On Eve of Retirement Pope Benedict XVI Ordered Changes to Baptismal Rite

From now on, at the end of the rite of reception, before signing with the cross the forehead of the child or of the children, the priest will longer say: "Magno gaudio communitas christiana te (vos) excipit," but instead: "Magno gaudio Ecclesia Dei te (vos) excipit".

In practice pope Joseph Ratzinger, as a sophisticated theologian, wanted that in the baptismal rite it should be clearly said that it is the Church of God - which subsists fully in the Catholic Church - that receives those who are being baptized, and not generically the “Christian community,” a term that also signifies the individual local communities or non-Catholic confessions, like the Protestants.

The decree published in “Notitiae" specifies that Benedict XVI “benevolently established” the aforementioned variation in the course of an audience granted to the prefect of the congregation, Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera, on January 28, 2013, just two weeks before the announcement of his resignation as pope.

The decree bears the date of February 22, 2013, the feast of the chair of St. Peter, and is signed by the cardinal prefect and by the secretary, Archbishop Arthur Roche. And it is said there that it went into effect on March 31, 2013, already under the reign of Pope was Francis, who evidently had nothing to object with regard to the decision of his predecessor.

Read the rest here.
HT: The Deacon's Bench

In New York Ultra-Orthodox Jews Wield Power In Battle Over Accommodation

Needing to abide by their tribe’s traditions of modesty, Hasidic women want the city to post a female lifeguard during a women-only swim session at a municipal pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and have lobbied a local councilman to take up their cause.

On another front, Hasidic matzo bakeries, citing ancient Jewish law, have insisted on using water from groundwater wells rather than from reservoirs in preparing the dough used for matzos and have found themselves tangling with health officials worried about the water’s purity.

And on a public bus service that plies a route between the Hasidic neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Borough Park, Brooklyn, men sit up front and women in the back, hewing to the practice of avoiding casual mingling of the sexes, even after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg condemned the arrangement.

While these episodes may not have reverberated beyond New York’s Hasidic enclaves, taken together they underscore a religious ascendancy confronting the city’s secular authorities in ways not seen in decades. 

Read the rest here.

Gay Lutheran Bishop Presides at Revisionist Worship Service

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s (ELCA) first openly gay bishop, Guy Erwin, presided over a highly heterodox worship service on August 14, 2013, during ELCA’s 2013 Churchwide Assembly in Pittsburgh.  Erwin’s subsequent dismissal of the service’s doctrinal significance notwithstanding, the bishop’s presence amidst such liturgical revisionism raises disturbing questions about proper theological formation in the ELCA.

This Festival Worship took place in the Omni William Penn Hotel’s Grand Ballroom after the ELCA assembly’s events had concluded that day in the David L. Lawrence Convention Center blocks away.  For the unsuspecting churchgoer, the service’s liturgical program printed by the gay Lutheran groups hosting the worship,ReconcilingWorks and Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries, was jarring.  The service’s “Thanksgiving for Baptism,” for example, invokes the “triune God” not under the formulation given by Jesus in the Gospels of “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost/Spirit,” but rather “Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit.”

Any adherent of orthodoxy like me, accustomed to the Anglican 1928 Book of Common Prayer (BCP), would be flabbergasted by the program’s “Affirmation of Faith.”  This apparent reworking of Christianity’s basic statement of faith, the Nicene Creed invokes again a non-gendered “God” as opposed to the creed’s “Father Almighty” in the 1928 BCP translation.  Likewise, the God who “came to us in human form—Jesus” receives no gender designation as the “only-begotten Son of God.”

Read the rest here.

Another Mainline Protestant denomination circles the drain...

Cyprus Bank’s Bailout Hands Ownership to Russians

LIMASSOL, Cyprus — When European leaders engineered a harsh bailout deal for this tiny Mediterranean nation in March, they cheered the end of an economic model fueled by a flood of cash from Russia. Wealthy Russians with money in Cyprus’s sickly banks lost billions.

But the Russians, though badly bruised, are now in a position to get something that has previously eluded even Moscow’s most audacious oligarchs: control of a so-called systemic financial institution in the European Union.

“They wanted to throw out the Russians but in the end, they delivered our main bank to the Russians,” said the Cypriot president, Nicos Anastasiades, in a June interview. 

Read the rest here.

France wants to get back in the Empire business

PARIS — As Western powers pressed the Syrian authorities to permit United Nations inspectors to examine the site of a claimed poison gas attack outside the capital, Damascus, France said on Thursday that outside powers should respond “with force” if the use of chemical weapons was confirmed.

At the same time, Israel said its intelligence assessments pointed to the use of chemical weapons.

“According to our intelligence assessments there was use of chemical weapons,” the Israeli minister of strategic and intelligence affairs and international relations, Yuval Steinitz, told Israel Radio, “and this of course was not for the first time.” 

Read the rest here.

For the record, I have no reason to doubt that Assad used lethal gas. The man has repeatedly demonstrated that he is a barbarian. But while I feel deeply for the suffering people of that country, including and especially the suffering Christian minority who are always the first casualties in any civil unrest, the fact is that it is none of our business. If France wants to take a trip down memory lane and send the Foreign Legion for a romp in her former colonies, good for them. I think they are nuts. But they will find that out in short order.

Syria is a country being ripped by a bloody civil war between a sociopathic dictator backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah (Iran's mercenary terrorist surrogates) on the one side and rebels mostly consisting of, and heavily backed by, Islamic religious extremists including Al Qaida who are fanatically anti-Western and anti-Christian on the other side.

What exactly do the French hope to gain from this? The problem with interventionists and enlightened imperialists like the French (and far too many Americans) is that they never grasp that some wars have no good guys involved. The supreme irony is that it was the French who warned Eisenhower to stay out of Vietnam.

Federal Court to Obama Administration - "Stop flouting the law"

Nowadays the federal government leavens its usual quotient of incompetence with large dollops of illegality. This is eliciting robust judicial rebukes, as when, last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia instructed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to stop “flouting the law.” Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh said: “It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case.”

Read the rest here.

NSA Illegally Collected Thousands of Emails

The National Security Agency unlawfully gathered as many as tens of thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans as part of a now-discontinued collection program, according to a 2011 secret court opinion.

The 86-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S. intelligence officials Wednesday, explains why the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled the collection method unconstitutional.

Read the rest here.

Syria Uses Poison Gas

BEIRUT — Syrian activists accused the government Wednesday of launching a massive chemical weapons attack that killed scores of people in the Damascus suburbs and left makeshift hospitals packed with victims gasping for breath.

The death toll from the alleged attack — which the government strongly denied — varied vastly. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 100 people were confirmed killed, but that the number was likely to rise, while the Syrian Opposition Coalition claimed that at least 1,300 died. The opposition Damascus Media Office also put the toll at more than 1,000. 

Read the rest here.

Manning gets 35 years

With time served, good behavior and parole he could be out in ten years. This seems fair to me. Details here.

Egypt's Ravaged Churches

In places such as Beni Mazar — a town on the Nile about 160 miles south of Cairo, in Minya province, which is riven by sectarian tensions — Christian residents made clear their sense of fear and anger. They said they believed Islamists had attacked the churches in retaliation for the police raids on Islamist protest camps in Cairo and also to punish Egypt’s Christian minority for its support of the July 3 coup that ousted president Mohamed Morsi. On the day of the raids, Islamists also attacked police stations across the country.

But in interviews Monday and Tuesday, many residents suggested that the police had been complicit, at least through a failure to respond.

“Until now, we have not heard about any real or serious investigation,” said Mina Thabet, an activist with the Maspero Youth Union, a Christian activist group, which has charted the attacks that have taken place nationwide since Aug. 14.

