My town about 60 years ago

Conservatism is not an ideology, and more

• Bob Wallace’s case for monarchy.
• From The Imaginative Conservative through Mark in Spokane:
  • Conservatism is not an ideology.
  • Counterfeiting conservatism.
  • Three:
    • A liberal political order cannot be content with modern left-liberalism’s hollow understanding of human flourishing.
    • A principled approach to politics is distinct from an ideological one.
    • An aversion of ideological politics does not mean avoiding hard questions and inspection of the need to reformulate conservative principles for current times.
  • The Founders and classical education: it wasn’t just about Latin; it was about virtue.
• From RR:
  • Cartoon: How Obamacare really works.
  • Libertarianism thick and thin and why paleolibertarianism is neither.
• From Hilary: Do you have a vocation to religious life? Quite honestly, folks, the pickings are slim out there in NewChurchland and I think that one of the more incalculable losses of the post-Asteroid Church are the lost vocations.
• Watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s yesterday. Based on a Truman Capote story I haven’t read, with a tacked-on Hollywood romantic ending I admit I like. What strikes me is Holly is an example of so much wrong with modernity, even wrapped in golden-era style, one of those characters the left gets nostalgic about (when that happens, look out). (Similar problem on the re-enactment that is Mad Men but I still say the lefty touches on it are for plausible deniability; ladies love Don so they watch.) She’s not hot, she’s not cute; she’s sick. The fun is from the better culture she’s a parasite of. Sure, parts of her story are sympathetic because Capote is glorifying her decadence. Mickey Rooney’s part was rude, but that’s not a huge problem. Got to love that poor cat.

Science myth and fact, and more

• From Cracked: Six science myths.
• From Roissy: Flirting (game) > looks.
• From LRC:
  • Fred Reed’s case for single-sex schooling. Good points but can you blame feminism, not women generally? Also, you don’t want homosexuality as in English boarding schools.
  • Not pacifist but anti-war. Laurence Vance and I agree. He often goes too far with his anti-military kick but here he’s good, saying seriously what this says with snark.
• From Dusk in Autumn:
  • Cohort effects in homelessness: Lifelong higher risk for those born near beginning of crime wave.
  • Bygone left-wing populism in rock music.
• From RR: American conservative Christians aren’t paranoid. The siege is real.

Fact vs. myth about the market, and more

• From RR: Debunking criticism of the free market, parts one and two.
• From Bob Wallace:
  • If there really were a free market.
  • Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanity. Our Third Worldization under the state proceeds (no more middle-class American dream with its affordable family formation; a few of the very rich and many of the very poor); also, women depend entirely on men, either directly, the normal way, or through the state, the modern way. (Cf. Sunshine Mary here.) Also, the Anti-Gnostic: The policy rationale behind government handouts: To enable women to have sex with men who make terrible husbands and fathers. Not surprisingly, single women put Obama in office. This is why we formerly did not let them vote.
  • Never let anyone tell your story for you. I decided years ago the way to destroy a culture is to take over education, the government, the media, and the churches, and attack the dominant culture.
• From the Anti-Gnostic: Price is elastic to supply. There is no ‘glass ceiling’ anti-woman conspiracy in business. I always find it remarkable, and perhaps even a little depressing, how few people are able to grasp that the primary consequence of the addition of 70 million working women, all of whom were already consumers, to the labor force could never have been anything else but to lower wages.
• From Ad Orientem: As the 50th anniversary approaches... JFK’s murder: lone Commie nut, All Society’s Fault™, or a coup that was neither? John pointed out to me the lefty narrative, blaming normal society at the time for it. Of course I don’t want to feed that but a coup seems likely. I’ve never seen Oliver Stone’s movie, by the way.
• From Takimag: The breakdown on Bitcoin.
• Dumbing down the readings in the Novus Ordo. I rarely go to it so I had no idea. Like other things in it that have been pointed out to me, not formally heretical but disturbing. Another reason the old Mass is better.

