http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/185770/20110723/anders-breikviks-photos-portraits-in-military-masonic-and-diving-suit-garb.htm
Added: July 25, 2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik#cite_note-manifesto-2
excerpts
PCCTS, "Knights Templar" order
During interrogation, Breivik claimed membership in an "international Christian military order" that "fights" against "Islamic suppression". This order allegedly is called the "Knights Templar" and, according to his manifesto, has between fifteen and eighty "ordinated knights" besides an unknown number of "civilian members".[73]
The order, whose full name is the "Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici" or PCCTS, is said to have been established in London in April, 2002, as a "re-founding" of the twelfth-century crusading order. The new organisation supposedly was established to take political and military control of Western Europe, with its members being armed as an "anti-Jihad crusader-organisation". It reportedly was established by nine men: two Englishmen, a Frenchman, a German, a Dutchman, a Greek, a Russian, a Norwegian, and a Serb. The main initiator apparently was the Serb, whom Breivik claims to have visited in Liberia and whom he referred to as a "war hero".
Breivik said that his own code name was "Sigurd Jorsalfar" (recalling the twelfth-century King Sigurd I of Norway, himself a Crusader) and that his "mentor" was "Richard Lionheart". Breivik asserted that Norway had "4,848 traitors" who had to die.[3]
In his manifesto, Breivik wrote that "[t]he PCCTS, Knights Templar is . . . . not a religious organization but rather a Christian 'culturalist' military order."[4]
Religion
On his Facebook profile, Breivik describes himself as a Christian.[45] Breivik states that he chose to be baptised into the Church of Norway at the age of 15 although he later became disenchanted with Norway's State Church.[74] In his manifesto, he described himself as a "moderately religious" protestant (p. 1398) who supports "a reformation of Protestantism leading to it being absorbed by Catholisism [sic]". Elsewhere in his manifesto, Breivik also declared himself to be the "a savior of our people and of European Christendom" (p. 1435).[4]
Police reports describe Breivik as a "Christian fundamentalist".[9][75] However, in contrast to the common theological understanding of such in the American sense, that of "militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism," and its emphasis on Protestant doctrine and salvation by faith,[76] in his manifesto Breivik referred to "Protestantism as the Marxism of Christianity," (p. 1346) and criticized salvation by faith and deplored "Christian fundamentalist theocracy" as "everything we do not want", in favor of "a secular European society based on our Christian cultural heritage", (p. 1346) while he also commended the separation of Church and state. (p. 1132)
Breivik invoked Roman Catholic Canon Law and the example of the Crusades for support, and looked toward a "Crusader Pope." (p. 1135) He also believed those who died in his case were worthy of an Indulgence, (pp. 1324-26, 46) and stated, "If there is a God I will be allowed to enter heaven as all other martyrs for the Church in the past," (p. 1345) and advocated that such potential martyrs take of "the Eucharist (Holy Communion/The Lord's Supper)" for strength to face such death. (p. 1345)
Breivik condemns Pope Benedict XVI, however, for his dialogue with Islam: “Pope Benedict has abandoned Christianity and all Christian Europeans and is to be considered a cowardly, incompetent, corrupt and illegitimate Pope.” It will thus be necessary, writes Breivik, to overthrow the Protestant and Catholic hierarchies, after which a “Great Christian Congress” would set up a new European Church.[77]
Breivik also considered it sufficient that one be "a Christian-agnostic or a Christian atheist" to fight for his Christian cultural heritage, (p. 1361, 62) and held that "it is essential that science takes an undisputed precedence over biblical teachings." (p. 1403)
In an insight on his personal morality, Breivik liked the clubs in Hungary, but avoided affairs with females for the sake of his mission, though he enjoyed getting drunk at his birthday party. (p. 1415) He also enjoyed video games such as "World of Warcraft' and "Dragon Age Origins," and stated "I regret to admit that I’ve become a notorious downloader of pirated movies, series and games etc." (p. 1418)...
Breivik listed Freemasonry as one of his interests on his Facebook page and was himself a Freemason.[24] He had displayed photographs of himself in Masonic regalia on his Facebook profile[25] and was a member of St. Olaus T.D. Tre Søiler No. 8 in Oslo.[26] In interviews after the attacks, his lodge stated they had only minimal contact with him, and Grand Master of the Norwegian Order of Freemasons Ivar A. Skaar issued an edict immediately expelling him from the fraternity based upon the acts he carried out and the values that appear to have motivated them.[27][28] His manifesto called for a revolution to be led by Knights Templar.[29]
The Counter Reformation of the Vatican's Jesuit Order did not end back in the 1600s - or more accurately, the Roman Catholic Inquisition did not end during the 1800s ------------------------------------------------------------- open their eyes, in order to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who are sanctified by faith in Me. Acts 26: 18 NKJV
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
Norwegian Anti-Islamic, Christian Nationalist Terrorists?
Behind the 7-22-11 terrorist attacks in Norway
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/07/norwegian-terrorist-was-anti-islam.html
According to a Norwegian-language version of Associated Press, the terrorist who bombed downtown Oslo and shot numerous children at summer camp was an Anti-Islam nationalist:
In online debates marks Anders Behring Breivik as well read, and one with strong opinions about Norwegian politics. He promotes a very conservative opinions, which he also called nationalist. He expresses himself strongly opposed to multiculturalism - that cultural differences can live together in a community.
Breivik has had many posts on the site Document.no, an Islam-critical site that publishes news and commentary.
In one of the posts he states that politics today no longer revolves around socialism against capitalism, but that the fight is between nationalism and internationalism. He expressed clear support for the nationalist mindset.
Anders Breivik Behring has also commented on the Swedish news articles, where he makes it clear that he believes the media have failed by not being "NOK" Islam-critical.
MSNBC reports:
TV2, the country's largest broadcaster, identified him as Anders Behring Breivik, 32, describing him as a member of "right-wing extremist groups in eastern Norway." Shortly thereafter, The Telegraph newspaper of London reported the same information, citing Norwegian Justice Minister Knut Storberget.
***
Tore Bjorgo, a professor at Norwegian Police University College — which state broadcaster NRK reported is working with police on the investigation — said the fact that the second attack was directed at a political youth organization suggested the involvement of local or European right-wing extremists.
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/07/norwegian-terrorist-was-anti-islam.html
According to a Norwegian-language version of Associated Press, the terrorist who bombed downtown Oslo and shot numerous children at summer camp was an Anti-Islam nationalist:
In online debates marks Anders Behring Breivik as well read, and one with strong opinions about Norwegian politics. He promotes a very conservative opinions, which he also called nationalist. He expresses himself strongly opposed to multiculturalism - that cultural differences can live together in a community.
Breivik has had many posts on the site Document.no, an Islam-critical site that publishes news and commentary.
In one of the posts he states that politics today no longer revolves around socialism against capitalism, but that the fight is between nationalism and internationalism. He expressed clear support for the nationalist mindset.
