Science

"beginning to bray scientifically" [Vansittart]

Bureaucracy

An inevitable consequence of capitalist enterprise is the creation of bourgeois youth demanding university education and employment in a bureaucracy.

Politicians

The never ending audacity of elected persons [Walt Whitman]

Darwin

"Patient as an observer, he is utterly imbecilic as a scientific reasoner" [O. Browning on Darwin]

Women priests

Women who wish to give their lives to the church are naturally reluctant to enter a profession in which there is no prospect of promotion. [J. Moorman]

Celibate clergy

The rule in the East that married men could not become bishops "has had the great disadvantage of blocking promotion in the Eastern church" [Walker Williston]

Pre-prints

The pre‑print is the principal means of communication. The published paper is a historical record. [J.A. Wheeler]

Jerome

Jerome was a saint in the highly technical sense of the word, being a literary genius of repellent disposition and venomous tongue. [R. West]

Augustine & Aquinas

All classicism [Aquinas] depends on a previous romanticism [Augustine]. [R. West]

Homosexuality

The real offense of homosexuality brings the confusion of passion into the domain where one ought to be able to practice calmly the art of friendship… [Rebecca West.Augustine 33

Homosexuality

The poisonous bite of a tarantula: homosexuality [Xenophon Memor p.22]

Huxley on Atheism

("Atheism is, logically speaking, as absurd as polytheism").

St. Medard

De par le roi, défense à Dieu
De faire miracles en ce lieu.
[The king to God:—To keep the peace,
Here miracles must henceforth cease.]

Constitution

2011 headline:
"Judge rules Constitution unconstitutional".

Mark Twain

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.”

“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way”,

Climate

Meanwhile, champions of “climate ethics” and “environmental justice” in dozens of rich countries are all too happy to provide what Lord Monckton called “bailout bucks for bedwetting big businesses".

Listen

"It's why God gives us two ears and only one mouth. You just listen."

Leadership

They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.” I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever. And this approach would indeed take them far in life. They would come back for their 25th reunion as a partner at White & Case, or an attending physician at Mass General, or an assistant secretary in the Department of State. That is exactly what places like Yale mean when they talk about training leaders.

Voltaire on history

As Voltaire observed, history is a pack of lies agreed upon.

True poverty

In Africa she saw abject physical poverty, but it was nothing compared with the impoverishment she saw when she came home. "When I came back to the U.S., I saw our true poverty of the heart and of the mind. And I saw the loneliness," she says. "It really made me give my life to the church.

Social science

Social scientists seem to know more about the future than they know about the past.

Words

Se payer des mots

Calumny

There is a hideous vitality in calumny

Meaning

In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Problems and solutions

A number of years ago, I came across a phrase in the 'Mafalda' comic strip from Argentina that has often come back into my mind in these days: 'I've got it,' said that feisty and perceptive little girl, 'the world is full of problemologists, but short on solutionologists'.

Ecumenism

The Lord Jesus said of himself, in one of his remarks that we are inclined to censure: "I have come to bring division" (Luke 12:51).

Stupidity

This must be very clear: those who are made strong by the inspired word and live in the "fear of God" are not afraid of anything, except perhaps the stupidity toward which, Bonhoeffer said, we are defenseless.

Picasso's charity

In his book "Intellectuals," Paul Johnson quotes Pablo Picasso scoffing at the idea that he would give to the needy. "I'm afraid you've got it wrong," Picasso explains, "we are socialists. We don't pretend to be Christians."

Liberal money

Secular liberals, the second largest group coming in at 10 percent of the population, were the whitest and richest of the four groups. (Some of you may also know them as "insufferable blowhards.") These "bleeding-heart tightwads," as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof calls them, were the second stingiest, just behind secular conservatives, who are mostly young, poor, cranky white guys.

Despite their wealth and advantages, secular liberals give to charity at a rate of 9 percent less than all Americans and 19 percent less than religious conservatives. They were also "significantly less likely than the population average to return excess change mistakenly given to them by a cashier." (Count Nancy Pelosi's change carefully!)

Charitable giving

Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks' study of charitable giving in America found that conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than liberals do, despite the fact that liberals have higher incomes than conservatives.

Terror in S. America

* 1992, the "Archives of Terror" (Archivos del
Terror) were found by a lawyer, Dr. Martín Almada,
and a human-rights activist and judge, Jose
Agustin Fernandez, in a police station in a suburb
of Asuncion (Lambare), capital of Paraguay.
Fernández was looking for files on a former
prisoner. Instead, he found archives describing
the fates of thousands of Latin Americans who had
been secretly kidnapped, tortured, and killed by
the security services of Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay

Berkeley's tree in the quad

Over a century later Berkeley's thought experiment was summarized in a limerick by Ronald Knox and an anonymous reply:

There was a young man who said "God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the quad."

"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by,

Yours faithfully, God."

Ah, science

One journal in medical research estimated that some 80% of published articles were later withdrawn, corrected, or contradicted by later articles.

Religions equal

Is one religion as good as another? Is one horse in the Derby as good as another?

Population "control" [reduction]

The U.S. government has long advocated population control internationally. While recent justifications of population control policy focus on environmental impact, in the 1970s the U.S. National Security Council's National Security Study Memorandum 200 backed population control for different reasons.

