Did Rome Accept the Canons of Trullo?

This may be considered a myopic debate, but it pertains to the question whether or not the Church of Rome accepted the Canons of the Council of Trullo (i.e. the Quinisext Council). The ramifications of whether they did, or did not, will not be discussed in detail here. Rather, the history of whether they at one time were accepted will be.

Arguments In Favor of the Acceptance of Trullo’s Canons. The historical evidence that Rome accepted the Council of Trullo is extremely strong. Rome had one (questionable) legate (Basil of Gortyna, who also acted as a legate during Constantinople III; Price, The Canons of the Qunisext Council, p. 35) and 11 additional bishops in their jurisdiction attending (Sissius of Dyrrachion, Ibid., and 10 from East Illyricum, Ibid., p. 11). These aformentioned attendees signed onto the council. The preceding demonstrates that Rome had some element of participation in the council through representatives, even if it was relatively minimal.

The Liber Pontificalis (a source which was updated during the 8th century) notes that Pope Saint Gregory II appears to have accepted the Council. He went to Constantinople and questioned Emperor Justinian II (who had convened the Trullo) about the Council. After receiving “an excellent reply” from Justinian II, his earlier opposition to Trullo had vanished as the emperor “resolved every question.” (Ibid., p. 43; passage in question is dated to the 740s) This is corroborated by a letter between Gregory II and Patriarch Germanos I quoted during Nicea II. It explicitly quotes Canon 82 of Trullo as from “the assembly of the holy [fathers].” (Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicea, p. 330) It should be noted that Canon 82 forbade the depiction of Christ as a lamb (opting for the depiction of His incarnate hypostasis–i.e. as a human). Interestingly, this Canon was anti-Roman, as the Church of Rome had followed this practice. (cf Price, The Canons of the Qunisext Council, p. 23) The fact that Rome had actually ceased conducting this practice immediately after the Trullan Council, as evidenced by a fresco commissioned by Pope John VII (approx 706-707 AD) which deliberately avoided the lamb depiction in conformance with the aforementioned canon, additionally implies the acceptance of Trullo. (Ibid., p. 42)

The preceding may imply full acceptance of Trullo, but it is not explicit evidence of such. However, such explicit evidence soon makes itself apparent. During the Council of Nicea 2, Canon 1 explicitly accepts all “the divine canons…those composed by the holy apostles, the celebrated trumpets of the Spirit, those published by the six holy ecumenical councils and by the councils convened locally to issue such injunctions, and those of our holy fathers.” (Price, Nicea 2, p. 610) This canon of Nicea 2, accepted by the West, clearly affirms Trullo. First, the fifth and sixth councils did not have canons and so by invoking the canons of “the six holy ecumenical councils,” it would have to be referencing the introduction to the Trullan canons. In this introduction, it asserts it is providing the canons the fifth and sixth canons lacked. (Price, The Canons of the Quinisext Council, p. 73) Second, the criteria of Canon 1 of Nicea 2, in its affirmation of both local councils and “those of our fathers,” is clearly is a citation of Canon 2 of Trullo. Canon 2 explicitly lists exactly which local councils and fathers are at issue.

Why this canon alone does not solve the dispute of whether the West accepted the Trullan canons is a question that there is no good answer to. It is on the basis of this canon that Nedungatt (2010) observes, “Recent scholarship, however, has rescued it [Trullo] and placed it back in the canon of the ecumenical councils.” (“The Council in Trullo Revisited,” p. 661) He calls this a “scholarly consensus.” (Ibid., p. 662)

There is a good reason for this consensus on the basis of corroborating evidence surrounding Nicea 2. Pope Adrian I in two separate occasions had accepted the Trullan canons. In his Letter to Taurisius (JE 2449) it is stated that , “I also accept the work of the same holy sixth council with all the canons,” a statement found intact in both the Greek and Latin manuscripts. (cf Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicea, p. 176) On top of this, Adrian I in a letter directed to Charlemagne cites Canon 82 of Trullo and attributes it to the “holy sixth council.” (Price, The Canons of the Qunisext Council, p. 50)

The Latin tradition since Nicea 2 has affirmed that the Trullan canons were accepted by Rome. In so doing, this tradition in time reconciled its anti-Roman canons as disciplinary and only applicable to the local context in the East. While this is a questionable reconciliation, it is a plausible (re-)interpretation of the “excellent reply” given by Justinian II which was accepted by Gregory II. How so? Justinian II probably put forward a compromise that allowed both sides to save face by employing economia. This worked due to the Trullan canons having great leeway in their application, thanks to the 102nd canon. In effect, Rome would be able to canonically not apply canons they found objectionable. The Trullan canons, such as Canon 30, had already explicitly applied economia in contexts which would otherwise forbid Roman practices. (Ibid., p. 38-39)

Read the rest here.

'The New York Times' can't shake the cloud over a 90-year-old Pulitzer Prize

The New York Times is looking to add to its list of 132 Pulitzer Prizes — by far the most of any news organization — when the 2022 recipients for journalism are announced on Monday.

Yet the war in Ukraine has renewed questions of whether the Times should return a Pulitzer awarded 90 years ago for work by Walter Duranty, its charismatic chief correspondent in the Soviet Union.

"He is the personification of evil in journalism," says Oksana Piaseckyj, a Ukrainian-American activist who came to the U.S. as a child refugee in 1950. She is among the advocates for the return of the award. "We think he was like the originator of fake news."

A new voice now adds himself to the cause: former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller — himself a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1989 for his own reporting for the Times on the Soviet Union.

In the 1930s, as now, an autocrat's decrees led to mass deaths of Ukrainian civilians and relied on misinformation to try to cover it up. Reporters, including Duranty, were censored and threatened. (A U.S. diplomat once wrote that Duranty told him his reports had to reflect "the official opinion of the Soviet regime.") Yet in a time before social media and the internet, foreign journalists were among the only ones who could get news out to the rest of the world.