Some “five or six” bearded Islamists with assault rifles broke through the evangelical church gate in Beni Mazar around midday Aug. 14, the owner of a Christian bookstore next door said in an interview this week. But he also said those Islamists worked in coordination with dozens of “thugs” who arrived in pickup trucks and didn’t look like Islamists.

The accomplices carried off thousands of dollars’ worth of computer, video and audio equipment, as well as air conditioning units, before setting the church on fire, according to the owner, who for security reasons would only permit the use of his first name, Ayman.

Read the rest here.

Russia's Great Nyet to the West

From the Young Fogey. There is much that I admire about Russia's stand on a range of issues which put it in conflict with the post-Christian West. I will however express opposition to the occasional violence that has been reported against homosexuals and other dissenters. Not cool at all. Love the sinner, hate the sin. That's a concept that I suspect has eluded Pat Buchanan.

Manning to be Sentenced Wednesday

He had his day in court and now the bill is due. The Army is asking for sixty years. That seems high to me. My guess is somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years. But I would be shocked if he gets less than twenty.

Old Calendarist "Milan Synod" disbands - Appeals to Moscow for reconcilliation

I don't follow the convoluted and thoroughly byzantine (pun intended) Old Calendarist world, so apologies for missing this late July news. But I think it is significant. Details may be read here including the letter of repentance from their hierarchs to Patriarch Kyrill.

Disclaimer: The linked website is affiliated with the Old Calendarist movement and therefor schismatic.

Shock: Greece will need a third bailout

And a fourth and a fifth... until people decide to stop throwing good money after bad. Greece is the Detroit of the EU. They are broke. They owe more money than they can repay. Period. They have already defaulted on their debt. It's long past time to just let the country go bankrupt so they can begin rebuilding and healing. Yes, that will mean a lot more near term pain. But this is a situation where there are no good alternatives. Bankruptcy is the least bad and the only one that holds out the hope of eventual recovery.

See here for latest news.

Britain's direct attack on the free press

British agents of the GCHQ (their equivalent to our NSA) entered the offices of the Guardian newspaper and systematically destroyed all of the paper's computers that could in anyway have been connected to Edward Snowden and the NSA story. They even destroyed the back up hard drives in the basement. The editors have courageously declared they will continue to pursue the story and publish on it, although from outside of Great Britain.

See here for details. Absolutely chilling.

EU Steps in as Spain and Britain Square Off Over Gibraltar (yet again)

The commission’s intervention came as a British warship docked in Gibraltar on Monday morning, part of what the British authorities described as a long-planned military training operation, rather than a show of force aimed at Spain.

Still, the arrival of the warship, the Westminster, which was escorted by two smaller ships from the Royal Navy, came a day after Spanish fishermen confronted British police vessels to protest Gibraltar’s construction of an artificial reef that is limiting their access to the waters off the territory.

Although Spain has regularly challenged Britain’s 300-year-old control of Gibraltar, the territory’s decision to build the reef has heightened tensions considerably. Gibraltar created the reef this month by dumping 70 concrete blocks into the sea in an attempt to prevent overfishing. Spain retaliated by tightening controls at the border, forcing cars to wait for hours to enter or leave the territory. Spain has also said that it may charge 50 euros, or about $67, to cross the border, saying that the additional revenue could help compensate Spanish fishermen for their losses.

Read the rest here.

Britain: Furor over detention of Snowden leak reporter's partner

David Miranda, the homosexual partner of a prominent Guardian newspaper reporter, was detained for nine hours at London's main airport by British police. No explanation was given, but the defacto arrest was carried out under authority of British anti-terrorism laws which permit detention without charge or access to a lawyer for up to nine hours. Mr. Miranda is the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the reporter for the Guardian who broke the story about Edward Snowden and the NSA's vast domestic espionage operation.

Predictably this is causing a huge uproar. See here and here.

The Empire's reach has grown long indeed.

A Reporter Dares to Challenge the Orthodoxy of Conspiracy

AS a veteran newspaper reporter, I’ve heard some things. I once sat in a Friendly’s restaurant in Connecticut with an earnest nun who, between sips of her Fribble, confided that an evil man who looked like Pope Paul VI — but who was not Pope Paul VI — had seized control of the Vatican in the 1960s. A papal double, she explained. And she had photographs to prove it.

I knocked back a double Fribble and asked for the check.

Journalists will entertain conspiracy theories because conspiracies, in fact, do take place, and at our best we seek out the stories behind the stories. But we also pay a price if we don’t buy into every one. If you write that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in the summer of 1969, some reader somewhere is guaranteed to call you a government dupe. Hey, Jimmy Olsen! Everyone knows that Armstrong took one giant leap on a secured movie lot. Sap.

Though I am not unfamiliar with being called a patsy, I still respect and admire those who challenge the conventional wisdom; this is how I was raised, as you will see. Even so, I was still cold-cocked by the response to a recent This Land column of mine that touched on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Holy Zapruder...

Read the rest here.

As a recovering JFK conspiracy theorist I feel for the guy. But at the risk of saying 60% of the American people are wrong, well... they are wrong. Oswald killed Kennedy and he did it alone. There has never been any credible evidence to the contrary. Read Bugliosi's book. He doesn't just knock down the conspiracy theories, he incinerates them in an irrefutable nuclear fireball of facts and logic. Or just watch this rare and honest examination of the case.

On the other hand, the Pope Paul VI double theory... that could explain a lot of things.

Thoughts on the Rebellion of 1861-1865

During the war, Northerners and Southerners sometimes used the uncapitalized phrase “civil war” as a declarative description of the mess in which they found themselves, but Civil War was not yet a proper noun. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war,” President Lincoln famously declared in the Gettysburg Address. Less famously, Lt. James Langhorne of the 4th Virginia Infantry lamented to his mother, “I think our country is doomed to a civil war of years duration.” Throughout the struggle Confederates likewise spoke of the “civil war,” or just “this war.”

But most often, Northerners referred to the war as a rebellion. They commonly used phrases like “this rebellion” and “the great rebellion.” Northerners followed the course of the war in Frank Moore’s popular Rebellion Record, which began to run in 1861, and Lincoln himself frequently used the word “rebellion” to describe the war in public and in private. Rebellion was simply what Union soldiers, and sometimes even Confederate ones, called the war. It seemed as natural as calling a tree “a tree.” The perpetually grouchy Massachusetts soldier Roland Bowen grumped that “we have not done much toward putting down this Rebellion yet,” for example, while the Floridian Roderick Gaspero Shaw worried that if Confederates did not kick the Yankees out of Georgia by the spring of 1864, the “Rebellion will tremble.” And of course, Northerners blasted Confederates as “rebels,” a label that many Confederates proudly adopted. But what did it mean to call the war a rebellion?

Lincoln understood the importance of semantics. “It might seem, at first thought, to be of little difference whether the present movement at the South be called ‘secession’ or ‘rebellion,’” he told Congress in July 1861. “The movers, however, well understand the difference.” Lincoln thought that secession was an act of rebellion against democratic self-government. A disgruntled minority had captured the reins of power in the South and rode it out of the Union because it did not like the way a presidential election turned out. This act defied the core principle of democratic self-government, for elections have validity only when all parties agree to abide by results, even when they don’t like them. If self-government was to survive, then the rejection of – rebellion against – a fairly and freely elected government had to be defeated. As Lincoln put it, “It is now for [us] to demonstrate to the world, that those who can fairly carry an election, can also suppress a rebellion.”

Read the rest here.

Feds Open Bribery Investigation of JP Morgan

Federal authorities have opened a bribery investigation into whether JPMorgan Chase hired the children of powerful Chinese officials to help the bank win lucrative business in the booming nation, according to a confidential United States government document.

