No,not whine. I'm not whining, I'm bragging.
The fermentation is slowing down, it's passing one bubble every four seconds through the lock. That's just about right on schedule. It was bubbling like it was a boil for a while. This batch is supposed to be ready for it's first racking a week from tomorrow, and I think it will make it.
At that point we will bet our first taste--and it will probably be rather nasty. After it's had time to sit and clarify for a couple of months, and then gets bottled and aged it will hopefully turn out well. I'm aiming for a semi-dry red with a pronounced fruity flavor, that will complement red-neck cuisine: heavy foods with lots of pepper etc.
I'm also hoping that it will lend itself to nice Sangria in the summer months.
Yep, six and one half gallons of home made Redneck Red Table Wine--with that, there won't be much to whine about.
Oh--it's 100% organic, with no added sulfites or artificial ingredients.
TRIUMPHALIST--YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT?
Saturday, November 13, 2010
A few little things that came to my attention,while I researched the post below...
HBO ANTI-CATHOLIC?--Bill Donohue is upset at HBO for airing an episode of Boardwalk Empire, that showed a group of men being entertained by watching porn involving graphic acts with a nun. He is saying this is Anti-Catholic. Mr. Donohue does a lot of good work in exposing Anti-Catholic bias, but in this case, I'm going to have to disagree with him. "Nun Porn", or for that matter porn involving priests and religious generally, has been around since there have been priests and religious. What's even more important to keep in mind is that this sort of porn is most popular in Catholic countries, regions or communities. What HBO is displaying isn't Anti-Catholic bias but a dimension of our cultures--both Catholic and American--that we would rather not admit to. Bad taste? Certainly. Tacky? You bet. Anti-Catholic? Not so much.
IS MARCO RUBIO STUPID, OR A LIAR?: Marco Rubio is a Senator -Elect from Florida, during the campaign he promoted himself as a Catholic, and received both endorsement and contribution from the Catholic Advocate PAC. But he attends and makes large contributions to a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. That's not exactly a Catholic Church. So, did Rubio lie about his religious affiliation, or is he under the impression that being catholic is like being, say, redheaded--it just stays? Mr. Rubio is in fact, an apostate Catholic, who has entered communion with a heretical and schismatic sect. Now he has a perfect right to do so, by both civil and canon law. But I can't help but wonder--was he knowingly scamming Catholics, or does he think that he is a Catholic in good standing?
THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION AND THE US--The US received a tongue lashing from the UN Human Rights Commission. You know, with those two paragons of decency, freedom and respect for human rights Saudi Arabia, China et al? And of the 288 recommendations made, many of then involved us ratifying treaties that we haven't, and that we don't want to, and don't have sh*t to say about human rights.
THE AMERICAN NATIONAL CATHOLIC CHURCH--has a web site called "A Priest Forever" looking for former priests to incardinate into their brand new schismatic structure. They have about three parishes, and a couple planned. They stress that they have valid orders, but I can find no bishop listed. They say that they will ordain women. (That pretty much puts the kibosh on valid orders) They are Gay Friendly. Yet another attempt by disaffected ex-priests to enter the "Independent/Old Catholic movement. But you just know that they'll get positive press coverage, because they are gay friendly and will pretend to ordain women, just as soon as they find themselves a bishop, or even a convincing impostor.
When people lose the Faith, why don't they just admit it and move on?
IS MARCO RUBIO STUPID, OR A LIAR?: Marco Rubio is a Senator -Elect from Florida, during the campaign he promoted himself as a Catholic, and received both endorsement and contribution from the Catholic Advocate PAC. But he attends and makes large contributions to a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. That's not exactly a Catholic Church. So, did Rubio lie about his religious affiliation, or is he under the impression that being catholic is like being, say, redheaded--it just stays? Mr. Rubio is in fact, an apostate Catholic, who has entered communion with a heretical and schismatic sect. Now he has a perfect right to do so, by both civil and canon law. But I can't help but wonder--was he knowingly scamming Catholics, or does he think that he is a Catholic in good standing?
THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION AND THE US--The US received a tongue lashing from the UN Human Rights Commission. You know, with those two paragons of decency, freedom and respect for human rights Saudi Arabia, China et al? And of the 288 recommendations made, many of then involved us ratifying treaties that we haven't, and that we don't want to, and don't have sh*t to say about human rights.
THE AMERICAN NATIONAL CATHOLIC CHURCH--has a web site called "A Priest Forever" looking for former priests to incardinate into their brand new schismatic structure. They have about three parishes, and a couple planned. They stress that they have valid orders, but I can find no bishop listed. They say that they will ordain women. (That pretty much puts the kibosh on valid orders) They are Gay Friendly. Yet another attempt by disaffected ex-priests to enter the "Independent/Old Catholic movement. But you just know that they'll get positive press coverage, because they are gay friendly and will pretend to ordain women, just as soon as they find themselves a bishop, or even a convincing impostor.
When people lose the Faith, why don't they just admit it and move on?
Abolish the Catholic Campaign for Human Development
Well, the title expresses my position on what should be done, exactly. It's time to abolish this miscarriage of Charity, and establish a new program, with absolutely no overlap in personnel. Especially in lay personnel. I know that's a broad brush, and I am convinced that there are a few good people involved, but the entrenched bureaucrats of the CCHD--mostly lay-- are part of the problem.
Another part of the problem, and the larger one, I think, is the very conceptual foundation of the CCHD, It is an obvious outgrowth of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century Catholic Action movement and campaigns. That movement had some notable failures, to be sure, but it also had some notable successes. The idea was to empower people to help themselves, and the idea is a good one, at it's root. But the CCHD is a little bit different. It's charter says it is not to give money for relief, but to hep empower people to end poverty. Well,the only real way to get people out of the depths of cyclic poverty is to enable them to pull themselves out. But the CCHD was founded with a great deal of input from Saul Alinsky, not just from Alinsky's followers, but from the man himself. And he did a great job confusing the Bishops as to the actual ends the Campaign would pursue. When people are asked to give money to the CCHD, they are asked to give money to help the poor--and many of them reasonably conclude that they are giving money to pursue the Corporal Works of Mercy. They are not, and the CCHD is banned by it's own charter from doing so. It's founded, in a way, upon a fraud perpetrated on the Faithful.
The CCHD is an example of something that Pope Paul VI (A Pontiff who will never be my favorite, but for whom I am developing a much greater respect as I learn about the things he had to deal with.) warned us about: The Church should never be reduced to a Social Services and Social Justice Group--it must always proclaim the gospel, and maintain sacramental ministry. The CCHD is firmly in the camp that declares that social justice concerns are the only real proclamation of the Gospel, and the only real Christian ministry.