Duranty was The New York Times' man in Moscow, as the line went, with a cushy apartment in which to entertain expatriates and a reputation as a leading authority on the Soviet Union. Duranty had staked his name on the idea that Josef Stalin was the strong leader the communist country needed. He is often credited with coining the term "Stalinism."

Read the rest here.

Texas Opens a Constitutional Can of Worms

Texas residents can now sue Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for allegedly censoring their content after a federal appeals court sided Wednesday with the state's law restricting how social media sites can moderate their platforms.

The 15-word ruling allowing the law, which had been blocked last year, to take effect has significant potential consequences. Most immediately, it creates new legal risks for the tech giants, and opens them up to a possible wave of litigation that legal experts say would be costly and difficult to defend.

Texas's law makes it illegal for any social media platform with 50 million or more US monthly users to "block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression."

The law creates enormous uncertainty about how social media will actually function in Texas, according to legal experts, and raises questions about what users' online spaces may look like and what content they may find there, if the companies are even able to run their services at all.

The ruling also sets the stage for what could be a Supreme Court showdown over First Amendment rights and, possibly, a dramatic reinterpretation of those rights that affects not just the tech industry but all Americans — and decades of established precedent.

In short, the decision has allowed Texas to declare open season on tech platforms, with huge ramifications for everyone in the country. It could reshape the rights and obligations of all websites; our relationship to technology and the internet; and even our basic, fundamental understanding of the First Amendment.

Read the rest here.

Crypto currencies hammered by heavy selling

Bitcoin fell below $26,000 for the first time in 16 months, amid a broader sell-off in cryptocurrencies that erased more than $200 billion from the entire market in a single day.

The price of bitcoin plunged as low as $25,401.29 on Thursday, according to Coin Metrics. That marks the first time the cryptocurrency has sunk below the $27,000 level since Dec. 26, 2020.

Bitcoin has since pared its losses and was last trading at $28,569.25, down 2.9%.

Ether, the second-biggest digital currency, tanked to as low as $1,704.05 per coin. It’s the first time the token has fallen beneath the $2,000 mark since June 2021. Ether was last down 8.8% at a price of $1,937.88.

Investors are fleeing from cryptocurrencies at a time when stock markets have plunged from the highs of the coronavirus pandemic on fears over soaring prices and a deteriorating economic outlook. U.S. inflation data out Wednesday showed prices for goods and services jumping 8.3% in April, higher than expected by analysts and close to the highest level in 40 years.

Also weighing on traders’ minds is the downfall of embattled stablecoin protocol Terra. TerraUSD, or UST, is supposed to mirror the value of the dollar. But it plummeted to less than 30 cents Wednesday, shaking investors’ confidence in the so-called decentralized finance space.

Stablecoins are like the bank accounts of the barely regulated crypto world. Digital currency investors often turn to them for safety in times of volatility in the markets. But UST, an “algorithmic” stablecoin that’s underpinned by code rather than cash held in a reserve, has struggled to maintain a stable value as holders bolted for the exits en masse.

On Thursday, UST was trading at about 41 cents, still well below its intended $1 peg. Luna, another Terra token that has a floating price and is meant to absorb UST price shocks, erased 99% of its value and was last worth just 4 cents.

Investors are scared about the implications for bitcoin. Luna Foundation Guard — a fund set up by Terra creator Do Kwon — had amassed a multibillion-dollar pile of bitcoin to help support UST in times of crisis. The fear is that Luna Foundation Guard sells a large portion of its bitcoin holdings to shore up its ailing stablecoin. That’s a risky gamble — not least because bitcoin is itself an incredibly volatile asset.

The fallout from Terra’s collapse led to fears of a market contagion. Tether, the world’s biggest stablecoin, also dropped below its $1 peg Thursday, at one point sinking to 95 cents. Economists have long feared that tether may not have the required amount of reserves to bolster its dollar peg in the event of mass withdrawals.

Source.

Financial Markets Take a Hit

April's southward drift has continued in May as all three major stock indices fell yesterday by more than 3%. The tech heavy NASDAQ was down by 5% following the Fed's decision to raise their fund rates by a half percentage. The Fed Rate remain below 1% with inflation officially clocking in at 8.5%. Bond yields continue to rise which means currently held bonds are losing value. The yield on the ten year US bond is now slightly over 3%. In 2020 the yield fell below .5%. Oil remains firmly over $100/barrel and metals have been sluggish amid expectations of further interest rate hikes. Bitcoin fell sharply and as of this post is trading under $36k. Broadly speaking Wall Street seems to be less than impressed by the Fed's actions to curb inflation and the expectation is that even if inflation peaks, it is likely to remain high in the near to intermediate term. Some observers have noted that according to the Taylor Rule, interest rates should be near 10%. But a move that high would almost certainly plunge the country into a severe recession.  It now appears that with the inflation genie out of its bottle, getting it back in is going to be both challenging and painful. 

Bank of England raises interest rates amid warnings of recession and 10% inflation

The government is facing calls to launch a fresh package of emergency financial support for households after the Bank of England warned Britain’s economy could plunge into recession before the end of the year.

As the nation went to the polls in the local elections, the Bank raised interest rates from 0.75% to 1% to tackle spiralling inflation made worse by Russia’s war in Ukraine. With a fresh jump in home energy bills expected in October, it forecast inflation would rise above 10% this year, the highest level since 1982.

The rate rise brings borrowing costs to levels unseen since the recession caused by the 2008 financial crisis, but the Bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) said action was warranted despite the gathering economic storm clouds.