Anders Breivik Behring has also commented on the Swedish news articles, where he makes it clear that he believes the media have failed by not being "NOK" Islam-critical.
MSNBC reports:
TV2, the country's largest broadcaster, identified him as Anders Behring Breivik, 32, describing him as a member of "right-wing extremist groups in eastern Norway." Shortly thereafter, The Telegraph newspaper of London reported the same information, citing Norwegian Justice Minister Knut Storberget.
***
Tore Bjorgo, a professor at Norwegian Police University College — which state broadcaster NRK reported is working with police on the investigation — said the fact that the second attack was directed at a political youth organization suggested the involvement of local or European right-wing extremists.
Bill Keller- Ban Writing About Topics You Are Not Assigned to Write About
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/books/review/up-front-bill-keller.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/magazine/bill-keller-wants-to-ban-books.html?adxnnl=1&ref=billkeller&adxnnlx=1310875787-ukMuqkP7P9daeTGHTlNJ6A
NY Times' Bill Keller's Ban Goes Beyond Paper Publishing
Let’s Ban Books, Or at Least Stop Writing Them
By BILL KELLER
Published: July 13, 2011
There was exciting news last month among the Twitterati. Brian Stelter, The New York Times prodigy and master of social media, announced to his 64,373 followers that he is going to write a book. The obvious question: What’s up with that?
Not that I doubt he can do it. The man The New York Observer calls our “Svelte Twitter Svengali” has a history of setting the bar high and vaulting over it. He files prodigiously for The Times; stars in the new “Page One” documentary; and has promulgated, as of my last check, 21,376 Tweets — not counting the separate Twitter stream where he records every morsel of food he consumes. (Brian lost more than 90 pounds last year on a Twitter-assisted diet; it’s probably hard to feed yourself when your fingers are permanently affixed to a keyboard.) As his colleague in the media-reporting unit, David Carr, memorably said of the talented upstart, “I still can’t get over the feeling that Brian Stelter was a robot assembled in the basement of The New York Times to come and destroy me.”
So yes, he can write a book. But why would he want to? Why, in fact, would anyone want to?
For years now the populist prophets of new media have been proclaiming the death of books, and the marketplace seems to back them up. Sales of print books in the U.S. peaked in 2005 and have been in steady decline since, according to publishers’ net revenue data reported to the Association of American Publishers.
Watching that trend, I find my grief for the state of civilization comes with a guilty surge of relief. Sure, I would miss books — and so, by the way, would my children — but at least the death of books would put an end to the annoying fact that everyone who works for me is either writing one or wants to. I would get my staff back!
Every month, it seems, some reporter drops by my office to request a leave of absence to write a book. I patiently explain that book-writing is agony — slow, lonely, frustrating work that, unless you are a very rare exception, gets a lukewarm review (if any), reaches a few thousand people and lands on a remaindered shelf at Barnes & Noble. I recount my own experience as a book failure — two incompletes, and I’m still paying back a sizable advance with a yearly check to Simon & Schuster that I think of not as a burden but as bail.
But still the reporters — and editors, too — keep coming to sit in my office among the teetering stacks of Times-written books that I mean to read someday and to listen politely to my description of book-writing Gethsemane, and then they join the cliff-bound lemmings anyway.
Off they go to write books about wars, books about spies, books about diplomacy. Books about basketball, books about China and, coming soon, a book about basketball in China. Half a dozen books exploring aspects of the recent financial meltdown. One (and one more pending) about George W. Bush; one (and another pending) about the Obama family. We do cookbooks, travel books, puzzle books and movie guides. A book explaining the English. A book explaining the French. Books about The New York Times. We do biographies (Whittaker Chambers, Edward Kennedy, Virgil Thomson, Einstein) and memoirs (growing up in Alabama, growing up in Liberia, growing up Catholic). Cancer. Jazz. Physics. Pipe organs. Marriage. The weather.
Two editors were writing books about their dogs. At the same time!
Over on the Op-Ed page, where I am migrating in September, every columnist except one has written a book or two or three, though only one is closing in on William Safire's 20-something output.
I’ve learned interesting things from the books of my staffers. I learned that I employed a financial writer who got himself so deep in debt he couldn't make his mortgage payments, a media columnist who had been a crack addict and a restaurant critic with a history of eating disorders. (To those who found these cases problematic, I replied that there is no better qualification for writing about life in all its complexity than having lived it.)
I confess I have not set a great example. I signed two book contracts, after all, and although I fulfilled neither of them, I did manage a short biography of Nelson Mandela for “young readers,” pardon the oxymoron, and I’ve written a few introductions for compilations of Times material. The Times covers books, reviews books, ranks books and publishes books. We are total enablers.
We indulge our writers because we want the talent happy, and because a little of their prestige accrues to The Times. But we do so at a cost. Books mean writers who are absent or distracted from daily journalism, writers who have to be replaced when they leave their reporting beats and landed somewhere when they return. There is the tricky relationship between what they unearth for their books and what goes into the paper. There is the awkwardness of reviewing books by colleagues — and the greater awkwardness of not reviewing them. There is the resentment of those left behind to take up the slack, especially where fat advances have been paid.
So, why aren’t books dead yet? It helps that e-books are booming. Kindle and Nook have begun to refashion the economics of the medieval publishing industry: no trucks, no paper, no returns or remainders.
But that does not explain why writers write them. Writers write them for reasons that usually have a little to do with money and not as much to do with masochism as you might think. There is real satisfaction in a story deeply told, a case richly argued, a puzzle meticulously untangled. (Note the tense. When people say they love writing, they usually mean they love having written.) And it is still a credential, a trophy, a pathway to “Charlie Rose” and “Morning Joe,” to conferences and panels that Build Your Brand, to speaking fees and writing assignments. After Brian’s book, he will be an even more stellar Stelter.
His book, by the way, will investigate another durable old medium — morning television. It will come in both print and electronic formats, but he confesses, “I’m sure I’ll prefer it as a hardcover.”
Sigh. It will never end.
Bill Keller is executive editor of The New York Times.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Romish Tool- NY Times Bill Keller
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/books/review/up-front-bill-keller.html
Bill Keller recently wrote, and I quoted:
http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/2011/07/up-front-hidden-in-plain-sight.html
“I run into readers who believe The Times is a place directed from on high,” Keller replied. “The truth is that our priesthood of journalists operates with great autonomy, and our congregation of readers makes up its own mind — all as it should be. In the unlikely event that the pope ever invited me for tea, we’d probably have stories to swap about the practical limits of authority. ‘Absolute monarchs’ indeed!”
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/bill_keller/index.html?scp=2&sq=ban%20books&st=cse
Bill Keller has been the executive editor of The New York Times since 2003. In May 2011, The New York Times announced that Mr. Keller is stepping down to become a full-time writer for the paper. He will be repaced by Jill Abramson, a former investigative reporter and Washington bureau chief for The Times.
