Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Keeping the holiday

Conservative traditionalist that I am, on deck for Halloween this evening is that bulwark of Western Civ, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.




True to my habit of differentiating individuals from groups,
I have to say that Tim Curry/Frankenfurter is my favorite
sweet transvestite from Transylvania.

Michael Rennie was ill the day the earth stood still
But he told us where we stand
And Flash Gordon was there in silver underwear
Claude Raines was the invisible man
Then something went wrong for Fay Wray and King Kong
They got caught in a celluloid jam
Then at a deadly pace it came from outer space
And this is how the message ran:

Science Fiction - Double Feature
Dr. X will build a creature
See androids fighting Brad and Janet
Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet
Oh-oh at the late night, double feature, picture show.

I knew Leo G. Carroll was over a barrel
When Tarantula took to the hills
And I really got hot when I saw Janet Scott
Fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills
Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes
And passing them used lots of skills
But when worlds collide, said George Pal to his bride
I'm gonna give you some terrible thrills, like a:

Science Fiction - Double Feature
Dr. X will build a creature
See androids fighting Brad and Janet
Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet
Oh-oh at the late night, double feature, picture show.
I wanna go, oh-oh, to the late night double feature picture show.
By RKO, oh-oh, at the late night double feature picture show.
In the back row at the late night double feature picture show.

Murphy Brown, continued

The single most powerful predictor of a dysfunctional life is unwed motherhood. Now fully 40% of babies born in American have unmarried mothers.

The 2010 breakdown by race, based on the CDC data:
  • Births to Black women: 72% unwed
  • Births to AmerIndian women: 66% unwed
  • Births to Hispanic women: 53% unwed
  • Births to White women: 29% unwed
  • Births to Asian women: 17% unwed

And even though, in aggregate, over half of these women have live-in partners at the time of birth, research shows that while they and their kids do better than children of women without partners, the children of unmarried partners fare significantly worse than the children of marriage.

So the next time someone says, "What harm could it do?", remember this.

Dan Quayle was right.


---

Adventures in The Liberal Mind

The contemporary Liberal Mind is much influenced by post-modernism, which takes a highly skeptical attitude toward "truth", except, of course, the truth of post-modernism.

In this Lib PoMo mindset, one of the phenomena that creates skepticism about truth is the existence of competing teachings. For example, why should Christianity have a claim to truth, when the majority of humans subscribe to other religions? Or why should Western civilization, dominated by White Males, claim superiority over all the other cultures of the world?

Etc.

Part of the weakness of this attitude, according to ExC, is that it take the mere existence of an alternative claim as sufficient reason to jettison an actual investigation into competing claims.

What never seems to come up for consideration is the question of why PoMo Liberalism should be the lens through which we view the world, since there are so many other viewpoints that assert quite different visions?*

Like most skepticisms, it is not at all skeptical about itself.
--


*Stephen Hicks has pointed out the oddity and regularity with which this skeptical attitude toward metaphysical truth is combined with a dogmatic passion for leftist politics. The very same people who found George Bush's "axis of evil" notion eye-rollingly primitive and unnuanced...after all, who's to say what "evil" is? One man's freedom fighter, etc...are utterly clear that White racism is the most evil force in history. End of story. 

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Trick or Treat



I prefer short hair on man. Mostly. And even though Treat Williams looked pretty fine in the upper left corner but he is a fella whose thick mop really suits him. It's almost a character by itself.




He might have been a bigger star if his voice were different. The Tom Selleck syndrome, where the  face and frame don't match the sound.

Monday, October 29, 2012

More on "hate"

The rise of hate in the age of Obama...

The basic assumption of all these bien-pensants who are "troubled" by the existence of unfriendly feelings about Certain Minority Groups must be this:

There can be no grounds, aside from evil and  irrational bigotry, for anyone to hold less than positive attitudes toward Certain Minority Groups.
What planet do these people live on?

It is taken for granted that if members of Certain Minority Groups have mixed or negative feelings about a Certain Historical But Diminishing Majority Group, this is only natural and understandable. But those who are "troubled" never ask why these attitudes and feelings exist.

Liberals treat race the way Victorians treated sex.



'via Blog this'

Panta rhei

The future is always unimaginable.

So? Even Yogi Berra knew that.

Worlds come together and then fall apart, succeeded by new ones, but the cycle continues.

As Lao Tzu knew, Heaven cares not for the ten thousand things; they are straw dogs.


Champs again


--

Who's the whore?


A British retelling of the times of Charles I, the Civil War and the regime of Oliver Cromwell, all through the story of Angelica Fanshaw, "a true account of her life and times."

Well.....no. According to an English history expert on the period, not at all.

A work of propaganda, feminist, anti-religious, class-war-ish, with a heroine as misguided as she is headstrong. But with the always watchable Dominic West as the Lord Protector. So it was not entire loss.




'via Blog this'

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Minorities with minorities

A website that critiques mainstream press reporting on religion turns its attention to a piece on gay marriage and "the Black churches."

Writing a puff piece: a how-to manual:

One line leapt out.
"Some have even said that given the challenges in the black community — from education to health care — marriage for gays cannot be a priority, despite a significant number of African Americans in same-sex relationships."





The recent Gallup poll indicates that perhaps 4% of Blacks would identify as "LGBT". Is 4% "significant"? And of course, only a small minority of that small minority would be in marriage-ready relationships.

So how is that "a significant number"? And where does the line break between significant and insignificant?

It would be fun to adapt Abraham's argument with the Lord about Sodom and Gomorrah --Wilst thou destroy it for for fifty, for twenty, for ten just?--to contemporary liberalism's passion for rescuing victims in "suffering situations". How many victims constitute a legitimate minority, deserving of all the ethical hyperventilation that is now de rigueur in this age of universal human rights and dignity and who are just a bunch of whiny cranks?**


*just the fact that a reporter can write "the Black churches" without further explanation shows, to paraphrase Mrs. Elton, "a shocking lack of diversity.

**An example: gays who want to get married are an oppressed minority, rejection of whose wishes is considered beyond gauche, even H8ful. But "angry White men", a much larger group, can be dismissed without fear of elite opprobrium. Funny how that works.


'via Blog this'

Primo primi

A booster article on what a great place Austin, Texas is includes this:
This raises troubling questions about these cities. Why is it that progressivism in smaller metros is so often associated with low numbers of African Americans? Can you have a progressive city properly so-called with only a disproportionate handful of African Americans in it? In addition, why has no one called these cities on it?
Most of my replies to these questions are too obvious to print. But they all end in, "Duh?"

Yet I must mention that the use of the phrase "raises troubling questions" reminds me of the nunnish phrase "surface a concern" I used to hear back in the day. And of course, there are the old standbyes, "breaking her silence" and "speaking truth to power."

