Metropolitan Hilarion's Visit to Greece

Metropolitan Hilarion celebrates at Agia Sophia in Athens
Metropolitan Hilarion concludes his working visit to Greece

Misc:
Easter at Holy Virgin Cathedral in SF


Hierarchical Divine Liturgy - St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church - Wilkes-Barre, PA

Ancient Byzantian-Russian Liturgy Russian Orthodox [Znamenny chant - demestvennaya polyphony]

From last year: Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk begins his visit to the Greek Orthodox Church

Valaam, The Jesus Prayer

John Tavener's 'Prayer of the Heart' with Bjork

Κύριε Ιησού Χριστέ, Υιέ του Θεού, ελέησόν με.

Quickly Quickly Expanding?

The number of locations, especially in Asianland (i.e. Cupertino) is astounding, especially with this economy. But its clientele is probably weathering the economic storm without too many problems, for now.

wiki

There is a YT channel.

Part 1D of Back of the Stone Age

Here

Something from Mark Richardson: Planet nation

Peter Hitchens on the Police

Whom Do the Police Serve? and Part 2

From the first part:

The modern belief among police officers that they are a special corps or squad, and that the rest of us are ‘civilians’, is very damaging, and utterly contradicts Sir Robert Peel’s original (and still valid) view of what a British police constable should be. The changes in law and practice that led to this state of affairs are explained in my book. My critics should read it, especially before accusing me of ignorance. Meanwhile, stay safe.

A Brief History of Crime or The Abolition of Liberty.

City Question Time with Peter Hitchens (Part 1)
City Question Time with Peter Hitchens (Part 2)

Lone Ranger trailer

They're aiming to make a more authentic-looking Tonto? Did they succeed? Is his appearance historically accurate? As for the film, I don't see them avoiding the excesses of the Pirates of the Carribean series. Whatever the flaws of the 1980 movie, at least it was more in the spirit of an old Western. This new movie is in the hyperkinetic style of MTV-inspired movie-makers, Michael Bay, or Quentin Tarantino. I don't think it fits the style of the American Western. Whatever Disney touches, it ruins.

Cowboys and Indians
HitFix - New 'Lone Ranger' images featuring Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer

Something for Person of Interest:
Person of Interest - Jonathan Nolan & Greg Plageman Interview

The Bankesters, "Don't Try To Be Anyone Else"

Their website.

News about St. Elias

See the September Newsletter.

"On 30 September, Fr Dennis Smolarski, SJ, from Santa Clara University, will serve the Divine Liturgy at St Elias Church. The first Sunday Liturgy served by Fr George Khoury will be on 7 October."


News item and video with Fr. George?

Arabic Christian Literature

Related:
Melkite Patriarch Gregorios Divine Liturgy in Rome

The pastor of St. George in Sacramento is a bi-ritual Dominican.

Items of Interest, 2 October 2012

Mystagogy: Japanese Fighter Baptized Orthodox Christian

Catholic Music: It’s Time to Stop Making Stuff Up by Jeffrey Tucker

Tea With Honey But Not in Jerusalem: The Archbishop of Canterbury Makes His Peace With Post-Christian England by Tracey Rowland

Veteran Soldiers Go Organic

Thaddeus Kozinski, Jacques Maritain, the HHS Mandate, and the Failure of American Pluralism

Eugene Genovese:
Redeeming the Time by Eugene D. Genovese
The New Republic: From the Archives: Eugene Genovese on Eric Hobsbawm
The Squandered Century
by Eugene Genovese
Paul Gottfried, Eric Hobsbawm and the Totalitarian Double Standard

AmCon:
More from Rod Dreher on the SSJ
Jack Hunter, Whatever Happened to Civil Liberties?
Kevin Gutzman, Misjudging Rehnquist
PJB, Obama’s Foreign Policy Unravels

Counterpunch:
Ralph Nader, Rigging the Presidential Debates
Paul Craig Roberts, Cynthia McKinney on Leadership

[Intellectual] Property:
An interview with Silke Helfrich: “We have to reformulate the role of the state as enabler of the commons”
Is Property Theft?

Automobiles and Driving:
Dmitry Orlov, In Praise of Anarchy, Part 1
Occupy the Motor Industry

Music:
Psy Talks ‘Gangnam Style’ and Newfound Fame
Waylon Jennings: The 'Last Recordings' Of A Dreamer

Square Dance History Project Launches New Website - here

Machiavellian

Dr. Fleming elucidates:

By Machiavellian, I am referring specifically and only to a tradition of political analysis that studies how elite classes gain and hold power. Machiavellians may hold quite contrasting political views--Mosca was a rightist, while Sorel was a leftist agitator and Gramsci a Communist. One false dichotomy, often made by the Straussians and those infected with their lies, is between ancient political thought that was rooted in the virtues and the Machiavellians who are interested in power. In fact, it is the nature of the commonwealth that has changed and not the terms of political analysis. The state--a word first used either by NM or in his time--is something new in the world, a political corporation owned by an elite class. I do not say this is a bad thing, only that the Tuscan and other city-states were a new form of government. Therefore, I am not talking about a cynical pursuit of power but a realistic assessment of political motives and strategy.

