Category: Notes and Comment Blog

  • We didn’t wait until he was almost vented

    This is what I’ve been wondering about. It is, however, just an unsourced item on Facebook, so not necessarily from an ER nurse at all. But I have been wondering – if Trump really did have a bad case and they really did fix it the way they said, why aren’t they fixing all the serious cases that way? What’s the deal here? What are we not being told?

    Nurses and Midwives at Work:

    “Copied and pasted from an ER nurse —ER nurse: Allow me to clarify some things as someone who’s taken care of a lot of covid patients. Trump is fine. And he will be fine. That’s because when he was MILDLY symptomatic, we threw all the things we throw at crashing patients at him. We didn’t make him wait. We didn’t make him meet criteria. We didn’t wait until he was almost vented. Trump got care that you can’t. After he trashed this pandemic. Let that sink in. He got care when he had a sniffle that we can’t give our patients until they are almost dead and it’s a Hail Mary attempt. So he will come out and say this was nothing and we have the best drugs and open up fully but don’t be blind to the fact that we can’t treat people the way he was treated because not everyone can pay for it, we don’t have the resources and there is a criteria in place that he was able to forgo. That, my friends, is privilege. You get what you vote for.

    I can’t provide source link.”

    That’s not entirely accurate – they didn’t throw all the things at him, unless they lied about it: he was never on a ventilator. If he had been he wouldn’t have been able to bounce back that quickly, as far as I know – being on one rips the hell out of your throat and you can’t talk right away, plus you’re wiped out. It takes weeks to come back from it.

    But they threw some things at him that more mild cases don’t get – but maybe more severe cases do? I guess it depends on how swamped the local ERs are.

    But it does seem fair to say “We didn’t make him wait. We didn’t make him meet criteria. We didn’t wait until he was almost vented. Trump got care that you can’t.”

  • The witness refuses to answer

    Excuse me?

    Is that right? So, is it illegal to murder people? Is it illegal to fly planes into tall buildings full of people? Is it illegal to hold up a bank? Is it illegal to stab people on the street? Is it illegal to extort money with menaces?

    I guess she can’t characterize the facts in that situation and can’t apply the law in it either?

  • 11 hours

    The US is a disgrace.

    Early voting opened Monday in Georgia for the 2020 general election — but the first day was marred by technical issues and lines that in some locations stretched more than five hours long, particularly in the Atlanta metro area.

    FIVE HOURS. Can you imagine?

    But that’s not even the worst.

    Back to NPR:

    Voters arriving in the morning at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena, the home of the NBA’s Hawks — and the state’s largest early voting site, with 300 voting machines — encountered technical issues, which election officials blamed on problems with the electronic poll pads.

    So they didn’t test them ahead of time?

    Looks like voter suppression to me.

  • When your body doesn’t belong to you

    ACB is a big fan of forced pregnancy.

    Amy Coney Barrett, the supreme court nominee, signed off on an advertisement in 2006 that called for the overturning of Roe v Wade, and called the landmark abortion rights decision “barbaric” and a “raw exercise of judicial power”.

    The two-page ad, published by the St Joseph County Right to Life group, an extreme anti-choice organization in South Bend, Indiana, is the most striking evidence to have emerged to date of Barrett’s personal opposition to Roe v Wade.

    And thus to women’s right to decide whether to be pregnant or not.

    The first page of the ad, which is signed by Barrett and her husband, Jesse, states that life begins at “fertilization”. The ad, which the organization publishes every year to mark the anniversary of Roe v Wade, was signed by Barrett while she was working as a law professor at Notre Dame.

    When “life begins” isn’t the issue. Viruses are alive*, bacteria are alive; so what? We don’t consider it murder, or bad, to kill them when necessary.

    On the second page of the two-page spread, the group condemns Roe and claims that “the majority of those abortions were performed for social reasons”.

