Obama should have attended the Auschwitz commemoration himself and sent the Jewish treasury secretary to the Saudi king’s funeral.
Month: January 2015
The Way of the Warrior
So, the wailing, the sobbing, the gnashing of teeth from the so-called intellectual and cultural elite over the runaway box-office success of American Sniper is pure music to my ears … all the more so since I started calling for this kind of movie to be made … oh, in the early days of the Daily Brief, back when it was still called Sgt. Stryker. It didn’t take the WWII-era studios to get cracking and crank out all kinds of inspirational military flicks within a year of Pearl Harbor, the disaster in the Philippines and the fall of Wake Island. Of course, those were full-service movie studios, accustomed to cranking out movie-theater fodder on an assembly-line basis. There was, IIRC one attempted TV series, set in an Army unit in Iraq, which was basically recycled Vietnam War-era military memes, and died after a couple of episodes, drowned in a sea of derision from more recent veterans, especially after an episode which featured an enlisted soldier smoking dope. On deployment. In a combat zone. The producers of the show had obviously never heard of Operation Golden Flow. Or maybe they had, and assumed it was something porn-ish.
“Lars Andersen: a new level of archery”
Maybe he should get together with this guy.
(Via Tom Smith.)
UPDATE: See also this post by brother Lynn.
UPDATE 2: Jim MacQuarrie says Andersen is a charlatan. There’s also a good back-and-forth in the comments on his post.
Some Catholic Items
There was much discussion and speculation regarding the recent synod on the family, including a media-driven suggestion that the Catholic Church was going to change long-standing rules pertaining to sexual morality.
George Weigel has a good recent piece which clarifies matters.
The Church’s diminishing appeal to men is a crisis which few have been willing to speak about bluntly. Cardinal Burke (pictured above) is an exception, as this piece shows.
One snippet:
“Sadly, the Church has not effectively reacted to these destructive cultural forces; instead the Church has become too influenced by radical feminism and has largely ignored the serious needs of men.”
The truth will set you free.
Pope Francis, in one of his controversy-provoking interviews, mentioned that one of his favorite spiritual writers is Fr. Louis Lallemant. I found on the Internet, and read, The Spiritual Doctrine of Father Louis Lallement, which is indeed an excellent book. Recommended.
UPDATE:
I meant to include this list of ten really short prayers to say during the day.
A very good list, with good commentary.
History Weekend: Tales of a 19th Century Road Warrior
He was the entrepeneur who came up with the bright idea to bring fine cooking and peerless customer service to the rowdy far West, and do so on a grand scale … and as a sidebar to that feat, also supplied thousands of wives to settlers in an otherwise female-deficient part of the country. He was a Scots-English immigrant from Liverpool named Fred Harvey. He arrived in New York at the age of 17, early in the 1850s. He took up employment washing pots and dishes at a popular restaurant of the day, and within a short time had worked up the kitchen ranks to waiter and then line cook. He only remained there for a year and a half – but in those months he had learned the restaurant business very, very well. He gravitated west, but only as far as St. Louis, where he managed a retail store, married and survived a bout of yellow fever. The restaurant business called to him, though. On the eve of the Civil War, he and a business partner opened a café. Which was successful, right up until the minute that his business partner, whose sympathies were with the Confederacy, took all the profits from the café and went South.