Culture of honor vs. culture of law

Most people who complain about the backward, violent, vengeful side of the Culture of Honor, as contrasted with the progressive, peaceful, neutral-third-party side of the Culture of Law, overlook honor's twin -- hospitality. Honor means, you f*ck me, I f*ck you ten times harder back. But hospitality means, you host me, I'll host you ten times as lavishly next time around. The Culture of Honor is therefore really a Culture of Reciprocity, only one-half of which is "an eye for an eye." Guided by a framework of hospitality, pastoralist peoples can expel an immigrant group for having worn out its welcome.

From Dusk in Autumn.

‘Star Trek Continues’: ‘Pilgrim of Eternity’

I’d heard of these fan-made new episodes of the old show but had never seen one until now. Neat!

Around town

• Drug bust next door. Actually a car stopped by three police cars, two unmarked. A man sitting on the curb, handcuffed, and a car search. Regular readers know that as a sort of libertarian I’m fine with decriminalizing drugs but I like the police too.
• Mainline decline and evangelical success. The former St John the Evangelist’s Episcopal Church, vacated in ’08 after about 100 years (the Episcopalians are still in two neighboring towns but St John’s has beautiful Gothic architecture great for Catholic worship), is now New Beginnings Church of Christ. I don’t think it’s part of the Churches of Christ, who have or used to have a church one town over. That town by the way has a tiny church with the most interesting saint’s dedication I’ve actually seen, and it’s not even Catholic. St Agabus. Meanwhile, the former St Peter’s, Broomall, is booming as Cornerstone Christian Church.

Tuesday links and quotations

• From LRC: How elites view the system.
• From Ad Orientem: The WaPo cheers Pope Francis to try to divide the church. The willfully ignorant secular media think we worship the Pope.
• From Ex-Army: Libertarians who rejoice at people having illegitimate children and taking drugs and indulging in other self-destructive behaviors are just being useful idiots for the left.
• From Takimag: Maybe the French like being French.
• From Bob Wallace: White men as scapegoats.
• From Roissy: One day, the wronged part of white America will notice the boot on its face. How they'll respond is anyone's guess. Perhaps they'll have learned to love being ground to dust. Or perhaps they'll shed their inertia, and execute an escape move. ... reaction fully unleashed, to be followed by a finishing move. The Anti-Gnostic’s been saying this too.

The Geator and me: Columbus Day in South Philly and more

Grand marshal Bobby Rydell waving and laughing after Jerry Blavat saw me and said, ‘The Blues Brothers’. Right after I took this, Blavat said to me, ‘Hey, Jake! Send my respects to Elwood.’ He said something about the hat two years ago too.

By the way, the hat’s a Borsalino.

Fiat voluntas tua: A South Broad Street popemobile.

Miss Philadelphia 2013.

Frank Rizzo. In the Sixties’ aftermath, the right people liked him. The right people hated him. Good cultural conservative but in over his head as Philadelphia’s mayor so he tried to get the federal government to pay for things. RIP.

Moorestown, NJ: the ’59 Caddy has the biggest tail fins.

Barrington, NJ.

Mass: In voluntate tua, Domine, universa sunt posita. Afterwards the priest said a prayer at the Lady altar for the anniversary of the last apparition at Fátima, the one where the sun hurtled toward the earth. The prayer recalled the Pope consecrating the world to Mary’s prayers. Traditionalists devoted to this apparition say the consecration has to be of Russia; they blame the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath, and society’s problems now, on this not being done. Private revelation isn’t strictly speaking part of the faith so I forgot about this anniversary until after Mass. I interpret ‘the conversion of Russia’ as mainly ‘the fall of Communism’. (Unsurprisingly, my dream: Russia becomes Orthodox again under Putin and his successors, the church for all intents dumps the council, and the Orthodox, estranged traditional Catholics, come back.) Anyway, Jesus saves; Mary prays.