Ms. Abramson, a managing editor since 2003, becomes the first woman to hold that position. She has been one of Mr. Keller's two top deputies overseeing the entire newsroom.
Mr. Keller, who ran the newsroom during eight years of great journalistic distinction but also declining revenue and cutbacks throughout the industry, said that with a formidable combination in place to succeed him, he felt it was a good time to step aside.
Mr. Keller said he was still working out the details of a column he will write for the paper’s new Sunday opinion section, which will be introduced later in May. He did rule one project out. “I won’t be writing a book about The New York Times,” he said.
Before becoming executive editor in July 2003. Mr. Keller had been an Op-Ed columnist and senior writer for The New York Times Magazine as well as other areas of the newspaper since September 2001. He served as managing editor from 1997 to September 2001 after having been the newspaper's foreign editor from June 1995 to 1997. He was the chief of The Times bureau in Johannesburg from April 1992 until May 1995.
From December 1986 to October 1991, Mr. Keller was a Times correspondent in Moscow, serving as bureau chief during his last three years there. In 1989, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Soviet Union. Mr. Keller joined The New York Times in 1984 as a domestic correspondent based in the Washington bureau.
Before coming to The Times, Mr. Keller was a reporter for The Dallas Times Herald, the Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report in Washington and The Portland Oregonian.
Mr. Keller graduated from Pomona College with a B.A. degree in 1970 and is a member of the college's board of trustees.
Friday, July 15, 2011
2,000 Years of Popes, Sacred and Profane
By BILL KELLER
Published: July 7, 2011
John Julius Norwich makes a point of saying in the introduction to his history of the popes that he is “no scholar” and that he is “an agnostic Protestant.” The first point means that while he will be scrupulous with his copious research, he feels no obligation to unearth new revelations or concoct revisionist theories. The second means that he has “no ax to grind.” In short, his only agenda is to tell us the story.
And he has plenty of story to tell. “Absolute Monarchs” sprawls across Europe and the Levant, over two millenniums, and with an impossibly immense cast: 265 popes (plus various usurpers and antipopes), feral hordes of Vandals, Huns and Visigoths, expansionist emperors, Byzantine intriguers, Borgias and Medicis, heretic zealots, conspiring clerics, bestial inquisitors and more. Norwich manages to organize this crowded stage and produce a rollicking narrative. He keeps things moving at nearly beach-read pace by being selective about where he lingers and by adopting the tone of an enthusiastic tour guide, expert but less than reverent.
A scholar or devout Roman Catholic would probably not have had so much fun, for example, with the tale of Pope Joan, the mid-ninth-century Englishwoman who, according to lore, disguised herself as a man, became pope and was caught out only when she gave birth. Although Norwich regards this as “one of the hoariest canards in papal history,” he cannot resist giving her a chapter of her own. It is a guilty pleasure, especially his deadpan pursuit of the story that the church, determined not to be fooled again, required subsequent papal candidates to sit on a chaise percée (pierced chair) and be groped from below by a junior cleric, who would shout to the multitude, “He has testicles!” Norwich tracks down just such a piece of furniture in the Vatican Museum, dutifully reports that it may have been an obstetric chair intended to symbolize Mother Church, but adds, “It cannot be gainsaid, on the other hand, that it is admirably designed for a diaconal grope; and it is only with considerable reluctance that one turns the idea aside.”
If you were raised Catholic, you may find it disconcerting to see an institution you were taught to think of as the repository of the faith so thoroughly deconsecrated. Norwich says little about theology and treats doctrinal disputes as matters of diplomacy. As he points out, this is in keeping with many of the popes themselves, “a surprising number of whom seem to have been far more interested in their own temporal power than in their spiritual well-being.” For most of their two millenniums, the popes were rulers of a large sectarian state, managers of a civil service, military strategists, occasionally battlefield generals, sometimes patrons of the arts and humanities, and, importantly, diplomats. They were indeed monarchs. (But not, it should be said, “absolute monarchs.” Whichever editor persuaded Norwich to change his British title, “The Popes: A History,” may have done the book a marketing favor but at the cost of accuracy: the popes’ power was invariably shared with or subordinated to emperors and kings of various stripes. In more recent times, the popes have had no civil power outside the 110 acres of Vatican City, no military at all, and even their moral authority has been flouted by legions of the faithful.)
Norwich, whose works of popular history include books on Venice and Byzantium, admires the popes who were effective statesmen and stewards, including Leo I, who protected Rome from the Huns; Benedict XIV, who kept the peace and instituted financial and liturgical reforms, allowing Rome to become the religious and cultural capital of Catholic Europe; and Leo XIII, who steered the Church into the industrial age. The popes who achieved greatness, however, were outnumbered by the corrupt, the inept, the venal, the lecherous, the ruthless, the mediocre and those who didn’t last long enough to make a mark.
Sinners, as any dramatist or newsman can tell you, are more entertaining than saints, and Norwich has much to work with. If you paid attention in high school, you know something of the Borgia popes, who are covered in a chapter succinctly called “The Monsters.” But they were not the first, the last or even the most colorful of the sacred scoundrels. The bishops who recently blamed the scourge of pedophile priests on the libertine culture of the 1960s should consult Norwich for evidence that clerical abuses are not a historical aberration.
Of the minor 15th-century Pope Paul II, to pick one from the ranks of the debauched, Norwich writes: “The pope’s sexual proclivities aroused a good deal of speculation. He seems to have had two weaknesses — for good-looking young men and for melons — though the contemporary rumor that he enjoyed watching the former being tortured while he gorged himself on the latter is surely unlikely.”
Sexual misconduct figures prominently in the history of the papacy (another chapter is entitled “Nicholas I and the Pornocracy”) but is hardly the only blot on the institution. Clement VII, the disastrous second Medici pope, oversaw “the worst sack of Rome since the barbarian invasions, the establishment in Germany of Protestantism as a separate religion and the definitive breakaway of the English church over Henry VIII’s divorce.” Paul IV “opened the most savage campaign in papal history against the Jews,” forcing them into ghettos and destroying synagogues. Gregory XIII spent the papacy into penury. Urban VIII imprisoned Galileo and banned all his works.
Most of the popes, being human, were complicated; the rogues had redeeming features, the capable leaders had defects. Innocent III was the greatest of the medieval popes, a man of galvanizing self-confidence who consolidated the Papal States. But he also initiated the Fourth Crusade, which led to the wild sacking of Constantinople, “the most unspeakable of the many outrages in the whole hideous history of the Crusades.” Sixtus IV sold indulgences and church offices “on a scale previously unparalleled,” made an 8-year-old boy the archbishop of Lisbon and began the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. But he also commissioned the Sistine Chapel.
Even the Borgia pope Alexander VI, who by the time he bribed his way into office had fathered eight children by at least three women, is credited with keeping the imperiled papacy alive by capable administration and astute diplomacy, “however questionable his means of doing so.”
