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Cabrini: a film about faith and persistence

Posted: March 26, 2024 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

Cabrini, a film about a Catholic nun who built orphanages and hospitals worldwide, is the best movie I have seen in years.

The storyline is outstanding. In 1850, a small and sickly girl, Francesca Cabrini, was born two months prematurely to a farm family in Italy. In her teens, she decided to give her life to Christ. The Daughters of the Sacred Heart rejected her, considering her too weak to endure convent life. She persisted and became a number in 1877, taking the name Frances Xavier Cabrini.

Years before, while visiting her uncle, Father Don Luigi Oldini, she placed violets into paper boats, dropped them into a stream, and imagined they carried her and other missionaries to China, where the great St. Francis Xavier had journeyed 300 years before.

When she founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1880, she told Pope Leo XIII she wanted to travel to Asia with her small group of sisters. However, the pope had another idea and sent her to the United States, where Italian immigrants lived in the harsh streets of New York. 

Pope Leo expressed skepticism about that journey and its challenges, given her weakness–a worry compounded when people met her because she was barely five feet tall. But she told him, “We can serve our weakness, or we can serve our purpose. We can’t do both.”

The cinematography and acting are compelling. 

Director Alejandro Monteverde provides a jarring, tightly focused tour of the underside of New York, where the poor scavenged for a life. 

Mother Cabrini, superbly portrayed by Cristiana Dell’Anna, encountered slums, hunger, disease, and virulent anti-Italian sentiment—even among many Irish Catholics, not least among them Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan, played by David Morse. 

The dialogue alternates between Italian and English, but I didn’t find the subtitles as annoying as I often do. Sometimes, the translations were a bit off, but not disturbingly so. 

The movie is not a religious hagiography. Despite almost overwhelming odds, it demonstrates what one person can accomplish. 

Before she died in 1917, Mother Cabrini helped build 67 schools, orphanages, and hospitals worldwide, including in China. 

She was canonized in 1946 and became known in the United States as the patron saint of immigrants.

Pennsylvania: Democrats can’t pay the bills

Posted: March 19, 2024 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, faces a fundamental problem: the state doesn’t have enough money to pay for programs he promised in his campaign.

The choice is obvious, either reduce the budget or raise taxes. But he wants to avoid making the tough calls. Instead, he wants to spend $3.5 billion to stabilize transit systems, fund a K-12 education overhaul, and expand the state’s economic development programs.

Pennsylvania has what’s known as a structural deficit. The state’s annual costs, such as paying public servants and providing health care to people who can’t afford it, exceed its yearly tax revenue.

Unlike the federal government, Pennsylvania cannot go into debt to cover its operating expenses. The state constitution prohibits the commonwealth from taking on debt except in a few specific scenarios, such as disaster relief.

Spotlight, an independent news operation, notes that the conundrum will not go away soon. “If Pennsylvania had to rely solely on the tax revenue the Shapiro administration projects to bring in over the next few years, it wouldn’t be able to cover the tab,” the news organization said recently.

The issue affects Pennsylvania’s local governments, which would have to pick up much of the tab. Perhaps more important, the state, which hovers between Democrats and Republicans in presidential contests, may put the Democrats in a bad light in the 2024 election, particularly in the Trump-Biden contest and a U.S. Senate race.

“If you’re serving a larger population with the same number of workers, or if you have costs that are going up and your budget stays flat, often that means that effectively public services have been reduced,” said Josh Goodman, a researcher with the Pew Charitable Trusts.

When the state refuses to increase funding for education and other services, the costs are passed on to counties, school districts, and nonprofits that rely on state dollars, said William Glasgall, senior director of public finance at Volcker Alliance, a good-government group.

“Even without new initiatives, you have rising costs,” Glasgall said. “And if the projection of revenues does not match that, you have a structural deficit.”

Pennsylvania’s failure to address its structural deficit may also have severe consequences if it needs to borrow money. Glasgall said lenders could increase the cost. Even now, the state has one of the worst fiscal ratings in the nation.

Pennsylvania’s divided executive and legislative branches have used various techniques that experts say hide the real cost of government. These include accounting gimmicks, delaying payments to state contractors, leaving job openings unfilled, or flat funding key programs to make the numbers work.

If the Democrats can’t offer their constituencies the usual goodies, the party may face a significant backlash. Alternatively, a tax increase would also not sit well with both parties.

Elon Musk

Posted: March 12, 2024 by chrisharper in Uncategorized

By Christopher Harper

I doubt I will ever own an electric car. I have no desire to be a colonizer of Mars. But I’m happy that Elon Musk is interested in EVs and Mars and bought Twitter, now known as X.

