Bearly tolerable

I watched two gay Bear movies, Bearcity 1 and 2. (Spoilers below).




Yikes.

The primary romantic story is between a young bear-chaser and a handsome bearded older man. The first movie is the drama of their finally overcoming various obstacles and falling in love. In the second move, the older one proposes marriage. The younger one first refuses, scared of such a commitment at his age and then agrees. The wedding is set in Provincetown, with a gathering of friends, former lovers (and the young guy's hyper-accepting parents) during Bear Week.




The climax comes when they decide, in flagrante ceremonio of course, not to proceed with the wedding because "it doesn't feel right, even though they love each other." So they break up, revert to being just friends and ex's and proceed to pick up new guys and make out with them.

Really.

The default model for the supporting friend characters --a hyper queeny twink or a very girthful fat-and-jolly type-- is the sassy Black girl. And we have drag, of course. Must have drag.

And one reviewer expressed his pleasure that the movie did not rely on tired gay cliches and stereotypes.

Really.

Wikipedia, famous for its inclusive authorship and its spotty reliability, describes a Bear as "a large, hairy man who projects an image of rugged masculinity...Some bears place importance on presenting a hypermasculine image and may shun interaction with, and even disdain, men who exhibit effeminacy."

Really?

Fake independence

When I really started thinking about economics, I happened on the question: Who creates wealth? And I realized that I have never created any in my life. I move around --for services rendered-- the wealth that others create. Earning a living is not the same as creating the environment in which people can earn a living. It's sorta like the difference between having money and having cash in your pocket.

An anti-feminist blog I recently found has now gone private. But I have used Google's cache to find a way in. This set of blunt thoughts from the author about women and men, wealth and independence.

Women Bearing the Brunt of Austerity in Britain

The feminist movement is a giant ponzi scheme, which never generates its own wealth or culture, but constantly steals from others lower down. The women at the top are either the lawyers, professors, and government workers, or the biggest victims. Victimhood buys its own status. The ones paying in are forced to - the men with alimony and child support around their necks; and men who pay taxes.

The so-called liberation of women was built off of the backs of men. Without men, empowered females have nothing. Government cutbacks prove this. Women are the first to suffer from government cutbacks, a line which seeks to show women as victims. What it really shows is how men have for so long been forced to foot the bill of female liberation. Men get to work the hot, uncomfortable or dangerous jobs (or live in polluted Asia to avoid the minefield of feminist culture) while women seek air conditioned comfort. All those HR jobs are provided by men who are doing the real producing, in other words.

The New York Times' Women Bearing the Brunt of Austerity in Britain* is one of those articles that says the above without meaning to say it. That women bear the brunt of austerity means that men bear the brunt of taxpaying and receive few government services in return. Men are sidelined.

Austerity measures will bring something of a better balance to society. Take day care, for example. Why is the government doing the mother's job? Why do women believe the feminist propaganda that women's work, in the home, is inferior to being a banker or a professor? Let men do those jobs so that women can stay at home and be proper mothers. The article offers typical womanist victimology:

“It would just be like losing a right arm,” she said. “I’d have to drop that one day a week, just to be able to be at home with Joshua,” her 2-year-old. 

OMG lady, you mean you'd have to stay at home and be a mother? How outrageous! What a victim you are!

Incidentally, if women are so empowered, why do they become such pathetic weakling victims the moment the government pulls the plug on a program? Is it real empowerment if you're so utterly dependent on something else? Isn't that more of a parent-child relationship? Aren't women, so completely government dependent, simply being child-like?

The modern woman moans and groans when heavily-indebted and heavily-taxing governments start to pull back from places to which they never should have gone:

Manchester, where Ms. Bradshaw, her partner, Lee Mellor, and their rambunctious blond boys live in a neighborhood of worn brown row houses, announced last month it was shutting its day care centers, which serve 800 children.

Like many cities and institutions around Britain, Manchester is searching for savings to close the gap created by the national government’s withdrawal of £3.5 billion, or about $5.6 billion, in support to localities this year, a drop of nearly 12 percent under Prime Minister David Cameron’s tough austerity program. Billions of pounds more are to vanish by 2015.

Mr. Cameron, a Conservative, has also lifted a requirement that the municipal authorities fund and operate Sure Start children’s centers, which offer services including prenatal checkups, breast-feeding support and day care. Their creation was a flagship achievement of the Labour government of the former prime minister Tony Blair; many strapped local councils are now closing the centers or scaling them back. 

Here we see Mr. Cameron being made out to be the bad guy, just like daddy is bad when he says no to the children and their requests. People - women above all - have defined their lives a little too closely to the government, and have refused to become independent. This is part of the lack of responsibility that has been drilled into women.

Manchester is broke. Britain is broke. The West is broke. Largely because feminism wanted to build some false utopia, where women could play cowgirl and empowered raunch bitch with no responsibility. In fact, the party lasted a lot shorter than I would have predicted. Maybe this is just a speed-bump on the road to greater skankiness.

The following words can only come out of a culture that is thoroughly Marxist and thoroughly white knight, as, again without meaning to, it shows just how spoiled women are:

As Britain shaves public services and benefits, advocates contend that women bear more than their fair share of the pain.

“The idea that what we should be doing is rolling back the state, it has really important implications for women,” said Professor Sue Himmelweit, an economist and policy coordinator of the Women’s Budget Group, an advocacy group. “Women lose particularly from public sector cuts. First of all, they lose their jobs.”

