Officer Tatum calls it

the way it is.



The choice is made in the bedroom, not the clinic.

Fan Baiting: It's a thing

Wokappopotamus Loses

In case you haven't heard the wonderful news, Oberlin College is finally ponying up the now $36.59 million dollar judgment to Gibson's Bakery.

"But what's with the headline, Pauli? What the hell are you talking about?"

I got the nickname Wokappopotamus from this Rate My Professor's page for Meredith Raimondo. She is really the big, big loser of the moment, whether she would admit it or not. The nickname is from an obviously fake review, but oh well.

Meredith Raimondo is the former Vice President and Dean of Student Affairs at Oberlin who distributed flyers condemning Gibson's Bakery as a "RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION".

It was Meredith Raimondo who egged on students to slander and libel Gibson's with a bullhorn.

It was Meredith Raimondo who did all these things in her official capacity as a representative of Oberlin College, causing all the pain and suffering of the bakery owners and eventually causing the original judgment of $32 million to be leveled in the original 2019 case, and my guess is that it was Meredith Raimondo whose shear insolence and intransigence led to refusal to pay and appeals which increased the price tag by over $4.5 million.

There was never any evidence provided for this "long account of racial discrimination". And this was all occasioned on a refusal to admit that some kids are bad and sometimes they actually steal stuff.

It is highly unlikely that this will hurt Oberlin College financially that much which has an endowment of over $1 billion. But it is a huge victory for Truth, because now supporters of the Truth can point to this court victory and say "Look --we can still win in court." It is too bad it has to come to this, but here we are.

I would love to hear what certain people at Oberlin say about Meredith Raimondo behind closed doors. She basically came in and stood behind an obvious lie, and then she puts the school's name on the lie, and then she lied long-form, in court and she LOST the college $36+ million. What did it gain or would it have gained the school if the judge had ruled that no slander or libel occurred? I can only think of one thing, and that is respect among other liars, mostly of the liberal persuasion.

The award for my favorite summation of this hard-fought victory goes to Daniel Suhr in his article:

When universities cross that line to actively back such protests, they have to own the results. Responsible adults in charge of billion-dollar institutions should not lightly accuse beloved small businesses of racism because their spoiled students feel entitled to shoplift scot-free.

Amen, buddy.

Best response to Covington Student incident from a Bishop

The best response from a representative of the Catholic Church about the Covington students comes to us in the form of two tweets from Bishop Rick Stika of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Knoxville, Tennessee. He recounts the story of a priest who was an eye-witness at the event.

I spoke to a good priest friend of mine who was part of his group at the March for Life. He was in front of the group from Covington. He was the priest heckled by the Black Hebrew Israelites with slurs like white faggot and child rapists and other horrific slurs. The boys wanted to protect the priest and his group from this bigoted attack so they formed a barrier and then the Native American who earlier tried to disrupt Mass appeared and the rest is history. It was not about the MAGA hat buts rather bigots who were attacking verbally those who marched.

Everyone is posting the tweets on Facebook, but tweets are hard to read, sorry. It has become a standardized format, but call me old-fashioned. I like to read paragraphs like a human being, not consume packets like a processor.

Well, the good Bishop's story confirms what we already know. And if you have a hard time believing that a bunch of violent nuts in a cult might hurl expletives at a Catholic priest, you need to get out more.

Bishop Stika with Pope Francis

References:
https://twitter.com/BishopStika/status/1088181425709432833
https://twitter.com/BishopStika/status/1088181426967797768

Larry Elder's Anthem Protest Article

This article about the NFL national anthem protests by conservative talk radio host Larry Elder is worth revisiting now that Colin Kaepernike (kaepernike.com is already taken —  don't you hate it?) has been signed as a major endorser, symbol, icon, etc. Elder asks "Do facts matter?" Here are some of the facts he presents with the numbers; you can decide how to answer the rhetorical question best.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, since 1968 police killings of blacks have declined nearly 75 percent. According to The Washington Post, almost 500 whites were killed by cops in 2015, an average of more than one a day. Two hundred fifty-nine blacks were killed by the police. Most suspects killed by police had a weapon.

