Have you seen Mockingjay 2?

I did, and contrary to some reviewers who gave it a pass, I loved it. Yes, some moments were rather silly, and others were utterly predictable (I find most movies are; it annoys my kids to death when I predict things as we're watching films, but then I am old, and they don't realize how cliched mainstream filmmaking has become). Anyhoo, if you message me on Facebook or email we, we can discuss why I liked this movie, but I won't discuss it publicly because… spoilers. But I'll give you a hint: read this Idlepost by David Warren, and see if you can find the connection. Let's just say this: I feel vindicated.
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Want to understand the Middle East?

Graph representing historical alliances, wars and grudges in  Middle East.

Good luck. A friend recently told me that it is nearly impossible for most westerners to comprehend what's going on "over there." And after reading these two pieces (by Ben Shapiro and David Warren), I believe him. God help us. Going to pray for Our Lady's intercession with my olive-wood rosary from Bethlehem, and then make some chocolate chip cookies. 

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"Now we have 'airheads'"

Lib-lefty politician: Vote for me and you will get lots of free stuff!
Electorate: Yay! 

I feel so vindicated (and affirmed) when I discover I've been thinking the same thoughts as a smart person. Of course, it's a tragic thing to feel affirmed when cultural and civilizational collaspe is in the offing. I really hadn't planned to post about the election, because it's too depressing. (Like Mrs. Beazly, I'm planning not to watch the news for the next decade or so.)

However, if you need our new Prime Minister (T-who-cannot-be-named) summed up, look no further: David Warren's "The Triumph of Drivel." The money quotes are just too numerous, so you should read the whole thing.

Much as I despised his Liberal predecessors, they also knew what a budget was, and could discern differences between large and small numbers. [...]

In addition to snowboarding, his experience includes nightclub bouncer, and teaching high school in Vancouver. To many (me for instance), his father was a devil in human flesh, his mother demonstrably insane, yet the lad was not really exposed to politics until it came into his head, or into the heads of Liberal Party organizers, that thanks to his family connexion, he could probably get elected to Parliament, in Montreal. This happened in 2007; he now has approximately eight years of bewilderment under his belt. [...]

His sincerity shines when it comes to a small range of policy enthusiasms, such as the legalization of marijuana and brothels, and he is visibly convinced that peace is much nicer than war. [...]

So how did this happen? Mr. Warren explains:

As I’ve mentioned before, the overwhelming majority of the general, voting population have been morally and intellectually debilitated — “idiotized” is my preferred term — by post-modern media and education, and by spiritual neglect within 

Amen, brother. 

Hands-down, Theo Caldwell wins the prize for the most engaging epithet: "ridiculous ballerina," but when he's not being funny, he too is struggling to wrap his head around how the majority of Canadians can be so utterly clueless as to elect someone even more shallow and incompetent than Barack Obama (audio for this vid not great, unfortunately).

At this point, I really am unsure whether to go gently into that horrific night, or to rage rage against the dying of the light. The latter is so exhausting. Perhaps there is a third way. If I wish to retain my sanity and my hope, I must continue to believe it. 

Laura Rosen Cohen's advice (snippet below) is remarkably similar to that of Bl. Mother Teresa: "Deal with what is at your feet." 

Thus, my post-election advice:
In my view, the important thing in times like these is to focus on the micro. Let the Liberals expend their hot air (and your money of course) on the Big Picture Save the Planet stuff and let them really knock themselves out. Focus on the small stuff because the small stuff is really the big stuff. 
Keep raising your children well. Speak up for what you believe in. Take on the battles that you can, (not what you can't). Live well, tell jokes. Tell your family and your friends you love them. Sing. Dance. Paint. Pray. Give thanks. Give hugs.
It's always darkest before the dawn

Amen, sister. 

Time to shower and get ready to take the kids to music lessons. Jesus is our saviour, but Chopin, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven certainly help.

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I like it when I accidentally say the same thing as a smart person

In fact, I feel downright affirmed. 

I eat donuts and do not feel guilty.

I eat quinoa salad and do not feel righteous. 
I generally dislike the saying, but in this case, it applies: "It's all good"

Mr. Warren weighs in (pardon the usage) on the evils of the diet and food-research/health industries:

What [researchers] have done is far more evil than this, however: for they have been exploiting the human propensity to guilt, which serves an irreplaceable purpose in the moral order. Compunction about sin and wrongdoing is distracted to meaningless dietary issues. The success of the nannying public health authorities has helped the principalities and powers to accomplish a complete moral inversion — in which abstinence and fasting to a spiritual end is now dismissed as silly, yet dieting for health is done with insufferably morbid gravity. We have, as a consequence, a society of obsessive dieters, deluded fitness fanatics, and low-calorie muffin eaters, who are utterly shameless in committing crimes contra naturam: that Culture of Death which Saint John-Paul identified with such harrowing accuracy.