In one instance, the bank hired the son of a former Chinese banking regulator who is now the chairman of the China Everbright Group, a state-controlled financial conglomerate, according to the document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, as well as public records. After the chairman’s son came on board, JPMorgan secured multiple coveted assignments from the Chinese conglomerate, including advising a subsidiary of the company on a stock offering, records show.

The Hong Kong office of JPMorgan also hired the daughter of a Chinese railway official. That official was later detained on accusations of doling out government contracts in exchange for cash bribes, the government document and public records show.

Read the rest here.

Banks are the enemy.

Quote of the day....

"Monarchy is the best guard against the power of idiots in large numbers."
-Uncertain, but widely attributed to Voltaire

Muslim Brotherhood denies attacks on churches

It's really just propaganda. And all the pictures and video are fake. From here.

NSA Repeatedly Violated Privacy Laws and Court Orders

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

Read the rest here.

What's up with the Old Calendarists?

Fr. John has a good post up that gives a basic overview of the controversy for the uninformed. It addresses a topic in more detail that I touched on in an earlier post.

The Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos

 A blessed feast to all.

A Morbid Anniversary

On this date 77 years ago Rainey Bethea gained the unhappy distinction of being the guest of honor at the last public execution in the United States which occurred in Owensboro Kentucky. An African American convicted (he confessed) of raping and murdering a 70 year old white woman, he was executed before a crowd of not less than 20,000 people. Adding to the rare spectacle of a public execution was the fact, astonishing for the time, that it was to be presided over by quite possibly the nation's first female sheriff. Florence Thompson had ended up with the job after her duly elected husband unexpectedly expired from pneumonia a few months earlier. And under state law it was the Sheriff's responsibility to handle these things.

Contrary to most of the highly sensational press reports at the time, the crowd was sober, orderly and subdued throughout the affair. Further the sheriff had taken the eminently sensible precaution of engaging two men to actually do the deed, one of whom was highly experienced.

The only real hitch occurred when the hangman, an ex cop from Louisiana, showed up immaculately attired in a white seersucker suit with a Panama hat... dead drunk. In due course Mr. Bethea was escorted quickly from the jail to the gallows and placed without difficulty on the trap door where his arms and legs were bound firmly with restraining belts by the assistant. There he declined to make any last statement but instead made a quick final confession to the attending Roman Catholic priest before the noose and a black hood were slipped over his head. At this point the signal was given to the ex-cop turned hangman to do the only thing he was required to do, and release the trap.

Alas, he was so plastered he couldn't get his hand to grasp the lever!

There followed several seconds of horrifying confusion as the signal was repeatedly given, and seemingly ignored, until finally an exasperated sheriff's deputy lunged forward and pulled the lever himself.

Thankfully, the assistant actually knew what he was doing and had made all of the preparations and arrangements exactly correct. The end result being that Mr. Bethea's neck was cleanly broken and he was pronounced dead only minutes later. But that is not what most of the country thought happened.

The press basically decided that facts were not important and the story that went out told of a massive, highly intoxicated crowd, only barely kept back from the gallows. The newspapers said that Sheriff Thompson fainted when the trap was released. There was talk of people staggering out of saloons to go and join the hanging. In short there was a national uproar.

The upshot of all of this was that when the state legislature met again in 1938, in those days it met only every two years, it passed a bill moving executions to the state prison which the governor quickly signed. But he later repented and expressed regret saying that he thought the state had become less safe with the abolition of public hangings.

Anti-Christian Pogroms Underway in Egypt

The Muslim Brotherhood's response to the military crackdown on their protests appears to include coordinated attacks on Christians and churches throughout Egypt. It is not known how many Christians have been beaten or murdered but at least 17 churches are reported to have been destroyed or gravely damaged. Among those believed destroyed was one dating to the fourth century. Most were Coptic Orthodox, though several were Catholic and at least one was Protestant. What follows is a partial list of churches attacked by the Muslims...

• Church of the Virgin Mary and Anba Abram of the Copts Orthodox. the village of Daljah, the district of Deir Mawas, Minya province. Burning and demolishing the church.
• The Church of St. Mina of the Coptic Orthodox. The neighborhood of Abu Hilal Kebly Minya province. Burning the church.
• St. George Church. Coptic Orthodox archbishopric land, Sohag province. Burning the church.
• Baptist Church. Status of  Bani Mazar, Minya province. Burning the church
• Church of the Virgin Lady of the Copts Orthodox, Nazlah village, Yusuf the righteous district, Fayoum province. Burning the church…
• Monastery of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd School. Suez. Burning.
• Church of Franciscan fathers. Street 23. Suez. Burning.
• Bible society friends, fayoum. Burning.
• Church of Saint Maximus. 45th Street. Alexandria. Harassment.
• Church of Prince Taodharos Elchatbi. Fayoum. Burning.
• Church of the virgin Lady of the Coptic Orthodox. butchers street. Abu Hilal District. Minia province. Burning.
• Church of Saint Mark. Catholic Copts. Abu Hilal District, Minya province. Burning.
• Church of the Jesuit Fathers. Abu Hilal District, Minya province. Burning.
• Church of the Virgin and Anba Abram. Sohag. Burning.
• Church of Saint Mark, and the building of services. electricity Street. Sohag. Burning.
• The house of Father Onjelios king. Pastor of the Church of the Virgin and Anba Abram in Daljah. Deir Mawas district. Minya province. Burning the house completely.
• Burning the Greek Church in Suez.

Source.

Egypt: Hundreds Dead Amidst Military Crackdown and Civil Unrest

CAIRO — Egyptian security forces stormed two sprawling sit-ins by supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi shortly after dawn Wednesday, killing or injuring hundreds of people and igniting a wave of violent clashes across the country.

Hours after the raids, Egypt’s military-backed interim president declared a state of emergency, imposing a nighttime curfew on Cairo and 10 provinces and allowing security forces to arrest and detain civilians indefinitely without charge. The state of emergency took effect at 4 p.m. local time (10 a.m. EDT).

Read the rest here.

A Succession of Sacrileges

A few news items getting scant attention in the last few days from the mainstream press and media...

President Obama's allies in Syria sacked and burned the Antiochian Orthodox church of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus. And in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood has similarly attacked and destroyed a number of Coptic Orthodox churches.

And here in the good old US of A two homosexual men had a fake wedding in a fake church, copying at least some pieces of the Orthodox wedding service. Predictably they are now announcing that theirs was the first gay Greek Orthodox wedding.

Lord have mercy!

Sources: Abducted Bishops Are Likely Dead

Disturbing reports from Samn!.

13 Wisconsin cops raid animal shelter to kill baby deer named Giggles

Two weeks ago, Ray Schulze was working in a barn at the Society of St. Francis no-kill animal shelter in Kenosha, Wis., when officials swarmed the shelter with a search warrant.

“[There were] nine [Department of Natural Resources] agents and four deputy sheriffs, and they were all armed to the teeth,” Mr. Schulze told WISN 12. “It was like a SWAT team.”

The agents were there to retrieve a baby deer named Giggles that was dropped off by a family worried she had been abandoned by her mother, the station reported. Wisconsin law forbids the possession of wildlife.

“I said the deer is scheduled to go to the wildlife reserve the next day,” Mr. Schulze told the station. “I was thinking in my mind they were going to take the deer and take it to a wildlife shelter, and here they come carrying the baby deer over their shoulder. She was in a body bag. I said, ‘Why did you do that?’ He said, ‘That’s our policy,’ and I said, ‘That’s one hell of a policy.’”

Read the rest here, if you have the stomach.