My primo primi reaction is that I want to backhand the speaker right across the mouth. So is my secundo primi reaction. If the speaker were close by, so would my plane deliberati be.
Medieval moral theology, more psychologically acute than given credit for, distinuished between ethically irrelevant spontaneously arising desires prior to any consent of the will (primo primi), venially sinful desires that are confronted by reflection but whose force overcomes the will (secundo primi) and mortally sinful desires which have been consciously and fully consented to (plane deliberati).

In each of those obnoxious phrases, expressed by either a journalist, a nun, a victim/survivor, or a justice advocate, I hear an assumed backstory of personal innocence and placidity interrupted by the interior call of moral obligation to courageously and disinterestedly confront some otherwise unaddressed evil that disturbs it.

Which is always complete self-aggrandizing BS.

Hence, the itching backhand.


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Saturday, October 27, 2012

Who's the monkey?

In talking with my friend Bill, who is contradiction personified -even more than Yours Truly-, I was reminded of one of the unsung oddities of The Liberal Mind.


Rossiter attempts a psychological version of Kenneth Minogue's
own excellent 1963(!) The Liberal Mind,
still right on target after 50 years:
"Liberalism speaks the language of individual freedom
in service of the growth of State paternalism."


Few things spark a liberal's upset and contempt as much as people who decline to accept the Darwinian theory of evolution as dogmatic fact, those dreaded God-clinging creationists who prefer to trust the trimillenial holy books which tell them they are made in the Divine image and likeness rather than a just a very clever race of multitasking primates.*




On the other hand, I know of no liberals who accept the logical outcome of Mr Darwin's cosmology and anthropogony: that since we are 97% chimpanzee**, it is fruitless, vain and cruel to attempt to create egalitarian and pacific societies out of the crooked genetic timber of Homo Sapiens.

Requiring us to believe that we are nothing more than the results of untold aeons of savage apery, we are then commanded to live like angels.


____


*Ex Cathedra is not one such. Never having been required by his Catholic education to reject evolution as the scientifically likely mode of how God set about to create His universe, he has found that the doctrine of Original Sin and the assumption that humans are the relatives of monkeys not very difficult to combine, at least on the experiential level. The doctrine that the same God who unleashed the Big Bang and the vicissitudes of Life is also the Loving Father of mankind is, however, another matter.

**One of Jack Donovan's chapters in The Way Of Men contrasts the archetypal reality of our chimpanzoid humanity with the dreamt-up Bonobo Masturbation Society toward which we are told we should be heading.


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Semper idem



Being a Five*, I am fascinated by explanatory principles. Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics provides an excellent set of examples:
One. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

Two. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing*. 
Three. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.



*This reminds me of First Things founding editor, Richard Neuhaus' Law:

Where orthodoxy is not explicity prescribed, it will eventually be proscribed.


HT to Steve Sailer, who references this article on "Liberal Privilege" in academia. Heh.

'via Blog this'



*As the site points out...

The connection between genius and madness has long been debated. These two states are really poles apart, the opposite ends of the personality spectrum. The genius is someone who fuses knowledge with insight into the nature of reality, someone who has the ability to see things with utter clarity and with awe-inspiring comprehension. What separates the genius from the madman is that the genius, in addition to extraordinary insights, has the ability to see them correctly, within their context. The genius perceives patterns which are actually present, whereas the madman imposes patterns, projecting erroneous perceptions onto every circumstance. The genius may sometimes seem to be out of touch with reality, but only because he or she operates at a more profound level. The madman, however, is truly out of touch with reality, having nothing but delusions to substitute for it.

The Five is the personality type which most exemplifies these extremes. In the Five, we see the genius and the madman, the innovator and intellectual, the mildly eccentric crackpot and the deeply disturbed delusional schizoid. To understand how these widely diverse states are part of the same personality type is to understand the Five.

Which is Ex Cathedra? Fair and Balanced. You decide.  

Word made flesh vs Word made words

A new monk of the old school makes a good point:

"the root cause of defects in the liturgical reform, both shortly before and after the Council, was a false anthropology stemming from the Enlightenment. In particular, the Enlightenment suffered from a truncated view of man's nature that exaggerates the exercise of rationality, particularly through verbal instruction, while neglecting the immense role played by the five senses, the symbolic imagination, and memory, as well as the appetitive side of human nature. Drawing upon the anthropology articulated in St. Thomas's Summa, Fr. Cassian maintained that modern man is no different in essence from what man has ever been, and that, consequently, a desire to adapt the liturgy to modern man rather than steeping modern man in the spirit of the liturgy had the potential to promote the very "industrial rationalism" of the modern age that the Liturgical Movement in many ways sought to combat with its emphasis on gesture, ritual, symbol, and fine art."

Although far from self-consciously rationalistic, the Reformers were obsessed with verbal instruction, that is, with information. Any images that did survive were emptied of their capacity for mystical participation and reduced to the status of visual aids.

'via Blog this'

Delectatio morosa vs Schadenfreude

I have always like Santayana's writing. He has a bit of the Mediterranean's love of flourish as well as the New Englander's economy, especially when biting.
The mass of mankind is divided into two classes: the Sancho Panzas, who have a sense for reality but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes, with a sense for ideals, but mad.

In Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1924) lie his wonderful insights about liberalism in faith, as well as this little gem comparing the broad and ancient Greco-Roman faith of Catholicism with the Teutonic upstart of self-interpreting Bible-obsessed Protestantism:


Ba dump bump ching!

Cyber hyper

I got stupidly caught up in a cyber problem yesterday afternoon. Some ad program infected my browser and started showing up in my blog as underlined words that led to a coupon. I did everything could think of to find the program and delete it: term search in Explorer for the whole C drive, a deep search by my current anti-virus/malware program and then downloaded another anti- virus/maleward program and did another 90 minute deep search, emptied the cache and cookies, deleted background programs, and wandered without success through the online forums. Until 5 minutes before my dinner guest arrived--and at this point I was getting anxiety pains in my chest-- I found a note in a forum that blamed a totally unrelated program, a fast torrent download app. When I disabled it, the invading coupon program disappeared.

But now Blogger still asks me to Sign In when I have already signed in. I have access, but have lost the capacity to directly edit the blog from the view screen.

My dinner guest asked it I were going to upgrade my OS to Windows 8.

Yeah, sure.

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The Last Legion and My Last Nerve


Being something of a Western declinist, I was curious about The Last Legion, a 2007 Dino di Laurentiis flick about the end of the Latin Roman empire in the mid 400's*. I knew from the trailer that this was going to be a bit imaginative, since it linked the "Last Caesar" to the legends of King Arthur, bridging Britain to Rome. Fair enough.

