Posts Tagged ‘pet peeves’

Why invistigate the nuns? Oh I don’t know maybe this?

Posted: October 27, 2009 by datechguy in catholic
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Outrage continues over the Vatican investigation of Nuns in America

“We can’t figure out why this is happening,” said Flannery, director of the Jesuit retreat house in Parma. “We’re just doing our jobs.”

The New York Times Maureen Dowd:

Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.

The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.

Nuns who took Vatican II as a mandate for reimagining their mission “started to look uppity to an awful lot of bishops and priests and, of course, the Vatican,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”

And the letters backed her up:

I came away amazed and profoundly touched by the sisters’ faithfulness to tradition as well as by their spirituality, community, ministry and joy in vowed lives devoted entirely to the church’s mission. No Catholics on earth are more faithful to the Catholic Church.

I agree, nuns are the rock of the church in America, it’s not as if they were out there supporting Abortion publicly. Oh wait:

A Dominican nun has been seen frequenting an abortion facility in Illinois recently – but not, as one might expect, to pray for an end to abortion or to counsel women seeking abortions, but to volunteer as a clinic escort.

Local pro-life activists say that they recognized the escort at the ACU Health Center as Sr. Donna Quinn, a nun outspokenly in favor of legalized abortion, after seeing her photo in a Chicago Tribune article.

Well it’s not as if her Prioress was backing her, oh wait:

And what about the pertinent Dominican religious superior? Why, she’s going to bat for Sister Donna’s right to choose the choice she has chosen:

Sr. Patricia Mulcahey, OP, Quinn’s Prioress at the Sinsinawa Dominican community, said in an email response to LSN that the nun sees her volunteer activity as “accompanying women who are verbally abused by protestors. Her stance is that if the protestors were not abusive, she would not be there.” Though Sr. Mulcahey claimed that her sisters “support the teachings of the Catholic Church,” she declined to comment on Quinn’s public protest of Catholic Church teaching.

See a contradiction here? Well you’re wrong. It might look a little odd at first glance, but in reality this is an example of the healthy and fully renewed religious life called for by the Second Vatican Council.

Well it’s not as if this was a violation of Canon law, now that you mention it:

1. Canon 695 calls for the mandatory dismissal of a religious guilty of the delict of abortion described in Canon 1398. A case can be made, I think, that Sr. Donna is an accomplice to abortion under Canon 1329, which, in turn, might bring her within the scope of the dismissal provision of Canon 695. The novelty of nuns serving as murder mistresses at abortion clinics means that there is not much jurisprudence for such cases, I grant, but it is still a theory worth exploring.

If, however, a more direct process is desired, Canon 696 seems a better place to start.

2. Under Canon 696, dismissal from religious life can be imposed against one who gives “grave scandal arising from culpable behavior”. This unusually broad language allows superiors to move against a religious whose specific conduct could not have been predicted when the revised Code was being drafted (perhaps, like Sr. Donna’s, it could scarcely have been imagined!), but which we now know can be both imagined and committed. So, to the extent that conducting babies to their death is scandalous behavior for a religious woman, Sr. Donna deserves dismissal.

3. Various provisions of penal law, for example Canon 1369 (authorizing a “just penalty” against those who use the means of social communication to gravely injure good morals or to excite contempt against religion or the Church) are applicable, I suggest, in response to the kind of verbiage that Sr. Donna directs from time to time against religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. But again, all of this seems self-evident.

Hey ya know maybe there is something to this Vatican investigation after all?

As I’ve said before Catholicism is a voluntary activity. If sister Quinn wants to push Abortion and aid at abortion clinics, it’s a free country, she just shouldn’t do it as a Catholic nun. If she insists on doing it as a Catholic Nun and her superiors do nothing then they ought not to be whining about the Vatican investigating them. It’s a variation of the murder your parents cry as an orphan business.

In the end Sr. Quinn will do what she wants and the media will fawn on her and she and her superiors will be celebrated for the rest of their lives…

…after that they’re on their own.

Apple customer support vs Squat. Squat Wins!