Catholic Action reached it's apogee in the US in the person of Dorothy Day, a woman who was the driving force behind it through much of the first half of the Twentieth Century. There are those in the Social Justice community who feel she should be canonized. I have no opinion in the matter, personally, but it's notable that they wish her to be canonized not because of a life of heroic virtue, but for political reasons. Which is interesting, because Miss Day was appalled at the directions the Social Justice community and the Church took in the late 60s. She had very little in common with the Modernizers who dropped their masks and revealed themselves to be Modernists. She especially had problems with their approach to the Eucharist. (She once attended a Mass held in a homeless shelter where the priest used one of the shelters coffee cups for the Precious Blood, she gave him what for, explained that his attempt to show "solidarity' was pathetic, and personally buried the cup to prevent it's ever being used for a lesser purpose!) Catholic Action, in the iteration that Ms. Day represented, was strongly Catholic in identity, rooted in prayer and sacrament, and was a hands on affair--yes, some Catholics wrote checks, but others got their hands dirty and did the work. it wasn't outsourced to applicant groups. And it was intended not only to provide relief, but to provide a way up, an improvement to communities and a method for communities to raise themselves up by their boot straps, maintaining that while there were a great many victims of injustice, in the end, the victims themselves, through personal responsibility and effort, held the key to their own improvement.
This spirit of Catholic Action, and the example of people like Dorothy Day informed the founding of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. unfortunately, it was contaminated-yes, I used the term 'contaminated"--from the very beginning with and by the input from Saul Alinsky. Among the distortions was the idea that there would be no direct relief included in the projects funded by the CCHD, a departure from 2000 years of tradition in performing the Corporal Works of Mercy, and the idea that the Campaign was to soft sell or even conceal the Catholic identity of the projects--it was intended to be separated from the Evangelization of Peoples. How Mr. Alinsky became involved is something of a mystery to me--he had a long history by this point of being opposed to the Church, in fact of being blatantly Anti-Catholic. None the less, his input distorted the effort from it's founding. In effect, in accordance with his Rules for Radicals, he put a huge con job over on the Bishops in the US, and through them, on the faithful who would be footing the bill.
Let's fast forward from the 1960s to the present decade. At this point, there is a groundswell of dissatisfaction among the Catholic Faithful--and I will open myself up to all sorts of vile remonstrance and accusation by saying that the Modernists are notCCHD, which culminated in the publication of the kinds of groups that were being funded, and the Bishops feeling the heat. This year, the CCHD published new guidelines on how it was going to conduct itself, and some of us saw a ray of hope.
Too bad it turned out to be a death ray.
My take on the process is that the Bishops are actually trying. Seriously. But that early on they resigned their control over the CCHD to a pro forma status, and gave it's operation over to lay bureaucrats, who are for the most part Modernists, uncommitted to the gospel, but very committed to progressive politics. The reform is already falling though.
After the publication of the types of groups that CCHD was funding, several groups lost their funding. Others were told that their contracts wouldn't be renewed. And those new guidelines were published. But we find that the people who are working in the CCHD are trying very hard not to comply. like in the Archdiocese of Chicago.
In the Archdiocese of Chicago, the CCHD was the subject of some excellent reforms. The Director for the Archdiocese, Rey Flores made great progress in establishing guidelines, and maintaining Catholic Identity within the program--the very reforms the National leadership had said were needed. He's been fired, and a group of Modernist priests led by a Father Larry Dowling, have been writing letters to Cardinal George saying it's insulting to applicants to ask them if they support Abortion and Same Sex Marriage. Priests who think it's insulting to ask groups that provide no social services with the money given, if they support murdering people before they're born and enabling sodomy. There is something very wrong there.
Mr. Flores said that for a very brief time, they were doing something wonderful in Chicago--they had the Pro-life people considering that the dignity of the worker and immigrant was an important part of being a pro-life activist, and they had the Social Justice community considering the justice implications of the sanctity of life and how the destruction of the societal institutions that nurture life were a huge contributor to poverty and injustice in the world. But that vital linkage, that is clear to anyone who actually takes a few hours to study the Catechism of the Catholic Church didn't last long. The old guard of the Social Justice community of Chicago has very thoroughly sunk it. No Father Dowling and his ilk--yeah, I used the work 'ilk' in a pejorative sense, and I mean it just the way it sounds--are targeting Flores' old boss, the Director of the Office of Peace and Justice Director Nicholas Lund-Molfese.
They don't want the Gospel cluttering up their view of justice--it's too hard to proclaim the whole gospel, and it hurts the feeling of their little buddies in the secular realm. Priests of divided heart are always destructive of the Mystical Body, and always ineffective in proclaiming the Gospel.
This is happening in a climate that has the bishops on the defensive about a program they have pushed for forty years. Ten diocese in the US have simply said they will no longer participate in the CCHD. But the USCCB is still trying to defend the program. One journalist described it as a "siege mentality" when it became apparent that the Faithful were not happy with this initiative. The defense of CCHD resulted in the new guidelines for activities--which are apparently still born. (This is illustrated by the inclusion of groups that support other groups, and participate in their activities, that link such things as a living wage, and enforcement of labor laws with Same Sex Marriage and the availability of federally funded abortions.) One of the things they have done,which may well be constructive, is the appointment of a Theologian to advise the CCHD on the moral fitness of various grant applications. They were at least sensitive enough to the concerns of those who pay the bill to appoint Father Daniel Mindling, Rectory of Mount Saint Mary's Seminary to the job. (Mt St. Mary's is regarded as the most orthodox seminary in the US--in itself sad--they should all be orthodox!)
Father Mindlings job description include ensuring that the grants distributed support and enhance Catholic Identity. I imagine that the Bureaucrats already hate him.
The Bishops, by and large, like this program. I am not sure how many of them like the way it's being run. if they were entirely satisfied, it's doubtful new guidelines would have been issued, or theologian appointed to oversee the work. On the other hand, if there weren't a sizable portion of the prelates who weren't pleased, it would be gone by now. So the Bishops are trying to get enough reform in the program for it to be at least morally acceptable, and to persuade the faithful that it's a legitimate and valuable way for the Church to spread the gospel. One way they are doing that is to release a cartoon. A cartoon! This is something that once again is divisive. To be blunt, we are the best educated group of the Faithful in church history. We do not need cartoons, we need teaching that explains some things to us. This just makes us think that we are held in contempt by our Bishops, and by the Modernist lay Bureaucracy that has so infested out Bishops Conference. It's hard for us to take the call to the laity to action and leadership in the Church when we get the feeling that unless the laity are modernists, we're considered too stupid to have input.
