OB thinks that the cockroaches that are literally at our doorstep originated from another house in the neighborhood. They must have fled after the occupants called in an exterminator and fumigated the house or something. Do I recall seeing anything like that in the last couple of months? Anyway, cockroaches elicit a reaction of disgust. Is this a natural response or if it is acquired? At any rate I was forced to take measures into my own hands and I laid down several layers of ant & roach killer spray in front of the door and garage; it has been rather effective but I am almost out of spray, so I may have to go to Home Depot this week to pick up another can.

Nasty.

Catholic republicanism?

Some interesting comments left by David Lindsay to this post by Daniel Larison, Hardly A Conservative Model:

As John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits; shall we not have swarms of them here, in as many shapes and disguises as ever a king of gypsies himself assumed?” As Jefferson replied, “their restoration makes a retrograde step from light towards darkness.”

The strange popular superstition that the Founding Fathers were devout Christians – prophets and apostles whose works, especially the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, are for all practical purposes part of the Canon of Scripture – urgently needs to be exploded. But 1776 predates 1789. The American Republic is not a product of the Revolution. Nevertheless, it sits under a radically orthodox theological critique, most obviously by reference to pre-Revolutionary traditions of Catholic and Protestant republican thought, on the Catholic side perhaps Venetian, on the Protestant side perhaps Dutch, and on both sides perhaps at cantonal level in Switzerland, where it is possible that such thought might hold sway even now.

Furthermore, Catholics, High Churchmen, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others retained, long after any hope of a Stuart restoration had died, grave reservations about the Hanoverian State, its Empire, that Empire’s capitalist ideology, and the slave trade integral to it. Far more Jacobites went into exile from these islands than Huguenots sought refuge here. Very many of them ended up in North America. New York seems the most obvious place to look for them, being named after its initial proprietor as a colony, the future James VII and II. However, there were many Jacobite Congregationalists, such as Edward Roberts, the exiled James’s emissary to the anti-Williamite Dutch republics, and Edward Nosworthy, a gentleman of his Privy Council both before and after 1688.

There was that Catholic enclave, Maryland. And there was Pennsylvania: almost, if almost, all of the Quakers were at least initially Jacobites, and William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four times between 1689 and 1691. Many Baptists were also Jacobites, and the name, episcopal succession and several other features of the American Episcopal Church derive, not from the Church of England, but from the staunchly Jacobite Episcopal Church in Scotland, which provided the American Colonies with a bishop, Samuel Seabury, in defiance of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian monarchy to which it was attached.

The American Republic, as such, therefore stands, in every sense radically, in the same tradition as Britain’s campaign against the slave trade, Radical Liberal action against social evils, extension of the franchise, creation of the Labour Movement, and opposition to the Boer and First World Wars: radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy. It still does.

(Also posted at his own blog.)

And:

You can treat the Founding Fathers as if they were the Apostles, or you can treat the Apostles as if they were the Apostles. But you cannot do both. At the end of the day, Jefferson et al were, among other things, Deists and particularly ferocious anti-Catholics.

That does not invalidate everything that they ever wrote. But it does require that their work, including the Declaration of Independence and including the Constitution, be understood, like every other document or artefact in the world, under the higher authority of Sacred Scripture within Sacred Tradition. Where the two conflict, then that of divine as well as human origin and authority (it’s a Christological thing) obviously takes precedence over that of purely human origin and authority. Jefferson, I am afraid, is bound to come out of that particularly badly.

Providentially, there exist Catholic and Protestant pre-Revolutionary republican traditions on which to draw in redeeming the American republican tradition, which is also pre-Revolutionary, since 1776 came before 1789. And there were the doubts about Hanoverian legitimacy within the traditions definitive of communities significant in America both before and after the Colonial period, doubts which undoubtedly contributed to the popular reception of the ideas of the Founding Fathers, since it is very difficult to see what else about them – socioeconomically, culturally, philosophically, theologically – can have had much, if any, popular appeal. Jefferson, frankly, least of all.

