Posted: October 12, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized
There has been a lot of speculation on the Position of Joe Biden on increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Quite a few Democrats have come out in favor of this but Joe Biden has not only refused to publicly state his position on it but he has gone so far as to state the voters don’t deserve an answer to that question.
Now the position of Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular seems pretty clear to me, but it might not be so for others so as a former programmer let me express it in the form of an early form of computer codeing namely an If / Then / ELSE statement.
IF
Joe Biden is Elected President of the United States
THEN
Increasing the size of the SCOTUS is a needed reform that Democrats in General and Joe Biden in particular, support.
ELSE
Increasing the size of the court would be a usurpation of power that Democrats in General and Joe Biden in particular, oppose.
END IF
Or to put it another way the Democrats are in favor of “court packing” as long as they are the ones doing the packing.
(1) The Supreme Court shall be limited to a maximum of 9 sitting justices
(2) This amendment shall be allotted twelve months from the date of passage for ratification by the states with a single extension of twelve months if requested by single any member of congress.
I’d make the Democrats who don’t want to say if they will pack the court vote on this amendment and I’d make every Democrat House and Senate Candidate be forced to have a position on this issue ASAP
Here is the text if you can’t read the screen shot:
“The Holy Bible is available in almost every language on earth: the Episcopal Conferences take care of the continuous updating of the translations. In order to have access to the latest Bible version, kindly consult the website of your Episcopal Conference. ”
Seriously you’re the vatican and you TOOK THE &(#$(@(% BIBLE OFF YOUR WEB SITE! You actually think it’s more important to carry a 13-year-old document by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace available for visitors than the Bible?
What on earth is going on in Rome?
And about a week later I noted that the Vatican had restored the Bible to their web site but did not make it visible to people looking for the Scripture:
So the question on the floor is this: What on earth is going on? If you are still referring people to the local sites and not providing a link to the Bible, why put sacred scripture back up if you’re going to make it tough to find?
Two logical answers come to mind
A charitable suggestion would be that people realized that even though they wanted people to go to local sites for scripture, every single document on the Vatican site since it went up that had existing links to the former online scripture became dead once it was pulled. Fixing all those links would be an expensive, time consuming and frankly herculean task. So given the choice between fixing those links or putting scripture back up without a direct link to it they choose the latter. If I had been their tech advisor that’s certainly the advice I’d have given to fix the problem.
A much less charitable explanation would be that the Vatican didn’t like the blowback from pulling the Bible but didn’t want to link to it, so they put it back up without a direct link to allow a spokesman to say “Of COURSE sacred scripture is available at our site, we just prefer you to use our local sites translation.” or in other words: “Beware of the Leopard!”
Here is the screen shot from that date of the page in question
Well there has been a development.
Yesterday I was reading my daily scripture from the Vatican site I ended up clicking not on the back button to get to the reference page of the bible but on the keys of Peter which took me to the front page of the Vatican Web site which I haven’t visited in the three years since those posts.
I thought I’d poke around as I was curious if there had been any change to operation “hide the bible”. You will note that on the front page there is no link to the Bible so most people who might visit looking for it might use the search function
And of course if you did a search for the bible using the Vatican search engine it would to my complete and utter lack of shock, avail you naught.
However I remembered that the Bible had been kept under Archive under Francis rather than linked on the home page as it once was. So on the front page of the Vatican Site I clicked on Archive.
On the Archive page there was a link at the top that said “bible” which was a good sign but there were to other things that jumped out at me.
w of course I remembered that the Bible was on the Archive site if you were going to the Vatican site and didn’t know it was there you might have to do a search for it.
Before we click on the bible link I want to note the addition to the Catechism of the Catholic church link which based on wayback machine searches was added between July 17th and Aug 11th of 2018 meaning that from that date people going to the Vatican site wanting to find that official church positions on various subjects by checking the actual Catechism of the church were dissuaded from doing so at least if you are a person who speaks English because if you read Italian.
or Spanish
Or French, Portuguese , German or even Latin the Vatican Catechism has no such disclaimer. Why it’s almost as if there is a direct effort to keep English speaking folk in general and American in particular unsure of the actual teachings of the church if they wanted to find it online.
Not that they would have found the Catechism anyways as you can see from this result from the Vatican Search engine anyways, but we digress..
Well once we are on the page we can now click on the Bible link and lo and behold we have a different page than before!
While we still have the disclaimer that we had before asking you to look elsewhere we also have a direct link to the Bible online were a person can actually click on it and read it at the Vatican site.
