Special Christendom lectures/podcasts are now available through iTunes.

The Simpsons - Mapple Store


hulu

Students downsize college dreams, by Michael Birnbaum

Would you marry someone with substantial personal debt? How can a person even consider himself to be available for marriage? It seems that these days people who are dating should be exchanging credit reports, and coming clear about their financial state up front.

Yahoo News: Birthmarks explained
There are many old wives' tales about birthmarks, but scientists know the truth.

HK45 Review


HK45

Asia Times: Chinese workerslose more than jobs

Millions of China's migrant workers are losing more than jobs as the country struggles to maintain growth in the global downturn. Newly won rights appear threatened, "old" folk of 30 or more are overlooked when vacancies do arise, and pay is being cut. All good reason for getting angry. - Ivan Franceschini

Bill Kauffman, AGAINST MOTHER’S DAY?

In daily discourse, when it is reason against emotion, emotion often wins. There are plenty of [pseudo-]holydays that should be eliminated from the calendar. But who wants to argue with women about this?

Review: 'Tar Sands' by Andrew Nikiforuk
Frank Kaminski, Seattle Peak Oil Awareness (SPOA)
If you’ve been following energy news with a discerning eye, then you already know better than to buy into all the hype about the Canadian tar sands...Far from being a panacea for declining supplies of conventional oil, the sands could...leave Alberta resembling “a third-rate golf course in the Sudan”...The quote comes from Andrew Nikiforuk’s new book Tar Sands, a powerful, eloquent litany of horrors associated with North America’s frenzied dash toward tar sands bitumen.

The American Papist: Rumor: Archbishop Chaput to oversee Legion visitation in the US?

Dean Baker, Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic
The Systematic Risk Regulators

He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy. Google Books

CSPAN: Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy

I dreamt I was running someone's presidential campaign. haha. laughable.

NLM: Morning Prayer, English and Latin and Cardinal Cañizares Writes About Usus Antiquior and Liturgical Reform.

Dr. Helen: The Spanking Controversy

Tea at Trianon recommends a movie that I had not heard of before: Sinner (2007).

S I N N E R

Trailer


So that is Nick Chinlund? I've seen him in only action/drama shows or movies until now.

Mr. Kunstler repeats himself--The Bottom--but it's a good summary of what he thinks the problems are and if they are being addressed by the current administration.

John Médaille, Life in Circle Six

A discussion on usury. Found this on Google -- Calvin Elliott, Usury: A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View.

A Disposable Society by Patrick Deneen

In a way, our inattentiveness and the plastic stirrer are deeply and profoundly related: they both derive from our massive employment of fossil fuels. The coffee stirrer - and all the plastic that undergirds our throw-away society - are made primarily from chemicals derived from fossil fuels. And our inattentiveness is primarily undergirded by that amazing resource that allows us much of the time to live elsewhere than where we actually are - whether by fueling the transportation system that has made global mobility as easy as chewing gum, or primarily powering the electrical grid that serves as a virtual transporter, affording a constant and often illusory, hypnotic and addictive form of displacement and disembodiment. Our lack of any relationship to the coffee stirrer is born of the same resource that made the stirrer.

Taking control of development at the local level
Christopher J. Ryan, AICP, The Localizer Blog
In traditional communities, blocks were short and navigable, retail and services in compatible and attractive corner stores within easy walking distance, and other destinations like schools and libraries easily walkable as well. Critics suggest that this model is outdated and no longer desired. Yet research suggests that most people when offered the option will choose the new urbanist model.

(original)

Jeff Leys, Obama's War Budget

At first glance, it is easy to conclude that the proposed 22 percent reduction in war spending from 2008 to 2009 represents a significant shift in war strategy and is indicative of a drawing down of the twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sadly, such a conclusion would be wrong.

What follows is a discussion of the three main components of the war budget: Personnel costs; Operation & Maintenance costs; and Procurement costs. This discussion is based upon data and material produced by the Department of Defense Comptroller; the Congressional Research Service; the budget justification materials of the branches of the military; and the Fiscal Year 2009 Bridge Fund appropriations passed by Congress last June. (Please see the end of this article for the source material used in preparing this analysis).