But, boy, "a bit imaginative" was an under-expectation. Historical accuracy of any kind seemed to be extremely low on the list of priorities. I knew the game was up when the lead male was dispatched to rescue the boy-Caesar in the company of a mystery rider in very non-Roman chain male. I could smell what was going to happen next. Lo and behold, there she was. Yes, a female. And from India, Kerala to be exact. And a martial artist. Yes.

That was the end of the Latin Roman empire for Ex Cathedra. One more ahistorical phallic female to serve the delusions of the current age. When I checked out the rest of the story on Wikipedia, I was relieved to learn that she married the male Roman lead and raised the boy-Emperor in Britain, putting an Indian woman at the root of English history and saving us from Eurocentricity. Along with the very Englishy named English actor Nonso Anozie (second from the left, below), to secure a place for Africans there too. How PC. Thank God the White people were not left alone.



But even Wikipedia could not handle the liberties the movie took. The corral of critics at Rotten Tomatoes were unsparing in their dismay: "A hunk of old Brie, left all day in the glove compartment in a car on a hot summer's day, could not smell more ripe than this absurd sword'n'sandal Roman movie."

Not to put too fine a point on it...


*The Greek-speaking Roman empire based in Constantinople lasted another thousand years until the Ottoman Turkish followers of The Religion of Peace finally completed their jihad on the Christian East in May 1453, a more than 800 year war which their Arab Muslim predecessors had begun in 633, less than two years after the death of their prophet, Muhammad.


'via Blog this'

Friday, October 26, 2012

3K posting, etc.

I just passed the 3000th post I've made here since December 2006. A festival, as B has opined, of "wisdom sayings and magical anecdotes." Or less ironically, "naked men and angry Muslims."



Reading some of the liturgy war blogs, I was thinking of one of the things I disliked about the New Regime in Catholic worship since the 60s --most of which I was happy with-- and that was all the options. Especially if they were coded by alphabet. Year B, acclamation C. Too many choices and too much bloviating. As if variety were somehow an absolute good. Reminded me of one of the complaints listed in the elegant explanatory preface to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, justifying that relatively simple and straightforward set of rites as a replacement for the complex medieval ones:
...the manifold changings of the Service was the cause...that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.
The opening lines of the preface, again in elegant but straightforward Elizabethan style:
There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised or so sure established which, in continuance of time, hath not been corrupted.
Those guys could write.


An interesting history of the upcoming Hallowe'en, as a rich layering of Celtic, Roman and Christian festivals, from a shockingly Eurocentric point of view:





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Thursday, October 25, 2012

Personal and planetary transformation

That's a line that often accompanies offers of service, products and programs in a lot of the New Agey magazines I've seen in the Bay Area over the years.

Nothing if not humble.

Here's a documentary about how American RC sisters got themselves transformed from, well, Catholic nuns into Global Citizens. And in the process, the film's author(ess) has a theological breakthrough, able for the first time to let go of her image of God "as an angry white man."

Truly, progress marches on.

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Minority Sweepstakes

A recent Gallup phone poll of 120,000 US adults reveals that 3.3% of the men identified themselves as "gay, bisexual, or transgender." So just on a wild guess about the numbers of bisexual or transgender respondents, I'm gonna say that 3% of American men are gay, at most.

And the number of them likely to get married when such legalities are available are a very tiny minority of that figure.

A classic example of this culture's obsession with the issues of a very small minority group. If you are willing to unravel a fundamental institution like marriage --with high-risk unintended outcomes-- what does that say about your civilizational sanity?

Like making it taboo to wish people Merry Christmas, in an almost 80% Christian country, lest those without "Christian privilege" feel un-included...

It's sick, really. Unhealthy and imbalanced, a kind of codependence of the majority. Protecting the basic rights of minorities, keeping them from actual harm, is a good idea. Kowtowing to their every tantrum is not. But it's the inevitable outcome of Burnham's Law:
"The liberal, and the group, nation, or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself."

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Faux-ery

HT to Bookworm, a pic set is making the liberal cyber-rounds, rather like those woodcut cartoons from the Reformation which contrasted the humble Christ with the corrupt Pope of Rome.

Jesus expelling the moneychangers from the Temple
The Pope counting his money*

And more to the point:


Christ at the Last Supper, washing His disciples feet.
The enthroned Pope of Rome having his feet kissed by his vassal nobles.

Here's the contemporary version:


Of course, like pretty well everything Obama-related, it is faux.

On the left, Rich White Guy Republican Romney has an underling shine his shoes. (Too bad the shoe shiner wasn't Black; that'd be perfecto). On the right, Mr. Cool Hand in Pocket Prez knocks knuckles with a fellow public servant. See? When the Bruthas are in charge, we'll all be pals.

Do I have to do this?

Yeah, of course, all Presidential candidates on campaign shine their own shoes. And churn their own butter. Like Barry Hussein shines his shoes...or has Michelle Antoinette do them?! This pic is just reality. As for the egalitarian bud behavior in the White House, it's faux. And embarrassing. Like Barry's faux Black preacher act. And revealing of the fakery in the Obama persona. This guy is the epitome of a socially constructed phenomenon. Black guys who --for reasons no one can figure out-- go to Columbia and Harvard are sure to be found just chillin' and kickin' it in the hood wit de homies. Yo. He's the g-d President of the (barely) United States, not your bro.


*I used to scandalize some of the more pious of the people when I was a pastor, people who wanted to solve every issue by asking What Would Jesus Do? Aside from the epistemological problems, I'd say that Jesus had a three-year career with a small and mobile band of disciples and he was completely in charge. Since he never had to run a parish, he was not a good role model.


Hypertangential

Sometimes my brain works in the free association mode. I can start out with topic A and find myself in Topic 3xxvi very quickly. The hyperlink feature of the net mirrors that. The "history" feature on my browser sometimes shows a shocking trail of connections. Especially in a blog devoted to politics and sex and religion.

But there are folks worse than me.

A news item: an imprudently hospitable paraplegic man found himself dumped alone on a New Mexico reservation back road and spent two days dragging himself along til a driver, rather than passing, stopped and got him help. He was foolishly trusting of strangers.

But the comment section instantly turned into a battle about whether a libertarian would recognize his right not to be thrown out of the sociopathic couple's car in the first place.


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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Before 9/11

The Muslim jihad had us in its sights but we didn't understand it. Most of us still don't. That would be raciss.

When I think of the 1984 Beirut Marines bombing, I always think of Father Ihanye, our Nigerian confrere, big on social justice and "the precious name of Jesus." When the news report came on about this bombing and the deaths, he jumped up out of his chair and clapped. He's the same paragon of the RC "preferential option for the poor" --where do they come up with this kind of tortured lingo?-- who blithely justified Nigeria's 1983 expulsion of a million Ghanaians on the grounds that "they're all thieves."

Perhaps some of my contempt for "social justice" types stems from that particular sociopath. Seems I am not alone.