Yeah you still won’t find it in the search engine and yeah you have to know to click on the “archive” link to get there but this still a vast improvement on the whole “Yoo Hoo Bible” game that the Vatican was playing before.
But I still miss the days when we these words from Christ…
Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one.
Posted: October 10, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized
As the election churns to its finish, and as pundits and polls try to tell us who the winner will be, it’s useful to remember that, as the saying goes, culture is upstream from politics. Culture has a greater and longer-lasting effect on our lives and our families than whoever wins a single election. The product of our arts, our sports, our religion, our education, culture informs our values, our ways of seeing the world and the people around us.
When we study the past, few will ever remember what laws were passed when, or what votes were cast by whom. Instead, we tend to look at an era’s literature, at the architecture, at the music and paintings and sculpture to understand the people of the past. A quick traipse through western civilization and you’ll find such luminaries as Beethoven, Shakespeare, Moliere, and, uh, Cardi B.
It’s of course bad enough that something as low and base as the rapper’s “W.A.P.” would find popularity. But leave it to the Democrats and Joe Biden to confer legitimacy on the demeaning and classless pop star by giving her an interview with him. What an example to set for the American people.
In another recent interview, with Hollywood trade publication Deadline, the British comic book author Alan Moore, who created the popular graphic novels, “The Watchmen” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” (both of which have been adapted into movies) lamented how pop culture has been overtaken by superhero stories. “I have no interest in superheroes, they were a thing that was invented in the late 1930s for children, and they are perfectly good as children’s entertainment. But if you try to make them for the adult world then I think it becomes kind of grotesque.”
Unfortunately, our culture, especially our pop culture, has been overtaken by these grotesques. But then Moore points to 2016, when the infantilization reflected at the box office, when half of the top twelve movies featured superheroes, and sees a link to the voters of Britain and the U.S. electing that year to leave the EU and electing Donald Trump president, respectively — elections that, according to Moore, reflected the infantilization of the population.
But here I think Moore gets it wrong. The true infantilization of the population is reflected in policies that, for example, keep young adults up to age 26 on their parents’ insurance policies, policies that seek to establish an ever-more paternalistic state too watch over us, make sure we get the right foods, the right medicines, the right rental rates for our apartments.
Our pop culture is dominated by children’s stories and vulgarities. It’s quite a change from the days of Shakespeare and Mozart. Or even Hemingway and Ellington. It should come as no surprise our politics are in the shape they are in. The waters flowing through need filtering.
According to Comscore data, the Drudge Report had 1.488 million unique visitors in July 2020 — the most recent month for which data is available. That’s down 38.0% from July 2019, when the site boasted 2.399 million unique visitors.
Remarking on a post that said the Drudge Report had seen a “historic crash,” the president wrote on Twitter Sunday, “Such an honor! Drudge is down 40% plus since he became Fake News. Most importantly, he’s bleeding profusely, and is no longer “hot”. But others are! Lost ALL Trumpers.”
The President who has been a frequent target of the change in editorial direction for Drudge has weighed in.
Such an honor! Drudge is down 40% plus since he became Fake News. Most importantly, he’s bleeding profusely, and is no longer “hot”. But others are! Lost ALL Trumpers. https://t.co/LdsYWKmgdL
Drudge’s move raises some interesting questions that we simply don’t know the answer to. Here are some that come to mind. All of these questions presume that he has not actually sold the company:
Matt Drudge came on the scene where there was pretty much no media servicing the conservative point of view. Did Mr. Drudge see this as a potential profitable market to be served independent of his personal views and act accordingly or did conservatism reflect his actual views at the time which coincided with market demand.
Until the rise of Donald Trump Drudge was considered a reliable conservative voice. Is the editorial change exclusively a “NeverTrump” or “Trump must Go” change or will this be a permanent move to the left?
Is the current editorial stance of the Drudge report revenue based, that is, has he accepted a large fee or regular fees to steer his coverage in its current direction?
Does the current editorial direction of the Drudge report reflect Mr. Drudge’s personal views, if so does this reflect an evolution of his views or the fact that he is comfortable enough financially that he no longer needs to promote views he disagrees with to live well?
Given that Matt Drudge is considered a rather private person and that he has done very well for decades does he really give a damn if his traffic is down or not?
In the end none of this matters. You can make a very nice living off advertising for a site that gets a 1/3 of what he is currently drawing now so unless Drudge has creditors chasing him or unless his name is recorded somewhere on a Ghislaine Maxwell’s list that we haven’t seen it’s very likely that Mr. Drudge is not going to be all that concerned about what anyone else thinks about his traffic
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