    Meaning, reasons having to do with the woman’s life and plans and wishes. Apparently ACB thinks women have no right to let their plans and wishes decide whether or not they want a human growing in their abdomens for nine months. Apparently ACB thinks women’s abdomens don’t belong to them but instead belong to any egg that happens to get fertilized. This amounts to thinking that women are public property and have no personal rights of their own.

    *Updating to add: Viruses not really alive:

    Since viruses were first discovered in 1892 by Dmitri Ivanovsky, our ideas of what they are have shifted from poisons to biological chemicals. Some years after their discovery, scientists first raised the idea that viruses were living – albeit simple – organisms because they caused diseases like bacteria, which we know to be alive. However, viruses lack the hallmarks of other living things. They don’t carry out metabolic processes, such as making the energy molecule of life, ATP, and they don’t have cells and therefore the cellular machinery needed to make proteins by themselves. The only life process a virus undergoes independently is reproduction to make copies of itself, which can only happen after they have invaded the cells of another organism. Outside of their host some viruses can still survive, depending on environmental conditions, but their life span is considerably shorter. This complete reliability on a host for all their vital processes has led some scientists to deem viruses as non-living.

  • Racial epithets not necessarily hostile

    The NAACP has thoughts on Amy Coney Barrett.

    We have reviewed Amy Coney Barrett’s record on civil rights, including her writings as a law professor and her three years as an appellate court judge. On issue after issue, we have found her to be stunningly hostile to civil rights. Her aggressive view of when past decisions should be overruled, combined with her reactionary positions on what rights the Constitution protects, will jeopardize our hard-fought wins in the Court. Her scholarship questions even foundational principles such as whether the Fourteenth Amendment was properly adopted and whether Brown v. Board of Education remains viable authority. Her repeated endorsement of discrimination in the workplace—including the stunning conclusions that separate can be equal when it comes to race and that the use of racial epithets does not necessarily create a hostile work environment—mark a clear willingness to jettison longstanding civil rights precedents.

    Let’s not have her on the Supreme Court.

  • At the grocery store

    Trump’s America:

    The wife of Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor alleges she was insulted with a racial slur while grocery shopping this week.

    Alleges it but also documents it, so…

    Gisele Barreto Fetterman, who is married to Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, told CNN the incident happened Sunday evening. In a two-second video Fetterman posted on her Twitter account, a White woman is seen lowering her mask and saying, “You’re a nigger” through Fetterman’s open car window and then walking away. Fetterman was born in Brazil.

    “A woman walks past me and stops and looks at me, and then says, ‘Ugh, there’s that n-word that Fetterman married. And, she said you don’t belong here, and she called me a thief, and uttered some other ramblings. And, (she) kept walking, went to the other aisle, came back, said a few more things,” Fetterman said.

    The woman then approached Fetterman while she was backing out of her parking space. Fetterman told CNN the woman came out of the store without groceries, just her purse, and started yelling.

    “I was still kind of crying and shaken, and that’s when I was able to record the final few seconds of her tirade, as I drove off. So you can see in the video, my car is actually moving. I was trying to leave where I was,” she said.

    Trump is to blame for some of this. A lot of it. It was already here, obviously, but he has amped it up a lot.

  • Only, all, many, some

    No no no.

    No no no. The point isn’t that all women have a cervix, it’s that only women have a cervix. If a woman doesn’t have a cervix then she’ll know warnings and information about the cervix aren’t relevant to her; problem solved. It’s silly and confusing to talk about people with a cervix not because all women have one but because only women have one.

    It’s both ridiculous and insulting to detach the word “women” from the word “cervix” simply because of all this childish pretending and role playing.

    And we don’t need any Joes explaining it to us.

  • Glamorous evening on a plane

    This cannot be true. The Guardian:

    Diners have rushed to pay up to ÂŁ360 per head to eat a meal on a stationary plane, in the latest sign of public appetite to recreate the onboard experience without travelling.

    Who would do that???

    Being on a plane is an absolute nightmare. The only thing that makes it just barely endurable is wanting to go where the plane is moving you*. Doing it for the sake of doing it is inconceivable.

    *Actually, also the view if there is any.