Andrew Bailey, the Bank’s governor, said there was a “narrow path” the central bank had to navigate between the dual risks of inflation and recession facing the British economy. He said the inflation shock had been made worse by the impact on supply chains from Covid lockdowns in China and the rise in energy costs since Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

Read the rest here. 

Jim Grant on bonds, interest rates and inflation

Leaked Draft Indicates Roe v Wade Will be Reversed

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

Deliberations on controversial cases have in the past been fluid. Justices can and sometimes do change their votes as draft opinions circulate and major decisions can be subject to multiple drafts and vote-trading, sometimes until just days before a decision is unveiled. The court’s holding will not be final until it is published, likely in the next two months.

The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion. It’s unclear if there have been subsequent changes to the draft.

No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending. The unprecedented revelation is bound to intensify the debate over what was already the most controversial case on the docket this term.

The draft opinion offers an extraordinary window into the justices’ deliberations in one of the most consequential cases before the court in the last five decades. Some court-watchers predicted that the conservative majority would slice away at abortion rights without flatly overturning a 49-year-old precedent. The draft shows that the court is looking to reject Roe’s logic and legal protections.

Read the rest here.

Obviously this is not a final opinion. But I have no reason to believe it is not authentic. POLITICO is a highly reputable news site and this must be acknowledged as one of the great "scoops" in the history of journalism.

Glory to God!

Quote of the day...

“If you said… for a 1% interest in all the farmland in the United States, pay our group $25 billion, I’ll write you a check this afternoon,” Buffett said. ”[For] $25 billion I now own 1% of the farmland. [If] you offer me 1% of all the apartment houses in the country and you want another $25 billion, I’ll write you a check, it’s very simple. Now if you told me you own all of the bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25 I wouldn’t take it because what would I do with it? I’d have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn’t going to do anything. The apartments are going to produce rent and the farms are going to produce food.”

 -Warren Buffet (from here)

Elon Musk

Is he really that bad? I confess that I have some decidedly mixed feeling about him. On the one hand I think he is a genius and his electric cars are probably making the world a better place. On the other hand I think he can be a flake and those electric cars always left me feeling like I was trapped in somebody's Play Station. On which note, I wonder how many of these woke scolds that are decrying Musk as the living incarnation of Old Scratch, are also driving one of his cars.

And then there is this. Sometimes the jokes write themselves. 

HT:Brian

Summer is coming

One of the best investments of the last 12 years

"I recommend the S&P 500 index fund and have for a long, long time to people," billionaire investor Warren Buffett said at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting last May.‌

That’s been pretty good advice, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he repeated it again at the upcoming shareholder meeting on Saturday.

In a report published last month, S&P Dow Jones Indices (SPDJI) analysts found that 85.1% of U.S. large-cap equity fund managers underperformed the S&P 500 in 2021. It was the 12th straight year that more than half of the managers in this category lagged the index.

In other words, investors following Buffett’s advice have outperformed most professional money managers every year for more than a decade.‌

Sure, the S&P 500 (^GSPC) has been having a rough go lately, falling about 13% from its Jan. 4 high of 4,818.‌

But as SPDJI’s data suggests, it’s incredibly difficult to overweight and underweight stocks in a way where you beat the market.‌

Indeed, many of the most popular stocks in the market have been doing terribly. On Tuesday, Mike Zaccardi tweeted stats showing how Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Tesla (TSLA), Nvidia (NVDA), and Facebook parent Meta (FB) are all down between 20% and 53% from their highs.‌

Following last Tuesday’s disastrous earnings announcement, Netflix (NFLX) shares are now down by 70% from their recent high.‌

According to a different report, SPDJI analysts found that only 22% of the stocks in the S&P 500 outperformed the index from 2000 to 2020.‌

No one’s saying that investors should outright avoid trying to pick winners for their stock portfolio. However, investors should understand that stock-picking is incredibly hard, and there’s a pretty good chance that you will ultimately underperform the market.

Source.

Holy Pascha, Matins, Divine Liturgy, April 24th, 2022

CHRIST IS RISEN!

Holy Pascha, Midnight Office, Procession, Matins

Hours, Typica, and Vesperal Liturgy for Great & Holy Saturday

Vespers for Great & Holy Friday

Service of the 12 Gospels

Matins for Great & Holy Thursday

Ukraine: The latest news

• The European Union is reportedly giving serious consideration to a full embargo of Russian oil, an act hitherto considered politically untenable because of the severe effects it could have on Europe's economy.  
• The Russian cruiser Moskva, flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, has been severely damaged and at least temporarily abandoned. Ukraine claimed last night to have struck the vessel with missiles while Russia has since acknowledged severe damage but claimed it was the result of an accidental fire that set off ordinance. (Setting aside the Kremlin's credibility gap, as a former sailor in the USN I am highly skeptical that this was an accident,) It is unclear if the ship is still afloat.
• Rumors are flying of a Kremlin purge within the senior ranks of the armed forces and intelligence services. For obvious reasons, hard and verifiable details are not easy to come by. 
• The US and NATO allies are believed to be shipping much heavier weapons to Ukraine, including artillery, armored vehicles, and some battlefield missiles.
• Evidence of mass atrocities committed by the Russian army and security services in areas under their occupation continue to mount. 
• It has been reported that as many as 15 dioceses of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church have ceased commemorating Patriarch Kyril of Moscow. The damage done to the reputation and position of the Russian Orthodox Church as a result of its endorsement of Russia's invasion, both in Ukraine and globally, is difficult to overstate.  
• The UN is reporting severe disruptions to global food supplies that could have catastrophic consequences in underdeveloped parts of the world due to untenable levels of food inflation. 

US Inflation Rate is 8.5%- Highest since 1981

Prices that consumers pay for everyday items surged in March to their highest levels since the early days of the Reagan administration, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday.