Mr. Warren describes most "health" related research as "bullsh**", and I am inclined to agree. In the last few years, I've had two health scares, neither of which (thankfully) turned out to be anything serious, but in both cases, I was advised to alter my diet. What made life more difficult was not adjusting to eating (or avoiding) certain stuff, but rather constantly reading conflicting and contradictory information about various foods.

 It would seem that grocery science isn't any more settled than climate science. I more or less gave up worrying about food, and wrote about it for The Record. Mind you, I am not judging people on special diets; eat what you choose, but for pity's sake, don't make it a religion.
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What's great about mid-January

Is, quite simply, that the month is HALF OVER. 

 Alas, this sentiment sums up the entirety of Advent and Christmas 2013 for me. Low points included:

• sickness. We've had colds, flus, coughs, sore throats etc. non stop since Dec. 16. 
• bad weather (WAY too many consecutive days of wind chill temps in the -30 to -40 C range) 
• due to both of the above: numerous missed events and/or cancellations: recitals, music lessons, meetings, church services, appointments
• my kitchen being dismantled until Dec. 21 (try to guess how much baking or other culinary prep I accomplished)
• extended-family issues: nuff said 
• being stuck in bed with stomach flu on Christmas Day (we missed a multi-family celebration, and the turkey was elsewhere, so my husband and kids literally had to scrounge the larder for Christmas dinner)
• getting in on the local epidemic: rushing a daughter to the ER with breathing difficulties on New Year's Day (eventually she tested positive for H1N1, the influenza strain that has been killing people in my part of the country. She is fine now.)
• just not enough time: I think Advent was only ten or eleven days long this year. At any rate, I have never been so poorly prepared (in every way imaginable) for Christmas in all my life.

But make no mistake, there were many highlights too, for which one must be very grateful. These were: 

• having my daughter NOT die (or even have to be hospitalized) for H1N1 flu (thanks, EMTs, Doc, and ER nurses, lab techs, all willing to work holidays!)
• spending wonderful time with visitors from afar, some of whom I have not seen in years, and some of whom I had never met in person (pre-school nephew and nieces from Oz)
• the turkey turned out well (I cooked one New Year's Day to make up for my family missing the Christmas Day bird)
• finding the source of my chronic back/neck pain and discovering it is CONQUERABLE (thanks, physiotherapy profession and referring physician! You guys and gals know your stuff!)
• my kitchen ceiling is FINISHED (long story, and probably interesting only to me and other reno-nuts)
• a fancy new coffeemaker (best hostess gift ever, from Oz relatives)
• getting addicted to Duck Dynasty (blame credit for this too is laid at the feet of those zany Australians)
• anything containing alcohol
• Salvation re: the Incarnation

For your perusal and edification, David Warren's dissection  of the January Blues. The Reason for the Season is the reason for all seasons, human existence, and eternity. Would that we could hearken.
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God bless David Warren

This is one of the most beautiful things I have read in a very long time. I'm not going to quote from it, because I want you to go read it for yourself. You will feel blessed if you do.
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Beautiful

The one and only David Warren, who waxes eloquently on a young Korean singer, Little Dorrit and eternity. I am not intelligent enough to understand 90% of what he writes, but this is one of those 10% moments, and I am grateful for it. 

Salvation comes not through “programmes” but through persons: a teacher, a food vendor, a nightclub singer.

If you plan to read Mr. Warren's essay, you might as well watch this first, so you know who he's talking about. 

The devil is in the bureaucracy.

Which should surprise absolutely no one. Bureaucracy is evil. David Warren nails it, as usual.

This has become, to my mind, the key practical issue for the Church to face in her immediate future.

And other thoughts on the pope's resignation. Read. It. All.
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It happens about as often as a total eclipse of the sun

But it appears that David Warren and I expressed some of the same sentiments at roughly the same time. (With profuse apologies to Mr. Warren). Here is my post-Christmas column from The Record. I'm not sure when it appeared in the print edition, but it was posted online Jan. 14. And here is an excerpt from Mr. Warren's Epiphany blog post. 

