Before I forget...

a reminder that I should consider obtaining a copy of Srdja Trifkovic's The Krajina Chronicle: A History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia. As MJB has a fondness for the Serbs, perhaps he would enjoy Mr. Trifkovic's writings. A review of the book by James Bisset.

Nicolas Gombert, Regina coeli

Huelgas Ensemble

World's Worst Traffic Jam

A Pearl River tale, power and pride in China

For a few days last week, global news agencies pursued the peculiar story of the world's worst traffic jam, which was reported to have lasted for around nine days and stretched across about 100 kilometres of a major highway leading to Beijing.

Fair Game

The trailer for the Valerie Plame movie is now online. (official site)

My bet is that this movie will not do well at the box office, even though Doug Liman is the director. Hollywood doesn't learn from its mistakes, and while the movie itself has its obvious heroine, I think the story represents many other things that are wrong with Uhmerica. Sean Penn playing the patriot? Yeah, sure.

The importance of tactile contact for infants

Miracle mum brings premature baby son back to life with two hours of loving cuddles after doctors pronounce him dead

Keith Preson on Carl Schmitt

Keith Preston, Carl Schmitt (Part I)
Weimar: State of Exception 

While Schmitt was certainly a thinker of the Right, it is a mistake to group him together with proponents of the “conservative revolution” such as Moeller van den Bruck, Oswald Spengler, Edgar Jung, or Hugo von Hofmannsthal. There is no evidence of him having expressed affinity for the views of these thinkers or joining any of the organizations that emerged to promote their ideas. Schmitt’s conservatism was squarely within the Machiavellian tradition, and he counted Machiavelli, Hobbes, Jean Bodin and conservative counterrevolutionaries such as Joseph De Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortes as his influences.

During the Weimar era, Schmitt expressed no sympathy for the mystical nationalism of the radical Right, much less the vulgar racism and anti-Semitism of the Nazi movement. He was closer to the anti-liberal thinkers that James Burnham and others subsequently labeled as “the neo-Machiavellians.” These included Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, and Georges Sorel along with aristocratic conservatives like Max Weber. These thinkers expressed skepticism regarding the prospects of liberalism and democracy and emphasized the role of elites, the irrational, and the power of myth with regards to the political. Though Schmitt never joined a political party during the Weimar era, within the spectrum of German politics of the time he can reasonably be categorized as something of a moderate. He had admirers on both the far Right and far Left, including sympathizers with the Conservative Revolution as well as prominent intellectuals associated with the Marxist Frankfurt School, such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer.

Schmitt’s own natural affinities were mostly likely closest to the Catholic Center Party, which along with the Social Democrats who had led the revolution of 1918 were the most consistently supportive of the republic and the constitutional order, and which represented the broadest cross-section of economic, class, regional, and institutional interests of any of the major parties during Weimar.

 A Note on Sources on Schmitt

A Forgotten Thinker On Nation-States vs. Empire by Paul Gottfried
Google Books
Professor Gottfried has his own website. You can purchase his book on Carl Schmitt through his website (assuming that copies are still available at Amazon). The website has not been updated for some time.

Comments on Carl Schmitt and Juan Donoso Cartes

InsideCatholic.com

Jeremiah Bannister on InsideCatholic.com's decision to delete responses by various editors of Distributist Review to the recent piece by Jeffrey Tucker.

The difference in strength between men and women may be greater than you think.

In The Angels principle, Mr. Richardson refers to this blog entry's citation of an article by David Puts:

When fat-free mass is considered, men are 40% heavier (Lassek & Gaulin, 2009; Mayhew & Salm, 1990) and have 60% more total lean muscle mass than women. Men have 80% greater arm muscle mass and 50% more lower body muscle mass (Abe, Kearns, & Fukunaga, 2003). Lassek and Gaulin (2009) note that the sex difference in upper-body muscle mass in humans is similar to the sex difference in fat-free mass in gorillas (Zihlman & MacFarland, 2000), the most sexually dimorphic of all living primates.


These differences in muscularity translate into large differences in strength and speed. Men have about 90% greater upper-body strength, a difference of approximately three standard deviations (Abe et al., 2003; Lassek & Gaulin, 2009). The average man is stronger than 99.9% of women (Lassek & Gaulin, 2009). Men also have about 65% greater lower body strength (Lassek & Gaulin, 2009; Mayhew & Salm, 1990), over 45% higher vertical leap, and over 22% faster sprint times (Mayhew & Salm, 1990).


