Take me to your lizard...

Ford and Arthur discuss politics when a robot steps out of a spaceship and asks to be taken to their Lizard.

The robot, said Ford,

"comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, ... "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said Ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

"What?"

"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"

I'm told this is making the bloggie rounds.

I also understand that there is an election expected soon in Yookay. It is, I am also informed, going to be a doddle for Ther Cameron.

Ther Cameron seems to want us to believe that when he takes over from Ther Broon, it will be because we picked him and like him best. He has promised that things will be Different under his thumb than it was under the thumb of Ther Broon. But this promise seems to have nothing to do with Ther Cameron's actual policies which he is also promising will be exactly the same. Because in the land of the Lizards, The Same is the same as Different, which is different from The Same.

I have only one thing to say...

got any gin?

Dear God, how I love the English!!

They just make you believe that everything is going to be all right in the end.

I wish everyone would just come home and stick around for a while. People shouldn't go away so much.

Abolish Everything

A while ago I posted a note on my facebook page of the little life axioms that I have come up with over the years, some of which regular readers will recognise. A lot of them have to do with the Church and the first four kind of sum up my feelings about the Church that have really come into maturity since I have come to Rome:

1. Never trust anything Catholic that is less than 500 years old.

2. Abolish everything.

3. Never join anything.

4. Never found, start, organise or volunteer for anything.

They're survival tips, really.

Among the long and growing list of things that I would abolish entirely if I were ever put in charge are the New Movements.

John Allen, with whom I rarely agree, points out one of the problems with the New Movements: that conservatives in the US think they're the bees knees. New Movements = conservative in the minds the US Church, so there is little discernment about them or the threat they pose.

New Movements, that's like Opus Dei and Regnum Christi, right?

Ah, no.

When Catholics in the States talk about “new movements” in the church, there’s a tendency to think “conservative,” because the few such groups most people have actually heard of – such as Opus Dei (technically a prelature, not a movement), or the Legionaries of Christ (a religious order, with an affiliated lay movement in Regnum Christi) – do tend to lean to the right [John Allen is sometimes dryly witty, but I think his jokes sometimes get missed for being too subtle].

In Europe, however, where the new movements have had their greatest success, their ideological profile is far less uniform. That’s certainly the case in Italy, where perhaps the best-known lay movement is the Community of Sant’Egidio. Known for its efforts in conflict resolution, ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue, and service to the poor, Sant’Egidio is generally seen as standing on the ecclesiastical “center-left.” [And in JohnAllenSpeak, you know that if he is calling something "center-left" it is as pink as the blush on Roger Mahoney's apple cheek.]

...

Founded in February 1968, the Community of Sant’Egidio marked its 42nd anniversary Thursday night with a Mass in the Basilica of San Giovanni Laterano celebrated by Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, president of the Italian bishops’ conference, and attended by a virtual who’s who of Italian political and ecclesiastical life.

St. Egregious is also known to be a big pusher of the usual political causes of the Catholic left.

But apart from the fact that any group of hippies and commies can get together and start calling themselves a New Movement in the Catholic Church and do any amount of harm, the whole concept is a giant capitulation. That we have New Movements at all is because of the failure of the Church.

In the old days, we had parishes and religious orders. There were a few other things, Confraternities, Sodalities, lay organisations like the Knights of Columbus and Legion of Mary and St. Vincent de Paul, but these were all parish-based. A Legion of Mary group was founded within a parish and operated from the parish. It worked within, and crucially, under the supervision of the local Church in the person of the parish priest. And if the Legion ladies started plumping for the local pro-abort politician (or whatever bad thing they had in the '50s) or invited the local feminist nutbar to speak at a presidium meeting, the PP would nix the idea and institute reforms.

The idea that you could or should go off and join a parallel Church and eschew parish life altogether, opting for some weird screwy thing that made up their own liturgical "traditions," was unknown. The Church was the parish and it was under scrutiny.

It is the failure of the parish as the centre of Catholic daily life, of parish devotions like Saturday night Rosary, weekly Benediction, Marian processions, saints days, and even bingo and pot luck suppers and sock-hops, that has allowed the canker of the New Movements to grow.

It used to drive me squirrelly that JPII was such a big fan of The Movements. He praised them, it seemed, regardless of whether they were actually working against the teaching of the Church or not. But every time he talked about how they were the answer to all the problems of the Church, I would cringe. The problems of the Church were made by the hierarchy and clergy who just seemed to wake up one morning and decide they didn't feel like doing their jobs any more.