The fake shutdown, the problematic Pope, and more

• Shutdown kabuki. So let’s see: Obama seems to love insurance companies and wants to look charitable by stealing and spending your money through quadrupling your health-insurance premium or fining you, to fund useless high-deductible policies. Probably to keep funding the government, which is broke. (Spending less ≠ lowering the debt.) The Republicans, although really just as statist as the Democrats, sort of do the right thing and protest, offering to fund everything in the government except this ripoff that most Americans don’t want. The Dems answer that the GOP is mean wanting to deny people health care and stage this ‘shutdown’, keeping 83% of the government running, and publicizing closing beaches and monuments, using more government workers (rangers and police) to do so than before the ‘shutdown’, in order to scare the populace. Boehner and the GOP likely will cave, again, raising the ‘debt ceiling’. A little more of our freedom and our money, gone. (Made me switch to my company’s Blue Cross, which should be fine for at least a year.) So meanwhile, has the government attacked Syria while nobody was looking anymore? Also, cops in DC gun down an unarmed crazy woman who drove through a barricade. Zero civil-rights outcry from the left, predictably, even though the victim was black. It was probably a show of force to try to pre-empt real civil unrest.
• Hilary on Francis. Nothing important has changed, because nothing important can change. And: Catholics don’t depend on the pope for the Faith. That said: the Successor of Peter has decided to take over the task of demonstrating that the Traditionalist critique of the post-Conciliar Church was right all along. Right, all this is coming from the first Pope ordained after the council. Papal-infallibility pop quiz. The point is it’s really about church infallibility; the Pope is infallible only if he defends the teaching of the church. If he tries to change the church into what the Western left (the church’s bastard) wants, St Robert Bellarmine’s explained what that would mean: the act would put him outside the church, ipso facto no longer Pope. Because nothing important can change, the best approach is not to pay too much attention to Francis. Just hope he leaves our Mass alone. Again, in a pinch there are the Greek Catholics (largely left alone thanks to ecumenism; hey, make political correctness work for you for a change) and the SSPX (we have our Mass because of Lefebvre; maybe the young conservative after Francis will make Fellay a cardinal).
• From Dusk in Autumn: The late-’60s and ’80s left vs. the left now. Arguably better because they still had more of a sense of a common good, carried over from the golden era, and were populist, rather than today’s silly identity politics. Maybe it was more like the ‘Reformation’ vs. the mainline now. But it seems to me the balkanization was already under way (the Black Panthers for example). Yet I remember in the ’70s when mainstream secular culture was much ruder to homosexuals than conservative Christians ever have been.
• Godspeed, Scott Carpenter.

The Obamacare scam

Michael Rivero of What Really Happened gives the best explanation I’ve seen for why the government is so intent that everyone must participate in this program. They have run the country into the ground and want to force us all to pay as they vainly struggle to keep things afloat. This is a last-ditch effort – the only alternative is economic collapse.

Obama’s utter refusal to compromise or delay Obamacare is more than mere political grandstanding. Obama has to prove he can continue to make the payments on the government debt. Now, based on reports we are getting from people who did sign up for Obamacare, they are being offered policies that cost about $500 a month, and have a deductible in the tens of thousands. That means that for the vast majority of Americans, they will be paying $500 a month for insurance that will in fact pay none of their medical costs. So, $500 a month is $6000 a year times 200 million complying Americans equals $1.2 trillion a year pouring into the Health Insurance companies as pure profit, of which the US Government gets almost $200 billion in taxes (plus the IRS fines on those who refuse to sign up). And THAT is why Obama is demanding that Obamacare move forward now, despite a totally botched computer management system and despite 71% public opposition. Absent that new cash flow, the US Government will collapse, and the one-year delay proposed by the House of Representatives is far too long to survive without some new source of loot from the public.

From LRC.

Cars and more: Burlington, NJ

’50 Buick.

’53 Hudson Hornet.

’57 Plymouth Belvedere, a near-Christine.

Galaxie.

Donna and Zero, a bomb-sniffing K-9.

Afterwards, mangiamo.

