"All men are created equal"

 was written in 1776 by the same man who wrote in 1821

"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people (Blacks) are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government."

"Autobiography" in Jefferson’s Works, Volume I, p. 48

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A wise crack

From an obscure site:

Atheists and other fundies often forget about the Orthodox Church, but it is the second largest Church in Christendom.  Together with the largest, the Roman Catholic, they comprise better than 63% of all Christians.  Throw in the third largest - the Anglican Communion - and we've got two-thirds of all Christians, well before we get down to the more exotic and idiosyncratic sects.  If I want to know "what Christianity teaches," I would be inclined to ask the Orthodox or Catholic churches, as they have near 2000 years of noodling over it.  Yet when the Coynes of the world want to tell us 'what Christians believe,' they agitate over the idiosyncratic beliefs of Bill and Ted's Excellent Bible Shack, whose teachings go back to last Tuesday.  Go figure.

In Nativitate Domini

Christmas tradition

Mr B and I headed south of SF yesterday evening for our annual Christmas dinner among the real people of the world. This time we returned to The Basque Cultural Center, with its tables full of large families, noise and easy atmosphere. Although it does not quite match Bertolucci's  [closed for the holidays this year  ;(   ]  for that feel of old Brooklyn in the '50s that I like, it was warm and easy.

Then we visited the Parkway Estates in South San Franciso, where they really do a bang-up job of Christmas lights. Lots of cars and tons of people out on foot to see them, including caroling. Very nice. (And 60 degrees!)

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Handsome German mesomorph interlude

Couldn't ask for much more, coudja?

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Pope Francis revealed

No longer a practicing Catholic, I have yet wanted the Church, once part of the 1000+ year old backbone of the West, to play its role in protecting the culture and peoples it shared in shaping, despite their current suicidality.

My areas of appreciation, always intellectual and aesthetic rather than moral, have been shrinking with the passing years. And since the arrival of Francis The Talking Pope, with the passing days. At this point, Catholicism's only contemporary value is that it refuses to bow to the feminist notion that males and females are interchangeable social constructs and that it, for this week at least, understands what marriage is, and is not. (The rest of its "social doctrine" is just leftoid sentimentality.)

Its refusal to sanction homosexual activity, while personally inconvenient, is part of its moral DNA and only a by-product of its larger sacramental task of seeing Holy Matrimony as a sacrament, which, in reality, is far more important than make less than 3% of the sexual public happy. IMHO, it really has no choice in the matter. To welcome gay marriage would be to commit suicide. Along with all the other Western White churches who are merrily slitting their own veins to the tune of Kumbaya.

But the matter of caring a damn about the European peoples who made Latin Christianity, Mother Church has now turned into Mommy Dearest, enthusiastically aiding and abetting a new Barbarian Invasion that will end either in alien domination or vast bloodshed. Rome has betrayed the West.

But back to the Argentine Jesuit pontiff of confusion and, as one theologian put it, his "hermeneutic of incoherence."

A very orthodox Catholic lay blogger has characterized the current Bishop of  Rome as "a good-hearted moron." Charitable of him. I clocked him as an exhibitionistic narcissist quite a long time ago. And to make it worse, a emotion-driven moralist with a big mouth.

In his Christmas address to the Roman Curia, the men who actually run the Vatican, he basically insults them up and down in words that he knows will be reported on a world scale. Two very orthodox priests called his tantrum "a condescending talk better given to Jesuit novices in Lent" and "sixteen paragraphs of sustained and immoderate abuse, just before Christmas." Global shaming which gives aid and comfort to his religion's enemies.

From USA Today, for example, voila: Pope Francis: Merry Christmas, you power-hungry hypocrites

On a pragmatic level, he now has a ton of resentful new haters in his court. And, as usual, He Who Blurts has given more canon fodder to the secular media to make a mockery of his church, while casting him as, literally, the Good Guy In White or, as one outlet of the media whoredom put it, "the world's BFF."

But if you read the text, it's as boringly predictable as his pot-shot filled daily sermons in the soulless modern chapel where he says Mass. He comes up with cleverly snide names for people he dislikes. It's scattershot criticism, thick with metaphor, and leaves many, including some of his honest bishops, completely baffled as to what he actually wants people to do. "Smell like sheep" and "Make a mess" are hardly actionable items.

Well, there's a simple answer to understanding this Obama clone in a mitre, and I think I have figured it out:

"Be me!"

Which, for any narcissist, is really all there is to it.

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'via Blog this'

More multiculti mush

JK Rowling confirms that there were Jewish wizards at Hogwarts | Books | The Guardian:

And "LGBT" ones, too!

Sigh.

I love the Harry Potter movies. I just watched two of them yesterday. For the umpteenth time.
I forced myself to "read" the books on mp3 audio just to see how they compared and to give better ground to my opinions. And the movies are better.

