Category Archives: culture

An Arrogant Pope

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Recall that French (should be ex-)Cardinal Philippe Barbarin was convicted of covering up the child sexual abuses inflicted by his priests.  Pursuant to that conviction, Barbarin tendered his resignation as Cardinal to Pope Francis.

Amazingly, the Pope refused the resignation.

“Monday morning, I handed over my mission to the Holy Father. He spoke of the presumption of innocence and did not accept this resignation,” Barbarin said in a statement.

Being convicted of a crime in a petty secular court apparently doesn’t satisfy the Pope’s definition of guilt.

Of course, the Pope also could have been operating off the French court’s sentence for Barbarin’s barbarity.  The court sentenced Barbarin to all of six months in jail. And then suspended even that. If the French don’t care about Barbarin’s terrible actions, there wouldn’t seem much reason for the Pope to, either.  Maybe not so arrogant.

Journalistic Dishonesty

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It turns out that a major player in the NLMSM, Reuters, had some dirt on Robert Francis O’Rourke a year before his Progressive-Democratic Party campaign for Senator in Texas in the 2018 season—and spiked the story rather than publishing it in real time, or during the campaign, because the information, in Reuters‘ view, could have hurt O’Rourke.

It seems that a teenaged Ol’ Beto was a member of the

“Cult of the Dead Cow,” a famous group of hackers credited with inventing the term “hacktivism….”
The group is responsible for a variety of shady activit[ies] like stealing credit card numbers to pay for long-distance telephone service, violating copyright laws, and hacking into computers, according to [Reuters], which stressed that O’Rourke himself never “engaged in the edgiest sorts of hacking activity.”

What’s of import today is not that misspent youth—Ol’ Beto isn’t the first misbehaving teenager who subsequently grew up—but the fact that this news outlet spiked a story because exposing the information might hurt their Chosen One.  This is the rationalization of Joe Menn, the “journalist” who hid the information with Reuters‘ approval [emphasis added]

“While he was on leave from Reuters and writing a book on the Cult of the Dead Cow, Joe Menn made an agreement regarding the embargo date of his interview with Beto O’Rourke. This is a common arrangement between journalists and sources, which we described in detail in a Reuters Backstory article on Friday,” a Reuters spokesperson told Fox News.

That just shows how pervasive and long-standing the dishonesty in what passes for today’s journalism is.  It’s OK to spike an unfriendly story, and it’s equally OK to go in real time with no hard facts on a story that destroys the lives of other teenagers—Catholic high school students, for instance.

These guys aren’t even capable of recognizing dishonesty any more.

Progressive-Democrats Politicizing Banking?

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Who would have thought such a thing?

House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) has decided to use her committee to go after the hated banking industry.  Congresswoman and Committee member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) has announced

We’re going to hold oversight hearings to make these banks accountable for investing in and making money off of the detention of immigrants[.]

Dangerously, and sadly, the overt intimidation seems to be working.

On February 5 JPMorgan Chase announced it will no longer do business with private prisons. In January Wells Fargo said it would no longer market to private prison companies, aiming to achieve the same objective by attrition.

Never mind that the Progressive-Democratic Party—then just the Democratic Party, with 61 Senators and 292 Representatives in that 95th Congress—politicized, and racialized, banking ‘way back in 1977 with their Community Reinvestment Act.

Today’s bankers are bowing and scraping and showing the same abject cowardice that bankers in the late ’70s and ’80s displayed when those Democrats attacked the banks for being banks—and for concerning themselves with their fiduciary duty to their owners and investors regarding loan risk.

It’s going to be a long two years for the American financial industry and so for our economy.

Wages of Bigotry?

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It seems that some Americans are waking up to the institutional bigotry of the Progressive-Democratic Party, an awakening triggered by the blatant disregard for Party antisemitism that House Progressive-Democrats proudly displayed in their refusal last month to censure Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN) over her anti-Semitic statements.  In that instance, Party chose, instead, to pass a heavily diluted resolution “disapproving” of bigotry in “all its forms,” but refusing to name the names of bigots in its own house.  Some Americans with Jewish heritage and religion are speaking up with dismay.

Mark Schwartz (D) Deputy Mayor of Teaneck, NJ:

We felt we had a home there [in the Party].  And now we feel like we have to check our passports.

Jordan Manor, a “gay Jewish Israeli-American” of Manhattan:

 The party I thought cared about me seems to disregard me when it comes to my Jewish identity.

Mark Dunec, Livingston, NJ, consultant and 2014 Progressive-Democratic candidate for Congress:

I’m physically afraid for myself and for my family.  I see my own party contributing to the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States.

A teacher in Queens has rejected Omar’s—and by extension, Pelosi’s—defense that Omar just didn’t know any better.

The fake defense she doesn’t know what she’s saying? I don’t believe it.  This is a grown woman and a member of Congress. Trying to excuse this as naivete is inexcusable.

It isn’t just anger, either; many are acting.  The Queens teacher has quit Party and now is registered as an Independent.  Allison Gangi of Manhattan, too:

The watered-down resolution triggered my decision to walk away from the Democratic Party.

That Teaneck Deputy Mayor?

Our only question now is, do we start voting Republican, or do we become Republicans?

And others, like this one, see the danger explicitly:

I’m homeless. I don’t think I can vote for Trump, even though he’s great for Israel.  But as a Jew, I can’t see a way to support the Democratic Party. It’s supporting your own destruction.

Alphabet Objects

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Alphabet, through its Google subordinate, objects to the White House’s and JCS’ characterization of it as aiding our enemy, the People’s Republic of China.

An anonymous (perhaps because he’s speaking without Google management’s permission, perhaps because he, or that management, is embarrassed by his claims) Google spokesperson said

We are not working with the Chinese military. We are working with the US government, including the Department of Defense, in many areas including cybersecurity, recruiting and healthcare.

Yet Alphabet has withdrawn Google from working with our defense establishment on drone or artificial intelligence technologies that could be used for active defense of our nation.

On the other hand, Alphabet has engaged Google with the People’s Republic of China for work supporting PRC government censorship via a censored and censorable version of a search engine for use in the PRC.  Alphabet has engaged Google with the PRC for work on aspects of AI—ostensibly for that censorable search engine—that can be used by the PRC’s People’s Liberation Army for its own defensive and offensive operations.