The Catholic Crisis Isn't What Most People Think It Is

Wife kitteh and I went to an open forum at a local parish this week. It was a 2-hour session led by one of the deacons and attended by 2 priests, one local and one visiting from Africa. There must have been 100 people there, each deeply concerned about ... the wrong problem.

Or should I say, a problem which has been solved already.

The deacon is a leader in the effort to deal with the pederasty problem. I mean pederasty, not pedophilia, because that's what it was. The priest had likewise spent ten years or more dealing with the issue in the diocese. I was the parent of grade-school Catholic students at the time and I can recall the dramatic safety measures that were put in place to stop the pederasty.

It turns out they have been very successful. For all practical purposes, the abuse of minors has stopped. The diocese has a zero tolerance policy and cooperates fully with law enforcement on these matters. In the years since those measures have been put in place, if I recall the figures correctly, there have been fewer than 10 incidents reported, only one of which was proven to have substance.

So we've got that issue, as the chaps in Monty Python might say, relatively under control. That leaves us with the poison in the hierarchy, the Lavender Mafia.

It turns out that when the pederasty crisis first blew containment and the leadership could no longer keep things quiet, the bishops held a nationwide meeting and developed strong rules with stiff penalties to deal with it.

Those penalties did not apply to the bishops or any of the prelates. The rules were deliberately written that way. If the feedback we got from the priests at this meeting was any indication, they're disgusted by it. Further, Bishop McElroy, our idiot leader, came out and attacked the Vigano letter which named names in the Lavender Mafia. Lots of other bishops came out in support of it, but the nincompoop in San Diego decided to rail against Vigano. Maybe because he was named as a member of that cabal.

The priests at the meeting thought his response was stupid. The parishioners at the meeting were very angry. Plans are being drawn up to protest his refusal to support investigating the high-level corruption.

It went a lot farther than that, but the two key takeaways for me were these:

• Priests aren't abusing children any more. At least not in the US.
• The Lavender Mafia is still a huge problem and took steps to keep themselves from punishment.

I'll close with an encouraging talk by a young bishop, Bishop Lopes. The dude was a seminarian in a McCarrick seminary and he's pulling no punches. So long as the Lavender Mafia isn't allowed to make changes to the Catechism to excuse their predatory behaviors, we'll come out of this OK.

Doctor Grasshopper

Or, should I say, doctored grasshopper.

I took a picture of this handsome critter as it sat on my fence and posed for me. I brought the image into Photoshop and tried to get a neon effect, but I don't know how to do that yet and I'm too lazy to look it up. Instead, I played with the colors and jacked up the yellows and magentas. I rather like it. I left it large, so it may be worth a click.

Enjoy!

The Catholic Church Can't Print Money

... instead, it relies on a relatively shallow pool of big donors.

Tim had a typically cogent comment on yesterday's post wherein I called for purge of the villains, now that we know who they are.

The problem, though, is how the purge is to be done? The way the church is structured, isn't all the power arranged from the top down? If the corruption is in the pope/cardinals/bishops level, do the lay members and the priests actually have any leverage? Other than stopping the flow of money collected by the parishes to the diocese, or schisming off from the church entirely, that is?

The flow of money is a big step. A diocese is a decent-sized organization with substantial labor and maintenance costs. I promise you, San Diego won't get another dime of my money until McElroy is gone. I'm not a really big donor, but I know some of them and I'm active in diocesan groups where they can be found. You better believe I'll be talking about this.

Then there is the encouragement of the local parish priests and staffs. Chances are really good that they're not part of the mafia. If you've got their backs and encourage them to stand up to the mafia, they might have some interesting behind-the-scenes conversations.

Finally, there is the diocesan staff themselves. The high-end experts such as the accountants and lawyers for the diocese are usually devout Catholics who think they're doing something good for the Church. If they get the idea that they're supporting the continued existence of the Mafia, they might quit and they're pretty hard to replace.

In short, if we find out that our bishop or cardinal is a member of the Lavender Mafia, we need to cut off their supplies and lay siege. There's not that many of them, it's just that they had an incredibly powerful network. Now that it is being exposed, that network is a liability.

Like this, only with fewer crossbows.

Update: Priests can be emboldened by a supportive laity.

We are called to speak up about sin in society, even if that implies getting our head chopped off. #StJohntheBaptist #HomilyTweet

— Fr Matthew P. Schneider LC (@FrMatthewLC) August 29, 2018

Purge Them All

"The Pope knows we have a bigger agenda. He's got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church. We're not going to go down a rabbit hole on this." —Cardinal Cupich https://t.co/ByEOh5Gkc8

— C. C. Pecknold (@ccpecknold) August 28, 2018

Update: You're also a racist.

The Lavender Mafia Helped Its Own

... but it's about to get smashed, big time.

The Lavender Mafia in the Church formed a ready-made career network for the gay priests who joined in the fun. Dig this article in the Catholic News Agency. Sorry for the long excerpt, but it illustrates the point well which I will make before you read it.

Imagine you're a devout, young Catholic man and you decide to enter the Seminary. You encounter the gay cabal, but in spite of the corruption all around you, you stick it our and get ordained. Now you're a young priest, working in a parish and learning your job. The gays get ordained as well, but when they leave seminary, they have "uncles" all around them with whom they've partied, drank and, in some cases, had sex.