----


Post-oneirics

In a terse example of that combination of superiority and grimness that characterizes Jungian thought*, Robert Johnson once wrote that the world is not supposed to work; all it can effectively do is create consciousness.

*
And of which Ex Cathedra hopes to be a shining example.


E.g.


Italians are virtuosi in matters of food, art and design and architecture, enjoying themselves (while lamenting everyone else), and sex and family. But when it comes to government...An Italian court has sentenced six scientists from the National Commission for the Prevention of Major Risks...yes...to six years in prison for not warning the residents of l'Aquila about the 2009 earthquake. 

How do you say scapegoat in Italian?



As I was emerging from sleep this morning, I was thinking about the scene in Last of the Mohicans where Daniel Day Lewis shoots the British office who is about to be slowly roasted to death by the Noble Savages. For whom, by the way, this kind of prolonged torture was a cherished custom.

And then I had a thought about making infant male circumcision illegal. Before I even woke up.




I have to post here, you see, just to prevent further mental deterioration...

Re the drive to criminalize the circumcision of minor males. It is based on a variety of things, partially a hatred of traditional religion...and probably of traditional anything unless it's AmerIndian or otherwise exotically non-White..partially revenge for a supposed diminution of sexual pleasure for the circumcized..and partially the assertion of a conception of the self as an atomized and completely independent abstraction. A site of supposedly free choices and nothing else.

But the effect of such a law, say, on Jews, would be to effectively destroy the community into which these boys are born, so that when they come of age at the magical number of 18, there would be no reason for them to choose the ancient rite. Even aside from the increased pain at that age.
The unfolding logic of this conception could lead to litigation about being forced to speak a mother tongue without choice, even being raised in any religion (with or without foreskin) sans choice, etc. You may say that is ridiculous, but fifty years ago, who would have believed the torrents of absurdity which now pass for common sense?  Human folly is unfathomable.

With traditional communities destroyed in the name of the Independent Self and its ever expanding repertoire of "human rights", the only source of power and identity left would be, of course, The State and its acolytes, the only "community" left at all.

---



Monday, October 22, 2012

Great

Now Blogger is running ads across the top of Ex Cathedra.

Well, I really can't complain. This program runs really well and it costs me not a cent.

PS. The Giants won and are going the Series again, as in 2010. Very nice!

--

Playing games




The SF Giants, despite a season-long history of losing every game to the Cardinals, rallied themselves for the National League championship series and now we have a 7th game tonight to decide who will go to Detroit on Wednesday for the World Series.

It was a great thing for this town when they won the Series in 2010.

Imagine, if the Giants won the series and RomneyRyan won the election...Ex Cathedra might have to put off ranting for a day or two!

Joking among the ruins

I just watched Romney's routine at the Al Smith dinner. Surprisingly funny...and pointed. Lots of zingers for Obama. I especially liked the Sesame Street line, President Obama, brought to you by the letter O and the number 16 trillion. And his imagining Obama's advice to Pope Benedict when he had problems, to blame everything on Pope John Paul. Bazinga!

I have no illusion that if Romney is elected, All Will Be Well. No one is as talented at squandering opportunities as the Republicans. But I'd sure love to hear the sound of the White House back door smacking Michelle's ass on her way out, hubby in tow. Then they could get on with the business of raking in speaking fees and becoming part of the 1%.

NY Archbishop Timothy Dolan's remarks contained one line that says all too much about the state of his Church. He joked that the Pope had given him a message to relate to the two candidates, but since it was in Latin, "he didn't understand a word." Imagine, a Cardinal of the Roman Church not knowing a word of Latin. As the Prophet Jeremiah said, "Oy."

I skipped O's speech, because Sister Mary Immaculata told us in second grade to avoid occasions of sin. 

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Meteorological retro-exegesis

There was a line from the Song of Songs that used to puzzle me. I first came across it as one of the antiphons for the Office of the Virgin:


Arise, my love, my beautiful one, my dove and come: 
Winter is past. The rains are over and gone.

One of the benefits of living in SF is that I now share a climate somewhat like Solomon's, in that there is a dry season (May to September) and a rainy season (October to April). Which started today with our first real rainfall. So next spring, when the water from the sky stops for the summer, I can at least say the second half of the phrase.

Even after 21 years here, I still consciously appreciate how this works. In the winter, it does get chillier, but it rains far more, so that everything gets greener in the winter. By Christmas, the lemon tree will produce many dozens of new fruit. Not a bad deal.

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Sunday, October 21, 2012

Monk in the headlights

A monastery included this image on the page where it invites young men to consider joining...


Who could resist?

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Post colonial sentimentality

Rewatched The Jewel in the Crown. And tried to do the same with A Passage to India*.

Both insufferably self-superior anti-colonialist flix, with the usual false comfort of moral autopsy.

I couldn't get past the first half hour of Passage. It was a cartoon set-up. What is it with White ethical self-flagellation? No other culture on earth abases itself like that for its success.

And in both flix, it is female curiosity and refusal to respect boundaries (suggesting a sense of superiority and entitlement) which precipitates the tragedies on which the narratives are built. And in both cases, it is the Indians suffer most for these women's highminded arrogance.

Reminds me of another story...**


*The transgressive heroine here is Judy Davis, whose career seems to be built on playing terminally irritable narcissists incapable of being satisfied.

**I find myself in partial agreement with a feminista. See how open minded I can be? It's true that the same female curiosity and boundary-breaking are what create the narrative. No crime, no story.

---

PS in North West Frontier aka Flame Over India (1959), we find a similar structure. Lauren Bacall plays an American woman among a group of people trying to escape on a creaky train from a Muslim uprising against a Hindu maharajah in 1905. Although the egalitarian humanist voice gets a full throated portrayal by Bacall, it's within the old trope of a woman and a man (the military man of duty) enacting attraction via aggression. And, startlingly, (SPOILER)...the righteously angry half-breed does indeed turn out to be a Bad Guy AND Ms. Bacall discovers the wisdom of using a gun at the right time, even admitting the trip had taught her some new things. The final words between the solider and the boy prince make the plot even more un-idealistic. A good flick.

From word to deed

The young Frenchmen who spoke here have acted on their words.





Occuping the central mosque in Poitiers, demanding an end to Muslim immigration and to mosque construction.

Invoking the defeat of invading Mohammedans by Charles Martel in that city in October 732, they want a national referendum about the replacement of the French with Muslims. "We will not be the Native Americans of France." Amen to that.

PS. The Powers That Be, who look for excuses when African Muslims aka "disaffected youths" riot and burn in France, are outraged and demand that this hateful group be destroyed. Heh.

Friday, October 19, 2012

The love that dare not speak

In the 1981 miniseries based on Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Sebastian Flyte's homosexuality is implied but never explicit, and in the final scene, as in the book, Charles Ryder has evidently converted to Catholicism.

