"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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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!

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"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."




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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: 

.......

Yugoslavian Alphabet Stew

I have likened the LGBT thingy to a sexual Yugoslavia, the artificial encompassing within a single polity of groups that don't belong together.

Now I just read about a UnitarianUniversalist service --wouldntcha know-- for people, sorry, "folks" who are "TBLGQI".

At first I thought this was a lost South American tribe, so poor and underdeveloped that they can only afford one vowel per word, no matter how long it is.

But no, alas, it stands for

Transgender Bisexual Lesbian Gay Questioning Intersex.

Notice who gets star billing. It's the usual reflex, to take the smallest minority and make them the headliners. Transgenders are .003% --three-one-thousandths -- of the US population.

Silly.

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Good advice

to apply to most contemporary "dialogue", "opinion" and "discussion" on "values."

"...to realize that the question does not matter

is the first step towards answering it correctly."

GK Chesterton
A Short History of England
1917


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La trahison des clercs

As with every single reform movement of the 1960's, it metasticized. Every good idea of those days has become a deformed exaggeration of itself.

Let the Church Be a House of Wonder - Crisis Magazine:

"Only academics can think themselves into pretending to like verse without music, music without harmony, painting without skies or flowers or animals or people. Intellectuals are the original smashers of images. It was not quarry workers who demanded that their communion rails be knocked out with sledge hammers. It was not little children who pleaded with their pastors to cover paintings with whitewash. It was not housewives who demanded that the high altars with all their draperies and candelabra be replaced with tables so bare and spare that they would not do for an ordinary kitchen."

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Minority privilege

Guess who gets to keep their holiday intact and whose gets reduced to a non-offensive inclusive generic that requires the erasure of its real name?

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Race has nothing to do with it!

This sacred slogan of all queens of denial has to contend, among tons of other evidence, with this:

(Even in California and New York!)

and this*:

*2012 results were not significantly different. See original, plus much more here, including a gender breakdown. (Spoiler: women of all conditions voted for O by the same large margins that men of all conditions voted for Romney.)





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Deformed offspring

Spain church criticized over Cordoba monument name - Yahoo News:

You can spend your blood and treasure for 800 years to drive the African Mohammedans out of Europe, but centuries later your "evolved" descendants will be looking to stab you in the back.



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Monday Morning Miscellany

On our grey and wet, and mildly chilly, December mornings, the pleasures of life include a hot cup of strong coffee --in my trusty old thermal Starbucks mug-- and a nice chunk of panettone from Dianda's bakery in the Mission, courtesy of Mr B.

My old friend C, mon frère ainé, died on the weekend. Infirm for the last several years, it was a chromosomally-originating blood disorder which carried him off.  Blessedly, and despite my own recent negligence, I got to visit with him in Toronto while I was back East for Thanksgiving, and to say goodbye to a 37-year connection. He was a very good-hearted and very complicated man whose life was full of painful contradictions. And the best of cooks. I feel sad for the loss of him, and sad for his partner of almost 40 years, who tended to him faithfully to the very end and who must now face life without him.

Pie Jesu, dona ei requiem.

I have always liked Advent. It's the introvert's season. And without the obsessive moralizing of Lent.

Mr B and I had our eighth (!) annual Santa Lucia dinner at his house on Saturday. The feast of that saint was the first time he invited me to his home for a meal, back in 2007, a few months after we first met. I remember it very well. This year the festivities included a rack of lamb (my contribution) and roast Dungeness crab (his). Yum.

How can anyone be a vegetarian?

Everyone has a dominant fault. At least one. The one of mine that I find the most irksome is procrastination, a variant of sloth. But if I could boutique my next lifetime (just imagining, not asserting at all), what other fault would I choose to dominate it instead? The seven capital sins are pride, rage, sloth, gluttony, greed, lust and envy. What a cheery set of choices.

I think I'll get back to my panettone.

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Pathological altruism,continued

Australia hostage siege: Muslim leaders condemn 'criminal' act as IllRideWithYou trends worldwide - Australasia - World - The Independent:

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Hmmm

Salty old Aussie broad Colleen McCullough, authoress of The Thorn Birds, opines:

"There are two types of writers: there are those who write because they can't talk. Those who talk so much no one listens any more, so they write. No prizes for guessing which I am,"

Ditto.


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Suicidal Sons

Sons of Anarchy spoilers here.







As with Breaking Bad, I wound up only watching the final few episodes. Do I have a thing for endings?

Superficial comment.

Charlie Hunnam as Jax is hot stuff. Young Viking redivivus. He certainly kept my attention in all his scenes. I remarked to Mr B, who is not one to look for homoerotic subtexts, that all these hypermasculine criminal Samcro members seemed to be in love with him. "Sure," he said.  So if he saw it...

And who can blame them?

Less superficial comments.

Charlie Hunnam is a Brit. Once again, the US goes out of country to find an actor who can be both a leading man and believably lethally masculine.

Jack Donovan's brilliant distinction between being a good man and being good at being a man is played out in this character. Not a good man, he is yet definitely a man, an alpha male, with an abundance of strength, courage, skill and a code of honor. In my own terms, he is father, fighter, feeder and friend. Other men are happy to submit to follow him. And if Mr B and I are right, to fall in love with him.

The romance between Tig and Venus, a gang member falling for an MTF transexual with breasts and a penis, is unbelievable, even if the acting is top notch. That a group like Samcro would tolerate such a thing beggars belief. The liberal moralizing narrative at work, even among criminals.

And along with Jax's Christlike atoning suicide at the end of the show, we have his, again, unbelievable, decision to integrate the Sons and bring on their first Black member. The liberal combo of guilt and noblesse oblige infects the story. But hey, suicide is what liberalism is all about. Since the last 50 years have taught us what a spectacular success integration is, I guess he decided to take down the whole organization with him when he killed himself.

Even murderous criminals get to be redemptively PC.

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Jews and Whiteness

Ashkenazi Jews are not white – Response to Haaretz article | Hila Hershkoviz | The Blogs | The Times of Israel:

Ms Hershkoviz makes a good point. She's not White and doesn't wanna be. No how.

But context is also real.

If the Jewish homeland is in western Asia, they are not really White, ie, with a homeland in Europe.
But in a race riot, as I have said, both me and Harry Schwartz --and Ms Hershoviz--would be honkeys.



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The biology of feminism

How Women Avoid Consequences | Chateau Heartiste:

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