This discussion includes total war funding for 2009, including both that amount appropriated by the Democrat-controlled Congress last June and the amount being requested by Obama in the currently pending supplemental spending request. It should be noted that the war funds approved by Congress last year were contained in the bill crafted by the Democratic Party leadership.

It should also be noted that while funding levels are reduced from 2008 to 2009, in each of the three categories, President Obama is in fact seeking new funding to the tune of $75.8 billion. That said, Personnel costs are reduced by $1.7 billion in 2009. Operation & Maintenance costs are reduced by $1.9 billion. Procurement costs are reduced by $37 billion. Even so, a closer look at the numbers behind the numbers reveals that the reductions are not as significant as they may appear to be at first glance.

NLM: Compendium of the 1955 Holy Week Revisions of Pius XII: Part 8 - The Hours of the Celebration of the Holy Week Liturgies by Shawn Tribe

From the Rockford Institute: John Randolph Club Returns to San Antonio

The Rockford Institute and Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture present
The 20th Annual Meeting of the John Randolph Club“The Future of America: Hell or Texas?” November 13-14, 2009
San Antonio, Texas

If I had the $$$ and the time, I'd be going. It would also be a good opportunity to visit San Antonio, see Sarge's family, and attend Mass at Our Lady of the Atonement.

AtonementOnline
Atonement Academy

San Antonio Missions National Historical Park
San Antonio Missions: Spanish Influence in Texas
The Five Spanish Missions of Old San Antonio
The website of the Texas San Antonio Mission

Why the 10th Amendment? by Brion McClanahan (via Conservative Heritage Times)

It becomes clear, then, that those who push for reasserting State power must know how the Founders defined a republic in both size and scope and what they meant by republicanism. Returning to the founding principles of the United States is an obvious way to end the insanity in Washington D.C., but it won’t happen if State’s rights are consistently viewed as a knee-jerk reactionary response to unconstitutional federal legislation. Yes, the 10th Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights, but why did the Founders insist on state sovereignty? Rather than a theoretical fabrication at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention or the State ratification conventions, State’s rights were explicitly linked to the stability of the United States from the Revolutionary War forward. That is the key to the State sovereignty movement.

Professor McClanahan is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers, which is supposed to be published at the end of June. (Hmm. H.W. Crocker III has written The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Civil War.)

From Donald Livingston in the current issue of Chronicles:

The United States is not now and has never been a republic. It is a federation of states, each of which, in Article IV of the Constitution, is guaranteed a republican form of government. But a federation of republics is not itself a republic any more than the federation of nations in the United States, or in the European Union, is a nation. A federation is a service agency of the political units that compose it. Whatever else a republic might be, it is not a service agency of something else. So instead of talking about 'restoring the old Republic,' we should talk of restoring republicanism in a federation of states. And this can only mean recalling the vast domain of unenumerated powers that the Constitution reserves to the states and which have been usurped by that artificial corporation, known as the United States, created by the states for their welfare.

Some words from Robert M. Peters:

It is to note, that although our term “republic” is a rendering of “res pulica,” a republic is itself, in its Aristotelian sense, the manifestation as polity of a social order which is organic in nature, reflecting in its confessing or living out, a function in the cosmic order, being a symbiotic relationship of various commonwealths - family, Church, local community, etc. - and thereby having unto itself unique traditions, customs and laws. Thus in a healthy society, res pulica and res familiaris are in an intricate dance with one another, if I may mix my metaphors. When the republics which formed the union of constitutionally federated republics delegated and enumerated specific rights to the general government -their creature and their agent - they reserved unto themselves all of the other rights and authorities unique to them individually. Those rights and authorities which Virginia reserved to herself were not the same as those which Rhode Island reserved for herself, for they had different components and different historical experiences, although there were, of course, enough common elements among them to bring them to the compact table.