In any career, a strong social network is a huge advantage to getting ahead. The gays had it in spades. It wasn't just an ordinary social network, it was one with the deeper bonds that come from sex. The straight priests were essentially solo artists while the gays had all the connections.

One of the things that jumps out at you from Virgano's letter is how he kept sending warning letters up his chain of command about predators like Cardinal McCarrick, but they never got responses or action. It's clear there was a layer of protectors from the Lavender Mafia keeping the news from doing any damage. I'm sure that wasn't by accident. The cabal took care of its own and probably did so strategically, working out just where to put their men in order to keep a lid on things.

Back in the parishes, the good priests were a majority, but they didn't have the power because they were clean. They hadn't formed the tight bonds that the partiers did. Their devotion to us in the laity and their faithfulness to the Church was what made them weak while the cabal grew stronger and stronger.

Vigano's letter is huge because it allows us all to form a public network. We're the vast majority in the Church and we're now aware of the cabal. We're not going to rest until heads roll. Those protective social networks won't work any more. In fact, it's a huge disadvantage because now we're going to start pulling the threads and exposing them. They're screwed.

And now, on with the excerpt.

CNA recently spoke to six priests of the Archdiocese of Newark, and one priest member of a religious order who was a seminarian in New York in the early 1970s, while McCarrick was a priest of the Archdiocese of New York...

The religious priest who spoke to CNA said when he studied in a seminary in New York, McCarrick, who was then an aide to Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York, would sometimes visit the seminary. The priest said that McCarrick’s reputation was already well established by this time.

“The dean of our theology school was a classmate at CUA with McCarrick, and he knew about the rumors,” the priest told CNA, “he spoke about them with the other faculty and theologians very openly.”

So well-known was McCarrick’s reputation, the priest said, that when McCarrick would accompany Cooke to visit the seminary there was a standing joke that they had to "hide the handsome ones" before he arrived...

The priest told CNA that, in addition to trips to a house on the shore, McCarrick would invite young men to stay the night in the cathedral rectory in central Newark.

“Priests would tell me ‘he’s sleeping with them’ all the time, but I couldn’t believe it – they seemed like perfectly normal guys,” the priest said...

Fr. Desmond Rossi was a seminarian in Newark in the late 1980s. He has publicly alleged that, in 1988, two transitional deacons sexually abused him.

According to Rossi, he told archdiocesan authorities about the assault and went before a review board. He said that his story was “found credible, but nothing happened.” Instead, he claims the archdiocese turned against him for bringing the allegation forward.

“They tried to turn it on me," Rossi said...

In recent years, several priests said, Weiner is known for hosting cocktail parties in his rectory, which other homosexual priests of the archdiocese are known to attend.

Three Newark priests independently gave CNA nearly identical accounts of being invited to these parties when they were newly ordained.

One recalled that he attended a cocktail party, thinking he had been invited to a simple priests’ dinner. “I was led into the room to a chorus of wolf-whistles,” he said. “It was clear right away I was ‘on display.’”

Another priest told CNA that he was also invited to a party hosted by the priest. “They were all carrying big mixed drinks, pink ones, it was like something out of Sex in City.”

He recalled that after asking for a beer, he was told by his host, “you need to try something more girly tonight.”

All recounted overtly sexual conversation at the cocktail parties. “I was fresh meat and they were trying me out,” one priest said.

All three said they left quickly upon realizing what was going on. “Everyone was getting loaded and getting closer on the couches, I wanted out of there,” a priest told CNA.

Imagine being a young seminarian and trying to blow the whistle on that. You're isolated and they're not. Well, that problem has been flipped on its head now. The good guys are backed by the laity and the Lavender Mafia's great strength, it's web of connections, is now its downfall.

We're going to find every one of you.

Check under your beds every night, guys. We're coming.

Sex, Borders, Religion And Power

Well, Ross provided some interesting reading this weekend.

Annnnnd in the evening's *other* news, this document is quite possibly a truly historic bombshell in the life of the Roman Catholic Church. https://t.co/cxY3xNi76g

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 26, 2018

And by "interesting" I mean jaw-dropping. It's a lengthy open letter from someone who has spent more than a decade in positions of power in the Church, both at the Vatican and in Washington, DC.

In case you don't want to read the link, which I highly recommend and think should be mandatory for all Catholics, there is a strong cabal of homosexual prelates within the Church that recruits, promotes and protects its members. The Lavender Mafia is indeed real and it is widespread among the prelates. It's weak among the laity and the normal parish priests, but the hierarchy within the Church is absolutely infested with it.

It goes all the way to the top.

The purpose of the Lavender Mafia is simply to procure young men for the older, powerful, homosexual prelates. That's it. That's its only real purpose in life. The Catholic faith has nothing to do with any of it, nor does celibacy. I was wrong about that.

It reminds me of the open-border Democrats. They don't care about you or me or the country. They don't care about the Mexicans. They don't care about voting rights when they insist that requiring an ID to vote is some kind of civil rights violation. All they want are voters who will elect them to power. They're not trying to do anything worthwhile with the power, they just want power.

