Stuff Black People Don't Like - SBPDL:
You know the names of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. You don't know this Black dude with the alien name or the three White girls he shot --one dead, one paralyzed, one scarred--because of his anger over White privilege.
There's lots more violence by Blacks against Whites in Obama's America that you don't know about because the Pravda and Izvestia crowd who run the national media think it might make you get unacceptable feelings about people of diverse races and cultures. And there's nothing worse than that.
Stories like this make me understand what turns Whites into White nationalists.
As it is, we remain The Most Foolish People On The Planet. (c)
'via Blog this'
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
God, have you stopped beating your Black wife?
Ran across a note about an evangelical Bible prof who penned a book for religion's cultured despisers about whether the God of the Bible is "angry, racist and sexist."
Yes.
Next question?
Well, to be more serious, but only a little, the issue of divine wrath is a well-travelled theological path. Catholics have had to match the passionlessness of the metaphysical God with the quite visible range of emotions of the Biblical God. In both Testaments, by the way.
As for "racism and sexism", these are newly made-up ideological cartoons in the service of one group's gaining ascendancy over another. Since they have no actual moral content, whether God is or is not related to them is irrelevant.
---
Yes.
Next question?
Well, to be more serious, but only a little, the issue of divine wrath is a well-travelled theological path. Catholics have had to match the passionlessness of the metaphysical God with the quite visible range of emotions of the Biblical God. In both Testaments, by the way.
As for "racism and sexism", these are newly made-up ideological cartoons in the service of one group's gaining ascendancy over another. Since they have no actual moral content, whether God is or is not related to them is irrelevant.
---
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Old Abe
Spengler » Islam’s Attempt to Appropriate Abraham:
It has recently become commonplace to talk about "the three Abrahamic faiths". Judaism, Christianity and Islam. As with so many of the progressive language tropes that we are taught to mimic, this is yet one more "mind-forged manacle" to legitimate Islam as a natural, rather than alien and hostile, religion in the West. Jews, Christians and Muslims, in this framework, all worship the same God, but just in different ways. In Spengler's words, it promotes "the idea popular in liberal religious circles that Christians, Muslims and Jews can hold hands and sing Kumbaya around the campfire by virtue of our common Abrahamic heritage." Reminds me of a Greek Orthodox priest's reaction to groovy pan-Christian ecumenism: "When we gather around the table with the Bible, we are united. As soon as we open it, we are divided."
For those of you rusty on your Bible, in Genesis 11-25 Abraham is called by the God Yahweh to leave his home city in Chaldea and journey with his aged wife to Canaan, where he makes a covenant with this single God, signified by circumcision and rewarded by the miraculous birth of Isaac, etc. and promises of great things to come.
For Jews, he is the physical father of their people, the first circumcised believer, being the grandfather of Jacob, who was re-named Israel (in Ex Cathedra's favorite Old Testament story, Genesis 32.) For Christians, via St Paul, he is the spiritual father of those who live by faith in Christ.
In the Koran --which contains reworkings of a lot of Jewish and Christian material that Mohammed learned from the Jewish and Christian Arabs*-- Abraham is a heroic prophet of monotheism. Islam bypasses Isaac in favor of focussing on Abraham's "illegitimate" son by his wife's slave Hagar, Ishmael, from whom Mohammed claimed descent. For Muslims, Abraham and Ishmael set up the Kaaba and made the first Hajj.
"Appropriation" --to make something one's own--is a loaded PC word, used to describe cultural theft. Usually it is applied to evil Westerners. I once watched a group of nasty gay activists try to shred a White gay man for "cultural appropriation" who was presenting his doctoral research on same-sex love in ancient China, because he wasn't Chinese. Spengler here accuses Islam of stealing Abraham for their own purposes. Muslims consider the first Muslim to be Adam, so Abraham is actually pretty derivative :) It's a tricky business this, assuming that culture is entirely like an owned object. For instance, what we call Arabic numerals, which replaced Roman numerals in the West in the 15th century, the Persians called Indian numerals. Was this "appropriation?" But when Kenneth Branagh casts a Black man to play a Norse god in Thor...what's that? Global village? Inclusion?
To me, it is about the purpose of the use. The current PC game around "Abrahamic Faiths" is entirely to grant Islam both legitimacy and equal status with the other two important religions in the West. And there is a previous tale of moving from a Christian civilization to a Judeo-Christian civilization. Another story.
*As Byzantine Emperor Manuel Paleologus pointed out, there is relatively little in Islam that is new. For a long time, Christians looked upon is as a heresy, a deformation of Christianity. IMHO, it can be adequately described as a combination of militant Hebraic tribal legalism with Christian missionary universalism. Joshua and King Josiah plus Saint Paul and Emperor Constantine = Muhammad.
--
'via Blog this'
It has recently become commonplace to talk about "the three Abrahamic faiths". Judaism, Christianity and Islam. As with so many of the progressive language tropes that we are taught to mimic, this is yet one more "mind-forged manacle" to legitimate Islam as a natural, rather than alien and hostile, religion in the West. Jews, Christians and Muslims, in this framework, all worship the same God, but just in different ways. In Spengler's words, it promotes "the idea popular in liberal religious circles that Christians, Muslims and Jews can hold hands and sing Kumbaya around the campfire by virtue of our common Abrahamic heritage." Reminds me of a Greek Orthodox priest's reaction to groovy pan-Christian ecumenism: "When we gather around the table with the Bible, we are united. As soon as we open it, we are divided."
For those of you rusty on your Bible, in Genesis 11-25 Abraham is called by the God Yahweh to leave his home city in Chaldea and journey with his aged wife to Canaan, where he makes a covenant with this single God, signified by circumcision and rewarded by the miraculous birth of Isaac, etc. and promises of great things to come.
The (halted) sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham
For Jews, he is the physical father of their people, the first circumcised believer, being the grandfather of Jacob, who was re-named Israel (in Ex Cathedra's favorite Old Testament story, Genesis 32.) For Christians, via St Paul, he is the spiritual father of those who live by faith in Christ.
In the Koran --which contains reworkings of a lot of Jewish and Christian material that Mohammed learned from the Jewish and Christian Arabs*-- Abraham is a heroic prophet of monotheism. Islam bypasses Isaac in favor of focussing on Abraham's "illegitimate" son by his wife's slave Hagar, Ishmael, from whom Mohammed claimed descent. For Muslims, Abraham and Ishmael set up the Kaaba and made the first Hajj.
"Appropriation" --to make something one's own--is a loaded PC word, used to describe cultural theft. Usually it is applied to evil Westerners. I once watched a group of nasty gay activists try to shred a White gay man for "cultural appropriation" who was presenting his doctoral research on same-sex love in ancient China, because he wasn't Chinese. Spengler here accuses Islam of stealing Abraham for their own purposes. Muslims consider the first Muslim to be Adam, so Abraham is actually pretty derivative :) It's a tricky business this, assuming that culture is entirely like an owned object. For instance, what we call Arabic numerals, which replaced Roman numerals in the West in the 15th century, the Persians called Indian numerals. Was this "appropriation?" But when Kenneth Branagh casts a Black man to play a Norse god in Thor...what's that? Global village? Inclusion?
A pet peeve of mine (which Spengler does not assert) is the accusation that Christians "appropriated" the Old Testament. In fact, the first Christians, who were all Jews, imposed the Hebrew scriptures on all believers in Jesus, Jewish or not. And whether they liked it or not.
To me, it is about the purpose of the use. The current PC game around "Abrahamic Faiths" is entirely to grant Islam both legitimacy and equal status with the other two important religions in the West. And there is a previous tale of moving from a Christian civilization to a Judeo-Christian civilization. Another story.
*As Byzantine Emperor Manuel Paleologus pointed out, there is relatively little in Islam that is new. For a long time, Christians looked upon is as a heresy, a deformation of Christianity. IMHO, it can be adequately described as a combination of militant Hebraic tribal legalism with Christian missionary universalism. Joshua and King Josiah plus Saint Paul and Emperor Constantine = Muhammad.
--
'via Blog this'
Time
Have a Northern Exposure episode on while I'm doing other things. This one's from 1993. Twenty years ago. I saw it when it first aired.
1993 is to 2013 as 1960 was to 1940.
I am no longer young.
--
1993 is to 2013 as 1960 was to 1940.
John Kennedy, elected in 1960. I remember that.
FDR. Died before I was born.
I am no longer young.
--
Sample taken
Having grown weary of plot and blood, I let Spartacus wander out of my field of vision. Decided to take peek at current status. Not much change. Oceans of blood, stop motion camera work, acres of muscle.
And funny attempt to mimic spoken Latin by removing most articles in speaking. The and a/an are few and far between.
Et narrationis et sanguinis taesus, ego Spartacum ex visionis meae campo vagare permisi. Placuit mihi statum actualem observare. Alteratio parva: aequora sanguinis, opus cameratum a motu cessato, musculorum herediae. Conationem ridiculam faciunt ad Latinae formam linguae imitandam per remotionem articulorum loquendi et definitorum et indefinitorum. Ille the ac a aut an raro audentur.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Uh oh
If you pay someone's bills, you have a say in how they incur expenses. Right?
That's one of the several reasons why national health care is wrong. If the taxpayers pay for your doctor bills, then the taxpayers --in the persons of lobbyists, advocates and bureaucrats-- will be deciding how you live.
The vulgar phrase "I own your ass" will become literally true.
The vulgar phrase "I own your ass" will become literally true.
Shall "we" penalize smokers and the obese --modern sinners and heretics against the progressive religion of Health & Safety-- for the drain they cause on "our" system? Shall we indeed regulate their behavior in order to prevent the expense they will cause "us?"
Sounds only fair, right?
But, oops.
Guess who the fattest people in America are?
Blacks. Followed up by Latinos. The CDC is anxious to "reduce racial and ethnic disparities in obesity rates." (Simple: fatten up the Whites and Asians!)
And guess who smokes the most?
Indians. (The tomahawk kind, like Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Warren, not the dot-on-the-forehead kind.)
So.....whadda we do now? Controlling and penalizing sacred and special POCs...das raciss.
I love this shit.