Yes; more whites are killed by the police than blacks.

Last year, The Washington Post put the number of unarmed black men killed by the police at 17, less than the number of blacks likely struck by lightning. Twenty-two unarmed whites were killed by the police. Any death that results from police misconduct is one death too many, but the point is that police killing of a suspect is rare, no matter the race of the suspect or the cop. And a police shooting of an unarmed black male is still more rare.

Even the frequency of interactions with police are greater or the same for whites than for blacks:

According to Philippe Lemoine, writing in National Review, a white person is, on average, more likely to have interactions with the police in any year than a black person, 20.7 percent vs. 17.5 percent. It is true that a black person is more likely to have multiple contacts with the police. But according to the data, multiple contacts with the police are rare, as well. Lemoine writes that 1.2 percent of white men have more than three contacts with the police in a year versus 1.5 percent of black men.

Read the whole thing. Burning sportswear might be a dumb thing to do, but continuing to believe the false narrative of widespread police brutality against blacks is even dumber. It amounts to sacrificing everything we have learned by looking at the evidence.

Actual Journalism vs. Spotlight

When I heard the title of the movie which lionized those oh-so-heroic reporters who covered the Boston Catholic abuse crisis back in the early 2000's, I thought it was perfect. Sunlight, Bryce's and Brandeis's "best disinfectant", illuminates half the globe at once — everyday. And we're talking about the actual globe we live on, not the Boston newspaper. But a spotlight only illuminates one particular thing at a time, leaving everything else in darkness. There is a searching quality about it; usually the spotlight adjusts a bit to focus on its target and moves along with it whether the target is a tap-dancer or a pop diva. The spotlight is unconcerned with anything else which may be going on in the theater or outside it.

So one might be led to think that the famous Spotlight division at the Boston Globe after which the film is named was shining light on the crime of child abuse. But they were actually shining light on a very particular subset of those crimes: only those in which the perpetrator was a Catholic priest. Just like the spotlight in a 1970's theater might have been indifferent that an aging Fred Astaire was enjoying the show in seat D5 and only interested in shining on a less talented dancer on stage, so this team was unconcerned that there was and still is child abuse going on in public schools, Hollywood talent scout offices and non-Catholic religious communities—that is, anywhere else.

But we've detailed all this before. There are several books about it (like this one), but most of it falls on deaf ears even though it's worthy to bring up again. My friend Jonathan Carpenter writes me in an email today:

Guess who watched "Spotlight" on his way home from Italy?

Did anyone ever ask Dreher or his Media buddies why they missed the terror Jerry Sandusky did at Penn State? How about the abuse of kids that went on in Hollywood during that time and still goes on? It is because it is easier for him and his friends to make it seem as if it is only a Catholic problem; when it is a human problem.

I agree heartily with Jonathan who, I confess, is more tireless than I. It's probably the military training, or maybe I've lapsed into an accepting sanguinity about the whole matter. People believe what they wish to believe.

But once someone knows the truth about a matter, they really have no right to opinions which deny it. Stated differently, when you learn something is full of lies, you should discard it as worthless. That is why I'm advising everyone read this article about the veracity of the Spotlight movie in its entirety. It is written by JoAnn Wypijewsky, a person who identifies with the political and cultural left and has no particular love for the Catholic hierarchy in Boston. It is meticulously researched and formidably executed. It is itself a spotlight on distortions, lies and obscuring the whole truth about characters and events. It is published in Counter Punch; it is a knock-out punch. The article is long, but I'll excerpt some of it in an attempt to entice you to read the whole thing.

I was in Boston in the Spring of 2002 reporting on the priest scandal, and because I know some of what is untrue, I don’t believe the personal injury lawyers or the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team or the Catholic “faithful” who became harpies outside Boston churches, carrying signs with images of Satan, hurling invective at congregants who’d just attended Mass, and at least once – this in my presence – spitting in the face of a person who dared dispute them.

