Tomás Luis de Victoria, Te Deum laudamus

Fred Reed, Why Mexicans Dont Like Gringos

Some immigrants, for example Europeans, quietly adapt to local habits, learn the language, exhibit the reticence that constitutes international good manners, and integrate themselves into the new country. We don’t. Americans, in which category I include Canadians, simply don’t belong in Mexico, at least most of those who come. Degrees and exceptions, yes. But…the hesitant walk, the anxious body language, the clumping together like clotting corpuscles in gringo venues—the gringos just look funny, alien, isolated. They aren’t bad people, or anyway no worse than the dismally low baseline for a race that amounts to a collection of technologized chimpanzees. They want to be liked, set up charities, try to do good works and usually succeed. It doesn’t help.

Read the rest.

I don't have a double standard -- if [Anglo- or Euro-]Americans living in Mexico think they are merely guests in the country, they should nonetheless not give offense to the natives by living ostentatiously. But if they are permanent residents, they should make an effort to assimilate into that society, or at least learn Spanish.

Thomas Fleming, Crossing the I in Idiot and the T in Tyranny

“Click it or Ticket” is the current slogan. But there is also Drive Hammered, Get Nailed. Slow Down or Pay Up, Buckle Up, IT’S THE LAW. There has been a lot of discussion on websites about the ineffectiveness of these campaigns, especially when they are promoted by police officers, who are among the worst drivers in the country and who, despite privileges that come close to immunities, are at least as prone as lesser men, to driving under the influence. Anyone remember Eliot Ness? The sanctimonious alcoholic who failed to convict Al Capone? He was involved in a drunk-driving accident, though he did escape the consequences.

But it is not the futility or the hypocrisy of these campaigns that disturb me so much as it is the bullying tone. We the taxpayers who pay the salaries have to be preached at by a set of goons, many of whom could not hold a job selling shoes at the mall. Imagine the effect these slogans have on the mind of an overpaid unionized patrolman who already resents the entire middle class for failing to give him the even higher salary he thinks he is entitled to.

Yes, yes, I am only talking about bad cops, though funnily enough they make up the overwhelming majority of the cops with whom I have dealt with in the past decade. But, if we did have any residual belief that we were citizens in a free country, these ad campaigns should eliminate them. But where is the outcry from elected officials?

NLM: McCrery Architects Design New Monastery for Carmelites of Wyoming

Gothic? I'm a surprised by the choice of architecture.

A pragmatic version of the gospel of vegetarianism

NLM: Medieval Version of the Salve Regina

The nephew apparently was very flirty with the Filipinas working on the cruise ship, and he was looking at and trying to get the attention of various women at Sweet Tomatoes today during lunch. How does he know that they are women?

Barbarian invasions, by Damien Perrotin

(original)

Peak energy makes things more complex, however. As the net energy available to society decreases, so will its capacity to support complex hierarchies. We can count on the ruling elites to pressure everyone and his dog so as to stay at the top, but ultimately they will fall. In the meantime , however, it will be the lower and middle classes which will hit the hardest. What that means for immigrants is that they will no longer be able, except for a few lucky individuals, to advance in society and will be permanently locked in underclass status. They will then have no reason to abandon the very real advantages of community solidarity for a more and more empty promise of integration.

Impoverished natives may and will then join immigrant culture – or rather what it will have become since it will quickly grow quite different of what it was at home – for protection and some form of advancement. This process is clearly at work in French society, even if it is marginal – racism and scapegoating is still the most common reaction.

As the crisis deepens and the middle class slips into permanent poverty, we may have a rather interesting “culture war” between whatever emerges from urban ghettos and a racism which in France may put on the mask of secularism – those who read French and will have look at this supposedly left wing blog will understand what I mean.

At some point in the process of decline, this is bound to generate a deep fracture in European societies, fracture which may take a territorial form, as it did in Britain, with an immigrant-based cultures prevailing in some areas and more native ones holding on in some others. Islamic polities may very well emerge in some French regions and large parts of Germany may very well become Turkish-speaking after the ultimate collapse of today's European states and of the elites which draw their power from them.