The consumer price index, which measures a wide-ranging basket of goods and services, jumped 8.5% from a year ago on an unadjusted basis, above even the already elevated Dow Jones estimate for 8.4%.

Excluding food and energy, the CPI increased 6.5%, in line with the expectation.

The data reflected price rises not seen in the U.S. since the stagflation days of the late 1970s and early ’80s. March’s headline reading in fact was the highest since December 1981. Core inflation was the hottest since August 1982.

However, core inflation appeared to be ebbing, rising 0.3% for the month, less than the 0.5% estimate.

Despite the increases, markets reacted positively to the report. Stock market futures rose and government bond yields declined.

“The big news in the March report was that core price pressures finally appear to be moderating,” wrote Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. Hunter said he thinks the March increase will “mark the peak” for inflation as year-over-year comparisons drive the numbers lower and energy prices subside.

Still, due to the surge in inflation, real earnings, despite rising 5.6% from a year ago, weren’t keeping pace with the cost of living. Real average hourly earnings posted a seasonally adjusted 0.8% decline for the month, according to a separate Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

The inability of wages to keep up with costs could add to inflation pressures.

The Atlanta Federal Reserve wage tracker for March indicated gains of another 6% which is “symptomatic of inflation pressures continuing to broaden,” said Brian Coulton, chief economist at Fitch Ratings. Coulton pointed out that the core inflation deceleration was due largely to a drop in auto prices, while other prices continued to show increases.

Read the rest here.

World may be on cusp of new inflationary era, says central bank chief

The world economy may be on the cusp of a new inflationary era with persistently higher growth in consumer prices due to the retreat of globalisation, a leading central bank chief has said.

Agustín Carstens, head of the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements – which is known as the central bank of central banks – said there was a strong risk that prices would rise uncontrollably without a sharp rise in interest rates above existing plans.

In a speech setting out risks for persistently higher rates of inflation, Carstens said higher borrowing costs could be required for several years to curb the risk of spiralling prices wreaking long-term damage on the economies of the industrialised world.

However, his comments are disputed as other experts warn that high inflation will probably choke consumer spending and economic growth – reducing the urgency for significantly higher interest rates.

Data has shown inflation heading towards 10% in several countries, mostly in response to rising gas and oil prices after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In February, the consumer prices index hit 6.2% in the UK – the highest level since the 1990s. In March, the CPI in Germany and Spain hit 7.3% and 9.8% respectively.

The Bank of England is on course to raise its base rate to 2% next year according to City investors, up from the current level of 0.75% after Threadneedle Street began hiking rates from a record low of 0.1% in December last year.

Last month the US Federal Reserve approved a 0.25 percentage point hike from near zero, the first increase since December 2018, with a signal it plans several more rate rises this year.

Read the rest here.

More News from Rome (and none good)

Here, here and here.

HT: Dr. Tighe

Oberlin College Loses Defamation Appeal

An Ohio appeals court has upheld a ruling that awarded more than $30 million to a bakery that accused Oberlin College of damaging its business and libeling it with false accusations of racism.

A three-judge panel on the Ninth District Court of Appeals issued a unanimous decision to uphold a 2019 ruling by Lorain County Judge John Miraldi, who initially awarded the bakery more than $40 million in punitive and compensatory damages, Cleveland.com reported. However, the sum was later reduced to $25 million, though the bakery was awarded more than $6 million for lawyers’ fees.

Gibson’s Bakery sued the college in 2017, accusing the school and one of its administrators of hurting its business and libeling it over an incident in which the son of the bakery owner stopped three black Oberlin College students, one of whom was stealing wine bottles from the store, in November 2016.

Students from the school protested the bakery after the arrest, handing out fliers outside the shop telling patrons to shop elsewhere. The fliers also accused the Gibsons of having a long history of racial profiling, citing the November 2016 incident, according to Legal Insurrection. Witnesses who testified at the trial said Oberlin College Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo participated in the protests, handing out stacks of fliers for others to distribute.

Oberlin College regularly purchased baked goods from the bakery for its student dining service but suspended its purchasing for a month after the incident.

The Gibsons denied any wrongdoing and asked for a public apology from the college to repair the reputational damage done to the bakery, though it has never received one, according to the report.

The students pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in 2017 and said Allyn Gibson’s actions were not racially motivated.

Oberlin College and Raimando appealed Miraldi’s 2019 ruling, seeking to overturn the compensatory and punitive damage awards, while Gibson’s Bakery challenged the ruling, looking to restore the initial $33 million punitive damages award. The bakery argued the Ohio tort reform reduction was unconstitutional.

Read the rest here.

This is good news. Oberlin's actions were outrageous. The damages are believed to be the largest ever awarded for defamation in the state's history.

Russia's Brain Drain

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — Russia’s tech workers are looking for safer and more secure professional pastures.

By one estimate, up to 70,000 computer specialists, spooked by a sudden frost in the business and political climate, have bolted the country since Russia invaded Ukraine five weeks ago. Many more are expected to follow.

For some countries, Russia’s loss is being seen as their potential gain and an opportunity to bring fresh expertise to their own high-tech industries.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has noticed the brain drain even in the throes of a war that, according to the U.N. refugee agency, has caused more than 4 million people to flee Ukraine and displaced millions more within the country.

This week, Putin reacted to the exodus of tech professionals by approving legislation to eliminate income taxes between now and 2024 for individuals who work for information technology companies.

Some people in the vast new pool of high-tech exiles say they are in no rush to return home. An elite crowd furnished with European Union visas has relocated to Poland or the Baltic nations of Latvia and Lithuania.

A larger contingent has fallen back on countries where Russians do not need visas: Armenia, Georgia and the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. In normal times, millions of less-skilled laborers emigrate from those economically shaky countries to comparatively more prosperous Russia.

Anastasia, a 24-year-old freelance computer systems analyst from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, chose Kyrgyzstan, where her husband has family.

