrior ’59 Chevy.

Seated: Korea vet, submarine sailor from the Cuban missile crisis (Guppy boats), and Battle of the Bulge vet. Got to shake hands with the last. The presenter’s a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who joined in ’58. Probably a Vietnam vet.

Movie history: tribute to American Graffiti’s hot-rod racer with the actor’s autograph.
Site.

'Mad Men' Season 6 finale

Great soap-opera fake-outs and twists, Peggy being sexy, and a cliffhanger for Don. But he still has his hat: he’s virtually unchanged from Season 1. Good. I saw his crises coming. The show’s about Don’s fall (the opening credits) as a metaphor for the disappearing golden era (an elegy, nostalgia), where he loses or almost loses everything (wife, kids, and job), and his possible redemption since we’re emotionally invested in this anti-hero.

Will Megan leave for good? Has Don really been fired? Will Ted the coward come back and would Peggy take him back? Just what the hell is Bob up to? Pete, when he screws up his face in anger like Don Knotts trying to look tough, has become comic relief.

Midlife: as what defines him as Don is taken away, he seems to be reconciling himself to being Dick Whitman, hence the visit to the old house where he spent his horrible adolescence.

So where will next season pick up? My guess is it will start in the winter or spring of ’69, just after where the show has left off, and end in ’70, as convenient for marking the end as ’60 was for the beginning.

The possibility of epilogue text on the screen telling us what happens to everybody, or the last scenes jumping to the end of a character’s (Don’s?) life in the ’80s or ’90s, or even to the present day with an older Peggy or Sally: closure or corny? I want to know but acknowledge that the text route’s too hokey for the show’s style, as would be fast-forwarding and/or age makeup (or use older actors) unless it were done extremely well.

How I got started: my first traditional Catholic liturgy

My first, not counting Anglo-Catholic Episcopal and highish but not A-C Episcopal services.

It was also my first Byzantine Rite Divine Liturgy (Fr Panasiuk called it ‘Holy Mass’) and first church experience with the first East Slavs (broadly speaking, the Russian tradition, but see below; watch it!) I knew, a high-school friend whose parents were refugees who came from the Ukraine right after the war, when the Soviets had invaded their part of the country, banned their church, and tried to force them into the Soviet-controlled Russian Orthodox Church.

St John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church, Whippany, NJ, April 1985:

Sweet little parish church (at the time), not at all latinized in its furnishings (beautiful wooden and gilt iconostasis), with a clean-shaven priest (common in American Orthodox history) doing a Low Mass (no music or incense; congregational responses). Gold brocade chasuble, ‘priest’s back to the people’ (really, priest’s and congregation’s Godwardness), whispered/‘low voice’ parts: traditional. It was in English but Fr Panasiuk, from the Ukraine, did the whispered parts in the liturgical language. At the time I didn't know Slavonic from Ukrainian so I don’t know which; I’m guessing because of his age it was Slavonic. The faithful received Communion kneeling in a row on the step in front of the iconostasis, and they passed down the priest’s blessing cross to kiss (like the pax-brede in the Roman Rite) before receiving.

As you can see, it had a silver onion dome with a three-bar cross, but with the bottom bar flattened out, not slanted, I guess so it wouldn’t look Russian Orthodox. This building went up in ’49, right after the war; Fr Panasiuk became pastor in ’51.

The family I knew were fine with being called Ukrainian Catholics, Byzantine Catholics, Greek Catholics, Uniates, or Roman Catholics, but not Russian or Orthodox even though they were obviously related.

The Ukrainian Catholic Church stood up to both the Soviets and the disaster in the church after the council, and in both cases barely won.

Дякую: thank you.

The show: Season 6 finale predictions

Before the season-six finale airs this Sunday, it seems appropriate to pause and reflect on where eight of the show's key figures have been this season and, perhaps, where things might take them in the season finale.

This season it’s 1968, the year Western society really started to go to hell. (Complete by ’73; I actually remember that. I’m Kevin Harris’ age. It’s segueing into what I remember, ’67 cars and all.) Don’s a sociopath but women can’t get enough of him, a Roissyan lesson. Anyway, if the opening credits are anything to go by, the show’s an elegy for the golden era, its decline parallelled by his decline (the animation of him falling). (This soap opera’s not a putdown of the past; because of Don, it’s porn for modern women.)

Next season:

• I can imagine in a real case Ted getting a divorce and marrying Peggy; she’d be happy at last.
• Sally will try to blackmail her dad. She’ll go off to boarding school and full-on rebel, maybe running off to Woodstock (meh; meanwhile, squares like me put a man on the moon).
• Bob Benson will be at Stonewall.
• Or maybe he really is an FBI agent tracking down Don for stealing the real Don’s identity, or a corporate spy.
• Megan becomes even more successful, wises up about Don, and leaves.
• Either Bert or Roger dies of a health problem.

On the triumph of the lumpenproletariat

Here Owen White scores a number of hits, and at least here like me appeals to nostalgia.

