Time

Elastic. Ending 2012 in a few hours.

Caught the last few episodes of Carnivale, which, with Deadwood, I used to watch on Sunday evenings with great pleasure and anticipation. Terrific shows, both of them. Unique.

Was stunned to see that Carnivale ended over 7 years ago. Deadwood, over 6.

Suddenly time feels like a white water raft.

--

Scrap "downright evil" Constitution

Georgetown Law professor: Scrap downright evil Constitution | The Daily Caller:

Who do you trust, Professor Seidman...or James Madison?

The Constitution is indeed imperfect. Its writers didn't have the  privilege of being tenured East Coast Liberal Jews. Instead, they were only a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves...

My philoSemitic index has been falling a lot of late. In far too many cases, what Kevin McDonald asserts and what Dennis Prager admits seem far too similar.



'via Blog this'

Forsaken Eloi

One of the internet guys who's even Rightier than me, and a bit of a moralizer, says that a lot of (White) Westerners have now become Eloi. These are one of the two post-human races in HG Wells' 1895 Time Machine.

The Eloi are the child-like, frail group, living a serene and banal life of ease on the surface of the earth, while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing and infrastructure for the Eloi.

But you know where the Morlocks get their food? The Eloi.

Back in 2008, one of the Western Eloi was Italian artist Pippi Bacca. She went off alone to promote peace in the Middle East by hitchhiking, dressed as a bride.

The Morlocks got her.

She was found naked, raped and murdered, in Turkey.



Yet another Eloi story:

A young Canadian-American couple, husband and wife, --Josh and Caitlin, really--set off for...wait for it...Afghanistan. She has a liver ailment. And...wait for it...she's pregnant. They apparently wanted to join a humanitarian aid group to help...wait for it...the Afghans. Now they're missing.

Daddy described her as "naive, adventuresome, idealistic, and with a humanitarian bent."

I've met them before, their type, imagining that their cool global intentions and self-regarding leapfrog morality* will shield them from the world.

“In 2011," continues Daddy, "they spent 4 months travelling throughout all the countries of Central America, returning for Thanksgiving. They enjoyed staying in hostels and tents, connecting as much as possible with local people and helping out as opportunities arose.” (ExC's italics).

They think they live in a Benneton commercial. Sometimes just cluelessly irresponsible. Sometimes culpably blind.

Eloi. The West's elite is full of them. Too good, as they say, for this world.

Food for Morlocks.



HT to VFR


*Leapfrog morality is the current Western moral fad, which values people in direct proportion to their distance from them. As Sailer says, “Modern liberals’ defining trait is making a public spectacle of how their loyalties leapfrog over some unworthy folks relatively close to them in favor of other people they barely know.”

I can't help thinking that these Eloi fools are the rootless and clueless ancestors descendents of the Protestant (proto-humanitarian) medical, teaching and social missionaries of the 19th century. At least those idealists believed that they were bettering their inferiors. The current versions believes we are all equal and that we owe it to these strangers, who are both the victims of our White Western colonialism, etc. blah blah and deeply spiritual.

Talk about a civilization dying not with a bang but with a whimper.
---

Unholy Romanish Empire

Whenever the seal of the confessional comes up in a contemporary detective story, it is always cast as somehow immoral, keeping vital information from people who think they deserve to know it, in the interests of justice. Cops especially. Or other moral agents with an ax du jour to grind: abuse-identified feminists, child-sex survivors, etc. The overarching assumption is that the State is the owner of morality and that some non-State institution --especially the despised Christian/Catholic religion--asserting a prior claim is an outrage. It certainly would have been the obvious position of a Communist regime. And as recently noted, in formerly Catholic Ireland.

In a limited government by republic, with an intact culture, the role of the State would often be to protect prior institutions, like family, religion, all sorts of other private and voluntary connections. The modern Liberal State, therapeutic, enlightened and ultimate, --imagining itself the very incarnation of The Community-- knows no such boundary. It is transcended by nothing.

Despite my criticisms of the Church, I remain concerned for its inner coherence and existence as one of the few realms left where this omnivorous State meets resistance, imperfect though that be. In America, where there was no State Church, the idea was to free the government from particular denominational doctrines and to leave the Church, in all its varied forms, free of the State's direction and of any State restraint on the free exercise of religion...in all areas of life. The Liberal State, while feigning hysterical fear of encroaching churchly theocracy, developed into a secular one, arrogating to itself not only the rule of law but the role of ultimate teacher and enforcer of morality: anti-discriminatory equality being its secularist dogma. Increasingly, the State has become the Church, replaced it, while the Church is increasingly regulated and constrained --like the family, marriage and all those formerly free associations which make up culture and which it once protected. It is no accident that Obama speaks of freedom of worship rather than freedom of religion.

Reminds me a bit of the Roman imperial strategy, where you could keep your local cult ceremonies as long as you worshipped the Emperor.

--

Thought flashes

We live in a society where the poor people are fat.

And where we are increasingly afraid, not of dying too soon, but of living too long.

---

And, of course, where majorities live in mortal fear of offending the sensibilities of hostile minorities.

---

The dissolution of Empire

Started to watch a Brit drama series about the surveillance state. Hinged on a mathematician from London returning home after years abroad and feeling the shock of the technological changes. What was as obvious as the Orwellian levels of surveillance was that with one exception, the English math guy was the only White guy in the film. In London. Otherwise if was a Third World festival.

Had to turn it off.

--

Image and ideology

In the current (and recent) Roman liturgy, the Sunday after Christmas is Holy Family Sunday. Never one of my faves. Along with Good Shepherd Sunday. Luckily I escaped before JIIPII hijacked the Easter Octave Sunday with his Polish-nun devotion, Divine Mercy Sunday. I guess I am more partial to mythic themes and events than to PR.

Focusing on the triad of Jesus, Mary and Joseph (a familiar Catholic curse phrase, btw) as a model family began in 16th century France. Since the breakdown of the Middle Ages, "devotions" took over more and more of the religious landscape of Catholicism. The Holy Family, the Sacred Heart, the Rosary, etc. And not infrequently they contained a moral program. And at least in American Catholic churches, there was the high altar holding Christ's presence in the Tabernacle, and then two side altars, almost always to the Virgin and to St. Joseph. So the Holy Family was architecturally embedded.

