Zmirak on Pius XII

more on the Good War

Tom Piatak, Faith-Based Economy

Faith-Based Economy

New The Andromeda Strain adaptation

website

New season of Dancing with the Stars

started yesterday; ABC official site. You can watch this season's episodes here.

From PopCrunch:

Julianne Hough and... Adam Carolla?!? I'll have to watch the first episode, but I don't think Miss Hough will be winning this season. (JH fan site)

The Philosopher might want to watch Monica Seles (paired with Jonathan Roberts):


And how will Marlee Matlin fare? How will she compete if she can't hear the music? Her partner is Fabian Sanchez.


more photos @Yahoo TV

M. Hutchinson, Sorry, I wasn't pessimistic enough

Sorry, I wasn'tpessimistic enough
Early forecasts of declines in US house prices and of mortgage bad-debt losses have fallen far short of the mark and a far grimmer picture is developing. Losses to come are probably large enough to wipe out the banking system and failure of any one major house could be sufficient to bring down the world economy. - Martin Hutchinson

Sovereign States website

The Sovereign States; features an online edition of James Jackson Kilpatrick's The Sovereign States: Notes of a Virginian and his introduction to We the States.

SIGARMS 556

SIGARMS; 556

SIGARMS 556 forum

Gummy, I'm Sorry

Sandara Park... nice glimpse of her with a chapel veil.

alt

080314

080316:


Live on MNet Countdown, 080318:


Korean RnB Diva, Gummy - I'm Sorry feat. Top (2008.)

[080316]Gummy - I'm Sorry [ft. TOP]

Bacevich picks Obama

The Right Choice?
Barack Obama is no conservative. He’s still the best hope for getting out of Iraq.
by Andrew J. Bacevich

Thomas Storck, Is Economic Justice Possible in this World?

Is Economic Justice Possible in this World?
by Thomas Storck

10 tips for judging the authenticity of ECD

via AB

Real Regency Dancers Don't Turn Single: Ten Tips for Judging Authenticity

Check out the comments, and this post--How Many Times Do We Play That Tune? (Posts with the tags Jane Austen/Regency and Country Dance.)

In defense of the contemporary practice of starting all the couples at once--this would seem more appropriate to the American egalitarian spirit and also to the rather informal nature of EC dancing in the United States. While the participants may form a community of their own, united by a common pastime, it is separate from their geographic community or any other sort of natural/"social" community. Also, how many Americans would be patient enough to wait their turn? If authentic ECD is tied to the culture and hierarchical distinctions of a certain period, should we who are looking for some form of folk dance to counter manufactured entertainment adopt something else? Or can ECD be adapted to a society with different expectations and mores?

Misc:
Elegant Arts Society English Regency Page ; (see Regency Assembly)
Country Dance*New York

Playford Ball -- Dance Instructions

Fr. Foster's Caesar song

heh found this on youtube...

Zmirak and Larison on the Good War

John Zmirak: The Good War
Daniel Larison: About the "Good War," Part 1 and Part 2

Dalrymple, Morality and Spitzer

Theodore Dalrymple

Morality and Spitzer

Michael Scheuer, Marching Through Hell

Free Press

Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq - Michael ...
Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq - Michael ...


Power Line: Marching toward the hell of Michael Scheuer's mind
Battling bin Laden | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com
Haq's Musings: Marching Toward Hell
YouTube - PBS | Tavis Smiley with former CIA Michael Scheuer on Iraq
Marching Toward Hell: Fighting the wrong foe with the wrong ...

Peter Knowles, OP, How monastic life can reinvigorate the Church

How monastic life can reinvigorate the Church

Fr Peter Knowles OP

Eastern Monasticism – Symbolic Synthesis of Christianity (doc)
Monasticism and the Byzantine Church

Rorate Caeli: Fr. Peter Knowles OP: Eternal Memory!
Priest's formidable legacy

Towards the end of his novitiate, Knowles had problems with a superior who didn't think he should be admitted to the order. So he left, returned to Australia and, after a stint as a jackaroo, joined the Dominicans. Their Australian province has been, by and large, a lower middle class, lace curtains, Irish outfit. Some in the order found his manner and his accent off-putting because there was nothing in the least genteel or Irish about either.