UPDATE: Nanny Mayor of NY, Ms Bloomberg, is being sued by Blacks and Latinos because his attack on sugary drinks "disproportionately affects minorities of color." Bwahahahahahahah.
Not with a bang, but with whimpering, all the way.
--
UPDATE: Nanny Mayor of NY, Ms Bloomberg, is being sued by Blacks and Latinos because his attack on sugary drinks "disproportionately affects minorities of color." Bwahahahahahahah.
Not with a bang, but with whimpering, all the way.
--
The Great and Powerful O preaches; Mr Buchanan demurs.
On the inaugural sermon, which reduced all of American history to equality, equality, equality:
The Old Republic and Obama’s America - Taki's Magazine:
"Feminism, the gay rights movement and the post-1965 civil rights movement, with their demand for equality not simply of rights but of rewards, cannot be achieved without trampling on the freedoms for which the patriot fathers fought. And they cannot triumph without creating a permanent, mammoth and redistributionist state more powerful, intrusive and dictatorial than anything George III ever dreamed of."
'via Blog this' HT to jpnill.
Ex Cathedra concurs. You cannot have an egalitarian society that is not a police state.
The Old Republic and Obama’s America - Taki's Magazine:
"Feminism, the gay rights movement and the post-1965 civil rights movement, with their demand for equality not simply of rights but of rewards, cannot be achieved without trampling on the freedoms for which the patriot fathers fought. And they cannot triumph without creating a permanent, mammoth and redistributionist state more powerful, intrusive and dictatorial than anything George III ever dreamed of."
'via Blog this' HT to jpnill.
Ex Cathedra concurs. You cannot have an egalitarian society that is not a police state.
Israel on my mind
Following up to my previous post, another thought about Jews and Judaism.
I was theologically educated in a very pro-Jewish atmosphere. No course I ever took or teacher I ever had ever underestimated or ignored the foundational Jewish contribution to Christianity in every aspect. Continuity was vastly more emphasized than discontinuity. And in the post-Vatican II and post-Holocaust world, it was looked upon as very rude to attempt to convert Jews anymore.
I recall preaching a homily once, contrasting the Jewish Law with the Law of Christ. I suggested that although St Paul (and St James, at the Council of Jerusalem, Acts 15) freed Gentile Christians from the burden of the Mosaic Law, it was not that simple. Moses, according to rabbinical count, had given the Jews 613 separate commandments, while Jesus gave only one: Love one another as I have loved you. Although at first this sounded like a liberation, I opined that perhaps the one was a far heavier burden to bear than the 613.
One of the most striking divergences between Christianity and Judaism is in how the Messiah* is envisioned. Judaism, at least in its bimillennial Rabbinic variety, has seen the Messiah as a man, but no more than a man, chosen by God to inaugurate a this-worldly utopia under Jewish leadership. Jesus did not fit that bill, especially in his orthodox form, as incarnate Second Person of the Divine Trinity on the cross!
It is even clear in the Gospels that the Apostles themselves, all Jews, recognized the problem of his very unexpected parabolic non-triumphant-ness. (Mark 8:27-33). Christianity's Christ, although victorious and reigning in the spiritual realm, died a crucified criminal in this one. He is a Messiah who said to Pilate "My kingdom is not of this world...not from here." John 18.36. The Isaian Suffering Servant libretto of Handel's great work is something a Jew would never create**. And as Ex Cathedra likes to point out, the image oft-used by social justice-obsessed Christian liberals of "building the Kingdom" never occurs in Scripture.
It is a further theme in the rabbis that the delay or arrival of this Messianic utopia may be pretty much up to the Jews, dependent on them. Now in traditional religion, this axial role has to do with religious observance, both ritual and ethical. My impression is that in modern Judaism, where so many of the sons and daughters of Israel leave ancient ways behind but keep their deep archetypal structure***, the coming of the Messianic Age is entirely a job for humans to create on this planet by their own efforts. I have heard Jews more than once make this point as a point of pride, that they do not care about some pie in the sky but work for a just world in the here and now. (As if that is necessarily a good thing.)
Hence, massive Jewish investment in supporting leftish utopian politics and values. Which often, as with actual Communism, or post-Civil Rights US Blacks, turn on them. And in Ex Cathedra's humble opinion, utopias always lead to guillotines and gulags.
So these divergent images of the Messiah and the Messianic Age can provide "spiritual" Christians with a huge dose of restraint and realism about this world's very limited possibilities that "realistic, here and now" Jews --especially post-religious Jews-- allow themselves to forget. The tragic vulnerability of so many of them to leftist utopian schemes very likely finds its roots in the traditional Jewish image of the earthly Messiah and his this-worldly Age.
On this issue, compared to the Jewish trend, Christ's "yoke is easy and (his) burden light." He redeemed the world; we don't have to.
--
*Maschiah in Hebrew mean Anointed, and in Greek this becomes christos. So one way of interpreting "Christianity" is "Messiah-ism."
**Or a Muslim. Perhaps there is something in the common Semitic mind of Jews and Arabs that finds little or no room for redemptive suffering in a prophet or a messiah. The Quran, copying an old Gnostic trope, emphatically denies that Jesus was ever crucified. And the story of Muhammed and all the prophets is one of victory over adversity, never sanctified failure.
***They are not alone in this. My principal interpretation of Liberalism is as a toxicly decaying form of post-religious European Christianity, with all its perfectionist ethical pretensions and none of its divine restrictions or grace.
---
I was theologically educated in a very pro-Jewish atmosphere. No course I ever took or teacher I ever had ever underestimated or ignored the foundational Jewish contribution to Christianity in every aspect. Continuity was vastly more emphasized than discontinuity. And in the post-Vatican II and post-Holocaust world, it was looked upon as very rude to attempt to convert Jews anymore.
I recall preaching a homily once, contrasting the Jewish Law with the Law of Christ. I suggested that although St Paul (and St James, at the Council of Jerusalem, Acts 15) freed Gentile Christians from the burden of the Mosaic Law, it was not that simple. Moses, according to rabbinical count, had given the Jews 613 separate commandments, while Jesus gave only one: Love one another as I have loved you. Although at first this sounded like a liberation, I opined that perhaps the one was a far heavier burden to bear than the 613.
One of the most striking divergences between Christianity and Judaism is in how the Messiah* is envisioned. Judaism, at least in its bimillennial Rabbinic variety, has seen the Messiah as a man, but no more than a man, chosen by God to inaugurate a this-worldly utopia under Jewish leadership. Jesus did not fit that bill, especially in his orthodox form, as incarnate Second Person of the Divine Trinity on the cross!
It is even clear in the Gospels that the Apostles themselves, all Jews, recognized the problem of his very unexpected parabolic non-triumphant-ness. (Mark 8:27-33). Christianity's Christ, although victorious and reigning in the spiritual realm, died a crucified criminal in this one. He is a Messiah who said to Pilate "My kingdom is not of this world...not from here." John 18.36. The Isaian Suffering Servant libretto of Handel's great work is something a Jew would never create**. And as Ex Cathedra likes to point out, the image oft-used by social justice-obsessed Christian liberals of "building the Kingdom" never occurs in Scripture.
It is a further theme in the rabbis that the delay or arrival of this Messianic utopia may be pretty much up to the Jews, dependent on them. Now in traditional religion, this axial role has to do with religious observance, both ritual and ethical. My impression is that in modern Judaism, where so many of the sons and daughters of Israel leave ancient ways behind but keep their deep archetypal structure***, the coming of the Messianic Age is entirely a job for humans to create on this planet by their own efforts. I have heard Jews more than once make this point as a point of pride, that they do not care about some pie in the sky but work for a just world in the here and now. (As if that is necessarily a good thing.)
Hence, massive Jewish investment in supporting leftish utopian politics and values. Which often, as with actual Communism, or post-Civil Rights US Blacks, turn on them. And in Ex Cathedra's humble opinion, utopias always lead to guillotines and gulags.
So these divergent images of the Messiah and the Messianic Age can provide "spiritual" Christians with a huge dose of restraint and realism about this world's very limited possibilities that "realistic, here and now" Jews --especially post-religious Jews-- allow themselves to forget. The tragic vulnerability of so many of them to leftist utopian schemes very likely finds its roots in the traditional Jewish image of the earthly Messiah and his this-worldly Age.
On this issue, compared to the Jewish trend, Christ's "yoke is easy and (his) burden light." He redeemed the world; we don't have to.
--
*Maschiah in Hebrew mean Anointed, and in Greek this becomes christos. So one way of interpreting "Christianity" is "Messiah-ism."
**Or a Muslim. Perhaps there is something in the common Semitic mind of Jews and Arabs that finds little or no room for redemptive suffering in a prophet or a messiah. The Quran, copying an old Gnostic trope, emphatically denies that Jesus was ever crucified. And the story of Muhammed and all the prophets is one of victory over adversity, never sanctified failure.
***They are not alone in this. My principal interpretation of Liberalism is as a toxicly decaying form of post-religious European Christianity, with all its perfectionist ethical pretensions and none of its divine restrictions or grace.
---
Jooz, continued
How odd of God
to choose the Jews.
Not original.
This highly unusual people regularly gives examples both of brilliance and of stupidity, sometimes combined. High group IQ average, yet massive voting for Obama.
On the happy side of the ledger, folks like Dr Krauthammer remind us that we have a statue of liberty, not a statue of equality.*
Well said, Reb K.
On the unhappy side, constitutional law professor Louis Seidman (employed by a Jesuit --and hence only nominally Catholic-- university) encourages us to dump the stupid, nay evil, Constitution.
Reb S., no thanks.
It is one thing to critique America's founding document. It is not sacred scripture, and I have ventured a few objections of my own. It is quite another to slander its founders and blithely call for us to dump the damn thing. Especially if your name is Seidman and this evil country has been more welcoming and accomodating to your kind than any other in history.
As the admirable Reb Prager has pointed out, with regret, it is the standard path of the non-religious Jew to transfer his or her loyalties to lefty utopian ideologies of liberalism or worse. As I noted not long ago, my historically high level of philosemitism has taken a hit as I see that there are many many more Seidmans than Krauthammers. As my sense of my country and culture's future darkens, I become less forgiving of the Seidmans.
And although most negative commentors are too PC and polite to point out that the professor's name is Seidman and not Jones, this does not passed unnoticed.
