The irony of being a progressive fossil.

Ok, anyone spot a similarity between this:

And this?:

I told myself I wasn’t go to pile on The Who for their croakfest yesterday, and I certainly have much more sympathy for them than the Massters of puppets (see what I did there?), but this article from the Chicago Sun-Times sums it up too well:

Though fans who know their history honor the accomplishments of the stars of the past, they wouldn’t want the New Orleans Saints to bring quarterback Archie Manning out of retirement for the Super Bowl, any more than they’d expect the Indianapolis Colts to despair because Johnny Unitas died in 2002.

Yet since the infamous “nipplegate” incident of 2004, the NFL has turned to an increasingly hoary roster of classic rockers well past their prime to crank out their dustiest hits during halftime-nostalgic blasts from the pasts in the middle of the game of the moment.

On Sunday, in the wake of Paul McCartney (2005), the Rolling Stones (‘06), Prince (‘07), Tom Petty (‘08) and Bruce Springsteen (‘09), Super Bowl XLIV gave us the saddest, most tired musical spectacle yet: the band that pretends to be the Who.

In fairness, I saw on Pete Townsend’s Wiki entry that “He refused to let Michael Moore use “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in Fahrenheit 9/11, saying that he watched Bowling for Columbine and wasn’t convinced.” I guess there’s always hope.

Thomas Peters to be on Hannity tonight (9PM est)

He describes it at his blog: http://www.catholicvoteaction.org/americanpapist/index.php?p=1108

He will be on to hopefully to skewer Harry Knox’s “Church teaching causes AIDS” canard.

Not often that one of ours from the Catholic blogosphere gets major media face time. Let’s send some prayers his way!

Preferring legal fiction to biological reality.

Another turn in the Lisa and Isabella Miller story (Background here.):

RUTLAND, VERMONT, January 28, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Ex-Lesbian Lisa Miller has been given 30 days to transfer custody of her daughter to her former lesbian partner, or possibly face criminal penalties.

Although Vermont Judge Richard Cohen has so far refused to issue an arrest warrant for Miller, he has set a deadline of February 23rd for the transfer to take place.

If Miller does not appear during that time, Cohen said on January 22, “I will consider all possible sanctions under the law,” according to the local Rutland Herald.

Such sanctions could include arrest and imprisonment for up to five years, a punishment that has been repeatedly requested by Miller’s former partner, Janet Jenkins.

Full article here which notes that Miller’s Facebook page and the website of the Protect Isabella Coaltion have disappeared without explanation. My prayers go to all involved.

The Sin-Makes-You-Stupid Super Bowl!

See? All one needed to do was send me a link to a web site of the U.S. Constitution and Democracy breaks out at Romish Graffiti! Let the readers decide! Which is moar st00pid?:

Our first contestant is Kate Childs Graham writing in NCR, who takes doctrinal advice from the movie Footloose:

[...]
And that got me thinking, what could “Footloose” teach the leaders of the Catholic church?

Rev. Moore’s impetus for banning dance and rock-and-roll was full of good intentions. He wanted to stop the town’s teens from being hurt — a laudable effort. Much like Rev. Moore, I believe that many church teachings, particularly around gender, sex and sexuality, began with good intentions. In excluding women from leadership, for instance, the bishops of yore were aspiring to do what they thought Christ would do (though I believe Christ would have done exactly the opposite). And you can’t blame them for that.

Quickly though, Rev. Moore’s good intentions transformed into wielding power for the sake of power. He himself even lost sight of why he stood so firmly opposed to something he once enjoyed. But he thought that letting go, admitting he was wrong, would show signs of weakness. The church hierarchy has been in this position, too. Their unwillingness to reverse their teaching on condom use for people living with HIV is but one example. At some point it’s no longer about protecting people, it’s about the fear of losing power and seeming weak.

Ultimately, Rev. Moore is able to release his fear-filled grip — and cut loose, if you will — because he realized that by ignoring the wants and needs of the people, he was driving a wedge between himself and those he served. There is no doubt in my mind, and the number of people leaving the church confirms, that the church hierarchy’s unwillingness to revamp its teachings on gender, sex and sexuality is driving a wedge between the hierarchy and the faithful.