But just as the “spirit of Christmas” is supposed to be remembered throughout the year, the spirit of the Mass goes forth into the world. We do not cease to be Christians when we walk out of church. We have been restored, but this restoration is carried with & within us.

However, he goes on to rant wax eloquently on the Liturgical Year, while I merely mock Elvis. (I never pretended that he and I were intellectual equals--Mr. Warren, not Elvis.) 

Parcelled with this convulsion, the knocking around of the most solemn Holy feasts, which once fell where they fell. It was unthinkable to transfer them, say to the nearest Sunday, the way a provincial government transfers bank holidays to the next or nearest Monday — for the sake of a notion of convenience that is aggressively worldly.
Twelve days from Christmas is twelve days from Christmas; one cannot muck with such a plain thing. I, at least, cannot get my little mind around, “The Epiphany of the Lord is celebrated on 6 January, unless, where it is not observed as a Holy day of obligation, it has been assigned to the Sunday occurring between 2 and 8 January.” I pray to God that I will never become so smart that I will be able to understand this instruction.

It is also the only instance when I have been able to read the phrase "liturgical dance" without retching.
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Happy Thanksgiving

Whether or not you're Canadian. And remember to be especially thankful for the Christian victory at the Battle of Lepanto, and anniversary of which was yesterday, Oct. 7.

David Warren: 
Were it not for Lepanto, it is doubtful that Canadians would be celebrating Thanksgiving this weekend; for the unambiguously Christian conceptions of life & liberty, that were carried to our shores, might not have survived in Europe.
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woo hoo! He's baaaaack

David Warren has a new blog.  (Time for me to start exercising those brain cells once again.)

Our ambition is to try a blog entitled “Essays in Idleness”; which hyperlinks only sparingly, & always with caution to the MSM; which does not celebrate the incursion of “events”; which may sneer at “breaking news,” ignore the polls, & give no advice in an election; which makes statements that could actually be contradicted, but only by someone who knows something; which rebels against the oppression of “democracy”; then flees from its howling mobs.

h/t BCF
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While I was on vacation

David Warren left the Ottawa Citizen. It's their loss. I look forward to his future endeavours.

I may well write for the paper in future, but not three times a week on staff. So far as I have any gifts at all, I will apply them in what remains of my life to argue for the Catholic religion, and defend nobility in every humane form, according to my faith and conscience. But I may no longer belong in "mainstream media;" may never have belonged, and must be on my way.  .

As we approach the Octave of Easter

David Warren, not just a national (Canadian) treasure, but a treasure of the Church:

Take for instance that "separation of church and state." It is hardly an article of the Canadian constitution, yet it is often invoked as if it were. It is taken for granted that no church has the right to intervene in state affairs, not only by the agnostic types, but by almost every Christian I know (and I have met a fair number).

But what of the contrary? It is now also taken for granted that the state has the right to intervene in church affairs, in comprehensive detail. The paperwork alone hamstrings all religious charitable activities, and increasingly the state, out of its bottomless arrogance, acts to legislate which religious doctrines may be taught, which must be ignored, and which must be openly contradicted in, for instance, religious schools.

[...]

All my life I have been haunted by that memory, and my child's knowledge of that plum as "a gift," as if given before all worlds. But to what can I refer except, a particular colour, which later I discerned in a twilight sky, and later still from an illuminator's brush, in a medieval codex.

This is a knowledge that can be banned, suppressed, punished, persecuted, hauled before Pilate by the functionaries of the state, or some self-appointed prosecuting authority. Scourged, mocked, and humiliated, by men "who know not what they do." Through 20 centuries, Christ has been crucified again and again.

And He is with us still.

Christ is Risen. And we get to keep saying it for 50 full days.
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Oh, if only we could

David Warren asks us to "Disconnect." But it would, indeed, take an asteroid.

Luddite one might aspire to be, but, as George Grant, the great prophet against technology, once said to me (while trying to explain the Volvo in his driveway), "Modern life requires a sense of irony." You could, in fact, retreat to a monastery, but not everyone has a calling for that, and, besides, I've noticed that when I email monks, I get very quick responses. That suggests technology has made serious inroads into the sanctuaries of silence, too.

Steyn on Afghanistan

They can breach our security, but we cannot breach theirs – the vast impregnable psychological fortress in which what passes for the Pushtun mind resides. Someone accidentally burned a Quran your pals had already defaced with covert messages? Die, die, foreigners! The president of the United States issues a groveling and characteristically clueless apology for it? Die, die, foreigners! The American friend who has trained you and hired you and paid you has arrived for a meeting? Die, die, foreigners! And those are the Afghans who know us best. To the upcountry village headmen, the fellows descending from the skies in full body armor are as alien as were the space invaders to Americans in the film "Independence Day."
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Before the election in 2010, the New York Post carried a picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in identical top-to-toe bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked on Sept. 10, 2001. We came, we saw, we left no trace. America's longest war will leave nothing behind.