    Singapore Airlines launched a waiting list after tickets rapidly sold out for two weekends of sittings onboard two stationary A380 superjumbos, with meals at seats and the chance to watch a movie, albeit no longer in-flight.

    Are there children behind each seat, kicking them throughout?

    Guests will get a meal from the standard Singapore Airlines menu, with S$642 (£360) buying the full works in a suite – or £30 per head for the tray in economy. Frequent flyers could also cash in points towards a meal.

    All tickets were snapped up in less than half an hour for the pop-up Restaurant A380, the airline told Bloomberg. About half of the 471 seats on each of the airline’s double-decker superjumbos, parked at Changi airport, were expected to be available with social distancing in place.

    People are crazy.

  • A vehicle to attack women in public

    Rosie Duffield MP is taking heat again.

    Rosie Duffield got a standing ovation in the House of Commons last year when she revealed her experiences of domestic abuse in a speech that left many of her colleagues in tears. The Labour MP for Canterbury has been attacked by left-wingers for speaking out against antisemitism and vilified by right-wingers for campaigning against Brexit.

    Now she is on the front line in the culture war accused of being “transphobic” after she liked a tweet suggesting that “individuals with a cervix” should be described as “women”.

    Tweet-liking crime – it’s an epidemic!

    The vitriol poured on her has left her “completely terrified”, she says. She has in the past suffered intimidation at home and threats from Twitter trolls, but, she tells us, “This feels worse — maybe because it strikes at the heart of who you are as a woman, and because it’s base, pure misogyny.”

    There is, she claims, a witch hunt underway. “It very much feels as though the stake is built as soon as there is even the mere hint of any charges. A word like ‘transphobe’ gets spread around without any actual evidence and the fire is lit.’’

    And in addition to the lack of evidence, there is also the extremely generous way “transphobia” is interpreted and detected – generous to the people who like to accuse, that is. It’s called “transphobia” to say that men are not women, which seems utterly absurd on its face. Even the most adamant enforcers of trans ideology are perfectly aware that men are not women most of the time. They can’t help it. We know the difference; we can’t help it; even the fanatics can’t help it.

    This is a row that started in July, when the broadcaster Piers Morgan responded to a CNN report suggesting that “individuals with a cervix” should have regular cervical cancer screening from the age of 25 with the tweet: “Do you mean women?” Duffield liked the tweet, then she further angered her critics by tweeting: “I’m a ‘transphobe’ for knowing that only women have a cervix . . . ?!’ ” Since then the row has escalated, with some Labour activists calling for Duffield to be deselected as an MP.

    Last week Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, became the party’s first senior figure to get involved, saying that Duffield — who resigned from the frontbench after admitting breaching lockdown rules — should “reflect” on her comments and realise they could be “hurtful”.

    Here’s a thought. It could be “hurtful” to women to pretend that men become women by simply saying so. It could be “hurtful” to women to try to force them to agree with that claim. It could be “hurtful” to women to pretend that sex is like a shirt or a hat, something that everyone can put on or take off at will. It could be “hurtful” to women to insist that men get to tell women what we can say about our own sex. I could go on.

    So far, Duffield has avoided commenting, but she tells us that she wants to explain her views because she feels it is wrong that women are being silenced in the gender debate. “All people need to do to attack me at the moment is be male and misogynist and angry,” she says. “Once you’re labelled a thing, that’s it. People attribute certain things to you . . . and actually I’m not sure they are bothered what I think. It’s just a vehicle to attack women in public. I feel like my female mouth is being well and truly closed without ever actually having been opened.”

    And, possibly the most disorienting aspect of all, people who consider themselves progressive look on in approval. They’re fine with all this bullying of women.

    “The other day I was walking through parliament wearing my mask and I thought, ‘This is a bit symbolic. I feel like I’m being shut up,’ and it was really horrible. It does feel like Gilead [in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale], where women aren’t allowed to ask questions or proffer alternative ideas. The shutting down of ideas is particularly dystopian. I am in a university city where ideas are everything; you’re supposed to be able to discuss, debate, question without being labelled.”