The Holy Family was supposed to be a model family. Far from it. Two virginal parents and a Messiah? And there's that joke about how you can prove that Jesus was Jewish: he lived at home til he was thirty, he went into his father's business, his mother thought he was God and he thought his mother was a virgin.

I used to think...and probably said from the pulpit...that The Waltons would be an easier act to follow. Part of my own complex about perfectionism getting acted out. Family provokes the highest expectations and the deepest disappointments.

As the holy pictures shows, it is also not a particularly masculine image, even though it is deeply patriarchal. I suspect that devotion to the Holy Family was a passtime for women and for family-less clergy and monks. For workaday husbands-fathers, I wonder what kind of inspiration it could have been?

A far more interesting picture of family is actually what constitutes the first part of the Bible, the Primitive and the Patriarchal narratives: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel and their descendants to Noah and his sons, then the essentially familial dramas of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (and Joseph)...and their women, without whom the story would ground to a halt.  To me, much more vivid and human. And hopeful, since the fulcrum families were anything but models*. Much more like our own. After all, what is more typically human than fractured relationships within families?

On the other hand, seeing the terrible damage done when families unravel, it's important to speak up for family life. In some ways, the only thing worse than having a family is not having one.

I could not let this post pass without a knock at The Nuns. The contemporary groovy ones. One of their big discoveries and values, along with The New Universe Story, is systems thinking. The LCRW, under fire from Rome for doctrinal failures --not, as the MSM and the nuns would have it, for their "social justice" work with kids and the poor and the sick-- publishes and promotes a Systems Thinking Handbook. It's really just watered down Marxism, the "systemic change" that crypto-Constantinian Christians use to "build a just social order."

But if one of the most devastating phenomena in our society is the unwed/divorced mother-led family, would it not be the best kind of systems thinking for these groovy nuns to focus their endless moralizing energies on recreating an ethic of marriage rather than grandstanding their care for "the poor and vulnerable" after the fact? How about systemically preventing tons of poorness and vulnerableness via marriage-before-children rather than having the treasury fund it after the fact?

Here endeth the lesson.

*It is a great virtue of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, that it portrays the patriarchs and prophets and kings and priests as flawed, but still beloved and chosen. Christianity, built around a single Perfect Man, lets almost everyone else have flaws, but with much less ease about it. And Islam carries this to an extreme, where Prophets must all be considered not only as extremely virtuous but extremely successful. The Koran denies that Jesus was crucified, since Allah would not allow such a shameful death for a prophet. 

A moderate Muslim writes

to express a point of view divergent from Ex Cathedra's:

Anonymous said...

To the author: Yeah, well i am Muslim and I'm damn proud of the clean way of life Islam offers , and if you don't like you can go to hell, you stupid ignorant piece of shit.

11:32 AM, December 29, 2012 

A petty peeve or two

neither political, sexual or religious.

If you're gonna dress up, then pull your damn tie up all the way.


And if you're Master of the Dominican Order, then wear your habit right
and stop having your damn shirt collar stick out. He doe this all the time. Drives me nuts.

---

One of the mysteries

Why Jimmy Stewart was so popular.

Pencil-necked geek with one of the most annoying voices in film.

And he pretty well usually played the same role no matter what the role called for.

I'm watching The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and I'd like bad guy Mr Valance to take him out.

--

Anti-hero on steroids

Wallander, the Swedish detective in Henning Mankell's books and Kenneth Branagh's BBC series.

God, what a mess he is. Dresses like a slob, on the job, and looks and sounds like he's half-asleep, or coming out of a drunk. But this is not a Columbo mask. He really is a mess. Guilt-ridden, unable to sleep, alienated from those who love him, taking every crime personally, having his own long-drawn nervous breakdown.

Because he killed a killer. In self defense. In the line of duty. But no one, says he, no one has the right to take a life. So he sets about unravelling his own. His moral compass is mad. Evil, actually. Masquerading as utter high-mindedness.

An example of a man --and of a society-- which has ceased to believe in God and has decided to take His place. A burden that only a sinless man could bear.

Anyone else --or any society-- it would drive insane.

And one of the side effects is that he becomes irritatingly boring. His moral obsession seems more and more like a weakness and a self-indulgence, especially as his paralysis wounds and drives away those closest to him because of the deaths of complete strangers. I find that I watch the series despite his character, because the plots are very interesting



PS. The blurb for the upcoming episode: Wallander moves into a dream home with his new girlfriend, but his happiness is shattered when the skeleton of a young girl is discovered in the garden.

LOL!!

Well, duh. Of course.
--

The Great Modern Lie

We have it in our power to set everything right.

---

Explains much

For every thorny, intractable, entrenched problem there exists a solution that is simple, direct, soul-satisfying and completely wrong.

HT to commentor "denton" at PJMedia


I have a few of these in my own pocket, ...forest of gallows, etc..but luckily I lack the means to implement them...

No to gun control

Assuming, and it's an easy assumption, that the logic of Liberalism means the total and complete disarmament of the populace, it should be the attitude and policy of any decent conservative to resist any and all attempts to control arms. Saying yes to whatever seems rational and reasonable and within limits today is only one more step to the eventual banning of arms entirely. So don't give an inch.

The Feast Day of Reality

From the Gospel of Matthew, for the feast of the Holy Innocents, December 28.

When [the Magi] had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. Get up, he said, take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him. So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son." 

When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.

Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: "A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more."

One of the common contemporary* critiques of the Bible is that, unlike the uplifting sutras of Buddhism or the poetry of Rod McKuen, it is full of violence of all kinds. The Good Book is indeed also a Bloody Book. I guess that's part of the difference between spiritual and religious. As much as parts of the Bible promote or describe human life as it should be, a great deal of it portrays human life as it actually is.

The Wikipedia entry about this episode describes it, in the first sentence, as an instance of infanticide and gendercide. These, as we now know in our enlightened times, having given them special technical names, are social problems which need solving...


*Actually, it's a very old complaint. Bishop Marcion tried to edit out the whole Old Testament and a lot of the New in the 2nd century, on grounds that it wasn't very nice. Pagan Platonists back in the classical world found the Bible barbaric. To this day, the Orthodox Christians never read the Book of Revelation in church services.
--

Funny

how the angle of the winter sun, even on a beautiful day by the Pacific, combined with a mundane task, a friend's aging, a tossed-off funny comment, a scheduling bump and a common voicemail message can conspire to bring you down, make you feel your mistakes and your illusions and your flaws, bring a sadness to your gut.