Rev. Moore was able to cut loose from his distrust and power. And it’s not that everyone’s lives were perfect because of it, because not every choice is the right one. It’s that in cutting loose everyone is free to follow their conscience. And that type of trust brings a community together.

Bishops, perhaps it’s time to cut loose.

She proves that if you are going to glean sound teaching from movies, see Father Baron or this guy instead.

Quite a formidable force in this contest wouldn’t you say? But hold on. She’s going up against Gene Robinson:

“We have to understand that the notion of a homosexual sexual orientation is a notion that’s only about 125 years old,” Bishop Robinson told CNSNews.com. “That is to say, St. Paul was talking about people that he understood to be heterosexual engaging in same-sex acts. It never occurred to anyone in ancient times that a certain minority of us would be born being affectionally oriented to people of the same sex.”

I think my favorite quip came from a commenter “websterglobe“: “If I’m born with a kleptomaniacal orientation, relieving you of your money isn’t stealing.”

Vote your choice!

Movie proclaims, “There is only one God, Science, and Darwin is His messenger”

James Bowman on Creation:

It will come as no news to readers of The American Spectator or this website that science is now no longer just science but has become a religion-substitute for a large number of Americans. This faith, perhaps, claims even a majority of those in some other liberal democracies of the West. And if science, and its political arm, environmentalism, is the new religion, Charles Darwin is its Christ figure, despised and rejected of (theist) men and persecuted for the Truth he sought to bring to set men free of their inherited chains. These are not the bonds of sin and death but of the superstition and ignorance which supposes the world to have had any Creator at all or any Redeemer other than Darwin himself. That is what we mean by myth: a story that explains the world, whether or not the story happens to be true, and the Darwinist myth now comes closer to an explanation that people are prepared to accept than any other since the Redemptive history in the Christian interpretation of the Bible.

For this reason Jon Amiel’s Creation, written by John Collee from a family memoir by Randal Keynes, Darwin’s great-great-grandson, has something of the odor of piety about it that has hardly been seen on screen since the days of Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical epics.

I’ve been outed…

Zippy posted a YouTube of Hank Marvin here. My confession: I was in a Shadows cover-band called Troubadours. That’s me in the middle with the dorky glasses thumping on the bass with the classic Brady-Bunch-Kid-Sneaking-Through-House sound:

Greatest hits from my favorite atheist.

When we think about the Orwellian mind-control state, we generally think of a few big, obvious examples. The Nazis. The Soviet Union. And so on. These regimes, of course, specialized in implanting bizarre, sometimes murderous, instructions in their subjects’ brains. If you must visualize these implanted Orwellian modules, you can think of them as little worms, like in Wrath of Khan, that crawl into the ear and stay there.

One imagines writing a letter to a dedicated National Socialist, explaining why he should expel his evil neural parasite and instead become a good liberal, signing it “Das Future” and emailing it through a time machine to 1938. Perhaps this could be the original red pill.

Here at UR we have many sinister devices, but a time machine is not one of them. And fortunately, you do not live in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or 1938. And even more fortunately, your democratic education has vaccinated you to perfection against the first, and to an adequate if unimpressive level against the second. And most fortunately of all, your government is nothing like either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. All good. But -

But in 1938, three systems of government were contending for global supremacy. One of them is still around: yours. Anglo-American liberal democracy. Had military luck favored either of the others – National Socialism or Marxist-Leninism – we can also be sure that it would have discovered and reveled in its foes’ every misdeed, and that it would have approached its own, if at all, tentatively and ambiguously.

If only one can survive, at least two must be illegitimate, and irredeemably criminal. And the survivor will certainly paint them as such. But suppose all three are irredeemably criminal? If the third is an Orwellian mind-control state as well, its subjects are unlikely to regard it as such. It will certainly not prosecute itself.