I don’t believe the prosecutors who pursued tainted cases or the therapists who revived junk science or the juries that sided with them or the judges who failed to act justly or the people who made money off any of this.

And I am astonished (though I suppose I shouldn’t be) that, across the past few months, ever since Spotlight hit theaters, otherwise serious left-of-center people have peppered their party conversation with effusions that the film reflects a heroic journalism, the kind we all need more of.

Although I never had my face spit in, I have had people tell me directly that I don't care about the victims of abuse because I'm not more angry, and that I should support that ridiculous "Crimes Against Humanity" brief filed in the UN court against the Vatican if I really cared about The Children.

Both men were called monsters. Both men were offered plea deals by their respective prosecutors that, had they actually committed the crimes, would be an affront to justice and proportion. Shanley was offered time served – the seven months he’d been jailed while awaiting trial – plus two and a half years’ house arrest if only he’d say he was guilty of raping a child on Sunday mornings between Masses. MacRae was offered three years in prison, later reduced to two, if only he’d say he was guilty of cruelly molesting a teenager. Both men refused and went to their fates abandoned by church hierarchy.

“Can you imagine”, Shanley said to me after his conviction in 2005, “here I am, the worst monster, a danger to children everywhere, and they offer me time served? … But for refusing to lie, I got twelve to fifteen years.”

I have never denied that some priests did horrible things to children, but I have always thought the details smelled fishy. I remember hearing a local talk radio broadcast in Cleveland where the talkers were livid that a case against a priest had been thrown out of court for lack of evidence. Wypijewski confirms this phenomenon as abeing not just local, but Globe-al:

Besides normalizing the presumption of guilt, the Globe’s courtroom of panic made a high and punishing principle out of cheap popular opinion: Well, maybe he didn’t do this, but he had to have done something! Where there’s smoke, there’s fire! Where the victim has to be believed, it doesn’t much matter if one person is telling the truth and one person is a money-grubber (or, to put the kindest interpretation on it, just looking for a simple explanation for all the troubles of his or her life). It doesn’t much matter who is in the dock or behind bars for what because, after all, statutes of limitations are limiting, and the notion that guilt might go unpunished is intolerable. Someone must pay. The church must pay. Priests must pay, because even if they didn’t do something, they said something; or they said nothing but they should have spoken; they knew nothing but they should have known; they should have acted. We “thought they were God”, and we must have our pound of flesh.

I hope you have gone over to read this article in full by now. After all, it is much shorter, cheaper and less boring than watching a movie where Mark Ruffalo doesn't get to suck face with Scarlett Johansson or turn into a green monster. But I'll understand if you are busy at the moment. Here's one more excerpt which deals with the real issue for all the scumbags who rode this train of deception:

It’s unseemly to mention money. We are asked to believe that the ATM that is the Catholic Church, password VICTIM, could not possibly be an inducement to any of the thousands of accusers who have lined up since the “Spotlight” team’s first breathy reports – as if the usual reflexes of American money-grubbing are inoperative in this one area of life, and the people who, for instance, clambered for cash to ease the pain and suffering of having seen a priest naked in the YMCA really are salt of the earth.

The church was known to have begun making settlements with accusers by the early 1990s. Some, perhaps many, were legitimate, but as a closet culture, an institution scandalized by scandal, the church is also particularly vulnerable to extortion. Spotlight does not reflect that reality, just as the Globe did not seriously explore it. Every financial settlement in the film is proof of beastliness.

...

It was in the early 1990s also that a drug addict and criminal named Thomas Grover said he had been molested as a 15-year-old by MacRae. The first assault, he said, occurred during a counseling session in the early 1980s. He returned for counseling three more times because, he said, after each bout with the priest he suffered total amnesia, his memory erased until one day years later he remembered all. Grover eventually collected $200,000 from the church.

Under pressure from the Globe, MacLeish and others, the church paid Shanley’s accuser, a military malcontent named Paul Busa, $500,000; it defrocked Shanley, presumed guilty on every front, and it did all of this before the trial had even begun. Let that sink in, too.