--

Stupefaction in the African Diaspora

"And the fact is that I would actually rather die by shooting than live armed."

More Guns, Less Crime: A Dialogue - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic:

Not only White Liberals, but Black* Liberals can show that peculiar combo of being too good for this world and yet presuming to tell the rest of us how to live in it.

*Since we are dealing with "Ta-Nehisi" Coates...who gives their kids stupid and pretentious names like that? (You know the answer but you're not allowed to say.)..I should have said "African-American", etc. He's a symptom of what The Atlantic has become.

I am cruelly reminded of Scrooge's remark to the charity-seekers who told him of people who would rather die than go to the workhouse: "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and reduce the surplus population."



'via Blog this'

VDH is a smart guy

The Year the Dreams Died - Victor Davis Hanson :

but a decent guy, too. So his list of dead dreams does not touch his own dream, of an America where inter-racial and inter-ethnic friendships trump race and culture group loyalty and drive for status, power and wealth.

As with Robert D Kaplan, it surprises me that a man like Mr Mexifornia Is Worse Than I Thought Hanson, who knows first hand the devastation that the Mexican invasion is wreaking on California, and the nation, still clings to this fiction.

But then I guess both of these guys make their livings as public writers and speakers. To embrace realism about race would be suicide.

 'via Blog this'

Raising the bar

I believe I have mentioned my eyerolling response to the inflated goals that so many do-gooders now feel must be their default position. Liberalism, after all, is driven by a passion for solving problems of suffering. Solving problems. Making them go away. Entirely. Forever.

Just to show good faith, you must promise the impossible.*

Good luck with that.

My two most recent examples. A Christian project --and being Christians, they really ought to know better than to fall for utopian lingo in this fallen world-- derived from Habitat for Humanity: a community of cyclists dedicated to ending poverty housing worldwide. Cyclists. Ending. Poverty Housing. Worldwide.

Mother of God.

And the other was an offer of a retirement investment program that would help to end animal cruelty.

Well, you know, animals have to fight for their survival and carnivorous animals have to kill just in order to eat at all, so I don't think it's really fair to call them cruel when they are simply acting out their God-given nature.

Oh. What? Oh.

Oh, that means human cruelty to animals?

*And since liberalism absolutely requires a constant supply of suffering situations to solve, it really behooves them to choose insoluble ones. That way they will always be needed and have work to do.

---

Ain't that the truth

HT to my FB pal Geoff

Older but not wiser?

I have been an admirer of Robert D Kaplan for quite a while. His article about The Coming Anarchy, back in 1994, when The Atlantic was not yet one more utterly predictable mouthpiece for the Northeast Liberal Elite, started me thinking about stubborn human realities that did not fit with my liberal assumptions. He nailed it when it came to understanding the inquisitorial role of mainstream media journalism. I even named him in my series on Impressive Guys.

His latest article, though, gives me a different impression. He seems to think that the erosion of "universal values" --aka White Western Post-Christian/Enlightenment Liberalism-- by "narrow nationalism" is some kind of surprise, as well as a threat. That, for example, Orthodox Russia's suspicion of Islam is "racist." (Has he forgotten Russian history? Or, in these days of 30 dead children in Connecticut, the 156 killed by Chechen Muslims in Beslan only 8 years ago? Would Reb Kaplan, who served in the Israeli army, characterize the Jewish state's defensive attitude toward the hostile Muslim sea around it as "racist", too?) For a man as supremely well-travelled as he, what part of his own reading of Samuel Huntington did he not get? Can he no longer "look the world in the eye?"


IMHO, racial, ethnic, tribal, religious, cultural identities are inherent in humans, constitutive, inescapeable, necessary, a constant source of difficulty, and ineradicable. Very much like sex differences. Respecting them and managing them as best we can is vastly different from transcending them, much less ignoring, erasing them or announcing them trivial or outmoded. That is something Liberals --and now, sadly, even Mr Kaplan-- seem impervious to understanding.

---

Moral panic

One of the age-old insights that Jung re-packaged for our times is the relative constancy of human nature. whether you are a New Guinea aboriginal or a Manhattan sophisticate. His psychological interpretation of UFO sightings in the 50's linked them to a long tradition of visionary visitations in times of societal crisis. Didn't we just live through the Mayan calendar issue, about which even Hollywood movies were made? We live in a Liberal world where human nature is considered to be a malleable social construct* and therefore the proper concern of the therapeutic managerial State. We can become whatever we (in the person of the Liberal State and Culture) wish us to be. Jung reminds us of what all the other non-insane people in history knew: there is indeed a nature to man, largely irrational, and it remains constant underneath the surface changes.

Salem Witch Hysteria

Moral panics are a part of human nature. We are used to thinking of them as being about sex, (remember the Satanic child sex abuse rings that no one could ever find?) or, in less "enlightened" societies, witchcraft,  but they can be about anything.

Liberal Gun Hysteria

Like guns.

Ms. Bookworm makes a telling point: Children are murdered by guns all year long, but "what the white liberals ignore until there’s a Columbine or Sandy Hook that makes them feel vulnerable " are the legions of Black kids who die by bullet. Details are farther down in her article, below the picture of the masked gangsta. Many, many more Black kids die each year --even each month-- than were killed in that school.

A moral panic arises when there is a perceived threat to the social order. But the social order takes it for granted that Blacks will shoot each other. No one will say that publicly, but everyone knows it. We have the little corner memorials, with candles and teddy bears, the weeping Black mother on the local news, the outraged Black preacher with the ritual call for peace, but we all know that this is indeed a part of the order of their society. It's only when Whites, or White children now, are killed in a hail of gunfire by Whites that "the social order" is threatened.

The current moral panic about guns is a White moral panic. And even though the MSM is functionally anti-White most of the time, here's an event which lets their true colors show. (Although the results of their agenda would be only to disarm Whites.)  And the Whites who are most in a panic to disarm the country are the very same ones who will cry "Racist!" any time someone refuses to worship their Lord and Savior, Barack Obama, whose Black brethren and sistern, all those little Trayvons, kill each other all the time.

Remove all the guns is no different from Burn all the witches.