(Puts, David, A. “Beauty and the Beast: Mechanisms of Sexual Selection in Humans.” Evolution & Human Behavior 31.3 (2010): 157-75.)

abstract


So why should women be serving as firefighters and LEOs? Strength-training for women is limited by the material. If you have two LEOs trying to subdue a suspect, do you want two men or one man and one woman?

O Virgin Pure! Agni Parthene Korean Byzantine Orthodox Chant 오 버진 순수! 비잔틴 정교회

(via JC)

"Compassio"

The Capilla Flamenca opened the first edition of the polyphonic festival "Passie van de Stemmen" in Leuven, Belgium. Psallentes (prepared by Henrik Vanden Abeele) and La Caccia (prepared by Patrick Denecker) were kindly invited by Marnix De Cat who was in charge of the artistic direction of this project.

Capilla Flamenca

Fr. Rutler on Liturgical "Experts"

The Liturgical Experts’ Long Tassels (via NLM and Insight Scoop)

Also from NLM: Rev. Robert Skeris to present in Madison, Wisconsin

PCR, The Nazification of the United States

The Nazification of the United States
Death of the First Amendment


He references Chuck Norris's "Obama's U.S. Assassination Program?" (parts 1 and 2)


More from Counterpunch: Julia Nissen, Birthright Citizenship, "Anchor Babies" and the 14th Amendment

Too much media exposure

AICN: Abstinence Advocate Bristol Palin Joins ABC's  DANCING WITH THE STARS!!

What were the motivations of the producers for putting her on the show? Do they want Sarah Palin to be seen in the audience for at least one episode?

The Nation of Immigrants Myth

I should have added this link to this post.

The Nation of Immigrants Myth by Howard Sutherland

The creed is half true at most and is a weapon for those who want to dissolve this country.

Ruger SR-556

Defense Review: Sturm, Ruger & Co. Introduces the Ruger SR-556/6.8 6.8 SPC (6.8×43mm SPC) Piston-Driven Tactical AR Rifle/Carbine
GunBlog

The original 5.56 version:
Ruger® SR-556™ Autoloading Rifle

Manipulating language -- the latest attempt by the POTUS?

President Obama is scheduled to give an address next Tuesday about the "end" of combat operations in Iraq.

Antiwar.com: Combat Pay to Continue in Iraq, Pentagon Assures

But the Pentagon is reassuring those troops that their combat pay will not be taken away from them, and that Iraq will continue to be “in the list of designated hostile fire or imminent danger pay areas” going forward.

Is hazardous duty or some similar name the same as "combat" pay, even if the amounts are the same? I'll have to ask Sarge.

Regarding the situation in Iraq: So what is the reality? American forces won't be on the offense any more, just on the defense?

Archbishop Chaput, Living within the truth: Religious liberty and Catholic mission in the new order of the world

Archbishop Chaput calls for resistance to intolerance of Christianity (via ML)

the full address

Is there a better proponent in the United States of a certain kind of Catholic citizenship than Archbishop Chaput?

American Catholics have no experience of the systematic repression so familiar to your Churches. It’s true that anti-Catholic prejudice has always played a role in American life. This bigotry came first from my country’s dominant Protestant culture, and now from its “post-Christian” leadership classes. But this is quite different from deliberate persecution. In general, Catholics have thrived in the United States. The reason is simple. America has always had a broadly Christian and religion-friendly moral foundation, and our public institutions were established as non-sectarian, not anti-religious.

Southrons might point out that it is not merely American Protestantism that is responsible for anti-Catholic bigotry. There was something else to it. This is just one consequence of the lumping the United States together as a single, uniform, homogeneous "nation-state." Catholics have done well because religion that wasn't a threat was ignored and not a priority for those seeking economic and political power. As a result of the direction development of the political economy has taken, Catholic spiritual life (and efforts at evangelization) have foundered. Yes, the response of Catholics to anti-Christian attacks needs to be a renewed focus on union with Christ.

The world urgently needs a re-awakening of the Church in our actions and in our public and private witness. The world needs each of us to come to a deeper experience of our Risen Lord in the company of our fellow believers. The renewal of the West depends overwhelmingly on our faithfulness to Jesus Christ and his Church.

We need to really believe what we say we believe. Then we need to prove it by the witness of our lives. We need to be so convinced of the truths of the Creed that we are on fire to live by these truths, to love by these truths, and to defend these truths, even to the point of our own discomfort and suffering.

We are ambassadors of the living God to a world that is on the verge of forgetting him. Our work is to make God real; to be the face of his love; to propose once more to the men and women of our day, the dialogue of salvation.