My mother grew up in a working class steel town neighborhood. She wore a hat and white gloves to church except between Memorial and Labor Days. Her house and yard were clean. Her father wore slacks and a button up collared shirt to his factory job. Families were centered around marriages, and the overwhelming majority of children lived in households wherein all the siblings had the same two biological parents. Today, two generations later, if you go to that same neighborhood you will find among the whites there (Hispanics have moved in but they are more family oriented than the whites who currently live there), that it is relatively rare for a woman to have the same biological father for all of her children, and rarer still for her to be living with the father of all of her children, let alone married to him. The yards are far more unkempt (and it's not like they were manicured 40 years ago), the houses far less clean, and the language used in front of children, and the media children exposed to, of a radically different sort than when my mother was a child. Criminal and anti-social activities, use of hard drugs, unstable sexual relationships, infatuations with more debased and degrading art and media forms, and so forth are far, far more common today in those neighborhoods.

I understand he’s not actually a Marxist, and I’m a nostalgic bourgeois conservative he hates*, but Marx was an expert diagnostician. As Chesterton said, the reformer such as Marx is right about what’s wrong but wrong about what’s right.

That said, tech for the masses can go either way, either soma, drugging the masses, or like Gutenberg’s press, empowering. You have access to all the world’s knowledge better than any library could do it, all in a tiny box in your hand (it’s science fiction to me; I’m writing this from a desk computer), or you can watch porn while the state undermines you (spies on you, takes your rights away, and even replaces you by importing ringers).

*I don’t deny anybody the right to immigrate, go to school or apply for a job so my conscience is clear.

Friday

Nothing very political right now. That the government is abusive isn’t news. Surprised that it and the Israelis are spying on us, and that it’s using big business (Verizon, Facebook, etc.) to do it? Me neither. Edward Snowden could well be a hero.

• Sailer on Turkey.
• Catholicism and Orthodoxy, in which I go virtual mano a mano with the OicwRs’ doyen starting here. But it’s mostly about ‘po-našomu’ Rusyn Greek Catholics’ religious identity and how history (immigrant schisms in America and Communist rule in the old country) has changed it. More.

Reading a mainstream article about game

Five ways regular guys ruin their first impression with women.

As readers of Roissy and Sunshine Mary (married conservative Protestant) know, most mainstream advice about dating and marriage, including from well-meaning conservative Christians (white knights et al.), is lies. (‘Be nice; just be yourself.’ Well, you can always change yourself if you’re not happy. That’s the good news of game.) So when I saw this from Cracked (better than the smug SWPLs at the Onion whom I don’t read anymore; mostly history and news of the weird, not snobbish putdowns; better than the average liberal dweeb but still parishioners at the Cathedral), I braced myself for anti-game bullshit. By the way, I’m not claiming to be a game expert.

As usual, Cracked’s better than you expect. Three standard nice-guy attempts to knock game (and not be excommunicated from the Cathedral); two points that are actually pro-game.

They Rely on a "System"... meeting someone isn't about memorizing a script.

Half-truth. Conservatives such as Roissy and Sailer are guilty of the sin (according to the Cathedral) of noticing things, such as women tend to have certain traits, so systems work. The partial credit here is something Roissy’s covered. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. You’ve got to dial it up or down depending on the girl and the situation. Roissy has a name for it, calibration. Just a normal social skill most people automatically learn, which PUAs’ students need coaching in. You also need to set your dial realistically for you. If you’ve got a Kia, you don’t try to pass it off as a Lamborghini; maybe as a high-end Hyundai. That also depends on what you want. One-night stand? Lie. (I’m not saying it’s right but that’s what a lot of men want.) Relationship? More honest but not the whole truth; some mystery for romance. Next...

Using Pick-Up Lines

Another partial.

you're not a goddamned salesman

Bull. Of course you are. And a good salesman knows how to dial it up or down depending on the customer.

Now that doesn't mean that you want to burst into the room and say, "Congratulations, you won. Get in the truck."

Know what? Depending on you, the girl, and the setup, that might work. Because:

Remember, for the most part, women put a pretty high value on confidence in a man.

Now what if there were a way to become more confident, say, looking and acting the part until you become it, so that you have a better chance? That’s all game is.

The truth is, there are people who look just like you, who have your same income, who are still having sex. If women only talked to guys with rock-hard bodies and six-figure incomes, they'd go a decade between encounters. If they didn't make compromises on a man's looks, condom companies would go out of business and we'd be in a global shrinking population crisis.

Right. Men are attracted to looks, for biological reasons; women are more interested in other things. See above about confidence. Enter game.

Last year's news: vicar converts

This story looked familiar. It’s a year old. Money quote:

It is a return to a faith that has fixed values that are not going to change at the next meeting of the General Synod.

Exactly.

When I was ordained in the Church of England in 1976 there were some things that would never be challenged.

