Biden Denied Communion

Wow.

President Biden, who is in Europe for several high level meetings, is taking off the morning of June 15 to meet Pope Francis as President of the United States for the first time. The President's entourage had originally requested for Biden to attend Mass with the Pope early in the morning, but the proposal was nixed by the Vatican after considering the impact that President Biden receiving Holy Communion from the Pope would have on the discussions the USCCB is planning to have during their meeting starting Wednesday, June 16. The U.S. bishops are slated to vote on creating a committee that would draft a document about Eucharistic coherence. 

It's not just about the impact blah blah blah. The Vatican refused to have the President of the United States take communion with them. This is not the first time he has been denied communion, but it is a denial by the mortal head of the church.

For non-religious people, this isn't a big deal; it's a ceremony that didn't happen (or will, but without the President present). 

In fact, it is a big deal. I hope President Biden's soul is not endangered by persistent refusal to reform, though ultimately that is his choice and not my own. We should pray for him, as we ought to do for political leaders even when they are in less danger.

We are Not Amused

This Arizona business is getting interesting. When the state governments turn against the Feds, well, in our system they're more properly the sovereign ones. That is why the general police power resides with the states, not the Federal government.

Right Up Grim's Alley

I'm a bit late, but thought I'd give a shout out to VFW Post 5202 in Waynesville, NC, who had their annual Bikers in Boxers event a few months back. Video at the link, if, uh, you're into that sort of thing. No one's judging.

"An Outmoded Word"

The word is "retarded," in case you were wondering. Chuck Schumer said it, and he's a top Democratic leader, so it gets this wildly generous treatment. 

That word used to mean "developmentally disabled" or something like that. Now it means "stupid people." Nobody thinks he meant to refer to children with learning disabilities. He meant "people who disagree with me." It's rude, and he definitely does look down on you if you don't think like him. We can be adults and just admit that. 

Ibuprofen?

The CDC is admitting there's an issue with the vaccine, at least for young men.

Lots of rumors are circulating about this stuff, which I hope are untrue. This is, however, why we we wait for a full Phase 3 trial before we approve a new vaccine for widespread distribution. Hopefully these things are going to be great and will have no bad long-term effects, or ones that are super-manageable (as treatment with ibuprofen would indicate). 

Hopefully, but not definitely. I wouldn't give any vaccines to anyone young at this time. The idea that we're going to start a Phase 2/3 trial for children is hugely alarming to me. I would never give a child an untested vaccine. The old can run their hazards as they choose, but children are likely to live to be 80 if you don't meddle with them. They can afford a year or two of waiting to see if this thing produces unwanted side effects. Let's take the time and get it right, says I.

UPDATE: Women too. 

Happy Flag Day

 

Audit Update

AZ:  

 “We found a ballot shortage, anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of the votes,” Josh Barnett, an audit organizer who led the affidavit drive to make the audit happen, tells NATIONAL FILE. “It looks like a couple hundred thousand ballots are unaccounted for. The ballots are missing.”

Oh, really? Two hundred thousand ballots allegedly counted on election day are... just not there? 

 GA: 

"The total number of absentee ballots whose chain of custody was purportedly documented in these 385 missing Fulton County absentee ballot transfer forms was 18,901, more than 6,000 votes greater than the less than 12,000 vote margin of Biden’s certified victory in the state," the report said....

"As we review the documents provided to you and our daily log. We noticed that a few forms are missing, it seems when 25 plus core personnel were quarantined due to positive COVID-19 outbreak at the EPC, some procedural paperwork may have been misplaced," she told the Star News.

A few forms are missing, you say. Like eighteen thousand legally required forms, without which we have no reason to believe the votes were legally cast.  [UPDATE: One in four, apparently.]

We used to say 'if it's not close, they can't cheat,' but it turns out that they can. There's no constitutional remedy for a stolen election, but perhaps some people could go to jail. 

80s Music

There was probably another song at some point. There was a whole decade. I'm not sure what it was.

Demons!

Once upon a time I was walking through Atlanta, and I came across some sort of religious organization that was all black, but all dressed in white robes. A woman of perhaps eighty or ninety was among them, wearing glasses that were Coke-bottle thick. She rolled her eyes up at me, took me in, and shouted: "A Demon!"

That's where this lady is, only you're paying her to educate you about race. Seriously, her PayPal is on the board so you'll know where to send the money.

(I of course did the old woman no harm whatsoever. Perhaps real demons can be known by their fruits, like other things; the fruit of our interaction was entirely benign.) 

The Top Threat

Eeeeehhh.... maybe not Climate Change.

The military's top officer asserted on Thursday that the biggest threats the U.S. faces are China and Russia, a day after President Joe Biden recounted to American troops during a trip to the U.K. that military leaders told him climate change represents the "greatest threat to America."

"Climate change does impact, but the president is looking at a much broader angle than I am," Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a congressional panel Thursday morning. "I'm looking at it from a strictly military standpoint. And from a strictly military standpoint, I'm putting China, Russia up there."

I mean it's China, without question.

Libya/Syria

Oh, dear.

Quad Charts are Fun

 

A Spirited Response

It's been a minute since the Attorney General of the United States was threatened with state prison time. 