---

*There are exceptions, of course. You can change your sex, but you can't change your race. We now have Mr. Chaz Bono, but even though, by the time he died, Michael Jackson had turned himself into some kind of a spectral White woman, his Black community embraced him as one of their own.

Which reminds me. You can change your race. If you're Black and a Republican, you lose your status.

--

Even the holiday holyday

can't stop my brain from musing.

How quickly a society can change. In a single lifetime.

For many people in the West, in America, --Caucasians, mostly-- the sight of a gun seems somehow praeter rerum seriem, outside the normal course of things, a shocking alien and dangerous presence.  Like seeing a child being spanked or corporally punished in any way. When I was a kid, spanking, hand-slapping, etc. were absolutely normal things. Now --and again, for Caucasians mostly, and probably Asians-- it seems criminal, really shocking, for a parent to lay a hand on a child. And I have met some kids who could use a smack or two. And when I was a kid in the 50's, I used to play with the Japanese rifle my dad said he took from a soldier in the war, and my uncle was a hunter. All very normal back then.

But people's minds can be changed, made to un-think things that were once ordinary. Especially now with the ubiquity of media.

My own life, for instance, a generation earlier, would have been a catastrophic family secret. Not that it was easy for my parents, but they could deal with it eventually, because times had changed, culture had changed.
It has been to my personal benefit, this change, but I would not be surprised if it were detrimental to society as a whole.

Back to guns and spanking. It feels to me like an unreal trance that the West is putting itself in, a kind of bubble or cocoon, where the realities of human nature are suppressed and denied, even made a scandal. Like a society of pre-mortem Jacob Marleys, we hobble ourselves with huge "mind-forged manacles" of our own making, where what was once common sense is now seen as a moral outrage. And vice versa.

A character in a Swedish detective story, done by the BBC*, is what provoked my musings yesterday about the extremes of a Godless life. This guy, Wallander, a burnt out hard case kinda guy --seems so odd in the midst of all the Nordic tidiness and civility-- takes personal responsibility for what other people do, and then spreads it out to "our society". Galactically overestimates his power. And then, in the midst of trying to keep a distraught young man from killing the guy who murdered his girlfriend, the flatfoot says, "No one deserves to die. No one." Moral conviction, utterly without grounds. Blind sentimentality. We've come a long way from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who is not above private justice and loses no sleep over it.

Amazing. What it really means is that "we" have lost the right to take life. Something that is, in fact, the foundation of survival. Both because we are simultaneously unworthy and too good.

As I say, complete lunacy like that can now be spoken as if it were just Ethics 101.

So, dear readers, buy a gun and learn to use it. Spank your kids if they need it. And don't mourn a wink when murderers are put down. In the end, that's for God to handle. Merry Christmas.


*PS. As I've noticed about Brit detective shows, with this Swedish one --made by Brits-- we have the same phenomenon of a populace which treats police with contempt and hostility and pretty well everyone in the stories is narcissistic, arrogant, short-tempered, self-pitying, entitled and unhappy. Two women, in separate instances, try to beat Wallender up out of frustration with not having their expectations met. And he takes this all, apologizing. Very odd. He's an existentialist on the way to a nervous breakdown. Despite the clean and orderly Swedish surroundings, the series --to my declinist self-- reeks of the decay of a world that no longer has any idea why it exists. Malmo.

It may be that Branagh and the BBC have pitched the Swedish original into this grim direction.

PPS. Finding a Swedish blog of somewhat similar mien, I wrote to ask the fella about this. He said that it was true, that native-born Swedes do have a lot of ill-feeling toward the cops. His analysis: they do not solve crimes (especially if related to the restive and violent Muslim/African immigrant population), they have a groovy 60's style out of step with current realities, and to avoid the race issue, pick on native Swedes for minor violations and minimize things like the rape epidemic, etc. One man's opinion.

--




---

Christmas 2012

Musing

I wonder,
 if a society no longer believes in God
--or karma or the rule of heaven--,
no longer feels that as humans
we are part of something far older and more powerful than we are,
which has created the limits and conditions in which we find ourselves,
that while we are morally responsible creatures in the world,
we do not bear the final moral burden for the world,
if its only two choices are
to take responsibility for everything
as if man had replaced God
or
as victims of a cosmic accident
to take responsibility for nothing.

Both of which lead to madness.


Humility can be a great relief.

--

Christmas Eve

Brenden Sanborn

...nestled all snug in their beds,

While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;

Even curmudgeonly ExC can be a little sentimental at Christmas.

--

Dear Santa

Toss Another Bag of Coal on the Christmas Fire - Taki's Magazine:

From Taki's resident master of outrage.

 "I wish that what I see with my very eyes was all an illusion. 

I wish I was wrong about a lot of things. Too many things."

Amen to that, St. Nick.

'via Blog this'

MSM BS

David Gregory, typical the Liberal establishment hypocrite.*

Doesn't your Torah say something about doing one thing while saying another, Mr. G?

*Let me repeat, my contempt for this kind of hypocrite is not fundamentally moral. We are all hypocritical in different ways. That makes it practically trivial. What burns me here is the insult to my intelligence, that he and others of his kind would think me stupid enough to buy his line...about this or about anything else.

---

PS. Hatred of "guns" by the Gun Control crowd is really about hating men, and White men in particular. Regardless of any rules, Blacks will continue their primitive hunter-gatherer tribal warfare, low-level and constant. 

Not a keeper

Michael Mann, who was a hot director in the 80's (Miami Vice), wrote and directed The Keep, a combo of supernatural horror flick and WWII Nazis centered on a strange castle-prison in Romania. Visual style and atmosphere, great.

Story, clunky and confused. I guess that's what happens when people whose real gift  is decoration turn to moralizing.

Again I note how often we see Nazis as the great evil in history while utterly ignoring the gruesome horrors of Marx and his devils, masquerading as angels of light.

---

In a bind

who would you rely on?

Pussy Brit "journalist" Piers Morgan, or Ted Nugent?

No contest.

**

Echoing nuns

LCWR calls for assault weapons ban | National Catholic Reporter:

Is there any attitude, viewpoint, policy or program of the Liberal Democrats
that these women are not in utter lockstep with?

'via Blog this'

Who could resist?

Description of a movie, Struck By Lightning.

After being struck and killed by lightning, a young man recounts the way he blackmailed his fellow classmates into contributing to his literary magazine.