Should be obvious to Catholics that this was never true; the first quote always was. For a few reasons, it’s been harder for Anglican would-be Catholics to see. Brings back a lot of memories. I was born Episcopal, because my dad left the church, and I lived in England. Anglican semi-congregationalism meant that, in the dark days after the council, some Anglican parishes and vicars were more ‘Catholic’ than the local libcaths in the official church. I’m thankful they were there — I say the creed in English from the old Prayer Book — but this has no future. There’s only one church. Most such Anglicans are now Catholics. I don’t think there will be many more conversions. Today, high C of E and Episcopal are liberal Protestants who dress up. Liberal high church: they believe our creeds and in our sacraments, and unlike most libcaths, they love our stuff.

There have been some happy landings, including, surprisingly, ex-Episcopal parishes switching and the many individual conversions from St Clement’s, in their case not to the ordinariate but to the Extraordinary Form of course, but the ordinariates are under-successful for a couple of reasons:

• Many of these parishes and parishioners were less Catholic than they looked. As Catholic as the vicar wanted to be, most of his flock were really regular C of E. They liked the building more than the religion he was trying to teach them. So, priest converts, congregation doesn’t.
• Related, many/most such parishes were known to really be hangouts for male homosexuals who like liturgical theatre.

Meanwhile, in the church, a few more troops to finish what Benedict the Great started in the Roman Rite.

Corporate training and truths about the sexes

Hooray! (Not sarcastic.) Newspapers are only a bad memory. After six months of technically temping, in which I’ve demonstrated my old-school work ethic, I’m a made man at the job, being a Mad Man online and by phone (I’m a copywriter dealing with sales reps and customers), working with nice twentysomethings in a booming business. (A new grad can go from temp gofer to supervisor in six months.) Part of that upgrade of course is watching human-resources department films/videos. Probably the same all over: doubtlessly well meant, like political correctness (a Christian heresy) generally, but starring people who can’t act in skits that seem like they were written and directed by aliens guessing how people behave.

In the old America such conduct matters fall under fairness, good manners, and common sense, including local managers’ discretion.

The sexual-harassment one was interesting not for any prurient reason but because the casting and directing reflected some Roissyan truths polite society doesn’t acknowledge, with exceptions such as this golden-era (old America) parody from ‘SNL’. Unattractive man clumsily touches woman and awkwardly asks her out. (In the real video, skinny geek and middle-aged girl next door.) Most women aren’t helpless damsels in that scenario; often more socially skilled than men, they effortlessly fend off betas and omegas, harmless but annoying, hitting on them. (Feminism’s hypocritical/self-serving, making the screening out easier.) Clueless Guy needs some coaching, maybe literally from a PUA pro: upgrade the look and mimic alpha social skills. (The stuff naturals learn automatically when they’re teenagers. Fake it till you make it; looking and acting cooler actually changes you so you’re more successful: more likely to talk to girls, and with the right attitude.) Natural or learned, a touch of game helps love make the world go around. But of course that’s beyond what an employer can or should tell you.

P.S. Great comment from Facebook: evangelicalism has its version of this. Church girl tells beta or omega asking her out that she’s given up dating as un-Christian, then God tells her to date when an alpha shows up.

Are women winning or are men losing?

Roissy:

As any halfway informed reader will tell you, the supposed discriminatory basis of the sex wage gap, so beloved of femc*nts for its usefulness as a blunt semantic weapon to cow lickspittles of the Undescended Testes Society into submission, is utter bullshit. Now there is evidence that some of the wage increase women have experienced is less a consequence of GOGRRL ambition than of F*CK MEN economic policies.

I don’t endorse all his answers.

Tuesday

• Pat Buchanan on Obama’s run-up to war with Syria.
• Picture from Ad Orientem.
• Yes, the system’s rigged against third parties.
• Me on Catholics and liturgical change.
• Classic: Western ‘Eastern Orthodoxy’ as boutique religion.

Franky Schaeffer

His article: Progressive Christianity is as broken as evangelicalism. Here’s how to fix it.

I’ll save you a couple of minutes: he thinks all Christians should be like the Episcopalians: fallible and fungible but with a cool liturgy (our fellow high-church cousins), doing everything secular society tells them to about inclusivity. Nice people, but last I checked, they are losing people like crazy. The mainstream has left them behind. Sounds like he should rethink his answer. A thought: might other whitebread converts to Orthodoxy eventually go this route in their retained anti-Romanism?

I don’t know what his problem is but I feel bad for him.