Times change. In the 2008 remake, it is perfectly clear that Sebastian is gay, but at the end of this film, Ryder leaves the chapel as the agnostic/atheist he was earlier.

What audiences can take has apparently changed.

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Thursday, October 18, 2012

Falling from grace, continued

Watching yet again one of my favorite film series, The Jewel in the Crown. From my reactionary vantage point, however, I am seeing the Good Guys and the Bad Guys are somewhat different from viewings in years past.

When I first watched Jewel In The Crown, I thought Daphne Manners noble, if a bit unrealistic. Now I see her, in her righteous and blind naivete, preferring her grand illusions to grubby reality, as the cause of a lot of serious misery for other people.

To me, she is another Eve, the true villain of the piece (not Ronald Merrick), a female whose unbridled curiosity, desire and blindness (signified by her physical myopia and thick glasses) lead her to cross a boundary set up for her own good. She partially "goes native" with Hari, both religiously (visiting the puja ceremony in the temple) and sexuall. Disaster ensues because of her moral arrogance.

And then she relies on her (British) feminine privilege to be indulged and cast as the victim, all the while holding poor stupid Hari to his promise of silence. She is, in my current view, completely contemptible: the face of evil staring out from that homely English girl's mug.

Tragic Harry/Hari, Daphne/Pandora, Ronald Merrick


Her Indian "auntie" has it right: "I used to be afraid for you. Now I am afraid for all of us, because of you. You don't shrink from anything, even your mistakes, your mahh-rvelous mistakes. You're like Pandora, who bashed off to the attic and opened her blasted box."

(She is not the only Eve/Pandora in self-flagellating Brit anti-imperial literature.)

And Sarah Layton, a much more competent and impressive woman, shares some of Daphne Manners' ideas without her reckless and selfish imprudence. She groundlessly blames not Ghandi but the British for the Hindu-Muslim violence and death at independence*. In this she epitomizes the bizarre combination of arrogance and self-loathing which characterizes White liberals: ignoring the ancient hatreds that long predated the arrival of the English, she wants to take the blame for it, when it was English power and law which contained and prevented it for so long. She shares with Daphne remote but real responsibility for the awful fate of her Indian friend Ahmed. Had she kept the distance form him that her culture mandated, he would not have suffered it.

The beautiful puer Ahmed, lanky snob Guy and sturdy classist Sarah

The obvious villain of the piece, Ronald Merrick, it now seems to me, despite his flaws of character --and they are not minor ones-- sees reality and acts on it in ways that people like Daphne and Sarah hold in contempt, but on which they have actually always depended. Golden boy Guy Perron, the tediously self-deprecating and liberally heroic opposite of Merrick, nevertheless betrays all the snobbery of the public school elite in despising Merrick for being so "middle class." Sarah frankly admits to her father that she resents Merrick's proposal to her sister because he not "our class." While despising racial ranking, they take class ranking as a sacred given.

And the Barbie Batchelor character, the unstable, hapless, nosy and feckless spinster missionary played by Peggie Ashcroft, is an excellent argument for Nietzsche being right about Christianity. God, what a deeply annoying and clingy woman. "Barbie" reminds me of a religious type whose self-deprecating style masks a ravenous need for attention, a dependant Black Hole. Although Mrs. Colonel Layton is cast as completely unsympathetic, a dead-souled and bitter alcoholic, I share her detestation of this meddling spinster with, in her words, "the soul of a parlour maid."

I watch how the Brits --especially some of these women-- collapse from within, losing all cultural self-confidence, simplistically unable to see the Indians as anything other than brown victims. And from a sentimental and humanitarian ethical viewpoint which is untethered to national or tribal interest. Or the reality of India, especially the violent and bloody history of invading Islam vs native Hinduism. The supposedly evil British oppressor was to be driven out, but the people the Indians really hated --and slaughtered-- were one another. Very few Brits were ever attacked as they were leaving and the mixed race Anglo-Indians were left in peace even as Hindus and Muslims killed each other brutally.

Two newish reflections in response to Paul Scott's anti-colonial project:

First, the film acts as if the British were the first and only invaders and colonizers of India. As if the Mughals simply arrived by chance, like the Pilgrims...and all those Muslims just sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. Hindus will tell you different.  The Muslim invasions of India were hugely bloody, violent, destructive and oppressive. Ask the Sikhs. The Brits, by comparison, were Quakers. Jewel in the Crown acts as if dominance based on race is evidently repugnant while dominance (and chronic savagery) based on religion were simply a fact of nature.

And secondly, if you are going to be a colonial power, do it, and don't fall for your own highminded PR. This brief psycho-bio of Scott reveals the same foolish liberal belief that the age of tribal belonging is past, that we have transcended the primitive notions of race, gender and class.

One thing I have learned from the execrable and ungrateful Jew, Reb Saul Alinsky,: never embrace a principle that your enemies can use against you.


*Most anti-colonial types know nothing of the immemorial history of empire long prior to Europe's turn. As if the whole nonWhite world were an exotic peaceful paradise until the awful Caucasians showed up. And the BrownBlack --and Yellow to a lesser extent-- types like to escape their own flaws and crimes by blaming Whitey. A game US Blacks thrive on as way to distract from or deny their massive self-destructiveness...which, of course, we wind up paying for.


BTW, on this day in the year 1009, the Muslim Caliph Al-Hakim brought his repressive anti-Christian campaign --forbidding the celebration of Easter, or of having wine at all, including at Mass-- of destroying churches by tearing down all the churches in Jerusalem, to its culmination by destroying the tomb of Jesus and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And the Crusades were unprovoked?
--

Still hard at it

As per my previous post, Obama ---btw, I still can't really believe that America elected some guy named Barack Hussein Obama...that alone is a bellweather of decline-- Obama gets no slack, individual though he be. He is the incarnation of everything I loathe.

A quote from a site rightier than thou...I mean me.
The real contest here is not Romney vs. Obama, it is Television vs. Reality. We have to notice how everything changes utterly once it is put within the framework of a TV screen. The President looked “authoritative,” he was “confident,” he had “great answers,” he fought back with determination. Meanwhile back in the real world, without a script, this same man fails at every point. This TV Personality President has no grasp of reality as it actually exists. He does not stand outside his received opinions even for a second. He plays a “Great Leader” on TV but hasn’t the slightest understanding of the country he leads. At every point events defeat him, but he never learns. Nothing is corrected or modified, no amount of pain inflicted means anything. Instead he grows only more determined to defeat reality. Arab Spring can be a success if we will only sacrifice more. Islam is the Religion of Peace equal to Christianity, let’s not be distracted by the piles of dead. Social Justice is just one more tax, one more government program away from being realized. Universal Equality is the highest goal even if we have to destroy the economy and every human distinction to achieve it. Yes, Obama may win the TV debate, but as the glow of the screen fades, reality closes in, accompanied by a sickening dread. 