The Hobbesian state which took power in 1865 had and continues to have absolutely no sensibility for real commonwealths, communities and republics. The Hobbesian is a man with a bulldozer - a monopoly on coercion and the ability to define the limits of his own power. He sees the landscape of the union of constitutionally federated republics as a mere patch of divergent weeds to be pushed down, drained of their essence and ultimately eradicated. On the ground which he has made barren, he will build his Utopia, which will some form of banal sameness.

The Hobbesian state can be possessed by different demons; but they all seek, as is the wont of demons, barren sameness: Stalin wanted a classless society and pursued sameness with terror and death. Hitler wased one race and pursued ssmeness with terror and death. The “fascitoid social democrats” who possess and embody our Hobbesian state also pursue sameness with the weapons of “civil rights,” “equality” and “social justice.” Their volent phase is yet to come.

Yet, despite the fact that the fall is working its way through the cosmic order, with the Hobbesian state being one manifestion thereof, there is a Cosmological Absolute, Who has in the Second Person of the Trinity, the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, become our Kinsman-Redeemer through His passion, death, resurrection and ascencion and has thereby undone as the Second Adam what the First Adam, in his fall, did. We must, therefore, in faith, hope and charity, await the workingout of this process and confess through our lives these things. I firmly hold that those fleeting moments of history, when the scale is right, when republican men can be found - freeholders who acquire and live out the cardinal virtues, the capital virtues and ultimately the theological virtues, men like Cincinatus, Washington and Jefferson Davis and when folks are focused on kith and kin, then we have a foretaste, although passing and momentary, of that Restoration which is yet to come in the plan of Providence. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot: this is the cause which is never truely lost because it has, as yet, to be fully gained. In the fullness of time, so is our hope, it will be. It is our duty to nurture it, not as an abstraction, but as a reality, be it but in the relative safety of our homes, and to be ready, with courage, to showcase it, when the historical opportunity presents itself.

Viktoria Mullova

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Featured on today's edition of the Early Music Show. Her official website.

Bach. BWV 1004. Chaconne violin solo. Viktoria Mullova. 1


Bach. BWV 1004. Chaconne violin solo. Viktoria Mullova. 2


Viktoria Mullova interview in London
Decca Music Group - Viktoria Mullova

Onyx Artists - Viktoria Mullova
Viktoria Mullova ArkivMusic
Viktoria Mullova: the fiddler who came in from the cold - Telegraph
Bach: Six Solo Sonatas and Partitas by Viktoria Mullova - Telegraph
Music Is The Key: J. S. Bach SONATAS Viktoria Mullova
Music: Bach: 6 Solo Sonatas & Partitas by Viktoria Mullova
Classical Music :: The Classical Source :: Viktoria Mullova
MPR: Classical Notes: BBC Proms: Viktoria Mullova
Cover Story
Viktoria Mullova - Yahoo! Music
Viktoria Mullova - Ice Queen melts to the blues

(Saturday's program: Ensemble Tourbillon and Noemi Kiss

Daniel Larison on Collaborators

James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition (published by Transaction Publishers)

Of this book Mr. Scott Richert writes in the current issue of Chronicles:

Burnham's 1959 book Congress and the Americna Tradition is his most conservative, and most consistently underrated, work. Asked by publisher Henry Regnery, in the wake of the McCarthy hearings, to write a defense of Congress's investigatory powers (which are never mentioned in the Constitution), Burnham gave Regnery much more: a serious work of political history that revives the Framers' understanding of the nature and role of Congress and places that understanding within the Anglo-American (and more broadly European) political tradition. (20)

(source of photo: National Review and the Triumph of the New Right)
James Burnham
Sempa James Burnham (I)
08/23/01 - James Burnham, The New Class, And The Nation-State
James Burnham and the Struggle for the World by Daniel Kelly

Also by Mr. Burnham: The managerial revolution. George Orwell wrote an essay on this book, James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (wiki).

More Josée Vautour

Josee Vautour et Paul Hebert au Theatre capitol


Josee Vautour - When you say nothing at all by Alison Krauss


Josée Vautour singing No place that far by Sara Evans


Josée Vautour singing Red high heels by Kellie Pickler


herenb.com - Josée is a rising star