RIP Robin Williams, and more

• The libertarian moment has definitely not arrived.
• A creepy side to creeping libertarianism. Nationally, since '04 I've voted Libertarian (first voted for them, for André Marrou, in ’92) or, in '08, nothing, but let the buyer beware. Left-libertarianism is leftism. There are good things about libertarianism, and there are bad things about it. Perhaps the worst thing is the tendency to move away from the notion of limited government to a notion of limited restraints on human behavior – a kind of "I don't follow rules, man" attitude. Yet, as Burke sagely observed, human beings are fit for liberty only to the extent that they can restrain their own passions and impulses. Man, he noted, must be governed. He can either govern himself or be governed by others, but he will be governed. I don't follow your bourgeois rules, man = do your own thing = every man for himself = why don't you just die already? A return to the jungle. Still, "they're queer (at most 3% of the population), they're here," that's their business and let's keep it that way.
• From Bob Wallace: Why automation is often not the answer. Honda invests in quality people to make a good product.
• From (Fr.?) Dale Griffith at Orthodox Blow-Out Department: What was a real hoot is the so-called Liturgy of St Gregory that was being used by the ROCOR had the novus ordo offertory prayers and was in horrid modern, American English! It was also very, very heavily Russified, including a Proskomedia and gobs of bellowed litanies à la Russe as well. The strangest was that the asperges was said after the introibo prayers…which were heavily truncated. They really hate our guts; compare this slapdash anti-Westernism ("as long as it's not one of the Catholic books intact"; very small of them) to the Russian Catholic non-Russians I’ve met in Manhattan, magnanimously trying to live fully in the other tradition, using the Orthodox books as is, and the whole ethnoi and nations of Eastern Catholics, from the western Ukrainians to the Maronites. I’m very much not a “Seinfeld” fan but this reminds me of the episode in which they made fun of the Orthodox by having George convert in order to keep an ethnic girl from leaving him: “Latvian” Orthodoxy (= Russian; these anti-Eastern Europe putdown jokes are revenge for the pogroms), complete with a silly made-up service that was a mash-up like this, sort of what Eastern liturgies feel like to outsiders. Latvians, by the way, are Balts, long Russian-ruled but not Slavs; they’re related. They are split evenly between Lutherans and Catholics.
• Orthodoxy vs. Catholicism: I've been fisked.
• RIP Robin Williams. Typical Hollywood liberal but a tremendous talent, from the high-octane (coked-up?) standup routine that started it all (I saw him on stage) to Mork to The Fisher King to Awakenings. What a waste. Another great one self-destructs. Del Shannon killed himself because he was depressed too.
• My Sunday-night cartoons weren't on because of the Teen Choice Awards. Like, so boring. Anyway, it's rigged.
• Some Sinatra.