Women account for two-thirds of employees in the public sector, where the government’s budget monitor says 710,000 jobs are to disappear. They rely more heavily than men on public services and financial assistance and are expected to lose 70 percent of the £18 billion being cut from benefits like housing support and tax credits for the working poor, says the Fawcett Society, a group pushing for greater gender equality.

Because they are poorer and live longer than men, women will be disproportionately affected by reductions in services to the elderly. 

The last bit, whining about women's longer lives, is a Hillary Clinton-type comment ("The greatest sufferers of war are the women because they lose their men.") Rather than looking at the gigantic elephant in the room called Men live fewer years than women, those with an opinion just spin women live longer than men into the old entitlement machine. Women are victims because they live longer than men. Their longer lives entitle them to more money - from men through the state. 

And further up in the block quote, it is noted that women "bear more than their fair share of the pain." Isn't that because women have all along been receiving more than fair ? Isn't it because feminists have used the government to entitle women off of the backs and hard work of men? Isn't it a bit of justice that women should suffer cutbacks? This is the sort of princess thinking that is destroying our society. Daddy always gives me a new car for my birthday. Poor me. This year, I get a miserable new bicycle and a Louis Vuitton. I hate daddy!

But despite all that foot-stomping and temper-tantrumming, the following words from the article really take the cake:

 “I’m not going to be as independent when I’m older,” she said. “It’s almost like we’re going back, women are becoming more dependent on men now.”

Her co-worker Teresa Angeletta, 53, sees progress slipping away.

“It’s like when my mum would wait for my dad — he’d come home with his wages and put them on the table,” she recalled. “She didn’t have money of her own.”

How were these women ever independent? As the cutbacks show, they never were, but had simply changed whom they depended on. Or had they: Weren't these women all these years simply dependent on male taxes? Instead of daddy coming home and laying his wage directly on the kitchen table, the government did it, grabbing money from men. Women still didn't have their own wealth.

Progress slipping away: How was grabbing tax from men to give to entitled princesses ever progress?

Recap: Women in the above article complain that they aren't receiving such a gigantic bigger share from the government than men anymore, but a smaller bigger share. Women complain that they live longer than men so need more gov money. Women complain that they have to stay at home and mother children - like mothers, for God's sake. Women complain that they might have to accept money from a hard-working husband.

Ladies, you ain't independent, and you never were. If this article doesn't prove that, then you're hopeless.

____________________

*This reminds Ex Cathedra of the famous likely NYT headline when the Second Coming happens: World To End Tomorrow. Women And Minorities Hardest Hit.

They call it a classic

because whenever it was written, when you read it, whenever you are, you recognize yourselves.

Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene II 
written in 1599
by Bill S.
Angel and Master
of the English Tongue and Human Soul,
who speaks things both hard dark
and sublime
in sweet craggy rhythms.

Gielgud and Mason

BRUTUS
What means this shouting? I do fear, the people
Choose Caesar for their king.
CASSIUS
Ay, do you fear it?
Then must I think you would not have it so.
BRUTUS
I would not, Cassius; yet I love him well.
But wherefore do you hold me here so long?
What is it that you would impart to me?
If it be aught toward the general good,
Set honour in one eye and death i' the other,
And I will look on both indifferently,
For let the gods so speed me as I love
The name of honour more than I fear death.
CASSIUS
I know that virtue to be in you, Brutus,
As well as I do know your outward favour.
Well, honour is the subject of my story.
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but, for my single self,
I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.
I was born free as Caesar; so were you:
We both have fed as well, and we can both
Endure the winter's cold as well as he:
For once, upon a raw and gusty day,
The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,
Caesar said to me 'Darest thou, Cassius, now
Leap in with me into this angry flood,
And swim to yonder point?' Upon the word,
Accoutred as I was, I plunged in
And bade him follow; so indeed he did.
The torrent roar'd, and we did buffet it
With lusty sinews, throwing it aside
And stemming it with hearts of controversy;
But ere we could arrive the point proposed,
Caesar cried 'Help me, Cassius, or I sink!'
I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor,
Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder
The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber
Did I the tired Caesar. And this man
Is now become a god, and Cassius is
A wretched creature and must bend his body,
If Caesar carelessly but nod on him.
He had a fever when he was in Spain,
And when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake: 'tis true, this god did shake;
His coward lips did from their colour fly,
And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world
Did lose his lustre: I did hear him groan:
Ay, and that tongue of his that bade the Romans
Mark him and write his speeches in their books,
Alas, it cried 'Give me some drink, Titinius,'
As a sick girl. Ye gods, it doth amaze me
A man of such a feeble temper should
So get the start of the majestic world
And bear the palm alone.
Shout. Flourish
BRUTUS
Another general shout!
I do believe that these applauses are
For some new honours that are heap'd on Caesar.
CASSIUS
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that 'Caesar'?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with 'em,
Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Caesar.
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed,
That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was famed with more than with one man?
When could they say till now, that talk'd of Rome,
That her wide walls encompass'd but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.
O, you and I have heard our fathers say,
There was a Brutus once that would have brook'd
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.
BRUTUS
That you do love me, I am nothing jealous;
What you would work me to, I have some aim:
How I have thought of this and of these times,
I shall recount hereafter; for this present,
I would not, so with love I might entreat you,
Be any further moved. What you have said
I will consider; what you have to say
I will with patience hear, and find a time
Both meet to hear and answer such high things.
Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this:
Brutus had rather be a villager
Than to repute himself a son of Rome
Under these hard conditions as this time
Is like to lay upon us.

Happy Hallowe'en

On the Eve of the Feast of All Hallows and the Celtic Night of Samhain: a festival apt for gay men and, I think, for psychotherapists...