If Mr. Lindsay could elaborate on these Catholic and Protestant pre-Revolutionary republican traditions...

Which chicken?

Mark Sisson, Choosing Chicken: A Primal Purchasing Guide

Heather MacDonald on HIP

Classical Music’s New Golden Age (via The Western Confucian)

But regardless of such disagreements, the value of the movement to our musical life has been indisputable. It has unleashed arguably the most concentrated rediscovery of lost music in history. Composers that had lain silent for centuries—Jean-Féry Rebel, Johann Friedrich Fasch, Heinrich Ignaz Biber, to name just a handful—are heard again. Hundreds of groups of specialists are busily digging into twelfth-century plainchant and thirteenth-century troubadour traditions. Unfamiliar repertoire by overly familiar composers is also being restored. The Naïve label, in one of the greatest recording projects of the early-music movement, is releasing all of Vivaldi’s operas. A wind blows through these magnificent, mostly unpublished works, but even when the rhythms are most propulsive, a deep melancholy pervades the music. Naïve’s recording of the haunting duet for mezzo and chalumeau (a proto-clarinet) from the oratorio Juditha Triumphans, “Veni, me sequere fida,” is alone a contribution to civilization.

The public’s ear for this music has expanded accordingly. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a few aristocratic salons hosted private performances of Renaissance and early baroque music, but outside those elite settings, there was no commercial demand for pre-Classical music. Today, by contrast, enough people are eager for works from remote eras to put the medieval a cappella ensemble Anonymous 4 on the top of Billboard charts. Jordi Savall’s Renaissance music group Hesperion XXI brings audience members to their feet during performances. Early-music festivals have even reached Missoula, Montana, where Heinrich Schütz’s Musikalisches Exequien was performed in March 2010, and Indianapolis, which offered Spanish ballads from the time of Cervantes in June 2010. The New York vocal group Polyhymnia invites its audience to “glimpse behind the tapestried walls of the ducal court at Munich, to hear the psalms kept for the private use of their patron,” assuming in their listeners the same desire to know the past that animates the performers themselves. Amateurs also perform this previously discarded music. Camps teaching medieval chant are ubiquitous, from Evansville, Indiana, to Litchfield, Connecticut. Reed, viol, and lute players can brush up on their skills at the Summer Texas Toot in Austin; San Jose, California, hosts a workshop for recorder players.

More:
H&H Society: Historically Informed Performance
Discussion at Bach-Cantatas.com
What is Early Music?
"Historically Informed" Performance: Who Says, and Why Must It Be
Centre for Research into Historically-Informed Performance
Period Performance Practice
Medieval and Renaissance Instruments
Period instruments

The PIPE List
Authentic Performance Recording Labels
Period Instrument Orchestras, Choruses & Operas | Early Music America
Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra
Period instruments - The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Baroque Band Chicago's period-instrument orchestra

"Authentic" baroque music performance: comment and research
Welcome to the HIP-ocrisy Home Page!

Another criticism of contemporary American ideals of female beauty

AskMen.com’s Top Babes: Ravishing or Roadkill? by Scott Locklin

The author voices a popular complaint I've seen written by many elsewhere:

Miz Miller brings up an issue I’ve noticed with more than one female celebrity: there often seems to be something, well, endocrinologically wrong with these women. They have ... square jaws, arms, deranged avian expressions on their faces, masculine brow-ridges; they look, well, male. I’m no endocrinologist, but I do have a few speculations about this; and I thoroughly believe these women have testosterone levels higher than most male physicists I’ve worked with.

How did they get this way? Well, I know for a fact that lots of female athletes and celebrities take anabolic steroids. Why would they do this? Well, for one thing, the more androgens you have in your body, the easier it is to shed body fat. That’s why teenage boys are so skinny. An agreeable side effect of androgen use is they also make you insanely horny. Probably, this makes hot tub parties more fun. Again, think about teenaged boys for example. Because I’m pretty sure what you’re looking at in a good fraction of AskMen’s top 99—genetic females who are endocrinological teenaged boys with plastic jahoobies sewed on. While it’s probably fun sleeping with women who hoover anavar off of Brad Pitt’s forearms, the long term results aren’t pretty. Unless you like women whose jawline you can exfoliate on.