In both cases, there are useful ideologues who are True Believers. Father James Martin SJ, a rabid, progressive partisan, is probably a True Believer. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is probably a True Believer. The weasels in the media and the cloistered academics in our elite universities are likely True Believers as well. Their leaders aren't. Their leaders are just hideously corrupt, self-serving scum.

The Church and the Democrat Party are incubators for this particular kind of evil. They are closed communities where personal networks make all the difference. It's hard to get a promotion if the Lavender Mafia doesn't approve. Until 2016, you didn't get the backing of the Party if the Clintons didn't approve.

Mind you, I could have chosen the Republican Party and its fake support for fiscal responsibility, but the open-borders thing really jumped out at me.

Just as the Democrats are using the media to pump the "Kids in Cages" story to bring in illegals to vote, the Lavender Mafia is trying to normalize homosexuality within the faith to bring in more young men to consume.

In both cases, it's sick.

Update: And just like that, an American bishop is calling out the Mafia in public. No surprise, the dude's from Texas.

Why We Need To See Some Anger From The Priests

Preface: This is kind of a weird post for me. I'm not sure I want to see anything come of it. It arose from wife kitteh and I discussing what bothers us about the lack of anger from the pulpit. Take it for what it's worth.

---

I loves me some Father Mike Schmitz. His homilies on YouTube are always cheerful and fun and upbeat. He got serious this time when he dealt with the latest sex scandal revelations. He chokes back his anger a number of times and he mentions how parishioners have repeatedly asked him if he's angry about it. He doesn't express his anger except in body language. He talks about how the scandal has affected him and how he gets "child molester" comments in public.

I'm really sorry for that, amigo, but you're missing the point from the laity. I think that almost all priests are missing the point.

We're your infantry. We're the ones who are surrounded by opposition 24/7. We don't live in a rectory and we don't work with Catholics. At school, at work, in social settings, we're surrounded by protestants, agnostics and atheists. We're the front lines, not you.

The Church leadership fed us to the machine guns to no purpose. Your troops went over the top and got shot to pieces for nothing. We tithed and volunteered and attended Mass and sent our kids to Catholic schools and defended the Catechism in public and contributed to the Church Building Fund when you asked. After all that, you threw our lives away.

We didn't mind fighting abortion and taking the hits for that. Most of us didn't mind fighting for traditional marriage and taking the hits for that. This was different. This was simply charging across no-man's land to get ripped to shreds for nothing at all.

I know you didn't do it. I get that many of you didn't know. I get that you're horrified, but your sermons are being given to the shell-shocked survivors of the slaughter. We've argued with our coworkers, we've struggled to keep our children in the faith, we kept contributing to the Church Building Fund and this is what we get.

"We're all sinners. This is a reminder that we are all fallen and need God's grace."

"We need to forgive."

"This is an opportunity to show mercy."

From the Pope, we get anodyne, wimpy letters of ... I have no idea what that thing was, actually. Yesterday, from Church leadership, we got this.

Statement by Bishop William Crean announcing the decision of the Bishops’ Conference to divest from fossil fuels https://t.co/4O238zAi18 @trocaire pic.twitter.com/sP4Lovd1Ss

— CatholicBishops (@CatholicBishops) August 24, 2018

So there we are in the pews. We've just faced another week of machine gun fire and shelling, almost all of it inflicted by our own leadership for their gratification. You don't want to show anger and the bishops are adopting yet another far-left political stance.

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, when you don't show anger, I feel all alone, as if our lives can be spent like water in pursuit of whatever the latest fad might be or maybe in pursuit of nothing at all.

Blue Collar Priests

Dig this blog post by Padre Peregrino, a Catholic priest. I don't know that I agree with all of it, but it's definitely thought-provoking. This bit jumped out at me right off the bat.

Jesus Christ chose twelve fishermen as His first Catholic bishops. Let that reality set in for a minute: Tough, blue-collar workers who never made it to rabbi-school were chosen as Apostles. To be sure, neither were they impious doofuses. They were tough, blue-collar workers who took their faith seriously, even when they had to say things to Our Lord like “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.”—Luke 5:8. They thought in black-and-whites like that, not Hegelian greys.

That's not exactly true, they weren't all fishermen, but it's close enough. The point is, He wasn't picking the elites, he was picking masculine, working men. Being a priest is not for sissies and it's not a job for people who want an easy life. I'm not sure that it changes my mind about doing away with the celibacy requirement, but it makes you think. Also, dig these quotes, taken out of order.

• There have always been gays in the priesthood, but this blog post is a cultural evaluation of what is different about the 20th and 21st centuries. I know a 55 years old priest who claims that 60% of the priests his age are gay and 80% of the bishops are gay.
• This is not a gay-bashing blog-post. I have good friends who have struggled with same-sex attraction. Most of them were smart enough not to enter seminary or religious life. I say “smart” because it would be stupid to go live with 100 people you’re sexually attracted to for over seven years.
• Most priests and seminarians under 45 years old in the United States are straight, so things are getting better.

Bingo. For a guy, celibacy is hard enough if you're straight and only hanging out with men. It would be totally impossible if you were hanging out with women, too. For a gay dude, it's too much to ask to lock them in a seminary with lots of other gay men.