“When we heard about the war on (Feb. 24), we thought it was probably time to leave, but that we might wait and see. On February 25, we bought our tickets and left,” Anastasia said. “There wasn’t much thinking to do.”

Like all the Russian workers contacted for this story, Anastasia asked to remain anonymous. Moscow was cracking down on dissent even before the invasion of Ukraine, and people living outside Russia still fear reprisals.

“As long as I can remember, there has always been fear around expressing one’s own views in Russia,” Anastasia said, adding that the war and “the background noise of patriotism” made the environment even more forbidding. “I left one day before they began searching and interrogating people at the border.”

The scale of the apparent brain drain was laid bare last week by Sergei Plugotarenko, the head of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, an industry lobbying group.

“The first wave – 50,000-70,000 people – has already left,” Plugotarenko told a parliamentary committee.

Only the high cost of flights out of the country prevented an even larger mass exit. Another 100,000 tech workers nevertheless might leave Russia in April, Plugotarenko predicted.

Read the rest here.

Hours and Divine Liturgy, Sunday of the Holy Cross

Russia Asserts Right to Use Nuclear Weapons

The Kremlin again raised the spectre of the use of nuclear weapons in the war with Ukraine as Russian forces struggled to hold a key city in the south of the country.

Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president who is deputy chairman of the country’s security council, said Moscow could strike against an enemy that only used conventional weapons while Vladimir Putin’s defence minster claimed nuclear “readiness” was a priority.

The comments on Saturday prompted Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in an appearance by video link at Qatar’s Doha Forum to warn that Moscow was a direct threat to the world.

“Russia is deliberating bragging they can destroy with nuclear weapons, not only a certain country but the entire planet,” Zelenskiy said.

Putin established the nuclear threat at the start of the war, warning that western intervention would reap “consequences you have never seen”.

Western officials have said the threats may be simply an attempt to divert attention from the failure of Putin’s forces to secure a swift occupation of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and to make advances in other key areas of the country.

An adviser to Ukraine’s defence ministry, Markian Lubkivskyi, claimed on Saturday that Russia would soon lose control of the southern city of Kherson, the first major centre to fall to the Kremlin since the war began on 24 February.

He said: “I believe that today the city will be fully under the control of Ukrainian armed forces. We have finished in the last two days the operation in the Kyiv region so other armed forces are now focused on the southern part trying to get free Kherson and some other Ukrainian cities.”

Russia has approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads – the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In an interview on Saturday, Medvedev said Russia’s nuclear doctrine did not require an enemy state to use such weapons first.

Read the rest here.

The latest war news

• US military sources are reporting that the Russian Army has suffered severe degradation in Ukraine. Intelligence believe that conservatively 10% of the initial invasion force has been killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Losses in equipment, including tanks and armored personal carriers are even higher as a percentage. 
• Fears that Russia may be considering use of poison gas remain high. However, there is no evidence that such an attack is imminent.
• The US Government claims that more than 2,000 Ukranian children in the Russian occupied areas of eastern Ukraine have been abducted and forcibly transported to various parts of Russia.
• A source within the Russian Security Service (FSB) has released documents which, if legitimate, indicate that the Russians are planning a campaign of ethnic cleansing within areas occupied by the Russian military. This would include mass forced deportations of civilians to Russia and the summary execution of anyone connected to pro-Ukranian groups or demonstrations.
• The Ukrainian Army has launched a counter offensive which has driven back the Russian Army in a number of locations. The Ukrainians claim to have liberated the city of Mykolaiv near the capitol city of Kyiv. Meanwhile US sources report that the Russians have pressed into the city of Mariupol which has been devastated in a weeks long siege. Much of the city has been destroyed and there are reports of hundreds or more corpses littering the wreckage unburied. Many of them civilians. 
• The supply and logistics situation within the Russian Army operating in Ukraine continues to deteriorate. In some units, food and ammunition are at critically short levels.
• Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny has been convicted of additional charges of fraud and contempt of court and sentenced to a further nine years in prison. The proceedings have been more or less universally described as a kangaroo court. 
• At least one in five Ukrainians have been displaced by the war. More than three million have fled the country. 

Ukrainians are being kidnapped

Multiple sources are reporting that the Russian Army is forcibly deporting thousands of Ukrainian civilians to Russia. 

A Memorandum on the Next Conclave Is Circulating Among the Cardinals

Here it is.

HT: Dr. Tighe

Lloyds and DNV withdraw Certification from all Russian Ships

These are two of the world's largest entities that certify ocean going vessels, including super yachts, for insurance purposes. What this means, is that any Russian ships certified by either of these entities may now be operating without insurance. This is a bit complicated as there are other certifiers, but these are the two used by the vast majority of ships and luxury yachts. In order to enter ports and refuel, most ships are required to show evidence of insurance. I'm not certain if this applies to all vessels owned by Russian entities or just Russian flagged ships. But this has the potential to be highly disruptive.

Update: At least one source is suggesting this is primarily being done to vessels owned by sanctioned persons, which would mostly limit it to luxury super yachts owned by Putin's cronies. More than a few of which have suddenly left their ports and turned off their satellite tracking beacons, which is against maritime law.

The Economic Consequences of Putin's War

The big western brands showed Vladimir Putin how to do it. While the Kremlin’s army was getting bogged down in Ukraine, Coca-Cola and Starbucks lost no time in closing their doors to Russian customers.

But the most emblematic move of all came from McDonald’s, which has shut all 850 of its outlets in Russia. The availability of Big Macs in the Soviet Union was seen in 1990 as evidence that the west’s old cold war foe was turning its back on communism, but the past fortnight has rekindled memories of the bad old days. There were queues outside McDonald’s when it first opened in Moscow. Last week, Russians queued for one last burger before the pull-out began.