I agree with his comments about American movie stars of the past:

This state of affairs wasn’t always so. Women in the golden age of cinema were amazing creatures. Hedy LaMarr, in addition to oozing feminine sexuality, was a bona fide genius. She invented spread spectrum radio transmission along with composer George Antheil. What modern “empowered” Hollyweird celebritard has done anything remotely approaching this? Veronica Lake, despite being respectably clothed in all of her appearances on the old movies was a sex goddess. Through the mists of time, her high cheekbones, sultry looks, lovely figure and natural gushing femininity arouse my admiration far more than any of the women featured in AskMen’s list.

These women of yesteryear were lovely, elegant, feminine and sexual without being trashy. They didn’t have personal trainers, plastic surgeons or even much in the way of makeup compared to today. Heck, they didn’t even have proper brazierrres in those days; yet these old school movie stars are far more attractive than the modern celebritards. You might argue I’m taking some exemplars, but go look at the lady sidekicks on a three stooges movie: obscure women from the golden era of cinema. I’d take any of ‘em over the entire AskMen top 99 slathered in crisco and delivered on a fork truck to my chambers.

One proposal for immigration law reform

The Alien Among Us: A Conservative Christian Perspective by Jonathan Moore

An argument for increased immigration that is more libertarian than conservative.

Items of Interest, 20 July 2010

Miss Korea contestants take part in a fashion show organized to support Pyeongchang's bidding for the 2018 Winter Olympics at the resort city in Gangwon Province on Friday. (Chosun Ilbo)

Something on Shifu Cloth. (via World Fair Trade Organization FB.)
10 Standards of Fair Trade

Rob Hopkins, A Review of Local Money by Peter North

Daniel Larison, Realist Roots and Romney and Palin

Lawrence Lew, O.P., Videos on Dominican life

Allan Carlson, Centralization (via The Western Confucian)

Stewart J. Lawrence, Why Obama's "Secure Communities" Program May be More Dangerous Than Arizona

Tim Hetherington On The Injuries at Rock Avalanche

A piece on Count Helmuth James von Moltke.
Jerry Salyer, “The Gestapo and the SS Have Done Us An Appreciable Service”: Egalitarian Western Liberals & The July 20 Plot (originally published at Brussels Journal)

Chosun Ilbo:
Miss Korea Has Universal Ambitions
Korean Songs Replace Dramas as Latest Fad in Japan

Korea Times:
F-22 Raptor to join naval drill in Korean seas
Charice, from girl-next-door to diva
Dispute over corporal punishment hits school

Asia News:
Religions united for the environment against Four Major Rivers Restoration Project
by Theresa Kim Hwa-young
Catholics, Protestants and Buddhists are working together to stop the project. Strongly backed by the South Korean government, the scheme could destroy the ecosystem of the country’s major river systems. Masses, demonstrations and prayer vigils are held for strictly religious reasons.

Licence to practice not renewed for lawyers who defend human rights or Falun Gong
Each year, Chinese lawyers must have local bar associations renew their licence to practice. Last year and even more so this year, renewal has been often rejected or made very difficult for lawyers who defend Tibetans, pro-rights activists or Falun Gong members.