This is not necessarily a bad outcome. These futures societies and polities can become as rich and cultured as England did despite its rather troubled origin. The problem is that this process, probably inevitable at this point, will meet with a lot of resistance from natives, and more specifically from those authorities who will draw their legitimacy from today's polities. Racism and ethnic cleansing are bound to show their ugly head and make the unraveling of our civilization far messier and bloodier than it needs to be.

Ironically, it is the very refusal of the native majority to make place to immigrants and to integrate a part of their culture into their own which make this outcome all the more likely. This means, of course that ethnic regions – the Celtic Fringe for instance, but that is only an example – may be less vulnerable. Whatever polity emerge from them will likely draw its legitimacy from a supposed – even if often more fantasized than real – resistance to the state it is a part today. This may enable them to integrate large section of immigrant culture, as a part of a necessary culture change, without endangering themselves. An emirate of Britanny may exist in the future and, even if I'd prefer a Wiccan democracy, it would be as Breton as today's French region.

Even here, however, it is far from a forgone conclusion. In an atmosphere of nationalist ranting and stigmatization, it seems that the likes of Gildas will have a field day, paving the way for those of Cerdic and Creoda.

If what Mr. Perrotin predicts comes to pass, then he has presented the case why immigrants of different cultures and religions should not have been admitted into society in the first place. What can be done about it now?

Peter Hitchens, Police and 'Civilians'

I have been objecting for years to the stupid use of the term 'civilians' by some police officers, to describe the public. It reflects a growing and mistaken view in the police that they are a separate semi-military body, rather than - as they were intended to be - citizens in uniform. This is explored in my book 'The Abolition of Liberty' (and by the way, readers seeking to find my books in bookshops, as one says she sought to do, will generally be disappointed. Few bookshops will stock them, as the publishing and bookselling industry is almost completely dominated by left-wing persons. But they can be got by ordering them, provided you spell my name right, or you can go to the internet booksellers).

So I object to the term being used to describe a growing and worrying problem - the quiet replacement of proper, sworn constables with feebler and less effective 'PCSO's - 'Community Support Officers'. Even so it is a real problem. The sworn constable is not a civil servant. He is a directly appointed officer of the law, bound by oath to uphold and enforce the law without fear or favour - which for instance means he must refuse an illegal or unlawful order, and derives his powers from the local magistracy rather than from the central government.

The PCSO, whose powers are limited but will grow as time goes by, is a civil servant ultimately controlled by the state rather than the law (as are gendarmes in non-Common Law countries). This may seem a technical difference, but it is in fact essential to our liberty that the police are not an arm of government. In the English-speaking countries, we have the rule of law. In the civil code countries, they have the inferior rule of power.

I don't doubt that there is an important distinction between the police and the PCSOs. But is it just English/Whig propaganda to claim the civil code countries have the inferior rule of power?

wiki
Police Service Recruitment
PCSO Overview

Metropolitan Police Service
UK Police Service
Home Office
The Police|Home Office


BARWELL, UNITED KINGDOM - SEPTEMBER 30: A police community support officer patrols Bardon Road on September 30, 2009 in Barwell, United Kingdom. An inquest jury has returned a verdict of suicide on Fiona Pilkington and unlawful killing on her 18-year-old daughter Francecca who were plagued by boisterous youths on the estate where they live. An inquest jury found the family's cries for help to the authorities had been ignored. (Getty/Daylife)

LONDON - MAY 13: Home Secretary Theresa May and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephens visit the York Road Estate, Clapham on May 13, 2010 in South West London, England. The Home Secretary said today that putting police back on the streets and slashing bureaucracy are among the Government's top priorities. (Getty/Daylife)

Daniel Larison, Palin Has No Political Future.

I hope that is the case...

Restoring Mayberry: The post-apocalypse movies we'd like to see

`Restoring Mayberry: The post-apocalypse movies we'd like to see

Wishful fantasies? Will people alter their lifestyles even if they knew the perils of peak oil? I doubt it.

2 by Sandro Magister

A Church Persecuted? Yes, by the Sins of Her Children

This is the "terrifying" relevance of the message of Fatima, according to Benedict XVI. But the last word in the story is the goodness of God. To be welcomed with penance and a spirit of conversion

Legion Leaders Absolve Themselves Before They Sink

In an internal memo, published here, they say they never knew anything about the double life of their founder, Maciel. But the judgment of the Vatican authorities says otherwise. The imminent appointment of the papal delegate

Giselle comments on the second piece.