That memorandum advocated population control to prevent developing nations from becoming politically powerful, to protect U.S. access to other countries' natural resources, and to limit the number of young people who are more likely to challenge existing social and political norms and cause instability.

Modern nuns

USF president Fr. Stephen Privett, S.J., was quoted as saying in the university’s announcement. “The sisters are extraordinary persons of faith devoted to building a better world through prayer and hard work".

[No mention of religion and the salvation of souls].

Bob Feller 2

“Trying to sneak a fastball by Ted Williams was like trying to sneak a sunbeam by a rooster in the morning,” Feller said

Bob Feller

As Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez was said to have remarked after three Feller pitches blew by him, “That last one sounded a little low.”

Politics

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies."

--- Groucho Marx

Bankers [new]

Bankster

Jebbies, again

The ACLU again urged the federal government to compel religious hospitals to provide “emergency abortions,” and Lisa Fullam, professor of moral theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University, urged the hospital to defy the bishop.

Obama campaign

the Barak Obama campaign bus that was completing a U turn; one of many on its route .

Gen. Wesley Clark

Wesley Clark — known as “the perfumed general.”

Muslim misogyny

Islam is misogynistic, and misogyny engenders homosexuality, which is why a disproportionate number of Muslim men are gay,

Jebbies, again

“Of the 28 Jesuit-run institutions of higher learning, 100% have pro-homosexual clubs,” the statement continues. “Many of these, such as Georgetown University, Gonzaga University, and Loyola Marymount University, have university-funded ‘Diversity Centers’ or other LGBT organizations that host or participate in pro-homosexual conferences with local and nation-wide homosexual activist organizations such as GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network).”

USCCB, again

Mar Munoz-Visoso, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops,

Judaic software

We need more Jewish converts (the software runs best on the original hardware),

Catholic scented

Kennedy's extremist reading of the American Founding provided political cover for the next generation of Catholic-scented politician

Apostolic visitation

Well, no one will have to suppress any religious congregations today, they're dying out of their own accord. I'm not saying that to be pessimistic, but simply realistic. A winnowing process is unfolding right before our eyes. The progressivist, LCWR vision of religious life is collapsing right before us. It doesn't have the spiritual vitality to attract those whom God is still calling to religious life

JFK's private religion

Archbishop Chaput said Kennedy’s speech “left a lasting mark on American politics. It was sincere, compelling, articulate — and wrong.

Iraq

Barack Obama's answer, the AP reported, was that America "cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep US forces there."

Bumper sticker

"Jesus Loves You - Whether You Like It Or Not"

ACLU

"Anti-Christian Lawyers Union"

Head of the Church

Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, the head of the German Catholic church.

[There is no "head" of the German, or any other, Catholic Church. The Holy Father is head of the Church. What is meant is likely the president of the German Bishops' Association, or what ever it is called].

Mother Theresa

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway.

~ Mother Theresa

.

Revolutionaries

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative
the day after the revolution.-- Hannah Arendt

Twain on the Phillipines

Assessing the United States’s 1899 adventure in the Philippines, he fulminates: “We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make these people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. . . . I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land".

Bernie Sanders

"How do I know Bernie Sanders is filibustering, he never shuts up anyway." That's a good point. He never shuts up.

Adolf Busch

"If you hang Hitler in the middle, with Goering on the left and Goebbels on the right, I'll return to Germany," he replied.

Our masters

Hanley: Yes, it is surely noteworthy that public health authorities have, on the one hand, taken aggressive, even authoritarian action by banning certain foods or mandating city-wide bans on smoking, which many feel are excessive restrictions.

The fact that they are mostly silent about sexual behavior -- which accounts for a host of other major epidemics in addition to AIDS -- indicates quite clearly that other things take precedence over their regard for the optimal health of the population.

When the good of health conflicts with the now decades-old project of absolute sexual freedom, we have seen quite clearly that there really is no contest. In fact, to suggest that people should limit their sexual behavior is to cross the cultural Rubicon; even officials to whom the public health is entrusted dare not contradict the prevailing ideological orthodoxy of modern western culture.

Education - the non-value of

Even within high HIV prevalence countries such as Kenya or Tanzania, it surprises many people to learn that AIDS rates tend to be higher among the well off than among the poorer classes; perhaps even more surprisingly, AIDS rates tend to be higher among the more educated than among the less educated.

Gov. Daniels

Inheriting a $600 million deficit, Daniels transformed it into a $370 million surplus within one year, without raising taxes. "You'd be amazed how much government you'll never miss,"

Elizabeth Edwards

She came over, sat down next to me, reached inside her purse for her wallet, opened it and said, “These are my children.” Pictures of four beautiful kids, one of whom I knew was dead. But Elizabeth never talked about Wade that way. She had four children, not three. It was just that one of them was gone.

Presidency

Pshaw, responded Hillary, the president is really a "chief executive officer" who must be "able to manage and run the bureaucracy."

The Real Absence

if Westminster Abbey is simply a stage, a shrine to the Real Absence on which any romance may be produced.”

Anglo-Catholics

Some Anglo-Catholics are charismatic and Evangelical in message while Catholic in style, while others are so high church as to make traditionalist Latin Mass Catholics look like folk-mass aficionados.

