Mysterious Things

And every other piety but how many of the Love Parade revellers were crazy on the drugs du jour or drunk?

Update on Sunday, July 25, 2010 at 8:40 by Marc

Not a word about the possible rôle of drink or pharmaceuticals in the Times, and the Guardian is full of the organisers' being greedy capitalists nonchalant about partiers' lives; I suppose I am simply too evil-minded, sometimes.

At least according to the Washington Post's Gene Weingarten (I think that the last time I paid him any attention was when he involved himself somehow in arranging for Joshua Bell to busk at the entrance of one of the downtown Metro stations in D.C.): Andrea Harris takes him to task for accusing Mr Guthrie of... well, it has to be treason to the cause and betrayal of the comrades, at some level, although the casus belli is materially a line in the 'Alice's restaurant' song. When I finally listened to the entire song, about ten years ago, I was... vaguely amused, mildly entertained, chiefly bored.

John Smeaton noted the article in the Times.  In spite of Miss Senior's admission that human life, each single human life, begins at conception, well, if you have a cause, you had better be ready to kill for it. Whether the position the lady has articulated supra is universally true or not (it isn't, obviously, but a solid current of opinion amongst the heathens holds that it is), it is almost refreshing to read such a bald statement of 'principle' from the pro-abortion party.

Update on Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 6:30 by Marc

And Carl Olson at Ignatius also has seen this.

Joe at ¡No Pasaran! points out for our amusement and edification some of the more amusing errors that French students have made on their baccalauréat exams (which amount, more or less, to a series of national university entrance tests).  "As the name indicates, the blues were invented by the blacks."  "The earth would be covered in ice were it not for the volcanos heating its interior."  "The chief exponent of Surrealism is Salvador Dalida." One more.  "The three states of matter are the solid state, the liquid state, and le tiers-état." Doubtless it's funnier that it's the poor French whose ignorance reveals itself: but Americans, alas....   

Mike Aquilina at The Way of the Fathers assembles some links to posts about the recent re-discovery of a mass burial of human infants northwest of London that is publicised because someone thinks the deceased were children of prostitutes.

Update on Saturday, June 26, 2010 at 16:52 by Marc

Skimming headlines after I check on the Bollettino (yes, sometimes items are added after the morning's first publication).  At the Times, moments ago, there are two links one above the other: "U.N. Council 'Gravely Concerned' At Korea Ship Sinking" (6 minutes ago), and then, "UN Urges Koreas to Avoid Acts That Raise Tensions" (9 minutes ago).  (To be fair, they are from the area of the front page that contains stories from Reuters and Associated Press; both of our articles are from Reuters.)  I suppose we are meant to understand that Pyongyang has elected to ignore the UN's urging? the juxtaposition of the headlines was wryly amusing-- that is the whole point of this. The Times's own story about North Korea? "Brazil Prepares for Match With North Korea". 

The Hanoverians settled themselves on St Edward's Chair, Swift wrote out his neuroses, the 60s let everyone experience the freedom to indulge their native preoccupations with lewdness and vice: who knows, but John Walsh's essay is vaguely interesting.  The English rejected the Christian religion-- there's an explanation for you.

Described wonderfully incisively by Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal (the link seems not to be working, at least at the moment), noticed by Daniel Mitsui.  Ante me nihil, post me omnia.

At Laudator Temporis Acti earlier; Thomas Babington Macaulay. "Where will your Emersons be then? But Herodotus will still be read with delight." Let us hope so.

Is an example of it: Andrea Harris discovers these things, somehow.

At First Things, by David Goldman, 'Spengler'.

The West has lost a series of battles, but not necessarily the war. Islamism also has its Achilles heel. I wrote in 2004:

The West cannot endure without faith that a loving Father dwells beyond the clouds that obscure His throne. Horror—the perception that cruelty has no purpose and no end—is lethal to the West. Europe is dying slowly from the horror of the twentieth century's world wars, ending the way T. S. Eliot foresaw in the poem cited above, ‘not with a bang but a whimper’. Despite its intrinsic optimism, America is vulnerable as well.

The Islamic world cannot endure without confidence in victory, that to “come to prayer” is the same thing as to ‘come to success’. Humiliation—the perception that the Ummah cannot reward those who submit to it—is beyond its capacity to endure.

Radical Islam has risen against the West in response to its humiliation—intentional or not—at Western hands. The West can break the revolt by inflicting even worse humiliation upon the Islamists, poisoning the confidence of their supporters in the Muslim world.

Israel, the stone that the builders rejected, yet may be the West’s cornerstone. An Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear program, if it humiliated Iran sufficiently, might change the equation.