One of Putin’s predecessors in the Kremlin – Lenin – once said there were decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen, and that’s true of the period since Russian troops moved across the border into Ukraine on 24 February.

It is not just that Russia faces a brutal recession. It is the shattering of the idea of a seamless post-cold-war global economy. It is the return to days of higher defence spending in the west. It is the possibility that governments may backpedal on their net zero carbon pledges.

“Putin has created his own worst nightmare,” says Mohamed El-Erian, chief economist at Allianz and president of Queens’ College, Cambridge. “He has united the west in a way it hasn’t been for a long time; he has been the catalyst for arms to Ukraine on a large scale; he has changed Germany’s approach to military spending; and he has brought the Russian economy to its knees. It is incredible.”

Freezing the bulk of Russia’s reserves has meant the central bank has struggled to shore up the rouble, which has plummeted by a third on the currency markets. Capital controls have been introduced, interest rates have more than doubled, and annual inflation is heading for 20%. The stock market has been closed and financial markets fear Moscow may default on a sovereign debt repayment later this week.

Read the rest here.

On the eve of the Great Fast

I beg forgiveness for any injury I may have caused, especially through this blog. No blogging until after Clean Wednesday.

Oil Surges

In overnight trading as of this posting...

Oil futures are at $126/barrel of West Texas Crude. That's the highest level since 2008.

The yield on the 10yr US Bond has fallen to 1.7%.

Gold has risen to 1,992/oz. Silver is at 26.15/oz

Bitcoin, after briefly rising to $43,000 as Russians were buying anything where they thought they could stash cash not subject to sanction or crippling inflation has retreated to a little over $38,000. 

US stock futures are currently down about 1.2%.

Finally something amusing from Ukraine

From Rod Dreher. (Adult language)

I don't think the civilized world has cheered this loudly for a country under attack by a powerful predatory neighbor since Belgium in 1914. 

Russia Prepares Law Against "Fake" News on War in Ukraine

The law, expected to be voted on tomorrow, makes it a criminal offense punishable by 15 years in prison to spread false news or reports on the war in Ukraine. The last two independent media outlets in Russia have both announced they are suspending operations. 

METROPOLITAN ONUPHRY APPEALS FOR PENITENTIAL PRAYER AND AN END TO THE “FRATRICIDAL WAR”

Dear brothers and sisters! The faithful of our Ukrainian Orthodox Church!

As the primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, I appeal to you and to all citizens of Ukraine. A disaster has occurred. Unfortunately, Russia has launched military actions against Ukraine, and at this fateful time I urge you not to panic, to be courageous, and to show love for your homeland and for each other. I call you, above all, to intensified penitential prayer for Ukraine, for our army, and our people, and I entreat you to lay aside mutual strife and misunderstandings and unite in love for God and our motherland.

At this tragic time, we express our fervent love and support to our soldiers standing guard and protecting and defending our land and our people. May God bless and keep them!

Defending the sovereignty and integrity of Ukraine, we appeal to the President of Russia and ask him to immediately stop the fratricidal war. The Ukrainian and Russian peoples came out of the Dnieper Baptismal font, and the war between these peoples is a repetition of the sin of Cain, who killed his own brother out of envy. Such a war has no justification either from God or from people.

I call everyone to common sense, which teaches us to solve our earthly problems in mutual dialogue and mutual understanding, and I sincerely hope that God will forgive us our sins and that God’s peace will reign on our land and throughout the world!

Source

The Russian Economy Has Been Nuked

Over the weekend Vladimir Putin rattled Russia's nuclear sabre. Meanwhile, the west pushed the button. The sanctions are the most rigorous I can remember against any country in my lifetime. Iran, South Africa during apartheid, even North Korea; they all look relatively ok compared to what is going on in Russia. Putin is now radioactive and that is extending to the entire country. This is likely to last a long time. Most of the industrialized world has moved to cut Russia off. The Ruble is one step from being used for toilet paper. The stock market has been closed by the Russian Central Bank to prevent a meltdown. There are reports of near panic buying of necessary comodities in order to unload their money while it still has any value at all. The massive amounts of foreign currency reserves stockpiled for years as a hedge against possible western sanctions are now mostly frozen. Putin does have some gold, which he has also been buying for the last decade or longer. But it's not clear where that is. And even Switzerland has joined the economic blockade. But even if the gold is in Russia, it won't be enough to keep the lights on for long. I feel badly for the Russian people. They can be added to the long list of Putin's victims.

AXIOS

In a rare break with Moscow, the leaders of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) have denounced the Russian invasion and urged their countrymen to support the Kiev government.

“Defending the sovereignty and integrity of Ukraine, we also appeal to the President of Russia to stop the fratricidal war immediately,” said Metropolitan Onufry, head of the UOC-MP. Father Mykola Danilevich, a spokesman for the UOC-MP, was more outspoken, saying: ““Putin treacherously attacked our country! We bless everyone for the defense of Ukraine!”

From here. 

Thousands of young Russian men flee to US

Thousands of Russians are trying to reach the United States to claim political asylum and avoid being drafted to the army, the Telegraph can reveal.

Immigration lawyers in America have been inundated with inquiries from Russian men and their families asking if the US will grant them political protection amid fears of conscription, following Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.

In recent months, record numbers of Russian citizens have been apprehended on the US border with Mexico, as an easy path to the US offers opponents of Vladimir Putin’s government an escape.

The Telegraph has spoken to bank managers, engineers and fashion designers who have all left their homes in search of a new life in the US after being targeted by police in Russia.

But now, immigration lawyers say the numbers will “skyrocket” amid fears that military-age men will be called up to fight in the war with Ukraine - which has already called up conscripts and reservists aged between 18 and 60.