I know you'll be shocked that I was able to resist watching, but, tough guy that I am, I was able.

--

Sex in Church

Why Don’t Men Come To Church? | The American Conservative

Why Are People Still Uncomfortable With Female Pastors and Rabbis?: The Atlantic

Aside from all the sociological and biological stuff about sex differences, there is the issue of Christianity itself. In Ex Cathedra's opinion, Christianity contains a powerful dose of femininity which, if not overtly anti-masculine, is certainly very ambivalent about the typical exercise of male passions. Take the Sermon on the Mount. Male resistance to church-going is a theological issue, too. And that I have seen neither side deal with much.

The Atlantic article mentions something I have thought female ordination but seen mentioned nowhere: that such females take on the clothing of males.

There isn't really an archetype in either Christianity or Judaism of a "priestess"—a strong, authoritative, but very female leader. So I think the women who take on those roles sometimes seem to people like they're trying to be men—like they're lesser versions of the male archetypes. Almost, like I said to you earlier in the kitchen, like they're cross-dressing—playing a part in a play that's written for a male actor. 

Yes, I definitely hear that. Even the clothes that female pastors wear in Christianity often look like identical versions of the male pastors' clothes, and it does have a strange visual effect.

It both (unconvincingly) masculinizes the girls and then, far worse, de-genders the men with the assumption that their vestments can just as well be worn by females. No one expects a female mayor or prime minister to dress in a suit and tie, but ordained females just put on the boys' clothes. Bad for both parties.

'via Blog this'

Reality-based

The politically conservative Dominican whose blog I read has a summary of some recent arguments in England about the basics of politics. The conservatives read the liberals as "anti-realists."

Of course, everyone thinks that they are being realistic. It was the lefties who dubbed themselves The Reality Based Community during the Bush years.

Given my own points of view, I think anti-realist is a good generalization about Liberalism, which seems to me to be the moralistic fallacy writ large and turned into a totalitarian program. It imagines a certain kind of utopian Ought To Be and then tells us that this is how things really are and it is only the ignorance and meanness of conservatives which stand in its way. And have apparently stood in its way since time began.

Friar OP described this worldview as fascist. Only in the sense that both fascism and Marxism expand the State so much. But fascism at least recognizes a prior natural and social order, which is why it is much more likely to be nationalist. Communism expands the State in the name of an imaginary group, a solely class-based group without familial, tribal, racial or religious ties. Liberalism is eventually totalitarian rather than fascist.

I would take a Franco over "The Republic" any day.

---

Do as I say

A flick I was mercifully able to fast-forward through, about struggling (and failing) actors in Hollywood, reminds me how odd it is for the "film community" to be so relentlessly liberal when its own behavior is as relentlessly and ruthlessly capitalist as anything the 19th century had to offer.

---

I was a bad boy, Santa

It's the Christmas season, and I developed a cold yesterday --sniffles and sneezing-- so this morning I thought I'd comfort, celebrate, fortify and heal myself by adding a bit of brandy to my morning brew.

Apparently I added more than I thought. And then forgot to eat anything.

So when my pal J called to ask me out for lunch, I stood up and...whoaaaaa!

Always been susceptible to ETOH.

Got myself to lunch and back, but the whole afternoon have been woozy and sleepy.

As the song goes, Booze in coffee bings, making spirits high...

--

Another shock

The internet is agog with outrage today that that Pope Benedict thinks gay marriage is a bad idea.

Hooda thunkit?

Like his speech to the same audience a few years ago, his annual "State of the Church" address to the Roman Curia talked about kinds of human self-invention that go beyond the bounds of nature, the sexual* nominalism that tells us we can be whatever the hell we want. No limits.

Catholicism, considers homosexuality one of these phenomena, and genderless** marriage another. Although it will be the same-sex marriage and LGBTQ types, like that Hetaira of the West, Lady Gaga, yelling the loudest at the unbelievable idea of the Pope of Rome disagreeing with them, I suspect the real background ideology is feminism.

After all, he attacks Simone de Beauvoir by name.

It is feminism which, in service of increased female power against and over men --and only that-- has declared gender both THE most important issue in the world AND a completely fraudulent social construct of oppression.

Without that groundwork, the LGBTQ thingy and gay marriage could not have gotten off the ground.

Just as, I suspect, without the moral outrage-based fuel of Martin Luther King, Betty Friedan would have stayed at home in her suburban gulag.




*As far as sex and gender go, anything goes. But when it comes to race, the iron law of fate and radical givenness obtain. You can go from male to female, but if you're Black or Brown or White, that is an immoveable identity. Even to think of switching is a horror of the first magnitude, dude.

**I call it genderless marriage because the fundamental argument behind same-sex marriage is that the gender, or the sex, if you will, of the spouses is irrelevant. Of no importance. Hence, gender-less.

Occasions of sin, again

Reported sex assaults leap 23 percent at US military academies - U.S. News:

I again find useful the Baltimore Catechism notion of occasions of sin, situations which, while not evil in themselves, are likely to tempt to evil.

In lingo that even brain dead morally-preening (but basically heartless) liberals might understand, they're like triggers, those situations likely to induce bad behavior such as substance abuse, etc. Anyone knows that you don't knowingly place people near their triggers.

Except when Equal Rights are in play. This is The Most Important Thing In The Whole Effing World.

The basic problem behind the sex assaults in the academies is that there are women there, in the first place.
Place females in a hugely young male, testosterone-fueled environment, and then be shocked and appalled when sexual aggression takes place, and then, of course, blame the men.

Nah. And you wonder if ExC is being a little extreme in saying that at the heart if feminism is a hatred of males?

As in so many ways, our anti-realist culture puts human beings in situations likely, likely, dare I say inevitably, tempting them to evil...and then blames them for it.

What did I read the other day about feminism (from a woman)? Ah yes. "Galloping self pity combined with driving ambition."

So many candidates for that forest of gallows. So many.

Oh, btw, congratulations on surviving the Mayan Apocalypse.

And Happy Solstice.

====






'via Blog this'

Obama's children, at it again

College student's murder yields $10 | StarNewsOnline.com:

One more "completely random" killing where armed Black thugs murder unarmed Whites.

The Black Intifada continues, although we are not supposed to know about it.

Dat would be raciss.