The Church is not in the business of re-creating society through Bureaucracy and direct political action. The Church is in the Business of Saving Souls--of enabling people to become saints. Saints living among us as always, leaven the Mystical Body which is Christs hands and feet on earth, and enable it to manifest the works of the Holy Spirit. if we want justice, we must remember that God Alone is Just. Not us. The battle over the CCHD isn't about a program, it's about the nature of the Church, and our role in proclaiming the Kingdom of God.
Michael Hichborn, who is spokesman for the group Reform CCHD Now says that the program is "...philosophically flawed right from the outset." Against this statement, it's illuminating to set the remarks of Robert Gorman, who is the Executive Director of Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Houma-Thibidaux in Louisiana. He says that the battle "It's a red herring. It's a national agenda that's not of importance to people at the local level who are just trying to work their way out of poverty and keep their kids safe". This is very illuminating, indeed.. Especially as Gorman went onto link justice to swimming pool safety and pollution. It points up a critical difference: To the social Justice crowd, the Gospel is only relevant to agenda. And the end justifies the means. CCHD hasn't given any money to relief--that's not it's job. Rather it has been, for a generation, distributing money to Organizers and Activists, who uniformly represent one end of the political spectrum, and whose efforts in the last generation have led to no improvement in the lot of the poor. In fact, their guiding light, Saul Alinsky, said that the goal wasn't to make things better, it was to leave people demanding more services from the Government. And a generation of this activity has led to a net increase in poverty, and a culture of dependence that will perpetuate poverty.
Moreover the groups that CCHD has supported and does support are problematical for Catholic Teaching not only in the realm of morality--abortion and same sex marriage, but in social teaching itself, ignoring such principles as private responsibility, subsidiarity, private property and the duty of government to promote the social order. Although the Peace and Justice crowd often trot out Cardinal Bernardin's famous "whole cloth" statement, they are not willing to apply that to what they do, only to use it to justify doing something they shouldn't, on our dime.
This battle points out something else: the infighting between the pro-life people and the social justice people. As Mr. Flores of Chicago said, for a brief time, they had everybody talking on the same page,and that got sabotaged. I've noticed this in our Archdiocese--the pro-life/evangelization people and the peace and justice people not only don't talk, they don't like each other. This division also runs parallel to the division between Catholic Teaching and Modernism.
It's time to abolish the CCHD, and replace it with another program--no one who looks at the whole of the situation can say there is no need--that takes a holistic approach, maintains the Catholic Identity of the program, and most especially doesn't let it become the entrenched bastion of a heretical faction. it should be closely overseen by the Bishops themselves, not delegated to the laity, where it can and would become an item in a tug of war between Modernists and Catholics.
In the Spiritual Struggle that Our Lady of Akita warned us about, the CCHD has become not only a battle ground, but a weapon being used by the Enemy. We need to end it now!
Another part of the problem, and the larger one, I think, is the very conceptual foundation of the CCHD, It is an obvious outgrowth of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century Catholic Action movement and campaigns. That movement had some notable failures, to be sure, but it also had some notable successes. The idea was to empower people to help themselves, and the idea is a good one, at it's root. But the CCHD is a little bit different. It's charter says it is not to give money for relief, but to hep empower people to end poverty. Well,the only real way to get people out of the depths of cyclic poverty is to enable them to pull themselves out. But the CCHD was founded with a great deal of input from Saul Alinsky, not just from Alinsky's followers, but from the man himself. And he did a great job confusing the Bishops as to the actual ends the Campaign would pursue. When people are asked to give money to the CCHD, they are asked to give money to help the poor--and many of them reasonably conclude that they are giving money to pursue the Corporal Works of Mercy. They are not, and the CCHD is banned by it's own charter from doing so. It's founded, in a way, upon a fraud perpetrated on the Faithful.
The CCHD is an example of something that Pope Paul VI (A Pontiff who will never be my favorite, but for whom I am developing a much greater respect as I learn about the things he had to deal with.) warned us about: The Church should never be reduced to a Social Services and Social Justice Group--it must always proclaim the gospel, and maintain sacramental ministry. The CCHD is firmly in the camp that declares that social justice concerns are the only real proclamation of the Gospel, and the only real Christian ministry.
Catholic Action reached it's apogee in the US in the person of Dorothy Day, a woman who was the driving force behind it through much of the first half of the Twentieth Century. There are those in the Social Justice community who feel she should be canonized. I have no opinion in the matter, personally, but it's notable that they wish her to be canonized not because of a life of heroic virtue, but for political reasons. Which is interesting, because Miss Day was appalled at the directions the Social Justice community and the Church took in the late 60s. She had very little in common with the Modernizers who dropped their masks and revealed themselves to be Modernists. She especially had problems with their approach to the Eucharist. (She once attended a Mass held in a homeless shelter where the priest used one of the shelters coffee cups for the Precious Blood, she gave him what for, explained that his attempt to show "solidarity' was pathetic, and personally buried the cup to prevent it's ever being used for a lesser purpose!) Catholic Action, in the iteration that Ms. Day represented, was strongly Catholic in identity, rooted in prayer and sacrament, and was a hands on affair--yes, some Catholics wrote checks, but others got their hands dirty and did the work. it wasn't outsourced to applicant groups. And it was intended not only to provide relief, but to provide a way up, an improvement to communities and a method for communities to raise themselves up by their boot straps, maintaining that while there were a great many victims of injustice, in the end, the victims themselves, through personal responsibility and effort, held the key to their own improvement.
This spirit of Catholic Action, and the example of people like Dorothy Day informed the founding of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. unfortunately, it was contaminated-yes, I used the term 'contaminated"--from the very beginning with and by the input from Saul Alinsky. Among the distortions was the idea that there would be no direct relief included in the projects funded by the CCHD, a departure from 2000 years of tradition in performing the Corporal Works of Mercy, and the idea that the Campaign was to soft sell or even conceal the Catholic identity of the projects--it was intended to be separated from the Evangelization of Peoples. How Mr. Alinsky became involved is something of a mystery to me--he had a long history by this point of being opposed to the Church, in fact of being blatantly Anti-Catholic. None the less, his input distorted the effort from it's founding. In effect, in accordance with his Rules for Radicals, he put a huge con job over on the Bishops in the US, and through them, on the faithful who would be footing the bill.
Let's fast forward from the 1960s to the present decade. At this point, there is a groundswell of dissatisfaction among the Catholic Faithful--and I will open myself up to all sorts of vile remonstrance and accusation by saying that the Modernists are notCCHD, which culminated in the publication of the kinds of groups that were being funded, and the Bishops feeling the heat. This year, the CCHD published new guidelines on how it was going to conduct itself, and some of us saw a ray of hope.
Too bad it turned out to be a death ray.