Overkill in DC, Modernism at Notre Dame, and who’s tough

• LRC on Miriam Carey here, here, and here. National-security theatre, or they want to scare us to keep us in line.
• E. Michael Jones on Notre Dame’s sellout and why the Sixties blew away American Catholicism. Hesburgh arrived on the scene when the WASP ruling class elite, led by John D. Rockefeller, 3rd, was looking for a way to undermine the Catholic Church’s position on birth control, as a way to destroy Catholic demographic and political power, and when the CIA’s C.D. Jackson was working with Time’s Henry Luce and the Jesuit John Courtney Murray to find a solution to what Paul Blanshard called “the Catholic problem.” In the end, the solution ... was disarmingly simple. It was the birth control pill. When the history of the Catholic Church in America finally gets written, it will show that all of the fierce Catholic resistance to American culture during the 1930s—from Cardinal Dougherty’s boycott of Warner Brothers theaters in Philadelphia under the aegis of the Legion of Decency to Msgr. Ryan’s defeat of Margaret Sanger before the American Congress to Father Coughlin’s attacks on usury and his defense of the working man—all collapsed over night when Hesburgh took Rockefeller money and gave Catholics permission to use birth control pills. The church is still here and it will be sound, but because of all this it will be much smaller.
• You may be strong but are you tough? Training, like Christian asceticism (St Paul alluded to running a race).

Obamacare theft, no confidence in Pope Francis, and more

• How much private health insurance is going up. I got the bad news from my insurance this week. I bought my own policy when I was still a temp at the new job; affordable and a bit of independence. While I’m thankful for the job, the company doesn’t own me; if the SHTF there I’m not at the ‘mercy’ of COBRA. Because Obama wants to look charitable by stealing my money and giving it to others, my premium is set to nearly quadruple after my year of putting it off. He obviously wants to take my liberty, first making me depend on the company and ultimately on the state.
• Of course the shutdown’s fake. I don’t hate the government per se. I like seeing the cops’ Crown Vics and Chargers guarding the entries to my town at 1am. That, paving the roads, etc. (I was going to say delivering the mail but that’s going the way of the telegraph.) The slowdown has potential to motivate people to permanently downsize the state, when they see how well they do without it, but it probably won’t. Thanks, GOP, for protesting the Obamacare outrage, even though you aren’t much better. The mainstream media are laughable, trying to get us teary about national parks closing.
• Dyspeptic Mutterings on Pope Francis’s infamous interview. More from MCJ here, here, and here, and Ad Orientem. He’s another Paul VI, the old liberals’ last hurrah. All the wrong people like him. Hunker down, and in a pinch there are the Greek Catholics and the SSPX.
• Bill Tighe recently passed around a 1990s New Oxford Review article on why the libcaths didn’t just leave. Because they were old enough to have grown up in the golden era before the council, so like the legions of lax and lapsed, Bad Catholics, they still believed the church is the true one, even though they hated what it teaches and does. The people who grew up after the council don’t have that instilled in them so they just leave. So you get a smaller, sounder church (Francis is a bump in the road).
• From Bob Wallace:
  • The dark triad vs. the cardinal virtues. Roissy describes fallen human nature as is and agrees the current state of things is bad for society.
  • The theme of the Machine State vs. the Natural State got started during the Industrial Revolution, specifically in England. Horrible things were done to people, all in the name of money and power. For one, there were the Enclosure Acts in England, which people were forced off their land by the State (i.e. the military) so they would have to work in the factories (which William Blake referred to as "Dark Satanic Mills"). Then there were the Clearances in Scotland, in which people were burned off their land. All of this was done by the State (and the police and the military) so people would have to spend their lives being Cogs in the Machine. Because of those things (and others) I years ago decided the Purpose of the State is to Turn You Into a Machine. Ties into the Obamacare outrage.
  • Did a corrupt AMA suppress a cure for cancer?
• From Dusk in Autumn:
  • Identity politics -- Balkanization or normlessness?
  • The "random acts of kindness" phenomenon.
  • The rise and fall of music stars who wrote their own songs.
• From Takimag:
  • Did Bobby Riggs throw the match? Two theories.
  • Children and guns: the hidden dads.