Jews can be exquisitely sensitive to any hint that they are looked upon as not-belonging. On the other hand, they typically carry a vivid sense of themselves as eternal outsiders. It must be tiring. And it drives the anti-Christian and anti-nationalist energies of Jewish liberals**, who are great champions of secularism and multiculturalism. But they often act outraged and surprised when these attitudes and programs, which are experienced as an attack on the religion and culture of the most Jew-welcoming country in history, result in anti-Jewish feeling. I call this species of ingratitude the Chomsky-Zinn reaction: biting the hand that freed them. I suspect that the professor might be one of these. Whatever may be the sources of the complex soup that goes by the name anti-Semitism, Jews are not simply its groundless and innocent objects. No historically loaded group with such a hugely disproportionate role in a society can play dumb like that. Especially when they are so smart. And it is sad that for every laudable Krauthammer, there are far too many Seidmans.
*Emma Lazarus' poem on the base, added in 1903 or so, and treated as virtually canonical, sentimentalizes the whole thing, providing a hook for those who feel that everyone on earth has a right to enter America.
**And not just liberals. The very (neo)conservative maven Midge Decter, (in)famous for her call to see homosexuals not as individuals but as a group, also reacted viscerally against "this notion of a Christian civilization:.
to choose the Jews.
Not original.
This highly unusual people regularly gives examples both of brilliance and of stupidity, sometimes combined. High group IQ average, yet massive voting for Obama.
On the happy side of the ledger, folks like Dr Krauthammer remind us that we have a statue of liberty, not a statue of equality.*
Well said, Reb K.
On the unhappy side, constitutional law professor Louis Seidman (employed by a Jesuit --and hence only nominally Catholic-- university) encourages us to dump the stupid, nay evil, Constitution.
Reb S., no thanks.
It is one thing to critique America's founding document. It is not sacred scripture, and I have ventured a few objections of my own. It is quite another to slander its founders and blithely call for us to dump the damn thing. Especially if your name is Seidman and this evil country has been more welcoming and accomodating to your kind than any other in history.
As the admirable Reb Prager has pointed out, with regret, it is the standard path of the non-religious Jew to transfer his or her loyalties to lefty utopian ideologies of liberalism or worse. As I noted not long ago, my historically high level of philosemitism has taken a hit as I see that there are many many more Seidmans than Krauthammers. As my sense of my country and culture's future darkens, I become less forgiving of the Seidmans.
And although most negative commentors are too PC and polite to point out that the professor's name is Seidman and not Jones, this does not passed unnoticed.
Jews can be exquisitely sensitive to any hint that they are looked upon as not-belonging. On the other hand, they typically carry a vivid sense of themselves as eternal outsiders. It must be tiring. And it drives the anti-Christian and anti-nationalist energies of Jewish liberals**, who are great champions of secularism and multiculturalism. But they often act outraged and surprised when these attitudes and programs, which are experienced as an attack on the religion and culture of the most Jew-welcoming country in history, result in anti-Jewish feeling. I call this species of ingratitude the Chomsky-Zinn reaction: biting the hand that freed them. I suspect that the professor might be one of these. Whatever may be the sources of the complex soup that goes by the name anti-Semitism, Jews are not simply its groundless and innocent objects. No historically loaded group with such a hugely disproportionate role in a society can play dumb like that. Especially when they are so smart. And it is sad that for every laudable Krauthammer, there are far too many Seidmans.
*Emma Lazarus' poem on the base, added in 1903 or so, and treated as virtually canonical, sentimentalizes the whole thing, providing a hook for those who feel that everyone on earth has a right to enter America.
**And not just liberals. The very (neo)conservative maven Midge Decter, (in)famous for her call to see homosexuals not as individuals but as a group, also reacted viscerally against "this notion of a Christian civilization:.
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Zero Dark Thirty
A review.
Michael Totten is an independent journalist with rare knowledge of the Middle East. I had a brief email exchage with him back around 2003, before he was famous.
The torture debate does not interest me. Ex Cathedra is allergic to moralists. Anyone who thinks that "harsh interrogation" has not been going on forever, that it was something cooked up fresh by the eeeeevil Bush-Cheney folks, is naive.
What made me suspicious is that the movie, by a woman, is centered on a woman. As one commentor wrote: Oh, and we are meant to believe that the war on terror is being fought essentially by Charlie's Angels.
I think I'll pass.
'via Blog this'
Michael Totten is an independent journalist with rare knowledge of the Middle East. I had a brief email exchage with him back around 2003, before he was famous.
The torture debate does not interest me. Ex Cathedra is allergic to moralists. Anyone who thinks that "harsh interrogation" has not been going on forever, that it was something cooked up fresh by the eeeeevil Bush-Cheney folks, is naive.
What made me suspicious is that the movie, by a woman, is centered on a woman. As one commentor wrote: Oh, and we are meant to believe that the war on terror is being fought essentially by Charlie's Angels.
I think I'll pass.
'via Blog this'
Friday, January 25, 2013
Oakland Teen gets 25 years to life for murdering adoptive parents
Oakland: Teen gets 25 years to life for murdering adoptive parents:
This year old case intrigued me and now it's come to its conclusion.
Though tried as an adult and now sentenced, no picture of Moses Alfredo Kamin is yet online. I wonder why...
'via Blog this'
This year old case intrigued me and now it's come to its conclusion.
Though tried as an adult and now sentenced, no picture of Moses Alfredo Kamin is yet online. I wonder why...
... prosecutor Stacie Pettigrew said Kamin had "a murderous state of mind" before he killed his adoptive parents and had written in his diary about his fantasy of killing his mother with a sharp knife and about slicing out her intestines and forcing her to eat them before she died.
'via Blog this'
Wah Wah Wah
American Idol Racism Row: Nine Black Rejects Sue Fox Show:
...insisted that they were targeted by producers of the Fox show who set out to humiliate them by making them audition and then disqualifying them due to their criminal records."
LOL.
PS. Don't you find the headline insensitive? "Black Rejects?" It should be "Persons of African Descent Rejected By The Show" or PADRBTSes, for short.
'via Blog this'
...insisted that they were targeted by producers of the Fox show who set out to humiliate them by making them audition and then disqualifying them due to their criminal records."
LOL.
PS. Don't you find the headline insensitive? "Black Rejects?" It should be "Persons of African Descent Rejected By The Show" or PADRBTSes, for short.
'via Blog this'
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Good actor
One of the lethal ex-con tough guys on Justified
previously played a weak inmate of an ex-gay therapy program in Save Me.
Robert Baker is believable in both roles. A good actor.
previously played a weak inmate of an ex-gay therapy program in Save Me.
Robert Baker is believable in both roles. A good actor.
Continuing education
While reading through exiled leukophor John Derbyshire's talk at the eeeevil White site, vdare, I learned two very useful terms, with wide application.
Anosognosia, a condition in which a person who suffers certain disability seems unaware of the existence of his or her disability.
Receptive aphasia, a language disorder that causes poor comprehension of speech and the production of fluent but incomprehensible sentences.
EG.
Anosognosia, a condition in which a person who suffers certain disability seems unaware of the existence of his or her disability.
Receptive aphasia, a language disorder that causes poor comprehension of speech and the production of fluent but incomprehensible sentences.
EG.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Soldier girls
Panetta to lift ban on women in combat | Fox News:
It was inevitable, given our suicidal obsession with the ideology oflevelling equality.
It is one of the primary strategies of feminism to make sure that there are no places on earth where men can be by and among themselves, separated from women. Given the unacknowledged but crucial role that these spaces play in male identity, this is yet another way in which feminism's core, resentful hatred of the masculine, reveals itself.
'via Blog this'
It was inevitable, given our suicidal obsession with the ideology of
It is one of the primary strategies of feminism to make sure that there are no places on earth where men can be by and among themselves, separated from women. Given the unacknowledged but crucial role that these spaces play in male identity, this is yet another way in which feminism's core, resentful hatred of the masculine, reveals itself.
'via Blog this'
He's Black, he's blind, he's a Democrat
AND he's a singer, so he must be right.
-Stevie Wonder
Is this a great country, or what?!
--
"For any problem, there's a solution. All we have to do is find it."
-Stevie Wonder
Is this a great country, or what?!
--
UnUnited States
One of the things I learned from Jung (and from his heretical post-modern child, James Hillman) is that when a value is affirmed strongly, to look around for its opposite hidden in the basement.
Uniting the states was, from the beginning, a great challenge. Contemporary Americans have long ceased either to think or to feel allegiance to their states, seeing them really as accidents of history and a secondary layer of the national government. But at the founding, the identity of Americans was perhaps as strongly state-based as national. The eventual dissolution of the Union proves Jung/Hillman's point: one only needs to affirm Union where the real and driving issue is DisUnion.
Watching once more the 2008 HBO series John Adams, the division within the new American nation are everywhere apparent. The Jay Treaty, which kept the fledgling country out of the long history of Franco-British hostilities, revealed a passionate and violent split. Adams and Jefferson (and Hamilton) all represent those foundational and continuing dis-unities.
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Uniting the states was, from the beginning, a great challenge. Contemporary Americans have long ceased either to think or to feel allegiance to their states, seeing them really as accidents of history and a secondary layer of the national government. But at the founding, the identity of Americans was perhaps as strongly state-based as national. The eventual dissolution of the Union proves Jung/Hillman's point: one only needs to affirm Union where the real and driving issue is DisUnion.
Watching once more the 2008 HBO series John Adams, the division within the new American nation are everywhere apparent. The Jay Treaty, which kept the fledgling country out of the long history of Franco-British hostilities, revealed a passionate and violent split. Adams and Jefferson (and Hamilton) all represent those foundational and continuing dis-unities.
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Tuesday, January 22, 2013
So glad
that a European priest opines.
Vatican Welcomes Obama Gun Control Proposal:
Why the fuck does the Vatican feel it needs to have an opinion on every damned thing? Stick to what you know and shut the hell up about everything else.
Where's Henry II when you need him?
'via Blog this'
The Camp of the Saints, continued
Responding to the recent mass marches against gay marriage in Paris, the socialist president of their republic dismissed it as merely the voice of "white Catholic" France.