The New Movements are a symptom, not a cure.

It's Friday: 80s day!

A little blast from the past to go with your fish n' chips:

Brings you back...

Thoughtcrime of the Day: Women should have the vote taken away from them

while there is still a Western Civilization left to save.

Socialism. Where did it come from? We see it eating like an acid into the foundations of our entire civilisation, corroding initiative, personal responsibility, individual and corporate courage, family life... it is everywhere. But how did we end up with it in nearly every western country? We could look at the history of the Great Change in western countries (Britain, Canada, Australia, N. Zealand,) from governments based on individual liberties, Common Law, objective reality...all that manly stuff, to what we have now: the nanny state.

But I think we have it wrong. I think we shouldn't be calling it the Nanny State. I think it should be called the Daddy State.

I was discussing this with a friend the other night and he said something that he knew I already agreed with, that it is the fault of the female vote. When did all this Fabianism get itself hooked into the political structure? When did we start thinking that government should hold your hand and do things for you? Even when you've grown up, left home and got your own apartment, the Daddy State should be coming over and fixing things for you and buying you groceries.

Socialism is a chick thing. As a private characteristic of the feminine mind it is right and good for women to want to be looked after. It's wired into us from our hunter-gatherer days. We need men to do the heavy lifting. It's a good thing for women to have the instinct to want to be looked after by a big strong man who can ward off cave bears and hunt the mammoths.

But feminism has used that natural need, the thing that makes us like and want men and that makes marriage desirable, and turned it against both men and children and ultimately against women. Feminism, you will note, has not actually accomplished anything but misery and destruction. A counterfeit freedom, exchanged for all the things we used to think made our lives real and meaningful.

I mentioned that one of the triumphs of feminism is to teach women that they should not get married to an individual man. Marriage, so the legend goes, is slavery, particularly after the kids come. Feminism reveals its Marxist origins when it says that women should instead marry the State. Men leave, we are told, and leave us holding the child-rearing bag alone. Much better to be married to the state. The state will never abandon you.

Indeed, women who divorce are often encouraged by social workers to either take up welfare as a replacement marriage, or send their ex-men taken through the various government-sponsored wringers like Ontario's Family Responsibility Office. Institutions like the FRO are designed for a two-fold purpose. They enslave the woman to the state, make sure she depends on the FRO and the welfare office for all the defence and support we once expected a husband to provide, and to punish, impoverish and disempower men.

And when did such structures start being put into place? About the same time women got the vote and started taking over the driver's seat in politics. Socialism is woman's politics. Indeed, we call it the nanny state because it tends to infantilise entire societies. But really, the new state that the woman's vote has created should more properly be called the Daddy State.

It comes from and is powered by the natural instinct of women to be looked after. Feminism is doubly insidious because it plays on that need and turns it into terror. I know from my own experience that women have been trained to be terrified of men, of wanting a man, of marriage and most especially of motherhood. It is an ideology of fear and hatred that teaches women their lives will never be secure until they give themselves and their children to the state.

Socialism, the Daddy State, comes from feminist panic attacks. Feminism whispers that men leave, they abandon women and their children, so it is best to replace the entire edifice of family life with the state.

The Daddy State was created by the woman's vote.

Telling it plain

My axiom continues to hold: Abolish Everything.

Especially all national bishops' conferences.


It continues to amaze me, given the ubiquity of computers with internet access in everyone's homes and offices, how credulous most people are about what is actually happening. I met many people in Washington, all of them on the right side, who hadn't a clew how things actually work.

But I see that the gap is being worked on, particularly on the net. Real Catholic TV.com is one of those efforts. What EWTN needs to be. The Truth, without the soft-focus lens.

Purcell Wednesday

I thought yesterday we needed to have a quiet day, so we held Purcell Wednesday over.

An Evening Hymn

Henry Purcell and the Divine Emma...

that should get you through.

Catholicism for the Very Stupid ... Liberals ... the Media

Is it worth it?

I don't know. Really, one has to wonder what the point is of explaining things to people who haven't developed even the most modest intellectual tools. Telling things about religion to secular liberals is like trying to explain to conspiracy theorists that it is simply a lot more likely that the Islams blew up the Trade Centre. But once in a while, the urge comes on...