    Duffield has received death threats on social media and admits that she has started to feel scared walking down the street. “There was a picture of a mocked-up hanging . . . and someone had put, ‘I wish I could photoshop Rosie Duffield into this.’

    “You could take that as a joke and think it’s just some silly boy behind his keyboard, but it’s pretty sinister,” she says. “I regularly talk to people who don’t agree with me on things like abortion or Brexit. We have civilised conversations. I’m not being cancelled or threatened with a noose, so why is this particular issue so toxic?”

    So toxic, and at the same time so vehemently endorsed and echoed on the left? What is that? Why is the left so happy to see women threatened and verbally abused because we don’t and literally can’t agree that men are women if they say they are?

  • An irresponsible botch

    More COVID spreading, because it’s just that urgent to re-enslave women.

    Senator Mike Lee — who tested positive for COVID-19 the same day as President Donald Trump — said Monday that he is cured and personally attended the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.

    …

    Some Democrats questioned whether proceeding was safe. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said, “Who has been tested? Who has been tested? Who is a danger? What contact tracing has been done on infected and exposed senators and staff? Nothing. The whole thing, just like Trump, is an irresponsible botch.”

    But totally worth it to get a cultist religious fanatic on the Supreme Court so that she can make a majority to force women to stay pregnant when they don’t want to.

  • Flogging puberty blockers online

    Mail-order puberty blockers…what could go wrong?

    A UK chemist has been flogging puberty blockers for children online, courtesy of a company set up by disgraced gender doctor, Helen Webberley.

    The Times has discovered that an online pharmacy, Clear Chemist, has been selling hormone treatments to ‘trans children’ on the internet and that this medication is being prescribed by GenderGP, the clinic originally founded by Helen Webberley.

    In 2017 Helen Webberley was suspended by the General Medical Council, pending an investigation into her conduct. She and her husband, Michael, were operating an unlicensed gender clinic, charging patients ÂŁ75 – ÂŁ150 per hour for their services and prescribing hormones to children as young as twelve. In December 2018 Webberley was found guilty of providing healthcare services illegally.

    And the “services” were quite drastic. It turns out that blocking puberty is not some harmless little tweak to the schedule.

    An anomaly in UK law allows British pharmacies to dispense prescriptions from offshore clinics. Consequently, GenderGP are able to prescribe blockers and hormones to patients in Britain without ever meeting them and without the clinic requiring any regulation in the UK.

    …

    Since The Times published the story, the General Pharmaceutical Council has said that it is looking into this issue as a matter of urgency due to concerns that GenderGP circumvents the NHS checks and safeguards usually required when these drugs are prescribed. And it looks as if the pharmacy in question has been prevented from dispensing any further GenderGP prescriptions. Nevertheless, the clinic is looking for alternative outlets through which to peddle its wares.

    Its dangerous wares that mess up people’s bodies, including their brains.

  • What hate isn’t

    Save Women’s Sports posted an item yesterday:

    The Save Women’s Sports flag was raised this morning over Nashua City Hall, where it will be flying through Friday! Thank you to Beth Scaer for your dedication to our movement! Ask your city if they offer this option and we can send a flag your way!

    But it got taken down today. A Nashua group page patted itself on the back for silencing women.

    Yesterday morning, a flag was raised over Nashua City Hall in support of a transphobic organization, with the expectation that it would continue to fly until Friday. As word spread through the community, the response was clear – this isn’t what Nashua stands for. Many folks reached out to Nashua government officials and city employees, others posted publicly about the issue. As of this morning at 8:30 AM, the flag is down.

    Many thanks to Jim Donchess for your quick response, Jan Schmidt and Jenn Morton and Mutual Aid & Defense NH for the calls to action, and everyone else who stood up for our Trans neighbors. Hate has no home in Nashua, full stop. I’m looking forward to updated guidelines from the The City of Nashua regarding usage of the Citizens’ Flag Pole to ensure that future flag requests are vetted more carefully.

