I seem to remember Robin Williams doing a riff on East German “Women” athletes years ago. For the life of me I can’t find it on Youtube anymore. I suspect two minutes of Williams riffing on “women athletes of East Germany” would make the left’s arguments on men in women’s sports untenable.
Well now we’ve had the first baseball game decided by the game clock. Bases loaded, two outs, bottom of the ninth, tied game, 3 balls two strikes and the next pitch doesn’t come, game over. Since I’m old enough to remember two hours games my suggestion is want faster games, sign pitchers who can pitch 7-8 innings a start.
The first Anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has passed and I’ve noticed an inordinate amount of people seem to have forgot about the events at the time. For weeks before Russia moved in Biden signaled Ukraine had to give in and when the came forward he was ready to evacuate Zelenskyy. Absolutely nobody expected Russia to be on the run with Ukraine still fighting today.
The Asbury revival seems to be spreading among protestants. Baylor is now seeing nightly prayer since February 19th. As a Catholic a church that has been doing 24/7 adoration for centuries my reaction is, that’s a nice start.
Finally just a few days after again getting evidence that the media is deceiving people to push an agenda concerning COVID that same media is declaring the Scott Adams is a racist who must be shunned. My take on this is rather simple: Given the history of the media why would any sane person take their judgement on Adams, a person they hate, seriously? So I followed him on twitter.
So I don’t know where to even start with this one. Obviously I’m referring to the FBI memo from the Richmond, VA office that indicates growing concern over terrorism people not worshiping the state in so-called “Traditional” Catholic parishes. When I first saw this article appear, I gave it the ole’ 72 hour wait to see what ends up being true.
After having the FBI confirm it, I went ahead and read the memo. I have read many, MANY FBI memos in the past. I’ve read plenty of intelligence memos from various agencies, and I’ve written a fair number of memos myself and with others. I also wrote a 100+ page masters thesis that was read by some very smart and important people in our government. I know that writing well is important because you never know how far something you write will travel, whether its an email, memo or 100 page analysis. Since its that important, you should learn to write well, cite good sources and be ready for criticism if you’re going to make points that are controversial.
Does this paper do that? Nope.
Seriously, go read it. First, it starts with an interesting statement: that RMVEs are interested in RTCs. As a network guy, I immediately confused RMVEs with NVME solid state hard drives and RTCs with the people that yell at you at boot camp. But no, RMVE is Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist, and RTC is radical-traditionalist Catholic. OK, lots of acronyms, which tells me this is legitimately from a government agency right off the bat, because we know that government loves its acronyms.
Reading the first few paragraphs, its actually kind of bland. The memo states that the FBI is seeing an increase in RMVEs reaching out to RTCs, attending services and engaging more on social media, and that the RMVEs are trying to recruit RTCs. That’s not a crazy assertion. If all you see at more “radical” Catholic churches is women wearing veils and priests speaking out about the evils of homosexuality, and especially if that group of “radical” Catholics thinks the world is on fire because of sins like homosexuality, then yeah, it might seem like a great place to recruit people that would be OK bombing a gay nightclub.
But that’s where it all starts to break down. When I hear Racially Motivated Violence, I think people that hate black people, or white people, or Asians, or immigrants, or something like that. I suspect most people do too. But I have yet to see the Catholic church, including more traditional churches, argue that racism is good. There are lots of Catholic positions that homosexuality, transgenderism, abortion and sex outside of marriage are bad and causing problems in society. These same Catholics vote and protest against the governments attempts to impose these views on people, which is probably the more likely reason the FBI doesn’t like these people.
Saying that the Catholic Church, and more traditional Church followers, appeals to racist terrorism is even more dumb when you think of the extensive Catholic Church in Africa and the Caribbean that is full of…wait for it…black people! The Catholic Church, even the more traditional portions of it, represents people from all walks of life and all skin colors.
Probably should have cited that article over Salon…but I digress.
The next part is though: the FBI referencing “tripwire and source development.” I read that as:
Place snitches in churches
Develop a list of “trigger” words
Wrap up so-called “radical” priests when they say mean things
Threaten a “radical” churches tax-exempt status if they say mean things about the state
Sheesh, does this sound like the Tea Party? Or Waco, TX? Or Trump’s home in Florida? Or the dude that got thrown in jail over defending his kid in PA? If I’m drawing this conclusion, so are a lot of other people.