Andrew Brown writes, in grand old Protestant style about

Papal aggression
Pope Benedict's view on equality and dissent will cause shock and outrage ahead of his visit.

[Now, let's start with an examination of cause and effect. A few years ago the pope gave a speech at Regensberg and there was "shock and outrage" then too. But it was funny that this "shock and outrage" didn't actually start happening until the media started telling people it was happening. So what I'm wondering here is who is causing what effect.]

Just when it seemed that Roman Catholicism was a normal and natural part of the English religious scene,

[just when the English Catholic Church appeared to have completely capitulated to the sexual revolution's zeitgeist in the person of Tony Blair and his old buddy at Westminster ... indeed, I can understand your disappointment.]

Pope Benedict

[a foreigner, a GERMAN for Pete sake!...did we mention he was in the Hitler Youth?]

has to come out with a statement that raises every residual Protestant hackle in the country. Authoritarian,

[actually, we call it "authoritative" since he is, you know, in authority over the English Bishops whom he was addressing]

tactless, [the worst sin there is in let's-not-talk-about-it England]

and without the muscle to back it up, [so it bothers you why, exactly?]

he says that

"In a social milieu that encourages the expression of a variety of opinions on every question that arises, it is important to recognise dissent for what it is, and not to mistake it for a mature contribution to a balanced and wide-ranging debate."

This sounds exactly like the papacy of Ian Paisley's darkest imaginings, totalitarian in its ambitions and utterly dismissive of disagreement.

[Ok, I'll try to use small words for you. We have this thing in Catholicism, it's called "religious doctrine". That means the "teachings" of the Catholic Church. Because Catholicism is a religion, not an ethnicity, you have to do certain things to belong to it. These include believing in the "religious doctrine" or "teachings" of the religion. These are about the nature of God, the relationship of man to God, the nature of the Church, the meaning of life...that sort of thing. Now, if you believe the things the Catholic Church teaches about all that, you can be a Catholic. If you don't, you can't.

This is what we like to call "the logical principle of non-contradiction", which isn't a religious doctrine at all but was believed by some very important and clever English People of the Past like Sherlock Holmes and Aristotle. According to that principle (which isn't religious, just logical) one thing can't be the same as a thing that is opposed to it. I can't both be in the room and not in the room at the same time, for example. Now, applying that principle to our topic, it goes, "You can't be a Catholic who doesn't believe what the Church teaches." That means that Ian Paisley can't call himself a Catholic without everyone laughing at him, which I understand he really hates. Similarly, a Catholic bishop who doesn't uphold and teach what the Catholic Church teaches, is going to be in a bit of hot water with the boss.

I realise this is hard. Try to keep up.]

"It is the truth revealed through scripture and tradition and articulated by the church's magisterium that sets us free." writes Benedict.

[Now, don't panic. This is actually just in the bible. Remember? 'The truth shall set you free'. It's not a hard concept: Catholics think their religion is true. The truth sets you free, therefore the head of the Catholic Church tells a group of Catholic bishops to tell other people that the Catholic religion will set them free.]

Presumably the other things that anyone else might mistake for truth, whether they are Anglicans, Muslims, or post-Christian simply bind us in error.

[There, you see? Now you're getting it! I told you it wasn't hard.]

It is difficult to think of anything which could more effectively enrage and energise the opponents of his visit.

[Actually, I think the opponents of his visit, Stonewall, OutRage, the National Secular Society, are just plain enraged most of the time about everything, but most particularly about the continued existence of the Catholic Church and Pope Benedict XVI. I'm pretty sure they would be able to find things to enrage them without your generous offer of help.]

English atheism descends very clearly from protestantism,

[Now this is one of the most useful things I've ever seen a Guardian writer say. Protestantism is the cause of English atheism. 500 years of the Let's-Not-Talk-About-It religion and we're where we are now.]

and tends to regard Catholicism as the purest and most evil religion.

[Again, v. helpful insight. And one we can work with. It means that among our enemies the basic intellectual tools are not so moribund as we fear. Here is a clear acknowledgement of the existence of objective evil, right and wrong and that one thing cannot be the same as a thing opposed to it. The L. P. of non-C.