One hesitation. He "hasn’t the slightest understanding of the country he leads." It elected him. And may do it again. At which point one must ask what is the nature of the country...

Hard at it

I got a quite unusual anonymous comment on here the other day and it had me thinking. Not that that's a particular accomplishment. Thinking is what I do. Compulsively.

Anyway, some post-comment ruminations.

He said I was not as hard as I appeared to be. Passing by any sophomoric double-entendres, I have to say that I am not sure what that means. Ex Cathedra is the place where the author --who has a real name and a non-ExC life-- rants, mostly. And sometimes puts up pictures of parts of God's creation that he finds inspiring. But it's mostly ranting. Since I live in a part of the world where no one I meet on a daily basis is at all on the same page with me politically, it is my safety valve.

And aside from representatives of groups, like the utterly unfortunately chosen POTUS, most of my ranting is really at groups rather than individuals. That's an important part of my character: I very naturally make distinctions --for people that I know-- between them as individual souls and them a members of groups or holders of ideas and beliefs and attitudes. Most of my friends and at least half my family are unreformed liberals. My regular non-casual relationships include people of color, people of both sexes. My patients at work all hold political and religious views with which I am utterly unsympathetic. But I am not unsympathetic to them. Not at all. Because in that space they are their unique selves, not bumper stickers...(even if they occasionally sound like them.)

So there is truth in what the commentor says. Not because I really like Islam or the demographic destruction of America, but because I naturally treat individuals in one way and groups (and ideas) in another.

As for my difficulty in believing in love...well, of course. Anyone grownup who peers deeply into history and experience should have some hesitation. Whoever the God is who has created the world, He is not Mr. Rogers. Yet there are people in my life whom I love and who love me. I know that.

And then there is the vexed question of what that slipperiest of English words means.

My lack of the theological virtue of charity is a given. In Catholic theology, one must be in a state of grace for that gift to be present and operative. I am long out of that state.*

One final thought. I imagine, but do not know, that my commentor --very likely a Catholic-- finds my political anger at liberalism evidence of my lack of love. I would point out that the vast majority of Catholics in history, including saints, have held political view galactically more "right wing" than mine without any sense of uneasiness about their faith. They took the fallen world as they found it, uninfected with the idolatrous and groundless utopian passions of egalitarian moralists who have replaced God with the State as Modern Self Writ Large. The modern Revelation of Liberalism and its highminded and destructive discontents has nothing whatever, nothing whatever, to do with actual historical Christianity. On the contrary, it is a deep disfigurement of Christianity, masquerading --like its Marxist inspiration-- as an uber-ethical transcending of it.

Yet my commentor was kind enough to say that he thinks well of me. For which I thank him.

Now, on to the next rant.


*If you will pardon a coy postal (vs post coital) note, I am in the State of California, which, in its current condition, is about as far from the state of grace as you can get.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Disciplina arcani

Someone who calls himself newnamenoah got himself recommended for entrance into the Mormon temple endowment ritual, filmed and recorded the whole thing as he went through it and put it up on YouTube recently.

Most people who watched and commented were contemptuous of the ceremony itself (even in its somewhat simplified and bowdlerized revision post 1990) and found its secrecy offensive*. Reading the typical mosh pit of moronic comments, I was reminded of the saying of Jesus not to cast pearls before swine or give sacred things to dogs, lest they trample them underfoot and then turn and tear you to pieces. Today this has been fulfilled in your hearing.

With my interest in world religions, I had investigated the Mormon "ordinances" before, so the outline was not a surprise to me, but this video included the entire film that has come to replace the dramatic enactments that actors originally took place did.

The upperclass living room aesthetics --both bourgeois and otherworldly--, the high technology and the esoteric washings and anointings, vestments, gestures, language and rites make for a somewhat jarring phenomenon, but it was fascinating. I have read that many Mormons, who experience these ceremonies without any prior idea of what they contain, are disoriented or worse. It's a bit like being raised in a Presbyterian meeting house and then being dropped into a Byzantine liturgy.



Like Gnosticism, Mormonism asserts a cosmic back-story that puts the Biblical narrative of the creation of the world, the story of Adam and Eve's creation and fall, as well as the incarnation of Christ, in a quite strikingly different context. The film --and the several rituals which punctuate it-- makes that very clear. Quite apart from its truth-claims, Joseph Smith's new faith is a brilliant work of religious imagination. It uses its reconfigured non-monotheist creation myth, the fundamental Mormon assertion of the restoration of a lost and powerful priesthood and the ceremonial language of Freemasonry to give to the men and women, each one, who go through the Endowment an experience of being Adam and Eve. It is a classic form of sacramental mystery: bringing the here and now into the eternal divine world of myth.



It is clear from the film that the Heavenly Father Mormons worship (the Old Testament Elohim) sends down two of his spirit offspring, Jehovah (who will later appear as Jesus Christ) and Michael the archangel, who together organize this creation and world (only one of many).

When Adam's body is created, it is Michael who provides him his spirit, forgetting his pre-mortal existence. So Adam is the incarnation of the archangel. In a striking resonance with the Catholic theme of felix culpa, it becomes clear that Adam and Eve's fall into mortality and suffering is a necessary part of the life-cycle** of a species whose destiny is to evolve into gods one day.




Adam refuses Satan's offer of the forbidden fruit, but Eve eats it. Touchingly, when he discovers this, Adam eats it as well, so as not to be separated from her. And in odd time machine form, Adam is later visited by the apostles Peter, James and John...

Really, to think that this amazing mythology sprang from the mind of an upstate New York farmboy who grew up among burned-over Yankee Protestants...no wonder Harold Bloom called Smith America's original religious genius.


*Secret rites are common in almost all religions. I wondered if they'd be similarly mocking of Islam's rites and restrictions about Mecca and the hajj. And of course none of them knew of the early Church's disciplina arcani, discipline of the secret. Even today, the Byzantine liturgy calls for expelling the unbaptized and closing the church doors before the central part of the Eucharist.

**In the Mormon Book of Moses 4, 11  And Eve, his wife, heard all these things and was glad, saying: Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient. 12  And Adam and Eve blessed the name of God, and they made all things known unto their sons and their daughters

Fallacio

The naturalistic fallacy is the mistake that what is natural must necessarily be good. The moralistic fallacy is the mistake that what is good must necessarily be natural.

Liberalism is really nothing but the moralistic fallacy universalized: a particular idea of the good imposed, willy-nilly and regardless of fact or fit, on the world.

Why are men and women equal? Why are all races equal? Because equality is the coolest thing and therefore it must be true.

