Archive for June, 2021

Biden, Lieu and Remembering the 18

Posted: June 21, 2021 by datechguy in catholic, Church doctrine
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Hell will be no more bearable and Heaven no less glorious if you find yourself there next to someone you hated in life

DaTechGuy

There was an article at the Daily Mail in England that talked about the Biden Eucharist business that had a headline that I thought missed the point completely:

Biden goes to Mass ignoring bishops’ move
that could BLOCK him and other Catholic
politicians from receiving Communion if
they support abortion

If you are a properly catechized Catholic your reaction to that headline would be: Of COURSE he went to Mass. he SHOULD go to mass. As a Catholic he is required to go to Mass weekly on pain of mortal sin and the solution to being in a state of mortal sin isn’t to add another one on top of what you have.

Now of course he like any other Catholic who is at Mass but not in a state of grace should not receive although he can go up to the priest at communion with his arms crossed to receive a priestly blessing but he should absolutely be going to mass.

The reaction of those thinking he should not illustrates the other half of this story, the other sin that the Devil is trying to foster in us: Spiritual Pride.

Pride is the deadliest of the deadly sins and Spiritual pride C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape calls it the: “strongest and most beautiful of the vices”

The danger of us looking at a Biden or a Lieu or anyone else who is committing public sin and boasting of it is that we look at such a person and grade ourselves on a curve based on their actions. The puffing of ourselves up is the temptation that is being played on us and we would be wise to remember this warning from Christ:

At that time some people who were present there told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. He said to them in reply, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!

Or those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them   – do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did

Luke 13:1-5

We can rightly call out this sin and hope to avoid it but let’s make sure that we don’t use it as a distraction from examining our own conscience.

That’s the trap, don’t fall into it

Bloody hell

Posted: June 20, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

In Turkey, a controversy erupted because Ancestry.com revealed that many Turks have more Greek DNA than Turkish. The Turkish DNA Project, a “community project” that researches Oghuz Turks, forerunners of the Ottoman Turks that conquered Anatolia from the Greek Byzantine Empire, called for boycotts of Ancestry.com, and Ahval, an online news site reporting on Turkey but based in the United Arab Emirates, reports that revelations about Turkish DNA have “shaken Turkish beliefs in their “Turkishness.”

The Turks originated in northeastern, Asia before migrating across southwest Asia in the medieval period, leaving significant pockets of Turks in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Persia, among others. Anatolia had long been a crossroad between Europe and Asia, and had been the home of Hittites, Lydians, Celts, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and more. Classical Greece famously colonized much of Anatolia, establishing settlements along the Aegean coast and in Pontus on the Black Sea, and Istanbul itself began as a Greek colony called Byzantium. Alexander the Great spread Greek culture even further across Anatolia into Persia and India, and the Pontic King Mithridates the Great claimed descent from Alexander and from the Persian King Xerxes

In 1071, the Turks under defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert, and the conquest of Anatolia began. Constantinople was conquered by Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 after a 53-day siege, and the Turks continued to advance across the Balkans and into Greece itself, taking Greece’s Peloponnesian Peninsula by 1459, Bosnia in 1463, and the Greek island of Rhodes in 1529. It was in Wallachia, in the Balkans, that Mehmed II, in 1462, faced Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Vlad impaled 23,000 Turks before Mehmed II was able to take Wallachia, too. In 1683, the Turks were finally defeated by the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the Battle of Vienna, and the Turks never threatened Europe again. At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was broken up, and Turkey’s borders have remained relatively the same since.

All of this history just goes to show what a mix Anatolians are. Even Turkish President Erdogan hails from a formerly Greek town that’s since been Turkified, and though would never admit it, likely has significant Greek heritage. A funny little joke the Greeks played, submitting to the Ottomans only to turn them all at least partly Greek.

Which just goes to show how little blood has to do with culture, despite what the race essentialists claim. I touched on this a little bit on Twitter with Ricochet’s Jon Gabriel (no relation) and Australian writer Gray Connolly. Culture is far more about common languages and beliefs than about ancestry, so whether the Turks have Greek or Turkic blood doesn’t matter. The Turks are tied by Islam and by the Turkish language. Both Connolly and Gabriel made the point that under the Roman Empire, a Roman was anyone who swore allegiance to Rome. Blood mattered little.

I remember when the U.S. seemed headed that way. Seems so long ago.

Crime pays as NYC DAs drop most post-death-of-George Floyd looting and rioting charges

Posted: June 20, 2021 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, media, News/opinion, politics
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North Michigan Avenue in Chicago last summer after rioting

By John Ruberry

A bit more than a year ago most large American cities were struck by widespread rioting and looting after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. 