One of the things that enrages me is all the smarmy huggykissiness that goes on at English 'ecumenical' gatherings. (Did you know the Anglicans and the Catholics got together for an ecumenical service at the Tower of London a few years ago to "commemorate" the Protestant Reformation?) It is why Rowan Williams is so universally reviled. All those guys trying to pretend to be friends. There's nothing more refreshing than a clear statement of enmity. Now we know where we are, who our enemies are and what is required. The dominant religion in England is atheism, the demon-spawn of apostate Anglicanism. Let's stop pretending to be friends with our mortal enemy.]

Its noisiest current spokesman, Richard Dawkins, once said in Dublin that "Horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.

But at the same time, the Pope's remarks are clearly prompted in part by a sense that the secularist forces are mounting an aggressive campaign that the Catholic church must resist,

[and he has had to do this, noisily and in front of the world's press, directly into the faces of the English bishops because they are the ones who have allowed this situation to metastasize by their determination to continue to pretend there are no enemies to fight. English Catholicism's determination to fit in and be, what was it you said? Oh yes, "a normal and natural part of the English religious scene." The true Church has never and never can be just a part of the landscape.]


as last week's battles over the equality bill in the House of Lords made clear.

So if he wants political support here, why say anything so divisive?

[Because he wants political support. I love it when liberals use the word "divisive" as a weapon against anyone who disagrees with them. It's the final expression of Let's-Not-Talk-About-Itism. Anyone who has an opinion of his own that differs from that of the cool kids will have his glasses broken in the school yard at lunch time. Of course, this could be considered an improvement over the good old days of the Elizabethan Settlement when such "divisiveness" would get you hung drawn and quartered. Or pressed to death.

In England, the great political sin is indeed "divisiveness" (also known as "having an opinion"). This is the reason the two dominant political parties are indistinguishable in their policies. It all comes back to the dominance, for 500 years, of the English-Tea-Party-Religion. The war against the Faith was won by violence and brutal political suppression, but the "Settlement" that eventually ended it in favour of protestantism 200 years later with the ascension of the Hanoverians was, essentially, a permanent state of threat: "We promise to stop killing you Catholics, as long as you never, ever venture out of your ghetto again." I think in the face of this, a little divisiveness is just what the country needs.]

I don't think he meant to be overheard.


[Except for the part where he submitted his talk to the Vatican Information Service for publication two hours after it was delivered. They have rooms in the Vatican with doors, you know. If he didn't want to be overheard, they can manage that in there.]

His talk was clearly addressed only to people who already agree with him – bishops in the first place, and lay Catholics after that. In that context "dissent" has a technical meaning which makes his remarks a little less outrageous.


[Oh come on, don't start getting all objective and factual now. You're just going to confuse your readers who are, after all, only people who already agree with you...]

What he is in fact trying to say is that the bishops should crack down on liberalism within their own church.

["crack down on liberalism" suddenly the delightful image has popped into my head of sober-faced Papal Gentilhuomini, circulating, at a gesture from Msgr. Georg, with silver platters carrying ornate baroque hammers. The bishops each take one in hand and solemnly start thwacking each other's heads.]

"The Catholic community in your country needs to speak with a united voice."


This is important because the Catholic church in Britain has never been as divided, as it is now. Not only is it shrinking in numbers, with an ageing priesthood, but there is now a vociferous right-wing party

[For just one second, I thought you were going to get it. But alas. The "right-wing party" in the Catholic Church in England huh? I wonder who he means. Of course, as a secular liberal, I guess you couldn't understand the incongruity of talking about "right-wing parties" in the context of religion. You would be unlikely to be corrected by any of the bishops in attendance at the pope's talk.]

which blames all its troubles on liberalism, wet bishops, and the lack of Latin masses.

[...lack of Catholicism, in short. Once again, the Catholic religion is not a political party, not an ethnicity, not a country club and one does not acquire it by being born into an ancient recusant family. One is Catholic by believing what the Catholic Church teaches,
and nothing else.]

The division lies roughly between the Catholic Herald, on the right, and the Tablet on the left.

[As Damian Thompson said, "No, the division lies "not between the Pope and the Catholic bishops on one side and (Harriet) Harman on the other. It lies between between the Pope, some bishops and orthodox lay Catholics on one side and, opposing them, Gordon Brown, Ed Balls, Harriet Harman and countless other Government ministers, MPs and quangocrats – plus Labour’s apologists in the Left-leaning Catholic bureaucracy."]

