Responsibilities of the Delegate (to the LCs)

Life After RC: Responsibilities of the Delegate

Not available on Zenit yet. However, it is posted at the RC website. I don't see it actually published as a part of the LC website, which has the following:
Appointment Letter for the Papal Delegate to the Legionaries of Christ
“By means of this letter, I am naming you my delegate for the congregation of the Legionaries of Christ..." (this does contain a link to the document at the RC website)

Papal Delegate Meets with Legion’s General Council to Present Decree

Mark's Daily Apple: Primal Strength Training for Women: Not So Different After All

You see, Conventional Wisdom has somehow drilled into our heads the silly notion that men and women are completely different species, especially when it comes to working out. There are definite differences – anyone who’s been married will be able to tell you that! – but that doesn’t take away from the fact that we’re all homo sapiens with the same basic physiological makeup. And so an outfit like Weight Watchers will push the chronic cardio, the ankle weights, and the step classes because of some underlying, self-defeating assumption that women aren’t “meant” to lift heavy weights. It’s insane, it’s preposterous, and it’s downright insulting. Men and women have different work capacities and different natural inclinations, but their bodies still work the same way.

Saw RHK's sister at 99 Chicken tonight. I guessed it was her when I saw her back after she sat down -- I recognized her from the reception that took place after their father's memorial service. I don't think she recognized me though.

There are a lot of cuties in the photos on the walls, but they're never there when I visit the restaurant...

Where's the movie for Henry Huggins?

Ramona and Beezus opens today. I can't help but think that the books of Beverly Cleary belong to America's past, along with Leave it to Beaver--the "Golden Age" of American suburbia, the 50s and early 60s... Some things just can't be updated, without destroying the original source material.

The soundtrack for the trailer was very annoying -- typical for kids/tween fare, whether at the theaters or Disney/Nickelodeon/ABC Family. At least they didn't try to use an ethnically diverse class, other than Sandra Oh as Ramona's teacher.

As for the question at the top of the post -- did the studio heads ever consider a movie about Henry Huggins? I am betting no, given the dominant trends in the American mass entertainment industry.


Apple

"Throw the bums out of office!"

Michael Shedlock, Bell California Emails Gone Viral; Citizens Protest $800K Salaries; City Manager Resigns; Can Anything be done about $600,000 Public Pensions?

Something needs to be done about CalPERS.

The City of Bell

"Your baby ain't sweet like mine"

A different view of the same performance.

Their youtube channel.

Democratic equality

America divided: the politics of inequality by Godfrey Hodgson (archived at EB)

Since this author and others live in the United States, it is understandable that they would talk and think in terms of "democracy" -- if they were to talk about aristocracy, they would lose readers. (Only paleoconservatives or traditional conservatives would be susceptible to supporting a historical aristocracy.)

From the essay:

The persistence of large-scale unemployment is a standing affront to another of America’s core ideas: that, as the country’s founding document says, all men are created equal. True, the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were here pledging fidelity to a natural-rights principle than thinking of absolute or even relative economic equality.

Classical liberalism works to the advantage of the haves, while modern liberalism is a reaction to that, and can be understood as a attempt, however misguided, to protect the have-nots? Each focuses on equality, but different sorts. Still, the author is reading an incorrect understanding of equality into the Declaration of Independence. I believe that this sort of equality is not discussed by Aristotle or Plato as a claim in support of democracy -- rather it is the fact that one is free that entitles one to participate in ruling. Those are free are equal in this respect, and this equality suffices for their claims to have a share in government.

It seems to me that the author, like other Democrats, presuppose the continuation of a system predicated on infinite economic growth. There is a disparity of wealth, but that number (personal or family wealth) taken in abstraction from living conditions, standards of living, and so on, can be misleading, and it ignores other forms of poverty (spiritual and social poverty).

Sometimes the difference between "conservatives" and "liberals" is stated as an opposition between equality of opportunity and equality of results. But if both violate distributive justice (and maybe even commutative justice), that does not prevent the distributist from advocating that all own the means of production. It does not preclude the distributist from recognizing that some may have more at the beginning of production, or end up with more after sales. But there will be a limit to the difference that is possible?

It may be that not all are able to exercise complete economic freedom, as defined by Belloc. But even those who are employed in the service of social and political superiors can have households that produce much of the goods that they consume. (As I suspect was the case in in the manor system and medieval feudalism in general?)

What is Jamba Juice thinking?I

Its normal smoothies are too healthy? Or that it needs to get more Americans to visit their stores?



Cheeseburger Chill

How big of a slice of the MIC pie is this program?