The question is, how is one to cultivate charity towards one's neighbor and be a good citizen? How one understands the problems of our age affects the answer.

One final point:
If someone is not a brother in Christ, can there be fraternal correction? How effective can our denunciations of evil be if people do not accept the authority of the Church or the Natural Law?

That brings me to my third and final point today: We live in a time when the Church is called to be a believing community of resistance. We need to call things by their true names. We need to fight the evils we see. And most importantly, we must not delude ourselves into thinking that by going along with the voices of secularism and de-Christianization we can somehow mitigate or change things. Only the Truth can set men free. We need to be apostles of Jesus Christ and the Truth he incarnates.

How are Christians to denounce sin, and what can we learn from the Christians of the past who engaged were engaged in missionary work in non-Christian societies? Because it seems to me that this is the strategy that those who are called to offer that sort of public witness to Christian teaching should be following, rather than one which assumes that the society is Christian, that it is willing to hear what Christians believe about morality, and so on.

When I finish the post on what Dr. Fleming recommends for American Christians, we'll see how they differ from the view put forth by Archbishop Chaput.

Edit.
Zenit: Archbishop Chaput on Liberty and Mission
"Events Suggest an Emerging, Systematic Discrimination" [

Forthcoming CD by Stile Antico

"Puer natus est, a programme of Tudor music for Advent and Christmas including the magnificent Tallis Mass 'Puer natus est nobis'." Classics Today review.

Previous CDs. Harmonia Mundi.

Remembering the Smiling Pope John Paul I 30 Years Later

(via Fr. D)

More videos:






Vatican.va
An Irish tribute.

Hmmm... CRC

Gun Rights Policy Conference

In San Francisco, September 24-6.

Jeffrey Tucker dons his other hat

Why Catholics Don't Understand Economics

Items of Interest, 26 August 2010

Thomas Storck, An Introduction to the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church

 Jeremiah Bannister, A Resolved Tension  and The Bottom Line: Exposing Catholic Austro-Libertarian Dissent

Zenit: South Korean Conference Focuses on Lay Identity
Participants to Reflect on Religious Liberty

Ratzinger Students to Consider Vatican II
Study Circle Taking up Central Theme of Pontificate
Energy Bulletin:
Good agriculture fosters good art, and vice-versa (original)

Gene Logsdon, OrganicToBe.org

People in Monet’s day saw much more than just the beauty of a haystack when they looked at one. They saw survival. As long as haystacks dotted the horizon every fall, society knew that it would survive until the next growing season. I wonder if even today, people look at those hay bales dotting a field and instinctively realize the same thing.


Reviving anarchy for the sake of sustainability (original)

Antonio Roman-Alcalá, Civil Eats

One thing that fascinates me about political theorist Murray Bookchin’s writing is how prescient it is. His essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” was written in 1965, six years before Earth Day, and almost a half-century before now. Yet its content is as relevant as ever, if not more so, given society's increasing interest in all things “green.” Bookchin even references future ramifications of climate change, long before many had even considered it.

Whiskey on the masculinity gap in Hollywood

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Movie Goer: Failure of the Fan-Boy Comic Movie and the Gender-Less Movie Star

PIcked up an assignment this morning, and have been mostly busy since. Will try to have a normal blogging day tomorrow, after I get out of work.

Zenit: Unmasking the "Ella" Masquerade
Mike Whitney, The Housing Holocaust

Jason Peters muses on the Long Emergency

Peak Oil and Ivory-Tower Pigheadedness

And I spend most of my time there because I also find it difficult to operate inside the main run of things, which is why I must say it’s hard not to credit Jim Kunstler for asking a pretty good question: “How could such a catastrophe [as., e.g., instability of world markets and “previously unimaginable austerity” after peak oil] be so close at hand[,] and civilized, educated people in free countries with free news media and transparent institutions be so uninformed about it?”

That, of course, is from The Long Emergency, which, as anyone who has read it knows, is a book that challenges what is “absolutely normative” about our current economic, social, and political arrangements and reminds us that only in an elaborate made-for-adults fairy tale can anyone believe that markets and technology will rescue us from the coming oil scarcity, to say nothing of the resource wars that, far from being likely, are inevitable.

But all across this Great Land Of Ours the denizens of the ivory towers will parrot the permitted technocratic bullshit and turn resolutely away from the evidence everywhere suggesting that, because there are natural limits just around the bend, hitting the brakes would be a really good idea.