My take on the process is that the Bishops are actually trying. Seriously. But that early on they resigned their control over the CCHD to a pro forma status, and gave it's operation over to lay bureaucrats, who are for the most part Modernists, uncommitted to the gospel, but very committed to progressive politics. The reform is already falling though.
After the publication of the types of groups that CCHD was funding, several groups lost their funding. Others were told that their contracts wouldn't be renewed. And those new guidelines were published. But we find that the people who are working in the CCHD are trying very hard not to comply. like in the Archdiocese of Chicago.
In the Archdiocese of Chicago, the CCHD was the subject of some excellent reforms. The Director for the Archdiocese, Rey Flores made great progress in establishing guidelines, and maintaining Catholic Identity within the program--the very reforms the National leadership had said were needed. He's been fired, and a group of Modernist priests led by a Father Larry Dowling, have been writing letters to Cardinal George saying it's insulting to applicants to ask them if they support Abortion and Same Sex Marriage. Priests who think it's insulting to ask groups that provide no social services with the money given, if they support murdering people before they're born and enabling sodomy. There is something very wrong there.
Mr. Flores said that for a very brief time, they were doing something wonderful in Chicago--they had the Pro-life people considering that the dignity of the worker and immigrant was an important part of being a pro-life activist, and they had the Social Justice community considering the justice implications of the sanctity of life and how the destruction of the societal institutions that nurture life were a huge contributor to poverty and injustice in the world. But that vital linkage, that is clear to anyone who actually takes a few hours to study the Catechism of the Catholic Church didn't last long. The old guard of the Social Justice community of Chicago has very thoroughly sunk it. No Father Dowling and his ilk--yeah, I used the work 'ilk' in a pejorative sense, and I mean it just the way it sounds--are targeting Flores' old boss, the Director of the Office of Peace and Justice Director Nicholas Lund-Molfese.
They don't want the Gospel cluttering up their view of justice--it's too hard to proclaim the whole gospel, and it hurts the feeling of their little buddies in the secular realm. Priests of divided heart are always destructive of the Mystical Body, and always ineffective in proclaiming the Gospel.
This is happening in a climate that has the bishops on the defensive about a program they have pushed for forty years. Ten diocese in the US have simply said they will no longer participate in the CCHD. But the USCCB is still trying to defend the program. One journalist described it as a "siege mentality" when it became apparent that the Faithful were not happy with this initiative. The defense of CCHD resulted in the new guidelines for activities--which are apparently still born. (This is illustrated by the inclusion of groups that support other groups, and participate in their activities, that link such things as a living wage, and enforcement of labor laws with Same Sex Marriage and the availability of federally funded abortions.) One of the things they have done,which may well be constructive, is the appointment of a Theologian to advise the CCHD on the moral fitness of various grant applications. They were at least sensitive enough to the concerns of those who pay the bill to appoint Father Daniel Mindling, Rectory of Mount Saint Mary's Seminary to the job. (Mt St. Mary's is regarded as the most orthodox seminary in the US--in itself sad--they should all be orthodox!)
Father Mindlings job description include ensuring that the grants distributed support and enhance Catholic Identity. I imagine that the Bureaucrats already hate him.
The Bishops, by and large, like this program. I am not sure how many of them like the way it's being run. if they were entirely satisfied, it's doubtful new guidelines would have been issued, or theologian appointed to oversee the work. On the other hand, if there weren't a sizable portion of the prelates who weren't pleased, it would be gone by now. So the Bishops are trying to get enough reform in the program for it to be at least morally acceptable, and to persuade the faithful that it's a legitimate and valuable way for the Church to spread the gospel. One way they are doing that is to release a cartoon. A cartoon! This is something that once again is divisive. To be blunt, we are the best educated group of the Faithful in church history. We do not need cartoons, we need teaching that explains some things to us. This just makes us think that we are held in contempt by our Bishops, and by the Modernist lay Bureaucracy that has so infested out Bishops Conference. It's hard for us to take the call to the laity to action and leadership in the Church when we get the feeling that unless the laity are modernists, we're considered too stupid to have input.
The Church is not in the business of re-creating society through Bureaucracy and direct political action. The Church is in the Business of Saving Souls--of enabling people to become saints. Saints living among us as always, leaven the Mystical Body which is Christs hands and feet on earth, and enable it to manifest the works of the Holy Spirit. if we want justice, we must remember that God Alone is Just. Not us. The battle over the CCHD isn't about a program, it's about the nature of the Church, and our role in proclaiming the Kingdom of God.
Michael Hichborn, who is spokesman for the group Reform CCHD Now says that the program is "...philosophically flawed right from the outset." Against this statement, it's illuminating to set the remarks of Robert Gorman, who is the Executive Director of Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Houma-Thibidaux in Louisiana. He says that the battle "It's a red herring. It's a national agenda that's not of importance to people at the local level who are just trying to work their way out of poverty and keep their kids safe". This is very illuminating, indeed.. Especially as Gorman went onto link justice to swimming pool safety and pollution. It points up a critical difference: To the social Justice crowd, the Gospel is only relevant to agenda. And the end justifies the means. CCHD hasn't given any money to relief--that's not it's job. Rather it has been, for a generation, distributing money to Organizers and Activists, who uniformly represent one end of the political spectrum, and whose efforts in the last generation have led to no improvement in the lot of the poor. In fact, their guiding light, Saul Alinsky, said that the goal wasn't to make things better, it was to leave people demanding more services from the Government. And a generation of this activity has led to a net increase in poverty, and a culture of dependence that will perpetuate poverty.
Moreover the groups that CCHD has supported and does support are problematical for Catholic Teaching not only in the realm of morality--abortion and same sex marriage, but in social teaching itself, ignoring such principles as private responsibility, subsidiarity, private property and the duty of government to promote the social order. Although the Peace and Justice crowd often trot out Cardinal Bernardin's famous "whole cloth" statement, they are not willing to apply that to what they do, only to use it to justify doing something they shouldn't, on our dime.
This battle points out something else: the infighting between the pro-life people and the social justice people. As Mr. Flores of Chicago said, for a brief time, they had everybody talking on the same page,and that got sabotaged. I've noticed this in our Archdiocese--the pro-life/evangelization people and the peace and justice people not only don't talk, they don't like each other. This division also runs parallel to the division between Catholic Teaching and Modernism.
It's time to abolish the CCHD, and replace it with another program--no one who looks at the whole of the situation can say there is no need--that takes a holistic approach, maintains the Catholic Identity of the program, and most especially doesn't let it become the entrenched bastion of a heretical faction. it should be closely overseen by the Bishops themselves, not delegated to the laity, where it can and would become an item in a tug of war between Modernists and Catholics.