As a result, I decided to learn more about the 52-year-old Musk and read Walter Isaacson’s useful and somewhat flawed biography of the billionaire entrepreneur.

Isaacson details the trials and tribulations of Musk’s ventures as he used his engineering background to dig deep into the workings of automobiles, space flight, artificial intelligence, and social media.

A member of a wealthy South African family, Musk was born in Pretoria and immigrated to Canada at 18, obtaining citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford but dropped out after a few days.

Musk co-founded the online software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. After Compaq paid $307 million to acquire Zip2, Musk bootstrapped his earnings into various businesses, starting in 1999 with X.com, an online bank.

With the $100 million he made from eBay’s purchase of PayPal, Musk founded SpaceX, a spaceflight services company. Two years later, he became an early investor in EV manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.). He became its chairman and product architect, assuming the position of CEO in 2008. Seven years later, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company. In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink, a company developing interfaces between human brains and computers. In 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion. He merged the company into the newly created X Corp. and rebranded the service as X the following year.

Isaacson reports how Musk almost went bankrupt in 2008 when Tesla couldn’t meet its production quotas, and SpaceX had trouble getting its rockets to fly successfully. But Musk marched down to the production floors of his businesses, reengineering key components, cutting costs, and turning the corporations into viable operations. According to Forbes, by 2012, he was the wealthiest person in the world.

Isaacson’s intimate portrait of Musk describes his bullying in early life at home and school. He also suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism, which makes him capable of intense concentration on complicated details of running his businesses but also makes him rather meteoric and unpredictable in his decisions and his relationships with partners and employees.

Unfortunately, Isaacson tells the stories chronologically, so the year-by-year structure jumps from business to business rather than giving a comprehensive picture of one operation at a time.

Twitter is the most interesting example of Musk’s tenacity. Only weeks after buying the company, he fired more than 75 percent of what he considered bloated staff, mainly because of what he considered the leftist bent of the enterprise’s massive “content moderation.” He invited journalists to investigate the previous regime of Twitter, which provided interesting reading and even congressional hearings into the way the company was run and how the content moderators had censored various stories, such as those on Hunter Biden.

What comes across is that Musk is an amazing entrepreneur and visionary–albeit a rather complicated character to understand.

Defining the real divide in America

Posted: March 5, 2024 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

For more than 50 years, I worked in two elite professions, currently known as the “talking professions” of university professors, journalists, lawyers, actors, and lobbyists.

Only in the past few years have I realized how dangerous these professions and elites can be. 

Stephen Moore, the co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, just published a study entitled “Them vs. U.S.” examining how America’s cultural elites are hopelessly out of touch with ordinary Americans. The study defined a member of the elite as someone with at least one postgraduate degree, a $150,000-plus annual income, a high-density urban residence, and Ivy League school attendance. 

“First, there are the cultural and overeducated snobs — the kind of people who religiously read The New York Times, drive electric vehicles, wear Harvard or Yale sweaters, and have never even heard of NASCAR or eaten at Popeyes or ridden a John Deere tractor,” Moore wrote recently. “And then there is normal Main Street America. The snobs thumb their collective noses at the unrefined working-class Americans. The elites believe they are intellectually, culturally, and morally superior to the working class and rural America. You won’t see too many elites at a Trump rally with 30,000 people.”

Following are some of the findings:

Financial Well-being: Nearly three-quarters of the elites surveyed believe they are better off financially than when Joe Biden entered the White House. Less than 20% of ordinary Americans feel the same way.

Individual Freedom: Elites are three times more likely than all Americans to say there is too much personal freedom in the country. Almost half of the elites and 6 of 10 Ivy Leaguers say there is too much freedom.

Climate Change: 72% of the elites—including 81% of the elites who graduated from the top universities—favor banning gas cars. Majorities of elites would also ban gas stoves, nonessential air travel, SUVs, and private air conditioning. 

Education: Most elites think that teachers’ unions and school administrators should control school agendas. Most mainstream Americans think that parents should make these decisions.

“Crime, illegal immigration, inflation, fentanyl, and factory closings aren’t keeping the elite up at night because in their cocoons, they don’t encounter these problems on a daily basis the way so many Americans do today. Not too many Main Street Americans are losing sleep about climate change or LGBTQ issues,” Moore wrote. 

Although the study did not analyze recent media accounts, it is readily apparent that the left is ramping up counterattacks. For example, MSNBC launched an attack on those who consider the United States as a country founded as a Christian nation. These people are called “Christian nationalists.” 

Also, Paul Krugman, arguably the worst prize-winning economist in history, wrote recently in DaTimes that “white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy.”

Having lived in big cities and small towns, I think the Committee to Unleash Prosperity’s poll provides a far better understanding of the divide in the United States. 

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