Oh, what the heck. Just one more:

Gregory Ford had been Boston’s favorite victim, the ultimate proof of Shanley’s monstrosity, from the time MacLeish introduced him to the world during that PowerPoint presentation in April of 2002. I won’t relate the young man’s sad and tortured tale here except to say that his claim of recovered memory (which Busa copied in all important respects) did not ring alarm bells with those noble reporters or their editors. When it was pointed out that Ford’s own mother was the catechism teacher at the time he claimed his agony of weekly rape began, the family, the lawyers, the press, the prosecution, simply amended the start date. When the prosecution dropped Ford from its child rape case against Shanley because at various times Ford had also said he was raped by his father, a neighbor, a relative, our noble reporters did not review their past unskeptical reports and say, “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Likewise when the two other men were dropped from the case, and Busa was left standing alone, the press, like the prosecution, pretended it didn’t matter. Against the advice of its legal counsel, the church had settled the civil suit MacLeish had brought on behalf of all four men. Ford faded away, with a check for more than $1.4 million. At the time of Shanley’s trial, broadcast live on TV and covered by media across the country, it was as if Ford had never existed, but he and the others are counted among Shanley’s victims.

Emphases mine. So the story was changed as needed. And lies were told under oath. For money. Please read this article. It's all you need to know about this Hollywood confabulation.

(H/T MediaReport)

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.

David Corn (huh-huh) get flushed

A friend in Pittsburgh, married now, related to me the story of how he received a phone call from another bachelor while viewing B&B on 7/15/1994. "Are you seeing this? Are you seeing this!?" his friend frenetically inquired. That was the Cornholio episode. It was pretty funny, I admit.

So people of a certain age might remember where they were when they first experienced Cornholio's "birth". I will remember where I was, driving through Fairview Park, Ohio on February 23, 2015, when I heard the complete dismantling of David Corn's credibility by Hugh Hewitt.



Hugh Hewitt irritates me on many occasions but he is a master at what he does. He is basically a photographer of sorts; he is really good at showing what is there. Once Corn gets flustered he is toast. Flustered, flummoxed, flushed.

Let's all be educated

Speaking of conflation, Brian Williams's new favorite word, here's the text from an email I received from Act! for America. Act! is a great organization for educating people (who want to be educated) about Islamic jihad and it's prevalence in the world.

At ACT for America it is no secret that we have not been in agreement with President Obama’s national security policies, but have always been respectful of the office which he holds.

Unfortunately, President Obama has not always been respectful of others and perhaps the worst example of disrespect came on Thursday at, of all events, the National Prayer Breakfast.

It was in that setting that President Obama delivered remarks comparing the actions of the Islamic State to things done “in the name of Jesus Christ.” Among those things according to President Obama: slavery.

He then cited the Crusades.

Not only were his remarks inappropriate for the occasion and insulting to peace loving Christians everywhere, they were historically inaccurate.

In terms of slavery, while it is true that Christians owned slaves, slavery is not an integral part of Christian doctrine. Jesus did not own slaves. The same cannot be said of Islam. Mohammed owned many slaves and even shared concubines with his warriors. There are today forty different words in Arabic to describe slaves; that’s how prominent slavery has been in the Islamic world. The slave trade in Africa was largely run by Muslims. And when Western nations finally abolished the evil practice of slavery, that slave trade in Africa persisted without them. Remember, Saudi Arabia, the site of Islam’s holiest sites, did not outlaw slavery until the 1960s. Moreover, slavery is still practiced today in parts of Islamic Africa, notably Sudan.

But Obama’s biggest dose of disinformation came in the form of his remarks on the Crusades.

There is a myth that the Crusades were nothing but an aggressive series of wars in which Christendom attacked the Muslim world and committed atrocities.

The reality is somewhat different.

The Crusades actually began after centuries of Islamic jihad invading, pillaging and conquering Christian lands in present-day North Africa and parts of Europe.