In Memory of Sigmund Freud

W. H. Auden 

But he wishes us more than this. To be free

is often to be lonely. He would unite

     the unequal moieties fractured

   by our own well-meaning sense of justice,

would restore to the larger the wit and will 

the smaller possesses but can only use

     for arid disputes, would give back to

   the son the mother's richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all 

to be enthusiastic over the night,

     not only for the sense of wonder

   it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes

its delectable creatures look up and beg

     us dumbly to ask them to follow:

   they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice

if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,

     even to bear our cry of 'Judas', 

   as he did and all must bear who serve it.

"Enlightenment does not consist in imagining figures of light, but in making the darkness conscious." CG Jung

Declining on film

A 2012 light comedy with a strong satiric edge, Gayby.

(I know. Why the hell do I watch these things?)

Reaching 30, two single friends in NY, gay man who works in a comic book store and a straight girl who teaches Bikram yoga, decide to have a baby together. The old fashioned way. Which we get to watch. Several times.

Their facial reactions are pretty much what mine were.

Of course, both of them then meet alluring partners. And other complications, etc. (Didn't Will & Grace play this game?)

The straights are sorta anocranial: self-absorbed artists, New Age stoners, borderline style sisters. The gays, except the lead and his serendipitously discovered crush,

 are all completely predictable cartoon cutout queens: one could be a bitchy Blackadder, the other has a Bear physique with the soul of an off the rack drag queen.  Aside from the updated clothes, they could fit right in with Boys In The Band.

All very multicultural and interracial and chill and groovy. Psych star Dule Hill makes an appearance. Their most judgmental category is "not cool."

Although the Bear Queen does rip down a poster at the LGBTQA* Center which advertises a Republican meeting, making clear that he hates certain people so much that they don't deserve a place even in a big tent community. (The predictability continues).

One thing I notice is that for both the straights (male and female) and the gays (male and femmy) sex is a matter completely without mystery or numinosity or awe. Without either shyness or taboo either in language or in action, it has all the magic of brushing your teeth.

Is this progress?



*They don't know what the A stands for either.

---

Angry GLBTs

The internet and the media are abuzz with angry GLBTs these days. In the USA, we are still going on about Rev. Rick Warren and the incoming President's inauguration invocation.

Now, with the utterly unbiased and unpredictable BBC (insert emoticon for eye-rolling sarcastic smile) leading the way, we hear that the Pope has taken the opportunity of the Christmas season of love and joy --where we should erase all references to Christmas lest we offend minorities, by the way-- to tell us that although saving the rainforests is a good thing, saving mankind from the threat of homos and transgenders is just as important. You can imagine the outrage.

Well, Il Papa did not say that. What he does reject is "gender theory", much beloved not only of gays and transgenders, but feminists, for its assertion that male and female are socially constructed (and oppressive) cultural performances, not expressions of nature, much less the Creator.

I reject it, too, though Benedict XVI and ExCathedra come to different conclusions about some of the consequences.

I am just about out the door and will return to this later, but here's the section of his speech...a long one (10 pages, 3600 words) given to the Curia, which ranged from reflections on World Youth Day to a four-part meditation on the role of the Holy Spirit, part one of which (see below) has to do with the rational structure of a cosmos created by a rational God, an old theme of his.
It was this theme that got the Muslims pissed at him a while ago.

The Italian text is the Vatican website. Here's my translation. And the screwup with the font is what happens when you copy a Word text to Blogger. Sorry.

There is first of all the affirmation that comes to us from the beginning of the story of creation: the creator Spirit who hovers over the waters, creates the world and continually renews it. Faith in the creator Spirit is an essential content of the Christian Credo. The datum that matter bears in itself a mathematical structure, is full of spirit, is the foundation on which stand the modern natural sciences. Only because matter is structured in an intelligent way is our spirit in a position to interpret it and to actively reshape it. The fact that this intelligent structure comes from the very same creator Spirit which has also given spirit to us carries with it both a task and a responsibility. In faith about the creation stands the ultimate foundation of our responsibility toward the earth. The earth is not simply our property to be enjoyed according to our interests and desires. It is rather the gift of the Creator that has designed its intrinsic orderings and with that has given the orientational signals to which we attend as stewards of his creation. The fact that the earth, the cosmos, reflect the creator Spirit means that their rational structures, beyond the mathematical order, become almost palpable in experience and bear within themselves an ethical orientation. The Spirit which has created them is more than mathematical – is the Good in person, which, through the language of creation, indicates to us the right path.



Because faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian Credo, the Church cannot and must not limit herself to transmitting to her faithful only the message of salvation. She has a responsibility for the creature and must assert this responsibility even in public. And in doing this, she must defend not only the earth, the water and the air as gifts of creation belonging to everyone. She must also protect man against his self-destruction. There must be something like an ecology of man, rightly understood. It is not an outmoded metaphysic if the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and women and asks that this order of creation be respected. Here it is a question of the fact of faith in the Creator and listening to the language of creation, dismissal of which would be a self-destruction of man and therefore a destruction of the very work of God. What is often expressed and intended by the term “gender” comes down to a self-emancipation of man from creaturehood and from the Creator. Man desires to make himself by himself and to dispose always and exclusively by himself what concerns him. But in this way he lives against the truth, lives against the creator Spirit. The rainforests deserve, yes, our protection but man deserves it no less, as a creature in which is inscribed a message which does not mean the contradiction of our freedom, but its condition. The great theologians of the Scholastic age have considered marriage, the lifelong bond between man and woman, as a sacrament of the creation, which the Creator himself instituted and which Christ –without modifying the message of creation—has then gathered into the history of his alliance with men. It is a part of the proclamation to which the Church must bear witness in favor of the creator Spirit present in nature in its ensemble and in a special way in the nature of man, created in the image of God. From this perspective, one ought to re-read the encyclical Humanae Vitae: the intention of Pope Paul VI was to defend love against sex-as-consumption, the future against exclusive claim of the present and the nature of man against its manipulation.