Seminaries full of gay dudes.

They're So Much Smarterer Than The Rest Of Us, You Know

... because they went to Wharton, a great business school, the best business school! Or maybe they went to Harvard or Berkeley or Yale or some combination of them. Yep, they're brilliant and we all need to leave our fates in their hands. I mean, good Lord, you wouldn't want to be responsible for all of the aspects of your own life, would you?

They're so brilliant, they cheat on their wives and then have their lawyers, who are crooked, pay off the bimbos to keep quiet.

They're so stunningly smart that they run email servers in a closet to do foreign policy work at the highest levels.

They're education teaches them that raping seminarians while their organization is literally dying for the lack of seminarians isn't such a big deal.

They take down pictures of Shakespeare from their universities because he's white. They hire crazy bigots to be on their editorial staffs, bigots who hate the largest group of customers in the country. They run up 20+ trillion in debt. They see how illegitimacy is wrecking the culture and they blame it on racism.

Yes, these are the best and the brightest.

Wanna know what makes me grateful? It's that the United States survived long enough as a small-government nation to finally make it to today's worship-the-experts paradise. It had to be nip-and-tuck for the first two centuries with dingbats and morons like us managing our own affairs.

George Washington. I guess it's too much to have expected him to have done any better. I mean, he didn't even go to Columbia!

Can You Spot The Kudzu?

No, you can't. This is San Diego and by mid-August, everything is brown and dried and dead.

It's been a particularly humid summer here in the coastal desert known as San Diego. Sweating in the muggy weather, I find that I wouldn't mind the thick air if it came with the greenery and rivers of the South.

Meh.

Aquinas Was A Radical. We Need A Radical Now.

In the wake of the latest round of the Catholic prelates trying to destroy the Church with their own versions of the Little Boy bomb, I've proposed we go full St. Thomas Aquinas and modify our theology in light of our improved understanding of God's biological laws.

Hey guys? How about if the next time you want to play with little boys you go far out into the woods and play with one like this?

To recap:

• God doesn't make contradictions. When science conflicts with theology, theology must bend.
• We know a whole lot more about sexual biochemistry now than we did 1,000 years ago.
• Christ did not come to Earth to bring us a pile of hopeless tasks. Celibacy isn't achievable by the vast majority of males of any species. Jesus never demanded that we do the impossible.

When I've engaged with Catholic Traditionalists, with whom I have great affinity if not membership in their group, they keep going back to the Church Fathers' teachings. What they don't get is that a lot of the Church Fathers were considered crazed radicals by the traddies of their day.

St. Thomas Aquinas was a bonafide heretic to many of his contemporaries. Among his many revolutionary and brilliant ideas, Aquinas claimed that there was a lot of valuable truth to be found in the Greek philosophers, all of whom were pagans.

The traddies replied, "Pagans? What madness is this? There is nothing we can derive from pagans save death and sin. No, we must chant and pray and burn incense, keeping our heads down in our prayer books and hymnals. To claim that because the world was created by God, all paths lead to God is heresy, plain and simple. Begone, you lunatic!"

In a lot of cases, the Church Fathers' greatest achievements were responses to crises of faith. Some of St. Augustine's teachings were corrections of heresies. Those heresies weren't always nutty, some of them were well-intentioned and reasonably logical. It required a devoted, holy genius to work out the response to the crisis of the moment.

Well, we need that now. This is clearly not working and I don't think it ever did. There are stories of priests going off the celibacy reservation from medieval times. Somebody with the theological chops and Church gravitas needs to make a stand for sanity. 

We need an Aquinas or an Augustine and we need him right now.

Annie: A Cure For The Turmoils Of The Day

... and causer of other turmoils.

I've still got enough OCD about this blog to feel the need to post something every day, despite my repeated attempts at self-interventions to stop the madness. I've got a few more deep, well, deep for me, thoughts about the prelates of the Catholic Church doing their best to blow up the best thing that ever happened to Mankind, but I'll leave the next installment of my incoherent ravings to tomorrow.

Today, it's Annie. Annie is a little, fuzzy dog that no doubt has a breed name, but it's unknown to me. She belongs to good friends of ours and she's a dear. We were over at their pad last night and this was the only shot I could get of her that was worth posting. She posed very briefly in all kinds of fetching ways in between demands that I throw her toys for her so that she and her compadre could spend their time fetching.

In any case, I think she's cute and sometimes there's been enough the-sky-is-falling blog posts and it's time for the beautiful and/or the cute.

Enjoy.

I'm Not Confessing Your Sins

... and you shouldn't have to do penance for mine.

A theme among Catholic priests on Twitter is how they're working to atone for the sins of their orders. I want to grab them by the lapels and shake them. I don't want them beating themselves up over sins they didn't commit, I want them taking pigs like Cardinal Wuerrl out into the alley behind the church and beating the tar out of them. We need warriors, not wimps.

Bishop Morlino of the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin nails it in this letter to the faithful.

Faced with stories of the depravity of sinners within the Church, I have been tempted to despair. And why? The reality of sin – even sin in the Church – is nothing new. We are a Church made of sinners, but we are sinners called to sanctity. So what is new? What is new is the seeming acceptance of sin by some in the Church, and the apparent efforts to cover over sin by them and others. Unless and until we take seriously our call to sanctity, we, as an institution and as individuals, will continue to suffer the “wages of sin.”