    It’s not “hate” to say that women’s sports should be for women, or that women have the right to have sports for women. If women can’t have sports for women then they can’t ever win at anything. It’s not “hate” to say that’s not a good outcome.

    It’s probably the case that trans women are a bit stuck if hormones make them less strong than the average male, but it’s still also the case that it shouldn’t be women’s job to solve that problem. Maybe that’s just the price trans women have to pay, or maybe they can continue to play on men’s teams despite the disadvantage, or maybe they’ll decide sport just isn’t in their future anymore, but what they don’t get to do is trash women’s sport.

  • Non-consensual

    First, the wildly dishonest ad:

    Next, Fauci’s emphatic disavowal of the ad’s use of something he said months ago.

    Dr. Anthony Fauci did not consent to being featured in a new advertisement from the Trump campaign touting President Donald Trump‘s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert told CNN his words were taken out of context.

    “In my nearly five decades of public service, I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate. The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials,” Fauci said in a statement provided exclusively to CNN when asked if he agreed to be featured in the ad.

    …

    “President Trump is recovering from the coronavirus, and so is America,” the ad’s narrator says. “Together we rose to meet the challenge, protecting our seniors, getting them life-saving drugs in record time, sparing no expense.”

    It takes quite a brass nerve to say that when cases are going up.

    The ad then flashes to an interview with Fauci in which he says, “I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more.”

    Though no date is provided in the ad, Fauci’s quote is from an interview with Fox News in March. During that interview, Fauci praised the White House coronavirus task force’s round-the-clock effort to respond to the pandemic, which he says included numerous White House meetings and late-night phone calls.

    Awesome. They won’t let him talk to the press, but they do steal something he said in another context months ago for a lying “elect Trump again” ad. Now that’s integrity.

  • Easy for you, guys

    Blegh.

    Also – it’s Rowling like rolling, not Rowling like howling. Rowl as in bowl, not as in cowl. English is completely wack and pronounces words randomly, whatever the spelling.

    H/t Pliny

  • The women who lived through those terrible times

    James Barry on Ireland and women and the new woke erasure of women:

    Enough now, Irish Twitter libfems. (Irish rant coming up). JUST because you made some noise for Repeal, and gained a few followers, does NOT make you the gatekeeper for “Irish feminism.” You’re NOT the person who forevermore gets to say “this is what Irish women are, or want.” 

    It wasn’t just the young and woke who caused Repeal to happen.

    Ireland was awful for a young woman in the 50s & 60s & 70s & 80s- and even 90s. ALL the women who lived through those terrible times, had a voice in the Repeal the 8th Referendum. The “repeal” doesn’t belong to any one group. 

    …

    Women’s issues in Ireland need to be treated with great care, kindness, respect, and truth. Even more so than in any other State or jurisdiction. To compensate for the very OPPOSITE way they were treated in the past.  EVERY SINGLE WOMEN’S ISSUE in Ireland needs to be examined on its own merits, weighed, looked at, in context of the past. We don’t get to obliterate women. We did that so much in the past that it is a National Shame.

    Do you need me to list the shame? The Magdalene Laundries? The babies sold to America, torn from sobbing girls? The symphysiotomies? The women dead in childbirth for lack of healthcare (and I mean contraception)?

    The rape and abuse of women and children, sanctioned by the Church? That abuse, covered up for generations? The girl dead in a grotto? The insult of a septic tank in Tuam?

    And even, through the decades, in the small, personal stories: the menace of the parochial house, with wandering fingers. The “marriage ban”. The persistent sexual abuse and assaults in schools, in any place where a sexual predator could rise to a position of power. 

    But now it’s all different, we’re told…but that’s a lie.

    Because now, our new masters are the “Official Irish Feminists” who speak for All Irish Women. These self-appointed spokeswomen speak for All Irish Women, and they do so gracefully and with authori-tayyy, using the nice pedestals they got during Repeal. 