So. Did Bennie Sixteen target homos and transgenders? Or did he make a general statement to the effect that things have a nature and a structure, reflecting the rational structure of a Creator who is not sheer Will but Logos, ordered meaning? And would departing from the structured nature of the human being in matters of gender not include also contraception, divorce, etc. as well as homosexual acts? Agree with him or not, he was hardly taking a swipe at a particular group to the exclusion of others, but, as he often does, discussing an idea which is dear to a group.
In the interests of full disclosure, as Cardinal Ratzinger, the Pope did some writing which had a big influence on my life a couple of decades ago and not a pleasant one. I had some very unfriendly things to say about his ideas and I said them publicly. But first I read the damn stuff, the whole text!
Journalists are, as a class, scum. Robert Kaplan considers them the Inquisition of the modern world. The spin on this speech reminds me of times when a news anchor tells you that after the commercial we will see so and so respond with rage to an allegation that such and such. When the film plays, we see so and so mildly unappreciative. MSM largely lie and tell you what you are supposed to be seeing and hearing when in fact it may not be so at all. I worked in a very media-intense field for several years and was often interviewed for TV, etc. I know how this goes. And the BBC? Please.

Re: LGBTQI, etc. outrage here...it's as if every time the Pope said the Creed, Jews exploded in wrath that he implied that their religion is wrong.

Foot-stamping adolescents.
________________________________

Indecent exposure

One of the Alt-Right sites I read and whose podcasts I listen to engages in constant verbal transgression, using every conceivable term that our masters have taught us are not only unsayable but unthinkable.

Decent people would find the language deeply offensive or, condescendingly, adolescent. But decent people, I have come to suspect, are prisoners of their enemies, having been lured into thinking that their decency has any value at all for those who hold them in contempt.

Part of the above lingo is what decent people would call rank homophobia. But I don't blame these guys. They are young (30s+), White, straight, Gentile males. And they quite accurately realize that they are being screwed. And that the so-called "LGBT community" is one phalanx in the army raised against them.

Although pretty well every therapist I know is a garden-variety San Francisco liberal, including the Jungian analysts who imagined themselves possessors of some kind of superior insight, it is my role as a psychotherapist that has played a part in my migration to the far Right.

When I work with people, I look for the throw-away line or the Completely Avoided Subject, etc as clues to what powers might be alive in the room but hidden. Including the parts that the Waking Ego would dismiss as "crazy." These marginalized or denied images and voices often carry truths that the Waking Ego cannot bear but may --and the word is may-- need to recognize and listen to.

That's part of how I started paying attention to the "Right-wing crazies," as possible messengers of the culture's soul. And discovered that they have a lot of denied and repressed reality to show.

As I have done before in my analyses of the Seven Headed Hydra or the Seven Spoked Wheel or the Seven Pillared Temple of our masters' now hegemonic religion, I tried to find the complex, the emotion-driven image, hiding inside the discourse. And here's what I discovered:

At the heart of the multicultural fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of the White race. 

At the heart of the genderist fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of White men, especially heterosexual men.

At the heart of the redistributionist fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of economically successful Whites. 

At the heart of the pacifist fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of White male physical power 

At the heart of the globalist fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of the White nation-state. 

At the heart of the secularist fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of the White religion of Christianity 

At the heart of the environmentalist fantasy is envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of the White consumer.

I have never before explicitly included the racial element in all the seven points, but it has become clearer to me that this qualifier is accurate. Reb Benjamin Disraeli said that, "All is race. There is no other truth." All the exceptions that the Left makes in each of these areas --hating the One Percent except for Hollywood, HipHop and Sports-- shows how central to the whole business is anti-White and especially anti-White Male hatred. As long as they are not allied to conservatism, People of Color are almost universally exempted from the excoriations of the SJW's and their leaders.

If you accept the very wise taxonomy of Samuel Huntington about the spectrum of group relations ranging from friends to allies to competitors to antagonists to enemies, you can see that if you are a
White male, the new religion is your enemy, that is, seeks your destruction.

And if that's the case, then the pretense of decency and the requirement of  "civil discourse" is simply mystification. Although Marx used the term from his perspective, it is now the "decent" people who are its victims. To paraphrase RD Laing's version,

mystification is a plausible misrepresentation of an activity or a goal, in the service of the interests of one group over/against another group . By representing forms of attack as forms of benevolence, the attackers bemuse the attacked into feeling at one with their attackers, or even into feeling gratitude for their attack, and lulled into feeling bad or mad even to think of rebellion."

When your existence is under threat from a group and a religion fueled by envy, resentment and ultimately murderous hatred of you, all mystified as a quest for a cosmic justice which you, as a decent person, should support, what is your option?

The very bad and mad language of these younger White males is a necessary response to their Blue Pill entrancement, an assertion of Red Pill awakening to the murderous Matrix in which they now find themselves.

-----

Juris prudence

HT to The Volokh Conspiracy.

Had I been of a different disposition, constitutional law might have been an alternate career.