Mr. Gates on charity

Mr. Gates said in an interview this week. "Sometimes the wife and the husband have never really talked through their priorities on the charity stuff."

Second base

You might as well cavil at Dizzy Dean's classic description of how Phil Rizzuto slud into second base.

Casey Stengel

Mr. Stengel was there to clarify baseball's exemption from the anti-trust laws, and before he was through, he'd clarified the subject beyond all understanding.

Puritans

Garrison Keillor notes, Calvinist Puritans came to this country seeking the freedom to be harsher with themselves than English law allowed.

The Magic Circle

Worlock had been one of the first of the English bishops to promote a new liberal vision for the Church.

The vision appropriated the structures, cultural loyalties, and financial contributions of the old, inward-looking, triumphalist “ghetto” Church to build a new, outward-facing Catholicism that focused on social climbing and liberal politics. Ultimately, Worlock’s vision aimed for the broader acceptance of Catholicism by the secular elite.

Social justice

The phrase "social justice," when invoked by members of the Catholic left, is a euphemism for the agenda of the Democratic Party. "Social justice" refers not to objective principles of justice but to specific policies of Democrats on health care, labor, welfare, and other matters.

Reagan on peace

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

-Ronald Reagan

U.S.industry

Do you know what our biggest export is today? Waste paper.

Barzun

Jacques Barzun, said, “Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.”

9/11

At Camp David in 2000, Israeli negotiators raised the possibility of a civilian airplane being diverted to a suicide attack as a reason in favor of Israeli control of a unified airspace over the West Bank. American mediators ridiculed the overactive imaginations of the Israelis — at least until 9/11.

UN peacekeepers

Abba Eban's quip that U.N. peacekeepers are like an umbrella that closes whenever it rains.

Jews

"The Jews, to their everlasting credit, had already defined as key to right belief an obedient loving response to the merciful goodness of God ­ and they did so without the support of the Incarnation and Atonement to steady them". [Aidan Nichols]

Auden's 1 Sep 1939

"The whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty -- and must be scrapped."

Cromwell

Here is the close of Oliver Cromwell’s speech dissolving the Long Parliament in 1653:

"It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors".

Writing your congress "person"

Greg Crosby, former creative head for Walt Disney publications, has written thousands of comics, hundreds of children's books, dozens of essays, and a letter to his congressman.

The sizzle

the legendary marketing genius, Elmer Wheeler, who instructed restaurateurs: "Don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle!"

Einstein & abortion

The year 1931 also saw the birth of the Committee of Self-Incrimination Against §218, which encouraged celebrities to come out and admit to having had, or having aided in, an abortion. Among those who came out was Albert Einstein.

Anglican empire

Let the Worldwide Anglican Communion go the way of the British Empire, of which it is but the spiritual ghost.

Liberal church

forgotten the radical implications of accepting Christ as whom he says he is.

First, such an acceptance rescues Christianity from becoming what the German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski calls “a cold religious project”: a “mix of social ethics, institutional power thinking, psychotherapy, techniques of meditation, museum curation, cultural project management, and social work.” That’s a concise description of the “liberal Christianity” that’s helped empty Western Europe’s churches, particularly in Benedict’s German homeland.

Art today

the artsy croissant crowd

Hatch &c

For many Catholics the Church now exists only to “hatch, match, and dispatch”

Missals

the current lame-duck Missal, which dates from the Age of Aquarius,

Liberals

Liberalism eats its young.

Mother Angelica

Mother often reminded us, “Unless we are willing to do the ridiculous, then God cannot do the miraculous.”

Green energy

In May, President Obama came to a Fremont, Calif., solar plant where he announced, "The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra." This month, Solyndra announced it was canceling its expansion plans. The announcement came after voters rewarded the green lobby by defeating Proposition 23 -- which would have postponed California's landmark greenhouse gas reduction law AB32 -- because voters bought the green-jobs promise.

Congress [again]

Senator John Danforth has said, "I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. We know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. ... We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected."

Congress

Serving in Congress should be seen as just that: service, which is distinct from self-service.

Donkeys

In Mexico, we say "No hay que ponerse con el burro a las patadas" ("don't play kick-me with donkeys",

Ecumenicism

Yes, Prime Minister, “interfaith interface” (in which one character is an Anglican cleric who thinks that “the Bible is some sort of Christian version of the Koran”)

Vocations

I've heard crackpot theories about early Church life -- exactly the sort Protestant demagogues used to confuse the peasantry centuries ago. And yet, at the height of the "reforms," these were coming down like snow through the Catholic hierarchy itself, in the bureaucratic language of episcopally appointed commissions, shaking and shivering the faith of the laity and discouraging all Catholic vocations.

The reforms

That Latin inheritance was suddenly replaced with crass translations into faux-contemporary English. A conscious effort was made not only to avoid the poetic but to smash the rhythmic and pedal order of words that had scanned with the music of the Mass. Centuries upon centuries of accumulated beauty were destroyed, pulverized, almost overnight.

Fatima

Yet it is hard not to think of the image presented by Our Lady of Fatima -- of souls falling like snowflakes into Hell -- as one ponders the fallout from the "reforms."