After 400 years of systematic genocide of Christians at the hands of Islamic jihadists, Pope Urban II, acting on a plea from the Byzantine emperor whose people had been attacked by Muslim hoards, finally called on “Christ’s heralds” to sound the call for help for the Christians in the east and free the Holy Land.

So, the first Crusade was a defensive action in response to Islamic jihad.

This is an historical fact that our president unfortunately left out of his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast.

So this is good to note about Islam and slavery, emphasis mine. There was never an Islamic movement to speak of to abolish slavery like there has been in Christianity. In America we fought a bloody war over slavery, but in Islam they are for the most part fine with it.

Lies, Stupid Lies and Even Worse Apologies

As usual, a ridiculous situation has reminded me of one of the Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey. This time the ridiculous thing is the whole apology after the Brian Williams helicopter lie, the lie which seems to resemble the Dan Rather Bush lie, the Lena Dunham rape lie, the AP Irish nuns lie, etc. Here's the Deep Thought (source):

I guess I kinda lost control, because in the middle of the play I ran up and lit the evil puppet villain on fire. No, I didn't. Just kidding. I just said that to help illustrate one of the human emotions, which is freaking out. Another emotion is greed, as when you kill someone for money, or something like that. Another emotion is generosity, as when you pay someone double what he paid for his stupid puppet.

Like I said, ridiculous. But no less ridiculous than the Brian Williams apology. Full Text (source):

On this broadcast last week, in an effort to honor and thank a veteran who protected me and so many others after a ground-fire incident in the desert during the Iraq War invasion, I made a mistake in recalling the events of twelve years ago. . . . I want to apologize. I said I was traveling in an aircraft that was hit by RPG fire; I was instead in a following aircraft. We all landed after the ground-fire incident and spent two harrowing nights in a sandstorm in the Iraq desert. This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran, and by extension, our brave military men and women, veterans everywhere, those who have served while I did not. I hope they know they have my greatest respect, and also now my apology.

Wwwwwoooooooowwwwwww.... Where is Michael Bloomberg when you need him?

It's what is really impressive to me, saying you got shot down, and then realizing that you just mis-remembered what actually happened. No one seems to appreciate that a lot of exciting things happen in your awesome life and, gee-whiz, why are they all upset that you can't remember small details? "Hey, I single-handedly fought off nine black-belts in that bar fight, and everyone is upset that I said it was ten! Like I was trying to exaggerate. Man, give me a break."

You have to wonder if they learn this in journalism school. I'm pretty sure they do, and they practice on town floozies in dive bars. I'll bet it works on them sometimes. Veterans on the other hand... not so much.

Looks like 2015 might be another record breaking year for lies, just like 2014.

What was my emergency again?

Many of you no doubt have seen this famous quote on signs, mugs, t-shirts, etc.

There's is a qualified and highly more accurate quote based on this one which I found in this wise man's forum signature:

Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?

Like Dylan said...

"There is no greatness in murder!"

I saw this before Christmas, and I loved it. It is full of great quotes like "President Obama... play your position," and "Stop attaching your emotions to your job," and "Al Sharpton... stands for nothing at all." It is not safe for work. Lots of bad language. Lots. But also a lot of truth and wisdom.

This Honestly Speaking lady sounds more like MLK here than Sharpton, Jackson and all their ilk.

George Weigel on Bad Ecumenism

Weigel shows how some people like Cd. Kurt Koch are really tied down by the human perspective on what's good for the Church and for true peace in the world. The fall of communism left a mess, but I seem to remember someone saying we shouldn't be afraid of messiness and making messes.

Yet what seems so clear to others is, somehow, not self-evident in the halls of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. In a recent interview with Vatican Radio, the pontifical council’s president, Cardinal Kurt Koch, said that “the changes in 1989 (that is, the collapse of communism in central and eastern Europe) were not advantageous for ecumenical relations” because “the Eastern Catholic churches banned by Stalin re-emerged” from underground—and that made life difficult for Roman ecumenists, given Russian Orthodox phobias about “Uniate churches” like the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Byzantine in liturgy and polity but in full communion with Rome.