On the level of plot narrative and characters, creation of an imaginative world, Ms Rowling is a truly gifted woman. While not a great writer, she is an extraordinary storyteller.

But as a moralist, she is as empty as Gene Roddenbury and Star Trek Drek.

Here again, in the above story, we have her trumpeting her all-inclusive values about Hogwarts, just to make sure we know she is orthodox and bien-pensant.

But without effect, at all.

Like Albus Dumbledore's homosexuality, the ethnic and racial, the cultural and religious "diversity" of the Wizarding World is all window-dressing in the service of highmindedness, but it has absolutely zero zip zilch nada effect on either the narrative or the characters. None of it makes the slightest bit of difference. The only character whose ethnicity has any bearing on his character is the irascible Irishman Seamus, who has a talent for blowing things up. IRA anyone? There's prominent inter-racial dating, for example, but hardly any (none, to my knowledge) inter-racial marriage.

As I said before, every single one of the characters of color could be transformed into the homogeneous and native White British mass who form the great majority of the human characters without the slightest change to anything at all but names and externals like skin color and dress. Otherwise, nothing different. Make Dumbledore straight: what's the difference? There's a Jew in Hogwarts? Who knew?

In the Wizarding World and in the world of Star Trek, all the "diverse" humans act like White British people*. Aside from externals, there is nothing distinctive about them. And in both these worlds, all the genetic differences of skill, attitude, behavior, capacity, tendency and sense of group identity are projected out onto non-human groups, other species, where it is presumably both ok and obvious. The generalizations (aka "stereotypes") that would be rejected with shrieks of horror if applied to intra-human groups are even more loudly asserted and trumpeted when applied either to non-human magicals (giants, goblins, elves, centaurs, etc.) or to non-human aliens (Vulcans, Klingons, Ferengi, Borg, etc.)

I'm not really complaining. Although Rowlings intentions are clearly to placate the Gods of the Facebook Trendings, this lack of follow-through makes the movies watchable for me.

But all this inclusive-diverse preening reveals the emptiness of the liberal PC multiculti ideology. In order to make real stories, and not just ideological cartoons, it either has to ignore or violate its own principles.

In case you'd like to hear me rant --intelligently, though, as always!-- about this, read here.

*A random thought. Maybe this is JK Rowlings' real (and gasp, racist) message, even if it is unconscious: that the way for us all to get along is for the minorities to keep their little accoutrements of skin and name but to become, in every other way, wholly English. (Except for Seamus.) Now that's a program ExC could get on board with!

'via Blog this'

"Eat Like An Idealist"

My Facebook page's column of ads invited me to this high ethical realm.

Status-whoring disguised as "values." Morality as a marketing ploy to buoy up declining sales.

Eat like an idealist.


Whole Foods Asks Shoppers to Consider a Value Proposition - NYTimes.com:

Whole Foods embodies a chunk of what I despise in the dying culture:
you have to have more evil capitalist money in your pocket in order
to afford the refined sense of moral purity and superiority that they sell you.

I'd barf my breakfast, but that would be a waste of food...

Against my "values."




'via Blog this'

Thoughts before retiring to sleep

American Horror Story: Freak Show. Sometimes horrifying, sometimes quite touching.



This fella has done his homework about what's "Islamic." Right from the camel's mouth, in detail.



The raw truth behind the failure of multiculturalism?

...whites seem to be the only people who widely accept multiculturalism as an ideal. Whites think that if they only set aside everything about their interests, tastes, and expectations that might clash with those of other races, they can demonstrate sufficient openness and good will that non-whites will drop their resentment, hike up their pants, join hands, and help them usher in a new age of post-racial harmony. Non-whites, however, are encouraged to be as ethnocentric, aggressive, and accusatory as possible in their dealings with whites. Thus present-day multiculturalism is a formula for the exploitation and victimization of whites, which can only increase racial tensions.

This query reminded me of my last attempt to connect with daylight Christendom. The church I was going to had a real, if quirky, sense of worship. I headed off to the Christmas Eve service expecting a solemn ritual imbued with the mysticism of the Gospel of John. What I got was excruciatingly sentimental uppermiddleclass cuteness in the form of a kiddie's Christmas pageant. One more nail in the coffin.



Everything wrong with America in the last fifty years, in one photo:

 To put it crudely and simply: the Blacks succeeded in convincing the Whites that they were guilty of all the Blacks' miseries*, and then White women took advantage of that sense of moral crime and stabbed their own men in the back for the sake of their irrational egos. And there you have it: the end of America. Whites, --White men especially-- have shown themselves to be The Most Foolish People On The Planet ©.

*Although the last half century has made it clear that no matter what we do, the Africans in America are the hapless authors of their own misfortunes, for which they will always blame us. The beginning of a cure here: 

.......