The brilliant Mr. Hollande must imagine that "non-white" France --Africans and Muslims-- will be big fans of gay marriage.
Which was what French once meant.
The brilliant Mr. Hollande must imagine that "non-white" France --Africans and Muslims-- will be big fans of gay marriage.
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A word of advice
"You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition. You do not have to quote great men to show you are one."
No, no. Not a critic of mine. (After all, Ex Cathedra's blog is for ranting, not rhetoric.) Abigail Adams to John Adams in the opening episode of that fine 2008 HBO series.
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Monday, January 21, 2013
The day of the jackals
My contempt for the incumbent and all his works needs no repetition, even as the loathesome liturgy of Obamanation unfolds today.
As for the sainted MLK, appropriately cast below in Maoist style, if we must now always hear about the slaveholding sins of the "propertied white men" who founded our nation, the flawed and imperfect Washingtons and Jeffersons, etc. or of Columbus as the father of New World genocide, then I will always point out that "Dr." King was a serial adulterer and a serial plagiarist, whose university work and doctoral degree was founded on a lie and whose Dream Speech was largely stolen from another author, one of his "bruthas." Rev. "Content of our character" is no saint to me, and only fifty years later, the results of his works have been fatal to this country.
The martyred Christian pacifist has given way to the Holders and Sharptons and Obamas (to name only a few), the touching little school girls to armies of bitch-n-ho baby mamas, all those shirt and tie marching men in search of jobs to the generations of fatherless hiphop gangstas, proud of their ebonic illiteracy and thuggish violence.
The segregated 60% White Birmingham where he marched has deteriorated into a 75% Black desert of corruption and self-inflicted poverty and crime. Just like every other Black majority and Black run place in the US: Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, Memphis, Detroit, Baton Rouge, Camden and Trenton St. Louis, etc. All blamed, of course, on White America. Even when successful, Blacks get to play the Eternal Victim and we're supposed to buy it. I don't buy it any more. None of it. To paraphrase from a local wag, "I have a dream" has turned out to mean "I have a scheme."
Color me White, and profoundly and thoroughly unimpressed.
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As for the sainted MLK, appropriately cast below in Maoist style, if we must now always hear about the slaveholding sins of the "propertied white men" who founded our nation, the flawed and imperfect Washingtons and Jeffersons, etc. or of Columbus as the father of New World genocide, then I will always point out that "Dr." King was a serial adulterer and a serial plagiarist, whose university work and doctoral degree was founded on a lie and whose Dream Speech was largely stolen from another author, one of his "bruthas." Rev. "Content of our character" is no saint to me, and only fifty years later, the results of his works have been fatal to this country.
Barry Hussein O contemplating the bust+ of St Mao Ze King
The martyred Christian pacifist has given way to the Holders and Sharptons and Obamas (to name only a few), the touching little school girls to armies of bitch-n-ho baby mamas, all those shirt and tie marching men in search of jobs to the generations of fatherless hiphop gangstas, proud of their ebonic illiteracy and thuggish violence.
The segregated 60% White Birmingham where he marched has deteriorated into a 75% Black desert of corruption and self-inflicted poverty and crime. Just like every other Black majority and Black run place in the US: Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, Memphis, Detroit, Baton Rouge, Camden and Trenton St. Louis, etc. All blamed, of course, on White America. Even when successful, Blacks get to play the Eternal Victim and we're supposed to buy it. I don't buy it any more. None of it. To paraphrase from a local wag, "I have a dream" has turned out to mean "I have a scheme."
Color me White, and profoundly and thoroughly unimpressed.
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Saturday, January 19, 2013
Oh, grow up
God's hand in General Synod politics | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk:
" I know a student at Cambridge who lost her faith from studying the workings of the Council of Nicaea. God, she felt, could not be found by bishops who tried to pull each others' beards off."
Had this broad ever read the Bible? Or history of the Church? What planet did she think the Incarnation took place on?
She's definitely a candidate for the spiritual not religious types. Too good for this world.
But, it must be said that Christianity does have a huge dose of trans-human perfectionism in it. Sets people up for a fall. A former theology student of mine with a ferocious and inconvenient memory reminded me that back in my churchly days I called Christianity organized disappointment.
'via Blog this'
" I know a student at Cambridge who lost her faith from studying the workings of the Council of Nicaea. God, she felt, could not be found by bishops who tried to pull each others' beards off."
Had this broad ever read the Bible? Or history of the Church? What planet did she think the Incarnation took place on?
She's definitely a candidate for the spiritual not religious types. Too good for this world.
But, it must be said that Christianity does have a huge dose of trans-human perfectionism in it. Sets people up for a fall. A former theology student of mine with a ferocious and inconvenient memory reminded me that back in my churchly days I called Christianity organized disappointment.
'via Blog this'
East Coast images
Out here on the east end of the North Fork, it's bright, windy and friggin cold. Ex Cathedra is blogging from one of the buildings below:
Whilst in Manhattan, I passed The Philip Berley Pre-School of the Arts. Really. Not The Onion.
Intrigued by this uberNewYorkness, I checked the website. Little White children only. Seemed very unPC. But the above mentioned academy for abstract-painting toddlers is a Jewish school. Even more uberNewYorkness.
I no longer feel at home in NY. It's full of Third Worlders, both native and foreign. Infested with this kind of stuff:
Not interested in eating meat that was sacrificed to Allah, facing Mecca.
The parish church of my childhood is now largely Haitian. Half a mile down the street is now a mosque. They had to close the parish school because the parents wouldn't pay tuition. They rented it out to a private academy named after St Martin De Porres.
This school closed and merged with another one after one of its "special needs" girls of 13 was gang-raped under a desk, in class, with a teacher in the room, by other "special needs" boys from "socio-economically challenged" families...
The Camp of the Saints.
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Whilst in Manhattan, I passed The Philip Berley Pre-School of the Arts. Really. Not The Onion.
Intrigued by this uberNewYorkness, I checked the website. Little White children only. Seemed very unPC. But the above mentioned academy for abstract-painting toddlers is a Jewish school. Even more uberNewYorkness.
I no longer feel at home in NY. It's full of Third Worlders, both native and foreign. Infested with this kind of stuff:
The parish church of my childhood is now largely Haitian. Half a mile down the street is now a mosque. They had to close the parish school because the parents wouldn't pay tuition. They rented it out to a private academy named after St Martin De Porres.
This school closed and merged with another one after one of its "special needs" girls of 13 was gang-raped under a desk, in class, with a teacher in the room, by other "special needs" boys from "socio-economically challenged" families...
The Camp of the Saints.
---
--
Friday, January 18, 2013
Tilting the paradigm
Alternative Vertical: "If the Right Wing has an essence that most can agree on, it is hierarchy, natural inequality, meritocracy, and aspiration to the sacred, in other words a sense of the vertical. Likewise the essence of the LEFT, when it isn’t forming itself into elitist revolutionary cliques preparing for heroic military conquest, has been an all-embracing egalitarianism and anti-hierarchical tendency, essentially a horizontal value."
So instead left/right, liberal/conservative, we really have Flatteners and Verticalists, Flats and Verts.
True, but not likely to catch on.
I have noticed, while watching TV, that the ubiquitous reality shows --run pretty well entirely by and for liberals-- are nevertheless mercilessly vertical. No affirmative action, no complaints about privilege. They are win/lose propositions and no whining is allowed. Like all of Hollywood, it mouths the pieties of the Church of Liberalism but lives a pretty much 19th century robber baron capitalist life. Hypocritical much?
Not unlike academia, where the tenured resist with all their might any attempt by the degreed proletariate, the lecturers and TA's, to organize for better wages, etc.
Now back to my coffee.
'via Blog this'
So instead left/right, liberal/conservative, we really have Flatteners and Verticalists, Flats and Verts.
True, but not likely to catch on.
I have noticed, while watching TV, that the ubiquitous reality shows --run pretty well entirely by and for liberals-- are nevertheless mercilessly vertical. No affirmative action, no complaints about privilege. They are win/lose propositions and no whining is allowed. Like all of Hollywood, it mouths the pieties of the Church of Liberalism but lives a pretty much 19th century robber baron capitalist life. Hypocritical much?
Not unlike academia, where the tenured resist with all their might any attempt by the degreed proletariate, the lecturers and TA's, to organize for better wages, etc.
Now back to my coffee.
'via Blog this'
Faith of our (Founding) Fathers
A conservative who was ranting --what else can we do these days?-- on another site mentioned the utopian drive of progressives to right the wrongs of Mother Nature, who is herself no egalitarian. It reminded me of the way in which the Declaration refers to the Deity as "Nature's God."
Nature, like God, is a word of widely varying definition and especially of connotation. A hippie vision of a Green life "in harmony with Nature"* is a far cry from Tennyson's "Nature red in tooth and claw." The divide is ancient. The father of Western natural law theory (which Catholicism considers part and parcel of rationality itself and which both the Renaissance and Enlightenment took as Gospel) is Cicero, who saw it as right reason in accord with human nature. His fellow Roman Ulpian took a less exalted view and saw it as "what Nature teaches all animals." For the Ciceronians, it is a matter of humans following the laws of their own nature; for Ulpians, humans following the laws of all nature.
Anyway, it's just another of my useless shooting-star thoughts, passing harmlessly and ineffectually through the firmament of my mind and blog, but if "Nature's God" were taken as described, then the foolish dreams of the equalizers would not last ten minutes.
*And as I enjoy pointing out to Goddess worshippers, if the Deity is a Sheity, please explain childbirth, menstruation and menopause.
Nature, like God, is a word of widely varying definition and especially of connotation. A hippie vision of a Green life "in harmony with Nature"* is a far cry from Tennyson's "Nature red in tooth and claw." The divide is ancient. The father of Western natural law theory (which Catholicism considers part and parcel of rationality itself and which both the Renaissance and Enlightenment took as Gospel) is Cicero, who saw it as right reason in accord with human nature. His fellow Roman Ulpian took a less exalted view and saw it as "what Nature teaches all animals." For the Ciceronians, it is a matter of humans following the laws of their own nature; for Ulpians, humans following the laws of all nature.