'via Blog this'

Lost Boys

A teacher and chaplain at a Christian reform school offers his four predictors of bad outcomes for boys, based on ten years of working directly with boys who wind up in his school:

1. Illegitimacy
2. Divorce.

Not surprising. Leaves a boy feeling rootless and rejected.

3. Adoption.

I recently discovered evidence that adopted kids are a big risk, regardless of how well they are parented, which surprised me. He agrees. The boy will take out his anger at the abandoning parents on the adoptive parents. Special warning from him: avoid kids from Eastern Europe. And especially avoid adopting Blacks if you are White.

4. Drugs. 

Again, not surprising. I have never known anyone whose life was improved by them.

--

Words

I'd be happy never to hear again:

Awesome!

Amazing!

"the poor, the vulnerable and the marginalized."

--

Red Book

Not this one.

This one.

It was not until 2009 that Jung's Red Book was published. Although he referred to it as the central work of his life, one he worked on for sixteen years --hand writing and illustrating it himself-- and which gave shape and meaning to everything else he did, no one knew what was in it except for a few illustrations. 

So it seems that everything anyone ever wrote about his work will need to be re-thought in light of it. Before RedBook and After RedBook.

Among those who think of him as a confused mystic, this book will only solidify their impression. Its 200 pages of consciously antiquarian text and pictures elaborate his near-psychotic encounters with the depth of his unconscious during his crisis years in the teens of the 20th century. They have the density and opacity of a primary religious revelation. 

We'll see how its influence unfolds, if, like Barth's Romans, it falls like a bombshell on the playground of the psychoanalysts.

Unsurprisingly, an orthodox theologian finds it a bomb rather than a bombshell...


[To add to my criminal use of foreign websites to watch movies for free, I found one that let me download the  $200 volume as a pdf onto my laptop for free...We'll see how much of it I get around to reading it.]

Perspective

A 1977 Christmas movie, where the patriarch, in a small New England town, decries the death of Christmas.  Thirty five years ago. The scenes show streets full of decorations and music, actual Santas asking for Salvation Army gifts and ringing bells. Everyone greeting "Merry Christmas", as if it were the immutable order of things.

Seems like The Golden Age by comparison.

--

Smokin' Sodomites

Chilly in SF today. Low 50's...in the house. I guess I'll turn the heat on for a while.

A funny memory, about how funny the world has become:

A few years back I worked with an out gay man who, because of his profession --not a medical man, btw-- felt it would be a problem if anyone saw him smoking cigarettes, which he liked to do. So here we are. 21st century America, San Francisco version: homosexuality is a non-issue, but it's risky to be seen smoking tobacco.

---

Surprised even me

Time magazine, once substantial and important --they published the first "letter to the editor" I ever wrote, when I was 14-- is now just a step up from Newsweek.

On their shortlist for 2012 "Person of the Year"?

Undocumented Americans.

That's right. Not illegal aliens. Not undocumented immigrants.
Undocumented Americans.

I propose that from now on, all Mexicans be referred to as
Future Americans.

Why not?

I recommend that in the houses or apartments of each of the Time-istas who came up with the crap, we move in several of the Undocumented Americans and tell them that from now on they have to refer to Jose and Maria and Diego and Rosa as Undocumented Members of the Family.


PS. They have made up their minds and chosen Barry Hussein O.

A documented alien.

So it all pans out.

----

How Caucasian

Aaron Eckhart

can you get?

---

One word

for those who are now in a righteous fit to ban as many guns as possible.

Prohibition.


---

Dining with the Ritz

Django Unchained star Jamie Foxx explains why he is sensitive about being African American | Mail Online:

"Dass raciss!"

Poor boy.

As an even more Rightish blogger than I explains that, for sensitive African-American multi-millionaire celebrities like L'il Jamie (net worth, about $80 million):

 (1) race—meaning how are blacks doing, and how are whites oppressing blacks—is always their primary interest; (2) their resentment of whites and America is unappeasable; and (3) therefore there is no point in trying to appease it.

'via Blog this'

Animadversion

I was very much a liberal, socially and politically, for most of my life. Things began to change, as far as I remember, in 2000, when the mounting contradictions and hypocricies of liberalism made me start questioning some life-long assumptions and led to my brief libertarian phase. And then post 9/11 I found myself increasingly conservative, a phenomenon which rather shocked me. A gay conservative? Over the last dozen years I have only gotten worse. In an earlier self-description of Ex Cathedra's politics, I situated myself somewhat humorously as "slightly to the left of Ghengis Khan."

I think I have moved, as they say, dexter.

***

Battles and wars

The folks over at GayPatriot, the gay Republican blog, are all crowing about Republican female Sikh Governor appointing Republican Black Senator from the Old Confederacy. Zzzz.

How liberal.

First off, Ex Cathedra has decided that the post-60's American obsession with Minorities of all kinds is a pathology. A White pathology, to be specific. One driven by Liberals and bought into by conservatives. Question this unquestionable piety and you become John Derbyshire.

Worship and appeasement of Sacred Victim Minorities is the coin of the contemporary moral realm, the gold standard of ethical probity in the Church of Liberalism. The other side of this coin, however, is that The White Majority is utterly bereft of moral standing, the Damoclean Sword of Racism hanging over our pale heads. Every hurrah for a minority "advance" provides tacit support to the underlying doctrine of our own racial worthlessness, requiring endless reparation, absolution nowhere in sight.

And it makes no difference if all sorts of minoritarian types show up in the Republican party. Drag our your Jindals and your Wests and your Condoleezas and your Nikki Randhawa Haleys all day long. The Republican Party is the White Party.

A majority of Whites vote Republican. No other group does that. 90% of Romney's votes came from Whites.

So getting all frissoned about a Black senator, etc.  Total waste of time.

----

O

December 17th at Vespers begins the cycle of the O antiphons, a different verse sung each night, before and after chanting the Magnificat, for the last seven days of Advent.

The melody for each one is quite similar, begin with the vocative O, and the texts are scripture-based images of Christ under seven different forms: as Wisdom, Lord, Root, Key, Sunrise, King and God. The first letters of each title in Latin, in reverse order, spell out the sentence Ero cras, Tomorrow I will come. And the sequence of images begins in cosmology, moves through the Old Testament and ends with the birth of Christ.

They have been sung in the Latin Advent liturgy since early in the Dark Ages, coming to Rome in the 700's.* The familiar Christmas carol O Come O Come Emmanuel is a 19th century hymnic version.

