Not!
Speaking of broken promises: “Blah, blah,blah,Ginger. Blah,blah blah.”
Is America getting the message? Is America in the dark?
Monthly Archives: October 2009
Obama’s Hypocritical Transparency
What more need to said?
The Brown Scapular
The Anchoress writes about the World’s Tiniest Hair Shirt, her scapular, which after hanging for years on her bedpost, now hangs about her neck as a “discipline.” I can relate.
Wearing the cloth scapular has been an on and off battle which I believe my scapular is now winning. From the stand point of pure convenience, I argued with Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, that wearing the medal was better and would make this devotion easier for me to undertake. So I wore the medal, but the cloth scapular glared at me from between socks, peeked through the clutter in my dresser drawer, or from wherever I last left it. Mary wasn’t buying my arguments. The Anchoress is right. It is a “discipline” – before it turns to love.
I finally found one I can wear with a minimum of hassle, though each morning, I still wake up with it intertwined with the chain of my Miraculous Medal. I used to grumble. Now I just smile. I think I owe the change in my motus primo primi (firstly first movement) to the efficacy of the scapular. It wraps me in the love of Mary and weaves the movements of her heart with mine. Does that make any sense?
Loosing the World of Face to Face?
How much of your world is face to face? Twitter, Facebook,virtual networking, email; all “thin community”. “Thick community” is eye to eye, face to face and human.
Os Guinness says that four things are important to humans: meaning, belonging, identity (Who am I?) and purpose (What am I here for?) Reminding me of Socrates’ “The unreflected life is not worth living.” Guinness writes:
“We are, quite literally, spread thin across space and time, potentially everywhere and nowhere at once. We thus tend to have, in the words of Gilbert Meilaender, ‘not an individual identity, but fragments of experience; not the narrative of a life that is in some sense a whole, but a decentered flow of experience.’ “
As I peek in on Facebook, I leave feeling as though I don’t know anyone anymore, just shouts and waves as comments and faces rush by. (Twitter’s even worse!) Am I alone in feeling this?
Guinness has an engaging discussion: “Survival of the fastest: Living sanely when life is fired point blank.” on the Veritas Forum .
Art, Plagerism, Fraud?
What were they (the Obamas) thinking when they chose to hang an Alma Thomas art piece in the White House. Perhaps, they were thinking, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.” The problem with this artist is that her creation, “Watusi (Hard Edge), as Michell Malkin says here , “is an almost exact reproduction of a 1953 piece by Henri Matisse titled “L’Escargot:” ”
“Here they are side by side, with “Watusi” rotated and on the left.”
Free Republic posts:
“Is this fraud? If the new piece has been titled “Homage to Collage” or “Matisse in Blue”, I would think the artist wasn’t trying to hide the copying. But I wonder whether anyone realized that the artist copied almost every aspect of a famous work to sell her artwork. Perhaps everyone involved knew that this is a re-colored reprint. If not, it seems to be an embarrassment for the “sophisticates” who failed to spot a copy hiding in plain sight.”
Abdicating or Retaining American Dominance
H/T AllaPundit Quote of the Day
“Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Charles Krauthammer
Charles Krauthammer:
The corollary to unchosen European collapse was unchosen American ascendancy. We–whom Lincoln once called God’s “almost chosen people”–did not save Europe twice in order to emerge from the ashes as the world’s co-hegemon. We went in to defend ourselves and save civilization. Our dominance after World War II was not sought. Nor was the even more remarkable dominance after the Soviet collapse. We are the rarest of geopolitical phenomena: the accidental hegemon and, given our history of isolationism and lack of instinctive imperial ambition, the reluctant hegemon–and now, after a near-decade of strenuous post-9/11 exertion, more reluctant than ever.
Which leads to my second proposition: Facing the choice of whether to maintain our dominance or to gradually, deliberately, willingly, and indeed relievedly give it up, we are currently on a course towards the latter. The current liberal ascendancy in the United States–controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture–has set us on a course for decline. And this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome.
Be Holy! 