RESTREPO - Sundance Film Festival 2010

Interview with co-directors Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger. RESTREPO.

Talk by Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P.

Faith Matters - Lent 2010 - Fr Aidan Nichols

Faith Matters - Lent 2010 - Fr Aidan Nichols from Catholic Westminster on Vimeo.

(More videos from Catholic Westminster.)

(via Lawrence Lew [flickr])

Insight Scoop: Dr. Charles E. Rice's commencement address at Christendom College

Zenit: On the Feast of the Ascension
"The Lord, Taking the Road to Heaven, Gives Us a Foretaste of Divine Life"

How we wrecked the oceans

Dave Cohen, Decline of the Empire

Like the Indo-Aryan God Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson is here to turn your comfortable, complacent Mental World upside-down. He's able to do that because we are destroying the Physical World—in this case, the Earth's Oceans.

(original)

Selection from today's Counterpunch

Pam Martens, The Big Plunge: SEC Admits to Inadequate Tools to Conduct Investigation

Franklin C. Spinney, The Arrogance of Ignorance: a Roadmap to Folly in Afghanistan

Patrick Cockburn, Tunnel Darkens for Obama's Afghan War

Ralph Nader, Getting to Know Elena Kagan

Kathy Kelly/Joshua Brollier, Pressured From All Sides in Pakistan's Swat Valley

The Stanford Early Music Singers have a free concert coming June 2. Undoubtedly more details are to come.

Jeff Taylor, Few v. Many: The Topsy-Turvy World of Judicial Demographics

John Dennis v. Dana Walsh

I just listened to a debate between John Dennis and Dana Walsh, who are both contending for nomination to be the Republican candidate running against Nancy Pelosi in November. (The 8th Congressional District.) Alas Ms. Walsh shares the same name as an ill-fated character on 24. Mr. Dennis is more of a libertarian while Ms. Walsh is more of a movement conservative. She wants to reduce government spending but she also supports neocon foreign policy. She also believes energy independence is possible and a goal to be pursued, while Mr. Dennis disagrees. Mr. Dennis unfortunately thinks autarky has been discredited for all goods, and shows now awareness of peak oil or the energy issues industrialized economies face. If I were living in the district I suppose I'd support Mr. Dennis over Ms. Walsh; he is more of a Ron Paul Republican. Despite his economic liberalism he is still a better choice than Ms. Pelosi. But I don't live in that district, so...



His youtube channel.

(Part 1 out of 7 total)


Her channel.

Today the house was visited by Chinese Jehovah's Witnesses and I was the only one home, so I answered the door. (It might have been better if I hadn't -- that's how I think as I write this.) So they made their pitch. At first I was going to listen to them and politely decline their literature, since I didn't really have time--I needed to finish breakfast and get ready for Sunday. But then I decided to actually respond to their questions and give some sort of defense of Catholic (and Jewish and Orthodox) practice regarding the Tetragammaton, God's name as He revealed it to Moses, as they harped on the subject one more time just as they were leaving. I should have asked them to look critically at the canonicity of Sacred Scripture and the question of authority, but I don't think they would have stuck around if I had. (We didn't even touch upon the Holy Trinity.) While we were talking (or while I was answering their questions) I think it was clear to them that they wouldn't be able to make a recruit here and so they were already set upon looking elsewhere. I don't think they'll come back.

I love the claim that they're not out to make converts or get people to change their religion -- they're just out spreading the Good News and telling people what God can do for us to help us with our problems.

I'll grant that they have zeal.

Robert George, Constitutionalism and Supreme Court Justices and Jurisprudence

I just read this piece by Fred Reed on Mexico and its US-imposed drug war: Meddling Where We Oughtn't Yet Again.

More Pedro de Escobar

2 pieces secular music by Pedro de Escobar


Pedro de Escobar (1465-1535) - In nativitate et Epiphanie Domini


VIRGEN BENDITA SIN PAR - Pedro de Escobar (c.1465 - c.1535)