Patriarch Kirill’s visit to Ukraine with an eye on the Vatican by Nina Achmatova

Asia Times:
Sex vs God in the Philippines
The long-standing debate about sex education in the Philippines is heating up, with the government and Catholic Church at loggerheads over plans to integrate discussions on human reproduction into elementary and high school curriculums. Muslims have also joined the opposition, while supporters say issues concerning the country's runaway population growth should be paramount. - Jennee Grace U Rubrico

Amid war talk, arms buildup continues
Talk of an Israeli strike against Iran won't go away, despite the latest rounds of sanctions placed on Tehran aimed at avoiding just such an offensive. In Lebanon meanwhile, where Israel still has unfinished business, Hezbollah is reported to be acquiring a large number of game-changing missile launchers. - David Moon

Iran blames US for mosque attack
After at least 30 people were killed at a Shi'ite mosque in the latest in a series of bloody attacks, Iran pointed the finger at US backing for Jundallah, the Sunni group that claimed responsibility for the double bombing. United States officials have long denied Washington supports the group. To some analysts, their denials are unconvincing. - Jim Lobe

The folly of common currencies
Europe should not be surprised at the difficulty it faces in maintaining a common currency across widely divergent economies. The examples of Argentina and Hong Kong in their efforts to peg their currencies to that of another country should have been lesson enough. - Henry CK Liu

Countdown to Zero

Apple


Take Part Social Action Network
2010 Sundance

A sad video

The one who uploaded this video writes in response to a viewer query, "This monk is good. Is he alone in the church?": "Yes. At the end he was alone. Now this abbey  is already closed."

Some recent news about Mariawald

Traditional Vocations Blog: Monastic Studies at Mariawald

(I was prompted to look for some info by something Bishop Fellay said -- see this post by Fr. Z.)

official site for the monastery





Related:
Damian Thompson
International Trappist Association

Second thoughts about Texas

via Michael Shedlock: Texas Budget Mess Now as Bad as California's

Russell Kirk on Robert A. Taft

The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft, by Russell Kirk and James McClellan (Google Books)

Troy MacGillivray at the Shetland Folk Festival 2007

His website.

The Cottars

Their website. MySpace. Blog?







Something for Sarge from UStream:
Taylor Swift - "Fearless" + Fan Q&A Webcast this Tuesday, July 20th at 2:00pm PT // 5:00pm ET http://www.ustream.tv/taylorswift

The New American Mob by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Chronicles

Liberalism as a political movement (it never was a political philosophy, for the very good reason that it fails to approach the level of philosophy at all) never made sense in spite of the fact that the majority of Americans since the War Between the States have been liberals, whether they knew it or not. It took what James Kalb calls advanced liberalism, coming in the last quarter of the 20th century, to bring the American public to a sort of political Great Awakening, in which they find themselves, somewhat groggily, shaking themselves and rubbing their eyes. Or rather, one half of the American public, the other having converted—as it seems, irredeemably—to the advanced-liberal ideology, which is really the old liberalism stretched and distorted and pummeled from its youthful naive falsity into senile surrealism. The arrival of advanced liberalism has divided the United States between the New and the Old America, a division that is unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future but is becoming, rather, more fixed and rigid. Liberalism in the era of Obama represents for the Old American culture what Islam does for the culture of Old Europe. “[B]e­tween us and you there is a great gulf fixed . . . ” Liberals blame an unenlightened reactionary mass for the divide, but in truth the fault is theirs, and all theirs. Advanced liberalism demands that people think, believe, and act in ways that it is simply unnatural for human beings to think, believe, and act, and it is unlikely that it will win over a greater proportion of Americans to those ways than it has managed thus far to do. The battle lines have been drawn. America is fated to remain a house divided against herself for many generations, and afterward to share the inevitable fate of all divided houses, which are by nature ungovernable, and hence unlivable.