O Wisdom, 

proceeding from the mouth of the Most High, 

reaching from beginning to end, 

strongly and sweetly ordering all things: 

come, and teach us the way of prudence. 

Sung by the Dominican friars of Oxford.

The strange set of vowels at the very end of the page

E u o u a e

directs the closing music of the doxology to the Trinity

which follows every Magnificat:

Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto

sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper

et in saecula

seculorum.

Amen.

**

*It is commonly asserted that Boethius alludes to them in the 500's, but none of the writers who pass on this notion ever provide a textual location.

Stupidity

I am no fan of Star Wars. "Less to this than meets the eye" is my reaction. But since Camille Paglia touted part of Revenge of the Sith as a great piece of cinematic artistry, I took a look.

During the climactic battle between Aniken and Obi-Wan, the Obi responds to something the future Darth Vader says with, "Only Sith Lords deal in absolutes."

This stuff makes me nuts.

The whole effing overdone hysterical film and its series and its mythology is inundated, suffused, flooded with absolutes, one after the other.

Part of the fraud of Liberal culture is to hold its own values as absolute in reality but to deny others' absolutes as, well, absolutist. If you don't believe me, wait til the next time a Liberal dribbles out something condescending or contemptuous about a non-Liberal's idea of "evil." Once they tell you that these things are relative, then tell them that they won't mind, then, if you inform them that Blacks are inferior to Whites and that the death penalty should be used far more often and performed in public.

Then we'll see about absolutes.

--

Tis the season

Jolly. Holly. Folly.

Christmas flicks. Few classics, much drek. 

Charlie Brown. Sentimental, yes, but grounded. And, hey, it's a cartoon.

Dickens Christmas Carol. Did you know that Christ is not mentioned in that classic? Christmas many times. Christ never. Still have a weakness for the 1951 Alistair Sim version.

On the other side of the ledger, a recent TV Christmas movie, which shall go unnamed. Upper middle class White family. The husband and wife in little more than a truce. No trace of respect for him from her, a full-time careerist and only part-time spouse and mother; from him, mostly diplomacy, accommodation and flight. The teenage girl is unbearable; nothing but moods, demands, disrespect, self-pity, utter narcissism. (The screenwriter is a woman, by the way). And from both parents toward her, only appeasement and diplomacy, never confrontation, much less discipline. Plus, we have a classic Magical Negro to fuel the plot. And the town Christmas pageant where all the groundless seasonal sentimentality triumphs is, like Dickens, utterly absent any mention of The Birthday Boy, just a talent show with antlers. 

--

Latin wor(l)ds

Classical Latin is a bit of an effort for me. Although my formal education in the language was entirely in that idiom --Caesar, Cicero, etc-- that was a long time ago. In the interim, it has been Christian Latin of the later years that I am most familiar with.

It is a language whose sound and flow I love.

Deus, qui nobis sub sacramento mirabili passionis tuae memoriam reliquisti; tribue, quaesumus, ita nos corporis et sanguinis tui sacra mysteria venerari, ut redemptionis tuae fructum in nobis iugiter sentiamus.

Unlike English, where word order is important for meaning because the language is so little inflected, Latin words can show up in what feel like whimsical places, their meanings anchored in their numerous inflections. You have to think and hear differently.

My friend Thom, who lives with his family about 50 miles from the recent school massacre, sent me a note with this phrase in it: praeter rerum seriem. "Outside the normal order of things." Part of the music of Catholic Advent and a reference to the virginal conception of Jesus. In darker tones, as he said, it reminded him of those deaths, also praeter rerum seriem.

My own Advent musings often hook up with another phrase, which came from the Classics, I think, --Pliny?-- but has been used by the Christians: senescente mundo. "The world, having grown old." Although I can't find a citation, I associate it with Advent as well. An old world coming to its end as a new life, praeter rerum seriem, is about to begin.

What is a world, after all? Not the physical planet, but an epochal space, a saeculum, a combination of place and time with a particular shape. Worlds are like cultures, particulars which feel like wholes: the Classical world, the world of childhood, the Muslim world.

Whatever is happening in the rest of the planet, it certainly feels like the end of a world in America, in the West; that the world which that new life began two millennia ago is itself sputtering out, having grown old. But no matter how strong the feeling, I am always a bit aware that I, too, am growing old and that my perceptions might be more a matter of senescente me than senescente mundo.

---

Bon jour

The original video of theirs was taken down because they used the music from the film Inception as background and Warner Brothers hit them for copyright infringement

Et, voilà.

These youngsters --after the obligatory pious rejection of "hate" and "racism", blah, blah-- get down to the point: "We cannot live together". "We have nothing in common."

The government and the media keep lying to them.

I wonder why people who would not balk at the idea that Communism is incompatible with Western liberal democracy find it so shocking to hear that the same Western liberal democracies cannot live with Islam.

Because it's just a religion? Because the Muslims, being non-White, are a sacred protected victim group?

----

With thanks to jpnill

Sensible pontification

for once.

One of the Catholic bishops of England reminds the current PM about the foundations of his drive no longer to "exclude" same-sex partners from the institution of marriage, a crime against "equality for all."*

I wish respectfully to point out that behind what you say lurks a basic philosophical misconception about the nature of 'equality.' Equality can never be an absolute value, only a derivative and relative value.

Tis rare I find myself agreeing with bishops, but here I do.

The ideological elevation of equality to an absolute value, a societal fetish and obsession, and the highest of values is, well, ludicrous. But most people remain utterly entranced by it. And a trance it is.


*The Brits passed a wide ranging Equalities Act and even have a Minister for Equalities. She --and it only makes sense for it to be a she-- will one day be the great ancestress of Diana Moon Gampers (see the right column of Ex Cathedra, partway down, under Vonnegut's Prophecy)


---

That forest of gallows

I sometimes evilly think about...Well, we can start with a smaller grove:

Connecticut school shooting: Westboro Baptist Church planning to picket :

'via Blog this'

Speaking of race

My own peeps, as it were, though not vampires on the national psyche*, certainly can play out their own talents at the effects of original sin: darkened minds, weakened wills, damaged hearts.

Edward Burns lays out, once again, the particular MAD style of the NY Irish American brand.

The Fitzgerald Family Christmas

(Angela's Ashes with money. Canadian version here.)