The analysis in the notes section does an OK job of breaking out SSPX vs FSSP vs Norvus Ordo. Honestly, style point here: put in a side-by-side comparison in the future. One nice graphic would make it a lot easier on the reader.
Further down, the memo admits it conducted no Analysis of Alternatives, fancy speak for “what other conclusions could we draw.” For an example, imagine a memo saying “War with China imminent in X years,” linking the increase in Chinese military activity to a desire to invade Taiwan. An alternative analysis might be that China is simply posturing to distract its population from domestic problems. Not having an alternative is another indication of sloppy detective and writing work on the part of the memo’s author.
The memo cites the Southern Poverty Law Center and a Salon article, which is what most conservative news agencies are jumping on. But the issues are deeper then that. There is no analysis of any of the RTCs, not even a basic open source analysis. The “Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary,” a scary sounding organization, is a bunch of nuns at a monastery. I doubt that they receive tactical weapons training on their campus, but maybe I’m wrong. If so, that might make for a cool addition to Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter science fiction series. But even a cursory review online shows that most of the organizations aren’t engaging in anything resembling violence.
The most disturbing thing to me is that this memo was even created and published. I’m sure the FBI gets thousands of leads every year, most of which end up being garbage. This looks like someone created an extensive memo over a single, unreliable source that was likely one racist person trying to recruit people that attend a Latin Catholic church. How did the Richmond station supervisor not read this and think “This looks dumb?” How did he or she not tell the author “You’re gonna need at least another source before we bother publishing this.”? That would have been my first comment.
So the FBI allows a poorly written memo attempting to tie racially-motivated extremists to members of the Catholic Church that attend a Mass said in a foreign language. It’s poorly researched, poorly sourced, draws crazy conclusions without data, all in what seems a blatant attempt to connect “white supremacy” to the Church. Much like the “white supremacy” nonsense that was tied to the military early on, this is only going to build more distrust in the FBI while doing nothing to fight actual terrorists.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, Roman Catholic Church, or any other government agency.
Tonight is the season finale of the Chosen season 3 for those like me who didn’t see it in the theatre. Here are some thoughts.
There was a big error right in the front. In Israel the queen wasn’t the king’s wife, kings had many wives, it was the king’s mother. We also don’t know which wife of David that was although given her age and pregnancy I’m betting Bathsheba.
It’s an interesting note because it was not uncommon to ask of the queen mother to intercede with the king on behalf of a need, which explains the “Hail Mary” prayer of the Rosary to a “T”.
I’m sure like me A lot of people expected the climax to be the feeding of the 5000, the fact that it ended on the walking on the water and calming the storm was a surprise. Thomas’ line concerning the 2nd most incredible thing he saw that day was funny but what was more significant to me was even having Jesus right and having Jesus do what he had already done that day the Disciples were still urging Simon Peter not to get out of the boat when invited by Christ.
The overall arc of the season was apparently the story of the prodigal son (which he has not told yet) in the sense that Simon Peter and Eden are the faithful child who complains “Why is the fatted calf killed for a party for the one who did not obey?” The frustration of both Eden and then Peter in their suffering while so many are healed around them is poignant.
I also thought that Eden going to her local Rabbi and not waiting for Jesus’ personally was an important reminder that when are priest intervenes when we have problems we ARE getting God’s intervention as he is there in persona Christi.
Just because you don’t see someone dramatically commanding the waves to stop it doesn’t mean your relief from the storm isn’t an act of God.
There were two significant cliff hangers. First of them is Rabbi Shmuel. We know that he was invited by Christ to pray with him when the crowds were gone and that Christ made himself available to him, so:
Did they pray together
Did he question Jesus
If so was he satisfied with the answer
That was to me the big cliff hanger, the second is Atticus Aemilius. He was right being the rabbis from Jerusalem in getting to the crowd, although they didn’t show it he obviously would have questioned them and more importantly he SAW Christ walk on the water and the sudden end of the storm.
Presuming he is a believer in the Roman Gods the idea that Jesus might be “A” God (as opposed to “The God”) would not be out of his comfort zone. The question is will he consider him a threat to Rome, basically a God of the Jews who is acting to challenge Rome or will his part be to be the one who reports to Tiberius, basically the Roman who produces the report to Caesar that is the basis for the movie “The inquiry“.