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, and Father's Day

• Mass: Dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea; quem timebo? Anglo-Catholic alumni recognize the Psalm 27 quotation; Oxford’s motto. (A long time ago, my late A-C rector started a much younger fogey on his adult life with that quotation, for courage. Thanks, Father.) A day for all fathers, it turns out. One of our living links to the old church, Fr Brannan, became a priest 50 years ago today. (Our Mass is a living tradition; it wasn’t too late to save it.) Another, historical note, showing the old church is a big tent: the priest of his order who gave his ordination retreat was the American champion of religious liberty, John Courtney Murray.
• Father’s points in understandably a sermon about vocation. First, Catholicism 101, going back to the fathers (Ignatius) and the New Testament: the buck stops with the bishop. You don’t know you have a calling until he says so. Second, understandable in Roman Rite culture, he said celibacy and the grace to live it are part of the calling. He said Fr Murray told his group of ordinands that the calling confirms that God hasn’t intended a woman for you. No disrespect to a fine churchman but that would be news to the married Greek Catholic priests in their homelands and their many Orthodox priest cousins. (The 1930s ACROD story: Slavs, not heretics, pushed out of the church for no good reason. I blame certain Roman Riters more than them.) Changing the rule wouldn’t reverse the vocations crunch (the Orthodox don’t have them anymore either), but it’s just a rule; not a hill I’m willing to die on.
• My late father. I resemble him but he was bigger, a six-footer, and his glasses were horn-rims, not browlines. He grew up speaking Spanish. For a while he and his dad were mountain men in the San Gabriels; he knew how to hunt. Wanted to be an Air Force pilot in the ’50s but for the aforementioned glasses. Ended up an engineer, fighting the Cold War by working on the navigation system of the F-4 Phantom fighter for the Navy, among many other projects. Got to be a private pilot for a while. Got out of the defense business for a couple of years to run the furniture factory he inherited (almost got burned down in the Sixties). A real Republican: Goldwater voter. Loved dogs. Got into lake sailing later on. Left the church for 20 years (why I was born Episcopal) but came back just in time.
• The pseudo-church’s foundations. Paleo goodness from the Anti-Gnostic. What we’re up against now. It’s not the passé, shrinking mainline; this was launched from it. It’s not evangelicalism. Our hosts’ main Protestant religion, even when it denies being a religion, has several names conservatives have given it. Rod Dreher has taken up the name moralistic therapeutic deism; I forget who came up with it. Moldbug rightly sees its roots in the Pilgrims’ extreme Protestantism (but the Pilgrims weren’t the only or even the main American colonial story; that’s a recent myth propped up by the government): he calls it cryptocalvinism or hyper-Puritanism: more from Foseti. Roissy and others call it the Cathedral. A state church in all but name, what Anglicanism tried to be and wishes it were. As I like to say, it’s a Christian heresy, claiming to be charitable and just, standing up for the oppressed (women, non-whites, homosexuals). Still more from The Reactivity Place: ...the three scientific premises of the Cathedral in its present-day iteration. These premises must be accepted without question for membership in good standing: Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), Human Neurological Uniformity (HNU) [its mortal enemy is human biodiversity, HBD], and Keynes-Fisher Macroeconomics (KFM). So there’s your handy rule-of-thumb for the day. If you’re hearing about AGW, HNU or KFM, then it’s the Cathedral talking. Hating both the Catholic Church and the old America that made a good home for it is the Cathedral too.
• The case for controlling immigration. Regular readers know my line: HBD’s true but ought not be any of the state’s business (so no to Sailer’s wall to keep the Mexicans out); defending individual liberty (to move, to apply for school and jobs) should be. (Neither Jim Crow nor affirmative action.) Bring a talent we need, work hard, and obey our do-no-harm rule, and you’re welcome. That said, here’s Pat Buchanan: Answers: No amnesty, secure the border, enforce laws against businesses that hire illegals, and impose a moratorium on new immigration so wages can rise and immigrants enter the middle class and start voting as did the children and grandchildren of the immigrants of 1890-1920 by 1972. In other words, a country can handle only so many new people, so controlling immigration actually helped the big Catholic minority reach its ’50s peak in prosperity and acceptance. Related: Sailer notes that César Chavez, a born American, opposed illegal immigration and importing Mexican labor because he understood supply and demand. The companies tried to use the government (the Bracero program of Mexican guest workers) to screw over Americans like him. As is happening to many Americans now.
• More from Pat: In demographic terms, more white Americans died in 2012 than were born. Never before—not during the Civil War bloodletting, not during the influenza epidemic after World War I, not during the Great Depression and birth dearth of the 1930s—has this happened. In ethnic terms, it means that Americans whose forebears came from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, Southern and Eastern Europe—the European tribes of North America—have begun to die. The demographic winter of white America is at hand, even as it began years ago for the native-born of old Europe. Maybe we shouldn’t have contracepted and aborted our kids. Stupid Sixties.
• Sailer on American Graffiti’s youth car culture: Practically everybody in the Los Angeles of my youth owned a car: capitalist egalitarianism, Henry Ford’s dream. It turned out that some minimum level of general prosperity, Los Angeles in 1962, say, is actually conducive to safety, public order, manners, and responsible behavior. Our elites have been trying to fix that problem ever since.
• Chevy on a West Philly street today. ’50?

Impala: the classic is back

Part spoof, part tribute, down to the January Jones lookalike. Cute.

But that blob’s no classic. This is:




This is the America we’re all still in love with!