QED.  Simple, no?

--

Kaffee mit slag

Always been very influenced by weather, so I woke up this grey morning feeling grey. Back when I lived in Toronto, there were times in the winter (January through mid-to-late April) when the greyness and cold and deadness made me want to jump under a bus. All it took was one trip to California during a February to make me decide to get the hell out of Canuckistan, even after 17 years of living there.

I have had several people from my various pasts contact me in the last year or so and I have replied to none of them. It's rude, but how do you tell people you are no longer interested in them? Nostalgia is apparently not my thing.

I am, without a doubt, my own worst enemy. Even the vile putz who outed me years and years ago  never did any final damage. As a matter of fact, I reversed that and turned it into a strong point...for a while. But on my own, well that's another matter. Aside from some of the effects of the Obama economy, all my problems are entirely my own doing. And almost always result from not doing something.

Was thinking of that incident a while back where a student wrestler bowed out of wrestling a female. Winning against a woman brings a man no honor at all; he can really only be embarrassed by it.  And losing to one is a catastrophe for him. To put a man in such a position in the first place reminded me of what deep loathing and contempt feminists have for men. What ignorance. No respect for the shape of the masculine soul or what men need, archetypally, to be the creatures that nature designed them to be.

One of the greatest achievements of liberalism is to blind people to the presence of enemies, to disallow the very thought that people who have wrapped themselves in the sacred mantle of victim might not actually be a herd of sheep, but a pack of wolves.

A long but accurate description of how our current thought-and-power regime prevents us from seeing reality.

*For those of you unfamiliar with the Viennese beverage, Kaffee mit Schlag, Coffee with Whipped Cream, that is the phrase behind the post's title. Ex Cathedra, irritable but educational.


---








Saturday, October 13, 2012

At home in the world

is a way I have rarely felt.


PS. Thanks to commentor "anonymous", I may have found my spirit animal...




--

Speaking of Protestants

and their decline in the disappearing American homeland, this alternative view of the Reformation in England.

Speaking of "homeland". No one has remarked, to my knowledge, about the uniqueness of this title in American history as the name for a government body, The Department of Homeland Security rather than "Domestic".

I think it ironic, that when the fractious, Balkanized, racially/gendered and class-identified, and fraying character of the USA became so obvious, we finally have a federal bureau calling it our homeland.

Scariest headline

Scarborough: Biden gave Democrats 'an excuse to believe,' but hurt his 2016 chances

[Read more: http://dailycaller.com/#ixzz29Cat53AL]

Hurt his 2016 chances? His 2016 chances?

My mother says that in order to get Obama out of the White House, she'd even vote for Howdy Doody. If Biden --God forbid-- ever wound up running for prez, she'd get her chance.




His 2016 chances?!!

Mother of God.



Sometimes I think Barry Hussein O chose this asshat just so he could humiliate White men by having him clown around as his beta-bitch.


--

In faire Cleveland

the, uh, underclass at play.

---

Friday, October 12, 2012

Latter Days

It's been a Mormon kind of week.

B spent a week in Utah, mostly in the national parks, but with a day or two in Salt Lake City and a tour of the Mormon sites. Although Mormon aesthetics are not shy of pictures or statues, B found them rather pale in comparison with the robustly bloody images of his Italian ancestors. Very nice people, though. Plus, "everything's clean and everything works." Sounds pretty Caucasian to me.

Which is one of the reasons that South Park creators' The Book of Mormon can ridicule this faith on Broadway and no one gets beheaded over it. Unlike a certain other peaceful religion we are not supposed to mention...



I downloaded and watched Brigham City, a 2001 murder mystery by then Mormon filmmaker Richard Dutcher, who wrote, directed and starred in it. Mayhem comes to an idyllic LDS small town: "Nothing attracts a serpent like a paradise."

This book has nothing directly to do with the film,
but I like the cover image a lot.



Dutcher as the local sheriff is also a Mormon bishop. Although there are a few false-step moments where his actions seem quite inexplicable except as a way to heighten drama, it is a strong film, worth watching. An engaging story, with heart and suspense. The final scene is very moving. Even the New York Times liked it.




The depiction of Mormons, and of Mormon worship (local sacrament meetings, not Temple rites), is fascinating and friendly and sees this religion and its believers as real and honorable people. I was struck by the co-existence of strong women characters and (perhaps because of rather than despite) a clearly patriarchal religion and culture. Much more respectful of actual human nature than the current liberal regime under feminism and its unhappy hordes of bitchy phallic females.

One or two moments illustrate the problems that arise when local religion and local government are so hand in glove. Imagine your local cop and your local parish priest as the same guy...




As historically shaky as Mormonism is, --Dutcher left the the faith while researching Joseph Smith's life for a biopic--it seems to provide happy and meaningful life in community for many people. You could do a lot worse. (See paragraph 2, last line, above).


Different assumptions

An anonymous commentor took me to task this week for being shallow --which I certainly can be-- and a bigot. About which I have no opinion and don't really care one way or the other, the word having become, along with racist, meaningless.

Two points this person made that I want to correct.

First is that the commonalities between or among all human ethnic and racial and national groups are so much greater than our differences, that it makes the differences insignificant. The old Shylock speech. He did not use those words, but that was his point: that there is no point in highlighting differences negatively because the commonalities are greater.

Well, that may be. But it is not the right question. The question is about the weight of our commonalities and differences. The much lauded "common humanity" is the thinnest and least consequential of our actual connections and only given credence in wooly headed White Western cultures. Re our differences and commonalities, the questions are: are they significant? are they compelling? are they determinative?

My own thought is that it is our common humanity, our shared human nature, which ought to make us wary of each other. I try to deal with the human species as it is rather than how I'd like it to be.

The modern White liberal thinks that all of human history is a huge misunderstanding. If only we could see how alike we are --"Don't the Russians love their children, too?", sang Sting -- all this fighting and hating would stop.

Only a child could believe this. (And if you observe children, fighting and hating are big on the menu.)

The second point was that since groups contain unique and complex individuals, it is wrong to judge them by the group's characteristics. Fair enough. But I never talked about individuals in that post. Straw man. I have, elsewhere. To recap: liking or disliking a single member of a group and your attitude toward the group itself are entirely and rightly dissociable. You can love your wife and detest her family, without hypocrisy. Same goes for any other group, including races. "Some of my best friends are..." is an achievement, not a flaw. My point is that individuals do indeed usually require a different set of assessments and behaviors. But that does not at all dissolve the group's identity. One Thomas Sowell does not make of America's Blacks a 40 million strong group of conservative intellectuals. Nor does one Ex Cathedra effect a similar miracle for gays.