What more can I add? What are we doing there? 

Also, read David Warren's view. 

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We rise again from ashes

But first we must acknowledge the ashes. David Warren. 

While we are used to getting the upbeat tone from church leaders in all congregations - that sick-making, public-relations blather I find especially irritating in sellout bishops - the Christian teaching begins instead in that assertion of Christ's. The truth may be extremely uncomfortable, and from many angles desolating, but it must be faced. We cannot build our lives or our churches upon pathetic lies. Read it all.

Pushing it

I've been catching up on David Warren's latest articles. Here he is on the HHS mandate:

And now, the trap they set for their reactionary opponents has sprung on their progressive selves. Obama can't back off without triggering outrage in his own feminist constituency. We saw what they did to the Komen Foundation the other day, when that breast cancer outfit tried to withdraw its Planned Parenthood contributions. Democrats dare not go there. Instead, he is trying to self-extricate with an administrative trick - a game of cups and marbles, which lets religious employers play Pontius Pilate, and wash their hands of direct responsibility, while their employees get just the same as if they'd paid. This may or may not bamboozle anyone. The very proposal, to get around a moral objection with an administrative expedient, is symptomatic of moral idiocy. To the sincere conscientious objector, it displays only a fundamental insincerity: another attempt at entrapment. It further stokes a fire which has already inspired explicit calls for civil disobedience, and driven Obama's least Catholic opponents to declare, "We are all Catholics now."

Some advice for the Wall Street protesters

From David Warren:

This is the unanswerable argument to the Left of all ages: Instead of trying to coerce someone else to do what you think is right and just (and every Left policy I have ever seen involved coercion of the non-Left), put your money where your mouth is. Go "liberate" cash by legitimate means (within the laws), then set an example in how you spend it.
Give, until it hurts, to the most needful. And you can volunteer your free time into the bargain, for in my experience, you cannot begin to know who is most needful, until you have rolled up your pant legs and waded into action.
Give the money instead to almost any "progressive" charity, and it will never get there. This is because, quite apart from corruption (which always exists when free money is floating about), the progressive idea of charity is agitprop. That is: give us your money, and we will lobby the government on behalf of the poor destitute victims whose plight is depicted so dramatically in our pamphlets.

[...] 

 But now comes the disappointment. For I am recommending a course that gives none of the rewards craved by the cavorting young ego. There is none of the euphoria of street demonstrations, none of the easy applause (and easy sex) that comes from boldly posturing as one of the "good people," fighting against the "bad people."

The rewards for doing something, where it counts, are different in kind; and they do not come easily.
I look at all the faces of the young, made up as zombies, clutching that fake dollar-store money, and strutting down Wall Street. Most, obviously, college-educated: the final products of an educational system that imparts little knowledge but a lot of self-esteem. I look at the sheer smugness in those faces, of people who have never experienced real hardship. All demanding that someone else do something.

Do read it all.
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The Brilliant Mr. W.

Sums up not just the hapless PCs who lost the recent election in Ontario, but our national ruling "conservative" class as well. (And, for that matter, not a few Republican hopefuls south of the border...)

And the term I wish to advance for this purpose, from the urban dictionary, is "self-servatives." That is, politicos who are only interested in taxes and debt, and the most superficial questions of law and order.
Who, to succeed, think their task is to convince a plurality of the electorate that they will contrive to leave more money in their pockets, and perhaps put more thieves and muggers in jail.
Who consciously avoid "emotional" issues. Who, if they have any private opinion on questions like abortion, or public pornography, or eugenic technology, or euthanasia, or same-sexism, or speech codes, or dangerous immigration, or the integrity of families, or religious faith and public prayer, are careful to keep it to themselves.
Who talk in carefully-rehearsed sound bites. Who tweet and Facebook 20 hours a day.
Who compete with gliberals in celebrating our fake diversity, and flattering as many special interests as they can. Who flaunt their own pathetic claims to multiculturehood.
Who defend today, what they opposed yesterday, when it was still possible to oppose easily; and who adapt themselves to changing circumstances in the manner of the Vicar of Bray.

Ontario votes this Thursday.

If only this column could be posted at every polling station.

McGuinty's insidious legacy