CALIFORNIA CODES
CIVIL CODE
SECTION 3509-3548




3509. The maxims of jurisprudence hereinafter set forth are
intended not to qualify any of the foregoing provisions of this Code,
but to aid in their just application.



3510. When the reason of a rule ceases, so should the rule itself.



3511. Where the reason is the same, the rule should be the same.



3512. One must not change his purpose to the injury of another.



3513. Any one may waive the advantage of a law intended solely for
his benefit. But a law established for a public reason cannot be
contravened by a private agreement.



3514. One must so use his own rights as not to infringe upon the
rights of another.



3515. He who consents to an act is not wronged by it.



3516. Acquiescence in error takes away the right of objecting to
it.


3517. No one can take advantage of his own wrong.



3518. He who has fraudulently dispossessed himself of a thing may
be treated as if he still had possession.



3519. He who can and does not forbid that which is done on his
behalf, is deemed to have bidden it.



3520. No one should suffer by the act of another.



3521. He who takes the benefit must bear the burden.



3522. One who grants a thing is presumed to grant also whatever is
essential to its use.



3523. For every wrong there is a remedy.



3524. Between those who are equally in the right, or equally in the
wrong, the law does not interpose.



3525. Between rights otherwise equal, the earliest is preferred.



3526. No man is responsible for that which no man can control.



3527. The law helps the vigilant, before those who sleep on their
rights.


3528. The law respects form less than substance.



3529. That which ought to have been done is to be regarded as done,
in favor of him to whom, and against him from whom, performance is
due.


3530. That which does not appear to exist is to be regarded as if
it did not exist.



3531. The law never requires impossibilities.



3532. The law neither does nor requires idle acts.



3533. The law disregards trifles.



3534. Particular expressions qualify those which are general.



3535. Contemporaneous exposition is in general the best.



3536. The greater contains the less.



3537. Superfluity does not vitiate.



3538. That is certain which can be made certain.



3539. Time does not confirm a void act.



3540. The incident follows the principal, and not the principal the
incident.


3541. An interpretation which gives effect is preferred to one
which makes void.



3542. Interpretation must be reasonable.



3543. Where one of two innocent persons must suffer by the act of a
third, he, by whose negligence it happened, must be the sufferer.



3545. Private transactions are fair and regular.



3546. Things happen according to the ordinary course of nature and
the ordinary habits of life.



3547. A thing continues to exist as long as is usual with things of
that nature.



3548. The law has been obeyed.

Scattershots

Oops, by writing scattershots, am I promoting a culture of gun violence? Heaven forefend.

This week, Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day are right next to each other. Meaningful coincidence?

An over-80 year old priest I know is asking to be laicized so he can marry his almost as old ladyfriend.

I often find my own character a cross to bear. It is, in fact, my principal cross. Nothing causes me as much chronic and serious grief as myself. As Pogo said, We have met the enemy and he is us.

An old friend who was in religious community with me reminded me of the usual solution given by the old Father Master to novices who came to him with problems or complaints: Go look in the mirror, Brother. And when you're done, go look again.

Have you noticed that the MSM often refer to a person, group or position as "rightwing" or "far-right" but almost never as "leftwing" or "far-left?" The children of Marcuse.

What I have to eat and drink during a day can vary quite a lot, but having a good big shot of coffee first thing in the morning is not very negotiable. My own blend from the $7 a pound store down the street is half Espresso and half French Roast. Boom. The hot, steaming, bitter-sweet syrupy nectar of daybreak. (I even bring it with me when I travel.) And I hardly ever drink coffee all day after that.

B was talking about the sensational violence in San Francisco when he was young: the Patty Hearst thing, the Zodiac killer, the (hidden away and not mentioned Black on White) Zebra murders. I can remember the assassinations of both Kennedys and of Martin Luther King, the riots, etc. and all the Vietnam-related stuff. But I was young and somehow these things did not portend The End to me. Although I do know young men who are declinists --some more vehement than I-- it doesn't seem far-fetched to link age with perception.

Because, when you are 20, you can't imagine your own end, it's hard to imagine your world's end. As you approach your sell-by date, it's easier.

One effing impressive guy...and he's a Brit!

Check him out: 43-year-old Bear Grylls,
of Discovery Channel's Man vs.Wild.
Damned impressive.

A mess of pottage

Oliver Stone is Jewish (I did not know that) and his wife is Christian. Their adult son, while making a documentary on Rumi in Iran, converted to Islam. But said that this does not mean he is abandoning Judaism and Christianity...

Huh?

Well, to begin with, kid, you can't practice Judaism and Christianity. My guess is that he was raised in a kind of amorphous soup, not unlike his father's movies.

But it is typical Muslim BS that since the Koran lists both Moses and Jesus as true prophets, Muslims who convert --or, in their self-serving lingo, revert-- still remain true to them. Except that the Moses and the Jesus of the Koran --the Jesus especially-- bear little resemblance to the men revered by Jews and Christians, respectively. The Koran expressly, clearly, loudly, emphatically and repeatedly denies the divinity of Christ, for starters. Reminds me of that stupid women who wanted to be a Muslim and an Episcopal priest at the same time.

I am sure Mr and Mrs Stone will be supportive of their Ahmahdinejad-supporting son. Why the hell not?

Bear Grylls pees

I started my "effing impressive guys" posts with him in April. Watching him again now dealing with winter in the Scottish highlands. To keep warm at night, he skinned the stinking carcass of a several-days dead deer to sleep inside the smelly skin, and peed into his water bottle to keep himself warm! Now he's fallen half naked into a cold fetig bog swamp after drinking water out of moss. Physical courage to spare. He is such a guy.