World Maker Faire 2012: John Robb,"Building Resilient Communities"

Edit. John Robb, 2012 Maker Faire Presentation + 3 Ways to Turn Ideas into Products

Interview with the Former President of Shell Oil

Hofmeister: A difficult decade ahead for oil prices and supplies by Robert Rapier (EB)

Related:
Citizens for Affordable Energy
Why We Hate the Oil Companies

Videos after the jump:

Eliminating "Culinary" Choices

Had a Royal Robin (monster) at Red Robin; my mother had the basic grilled chicken salad. The salad definitely was not worth the price. There are better salads at BJ's, and for the price, even the Costco salad is a more appealing alternative. The RR salad did not taste fresh - rather it tasted like it had been refrigerated from several days, and the grilled chicken tasted carbonized. Can I say the burgers at ROAM taste better? Maybe not, but I didn't feel repelled by the burgers at ROAM like I did last night, for whatever reason. The patties did not taste that seasoned this time around, and the fried egg did not enhance the flavor.

Perhaps I am starting to lose my craving for hamburgers. At this rate, I will soon have no more local restaurants to visit. I don't see any reason to go back to RR.


Related:
Paleo Mayonaise
Something on fluoride and dental care.

Infamous Stringdusters - "The Place That I Call Home"

CMT
website

The Post-Liberal Agenda by Phillip Blond

ResPublica

About Bravo Company Manufacturing

website

25th Anniversary of St. Basil the Great Church

My mother and I attended Sunday liturgy yesterday which was part of the special 3-day celebration commemorating the anniversary of the parish and honoring the Holy Protection of the Mother of God, and ending today with the observance of that feast. Bishop Gerald Dino was visiting the parish for the three days, and the local Roman bishop, Bishop Patrick McGrath was a guest at Sunday's liturgy.

At the reception, the parish's first pastor mentioned the local Orthodox church of the same patron. When the Ruthenian Catholic bishop of the time revealed his plans to establish a new parish in the area, he had asked the missionary priest who became the pastor to think of a name, one that was not taken by a RC church or by an Orthodox church. He thought St. Basil the Great was not taken, but it turns out that a Greek Orthodox community, with which he was familiar, had also been erected as a parish around the same time and their patron was St. Basil the Great as well.

He also mentioned that out of the 30 or so people in the original core group, only 2 remained. I don't know if the others passed on or if they moved out of the area.

My mother has attended Byzantine-rite liturgies before, but yesterday she mentioned that she was struck by the (beauty of?) the liturgy, so much so that she is thinking of going to Sunday liturgy more regularly.

Yesterday I was feeling that while I was hesitant about fully committing to changing rites, there seemed little reason for me to turn back (unless an Anglican-use parish came into being here, or if I moved closer to one).

The Byzantine-rite liturgy is certainly much more "traditional," even though it is in the vernacular (English), than the OF of the Roman rite in contemporary practice, and so it is more appealing to those who seek to ground their Christian identity and practice upon something that has been transmitted through time.

I've been to Our Lady of Fatima in SF; I would still like to visit St. Elias at least once, to see what the community is like. The Ukrainian Catholic Mission is too small and the liturgy is celebrated primarily in Ukrainian. The liturgies at Our Lady of Fatima and St. Basil the Great are mostly in English, and so they can have a broader appeal to those whose primary language is English. Can the Eastern rites in English be the foundation for the establishing of a distinctive Anglo-American liturgical rite? Could it be possible to adapt one of the Western [sacred] music forms to the Byzantine rite?

N Huynh came up to me at recess today and asked if I know Girls Generation. I said I did, and she was asking me about "Oh!" and "Gee" - she said she knew the dance moves but was a bit too shy to show all of them to me. Funny girl. One of her classmates, K, also knows about Girls Generation and T-Ara as well. They're third-graders and Vietnamese... so hallyu continues to have an impact...

Part 1C of Back to the Stone Age

Dr. Fleming's series on paleoconservatism.

2 The Machiavellian Approach. One of the greatest contributions to American conservative thought was James Burnham's book The Machiavellians. It had a profound influence on Burnhams's most important student, Samuel T. Francis. Machiavelli, particularly in his Commentaries on the Decades of Titus Livius, offered significant insights into the nature of power and the difficulty of acquiring or maintaining political liberty. This method of analysis was extended and deepened by Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, the German-turned-Italian Roberto Michels, and the French Syndicalist Georges Sore--among others, including Sam Francis and Burnham himself.