Open season on rad trads

Modestinus posts:

Though lengthy, the article takes apart the usual array of neo-Catholic/conservative objections to traditional Catholicism while also exposing the shortcomings in the typical neo-Catholic defenses of Vatican II and the changes which have taken place within the Church over the past 40 years.

As I wrote earlier, in the dark ages of Paul the Disaster (but he held the line on contraception; the nature of the church and the papacy made that so) and Blessed John Paul the Overrated, libs weren’t our mortal enemies. They didn’t take us seriously. It was the Novus neocons, defending tradition since 1970 and whatever the Pope’s opinion was that week (which is not what papal infallibility means). I thought that hostility abated under Benedict the Great (it IS ‘for you and for many’; case closed); maybe I’m wrong.

Derb on sexual harassment

So let’s talk about the “sexual harassment” panic that is currently gripping the West. The source of this collective hysteria is of course our society’s detachment from reality, the winds of Absolute and Unquestionable Human Equality blowing us ever further into the Gulf of Enstupidation.

Roissy’s explained much of this. People don’t say what they mean or mean what they say. Everybody really knows A&UHE’s bullshit. Don’t pay attention to what they say. Watch what they do.

This stuff about sexual harassment, obviously a knockoff of the church’s teaching on respecting women, purity, the purpose of sex, etc. (the Western left is a Christian heresy), was society returning to some sort of order after the Sixties free-for-all, which, surprise, it found it didn’t like. But the replacement is less civilized and doesn’t follow God’s plan. Instead of civilized society bringing average men and women together as much as possible to marry and have kids, it’s a return to the jungle, social Darwinism, serving alpha lust and female hypergamy (women’s natural attraction to high-status men). Now, with contraception and abortion, big daddy state taking men’s money through taxes and (no-fault) divorce court and giving it to women, ‘I don’t need a man’. The draconian sexual-harassment rule isn’t used on alphas. It’s for women to screen out betas hitting on them.

Also:

While the US Armed Forces becomes an equal employment center for the lower classes, most of the actual fighting will be increasingly outsourced to private contractors.

Criticizing libertarianism, and more

• Modestinus criticizes libertarianism. I won’t hang it up but this makes me think and I agree of course that the market doesn’t determine morality.
• Sed contra from LRC: The world first heard the puerile nonsense David Brooks is spouting from street thugs in brown and black shirts in the 1920s and 1930s. They too attacked what they described as the rootless atomistic individualism of classical liberalism (libertarianism) and lauded a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) based on national identity and social solidarity, submerging one’s personality into a faceless mass. Some guy named Mises later wrote a book about this.
• There’s NOTHING stopping a Protestant denomination going the mainline route. Even our close cousins the LCMS. ‘The Vicar of Dibley’: I know that the Rev. Joy Wallis and Dawn French created it to sell women’s ordination. Now that I think about it, I imagine they thought such a marketing campaign showing how ‘cool’ the Church of England had become would win the anti-religious English people back for it, getting at least some to go back to church at least a couple times a year. As I’m not Anglican and haven’t been in England for 20 years, I wonder how that’s working out.
• Sailer at Takimag: does Israel have a backdoor to US intel? Of course. Let me get this straight: our ‘ally’, our fellow Europeans’ ‘beacon of liberty’ in the Mideast, is rooting for al-Qaeda vs. Assad (a secular, heretical-Muslim ruler no threat to us) in Syria? For the folks who murdered nearly 3,000 of us on 9/11. Our capital ought not be Tel Aviv.
• Graph from Daniel Nichols. When’s it the market and when’s it just greed? Fallen human nature and the counterculture/neocon connection, even though the neocons often originally were liberal gentlemen of the old America who rightly hated the counterculture: magnified since 1968, do your own thing = every man for himself.
• From RR:
  • Webshaming backfires: level-headed Dunkin Donuts workers rewarded.
  • Poll: Bush now slightly more popular than Obama. Mainstream presidential politics is Punch and Judy for idiots. Neither is what he presents himself to be. Bush is a nice guy, not stupid like the left’s slander but not as smart as Cheney, with a real folksy accent, but from a liberal Rockefeller Republican family, very New World Order, not the social conservatives’ cultural hero (a character created by Karl Rove). Obama’s from a white and exotic foreign (Indonesian) background whose friends as a young man were rich Pakistanis; he’s not an American black nor all that different from the mainstream neocon GOP, except being more obviously evil about abortion and having a thing for insurance companies. Sailer: he’s really as WASPy as the elder Bush.

I've been quoted, a post on ecumenism, and two paleo links

• A TAC combox quotes me on HBD, Sailer, etc.
• Why dialogue with Anglicans is a waste of time. Classical Protestantism kept from Catholicism the ancient Greek philosophers' (Aristotle) understanding of reason as conforming yourself to reality. The 'Enlightenment' thinkers did too, even though they moved farther from the church. But the Protestants are founded on bad principles, private judgement. The Sixties blew the mainline open. Out went the country-club cultural conservatism (the Episcopalians as the Republicans at prayer); in went the modern Christian super-heresy of political correctness. Hello, Crazytown. Just like the Muslims.
• From the Anti-Gnostic:
  • When women and gays get access to the institution, it's no longer prestigious.
  • The paleo case. Not signing on but it makes me think.

