Joy this Christmas in Aleppo

Quote of the Day

There is no proletarian, not even communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time permitted by money – and that it happens without the idealists amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.

– Oswald Spengler The Decline of the West Vol. II, trans. C.F. Atkinson (1928), p.

The President of Syria at Christmas

For Christmas, the Syrian Presided Assad visits the Saidnaya convent.




Full article: https://syrianfreepress.wordpress.com/2016/12/26/christmas-in-syria-syrian-president-and-his-wife-visit-saidnaya-convent/

Festal Cockcrow

Some say, that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
This bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

                                      William Shakespeare

Treachery in Syria again

An excellent report from Moon of Alabama.  Due to the fanaticism of our Defense Secretary, and all the usual suspects, Russia has finally taken the step of excluding the US from any further negotiations in Syria.  Here's why.

Psychopath and war criminal Ash Carter (and yes, he is a genuine psychopath)

How The Military Excluded The White House From International Syria Negotiations

The NYT laments today that international negotiations about the situation in Syria now continue without any U.S. participation: Russia, Iran and Turkey Meet for Syria Talks, Excluding U.S.

Russia, Iran and Turkey met in Moscow on Tuesday to work toward a political accord to end Syria’s nearly six-year war, leaving the United States on the sidelines as the countries sought to drive the conflict in ways that serve their interests.Secretary of State John Kerry was not invited. Nor was the United Nations consulted.
With pro-government forces having made critical gains on the ground, ...

(Note: The last sentence originally and correctly said "pro-Syrian forces ...", not "pro-government forces ...". It was altered after I noted the "pro-Syrian" change of tone on Twitter.)

Russia kicked the U.S. out of any further talks about Syria after the U.S. blew a deal which, after long delaying negotiations, Kerry had made with the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov.

In a recent interview Kerry admits that it was opposition from the Pentagon, not Moscow or Damascus, that had blown up his agreement with Russia over Syria:

More recently, he has clashed inside the administration with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. Kerry negotiated an agreement with Russia to share joint military operations, but it fell apart.“Unfortunately we had divisions within our own ranks that made the implementation of that extremely hard to accomplish,” Kerry said. “But I believe in it, I think it can work, could have worked."

Kerry's agreement with Russia did not just "fell apart". The Pentagon actively sabotaged it by intentionally and perfidiously attacking the Syrian army.

The deal with Russia was made in June. It envisioned coordinated attacks on ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria, both designated as terrorist under two UN Security Council resolutions which call upon all countries to eradicate them. For months the U.S. failed to separate its CIA and Pentagon trained, supplied and paid "moderate rebel" from al-Qaeda, thereby blocking the deal. In September the deal was modified and finally ready to be implemented.

The Pentagon still did not like it but had been overruled by the White House:

The agreement that Secretary of State John Kerry announced with Russia to reduce the killing in Syria has widened an increasingly public divide between Mr. Kerry and Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, who has deep reservations about the plan for American and Russian forces to jointly target terrorist groups.

Mr. Carter was among the administration officials who pushed against the agreement on a conference call with the White House last week as Mr. Kerry, joining the argument from a secure facility in Geneva, grew increasingly frustrated. Although President Obama ultimately approved the effort after hours of debate, Pentagon officials remain unconvinced.
...
“I’m not saying yes or no,” Lt. Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, commander of the United States Air Forces Central Command, told reporters on a video conference call. “It would be premature to say that we’re going to jump right into it.”

The CentCom general threatened to not follow the decision his Commander of Chief had taken. He would not have done so without cover from Defense Secretary Ash Carter.

Three days later U.S. CentCom Air Forces and allied Danish airplanes attack Syrian army positions near the ISIS besieged city of Deir Ezzor. During 37 air attacks within one hour between 62 and 100 Syrian Arab Army soldiers were killed and many more wounded. They had held a defensive positions on hills overlooking the Deir Ezzor airport. Shortly after the U.S. air attack ISIS forces stormed the hills and have held them since. Resupply for the 100,000+  civilians and soldiers in Deir Ezzor is now endangered if not impossible. The CentCom attack enabled ISIS to eventually conquer Deir Ezzor and to establish the envisioned "Salafist principality" in east Syria.

During the U.S. attack the Syrian-Russian operations center had immediately tried to contact the designated coordination officer at U.S. Central Command to stop the attack. But that officer could not be reached and those at CentCom taking the Russian calls just hanged up:

Read the whole article.

James Larson: Christ's Advent blasphemed

Among the several hobby horses this writer has been riding since beginning this blog five years ago is the notion that the present malaise we find ourselves in did not begin recently.  Nor did it begin with Vatican II.  The disease was well and truly entrenched in the Church since at least the middle of the 19th century.  How do we know this?  We know it because of the actions of Pius IX and the actions taken by Pope St Pius X against Modernism.  If we forget this, and concentrate only on the daily outrages coming daily from the hierarchy of the Church, we fail to completely grasp the acuteness of the problem.