From Defense Review: Berkeley Bionics/Lockheed Martin Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC) Biomechanical Military Combat Exoskeleton Developed for Future Soldier/Warfighter Performance Enhancement: Bionic Super Soldiers on the Way?

Sigh. Horror films and Hollywood.

Spoilers about Piranha 3d. Not for the queasy or those with any sense, really. It's horror elicited through the showing of gore and mayhem--and people continue to criticize The Passion of the Christ for its violence? I have pondered Dr. Fleming's words and will have to re-evaluate the movie, but contemporary horror movies seem to be much worse.

Salt opens tomorrow. I just viewed the trailer again and I found the fight sequences to be ridiculous. Girl power, of course. A review of Salt at IGN:

As Salt works her way from Washington, D.C. to New York and back again, covertly attempting to clear her name… or save the in-danger Russian president… or rescue her kidnapped husband… or something, her motives become increasingly muddled. That husband is an interesting aspect of the picture, too. Played by German thesp August Diehl (Inglourious Basterds), the character is the opposite of Salt -- all soft and sensitive and scientist-y. How can this guy really stand up in our estimation as the equal of the goddess-like Jolie? Well, the answer is he can't. And therein lays a bigger problem for the film than the silly twists, for if we don't buy the relationship between Salt and her husband, then how much can her struggle to find him really matter to us?

As it turns out, that's only part of her struggle. But it illustrates a double standard of both Hollywood and the general audience -- and of this reviewer too, one supposes. Salt was originally a Tom Cruise project, and the title character was obviously designed as a male. In that scenario, somehow the wife-in-distress subplot would've been much more convincing, but in the current role reversal version it just doesn't jibe.

The trailer for The Company Men. This is the best Hollywood has to offer Americans during an economic crisis? I guess that's its job -- peddling illusions and fantasies to make the audience feel good.

The secular humanism of Star Trek

This new documentary, Trek Nation, will probably do a good job of showing and explaining it and the ideals of Gene Roddenberry:


Funny that the movie seems to praise Rick Berman. Some investigation of what fans think about him might reveal that his impact on Trek has been mixed. Would Gene Roddenberry have been happy with Berman's direction of the Trek franchise?

Items of Interest 22 July 2010

Rod Dreher, Bad economy! Bad, bad economy! and China is turning Christian and Goodbye, Beliefnet! Hello, BQO!
Fred Reed, Getting What You Want, Wanting What You Get: An Unbiased Study of Feminism


Energy Bulletin:
The peak oil crisis: thinking about China (original)

Tom Whipple, Falls Church News-Press

Whether Beijing's formula of mixed capitalism and state control of key enterprises will prove to be durable over the long run has yet to be seen. What we do know, however, is that a few more years of surging energy consumption will soon be playing havoc with energy prices around the world.

Oil production during deleveraging (original)

Stuart Staniford, Early Warning

I've been musing on the interaction between a) an extended period of economic stagnation/contraction due to deleveraging, and b) peak oil.

Counterpunch:
Gary Leupp, Obama's Afghan War in Perspective

Bruce E. Levine, How Psychologists Profit on Unending U.S. Wars

Wendell Berry, What else?

What else? (original)

Wendell Berry, Solutions

For more than 100 years the coal-producing counties of eastern Kentucky have been dependent on the coal industry, which has dominated them politically and, submitting only to the limits of technology, has come near to ruining them. The legacy of the coal economy in the Kentucky mountains will be immense and lasting damage to the land and to the people. Much of the damage to the land and the streams, and to water quality downstream, will be irreparable within historical time. The lastingness of the damage to the people will, to a considerable extent, be determined by the people.

Sebastian Junger, Why the Right and Left Are Wrong About My Movie

Book Beast

He makes it clear that he's a liberal intereventionist.

A Lake Garda Interview with Chris Ferrara

(via RA and JM) Mr. Ferrara is the author of The Church and the Libertarian. Tom Woods has a short piece on Chris Ferrera. You may recall that the two had collaborated on The Great Façade. Earlier he published an open letter to Mr. Woods in The Remnant. Is it argued that economics is merely a descriptive science, and that members of the Austrian school make their recommendations not as economists but as something else? That is their normative recommendations somehow stand apart from their "science," which merely tells us how reality is? The problem with that is their science is not really a science, since it lacks the certitude proper to science. It attempts to describe reality in terms of laws analogous to the (physical) laws of the "hard" sciences, but man, being free, is not compelled to behave in certain ways, as if his actions were determined like the actions of non-rational material creation. Rather, for their science to make any sort of predictions it must incorporate a lot of assumptions about human behavior, and these assumptions too are not necessarily fixed. John C. Médaille's Foreward to the book. Daily Mass from Lake Garda:

Wright On: Moral Reasoning and Natural Law | Big Questions Online

Wright On: Moral Reasoning and Natural Law | Big Questions Online
A "diavlog" with Robert P. George.