Anyway, it's just another of my useless shooting-star thoughts, passing harmlessly and ineffectually through the firmament of my mind and blog, but if "Nature's God" were taken as described, then the foolish dreams of the equalizers would not last ten minutes.
*And as I enjoy pointing out to Goddess worshippers, if the Deity is a Sheity, please explain childbirth, menstruation and menopause.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Lives and souls
A tribe of shellmound-builders in ancient Florida, the Calusa, had a belief in a three-fold soul: one in the pupil of your eye, one in the shadow you cast on the ground, and one in the face you reflect in the water.
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A downside
of visiting my family back East is watching TV. Aside from the inane and offensive shows and commercials, I get to see and hear Barack Obama speak on the news, and this makes my gorge rise and I have thoughts which , if enacted, would put me in prison for a long long time. God, I hate that man.
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Railing against the times
A rather well known Catholic blogger has changed his mind about a 40+ year old new practice and now wants to have communion rails re-installed in churches and have people kneel to receive the sacrament instead of stand, and receive it on the tongue, not in the hand. The way it was done for at least a thousand years.
As with so much of the Catholic liturgical revolution after Vatican II, --like having the priest face the congregation from the other side of the altar during the Mass-- the changes were billed as returns to ancient, pre-medieval practice of a supposedly more authentic age. True enough. But the meaning of many of these altered gestures, postures, etc. cannot be the same as it was in the late classical culture of the 6th century. To translate Teddy Roosevelt's thoughts on government into a though on religion, the postures and gestures were the same, but the people had changed, so these things counted for nothing.
The deacon-blogger's point was the seemingly ineradicable irreverence of a certain portion of the Catholic population. (And that includes priests.) As I have mentioned before, democratizing holiness was a big push from the Council, linked, willy nilly, with the manic levelling energy of the 60's: "the priesthood of the laity" and "the universal call to holiness." But instead of elevating the masses, what happened --as in all egalitarian schemes--was that sacredness became a deflationary currency, cheapened by being made more widely available without any cost.
I am only talking about ritual behavior here, the quality of perceptible behavior in sacred places and during sacred rites, not people's internal moral or spiritual condition. But what I observed and experienced during my years in the Church certainly pointed out to me that a sense of respect for sacred things --anywhere, not just in church-- was a dying element in our culture. An egalitarian casualness, often paraded as liberation from elitism or from "the Middle Ages", masked what I perceive to be a combination of personal and cultural emptiness, narcissism and entitlement in regard to anything that might call for that hesitance, special comportment and humility. The ego of the moment was the supreme god. The word "awesome" may be the contemporary version of "cool", but real awe is something our contemporaries reserve for celebrities.
My problems with Catholicism are pretty obvious, but it used to be one of the places where post-Enlightenment humans could learn to experience real sacredness. Not so much in the last 50 years. It could only benefit were such experiences once more become available in the Church of Rome.
--
As with so much of the Catholic liturgical revolution after Vatican II, --like having the priest face the congregation from the other side of the altar during the Mass-- the changes were billed as returns to ancient, pre-medieval practice of a supposedly more authentic age. True enough. But the meaning of many of these altered gestures, postures, etc. cannot be the same as it was in the late classical culture of the 6th century. To translate Teddy Roosevelt's thoughts on government into a though on religion, the postures and gestures were the same, but the people had changed, so these things counted for nothing.
The deacon-blogger's point was the seemingly ineradicable irreverence of a certain portion of the Catholic population. (And that includes priests.) As I have mentioned before, democratizing holiness was a big push from the Council, linked, willy nilly, with the manic levelling energy of the 60's: "the priesthood of the laity" and "the universal call to holiness." But instead of elevating the masses, what happened --as in all egalitarian schemes--was that sacredness became a deflationary currency, cheapened by being made more widely available without any cost.
I am only talking about ritual behavior here, the quality of perceptible behavior in sacred places and during sacred rites, not people's internal moral or spiritual condition. But what I observed and experienced during my years in the Church certainly pointed out to me that a sense of respect for sacred things --anywhere, not just in church-- was a dying element in our culture. An egalitarian casualness, often paraded as liberation from elitism or from "the Middle Ages", masked what I perceive to be a combination of personal and cultural emptiness, narcissism and entitlement in regard to anything that might call for that hesitance, special comportment and humility. The ego of the moment was the supreme god. The word "awesome" may be the contemporary version of "cool", but real awe is something our contemporaries reserve for celebrities.
My problems with Catholicism are pretty obvious, but it used to be one of the places where post-Enlightenment humans could learn to experience real sacredness. Not so much in the last 50 years. It could only benefit were such experiences once more become available in the Church of Rome.
--
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
The Vatican II Groovies
over at the PrayTell blog are exercising their talents to see how they might respond to the "new generation" of gender-queer activists who don't identify with the binary male/female thingy. Generation LGBTQIA, etc.
Replacing Brethren with Brothers and Sisters was the first move. Now they want something more inclusive...
Pathetic people, dancing like puppets to every cool new victim group.
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Replacing Brethren with Brothers and Sisters was the first move. Now they want something more inclusive...
Pathetic people, dancing like puppets to every cool new victim group.
--
Speaking of human rights
'Insulting' words crime which made it illegal to call a police horse 'gay' is to be changed - Telegraph:
How about enshrining a right to insult?
Well, it'll never happen under the current regime of enlightenment.
The dictum I call Voltaire's Razor --after Occam's, for you philosophicallly benighted types-- makes a telling point about real status and power in a society. It says that if you are not allowed to criticize someone (or a group of someones), then that tells you who is really your master. I would add Ex Cathedra's Corrolary, that if you are forbidden to insult someone (or a group of someones), the same structural truth emerges.
If you cannot insult a group, then they rule you, no matter what the ballot box says.
And under Liberalism, the Designated Sacred Victim groups are the masters. Jamie Foxx can banter about how much fun it was in Django Unchained to go around killing White people. No consequences. Even good Whities giggled. But make a public comment about nappy hair and your broadcasting career is in jeopardy.
So who's da massa now?
'via Blog this'
How about enshrining a right to insult?
Well, it'll never happen under the current regime of enlightenment.
The dictum I call Voltaire's Razor --after Occam's, for you philosophicallly benighted types-- makes a telling point about real status and power in a society. It says that if you are not allowed to criticize someone (or a group of someones), then that tells you who is really your master. I would add Ex Cathedra's Corrolary, that if you are forbidden to insult someone (or a group of someones), the same structural truth emerges.
If you cannot insult a group, then they rule you, no matter what the ballot box says.
And under Liberalism, the Designated Sacred Victim groups are the masters. Jamie Foxx can banter about how much fun it was in Django Unchained to go around killing White people. No consequences. Even good Whities giggled. But make a public comment about nappy hair and your broadcasting career is in jeopardy.
So who's da massa now?
'via Blog this'
Monday, January 14, 2013
More make believe
TV commercial: A cool and knowledgeable Black couple explain all about the Gerber College fund to two amazed and impressed and grateful and previously unknowing and un-cool White couples.
Happens all the time.
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Happens all the time.
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Sunday, January 13, 2013
Multicultural moments
In NY visiting family. A TV commercial with some famous actress/singer...the one famous for her booty...can't remember her name. But she's advertized as "100% Puerto Rican."
Can you imagine a White woman being advertized as "100% White?"
We don't have Minority Privilege.
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About Islam and all the special treatment it receives from the bien-pensants who run the West. Imagine if a religion just like Islam, an expansionist theocracy, were only about 100 years old and had been started not by an Arab, but by an Afrikaaner. And its adherents were mostly White, not Colored. And if it were responsible for as proportionately much terrorism as Islam is.
Now tell me that it would not be classed as a deranged and dangerous cult?
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Can you imagine a White woman being advertized as "100% White?"
We don't have Minority Privilege.
--
About Islam and all the special treatment it receives from the bien-pensants who run the West. Imagine if a religion just like Islam, an expansionist theocracy, were only about 100 years old and had been started not by an Arab, but by an Afrikaaner. And its adherents were mostly White, not Colored. And if it were responsible for as proportionately much terrorism as Islam is.
Now tell me that it would not be classed as a deranged and dangerous cult?
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Saturday, January 12, 2013
The Halal Rose of Texas
A lack of Muslim foster parents in North Texas means local Muslim children are almost always placed with families of other faiths, putting them in an unfamiliar cultural and religious environment and making a difficult process even harder.
A Richland Hills clinic doesn’t want foster children to face added stresses, like being served bacon when their religion forbids pork, or saying prayers in a bedroom with a cross on the wall. That’s why the Muslim Community Center for Human Services is offering up a challenge to local Muslims: Step up. Become a foster parent.
Of course Ex Cathedra's deeply dim view of Islam leads him to ask, Why the hell are there Muslims in North Texas to begin with?
And shouldn't little Mohammedans get to benefit from the cultural and religious diversity that the rest of us are supposed to find so enriching?
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Friday, January 11, 2013
Spiritual but not religious...oh, yeah?
I enjoy the look of discomfiture on people's faces whenever I describe myself as "religious, but not spiritual." For what it's worth, a Brit psychology study concludes that "spiritual, but not religious" types have an increased vulnerability to drug abuse and mental health disorders...
Religion, spirituality and mental health: results from a national study of English households:
'via Blog this'
Religion, spirituality and mental health: results from a national study of English households:
'via Blog this'
The Principles
of Unintended Outcomes and the Nullity of Good Intentions, illustrated.
HT to FB friend Leah.
HT to FB friend Leah.
Ferdinand and Isabella
Where are they now that we need them again?
Norwegian Students to Become a Minority in Oslo Schools in 8 Years:
'via Blog this'
Reminds me of a moment in the Wallander series, which I hate and which I cannot stop watching. A religious cult, of crazed Christians, of course, is described with contempt by one of the female Swedish cops as, "you know: anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, anti-Islam."
On the other hand, when a young member of this Christianoid cult is confronted by the cops, one of them says to her, "You can't impose your religion on all of society." She replies, "Of course you can. Why not? You impose your social democracy on all of us." No reply. :)
Norwegian Students to Become a Minority in Oslo Schools in 8 Years:
'via Blog this'
Reminds me of a moment in the Wallander series, which I hate and which I cannot stop watching. A religious cult, of crazed Christians, of course, is described with contempt by one of the female Swedish cops as, "you know: anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, anti-Islam."