What the Machiavellians have taught us to see is the significance of elite classes. According to Michels' "Iron Law of Oligarchy," there is only one form of government, namely, oligarchy. A monarch depends on an aristocracy to carry out his will and support his authority, while so-called democracies cannot be governed in any practical sense either by the people as a whole or by their elected representatives, unless the representative body is fairly small, coherent, and empowered for decades, in which case it forms an oligarchy.

Machiavellians are not necessarily cynical power-seekers; on the contrary, they typically believe in republican government and cherish political liberty, but they refuse to be taken in by surface illusions or rhetoric about democracy, equality, and human rights. While on the surface, political debates may seem like conflicts between angels and demons or an argument between two sorts of idealists, the reality is generally more sordid. Advocates of women's rights may really want to make them sexual slaves or ill-paid laborers; champions of democracy and liberty may be scheming to acquire a totalitarian power that they will claim to be based on the will of the people.

When James Henry Hammond was defending slavery in the US Senate a northern opponent boasted that in the North they had eliminated slavery. "Yes," retorted Hammond, "the name but not the thing." Hammond was, obviously, defending an economic system on which he had grown very rich, but my point is not to defend or excuse slavery but to point to a reality that my friend Eugene Genovese so brilliantly revealed in books like Roll, Jordan Roll: the World the Slaves Made, and in his subsequent investigations into the mind of antebellum slave-holders. Genovese was, in those days, a Machiavellian Marxist who viewed both sets of arguments, for and against slavery, as so much ideological posturing to defend two sets of regional class interests, those of Southern slaveholders and those of Northern capitalists and industrialists.

Inevitably, those who have looked with jaundiced eyes at the reality of minority rights movements, as Sam Francis did, have been condemned as bigots. Perhaps some of them were or are, but that is hardly the point. What is most deeply offensive in palaeoconservative thought is not the failure to celebrate the empowerment of minorities but the refusal to admire the emperor's new clothes and the insistence that while leftist politicians may have changed the names, political power still rests on the pursuit of power and the exploitation of the weak. They have learned from the ancients, from Herodotus and Aristotle, that it is the mark of a tyrant to elevate the poor and the weak as part of their project of disempowering their only real rivals, people of high social status, ability, or integrity.

Contra the Straussians and Catholics influenced by them, Dr. Fleming has much respect for Machiavelli as a political thinker.

Also from Dr. Fleming today: Romney's Last Chance

Wendell Berry, Inverting the Economic Order

The Progressive

Interesting discussion of Berry, Herman Daly and Keynes at the Respublica US FB group.

Missed AK again...

Alison Krauss was performing in Mountain View yesterday. Ah well, tickets were probably too expensive. She and her group are performing in Rohnert Park tonight.

Some videos taken by fans last night -






Misc:

Ian McPherson, Peak Oil: The 9 Billion Ton Hamster

Aussie accent!

End of Watch

(JoBlo)

Roger Ebert
Move Over, Roger Ebert: Ex-LAPD Chief Bill Bratton on 'End of Watch' and Other Cop Dramas

official
FB

Did Spyderco pay to have product placement in the movie? JG's character advertises his Spyderco tactical knife, but I only caught a quick glimpse and did not see the trademark hole. Was it this knife, the Embassy, or this one, the Citadel? (Or a different one entirely?) (To be honest, when I first saw it I was thinking the knife resembled something by Kershaw or another company.)

And then there were the Oakley sunglasses. (Naturally!)

I saw this movie two Fridays ago, when it was first released. It is a movie that portrays LAPD in a good light, rather than a bad one. Documentary/found footage filming style is mixed in with other shots; it can be annoying at times. The big appeal of the movie? Law enforcement but also the fraternithy that exists between the two patrol officers at the center of the movie - Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Zavala (Michael Peña).

For me and probably many other men, it's a prime example of mass entertainment being on occasion of living vicariously. This explains the popularity of cop and war movies, TV shows, and the link - the fantasy of chasing bad guys, being a warrior, defending a friend or quasi-adopted brother.

It is a suitable contrast with another movie that is still playing in the theaters, The Expendables 2, which features various action stars of the '80s and '90s and is a throwback to the excesses of the action movie genre of those decades. Cartoon violence and over-the-top machismo is to be expected (though there is a concession to feminism in the form of Nan Yu. It may be a guilty pleasure for those who miss '80s actions movies, but I didn't appreciate it as such. I wanted more realistic action. (I will have to wait for Zero Dark Thirty.) It is hard to take Sylvester Stallone and a bunch of mostly old men walk around and shoot things up as mercenaries, and for me Expendables 2 was a waste of an hour and half of time.