Knowles said: "I soon learned to keep quiet and think my own thoughts." But in recent years, meeting novices, he'd sometimes joke that entering the Dominican order was "rather like joining the Austro-Hungarian navy, a splendid institution, which alas no longer exists".

His forebears were Virginian aristocrats. They ill-advisedly sold their American property, including a block on Wall Street in New York, at the turn of the 19th century and moved to Australia. His grandparents, although pious, took a stern view of the clergy and wouldn't have them in the house except when administering the last rites. The family once owned a fine villa in Hill Street, North Adelaide, with Virginian cast-iron black boys out by the carriageway to which visitors could tether their horses. In the late '60s students used to spray anti-racist slogans on them and they were eventually removed. It was a surrender to political correctness which, as an avid reader of The Spectator, he deplored.

Who was Archpriest Peter Knowles OP & why the interest in him ...
photos from the funeral
RIP

Monasticism in the Christian East

AT review of 36 Secret Strategies of the Martial Arts

Ancient tactics for modern battles
The 36 Secret Strategies of the Martial Arts by Hiroshi Moriya with translation and foreword by William Scott Wilson

Reviewed by Michael Jen-Siu

Part 4 of Let's Talk About Dating

Let's Talk About Dating, Part 4: Moving Toward Clarity
by Suzanne Hadley

Mike Whitney, Barley Alive

On Bear Stearns.

Investment Giant Rushed to ICU by Panicky Fed Chief
Bearly Alive

By MIKE WHITNEY

From Patrick Deneen: Big
James Howard Kunstler
Michael Shedlock has more. Doug Noland.

Youtube vid of Fr. Foster

via Fr. Z.


Is that an American accent?

Zenit: Papal Homily for Palm Sunday

Papal Homily for Palm Sunday

"To Recognize God We Must Abandon the Pride That Blinds Us"

VATICAN CITY, MARCH 16, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of the homily Benedict XVI gave at today's Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter's Square.

* * *

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Year after year the Gospel passage for Palm Sunday relates to us Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. Together with his disciples and a growing throng of pilgrims, he ascended from the plain of Galilee to the Holy City. Like steps in this ascent, the evangelists have transmitted three of Jesus' announcements of his passion, using this at the same time to sketch the interior ascent that was also occurring in this pilgrimage. Jesus is on his way to the temple -- toward the place where God, as Deuteronomy says, desired to "establish the dwelling" of his name (cf. 12:11; 14:23). The God who created heaven and earth has given a name, he has made himself available to be called upon, indeed, he has almost made himself touchable by men. No place can contain him and nevertheless, or precisely because of this, he himself gives himself a name, so that he, the true God, can personally be venerated there as the God in our midst.

From the story of the 12-year-old Jesus we know that he loved the temple as the house of his Father, as his paternal house. Now he comes again to this temple, but his journey goes beyond it: The ultimate goal of his ascent is the cross. It is the ascent that the letter to the Hebrews describes as an ascent to the tent that is not made of human hands, to the presence of God. The ascent to the presence of God passes through the cross. It is the ascent to that which is "love to the end" (cf. John 13:1), and is thus God's true mountain, the definitive place of contact between God and man.

During the entry into Jerusalem the people pay homage to Jesus as the Son of David with the words of Psalm 118 [117] of the pilgrims: "Hosanna to the son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest of heavens!" (Matthew 21:9). Then he arrives at the temple. But there, where there should be the space of the meeting between God and man, he finds people selling animals and money changers who use the place of prayer for their business. It is true that the animals being sold there are destined for sacrifice in the temple. And because it was forbidden to use coins in the temple on which there were representations of the emperor, which were in conflict with the true God, it was necessary to exchange them for coins that did not bear idolatrous images.

But all of that could have been done elsewhere: The place that it had now appropriated was supposed to be the atrium for the pagans. The God of Israel was in fact the God of all peoples. And even if the pagans did not enter, so to speak, into the interior of revelation, they could nevertheless, in the atrium, associate themselves with prayer to the one God. The God of Israel, the God of all men, was always also awaiting their prayer, their seeking, their invocation. But now, the atrium was dominated by business, business that had been legalized by the competent authority, an authority which, for its part, had a part of the merchants' earnings.