In 2020, just 467 Russians were detained at America's southern border. Last year, that number soared to 9,376 - a result of the Russian crackdown on dissent following widespread protests spearheaded by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, experts say.

But the numbers are still increasing. Last month, 1,028 Russians and 248 Ukrainians made their way across the border, mostly crossing from Tijuana to San Diego.

“We have never been so busy,” said Ekaterina Mouratova, a Russian-American immigration lawyer based in Miami. “But the number is going to skyrocket. I have got tons of emails in the last few days - hundreds. They are mostly men between 20 and 55 who are asking if they can get protection from the US if Russia does a mandatory military draft. These people do not want to go to war.

Read the rest here. (paywalled)

What's the difference between the UN and the League of Nation?

The League never actually gave Hitler or Stalin a veto. Otherwise, I see no real difference.

Russian Bonds Downgraded

Standard & Poor's has downgraded Russian sovereign bonds to 'junk' status. That's going to hurt.

Russia Invades Ukraine

Russia launched a large-scale military operation tonight with the stated object of "demilitarizing and de-nazifying Ukraine." The irony being that Putin has been employing Hitler's playbook from 1938-39, almost verbatim. 

Russia Moves Against Ukraine

• Russian President V.V. Putin has announced formal recognition of two separatist regimes in Eastern Ukraine. Both have been widely described as puppet regimes of the Kremlin.
• Mr. Putin has ordered Russian troops to enter those self-proclaimed states for the purpose of "peace keeping."
• Russia's formal declaration recognizes all of the claimed territory of the two secessionist groups, including large swaths of territory held by the Ukrainian government.
• In a speech to the Russian nation Mr. Putin questioned the legitimacy of Ukraine's existence as an independent state.
• Mr. Putin has requested and received permission from the Russian Duma to deploy troops outside of Russia. The request was made in response to Russian claims of mass genocide being perpetrated by the government in Kyiv against ethnic Russians. Those claims have been emphatically denied by Ukraine and received with ridicule by the international community.
• Mr. Putin has issued a series of demands to Ukraine that include formal Ukrainian recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea which Russia seized in 2014, that Ukraine adopt a policy of what Moscow termed "strict neutrality" including a permanent pledge never to join NATO, and a formal demand that Ukraine effectively disarm itself and surrender all heavy weapons including any arms supplied by the United States or other powers. Presumably they would have to be surrendered to Russia. 

Ukraine

War may be imminent, or it may not. But if it comes one thing is certain; thousands will be killed and wounded. And most will be Orthodox Chrisitians. 

Lord have mercy.

Britain: National Power Grid to tap electric cars when in need of extra juice

Electric car owners will be called on to help Britain avoid an energy crunch as suppliers prepare tariffs allowing them to draw power from parked vehicles at times of low supply or high demand.

Cars which are charging on driveways are to be plugged into a system responsible for balancing the National Grid for the first time, in an experiment aimed at easing the burden on the country's creaking energy infrastructure.

It will lay the groundwork for a national rollout of the technology if successful, paving the way for millions of electric cars to act as a giant battery so that power supply is stable at times of low wind speeds after the transition to green energy.

In the trial, which will begin at some point from April to June, car owners will agree to allow the grid to draw power from their vehicles and release it as and when required. They will be paid for energy which the grid drains off.

Read the rest here.

According to the comments, the planned rebate will be 15/p per kwh. The problem is that the car owners are charged 19/p per kwh by the power grid. 

Lent is Coming

Catholics Debate: Regional Managers or Successors to the Apostles?

Last week, Bishop Joseph Strickland quoted a few lines from my latest article for Crisis Magazine called “The Great Convergence.” I wrote the piece, in part, to push back against what Bishop Athanasius Schneider calls the culture of papal-centrism we find everywhere in the modern Church. Here’s the paragraph Bishop Strickland tweeted:

"The West needs to remember that our bishops do not derive their authority from the pope. They are not the Vatican’s regional managers. They are Successors to the Apostles in their own right. They have their own teaching authority. They are the shepherds of their sheep."

For that, His Excellency was called a schismatic, a heretic, even an apostate. It goes to show how much confusion there is about the papacy even among faithful, well-informed Catholics. Apparently, quite a few of us think bishops are indeed the Vatican’s regional managers. They seem to think that the pope is the only real bishop, and that he simply rents out a little bit of his bishop-ness to the seven thousand ordinaries around the world.  

Clearly, that’s not the case. All bishops (including the pope) derive their authority from the same source: God. Our Lord consecrated the Twelve Apostles as bishops. The Apostles then passed on the authority of their office to a new generation through the laying on of hands. We call this line Apostolic Succession.  

As the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church puts it:

"For from the tradition, which is expressed especially in liturgical rites and in the practice of both the Church of the East and of the West, it is clear that, by means of the imposition of hands and the words of consecration, the grace of the Holy Spirit is so conferred, and the sacred character so impressed, that bishops in an eminent and visible way sustain the roles of Christ Himself as Teacher, Shepherd and High Priest, and that they act in His person. Therefore it pertains to the bishops to admit newly elected members into the Episcopal body by means of the sacrament of Orders."

Lumen Gentium goes on to explain: “This power, which they personally exercise in Christ’s name, is proper, ordinary and immediate, although its exercise is ultimately regulated by the supreme authority of the Church, and can be circumscribed by certain limits, for the advantage of the Church or of the faithful.” So, yes: bishops are bishops in their own right.  

It’s true that bishops are subject to higher authorities, including the pope. Yet it’s possible for them to exercise their episcopal office in defiance of the papacy. The Orthodox have been doing it for a thousand years. 

Read the rest here.

HT: Blog reader John L.