Social justice

The Church’s preaching remains too “one-sided … largely directed to the creation of a better world,” according to the Pope. “Hardly anyone talks any more about the other, truly better world. … Our task is to open up this horizon, to broaden it, and to turn our gaze toward the ultimate.”

Church bureaucracy

Pope Benedict reserves his most withering criticisms for some aspects of the institutional Church.
“The bureaucracy is spent and tired,” he says of some Church institutions in Europe and the West.

Error

My aunt was "often in error, but never in doubt"

Politicians

But politicians are an interesting group of frauds, by nature

Kibbutz

In the words of philosopher Martin Buber, the kibbutz was the world’s only “socialist experiment that did not fail.”

Stereotypes

In "Up in the Air," that ironic take on the cramped freneticism of airport life, George Clooney explains why he always follows Asians in the security line:

"They pack light, travel efficiently, and they got a thing for slip-on shoes, God love 'em."

"That's racist!"

"I'm like my mother. I stereotype. It's faster."

Dolan as USCCB president

it is more accurate to say that the moderate won and the liberal lost.

Abortion

After all, over 80% of all abortions are sought by single women.

Paper money

"Only government," Milton Friedman noted, "can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink, and make the combination worthless."

Mencken

H. L. Mencken’s words: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Mr. Obama

boy blunder

Wilde

Oscar Wilde once argued that “when bad ideas have nowhere to go they gravitate to American universities and become courses.”

Max Weber

In The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber noted that in the final stage of this evolution, it might truly be said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”

Tina Brown

Tina, Tina, Tina, you delightfully airheaded little British expat you. Odd that you don’t seem to understand that many of us fundie bitter clingers would prefer a Muslim president to an Episcopalian president since Muslims, you know, actually believe stuff.

Fish on liberalism

"Liberal universalism, with its superficial respect for everyone (as long as everyone is superficial) and its deep respect for no one, can’t do it".

Vince Lombardi

"If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?"
~Vince Lombardi

TR

"When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'"
~Theodore Roosevelt

Eugenics

Dr. Hannah Stone, a Jewish physician who served as Sanger's clinic director, and wrote in Eugenics, the journal of the American Eugenics Society (AES): "Not to unlimited procreation but rather to controlled propagation based upon a knowledge of the laws of genetics and eugenics must we look for the production of a superior race and a higher intellectual status."

S Fish liberalism

Religious rights “can only be effectively defended pursuant to a specific and distinctly religious framework.” Liberal universalism, with its superficial respect for everyone (as long as everyone is superficial) and its deep respect for no one, can’t do it.

Bishops

Once you become a bishop you never get bad news or a bad meal

M S Winters on the NYT

The friend I consult on environmental matters tells me that when she reads the Times on the subject, she assumes they will get it wrong.

Msgr Knox

Thank God, in these days of enlightenment and establishment, everyone has a right to his own opinions, and chiefly to the opinion, that nobody else has a right to theirs.

Ortega

What the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset called the barbarism of specialization

Broke

The Obama administration has replaced an old axiom, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," with one of its own: "If it ain't broke, fix it till it is." ...

Feminism

the dwindling gloomy band of radical feminists are too busy pouring new whine into old battles to celebrate success.

Habits and hobbies

"When a habit begins to cost money, it's suddenly called a hobby."

Obvious

It takes a high IQ to evade the obvious.

College

College kids are stupid. That's why they're still in college.

Merton

He wrote free verse, tennis without a net,

Eric Hoffer

Years ago the New York longshoreman and philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that every great cause starts off as a movement, becomes a business, and then degenerates into a racket.

Atheism

"The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own." Burke. A Vindication of Natural Society

I.B.Singer

"When I was a young boy, they called me a liar. Now that I'm all grown up, they call me a writer."

--- Isaac Bashevis Singer

Revel

The European establishment, Revel notes, soft-pedals the fact that Europeans “invented the great criminal ideologies of the twentieth century”; it defangs Communism (at “the top French business school,” students think Stalin’s great error was to “prioritize capital goods over . . . consumer goods”);

Sweden

Indeed, according to a recent study by the Swedish Trade Research Institute, Swedes have a slightly lower standard of living than black Americans

Anti-U.S. idealists

And why have these Machiavellians become idealists? Because they no longer have power —and, being powerless, they resent U.S. power, even when it’s used not to conquer but to help.
Robert Kagan

Hitchens

The moment I heard that Christopher Hitchens’ mother was a Jew who denied her origin in order to make him into “a real English Gentleman”

Parenting and pianos

"Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist."

--- Michael Levine

GKC on women

* If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.
o The Secret of Father Brown (1927) The Song of the Flying Fish

GKC on good and evil

Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

* The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Flying Stars

GKC on America

One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare — a hobby more patient than angling. [Secret Garden]

GKC on youth and age

He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not.

GKC on courage

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book.

GKC pessimism

the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself.

* Chapter V : The Flag of The World

GKC on charity

charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them.

GKC The heart has its reasons...

* There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.
o "A Defence of Heraldry"

GKC on atheists

* If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
o Where All Roads Lead (1922)

GKC Science and religion

As for science and religion, the known and admitted facts are few and plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been, or will be.

* Michael Moon in Manalive (1912)

GKC Conservative

He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.

* Varied Types (1903)

GKC on Job

A man can no more have a private religion than he can have a private sun or private moon.