I am hesitant about recommending End of Watch because I don't know if it is good enough to justify the time and money spent. It certainly would appeal to men, especially desk jockeys, who want to live like real men. The obvious coarseness in speech and use of profanity reminds us of the loss of refined civility in the younger generations, not just among the gangsters but also those in the police force. "It's in the nature of the job," one might say, referring to soldiers and the like, for men in such circumstances to be a bit rough around the edges. Even the patrol sergeant uses profanity.

Should profanity never be used? At least it should be limited, reserved for those occasions (or people) that warrant it, along with justified anger and scorn. In this liberal atomized collective, there is much to be angry about.

The female officers share in the coarseness of culture as well, perhaps to fit in and be like men, engaging in trash talk and displaying an air of toughness or false bravado, despite America Ferrera saying that this imitation isn't an aspect of women being in law enforcement. She lies, if we are to take her portrayal seriously.

She and her partner are both women - how often is it that female officers are doubled-up? Seems like a disaster waiting to happen, just like that incident in France. How decadent is a society when it doesn't take its defense seriously enough to put the best-suited to do that work, relying instead on those who overestimate themselves thanks to ideology, narcissism, and coddling?

I did see a pair of female police officers getting lunch in Brooklyn - they were both much shorter than me and rather overweight. (Members of minority ethnic groups as well.) Would a hardened criminal be unable to use force against them in order to escape?

*spoiler warning*

There is one female rookie, who is perceived by the two veteran female officers as not being cut out from the job - "She never would have made it past probation." The rookie ends up getting beaten by someone much bigger than her, after her partner is disabled with a knife (to the eye). She quits, handing her badge to the sergeant before she is taken away in an ambulance. She stands in opposition to the two veterans, who are cold, "without a soul." How many women are by disposition more like the rookie than the two veteran females? Why shouldn't the threat of violence and danger be used to weed out unsuitable candidates, both male and female, while they are in the academy, perhaps even before? While the movie seems to take the stand that women who can do the job should be hired to do it, it alludes to the reality that most women are not physically or psychologically capable.

The two veteran females are contrasted with the officers' wives (played by Natalie Martinez and Anna Kendrick), who are much more feminine. Still, even they engage in some candid raunch, with the wife giving "marital advice" to the newlywed. It's played for humor and the advice-giver is slightly drunk, but it is still embarrassing (as shown by the reaction of the advice-giver's husband) and reflects poorly on the character. (Her class background shouldn't be an excuse.)

I did think more about some of the other real-life issues that are featured in the story.

1. For example, the movie touches upon "black flight," with Mexican-Americans pushing blacks out of areas in Los Angeles that were formerly majority-black. How strong are the gangs in Los Angeles? Los Angeles may not be a bankrupt municipality yet, but if that happens, will we see some the rise of gangs as non-state entities providing services to the local populace?

While the Mexican cartels have not brought over their chilling and gruesome practices to the United States, is it likely that they will do so in the future? Will there be targeted assassination of law enforcement officers, judges, federal agents, and the like, especially if Mexico does become a failed state and the cartels gain the upper hand? What impact will the ending of the war in Mexico against drugs have on the violence there and the power of the cartels?

Mexico Dissolves Its FBI, Moves to Legalize Drugs

2. Is the wearing of a tiara for a teenager celebrating her quinceañera typical? Does it transform the coming-of-age ceremony into a celebration of the Latina princess mentality? I am reminded of the reality shows of teens celebrating their birthdays by spending a lot of money (their parents') on lavish parties in expensive settings and so on. Maybe an average quinceañera isn't so bad, but does the culture recognize the duties and responsibilities of adult women, including the necessity to make a wise choice in selecting a husband? Or is that just an afterthought? Is adulthood just some sort of independence characterized by conspicuous consumption? How much of feminism has infiltrated quinceañeras and Latino (or Mexican[-American]) culture in general?

3. If Anglo culture is rejected in favor of ghetto culture as a part of a separate identity, then how can there be "assimilation"? In times of prosperity two separate groups can exist peacefully with one another despite having very little interaction, but what happens in harsh times, when they have to compete with each other for necessities of life?

4. After Zavala saves two children from a burning house, he is chewed out by his wife: "Why are you willing to die for someone else's kid, when you're about to have one of your own?" Those who made the film might expect the audience to sympathize with the cop, because he's "serving the community" and doing his "duty," but her words deserve some consideration by those in law enforcement or thinking of going into law enforcement. Would the (single?) mom have paid him (or his family) back for the debt she owes him? Would she have provided support for his wife and child, if he had died trying to save her children? Probably not. How can there be community when people come and go, and have no sense of obligation to one another? Does his willingness to sacrifice himself for a stranger make sense when that stranger has no ties or obligations to him or to his family?



Trailer after the jump:

Macross FB7 Trailer

Macross 30 will be a game, not a series; but the FB7 movie will be released shortly.



Macross 30 Teaser Trailer Shows Promotional Artwork

Steep Canyon Rangers, "Long Shot"