Looking forward

It appears as though the mid-term elections will greatly reduce the Democrats' power. That is pleasing.

And to the extent that it is a smack to our post-American President, The One, even more pleasing. (Never liked him; can't bear him now.)

But whether the Republicans --both Tea Partiers and traditionals-- will be able to seize the moment...that is another matter entirely. I wonder if, at this point in our history, Washington has become like old Rome, swallowing up in corruption anyone who shows up, even, or especially, to reform it.

Mark Twain wrote that even after a century of national independence, America had yet to develop a truly indigenous criminal class...as long as you excepted Congress.

When people in my ultraliberal San Francisco world discover that I am not one of them, they sometimes gasp in horror, "You mean, you're a Republican?"  "No," I assure them, "Republicans are pussies. Way too liberal for me."

The exchange usually ends right there.

ExC on Roger Scruton on James Burnham

From Scruton's Civilizational Suicide: the 12-step program (2008)

“Suicide,” as the political philosopher James Burnham observed in his book Suicide of the West, “is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.” And civilizational suicide, as Burnham knew, can take many forms and is always a more or less protracted affair. What Burnham warned about, and what we are still conjuring with, is the seductive toxin of unanchored liberalism.  

Burnham subtitled his book “The Definitive Analysis of the Pathology of Liberalism.” At the center of that pathology is an awful failure of understanding which is also a failure of nerve, a failure of “the will to survive.” 

Liberalism, Burnham concludes, is “an ideology of suicide.” He admits that such a description may sound hyperbolic. ” ‘Suicide,’ it is objected, is too emotive a term, too negative and ‘bad.’ ” But it is part of the pathology that Burnham describes that such objections are “most often made most hotly by Westerners who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down. 

It is time–far past time–that we get back to the task of building it back up. The first steps in that process are 1) jettisoning the rancid, self-hating pieties of multiculturalism and 2) recognizing and celebrating what is valuable in our own civilization.

What Mr Scruton and other conservatives cannot allow themselves to say --if they even know it anymore-- is that civilization is rooted in culture and culture is rooted in a people. Not everyone, but a people. Which requires definition. And definition, by definition, includes exclusion. This, and not that.

Which, of course, means race and nation.

One of the central "rancid, self-hating pieties of multiculturalism" is that Western Civilization can be claimed and continued by non-Westerners, that is, people not descended from Europeans. The outcome of this is Nancy Pelosi's claim that the more non-Americans America is filled with, the more American it is.

And a big part of the multicultural lie must be laid at our own doorstep. Since the Enlightenment at least, our claim to fame has not only been that our civilization is better than everyone else's but that its superiority rests precisely on its being the true civilization of all humanity. That universalism, once a source of pride, is now the door to our destruction. Cause that means our White Western civilization is really everybody's property.

Except ours.

The bizarre state we have come to is this: for ExCathedra to claim that White Western Civilization is the property and patrimony of White Westerners --and therefore not of anyone else-- is considered to be the deepest sin imaginable. We are required to bear the guilty for all of Western Civilization's sins --if in fact, sins they be--but dare not claim its glories for our own.

When I first saw the phrase, Liberalism is a mental disorder, I thought it was wildly exaggerated.

No more.


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At home with Holmes

Jeremy Brett does his usual wonderful Sherlock Holmes in "The Devil's Foot."

In rural Cornwall, a greedy sibling poisons his brothers to madness and his sister to death, thus killing the great love of one Dr. Sterndale's life. By the end of the story, we discover that the Doc engages in private justice and takes the life of the murderer. When he offers himself up to Holmes for remanding to the authorities, Holmes sends Sterndale off to continue his scientific work in Africa. Watson puts up a token resistance but both agree that, in similar circumstances, they would do the same thing and that justice had been served, even if not through the usual channels.

Sounds good to me.

The Victorians certainly had vast numbers of restrictive rules that bound them. But we imagine that because our rules don't focus on the same issues, we enlightened and liberated types have fewer of them. I'm not at all sure. Do you know what can happen to you in the freewheeling city of San Francisco if you light up a cigar in Golden Gate Park or fail to give the garbageman three separate bags for compost, recyclables and trash? Ever try to exercise your Second Amendment right to bear arms or get the local police to deal with illegal immigrants or refer to a designated minority group as "you people"? All societies are rule-bound, but where the rules predominate makes a big difference.

It's the very rare TV drama in our time that would countenance the private justice of a hero like Holmes. One of the side effects of the rain of police and lawyer shows we have watched for a couple of generations is that we feel the need to involve official organs of justice to a far greater degree than the Victorians did. Besides, we are virtually weaponless. A rogue vigilante in the Death Wish films can give us some guilty pleasures. And an ordinary man deprived of peace can sometimes cross the public/private line, as in 2001's In The Bedroom or, to a lesser degree, in Urbania (2000). But a regular trope in our legal dramas is that that private avenger kills the wrong man, or woman. It is the rule of the law in its official form which dominates almost universally. Even the vilest of criminals need to be processed in the legal system.

And if, after 25 years on death row, a murderer is finally executed, as recently in Utah, we have to listen to the deep regrets of bleeding hearts over his bleeding heart, including a morally superior lecture from...The European Union.

But Arthur Conan Doyle's Victorian world, where nannies took care of children and were not the ubiquitous functionaries of a post-feminist health-and-safety state who make men into them, understood that sometimes justice served privately by good men is still justice served and suffices. If I had to choose whether to rely on the sense of justice of the bureaucrats in Brussels or the sleuth from Baker Street, it'd be a no-brainer.

