An Unexpected Vatican “Yoo Hoo, Bible” (and Catechism) Update

Posted: October 11, 2020 by datechguy in catholic, Uncategorized
Tags: , ,

You might remember a few years ago (July 14th 2017 to be exact) I was rather shocked to find that the Bible had been pulled from the Vatican Site.

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.

Matthew 5:37

…were unambiguously at least the public policy of the Holy See.

Diplomacy done right for Taiwan and India

Posted: October 10, 2020 by ng36b in Uncomfortable Truths, war
Tags: , , , , ,
Image from: https://www.imrmedia.in/india-rattles-china-appoints-new-envoy-to-taiwan/

Perhaps the only country not having a horrible 2020 might be Taiwan. Taiwan was one of the few countries to fight the spread of COVID-19 well, despite its proximity to Communist China. Later in the year, multiple US Navy vessels transited the Taiwan Straits, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated that the US is “a good partner for security” for Taiwan.

Now, on the day that is celebrated as Taiwan’s Independence Day (10 October, or “Double 10” day), #TaiwanNationalDay is trending throughout India. Communist China tried to snuff it out in advance with a strongly worded “reminder” that there is only one China. Not long ago China and India were fighting each other along their mountainous border, so its no surprise that this “reminder” found its way to the press. The reaction by Indians is telling. Even better, the timing is great, with Secretary Pompeo meeting with top Indian officials at the end of the month to discuss how to deepen ties between India and the United States.

After taking Hong Kong, China showed the world it will weather any storm of protests to achieve its own goals. Anything short of hard military and economic power doesn’t work. People continue to protest the horrible maltreatment of Uighurs and development of South China Sea artificial islands, and yet nothing has changed. The only reason China hasn’t grabbed Taiwan is the risk it faces of US military action. To get over this, China has built a navy now larger than the US (at least in terms of number of ships) and modernized its ground and rocket forces.

Traditional thinking would condemn the US to build an even bigger military, and recently Defense Secretary Esper called for just that: a 500 ship Navy. That’s currently a pipe dream, because we can’t even man the Navy we have now. The Navy currently has roughly 350,000 Sailors; an increase to 500 ships would require gaining at least 200,000 more, not to mention ships and Sailors take time to build and train.

But India? India is already worried about China. India is already in conflict. If Taiwan brings India into any future conflict with Communist China, its a winning move. China doesn’t want to fight on two fronts. It might be able to hold off the US long enough to cement gains in Taiwan, but its not going to do well if India pushes into its western territories. Worse still, if a place like Tibet or Xinjiang decides to not rejoin China, that could drag any conflict out for years, dragging down the economy and the Chinese middle class in the process. That’s a double whammy, because Communist China has to provide a good economy in exchange for not being a democracy. If the economy goes south for too long, it risks revolt.

Deepening ties with India is a smart move for Taiwan and the US. Let’s hope we get more of this diplomacy to stave off future conflicts.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

30 (32) Tips to Stay Married 30 (32) Years. #32 The Seven Second Delay

Posted: October 10, 2020 by datechguy in culture, personal
Tags:

Miranda: Ummm that was incredible. Was it good for you?

Fletcher: I’ve had better.

Liar Liar 1997

Of all the tips you have read so far this is the one that the two of us have the had the most trouble keeping.

On Radio there is a kill switch or if you know you are dealing with something that can cause grief you will have a seven second delay to allow the engineer, to keep something off the air that will get you in trouble. Marriage is the one other place where that can be most useful.

A seven second delay between the time you think something and the time you decide to say it aloud can be one of the best ways to keep a marriage strong.

The most obvious application is during an argument when someone will blurt out something that they instantly wish they could take back, or in a social setting when one might embarrass one’s spouse but believe it or not it’s OUTSIDE of such situations that this rule is most applicable.

A lifetime of watching sitcoms has had a bad effect in the sense that the idea that a conversation ends with a “zinger” might seem to be the norm, but the reality is that while that a good thing if your goal is to get a laugh from millions of viewers if your goal is a good relationship such a statement to your spouse is more likely to cause grief and not just grief the type of grief that doesn’t get expressed right away and is stored ready to be remembered as a grievance at a time of trouble perhaps even at a critical time.

This is your spouse not your “straight man” and there’s a reason why you haven’t quit your day job to go on tour.

It might take some practice, but getting that kill switch “installed” in your head will pay dividends for years to come.

The 30 (32) tips so far

Streaming Downward

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.

Older Entries
Newer Entries