To add to my sins, I could see taking a reserved-to-dim-to-unfriendly attitude toward individuals because they are vectors, seeders, of a group. This happens all the time, without moral grousing, when White gays move into a poor neighborhood, for example, and start fixing things up. It's called "gentrification"...which is usually a code word for having a POC neighborhood turn White. And it's perfectly OK to be against it. Who would begrudge a low income POC his dislike of the new boyz on the block if they are the harbingers of the transformation of it from his shabby home to a place he can no longer afford to live?

I'd give the same benefit to a person of Whiteness on the arrival of a Latino or Black in their neck of the woods. They might be very nice, but when their numbers increase, good things never happen. That, however, is raciss.

I assume that my commentor is either an emotional/ideological liberal --and so we talked past each other completely-- or an Enneagram 9, a compulsive peacemaker who cannot tolerate conflict. In any case, it is groups who determine the messy, bloody and competitive course of history and they are rarely friends-you-havent-met-yet. And individuals are often different from their groups, but what weight you give to all this (important or not) depends on the situation.

In America now, in the West now, I think my attitudes are pretty clear.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Rugby




seems like a pretty healthy sport.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Pew on Who's in the Pews

Lots of items in the news about the Pew Center's research, indicating that Protestants --including both oldtime Mainline types and the various Evangelicals-- are no longer the majority religion in America.

That is not surprising but it is not good news. It has always seemed to me that the one good justification for Protestantism was that only Protestants --and really, only English Protestants-- could have created America. John Adams pretty much said as much, too. And they, like her, are now passing away.

Not, apparently, because of conversions to other faiths, but because of the growth of the Nones, people who say they are religious, or at least not atheists/agnostics, but who are non-affiliated with a religious body. (I somehow think this is not unprecedented; am I wrong in my impression that a lot of Americans back around the founding and into the 19th century were culturally Protestant but un-churched?) Speculation as to the why of this current crop is rife.

The country remains, as it has been since its origins, vastly Christian, almost 80% so describe themselves --although God forbid anyone should ever describe the USA as a Christian nation unless they're a Muslim or a Jew or an atheist whining at feeling excluded or fending off the ever-imminent and never-arriving theocracy. And we're about 1/4 Catholic...though without the foreign invader Hispanics that number would be less.

My fascination with our fascination --nay, quoth he, pathological obsession--with minorities continues. According to Pew, two tiny tiny tiny minorities are Jews and Muslims. Jews are less than 2%. Muslims .... hold your breath: .6%. Point six percent. There are apparently more Buddhists in America than Mohammedans. So much for Barack Hussein's designation of us as a Muslim country.

Numbers count for a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. Especially if you once had them and then lose them. That's a whole and disorientingly new learning curve. But take the enormous, outsized, disproportionate power, influence, status of some of these minorities.

Numbers count. But they're not all that counts.


PS. Speaking of minorities, why is it so awful when some of them are "underrepresented" but not a problem when some of them are --massively-- "overrepresented'?  [Of course, the notion that every element in the world should isometrically reflect the percentage of this or that group in the population is complete BS, but it's part of the lingo and discourse of the Liberal Trance.]

---




Poulets

coming home to roost.

Some of the young among the Native Peoples of Europe catching on to the crimes --what else to call them?-- of my generational colleagues.



We are Generation Identitaire.
We are the generation who get killed for glancing at the wrong person,
for refusing someone a cigarette, |or having an "attitude" that annoys someone.
We are the generation of ethnic fracture,
total failure of coexistence,| and forced mixing of the races.
We are the generation doubly punished:| Condemned to pay into a social system
so generous with strangers it becomes| unsustainable for our own people.
Our generation are the victims of the May '68'ers|
who wanted to liberate themselves
from tradition, from knowledge and authority in education.
But they only accomplished to| liberate themselves from their responsibilities.
We reject your history books to re-gather our memories.
We no longer believe that „Khader" could ever be our brother,
we have stopped believing in a „Global Village" and the „Family of Man".
We discovered that we have roots, |ancestry and therefore a future.
Our heritage is our land, our blood, our identity. |
We are the heirs to our own future
We turned off the TV to march the streets.
We painted our slogans on the walls. Cried through loudspeakers
for "youth in power" and flew our Lambda flags high.

The Lambda, painted on proud Spartans' shields, is our symbol.

Don't you understand what this means ? |
We will not back down, we will not give in.
We are sick and tired of your cowardice.
You are from the years of post-war prosperity,|retirement benefits,
S.O.S Racism and "diversity",
sexual liberation and a bag of rice from Bernard Kouchner.
We are 25 percent unemployment,|social debt, multicultural collapse
and an explosion of anti-white racism.
We are broken families, and young French soldiers dying in Afghanistan.
You won't buy us with a condescending look,
a state-paid job of misery and a pat on the shoulder.
We don't need your youth-policies. |Youth IS our policy.
Don't think this is simply a manifesto.|It is a declaration of war.
You are of yesterday, we are of tomorrow.
We are Generation Identitaire.|
www.generation-identitaire.com


If you're one of those who can't tolerate the idea of being unhappy that your country is now full of aliens because these aliens are Persons of Color and that would be "racist", imagine that, instead of Africans and Muslims, France now had a resident 10%  population of unassimilating, socially disruptive (constituting 70% of those in prison), fertile (11%+ of all newborns) and restive Germans. Getting any clearer?

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Is it me?

Via my FB friend Geoff, I just watched Lady Gaga for the first time, really. Her song Born This Way.

I gotta say, it was disgusting.

Visually, Grand Guignol on steroids. She makes Madonna look like a Presbyterian.

Her pompous cosmogony myth preamble. And the lyrics. 90% unutterably stupid and, well, just wrong.

Am I really that old?

My stomach hurts.

---

Rough times

The other day, my longtime reader and commentor jpnill said that my problem was that I had not absorbed Martin Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche.

To make matters worse, an anonymous commentor this morning said I was shallow (but didn't mean to offend me).

I may just close down Ex Cathedra and get a government job.

--

More post-racial hope and change

A Black education and Black studies professor at Columbia, my alma mater, and, according to his own website "one of the youngest members of the growing body of Hip-Hop Intellectuals (!!!!!!!!!) in the country," celebrated Columbus Day by publishing a list of overrated Whites. Like Shakespeare. Yeah, no Snoop-Dog, he. One more pitiful attempt to make Blacks look good by criticizing Whites and our civilization.

The Civil Rights Movement. Such a win-win. (Maybe we should mark Juneteenth with a list of overrated Blacks...)

My thought experiment, A Day Without A Caucasian, still stands.

Just for starters.
There are 40 million Blacks in America.
Only 32,000 of them are physicians.

You do the math, hip-hop doc.

Endlessly whining about how The Man keeps you all down. The truth is that without the Man hold you up, you'd sink like a stone.

Without us, it'd be "Next Stop, Detroit" for all of you.
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