On the other hand, when a young member of this Christianoid cult is confronted by the cops, one of them says to her, "You can't impose your religion on all of society." She replies, "Of course you can. Why not? You impose your social democracy on all of us." No reply. :)
Nostalgia for (someone else's) empire
The Weird Phenomenon of Ottoman Empire Nostalgia:
One of the many charming aspects of yet another "tolerant" Muslim imperialist-colonialist power were the complementary Turkish institutions of the devshirme ( boy-harvest) and the janissaries ( the New Corps).
Having conquered the Christian Balkans, for 500 years the Ottomans demanded a regular levy of their dhimmis'* children. Sort of a prefigurement of Hunger Games. These boys were marched off to Istanbul, forcibly converted to Islam and raised as a specialized slave force of corpsmen** to serve the Sultan, the janissaries.
As the good Muslim founder of this corps put it:
Consider, though, if a Christian regime in Europe had carried out a similar program on Jews: taking their children and forcibly baptizing them and raising them as, say, a special group of monks in Rome to serve as the Pope's special guardians...
How do you spell "never hear the end of it"?
*dhimmi's were the "protected" peoples, Christian and Jewish, of Muslim empires. Not unlike the "protected" businesses in Mafia territories or Negroes under Jim Crow laws in the American South. Tolerated and second-class.
**Pronounced kor-men, not corpse-men. Hell, everyone in the 57 states of America knows that.
'via Blog this'
One of the many charming aspects of yet another "tolerant" Muslim imperialist-colonialist power were the complementary Turkish institutions of the devshirme ( boy-harvest) and the janissaries ( the New Corps).
Having conquered the Christian Balkans, for 500 years the Ottomans demanded a regular levy of their dhimmis'* children. Sort of a prefigurement of Hunger Games. These boys were marched off to Istanbul, forcibly converted to Islam and raised as a specialized slave force of corpsmen** to serve the Sultan, the janissaries.
As the good Muslim founder of this corps put it:
"The conquered are slaves of the conquerors, to whom their goods, their women, and their children belong as lawful possession.."Hardly anyone knows or hears about this aspect of that "innovative and multicultural society".
Consider, though, if a Christian regime in Europe had carried out a similar program on Jews: taking their children and forcibly baptizing them and raising them as, say, a special group of monks in Rome to serve as the Pope's special guardians...
How do you spell "never hear the end of it"?
*dhimmi's were the "protected" peoples, Christian and Jewish, of Muslim empires. Not unlike the "protected" businesses in Mafia territories or Negroes under Jim Crow laws in the American South. Tolerated and second-class.
**Pronounced kor-men, not corpse-men. Hell, everyone in the 57 states of America knows that.
'via Blog this'
More shameless superficiality
supporting the view that even reactionary curmudgeons are not lacking in appreciation for the finer things in life.
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Thursday, January 10, 2013
French insight
A group of French homos have put up a site called homovox, speaking out against the same-sex marriage law in France. Interesting to see another cultural perspective on this.
One comment made in the course of a larger argument made me laugh. It had to do with surrogate motherhood for gay men. The guy could not understand why it is illegal, as a prostitute, to rent out your vagina, but not illegal, as a surrogate, to rent out your uterus!
Good point.
Reminds me of someone else recently who noticed that it was legal to be paid for sex if it's filmed, but not if it's just for fun. One is called porn and the other whoring.
Sex makes us all incongruous.
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One comment made in the course of a larger argument made me laugh. It had to do with surrogate motherhood for gay men. The guy could not understand why it is illegal, as a prostitute, to rent out your vagina, but not illegal, as a surrogate, to rent out your uterus!
Good point.
Reminds me of someone else recently who noticed that it was legal to be paid for sex if it's filmed, but not if it's just for fun. One is called porn and the other whoring.
Sex makes us all incongruous.
--
Demographics and destiny
Barry Hussein O's choice of an inauguration poet is yet one more example of the erasure of Whiteness in Liberal America. Mr. Blanco --ironically named-- is in fact White, a European born in Spain. But with passage through Cuba and his "poetic" identity as an immigrant, this "white Hispanic" -- even more than half-Peruvian George Zimmerman-- now basks in the cultural glory and privilege of La Raza. Plus, he's a homo. Cool.
I have criticized Victor Davis Hanson, for whom I have had enormous respect for many years, because he decided he is too decent and upright to admit that what America is about is race, that the 2012 election was even more clearly about race than 2008. He has started to see the light. Or the darkness, if you will. Almost all conservatives refuse to. After all, being called a racist is The Crime Worse Than Which There Is No Whicher. A fear only Whites have to worry about, of course.
One more indication of the Balkanization of America in these figures and images. If only White votes counted, the electoral results would look like this astounding image.
Ninety percent of Romney's support came from Whites and sixty percent of Whites voted for him. But even with 2 out of 3 Americans being White, enough of us voted of O that, barring a revolutionary mass conversion, the future belongs to his kind. Even with that miracle, by mid-century we will be less than 1 out of 2.
Do you think I am a declinist for no reason?
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I have criticized Victor Davis Hanson, for whom I have had enormous respect for many years, because he decided he is too decent and upright to admit that what America is about is race, that the 2012 election was even more clearly about race than 2008. He has started to see the light. Or the darkness, if you will. Almost all conservatives refuse to. After all, being called a racist is The Crime Worse Than Which There Is No Whicher. A fear only Whites have to worry about, of course.
One more indication of the Balkanization of America in these figures and images. If only White votes counted, the electoral results would look like this astounding image.
Ninety percent of Romney's support came from Whites and sixty percent of Whites voted for him. But even with 2 out of 3 Americans being White, enough of us voted of O that, barring a revolutionary mass conversion, the future belongs to his kind. Even with that miracle, by mid-century we will be less than 1 out of 2.
Do you think I am a declinist for no reason?
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The poetics of Obamanation
Richard Blanco, Symbol of Diversity, Selected As Obama’s Inaugural Poet | TIME.com:
When I read his "poem", all I hear is self-indulgent whining against reality. How dare, how dare America (once) have a recognizable racial and cultural shape that does not match my little victimist immigrant ego?
Which is now the only reason you were chosen.
The essence of "diversity."
Mr. Blanco writes: My poetry and I are not exclusively aligned with any one particular group—Latino, Cuban, queer, or "white."
Notice who gets the honor of the scare quotation marks.
What a total piece of crap.
And you can apply that to what or whomever you want.
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'via Blog this'
When I read his "poem", all I hear is self-indulgent whining against reality. How dare, how dare America (once) have a recognizable racial and cultural shape that does not match my little victimist immigrant ego?
Which is now the only reason you were chosen.
The essence of "diversity."
Mr. Blanco writes: My poetry and I are not exclusively aligned with any one particular group—Latino, Cuban, queer, or "white."
Notice who gets the honor of the scare quotation marks.
What a total piece of crap.
And you can apply that to what or whomever you want.
---
'via Blog this'
It's not about what it's about
John Derbyshire, who actually does speak truth to power and is therefore exiled beyond the pale, points out that America has always been fighting the Civil War and it has always been a war between two tribes of Whites who loathe each other. North vs South, Blue vs Red.
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Wednesday, January 09, 2013
Ideology inscribed in language
Sounds pretty PoMo, No?
An article on the Muslim institution of death by stoning:
"...equally horrific stoning sentences are quietly carried out throughout the developing world on a regular basis."
Kinda like Arab Spring.
Use their lingo and they teach you how to think.
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Will & Black
At a Notre Dame commencement, conservative pundit George Will launched out on an exploration and defense of the constitution, especially in regard to the role of religion. Conrad Black found it brilliant, if flawed. Mr Black did touch on an issue I have recently come to re-think.
Second, I don’t agree that Madison’s constitutional stipulations of divided and restrained powers, no matter how faithfully adhered to, would have prevented the crisis that George Will rightly fears is upon us — a society that looks to government to cure all ills as a matter of right. That process is the result of a universal franchise, which, though Madison and Jefferson favored a broader electorate than did Washington, Adams, or Hamilton, is not what any of them, including Franklin, sought. Democracy was going to open the whole process to a supreme test of the maturity and political sobriety of the people, and the people’s will was never going to be frustrated indefinitely by recourse to the limited jurisdiction of the federal government. The idea that in what is essentially a free country the majority could be denied what it wants, even if its desires are incited by demagogues and charlatans, is moonshine.
With a HT to VFR, this typically oracular musing of Alexis de Tocqueville about American democracy and its future, in 1831:
I wish to imagine under what new features despotism might appear in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, living apart, is almost unaware of the destiny of all the rest. His children and personal friends are for him the whole of the human race; as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he stands alongside them but does not see them; he touches them without feeling them; he exists only in himself and for himself; if he still retains his family circle, at any rate he may be said to have lost his country … Above these men stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny. It is absolute, meticulous, ordered, provident, and kindly disposed. It would be like a fatherly authority, if, fatherlike, its aims were to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks only to keep them in perpetual childhood; it prefers its citizens to enjoy themselves provided they have only enjoyment in mind. It works readily for their happiness but it wishes to be the only provider and judge of it. It provides their security, anticipates and guarantees their needs, supplies their pleasures, directs their principal concerns, manages their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances. Why can it not remove them entirely from the bother of thinking and the troubles of life?Sound familiar?
_
Tuesday, January 08, 2013
Public education
DC police are responding to attacks on buses by handing out this "reminder" flier:
A Reminder from DC Police—With Proper Planning, Your Robberies Needn’t “Go Wrong”!
A wag suggests future fliers:
A Reminder from DC Police—Looting and Pillaging Are Not Appropriate at the Mall!
A Reminder from DC Police—With Proper Planning, Your Robberies Needn’t “Go Wrong”!
A Reminder from DC Police—Easy on the Random Homicides, Please!
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Acting
Although I am unsympathetic to using celebrities like actors as beacons of political wisdom, I do appreciate it when they are good at what they are supposed to be good at: making us believe they are someone they are not.
Stephen Lang can convince you that he is
the pussy-whipped husband at a Christian reparative therapy house for homosexuals in Save Me.
a kick-ass nasty bad-guy soldier of evil in the stupefyingly derivative Avatar.