One scene even shot outside the church where I went to grade school.

World-class selfishness. Arrogant even in repentance.
Flashes of brain in oceans of denseness.
The roller coaster between sentimentality and hardness of heart.


In fact, a very Catholic movie.

--

*A devoted reader challenged this assumption by mentioning the Kennedys, Biden and Maureen Dowd. A sad point well taken. But I was speaking, as usual, of the overall behaviors of groups. Ted Kennedy, thru his involvement with the 1965 Immigration Act, has my vote for Worst Of The Lot.

--

Links

 (Black) Teens Ask For Smoke, Kill (White) Woman Who Refuses

Apparently it's common enough so that even the French notice it.


'via Blog this'

On Race

Why the Ex Cathedra focus on race in the last years?

To paraphrase another site I read,

In the last fifty years, American Blacks have become the sacred victim minority at the center of the oppressor-victim narrative that fuels the Liberal religion. 

It is a role they do not deserve, being in fact the principal authors of their own costly and manifold pathologies and dysfunctions.

The reigning Liberal regime (including "decent" conservatives) creates constant anxiety in Whites lest they be charged with the most heinous crime in history, "racism" (which they are all considered to be guilty of anyway). They are therefore required to ignore, cover up, minimize or deny the facts of Black dysfunction, shifting responsibility to Whites (past and/or present), who are constantly blamed for it and taught to feel continually ashamed about it. Forever.

Which guilt is the most powerful tool in manipulating White Americans into national and racial suicide.

If the last line were not the case, I wouldn't pay that much attention.


--

Soviet News

Back in the Soviet days, the two big papers there were Pravda and Izvestia. Pravda means Truth, Izvestia means News. A famous Soviet joke ran thusly:

 "V Pravde net izvestiy, v Izvestiyakh net pravdy."
In The Truth there is no news, in The News there is no truth.

Welcome to 21st century America.

The painfully obvious refusal to tell the central truth of this story is repeated over and over, every day.

As the joke goes about the New York Times headline when Armageddon arrives:

World Ends Tomorrow; Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.

My contempt for journalists only deepens with time.

---

Tricky business

Jonah Goldberg To Christian Republicans: Disappear!:

I read the original piece earlier this week.

A lot of Jews feel that no matter how nice they appear, Christians are not to be trusted and that eventually they will turn on you.

A lot of Christians feel the same way about Jews.

Not smart, Jonah.

'via Blog this'

Luke 16.26 again

The moralizing in the wake of the Connecticut child murders is predictable, mostly.

I was unpleasantly surprised by one reaction, from a man I have otherwise learned a lot from: "Twelve thousand people are murdered in the US every year, so why is this so special?" What we call in the trade a major empathic failure. Regardless of how the media play it or Obama* plays it, ---irrelevant either way--dozens of mothers and fathers just found out their that their babies were slaughtered at school, that they died terrified and that they will never see them again. Another very Right guy decided that they were not "innocent victims" because no one is innocent in contemporary America. Again, major character flaw.

What worse thing can happen to a mother or father than to lose their child? Especially in a culture like ours, where investment in them is so high . My sister, a grown woman, died suddenly in a car crash several years ago. Aside from what it took out of me, I watched my poor parents. It was without doubt the worst thing that ever happened to them. But it could have been worse: how someone dies makes a significant difference in the effect the death has on loved ones. Not all deaths are equal. An accident is one thing, a murder another.

Anyway, the dominant theme in public reactions, of course, is to call for outlawing guns. This follows every murder, either the constant low-level murdering that Blacks specialize in and which account for the vast majority of killings the US or the spectacular outbursts which Whites and Asians seem to prefer. (Muslims, of course, are virtuosos at both.)

My thought here is not moralizing, but more philosophical. Not about the children and their killer, but about people's reactions to crimes like this. I think the Liberal reaction (Ban guns) and the Right reaction (make gun ownership more widespread so someone can take these guys out) reveal deeper and different background attitudes and assumptions about the world and about human nature.

My bias, of course, is no mystery.

Liberals seem to think that peace, safety, prosperity and good order are the natural state of things. One of the reasons I think they react so emotionally to events like this is that it runs up against their belief in the basic goodness of human nature.Plus, their faith teaches them that laws and regulations can fix anything, can end poverty or end domestic violence or end racism. (Has any law ever ended what it proscribed?)  Oddly, their naivete about human nature does not extend to one half of the species: men. Liberals see men as a fundamental problem because they (rightly) associate men with violence and with the direct exercise of force and power. Loving victims as they do, Liberals really fear and hate natural power. And such power is a male specialty. So banning guns lets them maintain the illusion that the law can fix any problem and lets them strike a blow against masculinity.

Conservatives think of peace, safety, prosperity and good order as hard-won and fragile achievements, not at all the state of nature. "A republic, madam, if you can keep it." Because they know that humans (each gender in their own way) are flawed by nature, they recognize that so-called final solutions to anything are illusory hubris. Much as Madison, rather than trying to eliminate ambition from government, used competing ambitions to self-contain government, conservatives think that having a lot of guns around is a more realistic way to deal with the inevitable violence that will always occur, regardless of any rules that God or man can devise. Plus, conservatives like masculinity, so they are in favor of training men to be decent men rather than trying to eradicate them into de-gendered "nice persons."

As opposite as they are on violence, Liberals and conservatives both converge and diverge, though, when it comes to legislation about sex. But that's for another post.










*My loathing for the man aside, I see no reason why, as a father, his tears were anything but real.

Yup.

Let’s face it. Without a normal dispensation of common sense (didn’t Jesus say to be wise as a serpent as well as gentle as a dove?), without a proper appreciation of the needs and requirements of human life in this God-created world, without a love of place and country and particularity, Christianity is a suicidal creed.

From a traditionalist site, by a non-liberal Christian.

Unlike Islam, which is a complete socio-political system (a theocracy) designed precisely for this world, Christianity's profound ambivalence about the world and the ambiguous results of its moral perfectionism make it a complex and unstable culture-founding religion.

Liberalism, which is a toxic decomposition of Christianity, is likewise a suicidal creed.

---

Sweet memories

Finding the Great O in Scripture reminded me of my first two posts about He Who Must Not Be Criticized, from way back in 2007.

It was all there then if you could see it.

His special qualifications.

His love of America.

---