What is going on here? No local Church in modern times suffered more for its fidelity to Rome than the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine—the world’s largest underground religious community between 1946 and 1989. Was Cardinal Koch suggesting that it would have been better for “ecumenical relations” if the communist crack-up in 1989 hadn’t occurred and if the Soviet Union had remained intact? It’s bad enough to be subjected to ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin’s laments about the Soviet crack-up being the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century; it’s even worse when the Catholic Church’s top ecumenical officer expresses what seem, at first blush, to be ominously parallel sentiments.

Bad ecumenism: is that phrase redundant? I'm one of those people that see the whole project of ecumenism in practice as being a big, ivory tower academic ritual. I'm much more interested in personal, hand-to-hand apologetics, even though it gets pugilistic at times. I prefer ecumenism to a supposed search for common ground which, in my experience, is usually a chance for theology grad students who can't write and don't want to commit to the priesthood or religious life to finally use those hours spent in classes and late-night bull sessions spent on the mostly irrelevant subject called comparative religion.

Conversion is about embracing the Truth which sets you free, not about mouthing other peoples' failed rhetoric in grandiose seminar settings and getting a rise out of "coming together". That's best left to the motivational speakers. What Weigel demonstrates in his article is how the fear of offending a group of people leads deep thinkers to lament the effects of fighting and overthrowing what, in the case of the Soviet regime, was truly and completely evil, and was persecuting all Christians viewed as threats (i.e., Catholics).

"I don't know, honestly"

Was The American Conservative's Rod Dreher previously Beliefnet's "Jackie"/Lena Dunham?

In my comments to Pikkumatti's excellent post here I make a case that at least must be addressed. In the wake of Dreher's latest post on Lena Dunham - still titled in Google's as yet uncached version as "Liar Liar Lena Dunham" like its permalink - I'll summarize those comments here.

This morning, the Senate Intelligence Committee will be releasing its torture report on Bush-era CIA interrogation methods. Four years ago, middle-aged professional writer Rod Dreher, then writing for Beliefnet, accused persons associated with Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts of willfully enabling the torture of a student assigned to their care - him.

Remember, four years ago Rod Dreher had already long since been established and well known as a professional writer, someone well-acquainted with what his carefully chosen words mean.

In this Beliefnet post (screen capture here, because Dreher's Beliefnet posts have a habit of mysteriously disappearing), Dreher claims:

When I think about the bullying I endured in high school, the most indelible image on my mind is being pinned to the floor and tortured in a hotel room on a school trip, and the two adult women chaperones in the room literally stepping over me, lying there screaming for them to help me, as they left the hotel room.

From my comments on Pikkumatti's post, here's how serious this really is:

• Dreher was born in 1967.

• According to numerous references throughout his writings, he attended high school at an actual high school, the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts

• If he started first grade at 6, that would have been 1967 + 6 = 1973

• Starting high school 8 years later would make the opening time bracket of the torture episode 1981

• Therefore, Rod Dreher is publicly claiming that, sometime between the years 1981 and 1985 (give or take a year on each end), two female chaperones employed or formally engaged by the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts allowed a student in their care to be tortured by other students while on a field trip sponsored by that school

• Dreher, long a professional writer as of this 2010 Beliefnet article, is using the same word being used to indict the CIA in the report being released today. He does not modify or otherwise explain his use of the word torture. 

• How serious was the liability which Dreher, at least since this 2010 Beliefnet piece, has accused the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts of enabling through its negligent chaperones? Why, any thing from being physically burned with cigarettes to being brutally sodomized. Taunting or tickling can in no way be described by a professional writer of the age Dreher was when he wrote that as "torture".

• If the story is true, school records will reveal there were specific real, identifiable women who enabled this torture and real fellow students who carried it out, real torture enablers and torturers associated with the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts.

• If the story is false, Rod Dreher has libeled the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts

As fabulists and defamers go, "Jackie" and Lena Dunham have nothing on TAC's Rod Dreher.