For too long we have diminished the reality of sin – we have refused to call a sin a sin – and we have excused sin in the name of a mistaken notion of mercy. In our efforts to be open to the world we have become all too willing to abandon the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In order to avoid causing offense we offer to ourselves and to others niceties and human consolation.

Amen, Bishop.  "(W)e have excused sin in the name of a mistaken notion of mercy" is exactly right.

See also: postmodernism, denying objective morality via.

So get over it, guys. Show some anger. As long as the sermons about this horror are muted, sad and wimpy, you're not going to convince us that there's a chance of stopping it. It's only going to end when the actual villains get expelled, tried, convicted, thrown into prison and we all see it.

There will be plenty of time for our mercy and their atonement while serving out their sentences.

The Elites Think We're Ignorant Swine

The Lavender Mafia in the Catholic Church smashing things to bits with their inerrant stupidity is just another case of the "elites" showing that they're idiots while looking down on the rest of us. Here are a few very recent examples of this.

Some of your employees are raping other employees and some of your customers as well? A common person would think those employees need to be fired and prosecuted. The elites (bishops) smiled and patted our heads and told us we just didn't understand.

Our Secretary of State did all of her business from her own email server in a closet somewhere? A common person would think she should be fired and prosecuted. The elites (FBI) smiled and patted our heads and told us we just didn't understand.

The NYT hired a raving, anti-white bigot to be on their editorial staff? A common person would think that it was a bad idea to hate the largest demographic group among your potential customers. The elites (NYT) smiled and patted our heads and told us we just didn't understand.

I could go on and on, but the Newcastle United game's second half just started.

This is how the "elites" see us.

Update: Ugh, what a horrible game.

Here's another example. A Yale professor, the very apex of "elite," wrote a zillion-word essay on why people ought to be allowed (with special exceptions!) to pick their own Halloween costumes, as if they needed to instruct us peasants. A normal person would say, "It's Halloween, we wear what we want. Get over it, Poindexter."

Catholic Arguments Against A Celibate Priesthood

What if the gay, rapist priests in the Church were intensely sexually frustrated men being asked to do what is impossible for all but a few? What if we've been trying to square the circle all this time and now it's really coming back to bite us?

I've come to the conclusion that a celibate priesthood has been a mistake from the beginning. It deprives us of a more masculine cadre of priests. It also pushes otherwise holy and devout men away from the priesthood.

Let's look at some Catholic arguments against it.

First, St. Peter, aka Simon Peter, the rock on which Jesus built his church, the first pope, was married. From Luke 4:38 we have this.

After he left the synagogue, he entered the house of Simon. Simon’s mother-in-law was afflicted with a severe fever, and they interceded with him about her. He stood over her, rebuked the fever, and it left her. She got up immediately and waited on them.

Second, we have Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 7.

A wife does not have authority over her own body, but rather her husband, and similarly a husband does not have authority over his own body, but rather his wife. Do not deprive each other, except perhaps by mutual consent for a time, to be free for prayer, but then return to one another, so that Satan may not tempt you through your lack of self-control.

Then we have the Catechism. From the guidance of Church Father St. Thomas Aquinas, it teaches us that when established science and theology conflict, theology must be re-examined because God does not make contradictions. I think we know a wee bit more about sexual biochemistry now than we did before.

We have St. Augustine's teachings about sex as well. He claimed that unlike other actions of our bodies, sexual desire was something outside of our wills. I can't find a Scratching Post-safe excerpt to quote here, so you'll just have to find it yourself.

Finally, there is 5 Things Women Need To Know About Men, written by Dr. Allen Hunt, published by that most Catholic of all American Catholic groups, Dynamic Catholic. Number 3 on his list is a physical relationship which he says is a need, not a want.

So there are some Catholic arguments against celibacy. Now how about a pro football argument?

The Lavender Mafia of Catholic prelates have managed to lose Ireland, thanks to their own hideous sexcapades. Ireland! How do Catholics manage to lose cultural dominance in Ireland of all places? That's like getting obliterated in a football game by a close rival. After that happens, some serious, fundamental questions need to be asked and answered.

We're not there yet, I guess. Maybe we need to experience a few more thrashings.

Note: The Bears coaching staff that oversaw this slaughter is no longer with the team.

The Elites (Bishops) Vs. The Normals (Laity)

So the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report on the Catholic sex scandal was released and it's mind-blowing. To put it broadly, Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals ran a homosexual, pedophile sex ring. Not all priests mind you, in fact, a small minority. However, it looks to me like the entire hierarchy was in on the act, if only the cover-up. The Lavender Mafia ran amok. I have a couple of developing thoughts on this, but for now, I want to look at one, weird angle.

What if this is a manifestation of Charles Murray's Coming Apart hypothesis - it's part of the division between the elites and the normals?

The bishops didn't see us as equals. We were peasants. If our little boys were raped by crazed, gay priests, well, the priests deserved mercy and we deserved ... maybe a payoff. We were never their equals.

Now dig an excerpt from this essay on the press penning a team editorial against President Trump.

Had those elites of both parties paid genuine attention to flyover country’s concerns, frustrations and fears, as silly and stupid as they seem to disconnected Beltway know-it-all’s, they would not be in today’s baffling, powerless position.

Let's translate that into the case of the Catholic bishops' suicide cult.

Had the bishops paid genuine attention to the laity's concerns, frustrations and fears, as silly and stupid as they seem to disconnected Catholic prelates, they would not be in today’s baffling, powerless position.

Oh yeah, these guys cared about us.

Maybe The Villains Got A Spanking

So open-minded and open-bordered Sweden has experienced another round of, err, youths setting fire to cars.

A gang of masked “youths” rampaged through Sweden’s second-largest city Monday night, setting cars ablaze in an attack described as “extremely organised” and like a military operation by the Prime Minister.

Don't worry, though, the authorities are on top of the situation.

Police chose not to arrest the “young people” at the scene and have since contacted their parents, reports state.

Dig this video of one of the Volvo-torching sessions.

Do you see any cops? I don't. All I see are masked individuals running off before they get caught. If this makes you ask some simple questions, don't feel like you're alone. I asked them, too. One in particular.

How did they know who their parents were?

Does it seem to you like the whole progressive, multi-culti thing is falling apart and now they're just flat-out lying to us about what is happening?

Bicycling?

You've got to be kidding me.

I'm on the East Coast today, hobnobbing and galavanting as is my wont from time to time. Last night, I landed in DC, rented a car and drove off. Gina Patrina*, my GPS system, guided me off to my hotel after a few stops for supplies.

Well, she sort of guided me.

Gina took my on the weirdest, most roundabout way I'd ever seen. I was going through mostly residential side streets. At one point, I went through a particular sequence twice and I still couldn't figure out how to follow her directions. She's usually so direct and reliable!

I finally realized she thought I was bicycling. At that intersection where I couldn't find the route, she was telling me to take a bike path through a park.

Gina! Stop that!

I have no idea why she thought I was on a bike. Sigh. Oh well, Gina, we're all allowed a mistake or three. It's OK, I won't hold a grudge.

Clouds over Virginia. The scene was much more attractive than this. Not sure why the shot came out so grainy.

* - Gina Patrina is our family name for Google maps, particularly in navigation mode.

Well, That Was A Dud

Now that the neo-nazis held a national march and only managed to gather a couple dozen people and a dyspeptic goat for their parade, can we please stop telling each other how America is full of white supremacists?

The goat agrees.

Life Imitates Red Dawn

... specifically, the reeducation camp scene.

My favorite detail is that the camp is a converted drive-in theater where the indoctrination movie is running in the background.

Now dig this.

Male, pale and stale university professors are to be given “reverse mentors” to teach them about unconscious bias, under a new Government funded scheme.

Under the project, white men in senior academic posts will be assigned a junior female colleague from an ethnic minority as a mentor.

Prof John Rowe, who is overseeing the project at Birmingham University, said he hoped the scheme will allow eminent professors to confront their own biases and leave them “feeling quite uncomfortable”.

It's not enough, of course, to indoctrinate the professors, you have to get the family as well. Oh, that's right, the education system is taking care of that.

Enlightenment observation: If this postmodernist rubbish was working, wouldn't we see boys achieving as well as girls? We don't, do we? Hmm. Maybe it was never about achievement, only about power and destroying the enemies of the Movement. Remember, in the postmodernist world, logic is actually an impediment to progress.

Watching the clip above, I thought of something else. How would it feel to be one of the children of those professors, knowing some punk was hired to go into your father's office and humiliate him on a regular basis. If you'd done that to my father, you'd have some problems from both of us.

Avenge me indeed.

Postmodernism Spinning Out Of Control

My own crude, incomplete definition of Postmodernism is that it is the rejection of the reality of objective truth. When progressives talk about "your truth" and "my truth", it is a direct result of the Postmodern movement that has taken over our educational system.

I'd argue that each successive generation raised under postmodernism is more off the rails than the last. The first generation, say the one of the 1960s, was only sort of nutty. Their teachers, not all of whom had been indoctrinated, had been raised in an enlightenment (logic- and objective fact-based) world. They may have rejected that, but they were intellectually coasting along under its momentum.

The second generation, say that of the 1990s, was instructed by the people raised in the 1960s, who were still managed by folks from the earlier, enlightenment era. They were taught crazy things, but still not totally insane. The indoctrination in the academies was more complete, but still not universal.

Today's generation is almost completely under the tutelage of postmodern teachers who are under the control of postmodern managers. The result is bat guano-crazy things like the craze over 178+ genders, the anti-scientific support for transgender people, the on-its-face stupid concept of unconscious bias and a complete lack of gratitude for the preceding generations who gave them everything up to and including the smartphones on which they while away the tedious hours.

When we see the mob come after people because they refuse to support today what was yesterday considered wrong (see: Obama's change in support for gay marriage, the demand that we all call Bruce Jenner a woman instead of crazy), we're seeing what happens when the culture is thoroughly postmodern, from top to bottom.

Without even a shred of objective reality or logic, there is nothing to keep us from changing course capriciously, wildly, even violently. Postmodernism carries with it no momentum from accepted thought, only the childish emotions of the mob.

And so massive corporations rush to deplatform the nutbag Alex Jones without warning this week. It's a postmodernist act - there's no objective measure bring applied that will allow us to predict who's next or even what's next.

Biology, Morality And Religion

At some pundit's recommendation, I think it was Victor Davis Hanson, I recently listened to a good portion of The Satyricon by Gaius Petronius. Petronius was a member of Nero's inner circle, circa 60 AD. I finally had to stop because the thing is mostly porn and I just couldn't stomach it any more.

The Satyricon is brilliantly written. It is one of the most beautiful and compelling pieces of prose I have ever read. You can easily get lost in the writing and carried along the sewer stream of the story. It is also very instructive regarding the development of morality in the absence of Judeo-Christian religion.

I don't have time to go into the plot, which you can find summarized elsewhere. Instead, I'll just say that the characters go from orgy to feast to orgy to theft to orgy to feast and on and on. There is a ton of homosexual sex as well as a great deal of seducing of children. Only in that last one do the characters reveal a scintilla of reluctance, but even then, not enough to stop themselves. In fact, when I finally couldn't stomach it any more, one character was proudly recounting how he had seduced a young boy right under the noses of his parents.

It's all horrible, but is it wrong? That's the question I wrestled with as I listened. Putting myself in their shoes, where their gods and goddesses are nothing more than good luck charms and their morality is derived from satisfying biological urges, why is any of it wrong?

Therein lies the problem for those who claim that atheism can produce a moral code equal or superior to Christianity. You might be able to do it in the faculty lounge, which I doubt, but you certainly can't do it with the general public. You can't answer the simple question that all moral codes must address: Why shouldn't I satisfy my biological urges?

Judeo-Christian Version

1. We were made in the image of God
2. We are all equal
3. We are called to love others as ourselves
4. God gave us our bodies to serve each other, not ourselves
5. We should enjoy sensual pleasures within that context

Atheist Version

1. ...
2. ...
3. ...
4. ...
5. Um, there are efficiencies to society if you practice some nebulously-defined restraint, so you probably shouldn't do it, OK?

Modern, Secular Version

1. You're a bigot if you don't support all 781 genders getting it on any way they want
2. For those of you who haven't consulted the latest list and still think there are only 765 genders, you're bigots, too. ANTIFA will be at your door shortly to provide instruction.

In the end, no one is going to listen to intellectuals tell them to restrain their desires because there's some kind of evolutionary advantage to it. That's nonsense from beginning to end. The evolutionary advantage comes to those who slake their lusts and desires as much as they possibly can. Hey, the dominant lion isn't an ascetic, you know.

And neither are the characters in The Satyricon. Go figure. And while you do, feel free to Bang A Gong (Get It On).

Nissans And Unconscious Bias

Pondering unconscious bias a bit more after yesterday's post, I think I've hit on the fatal flaw in it. Let's call it UB for short. Like most social justice phrases, it's awful and deserves nothing more than an abbreviation.

First, you have to realize that UB isn't confined to races or even people. It's your hidden feelings about adjective noun. For example, real UB retraining might focus on your secret feelings about Eskimo lesbians, but the logic is just as applicable to walnut furniture, ground corn or cold days.

I've owned two Nissan (Datsuns at the time) pickups, a Nissan Maxima and a Nissan Altima. My son bought a Nissan Sentra. I recently rented a late-model Nissan Altima. According to UB, I have must have hidden feelings about Nissan vehicles.

How in the world can that even be detected? I don't have hidden feelings about Nissans, I have vocal, obvious, conscious, experience-based feelings about Nissans. The thought that there would be some ultra-secret storehouse of biases lurking in my subconscious affecting my opinion about Nissans is utterly insane.

My opinion of Nissans isn't based on UB at all. UB would be nothing more than noise about 60 dB below the level of my analysis of empirical data.

Further, my opinion of Nissans changes over time. I had thought I was a hopeless Nissan partisan, but I didn't really like that rented Altima I drove recently. It was a big meh. If I was going to buy a new car right now, I don't think I'd go back to Nissan. You could have sent me to a year's worth of UB reeducation camps and they wouldn't have done doodly-toot compared to my experience driving the Altima.

Unconscious bias is quackery.

It's not really quackery, though, is it? It's something much, much worse.

Unconscious Bias Is Anti-Science

I work for what is considered a science and engineering organization. You couldn't tell it by the fact that some of our groups are undergoing unconscious bias training. I haven't done the research myself, but from what Jordan Peterson asserts, and he is always careful about what he says, the science behind unconscious bias is shoddy to the point of worthlessness. See below.

Shoddy or not, the whole idea is ridiculous. First, if it's unconscious, I don't know I have it. In fact, you can't even prove that I have it. If you could, that would mean you know more about my internal thoughts than I do.

Second, even if it's true, it's so far down the list of decision aids that it's irrelevant if I have it or not.

In the last few years, I've had the, err, opportunity to drive through South Central Los Angeles. South Central is a horror.

This is a pretty common sight.

When you drive through South Central, you drive through it. You don't stop to shop, dine, visit or anything else unless you absolutely have to do it. All the unconscious bias in the world going one way or another isn't going to result in a different decision. You're acting on conscious bias, informed by real-world data.

Which brings me to the final point. If you observe data, develop hypotheses about it and test those against more observed data, what room does that leave for unconscious bias? Where would it arise independent of empirical facts?

Science. You're doing it wrong.

Jesus Is Indeed A Socialist

Steven Colbert was right, Jesus is a socialist. Here's how you can tell. Think of the group that best embodies Christian life. Aren't they run by tyrannical leaders and surrounded by the bodies of the dead, killed by the leader's closest allies? They are, aren't they?

Yep, Jesus is a socialist. Makes sense to me.

Who can forget that classic line from the Sermon on the Cambodian Mount? "Blessed are the peacemakers, particular when they drive people out of the cities to slaughter them in the countryside."

The Final Verdict On RV Vacations

No. Because no.

We had a good time, but we would never rent an RV again and buying one is out of the question. The worst part was realizing you probably couldn't park the thing where you wanted to go, like downtown Asheville, North Carolina in the arts district. We ended up renting a car and driving that around and left the RV at the campground.

When you added up all of the costs - the rental, the rental car, the campground fees, the huge fuel bill, the camping gear we needed to bring - it turned out that the per-day expense of the RV was higher than the highest we've ever paid for a VRBO house rental and we've stayed in some pretty nice places.

In the end, you're still camping, it's just that you have four walls, a roof and some amount of mobility. Wife kitteh likes camping, but I'm not much of a fan even under the best of circumstances.

Meh.

Meanwhile, for your viewing pleasure, here's eastern Tennessee at 200 MPH. Enjoy.

Sarah Jeong Is An Inflection Point For America

I'm still processing the fact that the New York Times, the freaking New York Times, hired a crazed racist, not as an occasionally-published pundit, but as a member of their editorial board.

There's no going back from this one. The NYT has now normalized racism for its readers. Not that it wasn't bubbling up already, given the lunacy from our academies with their whiteness studies and toxic masculinity courses. Following along with the NYT, the WaPo published this her-racism-wasn't-so-bad-after-all piece. Here's a snippet.

Without evidence that they had any bearing on Jeong’s extensive body of work, which includes a book she wrote about online harassment, these statements could have perhaps been unceremoniously dismissed as insignificant.

Well, I guess it wasn't racism-racism. Of course, that logic only works if you accept the left's definition of racism that it can only come from whites. But fie upon logic! This isn't about logic and it never was. This is about the overuse of their favorite tool to gain power - the charge of racism. Sarah isn't an outlier to them, she's actually pretty typical, if you look at what's going on at our colleges.

And therein lies my only ray of hope from this horrific incident. My bet is that the NYT, the WaPo and most of the Democrats' base are living so deeply inside of a bubble that they don't really understand America at all. This is the real America:

We saw this at a blue-collar diner in the South this week. A white girl cheerfully waiting on two black gentlemen. It happens in every combination, every day, all over the place. This is the America we know from reality, not the race-obsessed madness of the left.

I'm hoping that normal Americans of all stripes will be repulsed by Sarah and the NYT. Maybe it will rip the veil off the Nazism of the American progressives, revealing their sickness to all.

You can be in favor of Medicare for all and a higher minimum wage without being a racist, you know.

This Has Got To Stop

... or it may already be too late and the NYT may have crossed the Rubicon in force by hiring a crazed racist to their editorial board.

Meet the newest member of the New York Times editorial board.

I'd say that these tweets were part of her resumè when she applied for the job. pic.twitter.com/CLgFvPeAgM

— Garbage Human 🗑 (@GarbageHuman_) August 2, 2018

UPDATE: Apparently it isn't her fault that she's racist so it's all good. pic.twitter.com/NZsGe3yAdT

— Garbage Human 🗑 (@GarbageHuman_) August 2, 2018

Topping on the cake:

Keep defending her guys, great job. pic.twitter.com/CgzXt8XcOZ

— EinsteinKnowsGod☇ (@destractions) August 2, 2018

No Flags

In the last 15 months, I've driven around every state in the old Confederacy, visiting a lot of blue collar eateries, cheap hotels, campgrounds and tap houses. In that time, I've seen less than 15 Confederate flags, total, including bumper stickers.

Meanwhile, the pubs and diners have been more racially integrated at all levels - customers, workers and managers - than anything I've ever seen outside of Dixie. If the South is full of crazed, hateful, white supremacists, they're doing a good job of hiding it.

Or maybe that's a long-dead boogie man preserved by progressives in order to gain power through fear and hate.

Maybe instead of repeating the hateful slander of would-be tyrants on the left, we could just enjoy places like the Nantahala River in North Carolina and the lovely people that live nearby.

The Nantahala Forest At 500 MPH

Here's a quick edit of a video segment from what we took yesterday using the windshield mount for the GoPro Hero3. It gives you an idea of what it's like driving the RV - it's like looking out of the eye slit of a knight's helmet.

I think the speed is too fast and I want to do some post-processing on the lighting, but we're off to explore Asheville and I don't have time to get too involved. I'll leave that for when we get back to the Catican Compound in San Diego.

In the meantime, enjoy! It's 1280 HD, so it might be worth watching it on YouTube in fullscreen mode.