When Pope Benedict announced earlier this year that there would be special arrangements made to welcome disaffected Anglican priests as a body, this looked like a triumph for the right in the internal Catholic struggle. But the Anglicans at whom it was aimed are now dithering at the prospect of actually leaping where they have so long looked longingly. The pope says "I am convinced that, if given a warm and open-hearted welcome, such groups will be a blessing for the entire church" but I don't know many other Catholics very convinced.

His vision is clearly of the Catholic church leading Europe away from both secularism and Islam, and restoring the whole continent – not just this country – to its Catholic roots.

[Yep.]

That is why he has fought so hard against equality legislation. It is difficult to imagine anything that could make this cause less popular than his own speeches.

[Oh, I don't know. Less popular with whom? With people who already hate him and everything he wants to do? Small loss, I'd say.]

The Euro's Rejection of The Real

A few days ago, I had a conversation with a colleague about the difference between the old world and the new. I mean, the world before the 1960s, that I have sometimes simply called The Before and the weird alienating and artificial wonderland we all live in now. I was explaining a theme of mine, the difference between The Real and Fantasy.

Since the 1960s our culture, so goes my brilliant and utterly unique philosophy, Western Civilization, has increasingly addicted itself to Fantasy, and the consequences have been vast and greatly destructive to the human soul. Having lived for a while now in Europe, I am beginning to understand that the addiction to Fantasy is also destructive in the material realm.

At Brussel's Journal, Paul Belien, (another determined rejecter of Fantasy) writes about the threat posed to the Euro by the collapse of the Greek economy:

The EU currency was not introduced because of economic considerations, but because the European Union is pretending to be a genuine state and states are expected to have single national currencies. Hoping to become a powerful political force in its own right, the EU adopted the euro as the common currency of some 327 million Europeans, so that the currency’s economic power would prefigure the political power to be...

The euro appeared to be very strong, with the value of the U.S. dollar, the British pound, and other currencies dramatically falling in comparison to it – one of the causes of Greece’s problems. Tourism is a major economic sector in Greece. For tourists from outside the eurozone, such as the Americans and British, the country became too expensive as a holiday destination. Last year, when the world economic crisis also affected Europe, with a huge drop in the numbers of EU-citizens, such as Italians, that headed for Greece, the Greek economy collapsed and the Greek government was no longer able to pay the country’s public debts.

The problem with basing an economic system on Fantasy is that it tends to create spaces of empty economic air, bubbles, that tend to burst spectacularly. The global economic crisis, I understand, was created much that way: by giving mortgages to people who could not afford houses, at rates below the standard ones for mortgages. All of this was based on an ideological principle, rather than a sound assesment of the borrower's ability to pay back a loan. We have all been fed the Fantasy that we all, somehow, "deserve" a home and that we can all have one if we just wish hard enough. This Fantasy created a bubble and the burst is the crisis we are all now experiencing. The fact that this crisis is merely an attempt by the system to revert back to a foundation in Real things (the idea that mortgage loans should go to people who can afford to pay them), merely the re-filling of the empty space created by the Fantasy, is not often talked about.

The problem with the European Union, as I see it, is that it is a Fantasy. It is based on things that are simply not true. As Belien points out, the people of the two economically strongest EU countries, Germany and the Netherlands, have said they do not want their money (the fact that "tax money" is the money of the people is often forgotten by EU leadership) to go to bail out the Greek economy, even though it might mean the downfall of the Euro:

Polls indicate that 70% of the Germans oppose using their taxes to bail out other countries. Despite the EU propaganda line that EU citizens share a common European national identity, this is simply not true... The German people are not prepared to lift countries such as Greece, Romania, Spain, Portugal and Ireland out of the recession at its own expense.

I imagine they must be asking themselves by this time what have they really gained by joining this new thing, the Euro. What was wrong with their old currencies? Well, to EU ideologues, what was wrong with it was that it was theirs. It was based on a Real thing, a national economy that involved the buying and selling within those countries of goods produced or imported by those countries. The abolition of the nation state that is being attempted in the EU, is based on something unreal.

The "European Project" to unite the nations of Europe under one gigantic supestate umbrella, is based on the Fantasy that there are no significant or meaningful differences between the many different peoples of Europe. That language, commerce, culture, history, religion, genetics, geography mean nothing and can be superseded by a common "European identity". This is false. This European Identity does not exist. What does exist, what is Real, are language, culture, history, religion, genetics and geography and national boundaries and economies based on these things. These are the things that make cultures and nations cohere and contribute significantly to the psychological identity of the people in them. They are also, it seems, the things that make economies run.