Highways

Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill....

The people

it becomes necessary for the government to dissolve the people and elect another.

College

you have spent your whole life saving money so your student can go to college and get an education so that they will be laid off from a better job than the one you have.

Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi said that cutting the number of children would prove to be an economic boon:

“Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.”

Opera

opera is high-brow, and it is dying because of it.

Death of art

"That an art has become confined to high-brow tastes is a sign that it is dying."
-- Brandon Watson

The new martyrdom

"For those who have come to be viewed unfavorably in illuminati circles, there is the spreading of defamatory half lies, print and blog ridicule, rumor, gossip, and character assassination".

In early Christian days, bishops were killed. Nowadays the target is their souls.

Gregory on bishops

Pastors who lack foresight hesitate to say openly what is right because they fear losing the favor of men. As the voice of truth tells us, such leaders are not zealous pastors who protect their flocks, rather they are like mercenaries who take refuge in silence when the wolf appears. The Lord reproaches them through the prophet: They are like dumb dogs that cannot bark.

Complicity with evil

some teachings of the Church have been allowed to fall by the wayside through what could be called, charitably, a kind of benign pastoral neglect. For many, in our politically correct world, this is identified with compassion. In truth, it often entails a complicity or a compromise with evil. Bp. Finn at the USCCB

USCCB

nor is a conference or its president able to act in the name of all the bishops unless each and every bishop has given consent (canon 455, ß4).

Work

"Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them."

--- Ann Landers

GKC on madmen

Materialists and madmen never have doubts. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The people

the fabled East European parliament that, realizing it had lost popular favor but unwilling to dissolve itself and call new elections, resolved instead to dissolve the people.

Excuse, accuse

'Qui excusat non accusat,'”

China - the new model

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman expressed his admiration for the Chinese authoritarian regime, lauding it as "a reasonably enlightened group of people" that can, without any checks or balances, impose whatever policies it sees fit "to move a society forward in the 21st century."

Notre Dame

Notre Dame has become more of a brand and less of a community,

Abp Chaput

sin is real, and men and women can be corrupted by power and prosperity

Confederate prison

Prisoners arriving in October 1864 had no living quarters. They built crude huts with scraps of pine left over from construction of the stockade. Records show that Camp Lawton held 10,229 Union troops by early November. Despite the camp's brief existence, at least 685 prisoners died there.

Road to hell

“The road to Hell is paved with the bones of priests and monks, and the skulls of bishops are the lamp posts that light the path.” -John Chrysostom,

Greens

Green is the first socio-political movement in which every single leader and spokesperson is filthy rich

Amazons

There they formed an independent kingdom under the government of a queen named Hippolyta or Hippolyte ("loose, unbridled mare").

Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion.

Yogi

Yogi Berra once observed, “If the fans don’t come out to the ball park, you can’t stop them.”

Thomas Peebles

Harvard Medical School pointed to his D in biology and lack of pre-med courses and summarily turned him down.
He went on to discover the measles vaccine.

Don Juan introd on Coleridge

Explaining metaphysics to the nation[1] --
I wish he would explain his Explanation.

Wordsworth by Byron

partly his having lent his more downright and unmeasured prose to the aid of a political party, with acknowledges its real weakness, though fenced with the whole armour of artificial Power, and defended by all the ingenuity of purchased Talent, in liberally rewarding with praise and pay even the meanest of its advocates

Mountebanks

and what mountebank will not find proselytes? (from Count Cagliostro to Madame Krudener) [Byron. pref to Don Juan]

Universities

What we have at the moment is merely a government funded theme park in many cases.

Unemployment

She contacted a local shelter but learned there was a waiting list. Welfare is not an option, because she does not have young children. She says none of her three adult sons are in a position to help her.

Another U.S. bishop

“Most Reverend Daniel Jenky, C.S.C., Bishop of the Diocese of Peoria, is immensely grateful that the University of Illinois was willing to listen to our concerns and has decided to act in what he believes in a very appropriate manner in allowing Dr. Kenneth Howell to return to the classroom,” she added.
"She" is the Chancellor of the Diocese. Another example of bishops ceding authority.

Nat Cncl of Churches

National Council of Churches Nobody Goes To Anymore

Fed law on immigrants

From the United States federal website, welcome guide to the United States, on page eight: "As a permanent resident, it is your responsibility to obey all federal, state, and local laws," except in Arizona. "Pay federal, state, and local income taxes," except in Arizona. "Register with the Selective Service if you're a male between 18 and 26, see page 11 for instructions." All this is true except if you are illegal in Arizona. "You are a permanent resident required to maintain your immigration status," except in Arizona. "And you are required to carry proof of your permanent resident status at all times," except in Arizona, and by extension, every other state now, theoretically. If you can't preempt federal law anywhere else, then we in big doo-doo, heap big doo-doo.

Money

"One who thinks that money can do everything is likely to do anything for money."

--- Chassidic saying

Gaza

“When leading news outlets mention the so-called humanitarian flotillas from Turkey, why do they omit the fact that life expectancy and literacy rates are higher, and infant mortality rates are lower in Gaza than corresponding rates in Turkey? Have they considered that perhaps the humanitarian flotillas ought to be going in the other direction, towards Turkey?”