    “The word “Woman” is merely a construct!” they tell us, gaily, while popping in to do a podcast with their fab woke chums. “Feminism includes Everyone Who Wants to Be a Woman!” they chirrup, while writing a column for the Phoenix about De Feminism.

    They yawn at the woman in her 60s, still broken from a symphisiotomy age 23, who needs to tell her story. They’re not interested in the woman in her 50s who had to give up her baby when she was 16. They don’t much care for the girls who were abused in school in the 80s. Nope.

    Because we don’t have “women’s issues” any more. Because it’s a New Ireland, now. And the word “Woman” has been excised from the literature of the Health Service Executive. Because it’s “discriminatory”. 

    He’s talking about the HSE on cervical cancer:

    The Health Service Executive has defended a decision to remove references to “women” in its online information about cervical cancer screening.

    Under changes made last December, the HSE’s webpage about the screening programme refers to “anyone with a cervix” rather than “women” or a “woman”.

    Because that’s “kinder” to men who say they are women…but much less “kind” to actual women, but that doesn’t matter because men who say they are women are more important than women. New boss just like the old boss.

    Read it all; it’s outstanding.

  • Total and complete…maybe

    “Misleading” is a polite way of putting it.

    Twitter on Sunday added a warning label to a tweet from President Donald Trump, who tested positive for the coronavirus and said he is no longer contagious. 

    Trump tweeted on Sunday that he received a “total and complete sign off from White House Doctors yesterday.”

    “That means I can’t get it (immune), and can’t give it,” the president added. “Very nice to know!!!”

    So he’s admitting that he didn’t “know” that before and thus knew he was being reckless with other people’s lives. Surprise surprise.

    The tweet contains “misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19,” the Twitter label says. It remains accessible because “Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest.” 

    It’s potentially harmful in encouraging others to be reckless with other people’s lives. Trump is like a chain reaction of danger to others.

    White House physician Sean Conley said in a statement Saturday evening that Trump “is no longer considered a transmission risk to others.” 

    Considered by whom, though? Conley is so weaselly that it’s hard to see that statement as reliable.

    Trump’s flagged tweet came after a Fox News interview with Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, during which the president first claimed to be “immune” to the coronavirus.

    “It looks like I’m immune for, I don’t know, maybe a long time, maybe a short time,” Trump told Bartiromo. “It could be a lifetime. Nobody really knows.” 

    That’s interesting because his tweet is much less cautious.

  • No Fauci for you

    How can they do that?

    I don’t understand how they have the authority to do that. Fauci is not an employee of Trump’s, and anyway employers don’t generally have the power to control what employees do in their own time, do they? I don’t understand what this “blocked” means.

    Axios elaborates:

    The White House refused to allow Anthony Fauci or any of the medical experts on the coronavirus task force to appear on ABC’s “This Week,” host Jon Karl said Sunday.

    But why is it a matter of the White House “allowing” any medical expert on the task force to go on a news show?

    There are lines of work where you’re not allowed to share everything you know – the law, intelligence gathering, research, and so on. Doctors can’t blab patient information, and there’s doubtless a long list of items like that. But this? Just “shut up because you’ll make us look bad”? Is it really that simple? The White House can enforce it?

    I suppose it can be just that they say we’ll remove you from the task force if you do, and they don’t want to be removed because they hope to be able to steer Trump in the right direction.

    President Trump has previously faced criticism for silencing Fauci, and White House officials have refused to answer basic questions about President Trump’s COVID test results, as it scrambles to respond to an outbreak within its own ranks.

    …

    The president is facing a credibility gap on the coronavirus issue. An ABC News/Washington Post poll out Sunday indicates 62% of Americans distrust what Trump says about the coronavirus, and 60% said they don’t trust the administration to provide accurate information about Trump’s health.

    Sooooo the way to fix that is to silence Fauci.

    They don’t think too good, do they.

    “We had hoped to talk to Dr. Fauci about both the outbreak at the White House and across the country,” Karl said at the start of the show.

    “He was more than willing to join us, but the White House wouldn’t allow you to hear from the nation’s leading expert on coronavirus.”