Back to my conversation with my colleague the other day. I presented my theory that the problems we are facing in western societies today can all be described as a cultural addiction to Fantasy. He asked me, quite properly, to define Fantasy.

I said that I think Fantasy is the adherence to a cherished personal preference or notion in the face of overwhelming objective evidence. I made this definition carefully, being certain to say it is not the notion or the preference itself that qualifies a thing as a full blown capital F Fantasy, but the adherence to it, the clinging to it against all evidence and the determination to live in it against the various pressures of The Real.

Our most popular modern Fantasies include the idea that "gender" is a malleable "social construct" and that a person is whatever "gender" he or she feels like being that week. Another is the idea that there is nothing inside a pregnant woman but a "blob of tissue". Another is that people can have sex outside marriage and experience only joy and freedom. Another, that there is no significant difference in temperament or social nature between men and women.

The expression, "create your own reality," popular in the 1980s, is the summation of the exchange our society has made of The Real for the three magic beans of our personal subjective preferences, whims, and wishes.

Of your charity...

If you could, please remember today in your prayers Beth Dipippo who passed away today after a long illness. She was a regular reader here and the mother of a great and dear friend of ours.

We're here for you sir, whenever you're ready.

I'm not alone!

I'm finally not the only one who is alive to the cephalopod threat.

The Weekly World News is with us!

Thank God the word is getting out.

Then we went to the Smithsonian...

The place was packed.

It's the thing to do. You go to the March, you stop by the Dubliner,


then you go to visit the Elephant the next day with the kids. Me and the elephant, we go way back.


Mummified ox.



Two down, billions to go...

But you don't come to the Natural History Museum for the ancient stuff or the sea stuff,

you come for the dinosaurs!






Duh!

Some favourite shots from the MfL

Lots of nuns (Nuns proper, according to the strict form of the Nun Taxonomy rules)



Nothin like real nuns to give you the nun-fever.

and some rather well-dressed priests


My favourite Cranky Old Man shot.

these guys are there every year. They are probably the most photographed pro-lifers in America and they get their faces in all the newspapers and magazines every year.


This sign stood out.


This guy should get the prize for "most confused".


They look terrified...


Me go there...

I posted the following note at Fr. Tim's blog where he has kindly linked to my "balanced reporting" post below.

I was a few minutes late on the Hill to catch the front of the March, but was there for quite some while waiting for the end of it to stream past. Teeming thousands...

I was particularly disappointed at the complete absence of counter-protesters. I had especially wanted to get some shots of them and perhaps even an interview, but even though I was v. close to the front of the March when I got to the Supreme Court building, there was nary a pro-abort to be found.

Later we discovered that the standard procedure for the counter-protesters is to show up well before the March begins so there are few or no pro-life people present. By pre-arrangement, the media come to film them and gather quotes and demonstrate that they are really the only ones there. Then they and the media take off, job done, while the teeming thousands are all still milling about on the Mall listening to the speeches.

By the time the teeming thousands of cheery pretty young pro-life girls come streaming past the court house, the pro-abortion counter-protesters (and probably their media buddies) are safely holed up in a pub somewhere near by.

Sometimes some of the media people will go down to the Mall to find the really stand-out cranks in the crowd, the old guys with the really strong southern accents croaking about God and doomsday, and make sure to give them lots of air time.

cf. the Washington Post video coverage, probably available on YouTube. It was a template of this procedure. Almost a caricature of the kind of coverage that has typified the media presence at the March for years.

The net is going to destroy the media

Is destroying it, by exposing its own absurd and absurdly obvious deceptions.They're becoming the butt of everyone's jokes since the scandals that ended whatsis name's career a few years ago.

"More than any other event, the March reveals the truly eye-popping, mind-boggling corruption of the Mainstream Media."

...but I hope my friends will remind me to just say no whenever I get the urge to interview a tearful teenage girl...


yeeee!


I shudder...

(If you feel the need to skip her cringeworthy deeply personal sharing experience, she's on from 5:32 to about 6:09)

That "right to choose" thing really gets around, don't it?

After her acquittal, Gilderale told the Daily Mail that she was unrepentant of having helped her daughter to kill herself. "I have never had a moment's regret," she said. Describing the day of her daughter's death, Gilderale said, "I never thought of snatching the syringe away because I knew that would have made her more determined, and I respected her as an adult with the right to choose."