Stephen Lang can convince you that he is
the pussy-whipped husband at a Christian reparative therapy house for homosexuals in Save Me.
and
a kick-ass nasty bad-guy soldier of evil in the stupefyingly derivative Avatar.
Monday, January 07, 2013
But, I transgress
In preparation for the upcoming holiday...
"The content of our character" meets Unintended Outcomes,
Exhibit 2,357,489B.*
(*Warning: combines fact with offensive language and opinion.)
Clarence Page asks, "Lincoln freed us for this?" Excellent question.
BTW, does anyone else see the post-colonial semiotics of internalized subalternism in the fact that MLKs memorial is carved out of White stone?
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Mao Tse King Monument in Washington DC
"The content of our character" meets Unintended Outcomes,
Exhibit 2,357,489B.*
(*Warning: combines fact with offensive language and opinion.)
Clarence Page asks, "Lincoln freed us for this?" Excellent question.
BTW, does anyone else see the post-colonial semiotics of internalized subalternism in the fact that MLKs memorial is carved out of White stone?
---
Sunday, January 06, 2013
Epiphany
The Twelve Days of Christmas are over and today is the Epiphany. January 6th. Since the mid 300's a really overloaded Christian feast day. Between East and West, it's for Christ's birth, the visit of the Magi, his Baptism in the Jordan and the miracle at Cana. It's the day when the Christmas decorations come down. When the Orthodox bless the rivers. And when Befana the witch gives Italian kids presents.
I have a new decoration up, the Ex Cathedra masthead for 2013. Muted colors. Appropriate for a declinist, no? Three images. For sex, a favorite image of the Jacob wrestling with the "angel.". For politics, a crop from The Forgotten Man. For religion, the Crusaders vs the Mohammedans. Or the French at Poitiers expelling the Muslim invaders. Or 700 years of Spanish history. Etc.
And, of course, the same humility.
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I have a new decoration up, the Ex Cathedra masthead for 2013. Muted colors. Appropriate for a declinist, no? Three images. For sex, a favorite image of the Jacob wrestling with the "angel.". For politics, a crop from The Forgotten Man. For religion, the Crusaders vs the Mohammedans. Or the French at Poitiers expelling the Muslim invaders. Or 700 years of Spanish history. Etc.
And, of course, the same humility.
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Friday, January 04, 2013
At last
Someone finally "gets" me.
My Facebook friend Geoff just described me as a "beautiful grump."
_____
My Facebook friend Geoff just described me as a "beautiful grump."
_____
Justified by
faith? works? angst?
It may be totally unfair and skewed --but hey, I'm Ex Cathedra, that's how I roll-- but you can get a sense for the difference between Europe and America by comparing Wallander with Justified.
Swedish Detective Kurt Wallander I have already expatiated on: the soul-sick hypercivilized European male.
Contrast with US Marshal Raylan Givens of Justified, battling the bad guys in the towns and hollers of eastern Kentucky and not losing a wink of sleep when he takes one of 'em down.
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It may be totally unfair and skewed --but hey, I'm Ex Cathedra, that's how I roll-- but you can get a sense for the difference between Europe and America by comparing Wallander with Justified.
Kenneth Branagh's Wallander
Swedish Detective Kurt Wallander I have already expatiated on: the soul-sick hypercivilized European male.
Timothy Oliphant's Givens
Contrast with US Marshal Raylan Givens of Justified, battling the bad guys in the towns and hollers of eastern Kentucky and not losing a wink of sleep when he takes one of 'em down.
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Campout of the Saints
Western Anglicanism Seriously Compromised :
Needs Third World missionaries.
Most Anglicans are now African. And they want to come back home to the White West and reform their erstwhile evangelizers.
Very funny. The unintended outcomes of success and empire.
PS. Note to self: avoid colonial imperialism, cause they'll eventually come back home to live with you in the Mother Country.
'via Blog this'
Needs Third World missionaries.
Most Anglicans are now African. And they want to come back home to the White West and reform their erstwhile evangelizers.
Very funny. The unintended outcomes of success and empire.
PS. Note to self: avoid colonial imperialism, cause they'll eventually come back home to live with you in the Mother Country.
'via Blog this'
Thursday, January 03, 2013
And now for something completely different
Why Is The World (Not) So Dangerous?
From the man who predicted the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War,
in 1983, a prediction of a world-wide economic boom based on a growing global middle class.
Hey, it's a new year. Why not dream a little?
'via Blog this'
From the man who predicted the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War,
in 1983, a prediction of a world-wide economic boom based on a growing global middle class.
Hey, it's a new year. Why not dream a little?
'via Blog this'
The new religion
Now here's an image of what one old priest used to call The Church Effervescent, a video promoting ordination of women as Catholics priests. It is sponsored by the Women's Ordination Conference, so it is not a parody. At least not intentionally.*
Pretty well everything you need to know about the movement is here...All right here.
Pretty well everything you need to know about the movement is here...All right here.
I had a dream as a girl
Like Therese of Lisieux
I need to give this whirl
So I can lead the way
Woman priest is my call
Women preaching for all
Don't listen to St. Paul
'Cuz I can lead the way
My ministry is growing
Excommunication? I'm still glowing.
M.Div, chasuble flowing
Where you think the Church is going?
Hey, I was baptized, and this is crazy,
But God just called me, so ordain a lady!
Justice doesn't look right, with only male priests,
But God just called me, so ordain a lady!
My call is a fact, but some Pope in a hat,
Closed discussion on that, and now he's in my way
I pray, sing, and feel
At first communion it's real
I but I refuse to kneel,
To Patriarchy's way
Justice doesn't look right with only male priests
But God just called me, so ordain a lady!
With women priests in my life, I was so glad
I missed them so bad, I missed them so, so bad
With women priests in my life, I was so glad
We want our Church back, we want it all, all back
Well, it's really stunning in its combination of arrogance, ignorance and stupidity. No wonder people thought it was a parody by the orthodox. Screw St Paul and get "some Pope in a hat" out of "my way" and this is supposed to induce the Church of Rome to ordain these "Catholic" women?
The Girl Power generation apparently really do believe that they are entitled by right towhatever they want.
Plus, this is the first time I have ever heard feminists describe themselves as "ladies".
And ladies in drag, at that. The priestly vestments are male, made for men and only worn by men. Just because they're flowing does not make them unisex. Ask Lawrence of Arabia.
Wow. Old White Man with more than a passing knowledge of a 2000 year old institution shakes head.
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*Watch this all the way to the end!
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The old religion
I wouldn't swear to this, but my recollection is that when the Latin liturgy was superceded by the new vernacular one, I was very much in favor of it. And although there were elements of the old rite that I was fine with letting go, some of its Baroque fussiness and its monotony, I never wanted to see it all disappear. Which it did. Entirely. When I had the opportunity, I used to try to save things, the Latin chant especially, some of it more than a thousand years old. Sounds that a friend of mine used to call "base-of-the-brain music." When I found the place where my father was buried, for instance, I took an old Latin breviary to his grave and recited the Office of the Dead for him in the old form, the one that he would have known in life.
And there were times...at least I think so...when the new rite began to take the tacky and soulless shape that it often has, that I missed the old Mass, was hungry for the kind of mythic power that it had and which the all too cheery and didactic reformed one lacked. The old rite could be hurried and a bit tacky, but it was never silly or embarrassing. Unlike the 12.30 Folk Masses I had to endure: cheap cheer and caterwauling combined. I first learned how to be an altar server in the Roman rite when I was in fifth grade, speaking the responses by rote, participating in the complex courtly choreography, and did that often for the next several years, til it disappeared in 1963 or so. My memories of that ritual remain vivid. I can still recite a lot of it from memory.
Simili modo postquam coenatum est accipiens et hunc praeclarem calicem in sanctas et venerabiles manus suas...
Anyway, in an article about the apparent interest of young Catholics in the ancient rite, I read words that struck me as true, that in the Roman Mass which evolved over twenty uninterrupted centuries, it evoked
Amen.
And there were times...at least I think so...when the new rite began to take the tacky and soulless shape that it often has, that I missed the old Mass, was hungry for the kind of mythic power that it had and which the all too cheery and didactic reformed one lacked. The old rite could be hurried and a bit tacky, but it was never silly or embarrassing. Unlike the 12.30 Folk Masses I had to endure: cheap cheer and caterwauling combined. I first learned how to be an altar server in the Roman rite when I was in fifth grade, speaking the responses by rote, participating in the complex courtly choreography, and did that often for the next several years, til it disappeared in 1963 or so. My memories of that ritual remain vivid. I can still recite a lot of it from memory.
Simili modo postquam coenatum est accipiens et hunc praeclarem calicem in sanctas et venerabiles manus suas...
Anyway, in an article about the apparent interest of young Catholics in the ancient rite, I read words that struck me as true, that in the Roman Mass which evolved over twenty uninterrupted centuries, it evoked
"some sense that you're peering through a window out of time, seeing through a glass not quite so darkly into another world far realer than our own....you learn to 'see' something profound and true: a sacrificial ritual enacting a solemn marriage between the fallen muck of earth and fire falling from heaven."
Amen.
Wednesday, January 02, 2013
Eros and ideology
Revisiting the BBC's 2003 Cambridge Spies. Four privileged insiders in Britain, two gay, two straight, caught up in their high-minded sentimental Communist trance, spending their careers damaging their own country. Dead set against fascism, pulling instead for Stalin's Moscow and its soul-destroying illusion that killed 100 million people. Loving the masses and classes of the common people without ever really knowing any of them.
Although it formally condemns them, the series also wants us to care about them, understand them, sympathize with their hatred of privilege and poverty. They were Communists. Can you imagine the BBC ever producing something asking us to take a similar attitude toward fascists. Or even --or especially-- the contemporary British Right? The BNP? Enoch Powell? In the conventional piety of our time, Marxism is ambiguous, but anything Right Wing is simply known to be, beyond the shadow of a doubt, Evil.
Yet eros drives these men, too. Friendship, very much. And sex. The mixing pros and cons thereof. Perhaps it is a weakness of mine, but it mitigates, humanizes their treason a little. But only just a little.