You could actually had Atticus urging and advising the death of Christ not because he doesn’t believe he is God but because he does.
That will be very interesting to see how it plays out.
Finally as of this writing they are still millions ($13.1) away from raising the funds needed for season 4. As of this day they have not yet payed for episode 4 so we don’t know when we will see it but we know a few things.
We know that Jesus will be healing Gaius’ son.
We know that even larger crowds will be following him
but most important of all
We know that boat will end up back in Capernaum
The significance of this is that in John Gospel directly after the feeding of the 5000 comes what is called “The bread of life discourses” The feeding of the 5000 and those words are basically John Chapter six and they, combined with the last supper, are the basis for the Eucharist where Jesus tells the crowd bluntly that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood and when challenged instead of explaining it as a metaphor doubles down, thus causing many of his disciples to leave him.
I’ve mentioned this before but I recall my Pastor upon hearing of the Chosen noted that Protestant productions that are not word for word adaptions of scripture invariably leave out the bread of life discourses as they are frightfully inconvenient.
I guess the rubber will meet the road in a year, how much influence the VERY catholic Jonathan Roumie will have on this decision will be interesting but either way we will see. (Of course if they do the feeding of the 4000 too they could always put it there).
Got a call first thing this morning from the plumber concerning the frozen pipes in the attic apartment that DaWife and I first lived in when married and has now been rented out to the same fellow for nearly 30 years. Water was leaking to the 2nd floor where my brother lives. I called and emailed Saturday concerning the problem, apparently it’s a good thing I called fast because while there are a lot of people ahead of me which means we likely won’t see them today, the number of people behind me is a whole lot longer.
That artic blast is a full employment program for the plumbing and heating industry which I suspect isn’t laying off anyone in New England anytime soon, but then again in an age where automation is taking over a lot the trades remain the best option out there during a recession.
My thought on the Chinese balloons was that it would be a better idea to capture it in the air rather than shoot is down as we don’t know if they might contain hazardous materials. With a slow moving balloon of indeterminate weight I don’t know how practicable such a move would have been but if that wasn’t possible I don’t see the advantage of allowing to to gather intelligence and transmit it in real time letting it traverse the country before taking it out over the Atlantic.
By waiting that long you basically gave China not only the real time data they were looking for but data on the use of such balloons as a delivery system for bio weapons for either a first strike or an attack if we defend Tawian.
The Biden administration’s reaction tells me that what I’ve said before still applies, when you buy them, they stay bought.
Let’s point one important thing concerning all this reparations talk that nobody is discussing.
My four grandparents came here around 1906 over 40 years after the end of slavery in the US. and as Sicilians were considered to be of a different “race” than the WASPS in Massachusetts where they settled having to work like dogs to get to where they were.
Even if you make the stupid argument that reparations are due to people who were never slavers and whose parents were never slaves (and whose grandparents were likely never slaves either) why the hell should any of the descendants of people who were no where near America in the 19th century be responsible for those sins?
This past weekend the NFL “Pro-bowl” became a flag football game and skills competitions that I suspect people didn’t care much about.
The reason the pro-bowl is in decline? That’s simple. Current salaries.
When an NFL player was not making generational wealth the bonus from even the loser’s share of a pro-bowl game was something worth showing up for, not to mention the trip to Hawaii.
But when you are making a fortune playing the game already there is little incentive to show up to play an extra game that you have the potential to be hurt at, and one injury could mean the end of your seven to eight figure paycheck.
Thus the well paid stars who the pro-bowl is meant to feature give it a miss and the middle tier guys to whom that extra cash might mean something show up and now you don’t even have a real football game.
How it draws any eyeballs escapes me.
Finally there was yet another “clarification” concerning homosexuality from the Pope as he continues to try to dance around reality so as not to have to speak the truth aloud so in the interest of clarity let me give you four basic Catholic truths.
There are NO circumstances where sex outside of marriage between one man and one woman is not mortal sin.
There are NO circumstances where homosexual sex is not mortal sin.
Mortal sin, sexual or otherwise, if sacramentally confessed with a firm resolve to amend is forgiven independent of sexual orientation.
If you fail in your resolve and sin again, sacramental confession remains available so you can pick yourself up and try again.
This is Catholic 101 and any Priest or Bishop who tells you different is at best ignorant and at worst a liar.
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