Suh- WEET!!

From the Open Europe Press Summary:

The salary of British MEPs rises next month from £63,000 to £80,500, and that in total MEPs can receive expenses and allowances of £363,000 a year including a £261 daily subsistence allowance for simply turning up at work and £45,648 in general office expenses, even if they don't have an office in their home constituency.

Where. Do. I. Sign. UP?!!

This working stuff is obviously for chumps.

Moving house

This weekend I'm shifting self, stuff and pussy cat across town to a smaller but more permanent abode (year-round leases are deuced difficult to come by in Santa Mar). So posts will be rather thin on the ground over the next few days.

You may talk quietly amongst yourselves, but if I hear any racket, I'm going to be right outside that door.

Over 45,000 years of marriage at Westminster

Is anyone going to this? If so, contact me will you?

Married for over 45,000 years!

Nearly 600 couples with a combined total of 45,584 years of marriage will be celebrating their wedding anniversaries at a Mass in Westminster Cathedral on Saturday 30th May 2009 at 11am. The Mass will be celebrated by the recently installed Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols.

Would you buy a used religion from this man?

Tony Blair's popularity as a religious guru seems to be waning.



PS: for those who are too young to remember, the line "Would you buy a used car from this man?" was the slogan pointed at "Tricky Dick" Nixon.

Obama and Cherie

This is what struck me, what shocked me actually, about the ever-so open-minded professors (and students) at the Angelicum who were so eager to praise the speech of Cherie Blair last year. The incredible gullibility of these people, who lapped up her oh so articulate tosh and cried foul when we pointed out that they had been played. It was the obviously powerful desire to be seen to like her and accept her and take what she said on its face. To be seen, perhaps, to be as enlightened and sophisticated and non-judgmental as she. To be one of the cool kids at last.

And these people were not stupid, nor were they pro-aborts or even "liberals". Many of them, the ones I spoke to, claimed plausibly enough to be serious-minded Catholics who are enthusiastically supportive of the Church's defence of human life. But there they were, mad as hornets that anyone had dared to say anything against Cherie.

This is the power of the leftist political machinery in having created for themselves this aura, this haze, of reasonableness, of warmth, of being the only really, truly, caring people around. It is the power of the Voice of Saruman, to soothe and to cloud the mind with warm, pink, fuzzy comfort so that anyone who dares to gainsay it is instantly rejected.

"When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell."

But Novak says that is the whole point of the (frankly completely transparent) rhetoric about "reducing the number of abortions" that has so often come lately from US pro-abort politicians.

The only people the president disarms with these words are those who are convinced that abortion is the deliberate taking of the life of a unique human individual (with its own unique DNA, distinct from that of its mother and its father). It is they and only they whom the president now summons to listen to the other side, to compromise, to pull clouds of uncertainty over their previous convictions, and to begin to waver. Obama is disarming the pro-life side, and only the pro-life side. The poor young students of Notre Dame, and their inexcusably uncritical and politically unsophisticated professors, are undone by a surface appeal to reason and civility, which is actually a call for their unconditional surrender.

Yeah, so? What's your point?

Just doing a quick little thing about Michael Novak's piece on the incredible bluders of L'Osservatore Romano (and I use the word "blunder" here in an attempt to be charitable).

He writes,

For the pro-abortion forces here [in the US], “reason” and “right” and “sensible” mean supporting abortion. Anything else is unreasonable, against women’s rights, and lacking in all sense. One highly placed appointee of President Obama even compares the condition of a woman who wants an abortion to that of the slave woman in America prior to 1863 — caught in a kind of mandatory, unwilling servitude.

But I hasten to point out that this position is widely accepted in the Catholic left as well. It is, in fact, the foundation of feminism as this pernicious social disease was first described by Friedrich Engels.

He describes the "Monogamous Family" that we first find

"in all its severity among the Greeks. While the position of the goddesses in their mythology, as Marx points out, brings before us an earlier period when the position of women was freer and more respected, in the heroic age we find the woman already being humiliated by the domination of the man...

...

Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other; it announces a struggle between the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous prehistoric period.

Marriage and motherhood is regarded by the feminists (Marxists) as a form of slavery. This obviously led to the idea that the only way to be free was to be free of children. To have the right, as did the Greek and Roman fathers of old, to kill them as they would rid themselves of unwanted property. Women have to have the right to kill or they are back to being slaves to men and to the degrading and dehumanizing drudgery of motherhood.

This was drilled into me from my earliest age, as the child of a feminist of the 1970s. As with most of my contemporaries on the West Coast, my mother, perhaps little guessing what sort of logical feedback loop it might create, instilled in me the notion that the worst form of slavery, one that inevitably trapped a woman into a lifetime of misery and poverty, is to be a mother.

It is simply taken as read on the left. And the suggestion that motherhood is a good thing for women is looked upon as a piece of lunacy. Or as the work of propagandists for the oppressors.

Legal abortion, therefore, is simply part and parcel of the success of the feminist movement. Emancipation means legally sanctioned murder as a "human right".

Why is anyone surprised by this?

Vibrant

A Polish student takes a few night time snaps of Britain's "vibrant" night life.

"Let's not deny them the right

to freely copulate".

Spain's prime minister defended Tuesday one of the most controversial parts of his proposed abortion law reform which would allow 16-year-olds to terminate their pregnancies without parental consent.

"Let's take into account what the experts say, the experience of other European countries and let's have confidence in our youth, in our women," Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said when asked about the measure.

"Let's not deny them the right to freely decide, let's not intervene in the free and private decision of a woman, who is the one who has to take on the responsibility of a pregnancy during her entire life," he added.

You can't kill people to solve your problems

Such a difficult concept, only a 12 year-old without a PhD can understand it.



(But I'm afraid I've always found there to be something somewhat distasteful about precocious children speaking this way in public. Always loathed Shirley Temple too).

Got cats?

I'll leave you with one more: