Brighter than the sun is to me

At least that's what I think she's saying....



Angelic. No matter what she's talking about.

Catholic Rap

My 8-year-old, Joe, has a new ambition: to become a rap artist. He did say that he'd do Catholic rap, and mentioned that I thought I had seen that someone had rapped the Nicene Creed once. Immediately my three oldest began to rap different prayers, the Glory Be and the Our Father. This was at dinner time to I had to make a new rule: No rapping at the dinner table.

Next I began checking out some Catholic rap, so I can be, you know, "with it, yo". I thought this one was pretty good:



This one was a little less to my liking due to the cheaper production, but still seemed like a good rap.



So now I'm covered and next week Joe will probably be back to wanting to be a video game designer.

US Textbooks: Muslims Discovered America

Stealth jihad is happening, especially at universities. Georgetown is mentioned; big surprise.

View From Your Parish

I got an idea from an anonymous commenter last week who suggested—in jest I believe—the creation of some kind of site called View From Your Parish which would feature pictures of potato salads from church dinners and whatnot. I thought, well, that's a good idea, but maybe we should feature something a little more uplifting than potato salad. Unless, of course, the potato salad has been blessed on Holy Saturday and has some sort of halo. Otherwise what's the point of looking at potato salad if you can't have a taste.

So along comes Pinterest and I get sucked in with loads of other folks. Here's my page for View From Your Parish and I started with one picture I snapped today in St. Patrick on Bridge Street in Cleveland.

Source: Uploaded by user via Paul on Pinterest

At this point you have to receive and invite to post (pin) things on Pinterest. Anyone here who wants to contribute to my View From Your Parish page, just let me know and I'll invite you via email.

If you don't want to join Pinterest you can always pray for us sore pinners. (Get it?)

I guess I'm not just a pinner. I'm a punner.

They could have just called one of us...

...and we would have told them. But instead, a study was conducted that found that "Organic Foods Reduce Prosocial Behavior and Harshen Moral Judgments" or as it is put in the connecting link on MSNBC (hat tip goes to reader Diane for emailing this to me) "organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks."

"I stopped at a market to get a fruit platter for a movie night with friends but I couldn't find one so I asked the produce guy," says the 40-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. "And he was like, 'If you want fruit platters, go to Safeway. We're organic.' I finally bought a small cake and some strawberries and then at the check stand, the guy was like 'You didn't bring your own bag? I need to charge you if you didn't bring your own bag.' It was like a 'Portlandia skit.' They were so snotty and arrogant."

As it turns out, new research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.

I guess this makes it official. But to me it goes in the "no duh" category with established phenomena like divorce rates being higher among Hollywood stars and kids being more likely to drop out of high schools in the inner city.

"We found that the organic people judged much harder compared to the control or comfort food groups," says Eskine. "On a scale of 1 to 7, the organic people were like 5.5 while the controls were about a 5 and the comfort food people were like a 4.89."

When it came to helping out a needy stranger, the organic people also proved to be more selfish, volunteering only 13 minutes as compared to 19 minutes (for controls) and 24 minutes (for comfort food folks).

"There's something about being exposed to organic food that made them feel better about themselves," says Eskine. "And that made them kind of jerks a little bit, I guess."

A little bit? You guess?? Come on. These people will bring their own snacks to your party and put them front and center, and then they go around telling everyone to eat their stuff because its organic. No lie.

Oh, I loved the concluding quip:

"At my local grocery, I sometimes catch organic eyes gazing into my grocery cart and scowling," says Sue Frause, a 61-year-old freelance writer/photographer from Whidbey Island. "So I'll often toss in really bad foods just to get them even more riled up."

Woman after my own heart.

Jigsaw President

I really appreciated Matthew Continetti's piece in which he provides evidence that Obama has, with the cooperation of the media, entirely constructed the character which his adorers see when they look at him. Excerpt:

Obama was similarly meticulous in constructing his positions, attitudes, and demeanor when he became a professional politician. Here, too, his identity was hard to pin down. His alliance with Jeremiah Wright was necessary to gain credibility with Chicago’s African-American community. He frequently voted present in the Illinois state senate in order not to offend particular constituencies. He agonized over his decision to oppose the Iraq war because he was afraid he would be on the wrong side of the issue. His debut at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was a gauzy, abstract paean to national unity. He became, as he put it in The Audacity of Hope, “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He ran for president as a bipartisan ‘pragmatist’ who would bring us together.

The conclusion is good too.

The composite identity that took Obama 47 years to create has come undone in less than four years. It was just as faked as Julia. Behold the man as he is: A “New Politics” liberal whose idealism is dropped at the first sight of an FEC deadline. There’s nothing funny about it.

Continetti proves in this article that the most devastating exposés of this phony chief executive do not have to contain words like "socialist", "communist" or "Alinsky". In fact, they are much more powerful when they don't.

I wish they'd turn up the volume, but...

Dr. Jeff Mirus makes a good point about the disappointing silence of Donald Cardinal Wuerl with regard to the Sibelius/Georgetown scandal. Basically the silver lining is in the Washington diocesan newspaper. Excerpt:

Second, it is enormously telling that the editor of Cardinal Wuerl’s newspaper felt at liberty to write clearly on Georgetown’s decision. The editor made it crystal clear that the decision to invite Sebelius was not only wrong but very typically wrong. It stated point blank that Georgetown can be more relied on to attack the Faith than to defend it. This kind of frankness is rare in the diocesan press.

Now it would have been very foolish of the editor to publish this editorial without knowing that Cardinal Wuerl approved. And in the long run it will prove foolish of Georgetown to, in effect, deliberately and directly pick a fight with the bishops. This is not your father's Church. The Modernists are not as strong as they were forty years ago. Even if they still control many universities and religious orders, they no longer control the episcopate. By a direct onslaught, Georgetown has hastened the day when it will find this out.

I don’t know exactly what can be done about Georgetown at this juncture. Certainly if Cardinal Wuerl can do more, he should; and if he cannot do more, it would be better for him to square off against Georgetown on this issue both personally and publicly. But that he is willing to permit the battle lines to be hardened is not nothing. That the Archdiocesan newspaper should so clearly want the faithful to realize that Georgetown is both wrong and unCatholic is not nothing. Not so many years ago, this would have been unthinkable.

Even so, I wish people like Cardinal Wuerl would turn up the volume of disapproval of Sebelius. Really, what's the circulation of a diocesan newspaper? The Bishops really should take a page out of Bill Donohue's book and whip out the media megaphone machine.

Mother's Day with the Romneys

I don't know, these people seem to be in touch with my life experience. No patronage appointments here.