NLM: Compendium of the Reforms of the Roman Breviary, 1568-1961: Part 4 - 1629: The Hymns of Urban VIII

May be offline for a while -- the computer is not working, and I have to figure out what is wrong with it...

Mark T. Mitchell, A Lost Job and a New Life

William Lind, On War #316: Last exit before Quagmire (also posted at @TAC)

Habsburg family demands right to seek Austrian presidency (via Stephen Hand)

Environmental Impacts of Oil Sands Development in Alberta

Simon Dyer, The Oil Drum

The oil sands are an issue of global importance. As conventional sources of crude oil are depleted, unconventional sources of oil, such as the bitumen found in oil sands, play a larger role in offsetting declining conventional production. The Canadian oil sands are the second largest proven oil reserve after Saudi Arabia.¹

Army testing new camo patterns

Sarge told me to look this bit of news up on the Internet, and so I found this CNN article: In Afghanistan, troops trying to blend in better.

U.S. Army ground commanders in Afghanistan say they need help, fast. That's not a request for more troops, but a request from commanders who say the current camouflage uniform is not blending well in the diverse countryside.

U.S. Army commanders in Afghanistan say the current uniform does not blend well in the countryside.

In response, the Army later this month will field-test two new camouflage color schemes and patterns on about 1,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, where the terrain is extremely varied.

Commanders have had problems there because of the numerous changes in environments a soldier can move in and out of in a short period of time -- from woodland to desert to alpine, and to rocky and snowy mountain tops.

The current uniform, known as the Army Combat Uniform or ACU, has lighter shades of green and tan, which some commanders have complained does not blend well if soldiers need to stay motionless on a mission, as snipers or reconnaissance troops must.

Looks like the Yankees are finally listening to the men who have to wear the ACU, instead of defending and proclaiming once again the results of their "extensive testing."

wiki entry on the ACU

The Huge Hole in Gen. McChrystal's Afghan Counterinsurgency Strategy

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

The Thinking Housewife: A Woman Drill Sergeant

Army Picks 1st Woman to Lead Drill Sergeants

Catholic Green Initiative of Santa Clara County

Catholic Green Initiative of Santa Clara County Announcement
Catholic Green Initiative of Santa Clara County underway
Environmental Justice
Parish Packet for St. Francis of Assisi Sunday
Statement on the St. Francis Pledge

It's hard not to have a knee-jerk reaction to this, but it is good as far as it goes. As long as it doesn't incorporate goofy eco-spirituality, it should be ok. But what more can it do to raise awareness?

What of this? Catholic Climate Covenant

Related links:
Houston Catholic Worker

P G Wodehouse will always have the last laugh

Opus Dei: New EWTN Series on St. Josemaría and Opus Dei Beginning August 30, EWTN will air a 13-part series of half-hour interviews about St. Josemaría and Opus Dei. Co-hosts are Damon Owens and John Coverdale.

Each segment will consist of a half-hour interview. One segment will be broadcast each week and will be shown in the United States and Canada three times during that week: Sunday at 5 p.m., Tuesday at 3:30 a.m., and Friday at 10:30 p.m.

Laurence Paul Hemming has a website...

A review of Laurence Paul Hemming's Postmodernity's Transcending: Devaluing God by Mary Troxell

James Howard Kunstler, Original Sin

The suburban project was not a conspiracy by the likes of Robert Moses, Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, and President Eisenhower to produce a living arrangement with no future. It was the emergent, self-organizing result of special circumstances in a particular time and place: post World War Two America, with an immense supply of cheap oil, cheap land, and the industrial capacity to churn out all the necessary components for a car-dependent development pattern. Suburbia was spawned out of a couple of persistent themes in American cultural history: 1.) that cities and city life were no good; 2.) and that the romance of settling the wilderness could be reenacted, at great profit, in all that space beyond the towns and cities. It would be silly to deny the appeal of this arrangement at its inception. By the end of WW II, city life in the popular imagination was reduced to one potently awful image: Ralph Kramden's apartment in "The Honeymooners" TV show.

There had to be something better than that. Suburbia was engineered as the antidote to the Kramden's apartment: country-living-for-everybody. The evacuation of the cities to the new outlands proceeded as relentlessly as the landings at Normandy. It wasn't until the program was well underway that the self-destructive essence of it became obvious -- that every new housing subdivision killed the original rural character of the land, with the result that suburban life quickly became a cartoon of country living in a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of the country. With additional layer-on-layer of, first, the shopping in the form of highway strips, then malls, along with the office "parks," these places elaborated themselves into a kind of cancer-of-the-landscape, a chronic and expensive condition that Americans had no choice but to live with, because of the monumental investments they had already made in it. The discontents it produced lent it to psychological depression and dark humor, just as chronic illness does. But we were stuck with it.

Meanwhile, all the machinery of culture and politics made it impossible to construct anything differently. The exquisitely fine-tuned planning-and-zoning codes generated by the thousands of town boards mandated a suburban outcome everywhere -- with plenty of help from the DOT traffic engineers, the fire marshals, and the even the mandarins of academia who trained all these professionals. As a natural consequence of all this, the disinvestment in cities -- especially the older cities of the industrial heartland -- continued remorsely until it seemed as if the Second World War had taken place in St. Louis and Cleveland.

Kevin Gutzman's retort to Austin Bramwell: They Really Meant It.

Bramwell notes that I insist on Jefferson’s standard of constitutionalism: that a constitution be interpreted “according to the true sense in which it was adopted by the States, that in which it was advocated by its friends.” He then provides extensive quotations from Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to the effect that one must not, as Bramwell puts it, “look into the intention of those who wrote it.”

Apparently Bramwell does not know the difference between the Philadelphia Convention that wrote the Constitution and the state conventions that ratified it. I agree with Hamilton and Madison that one should not ask what the Philadelphia Convention intended, even as I agree with Madison and Jefferson that one should ask what the ratification conventions understood. The ratification conventions did not write the Constitution, but they were the ones who gave it effect. They were, in a constitutional sense, the legislators whose understanding counts. Their understanding was shaped by what the Constitution’s friends said of it while it was being considered for ratification, as Jefferson said.

If, as Bramwell implied in his first piece, he had read my books, he would know that. If, as Bramwell implied in his first piece, he had read my on-line articles, he would know that. If he had simply read the Constitution itself, he would know that.

He makes the same mistake when, under “It is unclear whose expectations one should consult,” he says, “We can start with the handful of men who actually drafted the Constitution’s provisions.” Why would we do that? Not for any reason I know. They had no power to make law. One might as well interpret my will by asking not what I meant, but what my lawyer meant. Perhaps Bramwell sets up this straw man simply so that he can knock it down, but it seems more likely that he has confused the men who wrote the Constitution (whose opinions Hamilton and Madison called irrelevant) with those who ratified it (to whose understanding Madison, Jefferson, and I said one must look).

Rebellion: The Little Green Meltdown

See also Secession movement spreads well beyond Texas, which mentions "Bring the Guard Home.".

National Launch of "Bring the Guard Home! It's the Law."

Patrick Deneen, Electrifying

The loss of virtue and community is prior to the adoption of electronic entertainment. Would such discoveries have been possible in a non-industrialized economy that had access to cheap energy? For how long can a "primitive" village resist the allure of electronics? The Amish seem to be doing fine, but those who stay are committed to their way of life.

Re: We Are The Ones Song by will.i.am - Obama


Unfortunately, I think young Uhmericans still believe in the myth:

Obama - WE ARE THE ONES - Video

Arvo Pärt - The Beatitudes

Arvo Pärt - The Beatitudes Noel Edisson - Elora Festival Singers and Orchestra

BBC Early Music Show - Domenico Zipoli
5 days left to listen...

Playlist:

Zipoli: Sonate d'intavolatura: Toccata
Dominique Ferran (organ)
K617037 Tr 2

Zipoli: Sonate pour Violon et basse continue
Les Soloists de l'Ensemble Elyma
K617037 Tr 10

Zipoli: Partite (do maggiore) - Sonate d'intavolatura per cimbalo
Sergio Vartolo (harpsichord)
TACTUS TC682602 Tr 14

Zipoli: Deus In Adjutorium - Domine Ad Adjuvandum
Coro de Ninos Cantores de Cordoba
Ensemble Elyma
Gabriel Garrido (conductor)
K617027 CD 2 Tr 1

Zipoli: Beatus Vir
Coro de Ninos Cantores de Cordoba
Ensemble Elyma
Gabriel Garrido (conductor)
K617027 CD 2 Tr 4

Zipoli: Kyrie (Misa Brevis)
Cristina Garcia Banegas (organ)
Coro de Ninos Cantores de Cordoba
Ensemble Elyma
Affetti Musicali Buenos Aires
Gabriel Garrido (conductor)
K617036 Tr 1

Zipoli: Letania I En Do
Coro de Ninos Cantores de Cordoba
Cristina Garcia Banegas (organ)
Ensemble Elyma
Affetti Musicali Buenos Aires
Gabriel Garrido (conductor)
K617036 Tr 7.

Cultivating Freedom, by Lewis McCrary
Joel Salatin practices ethical animal husbandry— no thanks to the feds.

Polyface, Inc.

The Full Frame interviews: Joel Salatin from Food, Inc.
Chelsea Green

Sissy Farmer (Joel Salatin on Forgiveness)


The Polyface Farm DVD Trailer

Book Sales - Polyface, Inc.

Joel Salatin at The Farm
Our visit to Joel Salatin's farm
Joel Salatin, Jane Jacobs

POLYFACE FARM - Joel Salatin


The documentary FRESH.

FRESH the trailer

Lawrence Auster on Bright Star.

Related links:
Stills
Rope of Silicon
Celebrity Wonder
Yahoo! Movies

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Intellectual Incoherence of Conservatism

Something that caught my eye:

I do not wish to explain here the economic nonsense of Buchanan's and his theoreticians' even further-reaching idea of protectionist policies (of protecting American wages). If they were right, their argument in favor of economic protection would amount to an indictment of all trade and a defense of the thesis that each family would be better off if it never traded with anyone else. Certainly, in this case no one could ever lose his job, and unemployment due to "unfair" competition would be reduced to zero.

That is a bit of a leap -- what determines relations within a polity does not necessary apply to relations between polities, or individuals from different polities. Trade is primarily for the sake of supplying what is lacking, either in families or the polity taken as a whole, but neither the activity or the things it makes available is the highest good of the polity -- both are subordinate to the common good.

Table of contents for the first issue of Usus Antiquior is up.

Maney Publishing - Usus Antiquior
Society of Saint Catherine of Siena

Gothic chant - École de Notre-Dame: Benedicamus Domino