In the Spiritual Struggle that Our Lady of Akita warned us about, the CCHD has become not only a battle ground, but a weapon being used by the Enemy. We need to end it now!
Friday, November 12, 2010
A Book I Wish I Hadn't Read
have you ever read a book, thought about it and found that it had influenced your philosophy of life, and then years later wished you hadn't read it, because it was basically a crock? I have.
The book I'm thinking of is Crack in the Cosmic Egg, by Joseph Chilton Pierce. It was big in the late 70s and early 80s. Aside from a truly bad title and a lurid cover, it seemed well reasoned. That was part of the problem, though. You can construct reasonable intellectual structures, but if you have fallacious axioms, the structure, although entirely reasonable, will be false.
I wish I had taken some classes in formal logic before I read the book.
Mr. Pierce held that the only thing people have in common is the act of perception, and that although we used language to communicate our perceptions, they remained in essence incommunicable. What was perceived could never be truly shared, because it occurred within the internal forum of the mind, and that we were able to cooperate only because we developed language. language however, was simply a set of conventions and assumptions. To paint it broadly, we could both perceive something with the quality "blue" and agree that it held that quality. However I may perceive "blue" in a way that, were you to experience what I have perceived, you might label green. On the other hand, what you perceive as 'blue" were i able to actually experience what occurred in your mind, I might label "bacon".
From this, he expounded that reality was, to steal a word from he former presiding bishop of TEC, pluriform.
A little reflection then led him to propose that reality is malleable. not in the sense of self help book 'make your own reality by changing how you feel about our crappy job' but in the sense that objectively measured events are not possible, and by changing our conceptual framework, we can literally change the world around us.
Of course, I don't believe that. But it did lead to a moral relativism, a situational view of ethics and ultimately a practice of (self referential) self justification to legitimize what ever I wanted to do. most of the foolish things in my life, in retrospect, grew out of the seeds that this book planted.
I apologize to anyone I ever recommended it to.
The book I'm thinking of is Crack in the Cosmic Egg, by Joseph Chilton Pierce. It was big in the late 70s and early 80s. Aside from a truly bad title and a lurid cover, it seemed well reasoned. That was part of the problem, though. You can construct reasonable intellectual structures, but if you have fallacious axioms, the structure, although entirely reasonable, will be false.
I wish I had taken some classes in formal logic before I read the book.
Mr. Pierce held that the only thing people have in common is the act of perception, and that although we used language to communicate our perceptions, they remained in essence incommunicable. What was perceived could never be truly shared, because it occurred within the internal forum of the mind, and that we were able to cooperate only because we developed language. language however, was simply a set of conventions and assumptions. To paint it broadly, we could both perceive something with the quality "blue" and agree that it held that quality. However I may perceive "blue" in a way that, were you to experience what I have perceived, you might label green. On the other hand, what you perceive as 'blue" were i able to actually experience what occurred in your mind, I might label "bacon".
From this, he expounded that reality was, to steal a word from he former presiding bishop of TEC, pluriform.
A little reflection then led him to propose that reality is malleable. not in the sense of self help book 'make your own reality by changing how you feel about our crappy job' but in the sense that objectively measured events are not possible, and by changing our conceptual framework, we can literally change the world around us.
Of course, I don't believe that. But it did lead to a moral relativism, a situational view of ethics and ultimately a practice of (self referential) self justification to legitimize what ever I wanted to do. most of the foolish things in my life, in retrospect, grew out of the seeds that this book planted.
I apologize to anyone I ever recommended it to.
I'm glad I don't live in Florida.
I like the waters on the gulf coast of Florida. I like them a lot. And Florida can be very fun to visit, whatever your opinion of a fun time may be. (Unless you're devoted to cross country skiing.) But I sure am glad I don't live there.
Things happen there that don't happen here. Of course you have the whole Hurricane Season thing, but they have other things. Like people letting their pet snakes loose in the everglades so now there are large pythons that eat dogs and even try for gators.
I could probably learn to live with that, I mean, I put up with Hoosier politicians, hoodies, coyotes and the Courier-Journal.
But I'm going to draw the line at these things:
Locally acquired Dengue Fever--Miami/Dade County has had it's first locally acquired case since the 50s--the victim hadn't left town for longer than the incubation period of the disease--he caught it there. Plus, it's a different strain than that which has caused the other 57 locally acquired cases in Florida, (Mostly in Key West and Broward County)
But then there is the 'vigilance' thing for Cholera, which is now a concern in South East Florida.
And then again, they are having that hookworm outbreak on Atlantic Beach--you remember hookworm from public health class, maybe, you know, the one that's spread by dog and cat poop that gets ground into the soil and people step in it?
Things happen there that don't happen here. Of course you have the whole Hurricane Season thing, but they have other things. Like people letting their pet snakes loose in the everglades so now there are large pythons that eat dogs and even try for gators.
I could probably learn to live with that, I mean, I put up with Hoosier politicians, hoodies, coyotes and the Courier-Journal.
But I'm going to draw the line at these things:
Locally acquired Dengue Fever--Miami/Dade County has had it's first locally acquired case since the 50s--the victim hadn't left town for longer than the incubation period of the disease--he caught it there. Plus, it's a different strain than that which has caused the other 57 locally acquired cases in Florida, (Mostly in Key West and Broward County)
But then there is the 'vigilance' thing for Cholera, which is now a concern in South East Florida.
And then again, they are having that hookworm outbreak on Atlantic Beach--you remember hookworm from public health class, maybe, you know, the one that's spread by dog and cat poop that gets ground into the soil and people step in it?
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Report From the Battle Front: UK
In the interesting saga of the return of many Anglicans to Union with the Catholic Church, there have been many twists and turns. From the Oxford Movement, through Cardinal Newman, to the declaration on the invalidity of Anglican orders, to the conversion of the Society of the Atonement (The Graymore Friars), through the ecumenical work of the 70s and 80s, to the Pope's Document "Communities of Anglicans" (Sorry, the Latin Title just throws me--so I"m using the English.) the path has been a winding, I'm tempted to say meandering, one, marked by both attempts at reason and good will discussion, and emotionalism tinged with bigotry. It's a harder road than it first looked, considering the similarities between the two Faiths.
Certainly, considering the hundred or so years it took to finally wean the English people away from Catholicism and to the State Church, and the infighting within that State Church between factions that were essentially Catholic, Calvinist or Lutheran in faith, it's gone harder than one would have thought. One mustn't underestimate the depth of Anti-Catholic bias in the UK. And that is certainly a factor.