The "Non-Theistic" Dean of the National Cathedral

...“I describe myself as a non-theistic Christian,” Hall confided to Quinn, echoing infamous retired Episcopal John Shelby Spong, who once routinely regaled an approving Phil Donahue and other talk shows with his provocative disbelief of Christian orthodoxy. “Jesus doesn’t use the word God very much,” Hall insisted. “He talks about his Father.”

Hall asked: “Where I am now, how do I understand Jesus as a son of God that’s not magical? I’m trying to figure out Jesus as a son of God and a fully human being, if he has both fully human and a fully divine set of chromosomes.… He’s not some kind of superman coming down. God is present in all human beings. Jesus was an extraordinary human being. Jesus didn’t try to convert. He just had people at his table.”

Read the rest here.
HT: T-19

Patriarch Kyrill on the Legitimate Heir to the Russian Throne

H.I.H. The Grand Duchess Maria and her son Grand Duke George in audience with H.H. Pope (E) Benedict XVI

This is a bit dated but noteworthy. It comes from a Russian language source which as far as I can tell has received no notice in the English language press and media.

"Today, none of those persons who are descendants of the Romanovs are pretenders to the Russian throne. But in the person of Grand Duchess Maria Wladimirovna and her son, Georgii, the succession of the Romanovs is preserved — no longer to the Russian Imperial throne, but to history itself"

-Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow and All Russia 9 March 2013

Niall Ferguson Warns of Euro-American Decline

If you suffer from melancholia, or display other symptoms of clinical depression, you might want to skip reading Niall Ferguson’s The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. For the rest of us, it is an essential grounding in the daunting realities facing the current and future generations of the Western democracies, especially the United States.

Ferguson, a Scottish transplant to Harvard and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, based this book on his 2012 Reith Lectures for the BBC. Warning: Things are even worse than you thought.

Ferguson’s short, articulate, and powerful book describes a quartet of pathologies plaguing the United States and most Western countries: “democratic deficits,” “regulatory fragility,” the “rule of lawyers” rather than the rule of law, and an “uncivil society.” Ferguson believes these conditions have contributed to making the US a “stationary state,” a term coined by his countryman, Adam Smith. This has led to “a shocking and perhaps unparalleled breach” of Edmund Burke’s partnership which the great Anglo-Irish conservative described as “not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Ferguson relies heavily on contemporary scholarship but also draws on the intellectual legacy of the formidable triumvirate of Smith, Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville.

In the 1770s Smith described China then as a stationary state because of economic stagnation resulting from corruption of its laws and institutions. Ferguson now believes that Europe, Japan, and America have experienced the same sort of downward spiral in in their governments and civil societies.

“Public debt --stated and implicit-- has become a way for the older generation to live at the expense of the young and the unborn,” says Ferguson. “Regulation has become dysfunctional to the point of increasing the fragility of the [market] system. Lawyers, who can be revolutionaries in a dynamic society, become parasites in a stationary one. And civil society withers into a mere no man’s land between corporate interests and big government.”

Read the rest here.
HT: Ethics Forum

The Bickersons Go To Court (again and again)

Former Couple's Legal Fight Now in Year Seventeen. Unbelievable.

Slow Posting

Apologies for the dearth of posting lately. I have been busy with some personal business and frankly there hasn't been a ton of stuff out there that has caught my eye. I'm also trying to catch up on a backlog of material from my "to read" list.

2 Companies Close and Destroy Data Rather Than Reveal Files to Feds

The shutdown of two small e-mail providers on Thursday illustrates why it is so hard for Internet companies to challenge secret government surveillance: to protect their customers’ data from federal authorities, the two companies essentially committed suicide.

Lavabit, a Texas-based service that was reportedly used by Edward J. Snowden, the leaker who had worked as a National Security Agency contractor, announced the suspension of its service Thursday afternoon. In a blog post, the company’s owner, Ladar Levison, suggested — though did not say explicitly — that he had received a secret search order, and was choosing to shut the service to avoid being “complicit in crimes against the American people.”

Within hours, a fast-growing Maryland-based start-up called Silent Circle also closed its e-mail service and destroyed its e-mail servers. The company said it saw the writing on the wall — while also making it plain that it had not yet received any court orders soliciting user data.

Read the rest here.

I tip my hat to you sirs. It is remotely possible that true patriotism is not dead in corporate America.

A Bicentennial Resolution

OK, I will admit it. I am not a big fan of romance as a genre, either in film or literature. It's just not my thing. Some people really like it. Good for you. But it has been brought to my attention yet again, that this is the bicentennial of the publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Which even I know is the most famous work of the first truly great romantic novelist.

Oddly I have a site dedicated to her linked in the sidebar, mostly for it's great posts on late Georgian society and culture, but I have never read any of her books. Not one. But because of my love of period literature and fiction and in consideration of the anniversary, I am going to make a stab at it.

Any suggestions? Should I go for one of her other works or stick with Mr. Darcey and Miss Bennet?

Russian Orthodox Church still doubts authenticity of Russian royal family remains

Moscow, August 9, Interfax - The head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for Church and Society Relations Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin has said that the Russian Orthodox Church still has doubts regarding secular experts' conclusions that the human remains found near the city of Yekaterinburg belonged to the Russian Imperial Family members.

"In my opinion, a very wide range of competent experts, not necessarily just Orthodox experts, should be allowed to study the discovered remains," Father Vsevolod said.

It is important both to compare the DNA of some individual fragment with the DNA of the remains of other Imperial Family members, assess the wholeness of the skeletons, establish whether or not all of the found human remains have the same DNA and confirm the presence of former injuries, for example the injury that was sustained by Tsar Nicholas II during his trip to Japan when he was the heir to the Russian throne, the archpriest said.

There is also a need to compare different theories describing how the bodies were disposed of and buried, he said.

Read the rest here.

Sigh...

IRS manual detailed DEA's use of hidden intel evidence

(Reuters) - Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defense lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure.

A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA's Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Read the rest here.

JP Morgan Faces Civil and Criminal Investigations

JPMorgan Chase disclosed on Wednesday that it faced a criminal and civil investigation into whether it sold shoddy mortgage securities to investors in the run-up to the financial crisis, the latest legal threat to the nation’s biggest bank.

JPMorgan acknowledged for the first time the existence of the investigation — one of several mortgage-related problems looming for the bank — in a quarterly regulatory filing. It said that the civil division of the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of California, which covers a stretch of land that includes Sacramento and Yosemite, has “preliminarily concluded” that JPMorgan flouted federal laws with its sale of subprime mortgage securities from 2005 to 2007. The parallel criminal inquiry, according to one person briefed on the matter, is in a more preliminary stage.

Read the rest here.

Banks are the enemy.

Some Clarity on the War on Drugs

Colorado Lawmakers Get License Plate Protection From Traffic Cams - Parking Tickets

There are rules for the common people and rules for their "leaders," and only in rare cases do the same rules cover both. Chris Morran at the Consumerist points out how politicians (yet again) are being allowed to ignore the same laws that affect their constituents. Colorado legislators are immune from speeding tickets and parking tickets thanks to the special plates issued to lawmakers -- ones that aren't included in the DMV database.

Read the rest here.
HT: Bill (tGf)

A Spanish town gives new meaning to "lost and found"

BRUNETE, Spain — In the worldwide battle to get dog owners to clean up after their pets, enter Brunete, a middle-class suburb of Madrid fed up with dirty parks and sidewalks.

Some cities hand out steep fines. But in these tough economic times, the mayor here, Borja Gutiérrez, didn’t much like that idea. Instead, this town engaged a small army of volunteers to bag it, box it and send it back to its owners.

“It’s your dog, it’s your dog poop,” Mr. Gutiérrez said. “We are just returning it to you.”