Sometimes people do things which deprive them of their right to breathe among us. It's not a question of deterance or rehabilitation or restoration. It's just desserts. Our ancestors, who lived in far rougher and more uncertain times than we do, were sometimes too quick to strike. We, on the other hand, sin by excess of opposition, to the point where what looks like morality is actually cowardly nihilism.

No shit, Sherlock!

Patriarchy at play

The ordination of a male priest to the male office of Catholic bishop of Churchill-Hudson Bay, in Nunavut, Canada.

The other alphabet is Inuit, based on Cree, which was constructed by the missionaries. 

Handsome script, almost extra-terrestrial.

His Grace, prostrate on a polar bear skin rug.

I wonder if he was required to hunt it down himself to prove his worthiness for office?

No spokespersons for either PETA or the RomanCatholicWomenPriests were available.

--

Plus, a deer-hunting nun.

Out of his field, again

Pope Francis Doesn't Really Understand This Economics Thing, Does He?:

He also doesn't understand this theology thing, either. An Orthodox blogger who agrees with my assessment of Francis' IQ:  "The man is a good-hearted moron, and I mean that in a completely non-malicious way. He is a sentimental, gushing huggy-bear and would make a great parish priest, but is in well over his head as Patriarch of an autocephalous Church."

Yet another example.

And a very bright, widely and deeply read, and orthodox Latin Catholic priest commented on Papa Bergoglio's latest stunt of suddenly asking the Patriarch of Constantinople to bless him "and the Church of Rome" leading to this:

The reverend father opines that  "the Patriarch's action of smiling and kissing the Pope's skull cap looked for all the world like the kindly, indulgent gesture of a wise parent whose impetuously unrealistic child had suddenly asked for a space-rocket in which to go to Pluto and back before nursery school tomorrow morning."



'via Blog this'

Nature's diversity

was entirely geological, botanical and zoological in the eastern Sierras on my 5-day recent trip there. The human element was extremely un-"diverse".

In the Owens Valley, Mono and Inyo counties, I saw two Black people. Everyone else around June Lake (elev 7600ft, pop 629) was White.

In the forested lake country north of Tahoe, I saw one Chinese family, from Canada; one mixed race woman, one Asian man, and aside from a Zimmerman-like "White Hispanic" bartender, the only Latinos were the cleaning women at the place we stayed. Otherwise, complete Caucasianity. And this coming weekend there's a Tea Party gathering in Graeagle (elev 4500 ft, pop 731), where we stayed.

Lotsa families, mom and dad and kids, and male/female couples.

Oh, and two young gay guys, White, in Sierra City, while I was chatting with the road crew lady, Pamela, holding the Stop sign, about how a bear tried to break into her house the night before but she run him off with her gun and her dogs...


My impression: diversity makes people anxious, likeness makes them relaxed.

Fathers and Son

How a Father and Son Learned to Forgive |

One of the issues the frequently arises in my counseling work is tension between sons and fathers. I certainly had to work through a lot of my "stuff" with my own Dad. And the result of that work has made me sorta bulldoggish about it with my male clients. The most gratifying story involving this problem begins with a gay man announcing that, when his father died, he would not attend the funeral, to a recent toss-off comment from the same guy about how much he and his dad were alike and, despite their differences, how much he admires him.

Not every father-son relationship ends so warmly, to be sure. The story above is about working to repair a broken bond, one that was destroyed by the father's narcissism. Crucially, the father was willing to tell the truth. Sam Keen --whom I once read admiringly--is not alone in exemplifying the soul-wounding split between public persona and home life. How many famous philosophers or other gurus have lived family and private lives in radical contradiction to how an admiring world sees them? In my own twenty years of communal religious life, the gap between Father Wonderful out in the parish and Brother Asshole at home was not at all uncommmon. My favorite example, for ignoble reasons of Schadenfreude, is Alice Walker, an adored paradigm of Northern California cool: BlackFemaleSurvivorBuddhistFeministEtc. In home life, a cold-hearted bitch.

I suffer the same split, I confess. The bloodthirsty ExC, Destroyer of Progress, is actually, to those who know him, a mild-mannered fella who loves a good meal and a good laugh and who never goes out of his way to wound anyone.

I was struck by the article because of my family's current tensions in the wake of my mother's death. My siblings are painfully stuck in conflictual patterns from which some of them cannot imagine ever escaping. It's a particular feature of family battles that they take on a quality of eternity, as if what is happening now is all that will ever be happening.

Sometimes that's true. There were breaches in my parents' families that never healed. But sometimes it's not. In at least one case, after a long time, --50 years!--they were able to re-connect and find a lot of pleasure and comfort together before they both died.

There are guys, even gay guys, whose relationship with Dad is a good one, even a terrific one. Blessed are they! And there are guys for whom Dad is a source of frustration or worse. In my professional life, even when the work did not complete the course, I never found it a waste of time to explore the realities of men's lives, especially the fundamental and often fractious archetype of sons and fathers.

My own Dad --who was not my birth-father but the father who actually raised me-- was a very different guy from me. It took me a long time to finally see him whole, as it were, less clouded by my personality and my expectations. I have been lucky enough to recognize that I was raised by a thoroughly honorable man, a much better man, in truth, than I am. I could not always see that.

In fact, just the other day, it dawned on me that one of the verbal habits he had which used to annoy me was in fact a constant affirmation of his marking me, another man's child by blood, as his own. I am ashamed that even now I just figured it out.