By the time we reach the 20th century, about 420 pages in, our expectations are not high. We get a disheartening chapter on Pius XI and Pius XII, whose fear of Communism (along with the church’s long streak of anti-Semitism) made them compliant enablers of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. Pius XI, in Norwich’s view, redeemed himself by his belated but unflinching hostility to the Fascists and Nazis. But his indictment of Pius XII — who resisted every entreaty to speak out against mass murder, even as the trucks were transporting the Jews of Rome to Auschwitz — is compact, evenhanded and devastating. “It is painful to have to record,” Norwich concludes, “that, on the orders of his successor, the process of his canonization has already begun. Suffice it to say here that the current fashion for canonizing all popes on principle will, if continued, make a mockery of sainthood.”
Norwich devotes exactly one chapter to the popes of my lifetime — from the avuncular modernizer John XXIII, whom he plainly loves, to the austere Benedict, off to a “shaky start.” He credits the popular Polish pope, John Paul II — another candidate for sainthood — for his global diplomacy but faults his retrograde views on matters of sex and gender. Norwich’s conclusion may remind readers that he introduced himself as a Protestant agnostic, because whatever his views on God, his views on the papacy are clearly pro-reformation. “It is now well over half a century since progressive Catholics have longed to see their church bring itself into the modern age,” he writes. “With the accession of every succeeding pontiff they have raised their hopes that some progress might be made on the leading issues of the day — on homosexuality, on contraception, on the ordination of women priests. And each time they have been disappointed.”
Bill Keller is the executive editor of The Times.
By BILL KELLER
Published: July 7, 2011
John Julius Norwich makes a point of saying in the introduction to his history of the popes that he is “no scholar” and that he is “an agnostic Protestant.” The first point means that while he will be scrupulous with his copious research, he feels no obligation to unearth new revelations or concoct revisionist theories. The second means that he has “no ax to grind.” In short, his only agenda is to tell us the story.
And he has plenty of story to tell. “Absolute Monarchs” sprawls across Europe and the Levant, over two millenniums, and with an impossibly immense cast: 265 popes (plus various usurpers and antipopes), feral hordes of Vandals, Huns and Visigoths, expansionist emperors, Byzantine intriguers, Borgias and Medicis, heretic zealots, conspiring clerics, bestial inquisitors and more. Norwich manages to organize this crowded stage and produce a rollicking narrative. He keeps things moving at nearly beach-read pace by being selective about where he lingers and by adopting the tone of an enthusiastic tour guide, expert but less than reverent.
A scholar or devout Roman Catholic would probably not have had so much fun, for example, with the tale of Pope Joan, the mid-ninth-century Englishwoman who, according to lore, disguised herself as a man, became pope and was caught out only when she gave birth. Although Norwich regards this as “one of the hoariest canards in papal history,” he cannot resist giving her a chapter of her own. It is a guilty pleasure, especially his deadpan pursuit of the story that the church, determined not to be fooled again, required subsequent papal candidates to sit on a chaise percée (pierced chair) and be groped from below by a junior cleric, who would shout to the multitude, “He has testicles!” Norwich tracks down just such a piece of furniture in the Vatican Museum, dutifully reports that it may have been an obstetric chair intended to symbolize Mother Church, but adds, “It cannot be gainsaid, on the other hand, that it is admirably designed for a diaconal grope; and it is only with considerable reluctance that one turns the idea aside.”
If you were raised Catholic, you may find it disconcerting to see an institution you were taught to think of as the repository of the faith so thoroughly deconsecrated. Norwich says little about theology and treats doctrinal disputes as matters of diplomacy. As he points out, this is in keeping with many of the popes themselves, “a surprising number of whom seem to have been far more interested in their own temporal power than in their spiritual well-being.” For most of their two millenniums, the popes were rulers of a large sectarian state, managers of a civil service, military strategists, occasionally battlefield generals, sometimes patrons of the arts and humanities, and, importantly, diplomats. They were indeed monarchs. (But not, it should be said, “absolute monarchs.” Whichever editor persuaded Norwich to change his British title, “The Popes: A History,” may have done the book a marketing favor but at the cost of accuracy: the popes’ power was invariably shared with or subordinated to emperors and kings of various stripes. In more recent times, the popes have had no civil power outside the 110 acres of Vatican City, no military at all, and even their moral authority has been flouted by legions of the faithful.)
Norwich, whose works of popular history include books on Venice and Byzantium, admires the popes who were effective statesmen and stewards, including Leo I, who protected Rome from the Huns; Benedict XIV, who kept the peace and instituted financial and liturgical reforms, allowing Rome to become the religious and cultural capital of Catholic Europe; and Leo XIII, who steered the Church into the industrial age. The popes who achieved greatness, however, were outnumbered by the corrupt, the inept, the venal, the lecherous, the ruthless, the mediocre and those who didn’t last long enough to make a mark.
Sinners, as any dramatist or newsman can tell you, are more entertaining than saints, and Norwich has much to work with. If you paid attention in high school, you know something of the Borgia popes, who are covered in a chapter succinctly called “The Monsters.” But they were not the first, the last or even the most colorful of the sacred scoundrels. The bishops who recently blamed the scourge of pedophile priests on the libertine culture of the 1960s should consult Norwich for evidence that clerical abuses are not a historical aberration.
Of the minor 15th-century Pope Paul II, to pick one from the ranks of the debauched, Norwich writes: “The pope’s sexual proclivities aroused a good deal of speculation. He seems to have had two weaknesses — for good-looking young men and for melons — though the contemporary rumor that he enjoyed watching the former being tortured while he gorged himself on the latter is surely unlikely.”
Sexual misconduct figures prominently in the history of the papacy (another chapter is entitled “Nicholas I and the Pornocracy”) but is hardly the only blot on the institution. Clement VII, the disastrous second Medici pope, oversaw “the worst sack of Rome since the barbarian invasions, the establishment in Germany of Protestantism as a separate religion and the definitive breakaway of the English church over Henry VIII’s divorce.” Paul IV “opened the most savage campaign in papal history against the Jews,” forcing them into ghettos and destroying synagogues. Gregory XIII spent the papacy into penury. Urban VIII imprisoned Galileo and banned all his works.
Most of the popes, being human, were complicated; the rogues had redeeming features, the capable leaders had defects. Innocent III was the greatest of the medieval popes, a man of galvanizing self-confidence who consolidated the Papal States. But he also initiated the Fourth Crusade, which led to the wild sacking of Constantinople, “the most unspeakable of the many outrages in the whole hideous history of the Crusades.” Sixtus IV sold indulgences and church offices “on a scale previously unparalleled,” made an 8-year-old boy the archbishop of Lisbon and began the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. But he also commissioned the Sistine Chapel.