Car show, Clifton Heights, Pa.

A small show every year. No James Dean ’49 Merc like last year. This year’s stars were Chevys: ’57 and ’58 Bel Airs and a ’63 Impala.







I’m not a big fan of the ’57. My dad thought they were ugly at the time and they’ve become a Fifties cliché vs. the real ’50s. But this car is beautiful. Perfect stock condition.


My favorite kind of the three.





Hey, baby. Let’s cruise.

Third Sunday after Pentecost

• Mass: Respice in me et miserere mei, Domine.
• The great institutional church downsizing continues in the corner of Delco I live in: parish closings and mergers. ...declines in Mass attendance, sacramental activity, the availability of priests to staff parishes... As a result, our parish will be merging with St. Philomena Parish to form a new parish effective July 1, 2013. Everyone will attend Mass at the current St. Philomena Church. For the time being, the St. Cyril of Alexandria Church building will still be maintained as a worship site for weddings, funerals and feast days. Currently, many of our neighbors are learning of additional parish mergers in our area. St. Alice Parish will merge with and keep the name of St. Laurence Parish at that location. St. Louis Parish will merge and keep the name of Blessed Virgin Mary Parish at that location. So, Philly Archdiocese, how’s that ‘renewal’ from 40 years ago working out for youse? (In the private sector, an executive who came up with something like the council and its results would be out on his ass.)
• From Takimag: triumph of the hysterical. Apparently there was some politically correct outrage (that Christian heresy trying to stand by the oppressed but ending up looking stupid, denying reality) over a gentleman probably from the golden era noticing that the sexes are different: women naturally prefer to be mothers over being macho executives; they prefer marrying them to becoming them. There is no glass ceiling; men on average work harder and longer, which explains the pay gap. Most women conclude the rat race sucks and get out as soon as they can.
• Orthodoxy and Catholicism: the great Orthodox sellout on contraception. You can chart it in Timothy (Kallistos) Ware’s revisions to his book The Orthodox Church. (Sometimes a refreshing version of traditionalism, patristic and mystical; other times, as a Catholic friend once said, sloppy theology, like Anglicanism or Novus Ordo liberalism. Yeah, Anglicanism, except for having real bishops and a real Mass: pretty worship but a pushover in the culture wars.) A stark contradiction to that church’s wonderful natural traditionalism. (An estranged Catholicism, not Protestantism.) The Sixties hit them too, largely unknown because they’re a small minority in the West, unreported on: it took them from agreeing with the church, like the rest of 19th-century Christendom did, to the ’50s mainline position that’s the evangelical position now, cautious and plausible. I asked the late convert-boomlet ‘rock star’ Fr Peter Gillquist in person about this sellout and didn’t get an answer; he just changed the subject to how Orthodoxy’s against abortion, which, thank God, is true.
  
  From an email group:
  

  I don't know what to make of this "Michael Frost," although he strikes me as the sort of autodidact that filters his "learning" into his prior biases. He is a convert to Orthodoxy (I think from Lutheranism) who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, and yet on many Sundays drives to Des Moines, Iowa to attend a Continuing Anglican church (St. Aidan's, Des Moines), without receiving communion there. He fills the comment space on numerous blogs with defenses of the "Catholicity" of Luther, Bucer, Calvin, Oecolampadius (!) -- all except Zwingli -- without showing much awareness, and serious consideration, of their differences. "Any stick to beat a dog," the dog being Rome, is how I've thought of him -- but now it seems he is a kind of Orthodox revisionist, too, on the subject of contraception.
  
  What's to prevent an Orthodox Christian of his sort from deciding that WO is okay, if it gets enough traction among certain Orthodox constituencies? I am surprised, though, that he hasn't deployed the topos of the "Western Captivity of Orthodoxy" to justify his stance, although if it were to be applied to the subject of contraception that "captivity" would have begun, when, nearly 2000 years ago.
  
  All I know is that one would search in vain to find any respected orthodox Protestant pastor or scholar before the last 1/3 of the 19th century who approved of contraception (at least I've never found one - and that's being generous with the application of the words "respected" and "orthodox" even at that). Being Protestant, I've not looked at the Orthodox literature, but I'd wager you could move that date up at least a century in their case. I am aware that Bishop Ware changed what he said on the subject with each edition of his book on The Orthodox Church, beginning with the Church catholic's uniform prohibition.
  