Until now, Brunete’s claim to fame, if it had one, was that it sustained heavy damage in the Spanish Civil War. But these days, this leafy hamlet has made headlines all over Spain. Residents say that strangers take note when they say they live in Brunete.

At a recent political event, Mr. Gutiérrez said, the mayor of Madrid sought him out.

“She said, ‘Well, it is not many mayors who think sending dog poop to voters is a good idea,'” Mr. Gutiérrez said. “'How did you dare?'”

Read the rest here.

Feds Sue Bank of America for Fraud

(Reuters) - The U.S. government on Tuesday filed two civil lawsuits against Bank of America for what the Justice Department and securities regulators said was a fraud on investors involving $850 million of residential mortgage-backed securities.

The Justice Department and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed the parallel suits in U.S. District Court in Charlotte, according to the court filings.

The securities date to about January 2008, the government said, putting them just at the beginning of the global financial crisis.

Bank of America responded to the lawsuits with a statement: "These were prime mortgages sold to sophisticated investors who had ample access to the underlying data, and we will demonstrate that.

Read the rest here.

Banks are the enemy.

Richard III to be buried as a Protestant

The Roman Catholic King Richard III is to be interred in a Protestant Cathedral, presumably using the rites of the Church of England. The local Catholic bishop has volunteered to participate in an ecumenical capacity.

From here.

Fixed the link.

When God Spoke Greek

Timothy Michael Law is a scholar interested in history, theology, and religion. Last month Oxford University Press published his book on the Septuagint, When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible. I recently got the chance to talk with Law about his new book and the importance of the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament to contemporary churches.

Where did your interest in the Septuagint begin?

One night in 2002, I was sitting with one of my best friends from college and seminary, Kyle McDaniel, and he threw (literally!) a big blue book at me from across the room. The book was Alfred Rahlfs’ handbook edition of the Greek Septuagint. We started talking about it, and both of us were uncertain whether we wanted to pursue more Hebrew or Greek, or more early Judaism or early Christianity in our graduate work. We loved all of it. We decided that one way to marry those interests was to study the Septuagint.

Why should today’s churches care about the Septuagint?

There are several reasons I think modern Christians should care about the Septuagint.

First, when a modern reader sees Paul quoting Isaiah, and then turns to Isaiah in an English translation, she notices the citation is different. Why? The Old Testament translation of almost every modern English version of the Bible is based on the Hebrew Bible, but the New Testament authors and the early Church most often used the Septuagint. Augustine and others throughout history even argued that if the New Testament authors used the Septuagint, the Church ought to affirm its authority as well. I unpack this in several chapters in the book.

Second, the Septuagint, and not the Hebrew Bible, explicitly shaped some early Christian theology. For example, it was the Septuagint version of Isaiah, not the Hebrew Bible’s version, that shaped the most theologically profound book in the history of Christianity, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The primacy of the Septuagint continues after the first century, and one could not imagine the development of orthodoxy without it. None of this would be terribly significant if the Septuagint were merely a translation of the Hebrew; however, the Septuagint in many places contains a different message. Sometimes the translators of the Septuagint created new meanings in their translations, but there is also another reason the Septuagint is often different.

An alternative, sometimes older, form of the Hebrew text often lies behind the Greek. When the Reformers and their predecessors talked about returning to the original Hebrew (ad fontes!), and when modern Christians talk about studying the Hebrew because it is the “original text,” they are making several mistaken assumptions. The Hebrew Bible we now use is often not the oldest form of the Hebrew text, and sometimes the Septuagint provides the only access we have to that older form.

Read the rest here.
HT: Dr. Tighe

Reuters: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans

(Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."

Read the rest here.

This country is so screwed. Seriously. We might just as well run up the Hammer and Sickle right now. They won. We are a police state.

Russia's Dangerous Alliance Between Church and State

Russia officially celebrated Paratroopers Day on Friday. For more than 1.5 million men who serve or served as paratroopers, the day is a holiday, moreover one that is totally different than every other military holiday. On this day, paratrooper veterans have carte blanche to do strange things, which include getting drunk in the morning, fighting, and ritually bathing in the city fountains. On this day in provincial cities, careful mothers tend to lock their teenage daughters inside — and for good reason. Even Wikipedia warns that "the festivities are accompanied by fights, pogroms and public disorder."

But this year Paratroopers Day had a new twist. On all the billboards and posters in Moscow, the holiday had a dual title: "Paratroopers Day — ­Elijah's Day." The Orthodox Church does, in fact, commemorate the Prophet Elijah on Aug. 2. But it's hard to understand what the ascetic hermit Elijah — aka "the first virgin of the Old Testament," who certainly never jumped out of a plane in a parachute — has in common with paratroopers who, by definition, aren't what you'd call pacifists.

Nevertheless, this isn't the first attempt of the Russian Orthodox Church to interfere in the traditions of public and military holidays. Not long ago, the authorities in Voronezh region officially prohibited celebration of the ancient Slavic holiday of Ivan Kupala. A few days ago, the church pressured the Navy to drop several traditions from Navy Day. In the past, actors played Neptune, mermaids and other creatures who, in the words of an anonymous representative of the  Navy "were not on Noah's Ark during the Flood," as Interfax reported.

Declaring Neptune a persona non grata in the Navy may be comical, but it is indicative of the recent creep of clericalism into cultural and public life in Russia. Groups of aggressive Orthodox activists and Cossacks regularly attack art exhibitions showing "blasphemous" paintings and demand that theatrical performances be banned.

Read the rest here.

MLB Suspends A-Roid + 12 Others

In the biggest surprise since this morning's sunrise Major League Baseball handed out suspensions to 13 players including Alex Rodriguez for chemical cheating. Most copped to the charges and accepted the MLB version of a plea bargain that let them off with 50 game suspensions. But A-Roid was in the cross-hairs for his attempts to entice others into cheating, attempts to obtain and destroy evidence and directly lying to MLB when questioned on the matter. No plea bargain there. He was suspended for 214 (211) games which will commence after his appeals are exhausted.

It is overwhelmingly likely he will be out for the entirety of the 2014 and whatever part of the 2015 season is left over from when he starts to serve the suspension. Some experts opine that this may effectively end his career. The Yankees however are still on the hook for whatever part of his contract is not voided by the suspension. So he stands to walk away with tens of millions of dollars.

My take is that this is a good first step and probably as much as could be hoped for given the constraints of the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the Players Union. One really encouraging sign is that unlike in the 90's and early 2000's when most players resisted any testing and did everything in their power to obstruct inquiries into the rampant doping, the pendulum seems to have swung. Most players now see chemical cheating as dangerous to the integrity of the game itself and are loudly demanding stronger sanctions and more aggressive testing. There is almost no sympathy being expressed for those caught doping.

Players are actually pushing their union delegates to impose even more severe penalties than what MLB has asked for in the past. Among the more popular suggestions being floated by angry ballplayers is going to a two strikes and your out rule, with a first offense being a 100 game suspension. Second offenses resulting in a lifetime ban from professional baseball. And one innovative idea that might carry the most deterrent power of any I've heard of so far. The suggestion being that any player caught doping on a first offense, and proven beyond any doubt, would be liable to having his contract terminated by his club without further appeal. Given the kinds of long term contracts, frequently worth tens of millions of dollars, with a lot of pay back loaded, this could be the key to bringing an end to the era of chemical cheating.