A century and a half ago the United States wasted the greatest opportunity in American history to divide peacefully into two geographic sections, each left to go its own way. Our ancestors had their chance, and they threw it aside. (Had they not, the fastidious Yankees of our own time would enjoy the inestimable satisfaction of requiring the Neanderthal Confederates to obtain visas before traveling north.) For four terrible years, the United States suffered the War Between the States. That was terrible enough, but that was all it was—a conflict between two discrete opposing unions. Today, she faces the prospect of real civil war, a war among citizens that cannot be settled by the physical separation of the adherents of the two sides, who, to a greater or a lesser degree, are integrated one with the other across an entire continent. The day may yet come when America will rue the chance she long ago refused, to separate what Orestes Brownson called the personal or barbaric democracy of the South from the humanitarian democracy of the North. (He preferred the first kind.) The problem then was a simple one, and so was the solution. Today, it has become an impossible problem, for which there is no imaginable solution. Modern Americans do indeed exhibit a tendency to settle in communities according to their own kind—not just racially and ethnically compatible communities but politically agreeable ones as well. (One thinks of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Salt Lake City.) But these demographic self-rearrangements are insufficient to the scope of the difficulty, save on a statewide basis, in which case the resulting blocs of states would be unlikely to enjoy a convenient geographic contiguity. Whatever the solution—if there is a solution—turns out to be, it is clearly impossible that the United States should continue as she is going, trapped in a state of radical instability and wracked by the most profound public dissensions and animosities that inevitably acquire a personal dimension.

The Tea Party, as I have said, is not an agent of political change. It is an expression of a widespread popular demand for a kind of political and social reformation that has yet even to begin to be formulated in a conscious and deliberate way and coupled to a political vehicle devised more or less expressly for itself: a collection of loosely affiliated raiding parties, not an organized army fighting for a determined collective goal. Thus, the need seems to be for the eventual identification of some such goal, and the creation of a political movement capable of achieving it. Unfortunately, the times are probably not ripe for these developments. John Lukacs’s maxim that change within democratic polities always comes slowly may be soon tested. The United States, indeed, has changed radically, and with radical speed, in the past 60 years, and no one can say where she is going (except to likely disaster) and how fast she is going there. For this reason, the Tea Party’s essentially reactive, ad hoc, short-term strategy may be just what is wanted, for now. Perhaps, following this strategy that is in fact no strategy at all, it may help to create a political climate in this country from which some big political thing may arise. The Tea Party, and whatever friends and allies it may succeed in scrounging up for itself, are unlikely to create a true political party and less likely still ever to control the government, while the prospect of their establishing a ruling elite, as Sam Francis hoped his Middle American Radicals might do someday, is a near social and political impossibility. The New Class rules because it is necessary to the New America it has created, and, so long as the New America survives, the New Class has nothing finally to fear from the Tea Party and its sympathizers. This raises the great question whether the New America is actually sustainable, socially, economically, and politically speaking; or whether, as Edward Abbey put it 30 years ago, our only hope might not be catastrophe.

I don't know why you like this town so much, Sarge.

Actually, I do know what Boston's charms are for you. Alas, you don't see too much of the town in the trailer, but your alter ego Blake Lively does appear in it.

Ben Affleck does Heat.

Apple

official site

Film trailer: Ben Affleck's 'The Town' with Jeremy Renner‎ -

10th SFG (A) inaugurates combatives program

10th SFG (A) inaugurates combatives program
By Staff Sgt. Michael R. Noggle

The SOCP, as Thompson described, is developed to evolve at any point and time. When they receive feedback from the Green Berets on the battlefield on different techniques used, it is tested immediately by the schoolhouse.

"If you can show there is a better way of doing things, we will test it, vet it and we're going to do it," he said. "I don’t care whose system it came from, if its better, we're going to do it and have it absorbed into the system."

Haskins stated, "SOCP's loyalty is not to any one combatives discipline but to the Soldiers in uniform. SF Soldiers learn to fight in full kit and use their organic weapon systems in close-quarters hand-to-hand combat scenarios."

At the completion of the 40-hour course, 10th SFG (A) will have the most certified SOCP instructors in the SF community. Each Soldier will be able to instruct the basic course to members of their unit. Every two years, the instructor will have to be recertified as well as provide feedback to the schoolhouse at Fort Bragg.

Are they being taught how to use a combat knife?