    “In fact, they wouldn’t allow any of the medical experts on the president’s own coronavirus task force to appear on this show.”

    Well, it’s looking as if in three weeks plus a couple of days they’ll be facing the consequences.

  • If the BBC really thought

    Good catch.

    How the BBC words it:

    Speaking to BBC Sport in August, Grace McKenzie, a trans woman who plays for Golden Gate Women’s rugby club in San Francisco, said she was worried “that other sporting federations will look at World Rugby and begin to second-guess the existing science that supports trans women’s inclusion in sport, and begin to make policies based out of a place of fear instead of a place of logic and reason”.

    “I want to be able to participate fully with my team and in the sport that I love. I think that there is still a path forward to allow us to do that,” she said.

    Former Great Britain swimmer Sharron Davies, who has been vocal on the issue of trans women in elite sport, also welcomed World Rugby’s decision.

    The 57-year-old, a silver medallist at the 1980 Olympics, posted on social media: “If we, as a fair society, want equal opportunities for females to medals, team places, safe sport and scholarships, with all the associations, rewards and careers, sport must be based on biological sex.”

    I guess “the 57-year-olds” aren’t supposed to have opinions?

  • Guest post: In following the higher commands of God

    Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Like shards of glass stuck in your brain.

    I have just read the Croatian writer Daša Drndić’s extraordinary novel-cum-documentary, ‘Trieste’, which is about the destruction of the Italian Jews. A number of Jewish families gave their children to the Catholic Church for safe-keeping. After the defeat of Naziism & the Fascists, the Catholic Church refused to return the children to their families. Monsignor Angelo Roncall, papal nuncio to France and future Pope John XXIII was required to ensure that the Church retained supervision and guardianship over Jewish children who were baptised. Jewish children who had been baptised were on no account to be handed over to Jewish agencies with responsibility for the care of children, since these agencies could not guarantee the further Christian upbringing of these Jewish children, and could not be reunited with their families, assuming these had survived, who would not agree to continue their Christian upbringing…

    This of course meant that virtually none of these Jewish children were reunited with their families. The Church used every bureaucratic obfuscation in order to prevent it.

    I recommend reading pages 280-284 of ‘Trieste’ (at least – read the whole thing if you can), from which I have adapted the above.

    Why? Because the Church’s first priority is ‘saving souls’. Unbaptised children’s fate after death was anomalous (though there was limbo for centuries), and the fate of children brought up in Judaism was, well… unless they were baptised and brought into the Catholic faith. Therefore the Church is permitted, in following the higher commands of God, to ignore any human law and to behave in the most dishonest and inhumane ways in order to ensure that its first priority is maintained.

    The same applies to abortion, of course, so that the Church is perfectly happy that a woman should go to prison for many years for having a miscarriage or that an adolescent girl impregnated by some close relative or raped by some man should have to bear the child, as happens in El Salvador, where there is a ban on abortion in any circumstances that the Church supports. But souls are being saved! For unwanted babies or babies who will not survive outside the womb or may kill their mothers in childbirth may be christened.

    This putting of ‘God’s law’ above any human law, so that the latter may be broken or twisted with impunity in the name of the former, runs through Catholicism, whose priests are really mages, able to perform the powerfully magical act, conferred by God, of turning wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ. One need only read Chesterton, whom I now loathe with a passion though I enjoyed his Father Brown stories in youth when I didn’t recognise their implications. There is a fascination in them with the immense power conferred by God on ministering priests, who are therefore quite within their rights to break mere human law. Father Brown, being God’s representative on earth, is able to act as a god, and he and Chesterton rejoice in it.

  • An idea he was considering

    Hoo-boy.

    In several phone calls last weekend from the presidential suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Mr. Trump shared an idea he was considering: When he left the hospital, he wanted to appear frail at first when people saw him, according to people with knowledge of the conversations. But underneath his button-down dress shirt, he would wear a Superman T-shirt, which he would reveal as a symbol of strength when he ripped open the top layer.

    Very adult, very sensible, very even keel, very normal and ok.