Anyways MLB gets two and a half cheers for mostly handling this particular case right. A few too many leaks for my taste but all in all they didn't make a hash out of it. There was talk of invoking the MLB equivalent to the death penalty and slapping A-Roid with a lifetime ban. But as much as I don't care for the man that would have been overkill for what was technically a first offense. Likewise they didn't try to deny him his right to appeal. That would have looked bad and actually made the bum a sympathetic character. Besides there's really no need. By every account MLB has absolutely damning evidence against A-Roid. So let him file his appeal. It's just delaying the inevitable.

Morally of course, judgment has been rendered. He really would do well to just let the Yankees quietly pay him off and retire from baseball. There's just no point in trying to comeback in 2015. Nothing he can do will salvage his reputation and the doors to the Hall of Fame are forever closed to him.

Correction: I initially posted that A-Rod was suspended for 214 games. It was actually 211.

2 Years After 116 Police Bullets, Few Answers

MIAMI BEACH — The last 90 seconds of Raymond Herisse’s life unfold on YouTube with chilling clarity.

The car Mr. Herisse, 22, is driving rolls down a South Beach street. Shots are heard in the distance as Hialeah police officers try to stop the car. About two blocks later, the car slows to a stop, standing idle for more than minute. Eight Miami Beach police officers cluster near the driver’s side. Then they unleash a barrage of more than 100 bullets, a volley so startling that the hands of the person recording the scene from his cellphone shake.

In all, 16 bullets hit Mr. Herisse, who was killed sitting behind the wheel. Four bystanders were wounded — two men and two women, part of a large crowd gathered on May 30, 2011, for the final day of Urban Beach Week, a raucous, yearly hip-hop and rap event in South Beach.

But in the two years since Mr. Herisse’s death, his family and the four other victims, increasingly troubled by delays and the police’s handling of the investigation, are still waiting to learn why the officers opened fire on a stopped car amid a throng of onlookers.

Read the rest here.

WAPO: Five myths about libertarians

The specter of libertarianism is haunting America. Advocates of sharply reducing the government’s size, scope and spending are raising big bucks from GOP donors, trying to steal the mantle of populism, being blamed for the demise of Detroit and even getting caught in the middle of a battle for the Republican Party. Yet libertarians are among the most misunderstood forces in today’s politics. Let’s clear up some of the biggest misconceptions.

1. Libertarians are a fringe band of “hippies of the right.”

In 1971, the controversial and influential author Ayn Rand denounced right-wing anarchists as “hippies of the right,” a charge still leveled against libertarians, who push for a minimal state and maximal individual freedom.

Libertarians are often dismissed as a mutant subspecies of conservatives: pot smokers who are soft on defense and support marriage equality. But depending on their views, libertarians often match up equally well with right- and left-wingers.

The earliest example of libertarian principles in partisan politics might have come in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,when Anti-Imperialist League Democrats rejected empire and war — and believed in free trade and racial equality at a time when none of that was popular. More recently, civil libertarians such as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) supported Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in his filibuster on domestic drones and government surveillance.

Read the rest here.

California: US Supreme Court Upholds Order to Release Thousands of Convicts

WASHINGTON — In a major setback for Gov. Jerry Brown, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday declined to block a court order that he release 9,600 inmates from state prisons, moving California a step closer to relocating or freeing those prisoners by the end of the year.

The state can still pursue its appeal — and the administration vowed to do so. But the court's 6-3 vote was a disappointment for Brown, who had launched a political crusade against a three-judge panel that has consistently ruled that overcrowded prison conditions violate the rights of inmates.

The panel has ordered Brown to bring the number of inmates in its prisons down to 112,164 by the end of the year.

Read the rest here.

On the other hand...

Churches cannot thumb their nose at the law.

Britain: Gay Couple Sue For Right to Church Wedding

This has been getting a lot of attention on the web and in the news, most of which is undeserved. Several points.

* Britain has nothing comparable to our First Amendment, so people screaming "we are next" are delusional.
* While they lack anything as strong as our First Amendment, British and EU law does clearly protect religious conscience. Not even the most wacky court (and they have more than a few) in Europe is going to order churches to start marrying gays.
* They (the complainants) know this. This is a stunt with two objectives, first to get some free publicity and secondly to get social conservatives to all start barking at the moon.

On which note... mission accomplished.

HT: Several blog readers. Thanks for the tips.

US Issues Security Alert For Embassies - Travelers

The State Department issued a worldwide travel alert Friday, warning of potential terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda and its affiliates in the Middle East and North Africa that could target tourists on trains, flights or other forms of public transportation.

The alert follows the decision to close 21 U.S. embassies across the Muslim world on Sunday in response to the same security threat, according to State Department officials.

“Current information suggests that al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks both in the region and beyond, and that they may focus efforts to conduct attacks in the period between now and the end of August,” the State Department said in a statement Friday. It said the potential for attacks was particularly high in the Middle East and North Africa and that it could come from or occur on the Arabian Peninsula.

Read the rest here.

The Untouchables: America's Misbehaving Prosecutors, And The System That Protects Them

NEW ORLEANS -- Some questions seem particularly prone to set John Thompson off. Here's one he gets a lot: Have the prosecutors who sent him to death row ever apologized?

"Sorry? For what?" says Thompson. The 49-year-old is lean, almost skinny. He wears jeans, a T-shirt and running shoes and sports a thin mustache and soul patch, both stippled with gray. "You tell me that. Tell me what the hell would they be sorry for. They tried to kill me. To apologize would mean they're admitting the system is broken." His voice has been gradually increasing in volume. He's nearly yelling now. "That everyone around them is broken. It's the same motherfucking system that's protecting them."

He paces as he talks. His voice soars and breaks. At times, he gets within a few inches of me, jabbing his finger in my direction for emphasis. Thompson pauses as he takes a phone call from his wife. His tone changes for the duration of the conversation. Then he hangs up and resumes with the indignation. "What would I do with their apology anyway? Sorry. Huh. Sorry you tried to kill me? Sorry you tried to commit premeditated murder? No. No thank you. I don't need your apology."

The wrongly convicted often show remarkable grace and humility. It's inspiring to see, if a little difficult to understand; even after years or decades in prison, exonerees are typically marked by an absence of bitterness.

Not Thompson, but you can hardly blame him. Even among outrageous false conviction stories, his tale is particularly brutal. He was wrongly convicted not once, but twice -- separately -- for a carjacking and a murder. He spent 18 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, 14 of them on death row. His death warrant was signed eight times. When his attorneys finally found the evidence that cleared him -- evidence his prosecutors had known about for years -- he was weeks away from execution.

Read the rest here.
HT: PointedStick

Solzhenitsyn and the Russian Renaissance

Alexander Yakovlev, a Communist who became disillusioned following Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin, documented the terror perpetrated against Russia’s Orthodox Christians in his book A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Almost immediately upon the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1918, the clergy were purged. The Metropolitan of Kiev was mutilated and castrated, his naked corpse left to be desecrated in the street. The Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, in line to succeed the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, was doused with water and left to freeze to death, “a pillar of ice.” A bishop was strapped alive to the paddlewheel of a steamboat and mangled by the rotating blades. One archbishop was buried alive; another was crucified and burned to death. Three thousand members of the clergy were shot in the first year of the Russian Revolution. “All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith,” Solzhenitsyn noted. Tens of thousands of religious would be sent to concentration camps; few returned. And the worst was yet to come in the 1920s under Stalin.

Yet the faith of the Russian people was not extinguished by three generations of official atheism. Solzhenitsyn would note that, to the astonishment of the Soviet leadership, “the awareness of God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity.” During the reign of Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov, among the more ominous days of the Cold War, Solzhenitsyn declared, “It is here that we see the dawn of hope: For no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets . . . it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.”

