Archive for April, 2022

I speak to John Atlas of Catholic Scouting at the 2022 Catholic Men’s Conference at Assumption College

To clarify, this is the Diocese being involved in the Boy and Girl Scouts of America and not some other organization as some seeing the headline might think. Like those of us who stay in blue states to fight the good fight the Worcester Diocese does a badge for scouting the emphasizes Catholic values fighting the good fight for kids and Christ within these organizations.

This is the last of my Catholic Men’s Conference interviews for 2022

While Don Surber is right to hit General Miley both on his destruction of the morale, discouraging recruitment and getting Afghanistan wrong I have to give him a little bit of a mulligan in terms of Kiev.

To my knowledge while very few people were cheering for Russia to conquer Ukraine to my knowledge very few outside observers anticipated a successful defense of Kiev. In fact I think the only public figure that had any confidence in Ukraine resisting Russia was Zelenskyy.

It is of course still early and the Russian Bear might return in force or even bearing battlefield nukes but right now it looks like Ukraine will still exist as a nation and the person who deserves the credit for it is Zelenskyy who shocked everyone by deciding to stay and fight rather than take the money and run.

Corruption and patriotism are apparently not mutually exclusive.


Between Catholic Cardinals and Bishops in Germany saying we need to rethink the catechism on Sodomy in Germany and Pope Francis excluding the crucifix from an event in Malta in Lent so as to not offend Muslim migrants who might attend it’s a very interesting time to be a Catholic of faith.

A great way to get though this is to remember that while people and cultures may change neither God, nor the message of Christ nor truth has and Truth is always pastoral and that this isn’t the first time we’re run into this kind of thing (remember when there were multiple Popes all claiming the chair of St. Peter?)

The Best way to get though it however is to keep the basics

  1. Go to mass
  2. Pray (particularly the Rosary)
  3. Have faith in the Holy Spirit and Christ words that the gates of Hell will not prevail against his church

And never forget love is being willing to say the truth to a person who might not want to hear it, but needs to hear it.


The most interesting thing about the pushback on the Florida law not allowing teachers to push sex on kids eight years old and younger and younger is the absolute apoplexy of teachers, particularly gay and transgender teachers at the thought of not be able to do so.

By any objective standard this should be the golden age for such people in the west. In three generations this stuff has gone from being illegal to being celebrated and affirmed to the point where if you don’t completely embrace the LGBTQ ETC ETC ETC agenda you risk your livelihood, your reputation and angry mobs harassing you.

So why are such folks, during the easiest time in the last 1000 years to be gay or lesbian or transgender in western civilization so insecure about their identifies and proclivities that they can’t function without pushing it on kids?

My own theory is that reality doesn’t care about such false cultural trappings. I think a creature that is made in the image of God can’t run from the internal, even instinctual feeling that something about them is wrong, so no amount of affirmation is enough to get them though the day.

That’s what happens when you take God out of society and replace it with an idol.

Having my own sins to deal and per the command of Christ I can’t judge such people but I do pity them.


The latest inflation numbers are out and are the worst that Americans under 40 have ever seen. and the worst since the days of Carter.

That Brings up an interesting thing about both the Biden and Trump administrations, I had very low expectations for both of them.

The degree of success he had both at home and domestically of those years was astounding. Repeatedly the good economic news was reported as “better than expected” by a press flummoxed by said success. The Trump years were the most prosperous years of my life since the early days of the George W. Bush Administration.

Trump not only exceeded my low expectation but did so beyond my wildest expectations.

As for Biden my expectations were even lower given the theft of the election. I expected a tough time.

We now have war in Europe, Inflation at Carter Admin levels, Oil and gas prices through the roof, Supreme Court Justices who don’t know what a woman is and don’t believe in natural rights and food shortages. FOOD SHORTAGES!

As I said I had very low expectation for the Biden administration but even these failures were beyond my wildest dreams.

If you told me in 1997 that twenty five years later I’d consider Bill Clinton would the most competent Democrat to hold the Whitehouse since Johnson and the Least Corrupt since Carter I wouldn’t have believed you.