So what was Rod Dreher's torture?

A real event that, as reported, condemns the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts and its personnel for their reckless endangerment of their students? A made-up rape fantasy like "Jackie"'s or Lena Dunhams? Some mish-mash of both?

Either way, in the wake of tales like this what can one reasonably believe about Rod Dreher's factual accounts about anything, from 9/11, to the Catholic Church Scandals, to what his now-dead sister, unable to respond, may or may not have said or done?

Anything at all?

UPDATE (as they say): In the comments, Art Deco wonders whether the high school in question might actually have been Dreher's local West Feliciana High School rather than the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts.

If so, nothing but the name of the high school in question changes. There either were or were not real and identifiable chaperones responsible for enabling Rod's torture on an identifiable field trip sponsored by whichever high school it was, as well as real and identifiable students on that same trip from which the pool of actual torturers was comprised.

Sentiment should make us angry

After reading Laura Turner's fallacy-ridden sermon yesterday (in which she got fairly well pwned in the comments by many clear thinking people), I needed a palate cleanser.

In the wake of a grand jury’s divisive decision not to charge Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, a weary American populace told reporters Tuesday that they are not sure if they can take another bullshit speech about healing. “If I have to watch some politician, law enforcement official, or pretty much anyone regurgitate the same meaningless platitudes about setting aside our differences and coming together as a nation, I might just lose it,” said Atlanta resident Samantha Hubbard, echoing the sentiment of hundreds of millions of Americans who are uncertain if they can stomach even a single empty call for respect and civility. “I honestly don’t know if I’m physically capable of listening to another community leader recite the same unbearable garbage about how it’s time for an open and honest dialogue. I swear to God, if I hear even one goddamn person assert there’s more that unites us than divides us, I will immediately blow my brains out.” At press time, the nation was particularly apprehensive at the prospect of a bullshit speech that declared words were not enough.

Yes, I know. It's the Onion. But it proves Sid Caeser's statement about comedy and the truth. It's true that we shouldn't "set aside our differences" because what makes me different than a mindless, violent, unemployed low-life actually makes me a better person. It would be sinful to set aside that which makes me different from these people. The people in the angry lynch mob obviously don't want an open and honest dialogue since they are intent on shouting and burning and they tell and believe lies.

It's true that there should be more that unites us than divides us. But this is not the case, so let's not pretend it is. A close analogy would be a scenario where two people are walking along a high road together for miles, but then one leaves the path for no discernible reason and descends into a dark valley where he becomes lost. Soon the travelers are very far apart. The protestors believe that laws may be set aside on a whim, that the appetite is the master of the intellect and that their narrative trumps the inconvenient reality even when the latter is reinforced by mountains of evidence.

When what we need is the Truth, sentiment should make us angry. It's like being given a bag of Halloween candy when you need a good hot meal. Obama's impotent healing speech after the verdict was about 15 minutes too long at least, and most of his unnecessary rambling sounded like code for "Burn this bitch down".

The Great Rival to Christianity

My friend Bubba wrote the following to me in an email in June of 2013.

In The Four Loves, CS Lewis points out that, for everything but the love of God, any love that becomes a small-d deity immediately becomes a demon. Any ideology can become an idol, but I honestly think the Left's ideology is an intrinsic rival to Christianity. It's not just that some Leftists go overboard, it's that Leftism requires them to worship at its altar.

Man's two greatest needs is radical change and a sense of belonging. Christ offers both, through regeneration by His Spirit and adoption into His family. Leftism presumes to offer both as well: we know that the world's not right, and the Left offers utopia through revolution, and we know we don't belong, and the Left offers a sense of belonging through the State.

Christianity and Leftism are rival religions, with competing solutions to man's most fundamental needs.

Smart guy, that Bubba, and a devout Christian.