Posted: October 23, 2009 by datechguy in amazon reviews, tech
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Well my son and I drove an hour to the nearest apple store and were coldly informed that they will charge us $1100 to fix the machine he paid $1500 for less than two months ago. (Plus $200 for extended warranty)

Even worse than this was the cold customer service that reminds me of the NRCC’s attitude toward conservatives in NY-23, the old we have your money now do what we say business.

Since 2000 I’ve been doing computer support and customer service, I’ve seen all kinds of customer service, the Natick’s Apple store’s customer service wouldn’t pass for customer service in the old soviet union.

So congratulations Apple, you’ve managed to alienate me, a fellow who recommends computers to people and buys them on a regular basis. On the basis of the customer service I received it is impossible that I would buy an Apple for my other son. The chance that I will purchase one during my say 20+ years of computer buying is now zero.

As I have a large Sicilian family this story is going to be repeated among them, we Sicilians are very clannish, what are the odds that we won’t go elsewhere?

A week doesn’t go by when I’m not asked about what computer to buy, guess what I won’t recommend? What are the chances I would do so to any person I know or friend and customer I want to keep?

Oh and did I mention the sheer anger of my son? He has a half a century of buying of computers ahead of him. He is very catholic and will have kids. How many apples do you think he will buy? How many times do you thing this story will be repeated over the decades?

That doesn’t even count this blog and the visitors who come on a regular basis.

And I almost forgot, I happen to be a top 1000 reviewer at Amazon.com, you’ve heard of them I trust. I wrote a review of his computer over there, and I wrote it at the apple store.

So smart move Apple. Who needs those potential sales anyway?

Hutchenson continues to be wrong honest:

Posted: October 12, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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There are many times when Professor Darren Hutchenson drives me nuts. We are on polar opposites of the political spectrum and many times when I think he is dead wrong, but even so I wish more members of the progressive left were like him for reasons such as this:

Fifth, I am a proud member of the Internet Left Fringe (if that means “progressive critic of Obama”), but I never put much stock in the sweeping liberal rhetoric that surrounded Obama’s election. I agreed with Hillary Clinton who said that “you campaign in poetry but govern in prose.” I said a long time ago that the liberal euphoria surrounding Obama’s candidacy was misguided and that Obama was going to govern from the center because the country was politically divided and that he was a moderate — at best.

Read the whole post, his previous two are solid as well.

I would take issue that he is a moderate, I think he is more of an opportunist. I think Obama likely agrees with Professor Hutchenson on the issues but his primary belief system is the political and economic advancement of Barack Obama. Of course it is possible that he has never believed in any of this progressive stuff and has simply used it to get ahead. That would explain 20 years in the Wright pew without hearing anything.

There are not a lot of left blogs that I have on my blogroll. Hutchenson is one of them and I’m pleased and proud to link him here.

The difference between reporting what people say…

Posted: September 30, 2009 by datechguy in Uncategorized
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…and what fits your template, can be illustrated by a simple YouTube video:

Note: Stacy really deserves the hits on this has he has done the legwork while I’m sitting on a couch a thousand miles away, but I’m posting it here in case you are unwilling to go to his site because Charles says you can’t.

Now tell me, you might believe her you might not but which is more solid reporting? The AP story quoted in the post, or the actual film of what she claims to have said. Given the choice which report would you believe?

I’ll bet that if the AP guy knew this:

Miss Brown says she is not a Republican, but is a registered Democrat and, during her 2008 senior year at Corbin High School, was actually a leader of students supporting Barack Obama for the presidency.

And the reports themselves? Stacy links to this story that says in part:

Rudzinski did comment on some of the reports circulating about the death.

“Misinformation is one thing, but pure speculation is another,” She said. “What we’re seeing the bulk of is speculation by people who don’t have direct access to the investigation.”

I’ve objected to some of the speculation myself, the bottom line from the story:

“Misinformation is much more damaging to our investigation than the correct or no information,” he said.

But hey who cares about facts or actually catching a killer when there are points to be scored against the right?

Consider this: She will be leaving high school and either going to college or looking or work, what do you think will happen when her name is googled (and you know it will be) and that quote comes up? That is messing with a young woman’s future. That’s despicable and dishonorable.

If you want to know why this reporter is worth a ten spot, that is why.

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