M Friedman

Milton Friedman said, "No one washes a rented car."

Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael, the theater critic in New York after Nixon won in '72 said, "How did this happen? I don't know anybody who voted for Nixon."

Nat Cath Reporter

No single individual, indeed, no medium-sized office of people, would suffice to provide adequate replies to the mostly-junk theology routinely put out by the National Catholic Reporter.

Husbands

One woman told me, "After forty years of marriage, I can now predict exactly what my husband will think and do in every situation. But why he does it is still a mystery to me!"

Dogma

This is called being free from the fetters of Dogma; and it means holding opinions without knowing why. GKC

Cardinal Cormac

while Cormac is a very very nice man, he’s also a terrible snob –

Social

we all know that when used as a modifier, “social” means “not”; e.g., social justice, social security, social worker, etc.).

GKC on prohibition

But a Constitution is simply the statement of how laws are made. It has no business whatever with saying which laws should be made.

GKC

G.K. Chesterton observed that "sex is the materialist's religion."

Vatican visitation

I have a confession to make: Part of me hopes that the Vatican will lay down the law and warmly invite us to return to a semblance of religious life that we once lived prior to our expensive monthly perms, our fashion designer clothes and the select-your-own-autonomy mode of life which we have exercised for the past four decades.

People

And you don't learn to know what people need by fitting them into
your neat little categories, or matching them to your little store-bought
theories.

Henry Ford

Henry Ford is "chilled by the cold of some interior winter."

Purposeless effort

effort expended without purpose served no purpose, other than its own perpetuation....

Eisenhower

His presidential warnings to American warmongers are reminiscent of Clausewitz's discussion of the nature of war: "Remember this: when you resort to force as the arbiter of human difficulty, you don't know where you are going; but generally speaking, if you get deeper and deeper, there is just no limit except what is imposed by the limitations of force itself." (37)

Eisenhower

Eisenhower was not, of course, a military theorist in any academic sense; a cynic might be tempted to speculate that this was why he was so successful.

Jerry Brown

Brown loves to campaign, but not to govern.

Reagan on weapons

Ronald Reagan mused in his office 25 years ago. "Man has never had a weapon he didn't use,"

Pius XII on virginity

37. We have recently with sorrow censured the opinion of those who contend that marriage is the only means of assuring the natural development and perfection of the human personality.[60] For there are those who maintain that the grace of the sacrament, conferred ex opere operato, renders the use of marriage so holy as to be a fitter instrument than virginity for uniting souls with God; for marriage is a sacrament, but not virginity. We denounce this doctrine as a dangerous error. Certainly, the sacrament grants the married couple the grace to accomplish holily the duties of their married state, and it strengthens the bonds of mutual affection that unite them; but the purpose of its institution was not to make the employment of marriage the means, most suitable in itself, for uniting the souls of the husband and wife with God by the bonds of charity.[61]

Seminarians

the worldwide surge in seminarians-- the number increased from 63,882 in 1978 to 117,024 in 2008--

Patton

In his diary, Patton confided what he thought of Jews. Others might "believe that the Displaced Person is a human being," Patton wrote, but he knew "he is not." In particular, he whispered to his diary, the Jews "are lower than animals."

Television commentators

Talking Hairdos

Jesuits again

The Jesuit CEO of UCA News says that the Catholic understanding of transubstantiation is no longer tenable in our "post-Newtonian world of quantum physics."

Welfare

In America there is a bumper sticker that says "Work harder, millions on welfare depend on you."

Socialism

"The problem with socialism is sooner or later you run out of other people's money." - Margaret Thatcher

Money

Money can't buy you friends, but it does get you a better class of enemy" – Spike Milligan

Luck

As the song says, if it weren’t for bad luck, the Democratic Party would have no luck at all

O'Malley

More and more O'Malley appears to be a dissenter from Church orthodoxy and on the side of secular forces. He seems more faithful to the Boston Globe than the Roman Curia.

Admiral King

Adm. Ernest J. King, bullied and cajoled. (“He is the most even-tempered man in the Navy,” his daughter said. “He is always in a rage.”)

Abp Chaput

Those groups were formed to support Democrats in the face of issues in the Democratic platform that are contrary to church teaching. I don’t know why else they were formed. So I think they are dust in the air; they cause confusion.
[Caths for Choice, et al.]

Abp Chaput

I want to end with two modest suggestions. The first comes from Susan Sontag. In one of her last talks she said, “The writer’s first job is not to have opinions, but to tell the truth and to refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation.” That’s a noble task for the journalist in the 21st century. And while I’m quoting nonbelievers who had no love for the Catholic Church, here’s my second suggestion. It comes for George Orwell. He said, “Very few people, apart from Catholics themselves, seem to have grasped that the church is to be taken seriously.”

Abp Chaput

When reporters talked with me last fall about my book, Render Unto Caesar, I learned a number of things. First, many hadn’t really read it, but they interviewed me. Many lacked even a basic understanding of Catholic identity that you need for useful disagreement, although they wanted to disagree. And many weren’t interested in learning what they didn’t know. At the same time, some did, unfortunately, know what they planned to write before they walked into my office for the interview.