I wouldn't be surprised if some bodies of Anglicans went East, instead. The Orthodox Church of Antioch has provisions for a Western Rite, in union with their Patriarch. The Russian Orthodox Church received a number of Anglican/Episcopalian parishes in Alaska and the North West in the early twentieth century. Reason tells me that it's likely that there will be bodies of Anglicans going there, rather than to Rome. Some will go to the Orthodox out of a genuine conviction that that is the place that the Church Founded by Christ subsists. Others will choose Orthodoxy over Catholicism out of a distaste for the Papacy.
In the UK, words are flying like daggers, or sometimes cudgels. The Archbishop of Canterbury is having to face things that he temperamentally would much rather not. And everyone from pew sitters to priests is chiming in. And the consternation isn't just in C of E circles. There have been accusations of foot dragging by the Catholic Bishops in establishing the Ordinariate.
Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright spoke about this in the Church of Ireland Gazette, mentioned that several Catholic Bishops in the UK were unhappy with the Ordinariate. I think we can take this at face value. The Catholic hierarchy in the UK has bonds with the Anglican Hierarchy that spring in part from proximity in a small nation and in part from a certain commonality of experience. Leaving aside the question of Anglican Orders, they have very similar jobs, performed in similar circumstance. Friendships have sprung up between them, and it's difficult to do things that will hurt your friends feelings, or strain the friendship. But there is more to it than that. Bishop Wright said in the interview "...I did hear one Roman Catholic Priest--how representative I don't know--saying we've quite enough traditionalists in our own Church without having all yours as well." We shouldn't underestimate this!
The Catholic Bishops of the UK are charitably described as Liberal. A more accurate description would be modernist. The Modernist faction has controlled the Hierarchy in the UK for more than a generation, and Modernism tinges almost everything in the Church there. These were the Bishops who vociferously opposed the Summorum Pontificam and erected barrier to it's enactment throughout the UK, until Rome issued a "clarification that told them to stop. These are also the same prelates who a while back were criticised for requiring all immigrant priests to attend a special school as a requirement for receiving faculties, or for incardination, a school which one attendee said was teaching them "to be less Catholic." The idea that they will have parishes erected that cater to people more in touch with the traditions and nuances of the Catholic faith than they like, and that these parishes will not be subject to their interference must be unpalatable.
Bishop Wright, who is a member of the evangelical wing of the C of E also mentioned something else that we need to consider: he points to the indications of a turf war in the Vatican, and among the hierarchy in the UK. That's saddening. This shouldn't be about politics. The offer to communities of Anglicans was a response to requests by the the Bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion, to welcome into full and organic communion those whose Faith was Catholic, yet whose ecclesial bodies were separated. It shouldn't be an field for power struggles and prestige.
But problems also exist with the pew sitters in the Catholic Church. Some wonder why Anglicans who wish to convert are being received as a body, and why they are keeping their Liturgical and Spiritual Patrimony. This resistance strikes me as being born of ignorance. No one required the Easter Rites, such as the Byzantines or Ruthenians to repudiate their liturgies and customs. The idea of absolute liturgical uniformity didn't exist when the Anglican Schism occurred. At that time, the Church in England was a Latin Church, but followed the Sarum Usage, different in many ways from Roman Usage. The push to create an absolute uniformity of liturgical practice didn't occur until after the Council of Trent, and then explicit provision was made that customs in place for more than one hundred years had the force of law. the idea that Anglicans reuniting with Rome must discard their own liturgical custom and spiritual practices doesn't stand scrutiny in the light of history. These opponents, within the Catholic Church, of the Anglican Ordinariates need to remember that the phrase "Anglican Partimony" didn't originate with Anglicans. It originated with a Pope.
Mention must be made here, as well, of the opinion that the whole idea of an Anglican Ordinariate
One of the difficulties people are having with this is that they see it as debate about gender--about consecrating women as bishops. That's not the case at all,and this isn't a new dispute, it's been brewing since at least the 1830s. WE Catholics have a problem understanding the Anglican mind, especially the Anglo-Catholic mind. Most of us are not aware that in the 1890s, there were Anglican Bishops who sought consecration from the see of Utrecht when the Pope declared their holy Orders invalid. We are also unaware of the struggle--sometimes at risk of their own freedom and lively hood that they waged to keep the three fold ministry of Deacon, Priest and Bishop alive in their church in a recognizably Catholic form, of the fight to keep the Creeds alive in their worship. We don't understand that they are serious about "the Catholic faith as received". What's at stake here isn't the ordination of women,or even the consecration of women as bishops. What they perceive as being at stake is the Deposit of the Faith.
That's why the "olive branches" extended to them haven't worked. For them to accept any sort of arraignment with Canterbury means, at it's root, that they accept the idea that Apostolic Succession, the Sacraments, the moral Teachings--the whole fabric of the Church and it's Teachings--is subject to debate. And that they cannot do. Since the days of Archbishop Laud, the Anglicans have been on the horns of a dilemma--their Church was founded as an erastian body, to be sure that the structure of the faith would not oppose the structure of the state. In order for it to function, it must allow for the different strands of religious conviction, opinion and expression to exist in one body. If it happens that a strand that rejects the existence of immutable truth and unchanging practice gets control, they must either themselves, implicitly, reject the idea that there are truths that we received from Our lord, or find another home.
That very situation came to pass, and Anglo-Catholics are seeing that Petrine Ministry isn't just a practice of polity, but a vital part of the Church that Christ founded.
We Catholics are engaged in the same battle, in a way, with Modernism, and just as in the Anglican Communion, it threatens our integrity as an ecclesial body. The difference is, that we have a large body of Modernists who are threatening, and moving towards,schism with a largely orthodox hierarchy, and the Anglicans have a large modernist hierarchy that is driving the orthodox into "schism". (I used the quotes there because, technically speaking, they are renouncing schism!) But the same conflict is alive and well in our own Church. The main thing we can do, as pew sitters, is spend some time in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and pray for our Brothers and Sisters who are considering coming over, and praying for our own Church, that few will choose to leave, when the Schism becomes manifest as formal schism, rather than the poorly concealed material schism we now experience.
Certainly, considering the hundred or so years it took to finally wean the English people away from Catholicism and to the State Church, and the infighting within that State Church between factions that were essentially Catholic, Calvinist or Lutheran in faith, it's gone harder than one would have thought. One mustn't underestimate the depth of Anti-Catholic bias in the UK. And that is certainly a factor.
I wouldn't be surprised if some bodies of Anglicans went East, instead. The Orthodox Church of Antioch has provisions for a Western Rite, in union with their Patriarch. The Russian Orthodox Church received a number of Anglican/Episcopalian parishes in Alaska and the North West in the early twentieth century. Reason tells me that it's likely that there will be bodies of Anglicans going there, rather than to Rome. Some will go to the Orthodox out of a genuine conviction that that is the place that the Church Founded by Christ subsists. Others will choose Orthodoxy over Catholicism out of a distaste for the Papacy.