Bring Back the Cassock

(source: gallery for FSSP American ordinations, May 22, 2010)

An Anglican writes about the cassock and its symbolism in a post for FPR: The Cassock.

I like more tradtional clerical clothing, whether it be the cassock for Roman-rite priests or the rason for Byzantine Christians. (What is the name for what is worn by the Copts, the Assyrians, and so on?) I think it would be great if the cassock were adopted by more Roman-rite priests here in the United States as part of a return to the traditions of the Church. It might be said that there are other deficiencies in the formation of our clergy that are of greater concern and their correction should be of a higher priority, but the cassock can become a symbol of reform and the spirit of authentic renewal.

More info:
NLM: A Brief History of the Cassock
CE: Clerical costume
Orbis Catholicus has plenty of photos of clerics in cassocks and other traditional vestments.
Istok Orthodox Church Supplies

Alice von Hildebrand gives an appraisal of Christopher West's work

Dietrich von Hildebrand, Catholic Philosopher, and Christopher West, Modern Enthusiast:Two Very Different Approaches to Love, Marriage and Sex
By Alice von Hildebrand

(h/t to The Western Confucian and Dawn Eden)

Some YT vids of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra

their website

St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery

I am guessing that it is St.Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery that is profiled in the current issue of First Things.

More:
Orthodox Wiki
Pictures of Greek Orthodox Monasteries in the United States

Apparently, there has been some controversy surrounding the monastery--

Donald Drakeman on the Establishment Clause

Lee J. Strang, Church, State, and Original Intent:

Drakeman’s work bolsters that of other scholars, such as Philip Hamburger in his Separation of Church and State, who have shown that many aspects of the Supreme Court’s strict-separationist interpretation were, as Justice Clarence Thomas described it in Mitchell v. Helms (2000), the product of anti-Catholic animosity. His exposition of the Everson court’s flawed history is both a cautionary tale for originalists and a lesson that today’s sophisticated originalism is a viable project.

First, originalism’s critics have frequently argued that originalism is a flawed interpretative methodology because it requires honest historical analysis of issues of great import and this is simply too much to ask of judges. There is a significant amount of truth to this criticism. Everson shows that judges can construct a plausible case for mistaken historical claims to achieve desired policy outcomes.

This brings us to the second lesson: Originalists, recognizing this criticism, have rearticulated originalism to overcome it. For example, today’s originalism focuses on the constitutional text’s publicly understood meaning when it was ratified, instead of the purported “intent” of the Clause’s framers. This makes it harder for justices to cherry-pick “framers” to reach their desired result. Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), exemplifies this approach.

Another move made by originalists, one followed by Drakeman, is distinguishing between constitutional interpretation and constitutional construction. Interpretation is the activity of recovering the Constitution’s determinate original public meaning. Construction is the activity of creating constitutional meaning when the original meaning is indeterminate. This distinction permits originalists to acknowledge when history “runs out.” It makes originalists modest in their historical claims by relieving them of the task of finding all the answers in history.

Given the Supreme Court’s historical focus and, more importantly, the stakes for the contending sides in the church-state debate, it is not surprising that Everson “created a cottage industry populated by prolific originalists.” Drakeman groups them into nonpreferentialists, strict-separationists, and the “enhanced federal[ists].”

Nonpreferentialists claim that the Clause permits nondiscriminatory aid to religious groups and activities, while strict-separationists contend that it forbids governmental aid to religion. Enhanced federalists make the more limited claim that the Clause preserves state jurisdiction over religious matters and denies jurisdiction to the federal government.

Drakeman gives each camp a fair hearing and, in doing so, performs his own historical analysis. He concludes—noting that this conclusion does not fit his policy preferences—that the Clause’s “original meaning was to forbid the establishment of a single national religion.” (Call this the “no-national-church” interpretation.)

The most important historical fact, he writes, is that the Clause’s adoption engendered little controversy or debate. The strict-separationist interpretation, which would have, is therefore implausible. Only the no-national-church interpretation, which was widely accepted by Americans in 1791, can account for this lack of significant debate.