Even the Borgia pope Alexander VI, who by the time he bribed his way into office had fathered eight children by at least three women, is credited with keeping the imperiled papacy alive by capable administration and astute diplomacy, “however questionable his means of doing so.”
By the time we reach the 20th century, about 420 pages in, our expectations are not high. We get a disheartening chapter on Pius XI and Pius XII, whose fear of Communism (along with the church’s long streak of anti-Semitism) made them compliant enablers of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. Pius XI, in Norwich’s view, redeemed himself by his belated but unflinching hostility to the Fascists and Nazis. But his indictment of Pius XII — who resisted every entreaty to speak out against mass murder, even as the trucks were transporting the Jews of Rome to Auschwitz — is compact, evenhanded and devastating. “It is painful to have to record,” Norwich concludes, “that, on the orders of his successor, the process of his canonization has already begun. Suffice it to say here that the current fashion for canonizing all popes on principle will, if continued, make a mockery of sainthood.”
Norwich devotes exactly one chapter to the popes of my lifetime — from the avuncular modernizer John XXIII, whom he plainly loves, to the austere Benedict, off to a “shaky start.” He credits the popular Polish pope, John Paul II — another candidate for sainthood — for his global diplomacy but faults his retrograde views on matters of sex and gender. Norwich’s conclusion may remind readers that he introduced himself as a Protestant agnostic, because whatever his views on God, his views on the papacy are clearly pro-reformation. “It is now well over half a century since progressive Catholics have longed to see their church bring itself into the modern age,” he writes. “With the accession of every succeeding pontiff they have raised their hopes that some progress might be made on the leading issues of the day — on homosexuality, on contraception, on the ordination of women priests. And each time they have been disappointed.”
Bill Keller is the executive editor of The Times.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Up Front & Hidden In Plain Sight
About the Absolute Monarchy of the Continuing Roman Empire
Indeed! What about the political dynamics of this following story?!
The Washington, D.C. “South Capitol Mall”. Though never formally named, it appeared front and center within and throughout U.S. National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC's) 1997 publication “Extending the Legacy: Planning America’s Capital for the 21st Century".
“Extending the Legacy” refers to extending that of Washington, D.C.'s Pierre L’Enfant and McMillan Commission Washington, D.C. planning, with the latter adopting a beaux arts 'city beautiful' mode incoroporating and extending the linear green-way of the National Mall westward with a Reflecting Pool culminating in a Lincoln Memorial with traffic circle.
The 1990s USNCPC 'South Capitol Mall' concept of a new promenade extending due south from the U.S. Capitol building, via a widened South Capitol Street corridor, was the largest addition to the monumental core of Washington D.C. since the West Mall with the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, completed respectively by the early 1920s and early 1940s, and a subsequent NCPC "East Capitol Mall" proposal from the 1920s into about the early 1960s.
Both the McMillan plan and the subsequent East Capitol Mall proposal were contemporaneously reported about by newspapers, particularly the former’s West Mall-Lincoln Memorial.
LINK- East Capitol Mall
Completed and opened in April 1904.
Originally had more green space, now paved over for automobile parking, plus the addition to the rear of a rectory.
While any reporting about "Extending the Legacy" carefully avoided -- via the selective lexicon and omissions -- reporting on the South Capitol Mall, the conflict between "Extending the Legacy" and the Vatican went entirely unreported by the mainstream media.
LINK- Why Was Not The Public Informed?
Addition- Completed 9:14 PM
This is likewise true with the story of the single most significant building to be erected within the South Capitol Mall’s space – Nationals Ballpark Stadium – even as its planning predated the official abandonment of the South Capitol Mall concept in 2003; yet the planning for this stadium was publicized in 2002, and was notably again un-der-reported:
Interesting how the South Capitol site is described with the most vague terms “a location near the Southeast Federal Center and District waterfront”.
Such un-reporting, like that for the Extending the Legacy South Capitol Mall and its defying the odds of mislabeling things consistently, suggests this was all the baby from rather high up the political pyramid, connected to the entities being employed for its facilitation: the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission; Major League Baseball, and the powerful Washington, D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling.
Who Got Involved
http://wwwsouthcapitolstreet.blogspot.com/2006/04/who-got-involved-2002-efforts-to-bring.html
http://wwwsouthcapitolstreet.blogspot.com/2006/04/national-capital-planning.html
Michael Tuohey, then head of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, is well connected to this pinnacle of political power, known as the Roman Catholic Church.
He has been a member of the board of trustees of three Roman Catholic Schools: Jesuit Academy, Gonzaga High School, and Catholic University of America (CUA)- the latter with others including Washington Archbishop Theodore McCarrick (retired May 2006), New York Cardinal Edward Egan (retired 2009), and Egan’s replacement Timothy Dolan:
http://publicaffairs.cua.edu/factbook/trustees.htm
Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s name appears as follows in an article in The Washington Times, September 18, 2005:
The corporate entity of Major League Baseball was the tool to enforce the twin dictates of locating the stadium right next to South Capitol Street – essentially extending the St Vincent DePaul Church building line southward -- and its completion by March 2008, as conditions of the agreement crafted through Covington & Burling for the Washington Nationals franchise, reportedly via a vote of the MLB team franchise owners.
It gets to be called W stadium- double meaning referring to both the Washington Nationals and to a ‘kick-name’ of then U.S. President Bush, a former part owner of the Texas Rangers MLB team franchise, and whose last chance to throw the opening ball as U.S. President, a custom since the early 1900s, was March 2008.
"W"s Nationals Ballpark Stadium's 1st biggest VIP was Pope Benedict XVI, who held a huge outdoor mass on April 17, 2008.
Writing publicly on this then upcoming event, Washington Post real estate reporter Jacqueline Dupree (JD) said it best:
Above photo and caption by Washington Post real estate reporter Jacqueline Dupree http://www.jdland.com/dc/stadium.cfm?tab=no2
(9/1/07)
Above photo and caption Washington Post real estate reporter Jacqueline Dupree http://www.jdland.com/dc/stadium.cfm?tab=no3
Dupree hit the nail on the head with that caption of the view from that triangular shaped clubhouse, with the phrase she selected “King of the World”
She furthermore made a great analogy of it as the ‘bow of the S.S. Nationals’ and in the context of an event filled with VIPs in April 2008. Its a quite clear allusion of the political arrogance this structure reflects, as roughly analogous to the part of the Titanic that hit the iceberg.
It's an arrogance that can be quite apparant to anyone seeing and comprehending that 1990s Extending the Legacy South Capitol Mall proposal, the utter lack of reporting, discussion, debate, and that St. Vincent DePaul Church at South Capitol and M Street, as the only building fronting South Capitol Street saved by the mall’s cancellation as a monumental indicator of the continuing cloaked rule.