Nothing

"an impressive attempt to say nothing whatsoever"

Lutheran Church

Bishop Margot Käßmann, who led Germany’s Lutherans until her February arrest for drunk driving, paid tribute to the birth control pill.

Expenditures

"Congress does not always act on authorizations that are put into legislation by drafters," explained Kenneth Baer, a spokesman for the White House budget agency. "Authorizations for discretionary spending are not expenditures."

Our Bishops

"These silly men," Hewitt complains, "issued reams of nonsense and met and met and met even as the liturgy collapsed into incoherence and the preaching dissolved into eight-minute homilies on the need for love. There was also the problem of the Responsorial Antiphon. It would almost always cause me to either laugh or grind my teeth. Is there a worse collection of 'music' anywhere? And the Christian Rite of Initiation, and the revamped Sacrament of Reconciliation -- all of it just another set of committee reports from priests and nuns bored with the old Church. I could go on, but my guess is that you have heard it all before."

Los Angeles cathedral

Hewitt points to the cathedral in Los Angeles as "the perfect expression of the American Church today -- so sterile it could be an air conditioning plant and designed to please non-Catholics with the taste of the leadership."

Grayling

INDUSTRIAL-STYLE authorship of this kind is a triumph of the will rather than a display of intelligence. The effect is one of wearisome repetition, and one wonders what Grayling imagines he has achieved by the exercise.

Santayana on Russell

George Santayana, a thinker of insight and subtlety (these days much neglected), summed up Russell’s predilections perfectly: “His radical solutions were rendered vain by the conventionality of his problems. His outlook was universal, but his presuppositions were insular.”

John Gray

SEEING THEMSELVES as fiercely independent thinkers, bien-pensants are remarkable chiefly for the fervor with which they propagate the prevailing beliefs of their time. Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill’s godson and a scion of one of England’s great political dynasties, exemplified this contradiction throughout most of his life. British philosopher A. C. Grayling can now be counted amongst his number.

Kolakovski

He dismissed the idea of democratic socialism as "contradictory as a fried snowball",

Card George

In his recent book, The Difference God Makes, Cardinal Francis George wrote that a principal problem for liberal Catholics is their willingness to become chaplains to the status quo.

Courageously following the crowd

We moderns have a nearly infinite capacity to portray ourselves as romantic heroes because we so courageously follow the crowd.

Kelly on Brown

Kelly, too, decided to write for the non-specialist. He understood that ours is not a religion of the professors. Kelly asserted that what Brown called "science" was no more than unprovable theorizing, perhaps akin to sophisticated science fiction.

GKC on modernism

The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly "in the know." To flaunt the fact that we have had all the last books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last bonnets from Paris. To introduce into philosophical discussions a sneer at a creed's antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a lady's age. It is caddish because it is irrelevant. The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion. (All Things Considered, 1908)

Statistics

statistics show that 50% of statistics are made up.

Hazlitt on Malthus

William Hazlitt, the humanist essayist, accused Malthus of ‘starving the children of the poor to feed the horses of the rich’.

Anglicanism

I remember that the late Fr. Neuhaus said: The Anglican Church exists to make irony redundant.

Buddhism

Buddhism - spiritual auto-eroticism. [Card. Ratzinger]

Buddhism

Buddhism - spiritual auto-eroticism. [Card. Ratzinger]

Sweden

Certainly the country practised forced sterilisation of women deemed unfit to be mothers until as recently as 1975. Branded low class, or mentally slow, they were kept in Institutes for Misled and Morally Neglected Children, where they were eventually “treated”. In 1997, the government admitted that 60,000 women had been sterilised.

Lawyers

Like Hollywood actresses, lawyers need to believe they're noble and courageous to help them forget that they are corporate drones doing soul-destroying work, which mostly consists of making photocopies.

Rahm Emmanuel

"Rahm Emanuel is very good at making enemies and not very good at making friends," Mr. Massa said.

Reporters

Each year they come here, from Cambridge and Ithaca and New Haven, young and eager social critics seeking nothing more than an honest day's wage for an honest day's condescension, and perhaps a decent squab pate in white wine reduction.

Olympic medals

My 5-year-old son was very interested in the medals awarded at the Olympic Games and soon had them memorized: the gold, the silver and the Bronx.

Enver Hoxe

>Enver [what's his name] of Albania - New Year's greeting in 1968:
>"This year will be worse than last year but better than next year"

Gumment

Last month, a federal judge in California threw out the case, writing that a “citizen may not gain standing by claiming a right to have government follow the law.”

Worse

An apt axiom for government and the next administration is: “It can always get worse.”

How...?

How can I miss you if you won't go away?

Idaho

“Idaho does not have the same totally dysfunctional political system as New York and Illinois, but we’re working on it.”

New law

so-called Digital Economy Bill being slithered through Parliament by Lord Mandelson.

Labour

NuLabour always thinks they are right as they probably ask the same five people all the time.

Mother Teresa

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta gave us years ago:

“How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers.”

Wash Post

I wish the Post would stop writing sophisticated trash talk

Fairness

David Riesman, I believe-- who said: "The tests are not unfair. LIFE is unfair and the tests measure the results."

Hoover & the Japanese internment

J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, opposed the internment of the Japanese, regarding it as completely unnecessary, but his views sadly were ignored

Abp. Chaput

Additionally, we live
in an age when almost every scientific advance seems to be matched by some
increase of cruelty in our entertainment, cynicism in our politics, ignorance of
the past, consumer greed, little genocides posing as "rights" like the cult of
abortion, and a basic confusion about what—if anything at all—it means to be
"human."
...
Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M Cap.

"Equality"

[rg notes: From this logic, then, I assume he will force charities for blind people also to offer their services to deaf people. I've long thought it discriminatory that, as an able-bodied person, I'm not entitled to a disabled parking permit. How far is this ludicrous equal rights scenario going to go? Even further down the road to ridiculous extremes under the Tories than it already has under Labour, it seems.]

Cure d'Ars

that fellow who, day-after-day sat in the back of the Church staring at the altar as the Curé d’Ars said Mass. When the curious Curé asked why he just sat there, seemingly not participating, just staring at the altar, the man replied, "Oh, I'm not staring at the altar, I'm looking at Jesus."
"Oh," replied the Curé, incredulously. "And tell me, what is Jesus doing?"
Smiling the man said, "He's looking at me."

Wilson

Why did Woodrow Wilson undo years of Republican progress on race by re-segregating the civil service?

Feminism

"National Organization of Fewer and Fewer Women All The Time."

KISS

KISS: "Keep it -simple, stupid."

The nun crisis

“Sisters of Perpetual Liberation”

"Bishop" Schorri

In one New York Times interview she said Catholics had more children than Episcopalians because Catholics were “less educated”

Radicalism

Many a religious radical started out as a political radical (someone has got to employ all of those radicals leaving graduate school with unemployable majors.)

Mr. Obama

Obama has seemed prickly and generally in a bad mood. He looks, increasingly, like a man who wishes it would all just go away.

Imposed suicide

Until a new movement arises in which mothers are offered as human sacrifices from economic motives and then not killing your mother becomes a 'dogma' or the creed of cryptic priests.
[GKC ILNA 1 Jan 1927]

Democrats

The Democrats have no natural majority because they have no fundamental principles -- at least none that they are willing to state out loud. They are like a drunken vagrant who emerges from the alley to cause havoc every few years. They are the perpetual toothache of American politics. [A. Coulter]

Repub/Dem seesaw

As a result, for the past four decades, American politics has consisted of Republicans controlling Washington for eight to 14 years -- either from the White House or Capitol Hill -- thus allowing Americans to forget what it was they didn't like about Democrats, whom they then carelessly vote back in. The Democrats immediately remind Americans what they didn't like about Democrats, and their power is revoked at the voters' first possible opportunity. [Ann Coulter]

College life

Keep sending your kids to study liberal arts! It's a great choice! They will leave college with an arsenal of words and theories, ready to deride the world. Their insights will set them eons ahead of everyone else, making them virtual, undiscovered geniuses. Amongst their career pursuits will be: 1) college professor (a booming field), 2) blogger (an extremely lucrative pursuit), or 3) not really sure but I'll work at McDonald's if I have to. Nevermind the debt burden. $50,000 is a small price to pay to be one step behind Huang Chu, the Taiwanese Computer Science student who qualified for US degree equivalency on a C average. After all, your college grad will be able to wrack up the dough, skimping on unnecessary things like health insurance, dentist visits, and principle payments. They'll be well rounded, able to understand the New York Times and NPR better than everyone else, and most importantly willing to live with Mom and Dad well into their 40's. So, sign them up today! Job opportunities are abundant for those who put off responsibility for as long as possible and come out the other end with no real world skills.

HRBriggs (01/21/2010, 7:51 AM )

Eco bores

He has daringly criticised what he calls his girlfriend's "high priestess phase".

Campion award to Rowan Willaims

Many will take offense at the sly malice of the Jesuits in pretending to congratulate the man who, by his elegant unfitness for the job, has done more than any living Christian to bolster the esteem of the Roman Catholic Church in the eyes of his co-religionists.

ACLU

Anti-Christian Litigation Union

Justice Ginsburg

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she thought the landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion was predicated on the Supreme Court majority's desire to diminish “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

Kissinger

"The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it's their fault."
~Henry Kissinger.

Kennedys

Or perhaps it will be a reminder that in the past, voters once inadvertently elected an assembly-line worker named John Kennedy to be state treasurer.

Church of England

the Church of England has morphed into, a left wing pressure group with prayers,

ND & football

So a droll University of Oklahoma president was not quite kidding when he said, "We're trying to build a university our football team can be proud of." The wit who said football has about as much to do with education as bullfighting has to do with agriculture was more amusing than accurate.

Mary Daly

Dr. Daly dismissed college officials as "bore-ocrats" who suffered from "academentia" and "predictably reacted with 'misterical' behavior" -

Haugland

Mr. Haugland was not a fan. He particularly objected to the word “heroes” in the title. “I never use that word about myself or my friends,” he told BBC4 Radio in 2003. “We just did a job.” Referring to the glider crashes and the killing of the survivors, he added: “Forty-one men were killed, and it could have been avoided. Because of the loss of life, you shouldn’t glorify the story.”

Obama

"I think Obama's 'charisma' was based on voter narcissism—people excited not just about electing a black president, but about themselves, voting for a black president.

Committees

‘God so loved that world that He didn’t send a committee.’