Patrimony

We deny to claim "any Superiority to ourself
to defyne, decyde, or determyn any Article or Poynt
of the Christian Fayth and Relligion,
or to chang any Ancient Ceremony of the Church
from the Forme before received and observed
by the Catholick and Apostolick Church."

Norman Simplicity

Norman Simplicity
Click image for original | © Vitrearum (Allan Barton)

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Re-orientation

Can what is happening in politics happen in religion, as well? I'm neither a Catholic nor a Lutheran but I have more in common with traditional, liturgically minded Catholics and Lutherans than I do with liberal, social activist Anglicans.

Now, I don't think much of America's choice, between a pathological narcissist with no experience whatsoever and a narcissistic psychopath with ample experience (not always counted to their benefit). But I watched the Republican convention, though sometimes with my eyes closed.

What interests me is the effective re-orientation or re-alignment underway. Just as Goldwater spelled the end of the Eastern establishment types (although it took a bypass through Nixon until arriving at Reagan), so Trump spells the end of neo-cons (many of whom were Eastern establishment types, working for the NWO, who simply re-branded (falsely) as political outsiders).

What we have now is the possibility of a new Centre-Right party that repudiates longstanding "Republican" obsessions and replaces them with elements of the Reform party

  • Populism
  • Fiscal conservatism
  • Protectionism
  • Big tent
  • Anti-corruption

as melded to as many parts of the America First party as possible

  • Paleoconservatism
  • Economic nationalism
  • Non-interventionism

What will be the response of the Democratic party? Are other hallowed institutions destined for similar transformations or schisms? Only time will tell.

Stay tuned.

A faded postcard

From AncientBriton:

Exhibiting their profound ignorance of matters spiritual, the response of New Anglicans to traditionalists has been "Go to Rome if you don't like it" or, from the mainly menopausal feminist brigade, "Get used to it, we are in charge now". There have been no concessions in Wales. The only message is keep giving. For what? ...

Sunday by Sunday we are served with helpings of the latest Christian Response from an Anglican Perspective (CRAP) heavily laced with a misguided view of equality that has everything to do with political correctness and nothing to do with Christianity as the Gospel is bent to accommodate the latest alleged injustice. It is indeed very odd that the Bible can be taken literally in circumstances which threaten our very existence while bending other parts to suit a fashionable political stance.

Led by the Archbishops of Canterbury, York and Wales with the Archbishop of Westminster often in step, Christianity is continually being sold short to its own detriment with misapplied views on neighbourliness while giving succour to Islam as Muslims abroad continue to convert non-Muslims by the sword if necessary and in the UK demand more and more special privileges to enhance their status such as opting for Sharia, a legal code that systematically discriminates against women, children, apostates, blasphemers, non-believers (infidels), adulterers, and homosexuals. Imagine the outcry if Christians espoused such discriminatory values.

The CinW is fast reaching the end of the road with extinction predicted in a generation.

Saturday, July 16, 2016

This so-called life

Two (connected) paths I have successfully avoided:

  1. I’m living like a college student at 44
  2. My job nearly drove me to commit suicide

Start with one, end with the other. Problem solved.

Anatomization from The Rat-faced Man:

I’m not particularly far gone yet, but every rat-faced man must face the prospect of growing older. Unless your retirement plan is to move to Holland and get euthanized, you may well need decades of income saved to fund your retirement. You need to be able to plan for the inevitable transitions in life. Health declines, energy levels decline, people become dependent on familiar places and routines. Stone-age tribal knuckleheads from the back of beyond know this, but we apparently don’t anymore. How feasible is it going to be for these Peter (or Petra) Pans to finally learn how to do their own dishes at 50 when they’re laid off and suffering from a spastic colon? $3,000 a month after tax is kind of a lot, are they otherwise thrifty savers?

It’s framed as pleasure-seeking, and I don’t deny that element exists, but I think this trend is fundamentally about fear and stress. Confronted by the challenges of growing up, some people are being enabled in their choice of refusing to think about it. Saving money and learning how to manage your life is scary and painful. But the party’s got to stop sometime.

First you're green then you're grey

An observer at the end of the world

I've been absent from this blog, obscure but not unawares. The old order is ending and for real but unforeseen reasons. Everything occurring at the level of religion and politics are symptoms -- and not causes -- of this structural disorder. Furthermore, the narratives that might have yielded some comforts have also broken down, putting confusion to both the questions and the purported answers. For example, to the query "Why did he do it?", I must stuff up my ears: I don't even want to know what his reasons were. How could that help me? As I remind my students, even Hitler had reasons.

From The Z Man:

The general assumption was that a real country did not have military coups or revolutions because they had democracy of some sort. If the people were unhappy, they could vote in people they liked. If elements of the ruling elite were unhappy, they could appeal to the public for change. The military, instead of being an instrument of the ruling class, was subordinate to the civilian government and excluded from politics. That’s not a bad place to start when defining a modern country. Real countries have elections, not revolts.

I think this is why the western news services were having so much trouble fitting the attempted coup in Turkey into their standard narrative. Turkey is supposed to be different from the rest of the Muslim world. Turkey is a real country with elections and globalism. Sure, the political leaderships sounds a lot like the lunatics from the Arab world, but that’s just an act. It’s their version of boob bait for the bubbas. Instead of guns and abortion, their rednecks want to hear about Allah and the Jews. Turkey is a real country, not a banana republic ...

In this civil war, Erdogan is the Oliver Cromwell of Turkey and this attempted coup was something analogous to Penruddock’s Uprising. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it helps explain what’s happening in Turkey. The army is the defender of the secular legacy of Ataturk and the defender of the old order. Erdogan is the leader of the new order, the Islamists that believe they can have a modern technological society, under medieval Islamic moral codes ...

The civil war among the Turks is about what to do about the future, a future that will have more Kurds than Turks if something is not done to arrest the low TFR of young Turks. Turkey has the Western disease, but it is still an Eastern culture. In the West, civilizational death is celebrated in the form of open borders and multiculturalism. In the East, it is met with religious revivals and bloodbaths. David Goldman makes the argument that the Iranian revolution was driven by similar forces.

The Turks are faced with a choice. They can be fully Western and go quietly into that good night. Or, they can be Eastern and fight against the dying of the light. The former means modern technology and prosperity, for a little while at least. The latter means men in robes ordering homosexuals thrown off buildings. That’s what’s happening inside Turkey today. It’s a version of what’s happening in the West, but only in a country that culturally is closer to Byzantium than Brussels.

*****

From The Gatestone Institute:

"We are on the verge of a civil war." That quote did not come from a fanatic or a lunatic. No, it came from head of France's homeland security, the DGSI (Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure), Patrick Calvar. He has, in fact, spoken of the risk of a civil war many times. On July 12th, he warned a commission of members of parliament, in charge of a survey about the terrorist attacks of 2015, about it.

In May 2016, he delivered almost the same message to another commission of members of parliament, this time in charge of national defense. "Europe," he said, "is in danger. Extremism is on the rise everywhere, and we are now turning our attention to some far-right movements who are preparing a confrontation".

What kind of confrontation? "Intercommunity confrontations," he said -- polite for "a war against Muslims." "One or two more terrorist attacks," he added, "and we may well see a civil war."

In February 2016, in front of a senate commission in charge of intelligence information, he said again: "We are looking now at far-right extremists who are just waiting for more terrorist attacks to engage in violent confrontation."

No one knows if the truck terrorist, who plowed into the July 14th Bastille Day crowd in Nice and killed more than 80 people, will be the trigger for a French civil war, but it might help to look at what creates the risk of one in France and other countries, such as Germany or Sweden.