In the UK, words are flying like daggers, or sometimes cudgels. The Archbishop of Canterbury is having to face things that he temperamentally would much rather not. And everyone from pew sitters to priests is chiming in. And the consternation isn't just in C of E circles. There have been accusations of foot dragging by the Catholic Bishops in establishing the Ordinariate.
Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright spoke about this in the Church of Ireland Gazette, mentioned that several Catholic Bishops in the UK were unhappy with the Ordinariate. I think we can take this at face value. The Catholic hierarchy in the UK has bonds with the Anglican Hierarchy that spring in part from proximity in a small nation and in part from a certain commonality of experience. Leaving aside the question of Anglican Orders, they have very similar jobs, performed in similar circumstance. Friendships have sprung up between them, and it's difficult to do things that will hurt your friends feelings, or strain the friendship. But there is more to it than that. Bishop Wright said in the interview "...I did hear one Roman Catholic Priest--how representative I don't know--saying we've quite enough traditionalists in our own Church without having all yours as well." We shouldn't underestimate this!
The Catholic Bishops of the UK are charitably described as Liberal. A more accurate description would be modernist. The Modernist faction has controlled the Hierarchy in the UK for more than a generation, and Modernism tinges almost everything in the Church there. These were the Bishops who vociferously opposed the Summorum Pontificam and erected barrier to it's enactment throughout the UK, until Rome issued a "clarification that told them to stop. These are also the same prelates who a while back were criticised for requiring all immigrant priests to attend a special school as a requirement for receiving faculties, or for incardination, a school which one attendee said was teaching them "to be less Catholic." The idea that they will have parishes erected that cater to people more in touch with the traditions and nuances of the Catholic faith than they like, and that these parishes will not be subject to their interference must be unpalatable.
Bishop Wright, who is a member of the evangelical wing of the C of E also mentioned something else that we need to consider: he points to the indications of a turf war in the Vatican, and among the hierarchy in the UK. That's saddening. This shouldn't be about politics. The offer to communities of Anglicans was a response to requests by the the Bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion, to welcome into full and organic communion those whose Faith was Catholic, yet whose ecclesial bodies were separated. It shouldn't be an field for power struggles and prestige.
But problems also exist with the pew sitters in the Catholic Church. Some wonder why Anglicans who wish to convert are being received as a body, and why they are keeping their Liturgical and Spiritual Patrimony. This resistance strikes me as being born of ignorance. No one required the Easter Rites, such as the Byzantines or Ruthenians to repudiate their liturgies and customs. The idea of absolute liturgical uniformity didn't exist when the Anglican Schism occurred. At that time, the Church in England was a Latin Church, but followed the Sarum Usage, different in many ways from Roman Usage. The push to create an absolute uniformity of liturgical practice didn't occur until after the Council of Trent, and then explicit provision was made that customs in place for more than one hundred years had the force of law. the idea that Anglicans reuniting with Rome must discard their own liturgical custom and spiritual practices doesn't stand scrutiny in the light of history. These opponents, within the Catholic Church, of the Anglican Ordinariates need to remember that the phrase "Anglican Partimony" didn't originate with Anglicans. It originated with a Pope.
Mention must be made here, as well, of the opinion that the whole idea of an Anglican Ordinariate
One of the difficulties people are having with this is that they see it as debate about gender--about consecrating women as bishops. That's not the case at all,and this isn't a new dispute, it's been brewing since at least the 1830s. WE Catholics have a problem understanding the Anglican mind, especially the Anglo-Catholic mind. Most of us are not aware that in the 1890s, there were Anglican Bishops who sought consecration from the see of Utrecht when the Pope declared their holy Orders invalid. We are also unaware of the struggle--sometimes at risk of their own freedom and lively hood that they waged to keep the three fold ministry of Deacon, Priest and Bishop alive in their church in a recognizably Catholic form, of the fight to keep the Creeds alive in their worship. We don't understand that they are serious about "the Catholic faith as received". What's at stake here isn't the ordination of women,or even the consecration of women as bishops. What they perceive as being at stake is the Deposit of the Faith.
That's why the "olive branches" extended to them haven't worked. For them to accept any sort of arraignment with Canterbury means, at it's root, that they accept the idea that Apostolic Succession, the Sacraments, the moral Teachings--the whole fabric of the Church and it's Teachings--is subject to debate. And that they cannot do. Since the days of Archbishop Laud, the Anglicans have been on the horns of a dilemma--their Church was founded as an erastian body, to be sure that the structure of the faith would not oppose the structure of the state. In order for it to function, it must allow for the different strands of religious conviction, opinion and expression to exist in one body. If it happens that a strand that rejects the existence of immutable truth and unchanging practice gets control, they must either themselves, implicitly, reject the idea that there are truths that we received from Our lord, or find another home.
That very situation came to pass, and Anglo-Catholics are seeing that Petrine Ministry isn't just a practice of polity, but a vital part of the Church that Christ founded.
We Catholics are engaged in the same battle, in a way, with Modernism, and just as in the Anglican Communion, it threatens our integrity as an ecclesial body. The difference is, that we have a large body of Modernists who are threatening, and moving towards,schism with a largely orthodox hierarchy, and the Anglicans have a large modernist hierarchy that is driving the orthodox into "schism". (I used the quotes there because, technically speaking, they are renouncing schism!) But the same conflict is alive and well in our own Church. The main thing we can do, as pew sitters, is spend some time in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and pray for our Brothers and Sisters who are considering coming over, and praying for our own Church, that few will choose to leave, when the Schism becomes manifest as formal schism, rather than the poorly concealed material schism we now experience.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Sorry for not Blogging Today + Usefull Observation.
Sorry, I got my research (that's much to grand a word for what i do!) but haven't written.
i have a cold that has settled in the back of my sinus, a headache, sore throat and low fever. i don't even want to eat.
i have noticed that being on a mixture of OTC meds for the symptoms makes typing even more problematical than normal. So, remember: Friends don't let Friends Keyboard on OTC drugs.
I will be back tomorrow--I saved all my stuff.
i have a cold that has settled in the back of my sinus, a headache, sore throat and low fever. i don't even want to eat.
i have noticed that being on a mixture of OTC meds for the symptoms makes typing even more problematical than normal. So, remember: Friends don't let Friends Keyboard on OTC drugs.
I will be back tomorrow--I saved all my stuff.