  A lot of people blast Ware for the shifts in the contraception teaching found in the different editions of The Orthodox Church, but it seems to me he was just trying to report the "facts on the ground" rather than advance his own take on the matter. By the latter part of the 20th C., it was fairly commonplace for most Orthodox jurisdictions in the West (and probably in the East, too) to at least tacitly approve contraception. I could be wrong, but I believe the OCA's 1992 "Affirmation on Marriage..." was the first semi-official statement on the subject ever made by an organized Orthodox jurisdiction. The Moscow Patriarchate issued their own in 2000. It large apes the OCA's statement, namely that a married couple must be open to children, though they can space them out so long as they don't use an abortifacient, etc. The usual stuff.
  
  As a certain former Orthodox blogger recently pointed out on a Catholic web-log, in Orthodoxy every bishop (or, in most instances, every priest) is the magisterium, particularly in the American context where there's no set hierarchy. In my seven years in the Orthodox Church I heard at least a half-dozen different spins on the issue, and each of those spins often came packaged with a rich set of qualifiers ("oikonomia" and all that jazz). I suspect that in most instances the "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the confessional is in effect, though I doubt Ware could have put that in a book...

A Roissyan religious metaphor

Oh, I never realized that Jesus started the ECUSA!
The Episcopal Church is what the Catholic Church would be if it could change like that; it can't of course. Mainstream society is a hot 20something chick and ECUSA is a beta orbiter niceguy doing everything society tells it to, but society dumps it for alpha badboys: secular nastiness or, rarely, real religion such as conservative Catholicism or evangelicalism. ECUSA is in the friendzone, good for a sound bite to make the real lover jealous. It then doubles down, getting even more PC, and people still drop out in droves.

The church good and bad, and our mediocre, nasty government

• The Sacred Heart of Jesus. Another feast of the Incarnation like the biblical Annunciation and Nativity (Christmas), which leads to his Eucharistic presence, so this feast intentionally echoes Corpus Christi last week. A celebration of God’s love; from Jesus as both true God and true man. It’s from 17th-century France, with some antecedents in the Middle Ages (St Gertrude’s devotion; the Five Wounds devotion and banner of England’s Catholic rebels: we wyll haue the Masse). SS. Margaret Mary Alacoque, Claude de la Colombière, John Eudes, and Peter Julian Eymard, orate pro nobis.
• From Takimag: they say they want a revolution. According to Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind survey, 29% of US citizens polled say they believe that “In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties.” While people may be unhappy at the state of things, there is no political vanguard with ideas or organizational skills.
• From TAC: millennials in the mist.
• From LRC: the FBI knew of Saudi 9/11 ties and lied.
• From RR: NSA taps in to user data of Google, Skype and others, secret files reveal. More from Sailer.
• My close encounter with the government. All the horror stories about the DMV and the post office are true of other agencies too. As I’m not in the military (but don’t hate the military; quite the opposite) or otherwise working for the government, nor in the welfare or prison systems, I don’t get to see it face to face much. A recent encounter was like the DMV or post office writ larger, minus the lines. An older black woman in a secure job for life. How she ended our meeting: a minute of silence, then, not looking at me, ‘We’re done’. This was sitting at a desk with no line behind me. Government arrogance plus the race card (‘you can’t fire me’). Charming. Truisms: natural monopolies don’t care about customer service, the government isn’t meant to help you as a consumer of its services (it’s really coerced but in theory we are paying customers), it’s only perpetuating itself, and has or wants a monopoly on force so it never has to answer to you, and ‘civil service’ sinecures are for those unable or unwilling to make it in a real job in the private sector. (If you’re mediocre and have a bad attitude, try to get set for life in a government job, military or civilian.) I love the old republic, but wouldn’t mind saying to the government as we now have it, ‘we’re done’, Miz Jackson. (In that unlikely event, in which the market would do its work unhindered actually serving people, either I hope for your sake you have family to support you or you had best change your attitude.)
• I’ve run across such mediocrities among churchmen. A down side of the true-church claim is, for your millions of members, you’re a natural monopoly. I jump parishes because for trads, the system has been broken since the council. But for the most part, you’re stuck with the institution locally. Priests whose people skills suck. It’s about the song, not the singer; I’m Catholic because of the faith, not the awesomeness, not, of the clergy and lay bureaucrats. I don’t get involved; I keep my nose in my missal, drop my fire-insurance premium in the basket, and leave the priests in peace; they leave me in peace. (Sort of like my understanding about the government; I pay them their protection money and they’re supposed to leave me alone.) I can see how the big underage gay sex scandal and coverup happened. We’re sacerdotalists, not clericalists (a caricature of the church); throw the book at them.

The Real always wins

Today’s title’s from Hilary.