I am reminded of other Brits, of the exchange in Man For All Seasons, when Thomas More discovers that Richard Rich betrayed him in order to become attorney general for Wales.
For Marx? For Marx?
Although it formally condemns them, the series also wants us to care about them, understand them, sympathize with their hatred of privilege and poverty. They were Communists. Can you imagine the BBC ever producing something asking us to take a similar attitude toward fascists. Or even --or especially-- the contemporary British Right? The BNP? Enoch Powell? In the conventional piety of our time, Marxism is ambiguous, but anything Right Wing is simply known to be, beyond the shadow of a doubt, Evil.
Yet eros drives these men, too. Friendship, very much. And sex. The mixing pros and cons thereof. Perhaps it is a weakness of mine, but it mitigates, humanizes their treason a little. But only just a little.
The winged god Eros rules
ruthlessly
throughout the earth,
inflaming
Zeus himself,
wounded
with unquenched fires.
Ares the war god has felt those flames.
Hephaistos, too,
he who forges the three-forked thunderbolts,
and Apollo, the divine sun,
sure archer himself,
is pierced by a younger god
of surer aim,
the bane
both of heaven and earth.
Seneca, Phaedra
1st century AD
I am reminded of other Brits, of the exchange in Man For All Seasons, when Thomas More discovers that Richard Rich betrayed him in order to become attorney general for Wales.
It profiteth a man nothing to lose his soul for the whole world...but for Wales, Rich? For Wales?
For Marx? For Marx?
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
Female Left, Masculine Right
To avoid thinking about some things I don't want to think about for a while --what we call suppression, in the shrink trade, conscious denial-- I was perusing and comparing some of the complaints against Rome from the women of the ultra-liberal LCWR, who still operate within the Church, and the men of the ultra-conservative Society of St Pius X, who operate outside(ish) of it. Fascinating stuff, about both gender and organizational psychology. And the consistency of Romanità .
.
The females, American nuns, studiously avoid the very doctrinal issues which are the heart of Rome's problem with them. I have never seen them once address them. They concentrate on speculation about motivation and on emotional process. They interpret the challenge as about money, as a distraction from the sex abuse issue, as male fear of feminine power, as an attack on their "justice and peace" work with "the poor and vulnerable and marginalized." And they question the legitimacy of the post-assessment meetings because they don't feel "heard" or "seen", but "observed" and "judged."
To a post-feminist middle-class US woman, who seeks (and expects, as her birthright) constant and unwavering emotional validation above all, it's outrageously abusive.
The males, (mostly Northern) European priests, are obsessed with words, with documents, with the interpretation of texts and history. With issues. It is a conflict over ideas, traditional Roman Catholicism vs What Happened At Vatican II. The head of the organization, though, has laid out in a recent speech all the complications of process around these theological discussions and canonical meetings. For anyone, like your humble correspondent, who has lived in Rome and known people who have long worked there, it was almost hilariously familiar: double messages lost in a Mobius maze of conflicting public and private voices. Two classic examples he notes: one, receiving a strongly worded letter from Rome by mail and then receiving a phone call from the office that issued it, telling them just to file it away and forget it. Another is Rome agreeing to a document after a long and complex discussion and then submitting a revised version for signature, after the meeting, which redefines it to mean the opposite of the original.
To a tidy Franco-Germanic clerical mind, which seeks clarity and order above all, it's crazy-makingly ambiguous.
Welcome to Italy.
In 1870, after the newly-formed Italy dispossessed the Pope of his states, the lands of central Italy that he had ruled for 1000 years, he sulkingly withdrew into a role as "The Prisoner of the Vatican". Well, like many apparently absolute rulers, he remains a paradoxical prisoner, but his keepers are the many members of the Vatican bureaucracy who supposedly serve him. What Benedict XVI personally wants has to pass through a labyrinth of other wills, many of which are either overtly or covertly opposed to his. Not a new, or unique, situation. Court life. For instance, he has made the old Mass available again for whoever wants it, but has not dared to celebrate it himself in St Peter's.*
I think Jung might find some of his impressions of male/female difference validated here. I can image that Hell for each of these groups might be spending eternity in each others' company :) As the old Roman saying goes, If you want to keep your faith in the Barque of Peter, stay away from the engine room.
*Speaking of St Peter's and the Prisoner of the Vatican. The new Kingdom of Italy at first offered to leave the papacy part of Rome within the Leonine Walls. These were built by Pope Leo IV in the 9th century after...get this...the Muslims invaded the city and sacked St. Peter's in 846. Yup. Betcha didn't know that. Part of The Religion of Peace's continuous 1000+ years of predation and invasion of Christian Europe. Including a huge slave trade in Whites.
----
.
Maenad ecofem nuns dancing around their Wise Crone at an LCWR convention
The females, American nuns, studiously avoid the very doctrinal issues which are the heart of Rome's problem with them. I have never seen them once address them. They concentrate on speculation about motivation and on emotional process. They interpret the challenge as about money, as a distraction from the sex abuse issue, as male fear of feminine power, as an attack on their "justice and peace" work with "the poor and vulnerable and marginalized." And they question the legitimacy of the post-assessment meetings because they don't feel "heard" or "seen", but "observed" and "judged."
To a post-feminist middle-class US woman, who seeks (and expects, as her birthright) constant and unwavering emotional validation above all, it's outrageously abusive.
Illicitly but validly ordained traditionalist priests with their reactionary bishops
The males, (mostly Northern) European priests, are obsessed with words, with documents, with the interpretation of texts and history. With issues. It is a conflict over ideas, traditional Roman Catholicism vs What Happened At Vatican II. The head of the organization, though, has laid out in a recent speech all the complications of process around these theological discussions and canonical meetings. For anyone, like your humble correspondent, who has lived in Rome and known people who have long worked there, it was almost hilariously familiar: double messages lost in a Mobius maze of conflicting public and private voices. Two classic examples he notes: one, receiving a strongly worded letter from Rome by mail and then receiving a phone call from the office that issued it, telling them just to file it away and forget it. Another is Rome agreeing to a document after a long and complex discussion and then submitting a revised version for signature, after the meeting, which redefines it to mean the opposite of the original.
To a tidy Franco-Germanic clerical mind, which seeks clarity and order above all, it's crazy-makingly ambiguous.
Welcome to Italy.
In 1870, after the newly-formed Italy dispossessed the Pope of his states, the lands of central Italy that he had ruled for 1000 years, he sulkingly withdrew into a role as "The Prisoner of the Vatican". Well, like many apparently absolute rulers, he remains a paradoxical prisoner, but his keepers are the many members of the Vatican bureaucracy who supposedly serve him. What Benedict XVI personally wants has to pass through a labyrinth of other wills, many of which are either overtly or covertly opposed to his. Not a new, or unique, situation. Court life. For instance, he has made the old Mass available again for whoever wants it, but has not dared to celebrate it himself in St Peter's.*
I think Jung might find some of his impressions of male/female difference validated here. I can image that Hell for each of these groups might be spending eternity in each others' company :) As the old Roman saying goes, If you want to keep your faith in the Barque of Peter, stay away from the engine room.
*Speaking of St Peter's and the Prisoner of the Vatican. The new Kingdom of Italy at first offered to leave the papacy part of Rome within the Leonine Walls. These were built by Pope Leo IV in the 9th century after...get this...the Muslims invaded the city and sacked St. Peter's in 846. Yup. Betcha didn't know that. Part of The Religion of Peace's continuous 1000+ years of predation and invasion of Christian Europe. Including a huge slave trade in Whites.
----
No gun, will prattle
The Righties have been passing around links to a video which splices Hollywood celebrities pleading for gun control with scenes from the movies in which they blast everyone around them to Kingdom come. I don't need to look at it.
The more I think about it, the more acutely diagnostic it becomes that we listen to these people in the first place. After all, they are men and women whose signal talent is making believe they are somebody else. Successful fakery. A gift for deception. My old saw about traditional societies wisely ranking actors along with prostitutes.
No one would think to ask bankers or corporate executives to make public service videos. But why not? Like actors, they are hugely wealthy and are used to being treated in ways that the average person could not begin to imagine unless we read about it in the tabloids. As my relative in the business agrees: modern day Caesars. Successful actors, in fact, are even more removed from real life than bankers or corporation guys, much more likely to have their whims and especially their indulgences and vices catered to and even celebrated. Shall we take moral direction from Kanye West and Kim Kardashian?
And of course behind the people on the screens are guess what? Bankers and corporate executives. The actors and actresses, and sometimes the directors, are the faces of an enormous industry that is based, like all industries, on money, on making a profit. (And as I noted recently, in a ruthlessly capitalist mode.)
At least bankers are honest about it.
--
The more I think about it, the more acutely diagnostic it becomes that we listen to these people in the first place. After all, they are men and women whose signal talent is making believe they are somebody else. Successful fakery. A gift for deception. My old saw about traditional societies wisely ranking actors along with prostitutes.
No one would think to ask bankers or corporate executives to make public service videos. But why not? Like actors, they are hugely wealthy and are used to being treated in ways that the average person could not begin to imagine unless we read about it in the tabloids. As my relative in the business agrees: modern day Caesars. Successful actors, in fact, are even more removed from real life than bankers or corporation guys, much more likely to have their whims and especially their indulgences and vices catered to and even celebrated. Shall we take moral direction from Kanye West and Kim Kardashian?
And of course behind the people on the screens are guess what? Bankers and corporate executives. The actors and actresses, and sometimes the directors, are the faces of an enormous industry that is based, like all industries, on money, on making a profit. (And as I noted recently, in a ruthlessly capitalist mode.)
At least bankers are honest about it.
--
Another page, same book
I have the irritable and unfriendly attitude toward New Years that many of the denizens of my local world have toward Christmas. To me it is just one more day on the calendar; changing the number changes nothing else. A day to mark but nothing to celebrate. It's just chronology.
I have paid no attention to the "fiscal cliff" news --although I can see my own fast approaching-- because I have lost the fine discrimination skills to distinguish between disaster and catastrophe.
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I have paid no attention to the "fiscal cliff" news --although I can see my own fast approaching-- because I have lost the fine discrimination skills to distinguish between disaster and catastrophe.
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