The enhanced federalism position fits the absence of controversy and is therefore a plausible reading of the Clause’s text, but Drakeman rejects it. It “is arguably consistent with the language but unsupported by the documentary record [while the] no-national-church reading [has] a great deal of evidence in the records of all of the relevant events.”

Other historical evidence, he argues, makes his no-national-church interpretation superior to the strict-separationist and enhanced federalism interpretations. For example, both state and later the federal governments aided religion, while the primary substantive concern behind the Clause was that a Protestant denomination would become the established national church.

How does the enhanced federalism interpretation differ from the no national church interpretation? It seems to me that the former can be understood as being a version of the latter. The difference would be that the former explicitly gives states the right to establish a church, while the latter does not explicitly deny this right to the states.

Couch po-tah-toe

Many of us are aware that television, used by many as the solution to modern-day existential crisis or ennui may also feed it. In most cases it is a prime example of the misuse of leisure, even if some defend its use with the claim that after a long work-day people are too tired to engage in any real leisurely activity. It has been noted by bloggers like Whiskey that men have increasingly been tuning out broadcast TV. Who makes up most of the audience for girl power shows like In Plain Sight? Whiskey claims that much of what is on broadcast television just doesn't appeal to men, although mass-appealing shows on cable networks like USA seem to be doing ok with men. But even many of those shows that have main characters who are male as well as female have been influenced by feminism. I wish to focus on girl power shows, in which the main characters are primarily women (who ape masculine ideals). How men many actually enjoy girl power shows, rather than being shamed by them? Why should they be shamed? Because those female characters seem to be leading more manly lives than the typical American male couch potato, who is often more content with being a drone during the day than not. (They may grumble about work or bosses and such, but how many of them would be willing to trade their job for one that requires some measure of self-sufficiency and a lower standard of living? I suspect few.) At least with a male lead, there is the possible goal of living vicariously through him.

Items of Interest, 21 July 2010

Greek mythology: The real story of the European debt crisis by Walden Bello
‘The Catalogue of Anti-Male Shaming Tactics’ (via The Spearhead)
Full of Grace, Seasoned with Salt: My Social Influences

Two from Sandro Magister:
Ecumenism. The True Story of a War That Never Was

The patriarchs of Moscow and Constantinople threatened a complete break with Rome in 2003. The pretext was Ukraine. But at the Vatican, Kasper and Ratzinger defused the danger. Here's how

Sexual Abuse. The New Norms "On the Most Serious Offenses"

The complete text of the new norms, together with an historical contextualization of the 2001 motu proprio "Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela," of which they are an updated application. Everything introduced and explained by the director of the Vatican press office

Energy Bulletin:
Despite Gloom, Things Are Looking Up For Garden Farming (original)

Gene Logsdon, OrganicToBe.org

Food production is moving toward decentralization, and that is good news. With all the toxins and varmints and contrary weather and disintegration of the economy, our best bet, maybe our only bet, is to spread out the risks of food production to the largest number of people possible and that is happening.

How to be maladaptive: Fourteen tips for mental activities guaranteed to enhance your misery during bad times (original)

Kathy McMahon, Peak Oil Blues

Those who learn about Peak Oil, climate change, and economic hard times show a series of short-lived symptoms of stress over several months, but these are normal and expected reactions to these stunning findings. Roughly 50-60% of adults in North America are exposed to traumatic events, but only 5% to 10% develop maladjusted PTSD and related problems. What sorts of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors promote the developme


Are agricultural systems sustainable? (Toby Hemenway on permaculture) (original)

Jon Steinman, Deconstructing Dinner
(mp3)

Much of the content of Deconstructing Dinner revolves primarily around the practice of agriculture; from examining the downsides and challenges of current agricultural systems to the opportunities and alternatives to those challenges. However, most of those alternatives that we examine are 'agri'cultural alternatives, and so from time to time it's important to step back and deconstruct that very focus... asking the question; "Are 'agri'cultural alternatives an adequate response if they're rooted within that same 'agri'cultural box"? On this episode we listen to a talk Toby Hemenway delivered in February 2010 when he suggested that 'sustainable agriculture' might very well be a misnomer.

China's oil grab

Dave Cohen, Decline of the Empire

An amazing thing has happened. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China has now surpassed the United States as the world's biggest energy consumer.