A White House Sell Out
http://wwwfreespeechbeneathushs.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/books/review/up-front-bill-keller.html
Up Front: Bill Keller
By THE EDITORS
Published: July 7, 2011
Through the years, The New York Times’s coverage of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican has received sharp criticism from practicing Catholics — including the past eight years that Bill Keller has been the paper’s executive editor. Yet Keller, who wrote this week’s cover review of “Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy,” by John Julius Norwich, was raised within the fold.
“My parents took their faith very seriously — especially my mother, who had the fervor of a convert (from Episcopalian),” Keller recalled in an e-mail. “My brothers and I had nuns and priests as our teachers through high school, and I look back on that education with real gratitude. I’m now what my friend Dan Barry calls a ‘collapsed Catholic’ — beyond lapsed — but you never really extricate yourself from your upbringing.”
Keller, as most readers probably know, recently announced he would step down from his current position in September, though he will continue to write a regular column (it now appears in The Times Magazine). Has he observed any parallels between the institution he has led since 2003 and the one he writes about in his review?
“I run into readers who believe The Times is a place directed from on high,” Keller replied. “The truth is that our priesthood of journalists operates with great autonomy, and our congregation of readers makes up its own mind — all as it should be. In the unlikely event that the pope ever invited me for tea, we’d probably have stories to swap about the practical limits of authority. ‘Absolute monarchs’ indeed!”
Indeed! What about the political dynamics of this following story?!
The Washington, D.C. “South Capitol Mall”. Though never formally named, it appeared front and center within and throughout U.S. National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC's) 1997 publication “Extending the Legacy: Planning America’s Capital for the 21st Century".
“Extending the Legacy” refers to extending that of Washington, D.C.'s Pierre L’Enfant and McMillan Commission Washington, D.C. planning, with the latter adopting a beaux arts 'city beautiful' mode incoroporating and extending the linear green-way of the National Mall westward with a Reflecting Pool culminating in a Lincoln Memorial with traffic circle.
The 1990s USNCPC 'South Capitol Mall' concept of a new promenade extending due south from the U.S. Capitol building, via a widened South Capitol Street corridor, was the largest addition to the monumental core of Washington D.C. since the West Mall with the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, completed respectively by the early 1920s and early 1940s, and a subsequent NCPC "East Capitol Mall" proposal from the 1920s into about the early 1960s.
Both the McMillan plan and the subsequent East Capitol Mall proposal were contemporaneously reported about by newspapers, particularly the former’s West Mall-Lincoln Memorial.
LINK- East Capitol Mall
LINK- East Capitol Mall controversy
In sharp contrast, the 1990s “Extending the Legacy” South Capitol Mall went strangely un-dereported, only starting with being seemingly un-named (the term “South Capitol Mall” and any variant with the word “Mall”, “Promenade” nor “Greenway” appears nowhere within USNCPC's ‘Extending the Legacy’ publications), and is effectively masked by being mis-described via the notably vague yet consistent terminology rather as a "gateway" and "boulevard".
This would be universal throughout the MSM ‘reporting’, but also with the various ‘environmentalist’ organizations, all following such a consistently selective use of terminology to NOT inform about the proposal for the new linear park along the South Capitol axis.
Such a uniformity of focus and lexicon -- for such a signature proposal -- defied any reasonable expectation of the odds, of say any of the past such proposals being so un-der-reported.
It was like there was a giant ‘magnet’ controlling all of these entities in their selections of words and actions, all working together to obscure the issue for a larger agenda, via entities sold to the public for defending the very ideals they must actually betray for the sake of their hidden master[s]. Something with its tentacles throughout the U.S. and other governments, the media, and the various private organizations.
LINK- 1996 MSM non-reporting on proposed South Capitol Mall
LINK- 2003 MSM non-reporting on proposed South Capitol Mall
LINK- 'E' Groups Indifference
The single most significent building saved by the un-der-reported cancellation of the South Capitol Mall is the St Vincent DePaul Church at the northeast quadrant of the South Capitol Street intersection with M Street.
Located at the northeast quadrant of the intersection of South Capitol and M Streets.
In sharp contrast, the 1990s “Extending the Legacy” South Capitol Mall went strangely un-dereported, only starting with being seemingly un-named (the term “South Capitol Mall” and any variant with the word “Mall”, “Promenade” nor “Greenway” appears nowhere within USNCPC's ‘Extending the Legacy’ publications), and is effectively masked by being mis-described via the notably vague yet consistent terminology rather as a "gateway" and "boulevard".
This would be universal throughout the MSM ‘reporting’, but also with the various ‘environmentalist’ organizations, all following such a consistently selective use of terminology to NOT inform about the proposal for the new linear park along the South Capitol axis.
Such a uniformity of focus and lexicon -- for such a signature proposal -- defied any reasonable expectation of the odds, of say any of the past such proposals being so un-der-reported.
It was like there was a giant ‘magnet’ controlling all of these entities in their selections of words and actions, all working together to obscure the issue for a larger agenda, via entities sold to the public for defending the very ideals they must actually betray for the sake of their hidden master[s]. Something with its tentacles throughout the U.S. and other governments, the media, and the various private organizations.
LINK- 1996 MSM non-reporting on proposed South Capitol Mall
LINK- 2003 MSM non-reporting on proposed South Capitol Mall
LINK- 'E' Groups Indifference
The single most significent building saved by the un-der-reported cancellation of the South Capitol Mall is the St Vincent DePaul Church at the northeast quadrant of the South Capitol Street intersection with M Street.
Located at the northeast quadrant of the intersection of South Capitol and M Streets.
Completed and opened in April 1904.
Originally had more green space, now paved over for automobile parking, plus the addition to the rear of a rectory.
While any reporting about "Extending the Legacy" carefully avoided -- via the selective lexicon and omissions -- reporting on the South Capitol Mall, the conflict between "Extending the Legacy" and the Vatican went entirely unreported by the mainstream media.
LINK- Why Was Not The Public Informed?
Addition- Completed 9:14 PM
This is likewise true with the story of the single most significant building to be erected within the South Capitol Mall’s space – Nationals Ballpark Stadium – even as its planning predated the official abandonment of the South Capitol Mall concept in 2003; yet the planning for this stadium was publicized in 2002, and was notably again un-der-reported:
Advocates of major league baseball in the District this week made perhaps their boldest step yet in that city’s long quest for a team, sending the sport’s top executives a 70 page report documenting potential site plans for a stadium, as well as financing options for a project that could cost as much as $522 million.
The report – the result of a six-month, $300,000 site selection study by the D.C. Sports & Entertainment Commission, D.C. Office of Planning and a bid group led by financier Fred Malek – details the potential land use and financial plans for five potential stadium sites. The sites are scattered about the city: two along Massachusetts Avenue NW between Mount Vernon Square and Union Station, a location near the Southeast Federal Center and District waterfront, the RFK Stadium property, and located north of Union Station near New York Avenue NE.
Eric Fisher, The Washington Times November 15, 2002 District Outlines
Interesting how the South Capitol site is described with the most vague terms “a location near the Southeast Federal Center and District waterfront”.