The merchants were acting in a correct way according to the order that was in force, but the order itself was corrupt. "Greed is idolatry," says the letter to the Colossians (cf. 3:5). It is this idolatry that Jesus encounters and in the face of which he cites Isaiah: "My house shall be called a house of prayer" (Matthew 21:13; cf. Isaiah 56:7) and Jeremiah: "But you have made it a den of thieves" (Matthew 21:13; cf. Jeremiah 7:11). Against the badly interpreted order Jesus, with his prophetic gesture, defends the true order of things that is found in the Law and the Prophets.

As Christians, all of this must make us think today: Is our faith pure and open enough that, beginning from it, the "pagans" -- the persons today who are seeking and have their questions -- can also intuit the light of the one God, can associate themselves with our prayer in the atriums of faith and by their seeking perhaps become worshippers? Does the awareness that greed is idolatry also reach our heart and our life practices? Do we not perhaps also allow idols to enter even into the world of our faith? Are we disposed to let the Lord purify us again and again, allowing him to chase out of us and the Church what is contrary to him?

In the purification of the temple, however, there is more going on than the struggle against abuses. A new moment in history has been foretold. What Jesus had announced to the Samaritan woman in regard to her question about worship is now beginning: "The hour has come, and is now here, in which the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; because the Father seeks such worshippers" (John 4:23). The time in which animals were sacrificed to God has ended. Animal sacrifice had always been a miserable substitution, a gesture of nostalgia for the true way of worshiping God. On the life and work of Jesus the letter to the Hebrews offers as a motto a phrase from Psalm 40 [39]: "You did not want sacrifices or offerings, but a body you prepared for me" (Hebrews 10:5). The body of Christ, Christ himself, enters to take the place of the bloody sacrifices and the food offerings. Only the "love to the end," only the love for men for which he gives himself totally to God, this is the true worship, the true sacrifice. Worshipping in spirit and truth means worshiping in communion with him who is truth; worshipping in the communion of his body, in which the Holy Spirit unites us.

The evangelists tell us that in the trial against Jesus false witnesses are presented and they claim that Jesus said: "I can destroy God's temple and rebuild it in three days" (Matthew 26:61). Before Christ hanging on the cross some scoffers refer to the same words, screaming out: "You who will destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself!" (Matthew 27:40). John, in his account of the purification of the temple, reports the true version of the words, as they came from the mouth of Jesus himself. Responding to a request for a sign, with which the Lord was supposed to legitimize himself, Jesus says: "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it back up" (John 2:18 f.). John adds that, thinking again about this event after the resurrection, the disciples understood that Jesus had spoken of the temple of his body (cf. Jon 2:21 f.) It is not Jesus who destroys the temple; it is left to destruction by the attitude of those who transformed the place of meeting of all peoples with God into a "den of thieves," a place of business.

But, as always from the fall of Adam, the failure of men becomes an occasion for a still greater commitment on the part of God's love in regard to us. The hour of the temple of stone, the hour of the animal sacrifices had been left behind: The fact that Jesus now chases out the merchants does not only impede abuse, but indicates the new action of God. The new temple is formed: Jesus Christ himself, in whom God's love comes down to men. He, in his life, is the new and living temple. He, who passed through the cross and is risen, is the living space of spirit and life in which the right worship is realized. Thus, the purification of the temple, as the culmination of Jesus' solemn entry into Jerusalem is the sign both of the incumbent destruction of the building and the promise of the new temple; the promise of the kingdom of reconciliation and love that, in the communion with Christ, is established beyond every frontier.

St. Matthew, whose Gospel we hear this year, at the end of the Palm Sunday account, after the purification of the temple, reports to little events that have a prophetic character and once more make the true will of Jesus clear to us. Immediately after Jesus' words about the house of prayer of all peoples, the evangelist continues thus: "The blind and the lame drew near to him in the temple and he healed them." Furthermore, Matthew tells us that the children repeated the acclamation that the pilgrims made during the entry into the city: "Hosanna to the son of David!" (Matthew 21:14 f.).