I don't know, and do not pretend to. The one premise I consider incontrovertible-- that there is a substantial connexion between the Jews, the faithful of the First Covenant, and the State of Israel-- is certainly denied by many.

And, I must admit, I tend not to be able to, ahem, keep up.  The fundamental data, so far as I'm concerned are: one, the bishop has declared that an excommunication latae sententiae occurred, and his apostolic authority is owed the benefit of any doubt; and, two, the religious sister's defenders have been, for the most part, the creatures of the secular media and the party of dissenters and spiritists, of the Third Vatican Council and an 'hermeneutic of rupture' et cetera.  Professor Garnett, at Mirror of Justice, introduces a letter from John O'Callaghan, Notre Dame professor of philosophy, interpreting the illustrious Elizabeth Anscombe's doctrine of intention contra Professor Caveny.  

Professor Althouse posted a brief exchange between Richard Nixon and Art Linkletter (requiescant in pace) discussing the relations between the use of alcohol and the use of marijuana; my interest is in the interesting comments of 'Largo', 'Theo Boehme' and others. Ad rei memoriam....

Reads, and this post is a good example why.

... I’m trying to make a serious point here. A significant proportion of the population (significant if only in that they soak up most of the emergency services budgets) simply do not seem to know how to spend leisure time, without getting drunk and abusing other people....

How can elected government serve the common good well when its members are more concerned about the nonsense that preoccupies their class than they are about ameliorating the real nonsense that stains or cripples the lives and environments of a not insignificant number of their constituents?

Throughout history have been "obsessed", as Mark Steyn puts it, that civilisation has maintained its hard-won gains contra barbariam.

Update on Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 17:54 by Marc

Really, I had totally missed 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day', tsk; it is true that I have not been spending much time reading the secular politics and GWOT blogs et cetera during the last few weeks: am enjoying the first book of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria instead.  Post impetratam studiis meis quietem...

Because it reveals that lots of people who ought to be clear about the issues involved seem not to be; why, one wonders, if so and so publicly dissents from the authentic magisterium in this or that should one suppose that he is faithful also in these other matters?

Update on Friday, May 21, 2010 at 19:04 by Marc

Michael Liccione at First Things offers an analysis of the case.  Honestly, I haven't been paying any attention at all to the secular media's coverage of this scandal, and can only imagine the outraged virtue at the ENCR. I am afraid that there are too, too many nominal Catholics in the Catholic healthcare systems, and that their infidelity is costing human lives.

So they say, those who want to convert human persons into living farms of organs.  Michael Cook at BioEdge has noted the paper by Professor Julian Savulescu and Dominic Wilkinson, both of Oxford University, that will appear in the journal Bioethics.

... Savulescu and Wilkinson’s idea runs like this. It is indecent that 450 people die in Britain while waiting for an organ. People who are on life support or who are brain-dead are potentially a good source of organs, as each body can yield as many as nine of them. Organs taken from living patients are most suitable for transplant, because every second after the heart stops beating decreases the chances of transplant success. Patients would, of course, have to assent to the procedure before they became unconscious. And they envisage taking organs only from patients who would die soon anyway.

Adopting their proposal would be a revolution in medical ethics, they acknowledge, as doctors have always been forbidden to kill patients. And they also realise that the public would be unlikely to embrace the idea. “But if we can save even one life, that is something of great moral importance,” they write. “Many lives could be saved even if only a small percentage of people opted for [organ donation euthanasia].”

Their principal concern is to solve the organ shortage, but this idea also provides a strong argument for euthanasia: “although most arguments for euthanasia are distinguished from questions of organ donation, it may be that the benefits of donation, for the individual and for others, provide the strongest case for euthanasia.” ...

They won't stop agitating for this sort of barbarity, so the question is, do we continue to resist? or do we give up? of course our resistence, such as it is, may well be as futile in this business as it has proved to be in the faced of so many other evils that have afflicted the human race.

Am not at all familiar with Cristina Odone, wasn't reading the Catholic Herald while she was editor, I don't think, and if I happened to read this or that from the New Statesman while she was there her name certainly didn't stick in the memory; but this brief essay is quite good as to its substance.  The "to become a British citizenship" mistake... I suppose that the Telegraph bloggers aren't edited.  

Is once again, perhaps, to be the occasion of catastrophe and bloodshed and inhuman violence. @londiniensis g a.

1981; it is of no interest to me whatsoever which celebrities are counted on their list of influential people.  Barbarians and bureaucrats and petty copyists and demagogues the lot of them; tsk. 

A co-worker was prosing on this morning about what in his estimation was a delightfully witty scene in a recent broadcast of South Park and I forbore to point out that I haven't watched an episode of that televised exercise in adolescent humor in years.