Sign of Contradiction

In a Crisis article, Bill Maguire lays out the problem for Bishops who would like to pass off a complete change in Church teaching with regard to marriage, divorce and remarriage as a legitimate doctrinal development. Excerpt:

The problem, then, for those bishops proposing Eucharistic communion for the divorced and remarried isn’t that there hasn’t been a development of Church teaching or that the subject hasn’t already been “thoroughly examined.” The vast body of Magisterial teachings—we could also cite John Paul II’s Apostolic Exhortation Reconciliatio et Paenitentia (n.34) and Pope Benedict XVI’s Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (n. 29)—evidence 35 years of thorough examination and signal a significant development and deepening of the Church’s teaching regarding marriage.

On the contrary, then, the conundrum for the bishops is that the definitive examination of the subject and the development of the Church’s teaching on marriage have gone precisely the opposite direction they want it to go.

We will continue to see frustration and anger on the part of liberals who think along the lines "Man, there has simply got to be a way to let divorced and remarried people receive the sacraments! The sacraments are so important to Catholics!" Yes, the sacraments are important to Catholics, and that is why there is already a way for the remarried to receive them: practice complete continence, as the Catechism quoted in the article mentions. That sounds difficult, but since those people put themselves in a difficult situation to begin with, it is hardly unjust, though we are obliged to sympathize with them. Unfortunately this way of gaining access to the sacraments will often be ignored and left untried because it is difficult in fulfillment of Chesterton's timeless dictum.

Pope Paul VI has already given us the response for objections to unpopular beliefs in section 18 of Humanae Vitae.

It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching. There is too much clamorous outcry against the voice of the Church, and this is intensified by modern means of communication. But it comes as no surprise to the Church that she, no less than her divine Founder, is destined to be a "sign of contradiction." She does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on her of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical.

Pew Surveys Show Increasing Awareness of Islam's Violent Nature

This is encouraging. Christianity Today posted an encouraging chart in September showing three recent surveys by Pew. The first one was conducted in February of 2014, the second in July and the more recent one in September.

The question in the survey is this: "Compared with other religions, is the Islamic religion more likely to encourage violence among its believers?"

The most striking feature of the chart is that in every demographic slice listed in the 3 surveys the amount of "yes" votes have increased over time. There are a few dips, but in general everyone has become more ready to admit that Islam is violent between February and September of this year. Catholics are up 12% TO 53%, Protestants are up 16% to 59%.

The headline on the image is very misleading. "Most Older Adults Say Islam Encourages Violence More Than Other Religions." This describes one line of the results of the 3 surveys. Do people who slap headlines on articles and other pieces of information bother to read them first? The headline should merely be "Surveys Show More Seeing Islam As Encouraging Violence".

Here is a link to the full Pew study on the matter.

This is good news that people realize the danger of Islam and how violence is part of its true nature. Yes, there are other features of Islam which are good, and many good Muslims. But that is not what the survey is about, nor do those facts really matter in the face of the violent totalitarian ideology of the political Islamism against which we are fighting a war. Those are just the common red herrings which people drag across the path toward the truth about Islam and toward combating the evils which pervade Islamic teachings and actions.

(Note: I should point out that the CT article makes a number of assertions and quotes people making assertions which I in no way endorse. Most of these are attempts to excuse Islamic violence in some way, simply put.)

The CDC finally admits what we suspected

Hat tip Liberty News. Yes, we have suspected that Ebola is easier to contract than, for example, the AIDS virus.

Ebola is a lot easier to catch than health officials have admitted — and can be contracted by contact with a doorknob contaminated by a sneeze from an infected person an hour or more before, experts told The Post Tuesday.

“If you are sniffling and sneezing, you produce microorganisms that can get on stuff in a room. If people touch them, they could be” infected, said Dr. Meryl Nass, of the Institute for Public Accuracy in Washington, DC.

Nass pointed to a poster the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly released on its Web site saying the deadly virus can be spread through “droplets.”

“Droplet spread happens when germs traveling inside droplets that are coughed or sneezed from a sick person enter the eyes, nose or mouth of another person,” the poster states.

No, we shouldn't panic, but we like information when information reflects the Truth. Knowledge is power, and should lead to preparedness.