To the trafficking in animals and the money exchange Jesus opposes his goodness that makes well again. It is the true purification of the temple. He does not come as a destroyer; he does not come with the sword of the revolutionary. He comes with the gift of healing. He dedicates himself to those who because of their infirmities have been pushed to the end of their life and to the margins of society. Jesus reveals God as he who loves, and his power as the power of love. And thus he says to us what will always be a part of the true worship of God: healing, serving, the goodness that makes well again.

And then there are the children who pay homage to Jesus as the Son of David and acclaim "Hosanna." Jesus told his disciples that, to enter into the kingdom of God, they had to become like children again. He himself, who embraces the whole world, made himself little to come to us, to direct us toward God. To recognize God we must abandon the pride that blinds us, that wants to drive us far away from God, as if God were our competitor. To meet God it is necessary to become capable of seeing with the heart. We must learn to see with a young heart that is not hindered by prejudices and blinded by interests. Thus, in the little ones who with a similar free and open heart recognize him, the Church has seen the image of the believers of every century, her own image.

Dear friends, in this hour we associate ourselves with the procession of the young people of that time -- a procession that passes through the whole of history. Together with the young people of the whole world let us go to meet Jesus. Let us allow him to guide us to God, to learn from God himself how to be men. With him we thank God, because with Jesus, the Son of David, he has given us a place of peace and reconciliation that embraces the whole world. Let us pray to him that we too become with him and beginning from him messengers of his peace, so that in us and around us his kingdom will grow.

Amen.

[Translation by Joseph G. Trabbic]

John Adams Miniseries on HBO

preview:


John Adams Trailer (HBO)

HBO website

Based on the book by David McCullough.
David McCullough Interview
Audio Interview: David McCullough
David McCullough Interview -- Academy of Achievement
BookPage Interview June 2005: David McCullough
An interview with David McCullough - Charlie Rose
NPR: David McCullough Revisits '1776'
Interview - David McCullough on Leadership - CIO.com - Business ...
'John Adams' doesn't go Hollywood" -- Q&A with David McCullough ...

Looks like most of the reviews so far have been negative:
Houston Chronicle
NPR: Reviewed: HBO's 'John Adams'
USA Today
Newsweek
Sepinwall on TV: 'John Adams' review

Review | John Adams by David McCullough
CNN.com - David McCullough brings 'John Adams' to life - June 7, 2001

Appaloosa

One of the men's fashion magazines out on newsstands this month has a story and cover featuring Viggo Mortensen, who is a member of the cast for Appaloosa. I can't remember which magazine it was, and I haven't been able to find any of the photos accompanying the article on the Internet. Otherwise I would post them, since they are clothes for the Wild Wild West. I did find this photo at least:



The original novel by Robert B. Parker; Robert B. Parker blog.
GreenCine Daily: November 2007 Archives
Ed Harris to Construct "Appaloosa" with Viggo Mortensen and Diane Lane

My sister didn't need me to sit the niece, but I ended up getting up rather early anyway. Didn't do much except surf the net, as usual. I then put in an order for some takeout at Cafe Won Kee, and picked up two baked cha siu bao for niece #1 at Kee Wah.

Then another drive up the peninsula...

When I arrived, my brother-in-law was loading the minivan. I went to the apartment, and my sister started opening up the food containers so we had lunch. The salt & spicy fish filet and pork chops were overcooked (like last time). I don't think I will go to Cafe Won Kee again, if I have a choice. The quality seems to be stuck at this level.

When it was time for them to go, we went down to the garage to the minivan. After I put niece #1 in her carseat, she said, "Kau kau go in back."
I said, "Kau kau has to go home."
"No. Sit in big red car."
"Kau kau has to go home."
Then she started bawling.

Fortunately I had some ice so I used that to distract her, and she started laughing after I pressed it against her face. "Dong bing bing!"

I should be going down there next Sunday for Easter dinner. I hope I can take her to the part then, but she may have a date with the "Easter Bunny."

Darda was packed tonight--I had a craving for green onion pancake, so I ordered 3 to go. 3 was too many--it's ok, but not as good as nan, and there was too much of a flour taste to the pancakes, as if there was too much flour, and not enough water to mix it. Or something. Gordon Ramsay can give the explanation of what went wrong.

HKPRO page on the HK416

Sarge, you should check it out and see what Vickers says about it.