Srdja Trifkovic responds to Richard Hoste regarding Islam

Richard Hoste: Postmodern Dhimmitude

Islam has been for the past thousand years a gigantic grinder that turns its adherents into intellectual and moral cripples. Mr. Hoste does not know this because he does not know Islam and does not understand its debilitating effect on the soul and the mind. At the same time he has clearly absorbed the postmodernist assumptions of the Western elite class he claims to loath. His readiness to contemplate Islam as a substitute for the PC-liberal-secular pap is but the opposite side of the same coin. Both lead to a soul-numbing monism. For all the outward differences, Swedish feminists share with Mr. “Hoste’s” mullahs the desire for a monistic One World. They both long for the Great Gleichschaltung that will end in Strobe Talbot’s Single Global Authority, post-national and seamlessly standardized, an ummah under whatever name.

The Christian vision of Triune God is the enemy to both. All authentic Europeans and their overseas cousins should revive it and stick with it, not only because it is true -- which it is -- but also because it has been inseparable from their culture and civilization for over two millennia.

Recovery is still possible. A colossal, rapidly spreading global economic crisis, far harsher than the unpleasantness of the past two years, is coming. The meltdown and the collapse of confidence in the ability of the all-pervasive State to manage relief will force tens of millions of “Swedes” to re-examine their lives and their assumptions. By being disillusioned in progress they will rediscover the value and force of tradition. The ensuing struggle for diminishing resources will make them drop the neurotic becoming in favor of just being, that is, surviving. Children will no longer be a burden and a financial liability, they’ll regain their traditional value as economic assets and the substitute for collapsed social security and pension systems. The family will re-emerge as the essential social unit. Amidst collapsing political structures all ideological “propositions” will be recognized as empty abstracts. Communities linked to their native soil and bonded by kinship, memory, language, faith, and myth would be revived. The parasitic and hostile alien ghettos would be expelled or otherwise neutralized. And in adversity the eyes of men would be lifted, once again, to Heaven.

This scenario is far more likely, and far more desirable, than Mr. Hoste’s best bet.

Even in the absence of a life-altering event, normal people should not succumb to the myth that the game is up, that Dar al Islam is the end of the road for all of us, let alone “the least of all evils.” We Europeans are endowed with feelings and reason, with the awareness of who we are and the pride in our patrimony. Being the heirs of the greatest and best civilization the world has known, we know we will not fail it.

The coming struggle against Jihad is just and natural. It is inevitable even if the outcome is uncertain, just as the knowledge each of us has of his mortality does not stop us from holding on to life, and beauty, and truth. That struggle will be won, with or without Mr. Hoste and his ilk, and if need be in spite of them.

The comments once again highlight the different viewpoints of Alternative Right's readership. Some may see this as a strength, evidence of the broad appeal of the website. What is it exactly that unites them, other than being "other"? What program are they trying to achieve, other than opposing the excesses of "liberalism"?

Mr. Trifkovic responds to someone else:

"MODERATE ISLAM" is like the unicorn: you can visualize it, draw it, dream it, but the one thing you can't do is produce the bloody beast. "Moderate Islam" exists in the minds of the the postmodern dhimmis, enablers & fellow-travellers, but it is unclear whether, when, where, and how, the beast will be born. Presumably it would need to be capable of reinterpreting and relativizing jihad, sharia, Kuran 9-5 etc. and developing the new "Islamic" interpretations that would not be inherently criminal. The problem is that it has been tried before. Attempts to reformulate the doctrine of jihad in particular are not new, but they have failed because they opposed by centuries of orthodoxy.

The willingness of a few to become what are *objectively* bad Muslims, because they are willing to reject the many disgusting, criminal and utterly offensive tenets of historical Islam, may be laudable in human terms but it will do nothing to modify Islam as a doctrine. A reformed faith that should question the divine authority on which the institutions of Islam rest, or attempt by rationalistic selection or abatement to effect a change, would be Islam no longer. For the overwhelming majority of Muslims, any such attempt will smack of heresy. Alas, it is not the jihadists who are distorting”Islam; the would-be reformers are. Until the petrodollars support a comprehensive and explicit Kuranic revisionism capable of growing popular roots, we should seek ways to defend ourselves by disengaging from the world of Islam, physically and figuratively, by keeping Mecca away from the West and staying away from Mecca - or pulverizing it, if the cultists refuse to heed the edict & insist on doing their thing.

Colony

A new show coming to the Discover Channel. I see that it actually came out last year, and season 2 will be starting shortly. "

What would you do in the wake of a global catastrophe? Even if you survived it, could you survive the aftermath?

Season Two of THE COLONY introduces viewers to a new group of volunteers with differing backgrounds, skills and personalities, to bear witness to how these colonists will survive.

A promo from season 1


Discovery Channel's 'The Colony' requires suspension of disbelief

Maybe I'll take a look at what's available online, if I run out of diversions.