The third, our third, is very different from the other two. We must remember that American democracy is categorically distinct from National Socialism and the people’s democracies in too many ways to count. Since there are too many ways to count, we will not bother counting them. We remain entitled to notice parallels. (For instance, it is almost more aesthetic criticism than political or economic analysis, but do read Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Three New Deals.)

But no number of categorical distinctions from the other two can alter our estimate of the third’s criminality. There are as many ways to be a criminal as there are crimes. That we hang the murderer does not mean we must award a prize to the thief.

Ie: the assumption that, since the Third Reich was Orwellian, and Barack Obama is not Adolf Hitler, Washington must not be Orwellian, is completely fallacious. Socrates is a cat; Ribbentrop is not Socrates; therefore, Ribbentrop is not a cat.

(Comparing the totalitarian dictatorships of the mid-20th century to the OECD democracies of the early 21st is like comparing a reptile to a mammal, a propeller plane to a jet plane, or a flashlight to a laser. We may learn something about the latter from the former, but we may not, and we are easily misled. But they are what we think of what we think of Orwell, and the association must be tackled first.)

Anyway, let’s define this vague charge. What do we mean by Orwellian?

I’d say a fair definition of an Orwellian government is one whose principle of public legitimacy (Mosca’s political formula, if you care) is contradicted by an accurate perception of reality. In other words, the government is existentially dependent on systematic public deception. If it fails in its mission to keep the lie alive, it at least stands some chance of falling.

The basic premise of UR is that all the competing 20th-century systems of government, including the Western democracies which came out on top and which rule us to this day, are best classified as Orwellian. They maintain their legitimacy by shaping public opinion. They shape public opinion by sculpting the information presented to the public. As part of that public, you peruse the world through a lens poured by your government. Ie: you are pwned.

Full article.

Moar surf

When the apocalypse comes, the only things that will survive are cockroaches and Dick Dale.

The dog is dead but the tail still wags.–Parish flap over women’s ordination.

I’ve visited this parish with a friend several years ago. I was going to do a full write up on it, but it appears the Man with Black Hat is closer to the story and says basically everything I would, but better here: http://manwithblackhat.blogspot.com/2010/01/scandal-in-suburbia.html

But the one who says it best of all is the Holy Father in a speech unrelated to the story:

In a social milieu that encourages the expression of a variety of opinions on every question that arises, it is important to recognize dissent for what it is, and not to mistake it for a mature contribution to a balanced and wide-ranging debate. It is the truth revealed through Scripture and Tradition and articulated by the Church’s Magisterium that sets us free.

N.B. When I refer to the dog being dead, I am echoing Chesterton and refrering to the subject of women’s ordination in general and not to the poor woman in the story personally. I attribute her actions as stemming from awful catechesis and not maliciousness. Also, a troll came here and took swipes at me and the Church and linked me to the U.S. Constitution as if I’d never heard of it. While I find the rights enumerated there nice, convenient and normatively authoritative, none of them, not even the so-called establishment clause, effect my, or anyone else’s salvation.

Lydia vs. People playing feminist “gotcha!” Advantage: Lydia

The combox of this topic at What’s Wrong with the World seems to have developed a case of fleafestation. However, one gem emerged. When Lydia was confronted by one Karen:

Lydia, remind me why you’re blogging? You are willing to take advantage of the work of feminists in obtaining the opportunities for you to get an education and have a public role yet you return the favor by telling all the rest of us shut up and go back to the kitchen. Please, either change your mind about what women can do or take your own advice and allow the men to do all the talking.

Lydia doesn’t miss a beat:

Ah, Karen, I heard a wonderful answer to that very question when it was posed to one of my heroes, Phyllis Schlafly, a few years back when she was in town. She said that she credits her ability to do all the things she has done not to feminism but to the free market, which has eased women’s work so much and given women so much more time.

Mr. Jeff Culbreath, a staunch traditionalist, does not welcome my comments on his thread because of feminism. He does so because he and I respect and value each other. Neither of us owes that to feminism, and I do not owe the great relationship I have with my male colleagues here at W4 to feminism in any way, shape, or form. I am not “taking advantage to the work of feminists” in blogging here.