Finally apparently we’re reached the point in Seattle where if you’re the victim of a sexual assault as far as the city is concerned you’re on your own:

So here we are in 2022 and as predicted the public safety situation has become untenable. The city lacks enough officers to investigate sexual assault cases. Maybe no one predicted this specific outcome but many warnings were given multiple times over the past 20 months that public safety was going to suffer because of the lack of staffing. That’s what happened. The predictions were correct. The defund the police supporters on the city council put the city in this position. They should be the ones answering for this mess.

This would be bad news for the woman of Seattle but as neither the mayor’s office nor the police are staffed by biologists apparently the city won’t come to that conclusion.

I find myself completely unable to muster any outrage over it as the people, like many others in blue cities are getting exactly the government they deserve.

I finally found an expert about Russia and Ukraine!

Posted: April 12, 2022 by chrisharper in Uncategorized

By Christopher Harper

Although I have spent a lot of time in Russia and Eastern Europe, I don’t consider myself an “expert’–unlike many of those talking heads on network television who have spent far less time than I have in situ.

Remember top U.S. military experts saying the Russians would roll over the Ukrainians? Simply put, they’ve been wrong about almost everything.

Nevertheless, I finally found someone who knows his stuff. William Browder is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management. As such, he managed the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia during the 1990s and 2000s.

Browder has since run afoul of Vlad and his minions. So much so that Putin has tried to arrest him and put him in prison. One of his colleagues, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested and died in prison.

In a recent interview with Andrew Sorkin, the co-anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Browder pitched his analysis from a new book on Russia. See https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Freezing-Order/Bill-Browder/9781982153281

Here is an edited version of that interview:

Sorkin: What do you think Mr. Putin’s endgame is at this point?

Browder: Putin is a dictator. One of the great benefits of dictatorship is that he can steal as much money as he chooses. And he chooses to steal a lot.

After a while, in a country where people sort of think they’re in a democracy, they start to see that they’re hungry and not being cared for in hospitals, and their children aren’t being educated. They start getting angry, and they get angry at the guy in charge. And so, every once in a while, the guy in charge has to do something to make people less angry at him.

The purpose of these wars is that he was afraid of being overthrown. And so the best way to do that is to get everyone to rally around the leader. And so, when you’re talking about an endgame, there is no endgame. This is just him staying in power.

Sorkin: As a longtime target of Mr. Putin’s — and someone who I imagine has tried to better understand what motivates him — what do you think he is thinking?

Browder: The problem is that there’s some psychological features that feed into this whole thing, which make it a particularly toxic brew. The world that he lives in is like a prison yard. This is a world where everybody is sort of eyeing each other up aggressively, and everybody has to show strength to each other. You know the most powerful person in a yard has to be the most vicious person in order to keep their power.

And so his idea was to just destroy Ukraine and then thump his chest and show everybody how powerful he is. But his misjudgment in how effectively the Ukrainians are fighting back has made him look stupid. And for a prison yard type of person, that’s the worst thing that could ever happen.

Sorkin: Do you think he understands that?

Browder: Of course.

Sorkin: Do you think everyone around him is a yes man?

Browder: It’s not just the people around him. It’s also the people in the West. The Ukrainians have shown him huge disrespect by successfully fighting back. And so, for example, the war crimes that have been committed are not by accident. This is part of his thing.

He’s got to show that he and his people and everybody around him are so vicious. They’ll just keep on escalating and upping the ante, and they don’t care what people think about them. In fact, they want people to think this bad stuff about them because that makes them look more brutal.

Sorkin: Given what you’re saying, what is a reasonable way to think about the endgame?

Browder: There is no reasonable way for this thing to end. There’s only an unreasonable way.

It’s either he ends up taking over Ukraine and then moving his way toward the Baltic countries to challenge us at NATO — or for him to be defeated by Ukraine and then having the Russian people overthrow him because he was the weak guy who couldn’t beat Ukraine.

Sorkin: How do you handicap those two options?

Browder: I think each of those options has a 15 percent probability.

Sorkin: What’s the remaining 70 percent probability?

Browder: That he and the Ukrainians and all of us are stuck in this low simmer. It’s not going to be at the same level of awfulness that it is right now, but at this low simmering conflict that just goes on and on and on for years.

I spoke to Stephan and Patti of the Urban Missionaries at the 2022 Catholic Men’s Conference at Assumption College.

Part of loving your neighbor is taking care of the people right in front of you.