A recent adage has it that 'garbage in, garbage out", applies to computers.  But we can apply that also to young minds.  In the article below Mr Larson studies the "garbage in" of a young Joseph Ratzinger who learned from such flingers of refuse as Teilhard and Rahner, and the "garbage out" of his mature years, in which he applied what he learned from the bad sources who taught him. Before I am taken to task for this seemingly crude description of the thinking of Benedict I would ask that the reader consider carefully the article which follows.  There is always, of course, the comments section, designed to engage in fruitful discussion.

I will add that Ratzinger does enjoy  exotic restructurings of simple words in order to dazzle his readers, a trait commonly found in those who practice the art of ambiguity.  "Complexification" is a favorite !  Or this gem of obfuscation directed at us simple folk:  “From here it is possible to understand the final aim of the whole movement as Teilhard sees it: the cosmic drift moves ‘in the direction of an incredible ‘mono-molecular’ state, so to speak, in which…each ego is destined to attain in climax in a sort of mysterious superego’.”  [Gosh !]  Or this amazing statement which at least has the benefit of clarity:  Revelation now appeared no longer simply as a communication of truths to the intellect but as a historical action of God in which truth becomes gradually unveiled.   Indeed.  Our current Pope has been "unveiling" quite a bit of revelation lately.  I shudder to think what the next Pope will unveil. [After reading the 25 quotes from Father, Cardinal and Pope Ratzinger which are in the following article I recommend two aspirin and a glass of water.]

Bearing all that in mind I offer our readers an evaluation by James Larson of this malaise as it concerns a number of recent pontificates.  It begins thusly:

Truth Shall Be Cast Down on the Ground
Christ’s Advent Blasphemed

“And strength was given him [the Antichrist] against the continual sacrifice, because of sins: and truth shall be cast down on the ground….” (Dan 8: 12)

It is extremely difficult to convince people of the depth of the crisis which we now face.

It has been standard fare among orthodox and traditional Catholics to see Pope Francis as some sort of singular aberration, and to hunger for a return to what is thought to have been the relative Catholic “sanity” of a papacy such as that of Pope Benedict XVI. As a consequence of this position, it is also a prevalent attitude that it is now just a matter of “getting beyond” Francis in order for things to return to some sort of normal.

This is a delusion. The “excesses” of Pope Francis are the fruition of a philosophy and theology which has been long in preparation, has poisoned the thinking of virtually all members of the Catholic hierarchy, and which found its most succinct and influential formulations in the thought of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI. There can be no “return” to Catholic sanity until the sources of these errors are confronted, engaged in battle, and defeated.

I have therefore compiled below a series of quotations from Joseph Ratzinger’s works. I request that the reader meditate on these passages, ask themselves whether there is any truly Catholic context in which they could be considered acceptable, and then go on to read my articles in which these passages (and many others) are more closely examined. At the end of these quotations I have also linked the most relevant articles.

Before listing these quotations I also offer, in the following two paragraphs, a general synopsis of the depths of this crisis:

The “new” theology, in all its varieties, must be seen as being primarily due to the eviscerating effect of reductive science upon the minds and hearts of Catholic theologians and philosophers. It begins with the denial of substantial being as constituting the root concept of all philosophy and theology. Since all physical reality is now wrongly thought to be entirely reducible to atoms (and quantum mechanics), and since such phenomena are constantly subject to change, then all of created reality has come to be viewed in terms of the constantly changing and evolving relationships between these phenomena.

As a result of such reductive science, every concept involving a “fixed” substantial nature has been cast aside, and is replaced by the concept of ongoing and ever-changing relationships. Evolution thus becomes the necessary mistress of all human thought and spirituality. Under the influence of such thinking, it is impossible to believe in an original nature of man created in sanctifying grace; there can be no Fall from such a nature through original sin; there can be no restoration of such a nature to innocence through sanctifying grace (thus destroying the traditional doctrine concerning Baptism); and there can be no real distinction between mortal and venial sin. There can therefore be no judgment in regard to the present state of the soul of any individual person (or whether he or she is in the proper state of grace to receive Holy Communion), but only an ongoing pastoral approach of universal mercy. Also, since there is no such thing as fixed substance, and certainly no ontological distinction between substance and accidents, there can be no change of the entire substance of bread into the substance of Christ’s Body, or the entire substance of wine into the substance of His Blood. Finally, God Himself must also be seen entirely in terms of relationship, as also must His Revelation to man. Thus, all of Catholic doctrine and dogma is destroyed of any absoluteness or permanence, and must also be seen as evolving phenomena. In other words, the entire Catholic Faith is substantially destroyed.

The following 25 quotations are placed in a somewhat loose order, which will hopefully help penetrate to the interconnectedness of the heresies enumerated above. I have numbered them for easy referencing. I remind the reader again that they are all from the works or statements of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI.

Read the whole article.

Another Sarajevo? Russian diplomat assassinated

Not good.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_TURKEY_RUSSIAN_AMBASSADOR?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-12-19-11-44-24

https://www.rt.com/news/370782-attack-russian-ambassador-ankara/

https://www.rt.com/on-air/

Lullay My Liking

A Medieval carol, from England and Wales, a song sung by the Virgin Mary to her newborn Child.

Serious words to ponder

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”


― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn