Why are Bill and Melinda Gates getting divorced?

Some people think that the close quarters caused by the COVID lockdowns are responsible for the demise of Bill and Melinda Gates's marriage. Others point out that if you spell divorce backwards, you can see the letters COVID pretty clearly. And Bill Gates has defintely had an unhealthy obsession with COVID, and no, this is not only a rightwing conspiracy.

But I believe that it is a different obsession which caused his wife to leave him. It is his obsession with human feces. Everywhere Gates goes he carries a jar of poop with him. And in November of 2018, he gave a well publicized talk with his pet poop right there next to him in a glass jar, speculating about what sort of diseases might be residing within the mineral-rich substance.

"This small amount of feces," Gates said, brandishing the jar of excrement, "could contain as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion shigella bacteria and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs."

The audience had to appreciate that vivid description. And they were so grateful to be able to view Bill's actual stool sample. Visualizing human dung, as if it were something a person saw every day or two, can be a challenge. Good thing he was "brandishing" it, as NPR noted.

A prized sample from the Gates Foundation's ever-growing collection of human excrement.

People, this is not a molded foam poop emoji that someone like me might or might not have in their top desk drawer to relieve stress by squeezing. This is not even a picture of "Poop from Heaven" which one of my kids might or might not have drawn when he was six-and-a-half.

This is actual poop and it is inside a jar and you can see it. Not like the shoebox which I had in the garage because I was too lazy to come in the house and that my wife found later and didn't want to talk to me for a few days afterward.

By the way, speaking of wives in general. Women do not understand men's obsession with human dung and the production thereof. That is why I have to figure that Melinda finally cracked. Allegedly, she is some type of Catholic, and so when Pope Francis used the word coprophilia it must have struck home.

This theory could all be wrong. It might be that Melinda could no longer hide the fact that she prefers iPhones to the Microsoft POS phone that Bill got for her last Christmas, and this is a huge problem for him. But I still think it is more likely that Bill's obsession with literal Pieces Of Sh*t is a bigger problem for her. However maybe the two go together; this is the guy who got rich selling this stuff.

Benedict Option: For Christians with Expanding Brains

I just keep coming up blank for anything to say about the Benedict Option. Everything there is to say has been said by others. Recently there's been great stuff from Keith and Sam Rocha. Going back a little further there's me in 2016 and me in 2015, etc. Oh, also Keith in 2015. And of course Bruce Frohnen's in 2015.

Oh wait, here's another good one I did in 2015.

Right now, all I have left to say about the Benedict Option can be summed up by use of the expanding brain meme.

PS - Here's a prophetic post from Keith from 2014. But... I mean, here's the whole list, have at it, man.

Holding up a mirror to Planned Parenthood

I'm very busy today, but I feel like this post is necessary to read and assimilate for everyone concerned with the fighting the moral war we've been fighting since Eve bit the apple. It's especially important for all Christians and other Pro-life people upon the release of the latest video from the Center for Medical Progress to agree that the undercover work they do is good and just and justified. Here's the meat of it:

Here are just a few of the implications of verbal pacifism. On that theory, the following activities would be intrinsically evil, just like using child suicide bombers against the Nazis — and it would be better to die, and let millions of others be tortured, raped or killed, rather than engage in them. In fact, doing any one of them would be a sin sufficient to damn one’s soul to hell:

• Deceiving the Pharaoh who wished to kill all the newborn male Hebrews — as the midwives did in Exodus 1:15-21. (The Bible tells us that “God dealt well with the midwives.”)
• Deceiving priest-hunters by using assumed names, as Jesuit missionaries did when they ministered in Reformation England, and St. Miguel Pro did in Mexico in the 1920s.
• Deceiving the Nazis to rescue Jews from the gas chambers, as Oskar Schindler did.
• Distributing false baptismal certificates so that Jews could pass as Gentiles and escape extermination, as John XXIII did during World War II.
• Using false documents and false statements in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, like the conspirators working with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who were aided by Pope Pius XII (who passed their messages via Vatican couriers).
• Deceiving the brutal dictators who hoped to hunt down and torture leftist priests, as Pope Francis did while serving as Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
• Posing as a child in online forums in order to catch child porn distributors and pedophiles, as police routinely do — having found it the only effective means of capturing such predators.
• Pretending to be an Islamist, in order to infiltrate terrorist organizations like al-Qaida and ISIS, as CIA operatives do.
• Misleading criminal suspects about the evidence you have, as police do to obtain truthful confessions without coercion.
• Infiltrating an abortion business like Planned Parenthood to see if they are breaking laws about statutory rape and organ trafficking, as Live Action and the Center for Medical Progress did.

Any moral philosophy that claims that all these activities are intrinsically evil has got some explaining to do. By insisting on premises that yield such repugnant conclusions, and claiming that the only alternative is a crass and unprincipled pragmatism, verbal pacifists are cutting off their nose to spite their face.

I was so glad to see clarity provided on the morality of some types of trickery that I sent an email to the author. Here's an abbreviated form of the email:

Excellent work, John! I honestly don't know what Mark Shea's deal is. What is really going on here is that people are holding up a MIRROR to the face of Planned Parenthood, they're looking in, seeing the ugliness and saying "YEP. THAT'S ME. THAT'S US. WE *OWN* IT, WE'RE PROUD OF IT." Picasso said something like "art is a lie which helps us see the truth". Well, what CMP does is ARTWORK.

Here's a few other points I've thought of in the past to counter Shea's absurdity and obsession:

• Acts 5:7-9: St. Peter dissimulates and sets up Sapphira for the Holy Spirit to whack her. So... St. Peter tempted her to sin?
• I Kings 3:24-28: King Solomon tricks a hooker into revealing that she is not the mother, and that she's OK with murdering an innocent child.

These events are held up in sacred scripture as truly right and just. And of course there are many other examples from scripture and elsewhere in history.

The second example is particularly apropos to CMP — they are basically being Solomon in the modern day.

Keep up the good work.

Mark Shea on the Benedict Option

Since my friend Joseph is always bringing up the somewhat relevant Catholic author Mark Shea, I thought I should check out what Mark Shea recently had to say about the Benedict Option:

Instead of withdrawal from the world, how about sharing the fruits of prayer and contemplation with the world? God did not so love the world that he hunkered down in Fortress Katolicus seeking the perfect liturgy, scrutinizing people for heresy, and repelling everybody who sought him as an invader.

The world is to be loved, not feared or worshiped. Father Dominic got this.

Seriously. Who at this point hears Benedict Option and doesn't think "bunker"? If the so-called Benedict Option was truly a strategic withdrawal then no one would even know about it as I've said before. Conceding defeat in the war of ideas isn't strategic. How can you even purport to be a standard-bearer for Burkean ideals and leave the fight?

Shea and I disagree on many things and his reflexive moral equivalency in the political sphere is tiresome, but we agree (along with Tom) that the so-called Benedict Option isn't to be considered either because it isn't really Christian or it doesn't really exist. Or... maybe a bit of both.

Tom on the Benedict Option

Over at Disputations, Tom's not in the mood to waste words on the Benedict Option.

If you ever come across the term "the Benedict Option," there's really only one thing you need to know about: It's nonsense.

More precisely, it's a meaningless term, a cypher. The thing it refers to is a non-thing. As such, it can mean anything. And a term that can mean anything isn't worth talking about.

I agree with this assessment entirely. And yet the correction of errors often requires the dealing with non-things patiently and tirelessly. For example, the monster under the bed is a non-thing, but some people require night after night of sleeping in their parents' bed because they are obsessed with that non-thing, until finally they figure out it doesn't exist. Also some people don't want to go to the basement without at least their big brother because there's something scary down there if you happen to be alone.

Those are two examples that come to mind immediately, and it hasn't escaped my notice that they pertain to very immature minds. This is probably accordant with the whole point; Tom goes on:

"The Benedict Option" was a cypher when Rod Dreher coined the term nine or ten years ago, a contentless label generated as a placeholder for the idea he hoped would follow from his feelings on reading the last paragraph of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue.

Waiting, waiting, waiting for an "idea he hoped would follow from his feelings". Waiting not for Godot, not for Benedict.... merely waiting for an idea that never took any discernible shape....

Since then, Rod has written a lot about "the Benedict Option" without managing to define it in a way anyone who doesn't find what he writes convincing can comprehend. These days, although he still can't say what it is, he does insist it's hugely important to every Christian in America:

Again and again: these are not normal times. We can’t be about business as usual. The future of Christianity in America will be Benedictine — as in Benedict Option — or it won’t be at all.

That might give one pause.

The Pause it gives me is akin to the town council's pause after Corky St. Clair announces his dollar figure in Waiting for Guffman.



The Pause is more real than the non-thing that is the Benedict Option because it actually does something. It asks a single, one-word question:

"Seriously?"

Read the whole thing over at Tom's. He really does have a great blog, and I don't check it out nearly enough. I'll just leave you with one more line of his which could serve as a conclusion to any and every post we do on the Benedict Option:

My advice to anyone who might be interested in "new forms of community within which the moral life [can] be sustained" is to think about them without reference to Rod Dreher or "the Benedict Option."

Hear, hear.

Hilarious Meltdowns on Democratic Underground

Speaking of reactions, the Daily Caller provides us with a great Top 16 Meltdown List from Democratic Underground posts reacting to the wipe-out of all they hold dear and the repudiation of the war-on-women façade with all the other left scare tactics. Here's a shorter list of my faves, along with my own comments.

1. We need to yell louder and cuss harder, dammit!
   
   Unknown Beatle: “What the fuck is the matter with this nation? Things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse, and as hard as we try and yell and cuss, no one is doing shit about all the criminality going on with the banks, politicians, and anyone that breaks the law as long as they’re filthy rich. I’m so fucking pissed off right now I can’t see straight. My blood pressure is sky high. I need to take it easy.”
   
   Yes, please take it easy, UB. Have a drink or four.
   
   
2. "Charlatans, Demagogues and Scalawags"
   
   KingCharlemagne: “I am deeply disappointed in my fellow Americans tonight. The suffering that will ensue was and is mostly entirely preventable. So I am disappointed that we shall have to endure this suffering for at least 2 years now because Americans could not see through the lies sold to them by this pack of charlatans, demagogues and scalawags. Yes, the Democrats largely ran away from President Obama after allowing the Republicans to frame the race as “Obama, Obama, Obama” and that bespeaks a party in trouble. But in the final analysis, voters chose to vote against their self-interest and against the interest of their compatriots for what? To ‘send a message’ to Dems? The reality is that things will not get better in the next two years. They will get worse and possibly much, much worse. And so I am disappointed that my fellow Americans chose a path that will cause suffering for their countrymen when I have to believe most of them did not seek to cause such suffering.”
   
   This is how this trudging rant reads to me: "disappointed... suffering... disappointed... suffering... disappointed... suffering... suffering...."
   
   I wonder if KingCharlamagne realizes the racist history of the term scalawag.
   
   
3. Ampersand Unicode contemplates suicide: "Should I just do myself in?"
   
   Ampersand Unicode: ”I’m actually scared — as in can’t-sleep-tonight-Halloween-came-five-days-late scared — of the GOP fascists taking over the Kennedy state. I voted for Coakley but am not optimistic because of all the endorsements Baker has gotten and the past history of electing GOP governors (Romney, Weld). I’m also looking to leave because MA just voted to keep the filthy casinos. Also, there is a gun store that just popped up out of nowhere down the street from my house on a main street. I no longer feel safe in my neighborhood or my state. Should I find a way to move to Vermont where Bernie and the sane people live? Or if I can’t afford to leave, should I just do myself in? I honestly am terrified that we’re living in the decline of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Reich.”
   
   This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if I live in the same country as some people. I could say the same thing about some conservatives I know personally who routinely compare Obama to Hitler. But it is probably more accurate to say they don't know the facts of history very well. The Beer Hall Putsch happened in early November but the comparisons with the 2014 Midterms end there; people actually got killed! Honestly.
   
   
4. We don't deserve Obama; he should just quit and show everybody
   
   CK_John: “I think the President has to put resignation on the table and not give them the satisfaction of being impeached.”
   
   This is hilarious. The fantasy looks like this: Obama comes in to the room with Republican lawmakers and threatens to resign. He calmly says "I'm just gonna take my Biden and go home." The Republicans are aghast, and realize that the US will be hit with tidal waves and hurricanes if they let Obama step down and unleash the wrath of the global warming gods. They plead with him to stay, but he and Joe Biden raise their hands and ascend into Heaven. It's the leftist version of Left Behind.
   
   
5. Put the lime in the coconut, baby
   
   upaloopa: “So now that we have nothing more to lose how about taking our party on a hard turn to the left. Let’s come up with every progressive idea we can and put together a liberal platform for 2016. Never compromise with the devil”
   
   Please, please, PLEASE do this. There is nothing we love more than seeing your true colors, upaloopa, and watching normal people utterly reject your ideological points one by one. How about the 2016 democrat platform featuring mandatory bathrooms for transvestites, 100% gun confiscation and open borders as the top items? That should be enough to start with.
   

The rest are funny, too. I just wish we could have laughed this hard in 2012.

NBC gives us the bad news: We are angry haters for voting Republican

Really NBC? These are your 5 big questions after the Democrats were obliterated? What would the proverbial "Man from Mars" think if he read the following Big Question number 5? Would he really get a clear picture of why the GOP swept the floor with the Democrats?

5. Will voter angst last?

The defining characteristic of politics in 2014 is an electorate that is angry with members of both parties and dissatisfied with its leaders. Obama’s approval rating is declining, but it still remains far ahead of Congress.

There are no signs Washington will become less polarized. In fact, with two houses of Congress opposing Obama, the partisan battles there may intensify. Polls suggest Republicans are growing in their hatred of Hillary Clinton as she becomes less identified with her role as secretary of state and more a Democratic candidate. The Republican presidential candidates, particularly Cruz and Christie, are hardly conciliatory figures.

Here we go again with the anger accusation. That's from the 1994 Jennings playbook which we all remember. Because being angry with members of both parties causes people to do what? Vote for members of the angriest party they can find, the Republicans.

I'm mad at both parties, so I guess I'll vote Republican. That ought to show everybody! Yeah!

Next item of stupidity: I have to say I'm getting tired of the invalid comparison between the Presidential approval rating and the so-called congressional approval rating. "Obama’s approval rating is declining, but it still remains far ahead of Congress." This is an apples and oranges comparison that doesn't translate into any type of real action. Nobody votes for "congress", you get to vote for one member of congress. If your member of congress wins and can't get anything done you blame "congress" and give them a low rating. Then you send the same person back 2 years later.

And then we get to the topic of Hillary Clinton—the unannounced Democratic front-runner for President—who we learn isn't merely disapproved of by Republican voters but hated. In fact, we are told that we are "growing in [our] hatred of Hillary Clinton as she becomes less identified with her role as secretary of state and more a Democratic candidate." Yeah, we really liked her as Secretary of State, uh-huh. This is what passes as election analysis at NBC.

Exile (with leather armchairs)

My favorite humorist, Jack Handey, writes: "I bet the sparrow looks at the parrot and thinks, yes, you can talk, but LISTEN TO YOURSELF!" Listen to yourself. Good advice; probably should come right after Socrates's "Know yourself" in importance, advice which some people never take to heart.

People who write for a living (or as a hobby for that matter) should at least "listen to themselves". But they don't always. More often they parrot things that sound good to them.

I received an email from a reader with this link and this excerpt from an exceedingly long and rambling post:

Anyway, Orthodoxy is not just what you do on Sunday. It cannot be, and still be Orthodoxy. That is the point.

After eight years of living this life, I find the resilience it builds into you to be astonishing. And because Orthodox spirituality compels you always to search your conscience and to repent, I find that it has forced me to do some pretty painful, at times, growing in the spirit. It is possible, of course, to be self-satisfied as an Orthodox Christian, but to do so requires you to fight hard against the spiritual currents within the Church — which, I underscore, is less an institution and more of a Way.

Orthodoxy is weird. Incredibly weird by American standards. This is a strength, I find. If you’re Orthodox, you’re never going to really fit in to American Christian practice. You will always know who you are.

On the other hand, Orthodoxy is institutionally weak in this country. There are very few of us, and our churches are, for now, few and far between. Not all Orthodox churches are, well, orthodox. It is, sadly, too easy to find Orthodox parishes that are grim, closed-off ethnic clubs. It is too easy to find Orthodox parishes that are basically Mainline Protestantism with food festivals. No church is perfect, and never will be. My hope, though, is that in the time of exile, many American Christians will be drawn to the steady, faithful witness of Orthodox Christianity, and unite themselves to it, and strengthen the Orthodox Church.

That’s my positive case for why Orthodoxy is the best home for small-o orthodox Christians in American exile. What’s yours for your church? Remember the rules bounding this discussion.

The post mentions Roman Catholicism a lot, of course. How could it not? Even when Mr. Dreher is not bashing the church over hoaxes like Tuam, etc. he is dining out on being a "Catholic" writer, copping ideas from Catholic saints like "little way", planning a festival for an actual Catholic writer, Walker Percy and most recently, writing a book about Dante's Divine Comedy (nota—Dante was Catholic). I don't think I ever have seen evidence that he devotes as much time to Orthodox subjects in any detail, other than to say it's weird and otherworldly and really conservative as he does in this post, or when he gets embroiled in Church politics and cults of personality like he did awhile back.

I'm not interested in the whole "best home for small-o orthodox Christians in American exile" discussion any more than a "best home for small-o orthodox Christians in French exile" would. Let alone the "rules bounding this discussion". Isn't this entire life supposed to be an exile for the Christian by Christ's own words? "The foxes have holes..." remember that? Or read St. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians if you thought Christ was just being pessimistic.

I think that the best home for me in exile is the Roman Catholic church. This is because I believe the Catholic church is the one true church founded by Christ. It's my faith. But there are wheat and tares and they are in the Church together at this point. The Apocalypse of St. John starts off with condemnation of churches started by first generation Christians. So I would be horribly misguided to imagine that I would find the church in any age without major issues going one of one kind or another, or to one degree or another. And being called "vomit" or a "synagogue of Satan" qualifies as a high degree, I'd guess.

Aside from the implicit Catholic-bashing, what I glanced at in this post strikes me as a bit embarrassing in the same way as Miley Cyrus's antics (which, I might point out I also merely glanced at.) It's generally said that she is embarrassing because she obviously thinks she was the first human being to discover sex. In the same way, Dreher sounds like he thinks that he is the first to discover Christianity and how being a serious Christian is counter-cultural. But I'm pretty sure that there were a bunch of people who preceded us who discovered that in a much deeper way. This was due to the fact that the flames started at their feet. Agonizing seconds probably past by like hours before they died of smoke inhalation or severe shock to their nervous system. You can imagine that the burning martyr was truly longing for the homeland as one living in exile. You can be pretty sure he or she was not feeling like this. Exile? You decide.

My final observation is a question. What is the difference between this:

Not all Orthodox churches are, well, orthodox. It is, sadly, too easy to find Orthodox parishes that are grim, closed-off ethnic clubs. It is too easy to find Orthodox parishes that are basically Mainline Protestantism with food festivals.

and this?

Catholicism has the Magisterium and the Catechism, which are doctrinal rocks, but in my experience, so many American Catholics don’t submit their consciences to them.

Answer: nothing. So what is the point really?

"It's not even close."

I feel somewhat like I'm waking up from a weird dream, an alternate reality. I've been driving to western Michigan and back every week for five months. It has kept me extremely busy. I wanted to spend every spare moment with my wife and kids and my weird hobbies which have nothing to do with scribbling on the internets. Now this contract is ending and I have all these thoughts in my head, like puddles after the rain, from the first half of 2014 which I never commented on here, though I wanted to. So forgive me if some of this stuff is "old news", old by our modern news-cycle standards at any rate.

Here's the first thing I wanted to remark on. Yes, Bloomberg is quite a thing. And obviously his new anti-gun project is something which I detest and I hope turns ultimately into a huge waste of time, money and resources. So I was going to opine that I suspect my hope is correct. There are plenty of Democrats who detest gun-grabbing and I believe this group is playing to a rather small gallery.

But when I got to the last two paragraphs, I thought I'd wandered into an amateur comedy club. The focus of my derision shifted as Bloomberg went full retard into religion:

Mr. Bloomberg was introspective as he spoke, and seemed both restless and wistful. When he sat down for the interview, it was a few days before his 50th college reunion. His mortality has started dawning on him, at 72. And he admitted he was a bit taken aback by how many of his former classmates had been appearing in the “in memoriam” pages of his school newsletter.

But if he senses that he may not have as much time left as he would like, he has little doubt about what would await him at a Judgment Day. Pointing to his work on gun safety, obesity and smoking cessation, he said with a grin: “I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”

Stand back, St. Peter! The former Mayor of New York is heading straight in!

Al E. quipped that two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. Then he added the disclaimer that he wasn't sure about the universe. I'm wondering something. If you could earn a place in Heaven―and I don't believe you can―would you be able to if you weren't even sure Heaven existed? In other words, you weren't sure there was a God to be worshiped on earth? And if everyone in Heaven knows everything there is to be known as perfectly as each of their minds can grasp knowledge, will there be interviews at the Pearly Gates? Even with people as important as Michael Bloomberg? Possibly; journalists and video crews who make it there might not know how to do anything else.

I hope Bloomberg does go to Heaven, but I don't think he'll like it. There won't be any government and no ability to run anything or ban anything. There will be smokers there, no doubt, and obese people like St. Thomas Aquinas and plenty of firing of guns for fun, since they won't be able to hurt anybody. (Trust me on this last point.) But maybe Bloomberg's first meeting with G. K. Chesterton would be worth capturing on video.

In case of the rapture... or Google...

Remember our old Dangerous Ideas posts from days of yore? Well, I give you the whole Google robot car debacle-waiting-to-happen.

I actually heard grown men discussing the benefits of driverless cars with serious faces the other day. "Of course," said one, "you'd have to make sure everyone else on the road has a special transmitting device so the driverless cars 'knows' about them." Oh great, I thought, so these things are blind as well as looking totally retarded?

Immediately I was reminded of a Jack Handey deep thought: "I wish a robot would get elected President. That way, when he came to town, we could all take a shot at him and not feel too bad." It might be fun to goof on these puppies, maybe spray paint the Apple logo on them, or tag them with that bumper sticker about the rapture, etc. But wear your ninja outfit; I'm sure they have wireless cams all over them with a lawyer or two on the other end.

And speaking of lawyers, I'm sure there are some ambulance chasers strategizing how you might sue the deep-pocketed GOOG over these marvels. Who would likely win a "she said / it said" case?