Atlanta Bleeds

Two of my ancestors helped Sherman burn the city where I was born, but at least they meant to destroy it. This time it's being destroyed by do-gooders who think they're helping. 

“It’s right up the street from us,” Mack said. “He told me ‘I love you’ and I said, ‘Love you too.’ But he didn’t make it there.”

Relatives discovered David Mack’s body while searching for him the following day. He’d been shot to death behind a public golf course about a quarter-mile from his southwest Atlanta home. He was 12.

David was one of more than 60 people in Atlanta whose lives were ended by violence this year.

May his death hang around the necks of the people who wrecked his home. Like a millstone on their way to the wine-dark sea.

UPDATE:

Buckhead is one of the wealthiest parts of the city. What have they done?

Resignation

A letter from one who was until lately a teacher.

Many pretend to agree because of pressure to conform. I’ve heard from students who want to ask a question but stop for fear of offending someone. I have heard from students who don’t participate in discussions for fear of being ostracized. One student did not want to develop her personal essay — about an experience she had in another country — for fear that it might mean that she was, without even realizing it, racist. In her fear, she actually stopped herself from thinking. This is the very definition of self-censorship.

...fear pervades the faculty. On at least two separate occasions in 2017 and 2018, our Head of School, standing at the front of Hajjar Auditorium, told the entire faculty that he would fire us all if he could so that he could replace us all with people of color. This year, administrators continue to assert  D-E’s policy that we are hiring “for diversity.” D-E has become a workplace that is hostile toward educators based solely on their immutable traits.

During a recent faculty meeting, teachers were segregated by skin color. Teachers who had light skin were placed into a “white caucus” group and asked to “remember” that we are “White” and “to take responsibility for [our] power and privilege.” 

Well done. You did indeed take responsibility, and use your power.  

Tears in Rain

I never once saw my father cry: not the day my son was born, not the day he died, not even the day when he realized he was going to die. Not one time, come what may, did he ever cry in front of me. 

The world is different now, for better or for worse. 

A Geographical Interlude

Let's begin with defining our terms:

Next, some aspects of the legal system:

How Big a Threat is Psychiatry?

If you've never seen the BBC Documentary "The Century of the Self,"  (also at YouTube) it is a prerequisite for this discussion. It reveals how psychiatry convinced governments across the world, including our own and others we think of as humane, that most of humanity were savage beasts in need of control: this produced monstrous secret government programs even in the United States. The effect of Freud on the elite who studied him was a horrified fear of those they governed -- and, then, sought to rule and dominate for their own self-preservation. 

Later psychoanalysis created extraordinary instability by asserting that human meaning was to be found through self-actualization rather than in communities with common purpose. One example in the documentary is a convent of nuns that was completely destroyed by it. They began with devout and sworn members of a lifelong religious community. The effect was that 300 nuns -- more than half the convent -- petitioned to be released from their vows. The convent closed its doors to new recruits. The remainder of the convent divided into those who "became radical lesbian nuns," and who drove out  most of the rest. (This is at 2 hours, 20 minutes, 13 seconds in the YoutTube video.) A community with a deep, meaningful commitment to a moral vision of the good life was completely destroyed by psychoanalysis committed to self-actualization.

The modal answer to the question therefore should be "At least among the biggest threats facing humanity"; we are interested in whether or not it is closer to the biggest one, or a somewhat less pressing (but still major) threat.

So today we see a new psychoanalytic theory that most of America is malignantly ill. 

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

There is, of course, a permanent cure. It is the one that the phrase "never again" intends to memorialize. This psychiatrist is here engage in a rhetorical move, one that is meant to yoke the left-hated Israel to the left-hated flag-waving Americans, who were also characterized as 'having whiteness.' It is also meant to diminish the concerns of both groups to mere psychological disorders, not pointed at real threats faced by anyone. 

Yet of course there really was a Holocaust; and there really could be another. Antisemitism is rising even in America, and on both the political right and left. A rabbi I know is warning American Jews that they may no longer be safe in America; and indeed there are places where they well may not be. 

And there is really a genocide going on right now in China, where the Uighur people are being both actively exterminated and subject to legal restrictions on their reproduction. This is no paranoid delusion, but an actual fact. China is, of course, the power that stands to gain the most should America fail to be 'great again.' 

This is not one guy, either.  It is not just him plus that lady at Yale who fantasizes about emptying revolvers into people. It is an idea that is gaining prominence in American society, especially among psychiatrists. 

So: watch the documentary if you have not. It is fairly long, but time very well spent. Then consider this question, and what might be done about it. 

I Don't Think Waylon Done It This Way

Nashville is a mainstreaming, corporate giant that tries to force every act into the same kind of proven, salable sound. That's been true since Country Music has been a thing. It was the reason that Willie Nelson left Nashville and returned to Texas, where in Luckenbach and Austin he founded his own thing. It's why he asked Waylon Jennings to join him, and the two of them built the Outlaw revolution.

The thing they had going for themselves, though, was that they were both great musicians. They had great bands that could do something different, worthy of doing in its own right.

I'm not convinced that is true here.

At least so far, this guy is just selling Nashville music with political lyrics. That's fine; he can do what he wants. But he's not the same kind of revolutionary. 

Lanterns rising

A weaver friend designed and made this rug. The pattern is meant to suggest Chinese lanterns rising into a darkening sky.