Of course for the most part the rioting was termed “unrest” by the mainstream media. In case you think reporters forgot what the word “riot” means, the “R” word was front in center in January news coverage after a pro-Donald Trump mob stormed the US Capitol. 

Local television reporters across the country–who are generally more credible than their dead-tree media counterparts–brought viewers many scenes of unmasked people emptying out stores. Some of the looters even posted their crimes on social media.

Were these outrages open-and-shut case for prosecutors? Yes, but not in the way you think. 

From NBC New York:

NYPD data reviewed by the NBC New York I-Team shows 118 arrests were made in the Bronx during the worst of the looting in early June. 

Since then, the NYPD says the Bronx DA and the courts have dismissed most of those cases – 73 in all. Eighteen cases remain open and there have been 19 convictions for mostly lesser counts like trespassing, counts which carry no jail time. 

Jessica Betancourt owns an eyeglass shop that was looted and destroyed along Burnside Avenue in the Bronx last June.

Those numbers, to be honest with you, is [sic] disgusting,” Betancourt said when told of the few cases being prosecuted.

According to the NBC New York, prosecutors are claiming that there is a backlog of cases because of the COVID-19 epidemic. “If they are so overworked that they can’t handle the mission that they’re hired for, then maybe they should find another line of work,” says former NYPD Chief of Patrol Wilbur Chapman.  True, that.

There is a similar pattern of prosecutorial malpractice in Manhattan too. The DA in Manhattan is Cyrus Vance Jr, the leftist zealot who is on a Captain Ahab-like quest to charge Donald Trump with crimes.

The primary focus of any prosecutor should be to protect the public. But are prosecutors subject to the “CSI Effect” that plagues trials? That is, short of videotaped confessions of criminals, there is always room for a scintilla of doubt–because cases laid out perfectly when presented in a television drama.

Maybe. But instead I suspect there is an even worse possibility.

During the rioting last summer in Chicago I watched live coverage on WGN-TV of a couple of women calmly loading their car with what must have been looted goods. The license plate of their car was readable. Locating the criminals should have been quite easy. I wonder if Cook County’s state’s attorney, the woke Kim Foxx who of course dropped the hoax charges against Jussie Smollett–since reinstated with a special prosecutor in charge–botherered to investigate those two looters?

Yes, I had to bring up Smollett. As a black man and a gay man–that’s a two-fer–the former Empire actor is automatically a double-victim. And since many of the looters were minorities, they are victims too. Not of course the owners of stores that were looted last year even though many of those shop owners were minorities too. The criminals are the victims here, it’s not the other way around. If this quasi-reasoning makes sense to you then I recommend that you watch less CNN and MSNBC–and cancel your subscription to The Atlantic.

Some in the dead-tree media have called these riots and outbreaks of looting an uprising. Here and here, for instance. Meanwhile, the investigation of the attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters, which The Media Elect is calling either a riot or an insurrection–is being aggressively pursued by federal prosecutors, and the allegd perpetatrors are being charged with low-level crimes such as tresspassing. Yes, they should be prosecuted. But to call the Capitol Riot, in the words some federal prosecutors, an “existential threat” to the republic is a gross exaggeration. And some of those alleged rioters are being held in solitary confinement in Gitmo-like conditions, including the moron who put his on Nancy Pelosi’s desk and the so-called QAnon Shaman. Yeah, I get it, the feds have jurisdiction over the Capitol attack, not New York or Chicago prosecutors. But the message to the public should be clear here.

Then there is Antifa, which for weeks was violently attacking nearly every night the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon. Where is the dogged federal investigation of those riots? 

But I fear some in prosecutorial circles sympathize with Antifa, as I strongly suspect they do in regards to the George Floyd “uprising.”

It seems that prosecutors are taking sides. And that in the right circumstances crime pays well for the criminals. 

But civil society cannot survive such a mindset. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

The Eucharistic as it Actually is

Posted: June 20, 2021 by datechguy in catholic, Church doctrine
Tags: , ,

With the left/media trying to turn the Eucharistic into an attendance prize it’s rather important to remember what it actually is and nothing illustrates it better than this image.

What happened is this. During the mass the priest when giving out the blood of Christ accidently spilled some on the carpet. When the mass was over he went to get the items necessary to clean up the precious blood he found that three nuns were kneeling before the spilled sacrament in adoration.

They know and they understand exactly what and more importantly WHO the Eucharist is and what a honor is it to be even in the presence of the blessed sacrament.

Would that not just Catholic pols but ALL Catholics and even all Christians had the same honor, reverence and understanding of the Eucharist that these three nuns have.

Here’s the video.

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