USASOC News Service

Items of Interest, 19 July 2010

John Robb,JOURNAL: Global Guerrillas and Resilient Communities in Afghanistan

Catholic Light:
I still think people should avoid TFP
From Petrus: the Medjugorje 'seers' will have to report their ten secrets

Energy Bulletin:
Lloyd's Sustainable Energy Security White Paper - Some hits; some misses (original)

Gail Tverberg, The Oil Drum

Lloyd's hired Chatham House to prepare a white paper on the risks of peak oil called Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic risks and opportunities for business. It seems to me that this new report gets quite a few things right, but it misleads in the direction of thinking things are better than they really are, when it comes to timing and alternatives

Fizzling dreams of "back-to-the-land" (original)

Blujay, these new old traditions

And then *POP* just like that, my back-to-the-land bubble bursts. I rub the sleep from my eyes and blink: Ah yes, here I am. Back in Brooklyn, in school full time, pursuing a masters degree, racking up the loans.

Modernizing Henry George (original)

Herman Daly, The Daly News

Economists have traditionally considered nature to be infinite relative to the economy, and therefore not scarce, and therefore properly priced at zero. But the biosphere is now scarce, and becoming more so every day as a result of growth of its large and dependent subsystem, the macro-economy.

Counterpunch:
Patrick Cockburn, Leaving Iraq: The Ruin They'll Leave Behind
Dave Lindorff, Cracking the Sea Floor: Fools' Errand in the Gulf

Zenit: Papal Delegate's Homily at Legionary Center
"We Have the Task of Fulfilling God's Plan" (also at the RC website)


Life After RC: Moving into a fog bank
Clarity of vision

NLM: Cardinal Cañizares Interview on Three Years of Summorum Pontificum: Full Text

Chastened

Just listened to part of an interview of the author of Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex, Hephzibah Anderson, by Rabbi Daniel Lapin on AM 560. Has Rabbi Lapin had Dawn Eden on his show? Chastened may reach a broader audience than Thrill of the Chaste, but I think the latter is "spiritual" without being preachy about religion. Still, Chastened may be of help to young women today by getting them to rethink how they conduct their love lives.

Related:
My (Voluntary) Year Without Sex -- A Q&A With Hephzibah Anderson


Smithmag Interview
(She's attractive.)

Tres Sugar
The Jewish Chronicle
The Atlantic

The Today Show
Penguin.com
New Statesman archive

Peter Hitchens, Our shameful journey from Diana to the sick cult of Raoul Moat

His column today.

Of course, it is obvious now that the unleashed passions of the new underclass are pretty nasty. How could they not be? They have been brought up to be nasty, or at least nobody in our neon-lit, raucous Babylon has ever had any opportunity to persuade them to be anything else but nasty during their formative years.

The cultural revolution of the Sixties robbed the British poor of anything to believe in, or any reason to try to be good. Patriotism was derided and rejected. The Christian religion was mocked, marginalised and studied – if at all – as a weird curiosity.

The stable two-parent families in which children learned manners and morals were more or less abolished, so that a household with two contin­uously married parents is now a luxury item, as is an orderly classroom.

The virtues of patience, stoicism, thrift, temperance, constancy and modesty were reclassified as ‘repression’ and ‘inhibition’ and all were encouraged to cast them off. And they did, so that on Friday and Sat­urday nights it often seems as if half the young people of Britain have decided to dress as hookers, and the other half as convicts newly released from 19th Century hulks. We are nearly back to the days of William Hogarth’s Gin Lane, only without the high-minded evangelists trying to rescue the poor from wickedness.

Full of Grace, Seasoned with Salt: No More Christian Nice Guys & Gals

An interview with Paul Coughlin.

Low-Carb Community Reaction To The USDA 2010 Dietary Guidelines Testimony On July 8, 2010

(Via Jimmy Moore -- more coverage of this topic at his blog.)

Rod Dreher, Information, the basis of reality

I thought maybe there was a potential for finding some sort of analogue to form, but instead I think this is just an example of what happens when scientists get trapped in their own head.