Such un-reporting, like that for the Extending the Legacy South Capitol Mall and its defying the odds of mislabeling things consistently, suggests this was all the baby from rather high up the political pyramid, connected to the entities being employed for its facilitation: the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission; Major League Baseball, and the powerful Washington, D.C. law firm of Covington & Burling.
Who Got Involved
http://wwwsouthcapitolstreet.blogspot.com/2006/04/who-got-involved-2002-efforts-to-bring.html
http://wwwsouthcapitolstreet.blogspot.com/2006/04/national-capital-planning.html
Michael Tuohey, then head of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, is well connected to this pinnacle of political power, known as the Roman Catholic Church.
He has been a member of the board of trustees of three Roman Catholic Schools: Jesuit Academy, Gonzaga High School, and Catholic University of America (CUA)- the latter with others including Washington Archbishop Theodore McCarrick (retired May 2006), New York Cardinal Edward Egan (retired 2009), and Egan’s replacement Timothy Dolan:
http://publicaffairs.cua.edu/factbook/trustees.htm
Board of Trustees*
Carl A. Anderson, New Haven, Conn.
Richard D. Banziger, New York, N.Y.
Nancy J. Bidwill, Phoenix, Ariz.
Bertha S.Braddock, Alexandria, Va.
Bishop Michael J. Bransfield, Wheeling, W.Va.
Archbishop Raymond L. Burke , St. Louis, Mo.
Timothy R. Busch, Esq., Irvine, Calif.
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Denver, Colo.
Paul J. Chiapparone, Frisco, Texas
Robert F. Comstock, Esq., Washington, D.C.
Robert E. Craves, Issaquah, Wash.
Robert J. Crimmins, Huntington, N.Y.
Bishop Edward P. Cullen, Allentown, Pa.
Leo A. Daly III, Washington, D.C.
Bishop Daniel N. DiNardo, Houston, Texas
Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, Milwaukee, Wis. [succeeded Egan]
David A. Donohoe, Esq., Vice Chairman, Washington, D.C.
Bishop Thomas G. Doran, Rockford, Ill.
Cardinal Edward M. Egan, New York, N.Y.
Archbishop John C. Favalora, Miami Shores, Fla.
Frederick R. Favo, Oakmont, Pa.
Sister Margaret Mary Fitzpatrick, S.C., Sparkill, N.Y.
Archbishop Harry J. Flynn, St. Paul, Minn.
Cardinal Francis E. George, O.M.I., Chicago, Ill.
Stephanie Germack-Kerzic, Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich.
Archbishop José H. Gomez, San Antonio, Texas
Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory, Atlanta, Ga.
Ray J. Hillenbrand, Rapid City, S.D.
Michael P. Hoffman, New York, N.Y.
Cardinal William H. Keeler, Baltimore, Md.
Bishop William E. Lori, Chairman, Bridgeport, Conn.
Cardinal Roger Mahony, Los Angeles, Calif.
Cardinal Adam J. Maida, Detroit, Mich.
Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, Chancellor, Washington, D.C.
William A. McKenna Jr., Saugerties, N.Y.
Sandra A. McMurtrie, Bethesda, Md.
Bishop William F. Murphy, Rockville Centre, N.Y.
Archbishop John J. Myers, Newark, N.J.
Very Rev. David M. O’Connell, C.M., President, Washington, D.C.
Archbishop Sean P. O’Malley, O.F.M. Cap., Boston, Mass.
William G. Parrett, New York, N.Y.
Bishop Joseph A. Pepe, Las Vegas, Nev.
Neil J. Rauenhorst, Tampa, Fla.
Cardinal Justin F. Rigali, Philadelphia, Pa.
Andrea Roane, Washington, D.C.
Monsignor Walter R. Rossi, Washington, D.C.
Timothy C. Scheve, Towson, Md.Rodger D. Shay, Miami, Fla.
Mark H. Tuohey III, Esq., Washington, D.C.
Bishop Allen H. Vigneron, Oakland, Calif.
Frank G. Persico, Secretary of the Board, Fulton, Md.
Archbishop Theodore McCarrick’s name appears as follows in an article in The Washington Times, September 18, 2005:
OK, we know you have connections. An office overlooking the inaugural parade. Access to a private jet. A drink named after you at Zola. A booth at the Palm restaurant. Your face on the wall at the Palm.
But have you yelled "Beer man" next to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice? Have you spilled popcorn on James Carville? Have you elbowed Tim Russert during the T-shirt toss or tripped over Al Hunt's loafers on the way to the men's room or cut in the hot-dog line in front of Judy Woodruff?
If so, you belong to an exclusive club of baseball fans -- high-priced lawyers, lobbyists, politicos and media types -- who have made RFK Stadium power
central during the balmy nights of late summer. The Nationals may win or lose,
but it's never a bad night behind the dugouts.
Mayor Anthony A. Williams, pundit Mark Shields and AOL emeritus Jim Kimsey all have season tickets. Guests spotted over the summer have been rocker Dave Matthews; rapper Ludacris; Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; actor Kevin Sorbo; White House spokesman Scott McClellan; and athletes Art Monk, Carlton Fisk, Sonny Jurgensen, Joe Theismann and Daryl Green. Fred Malek, who is head of the Washington Baseball Club, a consortium hoping to buy the team when Major League Baseball holds an upcoming auction, has tickets two rows up behind first base.
“It gives you 81 opportunities to do this -- and the seats aren't so darn expensive that people can't accept them as a gift. It falls within the limits," he says. (He is referring to the $50 limit on gifts people in government can accept.)
"People do go to be seen," says a K Street lobbyist who often entertains out-of-town guests with seats at RFK. "Let's face it, there are very few things like this for middle-aged guys like me to do. Washington is venue-starved."
And if you've nibbled on lamb chops in D.C. Sports & Entertainment Commission Chairman Mark Tuohey's private suite, you know you're not in Baltimore anymore, eating soggy crab cakes and dreading that hour long ride home. (Mr. Tuohey also bought up a truckload of hot dogs and serves them to his guests. He also gives them to the team after each game.)
Washington finally has a new venue for schmoozing and deal-making, and by all accounts, the results have been formidable.
"It's all about building relationships," Mr. Tuohey said one humid night in his large suite, where he has entertained guests from Capitol Hill as well as Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Eddie Jordan, coach of the Wizards. "Is this a good place to do that? The answer is yes."
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and his wife, TV journalist Andrea Mitchell, recently sat behind home plate as guests of journalists Al Hunt and Judy Woodruff. Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, has sat on the hard orange seats. So have White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Mary Matalin and President Bush's political architect, Karl Rove. (Mr. Bush himself has attended two games, sitting in the President's Box.)
The corporate entity of Major League Baseball was the tool to enforce the twin dictates of locating the stadium right next to South Capitol Street – essentially extending the St Vincent DePaul Church building line southward -- and its completion by March 2008, as conditions of the agreement crafted through Covington & Burling for the Washington Nationals franchise, reportedly via a vote of the MLB team franchise owners.