Some men are indeed bad fathers, bad men. Some out of weakness, some out of cruelty. My bulldog attitude, that men need --eventually-- to work on that connection is not a requirement that everything turn out rosily. Men can, for instance, abandon their sons and wives out of base motives. And lacking eventual repentance, I find it hard to understand why a son would not bear a lifelong grudge. But in the work I do, my interest there would be in how the bearing of that justifiable grudge finally affected the life of the bearer.

I am a believer in tactical forgiveness, of letting painful anger go when it has served its purpose and now only eats away at the bearer's future, effectively making him a prisoner of the man he vilifies. That is not something that can be managed and manipulated by ego or ideal so easily. Sometimes we have to walk with it until its time.

And while I'm at it, let me say that the Church, mater et magistra, is a lousy teacher. Telling people to forgive --one of the most emotionally challenging things a human can ever do-- without helping them through the process, being wise and spending patient energy on it...well, it kinda lets you know that they're not really all that serious about it.

Reconciliation does not mean making believe that history never happened, or that failures were not failures, but creating a new connection that takes all that into account yet does not let the burden of a painful past dominate and stunt everything new.

If a man can do that --when it's time-- he will not regret it.


--

'via Blog this'

What gives you the right?

One of the changes in the last five decades is that we are inundated with the language of rights, civil rights and human rights. Rights have gone viral. And, IMHO, haywire.

One of my thoughtful commentors recently asked me about where rights come from. I am afraid that's a bit above my pay grade. I know enough to know that it is not a simply answered question. It requires elucidating views about human nature, human communities, history, the world and God.

On the homepage of the Dominican Order, its justice-and-peace devotees have articles up like this one: Brazilian street orphans and education: a human rights perspective. Without reading beyond the headline, you know that they will argue for a rights-based duty on the part of the Brazilian state to provide education for these kids. For most of the folks who speak the lingo of human rights, anything they think a person needs becomes a positive right. In America, we are now asked to believe that free health care is a human and civil right. (And that balking at "free" aka paid-for-by-someone-else contraception amounts to a "war on women") Where does it stop? Jefferson's deeply ambiguous phrase about a right to pursuit of happiness is now heard as a right to happiness itself.

With a HT to Canuckistan curmudgeoness-in-training Kathy Shaidle, a critique of the "human rights" regime and industry in far-advanced Europe by Luke Samuel:

But there is a more fundamental reason that liberals should be sceptical of human-rights law: because it makes us all less free. Human rights are not ‘rights’ in a liberal sense at all. They bear no resemblance to the ‘rights’ fought for by the radical liberals of the English Civil War, or the French and American revolutions, which sought to limit the power of the state and protect the autonomy of citizens. Instead, human rights treat people as fundamentally vulnerable and in need of state protection. This view of human vulnerability, in the eyes of the human-rights lobby, justifies the granting of absolute power to the state to set the boundaries of freedom.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg recently advised the remorphing Egyptian State not to use the old and limiting US Constitution as a model for their new make-believe democracy.  Her suggested models were the new-fangled and much more high-minded versions found in Canada and South Africa. She was right, but for the wrong reasons.

Since she was part of the Kelo decision, it probably does not bother her that the shiny Trudeaupian Charter of Rights and Freedoms lacks any recognition of the right to property. Or that no matter what kind of armchair glories the South African paper might describe, it does nothing to prevent world-class rates of robbery, rape and race-revenge murder*, to say nothing of the tribalism and corruption endemic to Third World countries (which Black "Truth-and-Reconciliation" South Africa now is). Anyway, we all know how respectful Arab Muslim states are when it comes to constitutional fidelity, so Ginsberg's advice is just pissing in the wind...(can females do that?)

*More White farmers have been slaughtered by Blacks there since St Nelson Mandela's ANC victory in 1994 than all the Blacks lynched in the US since the Civil War.

My point is that the American Constitution, while a product of both the English Protestant temper and the (AngloScottish) Enlightenment, was uniquely adapted to the peoples it was designed for: the Original Thirteen States. It stood on massive cultural, social, philosophical, economic and religious assumptions and on very particular political grounds. It was not the French Revolution's grandiose Declaration of the Rights of Man (parent, of course, to the UN's verbose paper frauds). Most of it was designed to create a limited government, a structure of purposeful inefficiency which would attempt to thwart or at least to slow the natural drift of any State toward tyranny. The Bill of Rights was a set of  amendments.

What strikes me more and more is that while democracy and human rights and dignity is touted around the globe as the unquestioned currency of civilized discourse, even by the Roman Catholic Church, it is as strange to human nature as it is rare in history. It is an opus contra naturam, requiring the skill, dedication and discipline of an alchemist searching for the gold hidden in the lead.

Mr Samuel puts his finger on the root difference between the once-robust and now fading-into-history American sense of rights and the Eurotopian version: ours assumed that the what people most needed was protection from the State. On the Old Continent --and its backwash here-- it's protection by the State.

A world of difference.

And as our demographics become more and more disconnected from the culture that gave birth to us, it is likely that, regardless of what the Dead White Men's document says, the collectivism deep in the human psyche will triumph. To say that we are a Creedal Nation, not an Ethnic one, is as much a deception as imagining that either Nature or Nurture have power unconnected to the other.

The group most likely to carry on the American tradition of rights, as opposed to the European, is the group most like the one that created it: White Christian Males. And that group is like the duck in Peter and the Wolf. The groups who naturally fall into the arms of the Statists, shown clearly by their voting patterns, are urbanites, women, Blacks and Hispanics, gays, Jews and Catholics. And we all know how much more White and rural the country is becoming.