Monday, November 8, 2010
A Story In Search of an Author (PG-13 /2)
Santa's heels drummed the floor, splattering snow, soot and deer shit across the Persian carpet. A .45 caliber hole was in his forehead; the back of his head was oozing gelatinously down the Currier and Ives lithograph of smug, ice skating 19th century Bourgeoisie villagers. A stench fouled the air even as his back relaxed from it's arched death throws. The assassin had no doubt the body would soon be found. After all, nine field dressed reindeer seldom hung from the holly trees lining the suburban drive, and the massive sleigh blocked the street, where it had landed after sliding from the roof. With a snick the fresh magazine slid into the but of the MIL-SPEC M1911, and the assassin allowed herself a grim smile; now it was the elves turn.
It's not even thanksgiving, and the commercial x-mass decorations are going up downtown! I want the Solemnity of the Nativity of Our Lord Back, and the hell with Santa Claus!
There. that's my anti-commercial Christmass rant for the year. I'll say no more about it. And yes, I know I spelled Christmass with two esses. I'm reclaiming it from Reformation English, and plan on going to Christmass Eve Midnight Mass.
It's not even thanksgiving, and the commercial x-mass decorations are going up downtown! I want the Solemnity of the Nativity of Our Lord Back, and the hell with Santa Claus!
There. that's my anti-commercial Christmass rant for the year. I'll say no more about it. And yes, I know I spelled Christmass with two esses. I'm reclaiming it from Reformation English, and plan on going to Christmass Eve Midnight Mass.
Rounding up, with Apologies.
I'd like to apologize for just putting up a round up today--any of these topics is worthy of being a post in and of themselves, but for the month of November I'm working on a personal project that seems to be eating my time. so here are the things I"m rounding up.
- The Odd Thing About Modernists--Modernists seem to me to combine two unlikely trends that have run throughout the history of Heresy and Schism: Clericalism, and Anti-Sacradotalism . i find that almost incredible, but none the less true. The modernists try to deemphasize the priesthood and the sacraments at every turn. yet at the same time they claim clerical privilege. Consider how often the term 'Celebrant' has been replaced by "Presider". And the deliberate removal of the Blessed Sacrament, the emphasis on the social dimension of the liturgy. Most of all, think of the move to ordain women. This last is the most telling, for it points a rejection of the idea of matter and form from the sacraments as elements instituted by Christ. Modernists, in saying the church can and should change it's essentials with the times denies that there is anything supernatural about persons in the Church. in it's essence, modernism denies the Sacramental Priesthood, replacing it with a social leadership model. yet when you call a Modernist Cleric on this, even citing authoritative teaching or documents, they fall back on the "I'm the priest/lay minister/sister or what have you argument. It's very strange. In fact, that might be the tale-tell to use in sorting modernists from liberal clerics.
- I'm Still worried About Islam--I mentioned before that Muslims are upset that Oklahoma has passed a law saying that Sharia courts have no legal standing, and the CAIR was suing the State to block the law. it's interesting that their disinformation campaign says that the law will stop sharia from being used in private arbitration. It does nothing of the sort. It prevents one party in Arbitration from being forced to submit to Sharia when they choose not to be bound by the tenants of a religion they don't believe in. The Muslims are calling that bigotry. In another venue, Nazim Mahmoud Salim has been charged with inciting people to acts of violence against the Pope. Salim has been charged in Israel, a nation that is less than pleased with the Vatican right now. In Cairo, Anwar Al-Awlaki is saying that there should be no more Fatwas justifying the killing of Americans. His reasoning is simple--there are enough already, and no one needs to pray or seek guidance because killing Americans is clearly the right thing to do. Odd, considering tht he was born in New Mexico, and is therefore and American Citizen. Islam teaches that Mohamed was the best man ever, and should be imitated by all men. So in Sheffield England, five men were sentenced to prison for a total of 32 years. Umar and Razwan Razaq, Zafran Razman, Adil Hussain and Moshin Kahn were operating a ring that preyed on teenage girls, some as young as twelve. Not, you will note, Irish names. They cried as they were sentenced, because they didn't see why they should be jailed: Mohamed deflowered his favorite wife when she was nine.
- The Church of England--Speaking of Modernists who wish to alter the priesthood, the Cof E is expected to announce the resignation of five of it's bishops and their conversion to Catholicism. it seems that many Anglo Catholics no longer feel they can practice anything resembling the Catholic Faith in the C of E. It's a realization that has been a long time coming. I have to wonder though, what is the least free person in the UKs Opinion? I'm speaking of course abut the Queen, who is herself reputedly and Anglo Catholic.
How much do you want to bet?
If I were the sort of guy who makes more than one bet a year, I'd place a bet today that by the 20th of June, 2011, we find that the GOP Machine has co opted all those nice new faces that entered the house, and those Republicans who went to the Senate.
We won't have changed a damned thing. Nothing.
I'm already starting to see indicators of it.
I expect that by June, we will see that in this election we have sent a message to Congress, and to the Two Parties: An end to the irresponsible and corrupt use of government to buy votes for political machines with the peoples money isn't working, change it. And we will have seen the answer: You can't make us.
It's time for a Constitutional Convention. We need to reinforce and extend the Bill of Rights. We need to especially to restore the division of powers, not only between the Branches of the Federal Government, but between the Federal Government and the Several States. We need to reign in the judiciaries discovery that it can make law and overturn precedent, and the temptation to engage in activist jurisprudence. And we need to find a way to break the Republican and Democratic Parties so that never again will we be dominated the machinations of a professional political class. I don't like ruling classes. period.
We won't have changed a damned thing. Nothing.
I'm already starting to see indicators of it.
I expect that by June, we will see that in this election we have sent a message to Congress, and to the Two Parties: An end to the irresponsible and corrupt use of government to buy votes for political machines with the peoples money isn't working, change it. And we will have seen the answer: You can't make us.
It's time for a Constitutional Convention. We need to reinforce and extend the Bill of Rights. We need to especially to restore the division of powers, not only between the Branches of the Federal Government, but between the Federal Government and the Several States. We need to reign in the judiciaries discovery that it can make law and overturn precedent, and the temptation to engage in activist jurisprudence. And we need to find a way to break the Republican and Democratic Parties so that never again will we be dominated the machinations of a professional political class. I don't like ruling classes. period.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
A post by my three year old granddaughter
ssssssssssssskkkkjyoooooooopp0ppddddddddddddddddssssssssssssssss7777777777777778888888888888888888dsgdd
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzccccccc
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It was a VERY patriotic breakfast.
In truth, one of the most patriotic things I'll do all week.
Three eggs, over medium, cooked in sausage and bacon drippings
Five sausage patties.
Three biscuits, with ample butter.
The things I do for the Republic... .
Three eggs, over medium, cooked in sausage and bacon drippings
Five sausage patties.
Three biscuits, with ample butter.
The things I do for the Republic... .
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