It gets to be called W stadium- double meaning referring to both the Washington Nationals and to a ‘kick-name’ of then U.S. President Bush, a former part owner of the Texas Rangers MLB team franchise, and whose last chance to throw the opening ball as U.S. President, a custom since the early 1900s, was March 2008.
"W"s Nationals Ballpark Stadium's 1st biggest VIP was Pope Benedict XVI, who held a huge outdoor mass on April 17, 2008.
Writing publicly on this then upcoming event, Washington Post real estate reporter Jacqueline Dupree (JD) said it best:
With the Douglass Bridge viaduct now demolished, the views looking north on South Capitol Street easily encompass both the ballpark and the Capitol dome. The Administration building at right is now topped out. Note the knife-edged clubhouse to the right. (10/21/07)
Above photo and caption by Washington Post real estate reporter Jacqueline Dupree http://www.jdland.com/dc/stadium.cfm?tab=no2
Looking across the roof of the under-construction admin building (or, as I call it, the bow of the S.S. Nationals), toward South Capitol Street and points south, including the new intersection at South Capitol and Potomac. I'm King of the World!!!
(9/1/07)
Above photo and caption Washington Post real estate reporter Jacqueline Dupree http://www.jdland.com/dc/stadium.cfm?tab=no3
Dupree hit the nail on the head with that caption of the view from that triangular shaped clubhouse, with the phrase she selected “King of the World”
She furthermore made a great analogy of it as the ‘bow of the S.S. Nationals’ and in the context of an event filled with VIPs in April 2008. Its a quite clear allusion of the political arrogance this structure reflects, as roughly analogous to the part of the Titanic that hit the iceberg.
It's an arrogance that can be quite apparant to anyone seeing and comprehending that 1990s Extending the Legacy South Capitol Mall proposal, the utter lack of reporting, discussion, debate, and that St. Vincent DePaul Church at South Capitol and M Street, as the only building fronting South Capitol Street saved by the mall’s cancellation as a monumental indicator of the continuing cloaked rule.
A White House Sell Out
http://wwwfreespeechbeneathushs.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Otto Habsburg Said to Hate Serbia- but what about Wlodimir Ledochowski?
Reportedly blaimed Serbia for bringing about the end of Austria-Hungary
Otto Habsburg Dies.
Was son of Charles I- last Emperor of Austria-Hungary (1916-1918), and Zita (1892-1989).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Habsburg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_Austria
Charles I was son of Otto Franz (1865-1906), brother of Franz Ferdinand (1864-1914), whose June 28, 1914 assassination alongside his part German Czech wife, insufficently dynastic Sophia Chotek, married "morganatically" (meaning no succession via their offspring), was used to spark WWI.
United States of Greater Austria- Franz Ferdinand sought extending greater rights and powers for the nationalities beyond German and Hungarian.
Otto Franz and Franz Ferdinand were sons of Archduke Karl Ludwig- brother of Austria-Hungary Emperor Franz Joseph, who was born in 1830, became Emperor 1848, reigning to his death in 1916.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archduke_Karl_Ludwig_of_Austria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Joseph_I_of_Austria
Emperor Franz Joseph was married to Emperess Elisabeth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_of_Bavaria
Together, they had a son, Crown Prince Rudolf, born 1858, who committed suicide in 1889 under unusual circumstances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Prince_Rudolf_of_Austria
Some 9 years later in 1898, Empress Elisabeth was assassinated via a stabbing by "anarchist" Luigi Lucheni.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Lucheni
One of her pages was the future Jesuit Superior General of the time of the end of the Austria-Hungary Empire.
Otto Habsburg Dies.
Was son of Charles I- last Emperor of Austria-Hungary (1916-1918), and Zita (1892-1989).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Habsburg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_Austria
Charles I was son of Otto Franz (1865-1906), brother of Franz Ferdinand (1864-1914), whose June 28, 1914 assassination alongside his part German Czech wife, insufficently dynastic Sophia Chotek, married "morganatically" (meaning no succession via their offspring), was used to spark WWI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand_of_Austria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand_of_Austria
Historians have disagreed on how to characterize the political philosophies of Franz Ferdinand, some attributing generally liberal views on the empire's nationalities while others have emphasized his dynastic centralism, Catholic conservatism, and tendency to clash with other leaders.[9] He advocated granting greater autonomy to ethnic groups within the Empire and addressing their grievances, especially the Czechs in Bohemia and the Yugoslavic peoples in Croatia and Bosnia, who had been left out of the Austro-Hungarian compromise of 1867.[17] Yet his feelings towards the Hungarians were less generous; he regarded Magyar nationalism as a revolutionary threat to the Habsburg dynasty and reportedly became angry when officers of the 9th Hussars Regiment (which he commanded) spoke Magyar in his presence - despite the fact that it was the official regimental language.[10] He further regarded the Hungarian branch of the Dual Monarchy's army, the Honvédség, as an unreliable and potentially threatening force within the empire, complaining at the Hungarians' failure to provide funds for the joint army[18] and opposing the formation of artillery units within the Hungarian forces.[19]
He also advocated a careful approach towards Serbia - repeatedly locking horns with Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Vienna's hard-line Chief of the General Staff, warning that harsh treatment of Serbia would bring Austria-Hungary into open conflict with Russia, to the ruin of both Empires.
He was disappointed when Austria-Hungary failed to act as a Great Power, such as during the Boxer Rebellion; in 1900 other nations, including, in his description, "dwarf states like Belgium and Portugal",[20] sent troops to protect Westerners and punish the Chinese, but Austria-Hungary did not.
Franz Ferdinand was a prominent and influential supporter of the Austro-Hungarian Navy in a time when sea power was not a priority in Austrian foreign policy and the Navy was relatively little known and supported by the public. After his assassination in 1914, the Navy honoured Franz Ferdinand and his wife with a lying in state aboard the SMS Viribus Unitis.
United States of Greater Austria- Franz Ferdinand sought extending greater rights and powers for the nationalities beyond German and Hungarian.
Otto Franz and Franz Ferdinand were sons of Archduke Karl Ludwig- brother of Austria-Hungary Emperor Franz Joseph, who was born in 1830, became Emperor 1848, reigning to his death in 1916.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archduke_Karl_Ludwig_of_Austria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Joseph_I_of_Austria
Emperor Franz Joseph was married to Emperess Elisabeth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_of_Bavaria
Together, they had a son, Crown Prince Rudolf, born 1858, who committed suicide in 1889 under unusual circumstances.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Prince_Rudolf_of_Austria
Some 9 years later in 1898, Empress Elisabeth was assassinated via a stabbing by "anarchist" Luigi Lucheni.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Lucheni
One of her pages was the future Jesuit Superior General of the time of the end of the Austria-Hungary Empire.