Today there is a revitalization taking place in Russian culture and, as with the Renaissance in Western Europe, it is being spearheaded by institutional Christianity. This renaissance is perhaps best captured in the work of Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, a celebrated historian, philosopher, theologian, and composer who is only forty-seven. Like Solzhenitsyn, Alfeyev strives to fill the cultural void of Russia’s lost century, and does so with indefatigable energy. This can be heard in his St. Matthew Passion, a sublime orchestral and choral piece that seems to hasten with desperation to recapture time lost. Like the martyred Metropolitan Veniamin of St. Petersburg, Alfeyev is a leading candidate to become Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. While he is, like Solzhenitsyn, unapologetically Russian, Alfeyev’s worldview has been shaped significantly by his exposure to the West, where he has lived and traveled widely. He also has close ties to the Vatican, and represented the Russian Orthodox Church at the installation of Pope Francis. His worldview is not limited to Russia, nor indeed to Orthodox Christianity.

Read the rest here.

Scapegoating the Copts

On July 3, Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), was ousted from power. His detractors came from many segments of Egyptian society, but it is the Coptic Christian community that the MB is scapegoating as the principal actor behind his removal. The Middle East Media Research Institute reports that, in a recent article on the MB website entitled “The Military Republic of Tawadros” (Tawadros being the Coptic Orthodox pope), the MB urges its followers to believe that the Copts “openly and secretly led the process of opposition to the Islamic stream and this stream’s rise to power.” 

Attacking the Copts will prove to be as destructive to Egypt as to the religious minority itself.

Read the rest here.

Libertarians flex their muscle in the GOP

Way back in 1975, a Republican agitator named Ronald Reagan had this to say about an esoteric young movement that was roiling politics: “If you analyze it, I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”

Neither the GOP old guard nor the rowdy libertarians ever quite bought that argument.

They both lay claim to the same conservative economic philosophy. But libertarians are more isolationist and antiwar than Republican orthodoxy allows on foreign policy and more permissive on social issues.

Still, in the nearly four decades since Reagan made those comments, the two have managed — at least most of the time — to maintain an uneasy marriage of expedience.

Libertarianism once again appears to be on the rise, particularly among the young. However, its alliance with the Republican establishment is fraying, as demonstrated by the increasingly personal war of words between two leading potential 2016 presidential contenders.

Read the rest here.

Detroit's Death by Democracy

In 1860, an uneasy Charles Darwin confided in a letter to a friend: “I had no intention to write atheistically” but “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” What appalled him had fascinated entomologist William Kirby (1759-1850): The ichneumon fly inserts an egg in a caterpillar, and the larva hatched from the egg, he said, “gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, and though at last it has devoured almost every part of it except the skin and intestines, carefully all this time avoids injuring the vital organs, as if aware that its own existence depends on that of the insect on which it preys!”

Government employees’ unions living parasitically on Detroit have been less aware than ichneumon larvae. About them, and their collaborators in the political class, the question is: What. Were. They. Thinking? Well, how did Bernie Madoff or the Enron executives convince themselves their houses of cards would never collapse?

Read the rest here.

Prayers Please

I am saddened to report that the mother of blogger New Catholic (proprietor of Rorate Caeli) has reposed after a long and painful illness. In your charity please keep him and his mother in your prayers. Memory eternal.

MLB Prepares to Suspend 9 Players

Major League Baseball officials told union leaders during a meeting at the Players Association’s midtown Manhattan offices on Tuesday that they plan to suspend Alex Rodriguez and eight other players who allegedly obtained performance-enhancing drugs from a South Florida anti-aging clinic.

Most of the players will be suspended for 50 games, but some – including the Yankees’ embattled superstar — face stiffer penalties for lying to MLB investigators or interfering in baseball’s year-long Biogenesis investigation.

Not all of the players linked to Biogenesis in media reports face discipline, sources have told The News. Two former Yankees — Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Melky Cabrera and Oakland A’s pitcher Bartolo Colon — will not be punished because they already have been suspended as a result of their links to Biogenesis and its owner, self-styled “biochemist” Anthony Bosch.

Read the rest here.

This doping has to be curtailed. It's reaching the point where no one trusts player's stats and sportswriters are refusing to induct people into the Hall of Fame because of the (frequently justified) suspicion that they are frauds. In short the epidemic of chemical cheating poses the most direct threat to the integrity of major league baseball since the days of gambling and fixing the World Series. My view is that it should be dealt with in a similar manner, a zero tolerance policy. And no this is not an ant-libertarian position. MLB is not the government and we are not talking about prison. Employers have a right to hold employees to standards relevant to their job.

JPMorgan Looks to Pay to Settle U.S. Inquiries

JPMorgan Chase is pulling out its checkbook to help mend frayed relationships with the government.

But its new and conciliatory approach — a departure for the bank and its leader, Jamie Dimon, who generally has taken a hard line with the authorities — is yielding mixed results. Government officials, stung by the bank’s past displays of hubris, may drive up the price of settlements or resist the overtures altogether.

The hefty payouts started on Tuesday when JPMorgan struck a $410 million settlement with the nation’s top energy regulator, which had accused the bank of devising “manipulative schemes” to transform “money-losing power plants into powerful profit centers.” The agreement was a record fine for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whose most recent settlement with a big bank totaled only $1.6 million.

Read the rest here.

Too big to fail and too big to jail. Banks are the enemy.

New York: Bad News For The Food Fascists

(Reuters) - New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's controversial plan to keep large sugary drinks out of restaurants and other eateries was rejected by a state appeals court on Tuesday, which said he had overstepped his authority in trying to impose the ban.

The law, which would have prohibited those businesses from selling sodas and other sugary beverages larger than 16 ounces (473 ml), "violated the state principle of separation of powers," the First Department of the state Supreme Court's Appellate Division said.

The decision, upholding a lower court ruling in March that struck down the law, dealt a blow to Bloomberg's attempt to advance the pioneering regulation as a way to combat obesity. Beverage makers and business groups, however, challenged it in court, arguing that the mayoral-appointed health board had gone too far when it approved the law.

A unanimous four-judge panel at the appeals court agreed, finding that the board had stepped beyond its power to regulate public health and usurped the policy-making role of the legislature.

Read the rest here.

For the record, I don't encourage people to drink soda. It really is just horrible stuff and a major contributing factor to all kinds of health problems. But it's a semi-free country, even in New York for the moment. So if you've got a craving for a super sized container of liquid sugar, knock yourself out.

Fast Food Workers Strike For Better Pay And Rights

NEW YORK (AP) — Workers at McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's restaurants across New York walked out Monday in a one-day strike to demand better pay and the right to unionize, calling for minimum wage to more than double from $7.25 to $15 an hour and the end to what activists called "abusive labor practices."

"It's noisy, it's really hot, fast, they rush you. Sometimes you don't even get breaks. All for $7.25? It's crazy," said Nathalia Sepulveda, who works at a McDonald's opposite Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, where one protest took place.

Outside the McDonald's as well as a Wendy's in lower Manhattan, workers chanted "we can't survive on $7.25" and "supersize our wages." At the Wendy's, the crowd shouted at customers not to go in and two police officers were stationed inside.

Read the rest here.

Not a huge fan of unions here, but this is clearly a case of abusive labor practices. $7.25 an hour in New York City? That's scandalous. I am not sure about a $15 hr wage, but they are absolutely right to call out their greedy employers on this issue. And frankly they are doing it the right way. Instead of asking the government to interfere they are exercising their individual rights to band together and demand better wages and working conditions. This is the libertarian approach.

I wish them luck.

Manning: Guilty of Espionage Act - Not Guilty of Aiding the Enemy

An Army judge on Tuesday acquitted Pfc. Bradley Manning of aiding the enemy by disclosing a trove of secret U.S. government documents, a striking rebuke to military prosecutors who argued that the largest leak in U.S. history had assisted al-Qaeda.

The judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, found Manning guilty of most of the more than 20 crimes he was charged with, including several counts of violating the Espionage Act. She also acquitted him of one count of violating the Espionage Act that stemmed from his leak of a video that depicted a fatal U.S. military airstrike in Farah, Afghanistan.

Read the rest here.

While I empathize with his motives the problem is that he is a soldier and he raised his right and and took the oath. The military by its very nature can't have people deciding when they will and will not obey orders. You might just as well disband the armed forces. As for the law, the press is (what a surprise!) wrong when they characterize this as a government defeat. They won big time. While the media is focusing on the "Aiding the Enemy" charge," they are missing a huge legal point. He was convicted of violating the Espionage Act. That's going to carry a lot of weight in prosecuting other leakers.

Manning may not be looking at the proverbial blindfold and cigarette, or a mandatory life without parole, but he is going down hard. I would be stunned if he gets less than 20 years in prison.

Important: More things the Pope said that the media missed

I received an email from blog reader John L. with some extremely significant quotes from the Pope's impromptu flying press conference. Some of them deal with touchy issues dividing Rome from Orthodoxy including the question of the sacraments for the divorced and remarried while others speak rather kindly of our liturgical praxis. Rather than paraphrasing I am going to append the entire email below. On a side note I deeply appreciate the tips I get from blog readers. Obviously I can't spend the entire day wandering the web and even if I could I would not be able to touch even a fraction of the often blogworthy stuff that's out there.

Emphasis is mine...

Trad blogs are obsessed with either the gay comments or the Latin Mass, but there was more. The way Francis' presents himself on issues... it's a bit like grasping jello, or picking up tofu with chopsticks. But sedecvacantist priest Fr. Cekeda noticed all of these things at Rorate Caeli's comments...

Check out this bit on divorce and remarriage. This is a huge issue that affects far more Catholics and ex-Catholics than the media fixation on gays. Cekada calls divorced/married Catholics "adulterers", but Pope Francis described this attitude as "clericalism".

http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/the-vatican/detail/articolo/gmg-26831//pag/2/

>>The Church is a mother and in the Church we need to be merciful towards everyone. We shouldn’t just wait for the wounded to come to us, we need to go out and search for them. I think the time for mercy has come as John Paul II predicted by introducing the Feast of Divine Mercy. Divorced people can take communion, it is those who have divorced and remarried that cannot. Here I must add that the orthodox follow the theology of economics and allow second marriages. When the commission of eight cardinals meets at the beginning of October we will discuss how to proceed. The Church is taking a very close look at pastoral initiatives for marriage. My predecessor in Buenos Aires, Cardinal Quarracino always used to say: “I consider half of today’s marriages to be invalid because people get married without realising it means forever. They do it out of social convenience, etc...” The issue of invalidity needs to be looked into as well.”
<<

>>
“The Orthodox Churches have preserved the liturgy which is so beautiful. We’ve lost sight slightly of the meaning of worship. They worship God and they sing about it; time is immaterial to them. One day we were speaking about Western Europe and they said that “ex Oriente lux” “ex Oriente luxus”, meaning that light comes from the East and consumerism and wealth which do a lot of harm, come from the West. The Orthodox Church preserves the beauty of God being at the centre of everything. When you read Dostoevsky you can really feel the Russian and Oriental spirit. We are deeply in need of this breath of fresh air, this light from the East.”
<<

Do check out the linked article.

The Limits of Home Schooling Rights

Josh Powell wanted to go to school so badly that he pleaded with local officials to let him enroll. He didn’t know exactly what students were learning at Buckingham County High School, in rural central Virginia, but he had the sense that he was missing something fundamental.

By the time he was 16, he had never written an essay. He didn’t know South Africa was a country. He couldn’t solve basic algebra problems.

“There were all these things that are part of this common collective of knowledge that 99 percent of people have that I didn’t have,” Powell said.

Powell was taught at home, his parents using a religious exemption that allows families to entirely opt out of public education, a Virginia law that is unlike any other in the country. That means that not only are their children excused from attending school — as those educated under the state’s home-school statute are — but they also are exempt from all government oversight.

School officials don’t ever ask them for transcripts, test scores or proof of education of any kind: Parents have total control.

Read the rest here.

Outdoor Liturgy on the Feast of St. Vladimir

Part I

Part II

Part of the commemoration of 1025th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus.

Pope Francis Again: He restricts use of the Old Mass by some clergy

This is getting even more attention in parts of the Catholic blogosphere than his comments suggesting a greater tolerance for gay clergy. Trad Catholics have been suspicious of, if not downright hostile to, the new Pope from the announcement of his election. Thus the announcement that the Vatican has issued a directive which among other things, restricts the use of the Old Mass by clergy of a conservative Franciscan order has trad Catholics throwing a fit.

Fr. Z however has some very interesting background that adds a lot of perspective to this situation. Valid and fair points to be sure. But I am still left with the uncomfortable feeling that Summorum Pontificum has been weakened by this. It seems like Rome has used a sledgehammer to kill a fly. And other recent comments by the Pope have not helped to alleviate concerns that he is cool towards those Catholics attached to the historic rites of the Roman Church.

Yahoo Mail

So I was forcibly migrated into the new version of Yahoo Mail, which is so manifestly inferior to the old version that it's driving me crazy. I am seriously looking at the possibility of abandoning it and using another email service. Anyone else have similar complaints or suggestions for a good replacement?

News from Mt. Athos

Two stories, both of which are disturbing.

First schismatic monks (radical old calendarists) violently attacked police who were sent to evict them. And secondly, European leftists are continuing to press (with some success) court cases against the monks for their thousand year tradition of excluding women from the Holy Mountain.

Pope Francis On Gay Clergy:"'Who am I to judge?"

ABOARD THE PAPAL AIRCRAFT — Pope Francis reached out to gays, saying he won’t judge priests for their sexual orientation in a remarkably open and wide-ranging news conference Monday as he returned from his first foreign trip.

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis asked. “We shouldn’t marginalize people for this. They must be integrated into society.”

Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, signed a document in 2005 that said men who had deep-rooted homosexual tendencies should not be priests. Francis was much more conciliatory in his first news conference as pope, saying gay clergymen should be forgiven and their sins forgotten.

The comments did not signal any change in church policy. Catholic teaching still holds that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.” But they indicated a shift in tone under Francis’ young papacy and an emphasis on a church that is more inclusive and merciful rather than critical and disciplinary.

Read the rest here.

Emphasis mine. And the correct word is "doctrine" not "policy." All of which said this is certain to be seen as a retreat from the more traditional Catholic discipline regarding eligibility for Holy Orders recently reiterated by Benedict XVI. I suspect people are flipping out all over the blogosphere.

Momentum Builds Against N.S.A. Surveillance

WASHINGTON — The movement to crack down on government surveillance started with an odd couple from Michigan, Representatives Justin Amash, a young libertarian Republican known even to his friends as “chief wing nut,” and John Conyers Jr., an elder of the liberal left in his 25th House term.

But what began on the political fringes only a week ago has built a momentum that even critics say may be unstoppable, drawing support from Republican and Democratic leaders, attracting moderates in both parties and pulling in some of the most respected voices on national security in the House.

The rapidly shifting politics were reflected clearly in the House on Wednesday, when a plan to defund the National Security Agency’s telephone data collection program fell just seven votes short of passage. Now, after initially signaling that they were comfortable with the scope of the N.S.A.’s collection of Americans’ phone and Internet activities, but not their content, revealed last month by Edward J. Snowden, lawmakers are showing an increasing willingness to use legislation to curb those actions.

Read the rest here.