A Very Deep Bow

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Last Thursday, our illustrious Secretary of State, Antony Blinken tweeted out a straightforward, plain-spoken message of support for Hong Kongers following the People’s Republic of China’s disqualification of seven of Hong Kong’s local district councilors from holding the offices to which they were elected.

The PRC’s Foreign Ministry’s Hong Kong office objected to Blinken’s tweet, as summarized by the South China Morning Post.

strongly opposing “irresponsible comments from certain US politicians” on Hong Kong, saying that “no US slanders” would deter the nation’s determination to enforce “patriots administering Hong Kong”.

Blinken promptly deleted his tweet and put out this much milder effort:

Talk about bending down. Wow.

Pope Francis, Communion, and Abortion

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This is a subject into which I’m going to poke my Protestant nose, which may be a symptom of my own sin of arrogance, but there it is.

Pope Francis insists that communion is a gift to all of us, not a prize for the perfect. He also says,

What must the pastor do? Be a pastor; don’t go condemning. Be a pastor, because he is a pastor also for the excommunicated.

He’s right, too, as far as he goes.

He also emphasizes

Whoever has an abortion kills. It is a human life. This human life must be respected—this principle is so clear.

He’s right here, too.

But while communion is for us sinners, including the excommunicated, for us who truly try to do better, who truly try to repent for our past failures, can it really be for those don’t bother, for those who reject the Church’s teachings outright?

It seems to me that those latter have taken themselves out of the church [sic] altogether. It’s not so much that they should be, or are, denied communion; they’ve made themselves ineligible for it.

And so it is for those who claim to be anti-abortion personally but fine with abortion for others. That strikes me as an especially grievous example of a sin of hypocrisy.

Bishop Michael Olson of the Ft Worth, Tx, Diocese:

He [Pope Francis] wants us to be pastors, and we also want to be pastors. But a pastor is not just a mascot for one’s private point of view.

Inflation

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The subheadline on a recent wall Street Journal editorial claimed

Voters know how much prices are rising even if politicians don’t.

As some might expect, I have a couple things to say about that.

One thing is that politicians certainly do know prices are rising, and they know the rate of rise; they just don’t care.

The other thing is that there is a world of difference between price rise, inflation, and price level, what we actually pay.

It may be the case that price rise/inflation is abating, and to the extent it is, that’ll be useful for us consumers’ planning for our future expenses. But until price levels return to the status quo ante Wuhan Virus, we’ll still be paying those higher prices, and that still will continue damaging our pocketbooks.

Is Justice Served?

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Marc Baier, Ryan Adams and Daniel Gericke, who illegally transferred computer-hacking technology to the United Arab Emirates, have successfully pled out their crimes of computer fraud and violating export control laws, and they’ve received their sentences.

The men will have to pay $1.7 million to resolve the criminal charges in the “Hacking for Hire” operation.

Their deal also includes

a deferred prosecution agreement also requiring the men to cooperate with the investigation, sever ties with any UAE intelligence or law enforcement agencies, and forego security clearances. The Justice Department will abandon the prosecution if they comply with those and other terms for three years[.]

Never mind that computer fraud, on a first conviction, is punishable by prison terms of up to 10 years, and that export control violations are punishable by prison terms of up to 5 years.

This compares with a navy sailor who ignorantly took souvenir pictures in a classified area of a submarine, and then actually did a year in jail.

Justice most assuredly was not served. The three men, with their wealth, were able to buy their way out into light sentences and a supervision period much less than the jail time for which they were eligible.

In Which I Disagree

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There is a bipartisan bill afoot that would cut all taxpayer-based funding for any gain-of-function research into any virus or bacterium for at least next five years.

I disagree.

As the Wuhan Virus, which the People’s Republic of China government released onto the world (whether by design or by incompetent lab carelessness) demonstrates, we need, desperately, to understand such plussed up biologics, whether they’ve been…enhanced…for politico-military use, as our enemies are surely researching, or they’ve naturally jumped from their animal origins to human infectiousness.

That requires gain-of-function research because that’s the only way we’ll be able quickly to understand and then to respond to a new disease. We just need to do the research entirely domestically rather than relying on, or paying, our enemies to do the research for us.