• Durrr... New study finds women prefer to be housewives than corporate execs... The first thing Feminism had to do was convince everyone that there is no such thing as an inherent feminine and masculine nature. But The Real always wins.
• The Death Culture is driven by fear. And our culture has become so atomized and individualized, that a lot of people are simply afraid of life on their own when they are no longer able to fend for themselves. The Sixties: do your own thing = every man for himself. Also a flaw of tiresome ‘you’re not the boss of me’ left-libertarianism: selfishness. Right-libertarianism (minarchism, weak libertarianism, Burkean conservatism): there are, naturally and divinely, community and bosses/hierarchy (family, church), just not an unlimited state (a false church).
• The Sixties and their aftermath are a class war.
• Homosexuality: that does not go there. The War on Reality and biology. Homosex is not sex.
• Muscular men tend to favor governmental policies on redistribution that are in their own self-interest. In other words, a truism: muscular men get what they want. Of interest: And, perhaps not coincidentally, programmers are notoriously prone to self-defeating universalist ideologies like libertarianism and open borders. Sound familiar? It’s an old condemnation of Christianity. Ancient Rome and Hinduism for example: ‘Jesus was weak.’ Not at all surprising since secular universalist ideologies such as the reigning political correctness (Roissy calls it the Cathedral; it is a false church) are Christian heresies (Christian values such as love and justice, separated from Catholicism’s Christ, true God and true man, the writer of the natural law) like mainline Protestantism is. A reason I read Sailer is of course I don’t buy the equalist lie that races on average are the same. (Well-meant attempt at justice and/or the liberal elite using nonwhites in a proxy war against conservative prole whites. Drive out the undesirable whites and replace them with a helot class you can pay less and that obeys you, for now anyway, all while looking enlightened/not prejudiced. And you don’t have to live with any consequences when you’re rich enough. That’s for proles. Nobody said SWPLs were dumb.) Where he and his biggest fans and I seem to part ways is I stick to Christian universalism in the sense of individual rights (one soul is of infinite value) and thus color-blind real equal opportunity including the right to immigrate (the Saileristas and I agree that unequal average group outcomes are natural, fair, and none of the state’s business) while the Saileristas and their pals at Takimag seem to want to dump that as wimpy and really be racists.
• Also from Sailer: in the non-news, an ex-SEAL has emotional problems. How embarrassing, says any normal person. She had a Y-chromosome-ectomy that replaced the Y-chromosomes in all the trillions of cells in her body with another X chromosome, so now she's a woman. Oh, wait, that operation doesn't exist. Sorry, my mistake. Of course the mainstream media in its War on Reality is pushing this. Reminds me of poor Mike Penner, RIP.
• ‘The church is dwindling’ vs. 1.2 billion Catholics. Worldwide? Here in American Catholicism's home base, the Northeast and industrial Midwest, our white numbers (our ethnic base) have been freefalling for 45 years, just like mainline Protestants. The council sucked. Our American numbers are artificially high because of Mexican ringers whose commitment to the church is iffy. We'll probably never get our '50s peak back but American Catholicism needs 20+ years of a younger Benedict (someone with the stamina to finish what he started), not an old social-justicer the mainstream will tune out as me-too politically correct, to turn the American church around and ensure its survival in a Protestant country now even more hostile to it. That said, Sailer quotes an article repeating one of Diane Kamer’s points: Ethnic Catholic whites are one of the main demographic groups that are high tailing it out of the Midwest the fastest. But Catholics are among the fastest growing demographic groups in the Southeast: states like Florida, Georgia and North Carolina either now have, or will soon have, more Catholics than historically heavily Catholic Ohio and Michigan.
• Consequentialism, a sin we’re probably all guilty of: the end justifies the means.
• I’m not mad at Ollie North for what happened about 25 years ago. Even though I’m a Constitution fan. That was Realpolitik, making a deal with someone not a threat to our sovereignty (the ayatollahs of a Hellholistan) in order to fight a real threat to us (global Communism). It’s not like the left really gives a damn about the Constitution (Obama can get away with anything). Daniel Nichols is right, though, about North’s ‘conservative’ fear/warmongering today about Muslims. I fear we really are dumb enough to help al-Qaeda overthrow Syria’s secular government. (There’s no draft and Americans are distracted by entertainment.)
• Chomsky on libertarianism. The assumption is that by some kind of magic, "concentrated private power will lead to a more free and just society." Which libertarians, I wonder, believe this? Mises argued that in a free market, businesses profit by producing what consumers want; capitalism, he said, is a system of "mass production for the masses." Chomsky prefers anarcho-syndicalism; this "is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none." It does not seem to occur to Chomsky that firms owned by workers must also please consumers, if they want to stay in business; why would employees in such companies face fewer constraints than those who work for the capitalists whom Chomsky excoriates? Perhaps, though, he wants to do away with the market altogether. This version of anarcho-syndicalism would soon collapse into chaos.

Speculaton about the show

• Who is Bob Benson? One and Two. FBI agent out to get Don? Corporate spy? Only what he seems, a nice but ambitious go-getter?
• Is Megan a fictionalized Sharon Tate?
• Christina’s commercial. I have to have a reason?

Packard, Buick, and Cadillac

Yesterday on the outskirts of Camden. Highlight: talking to someone who hung around Wildwood in the ’50s, learning about the places that aren’t there anymore. Like where he went to hear doo-wop.