Psychic Con Artists

What does it take for someone to impersonate a dead teenager to the grieving mother of the deceased? For M Lamar Keene, a prominent Tampa-based medium in the 1960s and 70s, it was a cinch – all it required was a cocktail of cunning, charisma and sheer audacity. In front of the congregation of his spiritualist church, Keene would enter a trance state and appear to speak as the deceased 17-year-old, Jack, and ask Jack’s mother, Lona, to donate thousands of dollars to the church. One day, Lona asked Jack about the secret name he used for her, to prove it was really him, and Keene was stumped – until he attended a gathering at her house and feigned a headache. While pretending to rest in her bedroom, he searched her belongings and found the name scribbled in a family Bible: “Appleonia”. He pulled it off.

Keene confessed to being a conman in his 1976 book, The Psychic Mafia. Jack and Lona’s was just one of many audacious cases he revealed in the exposé, which shook the world of spiritualism so much that it led to an attempt on his life. Someone took a shot at him on his lawn but missed, leaving a bullet in the side of his house. In the book, Keene described how mediums shared client information so that they could conduct “hot readings” based on solid facts. He recounted how they would steal jewellery from clients for a few months, only to pretend a dead family member’s spirit had made it reappear (which usually resulted in generous tips). Ultimately, he confirmed that mediums formed a vast network to fraudulently monetise people’s grief. So why did Keene – the so-called Prince of the Spiritualists – choose to blow the whistle on everyone?

Read the rest here.

Crypto’s gold standard claims are fading fast

The US-focused shakeout in financial markets has at least given us clarity on one point: bitcoin is not “digital gold” or a “store of value”, to mention two grand claims made about the cryptocurrency when its price was going up.

At $37,000, the late-afternoon level on Tuesday, bitcoin has fallen by 22% since the start of January and by 45% since recording an all-time high in early November. The crypto crew may have convoluted explanations for this setback, but the simplest one is best: bitcoin has always primarily been an instrument for pure speculation; when high-risk assets are out of favour, it will be clobbered.

If anything, bitcoin is behaving like a souped-up proxy for the technology-heavy Nasdaq index in the US, down 14% since the start of 2022. So the parallel claim about “uncorrelated returns” doesn’t stack up either.

Meanwhile actual gold, a real store of value on the evidence of a few thousand years, has been doing roughly what it is supposed to do during an inflation scare: it has fluttered sideways to gently upwards over the past few months.

None of which precludes the possibility that bitcoin will rally when risk-taking appetites recover. But, if that happens, please let’s not hear a reheated version of the thesis (pushed by a Goldman Sachs strategist, bizarrely, only a few weeks ago) that bitcoin is competing with gold in “the store of value market” and thus could hit $100,000 if it grabs a 50% share.

Come on, cryptocurrencies are not playing on the same pitch, asset-wise, as gold – and one doubts they ever will.

Source.

Quote of the day...

Important “the West needs to remember that our bishops do not derive their authority from the pope. They are not the Vatican’s regional managers. They are Successors to the Apostles in their own right. They have their own teaching authority. They are the shepherds of their sheep”

-Source

See also this.

Pope Benedict XV is Dead (1922)

One hundred years ago today.

Crypto Crash

The latest (as of posting time) in the seemingly endless chain of crashes, punctuated by suckers rallies in the crypto markets. Bitcoin down -14%, Etherium -18%, Ripple -15%, Litecoin -17% since midnight.  

Russia reportedly preparing false flag operations in Ukraine

The US has information that indicates Russia has prepositioned a group of operatives to conduct a false-flag operation in eastern Ukraine, a US official told CNN on Friday, in an attempt to create a pretext for an invasion.

The official said the US has evidence that the operatives are trained in urban warfare and in using explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia's own proxy forces.

The allegation echoes a statement released by Ukraine's Ministry of Defense on Friday, which said that Russian special services are preparing provocations against Russian forces in an attempt to frame Ukraine. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan hinted at the intelligence during a briefing with reporters on Thursday.

"Our intelligence community has developed information, which has now been downgraded, that Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating the pretext for an invasion," Sullivan said on Thursday. "We saw this playbook in 2014. They are preparing this playbook again and we will have, the administration will have, further details on what we see as this potential laying of the pretext to share with the press over the course of the next 24 hours."

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Friday that "the military units of the aggressor country and its satellites receive orders to prepare for such provocations."

The US intelligence finding comes after a week's worth of diplomatic meetings between Russian and Western officials over Russia's amassing of tens of thousands of troops along Ukraine's border. But the talks failed to achieve any breakthroughs, as Russia would not commit to de-escalating and American and NATO officials said Moscow's demands -- including that NATO never admit Ukraine into the alliance -- were non-starters.

A number of Ukraine's governmental websites were hit by a cyberattack on Friday, a development European officials warned would ratchet up tensions over Ukraine even further.

The US official said that the Biden administration believes Russia could be preparing for an invasion into Ukraine "that may result in widespread human rights violations and war crimes should diplomacy fail to meet their objectives."

"The Russian military plans to begin these activities several weeks before a military invasion, which could begin between mid-January and mid-February," the official said. "We saw this playbook in 2014 with Crimea."

Read the rest here.

See also this related story analyzing possible military scenarios if Russia invades Ukraine. (Paywalled)

Prince Andrew is stripped of military honours and patronages

HM The Queen has stripped Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, of all his honorary military titles and royal patronages. Additionally, he is no longer permitted to use his HRH, according to an announcement from the Palace. The announcement stated that the Duke will defend himself in his current court case as a private citizen. 

I have up to now refrained from commenting on this sordid business, but I think this worth noting. My only response is that this is as welcome as it is overdue. 

Details.

Christmas Liturgy from Bethlehem

Manhattan's new DA will seek jail sentences only for 'most serious crimes'

Manhattan’s new district attorney began this week to adopt the lenient policies he campaigned on, setting the stage for potential conflict inside and outside his office as he tries to change the way criminal justice is administered in the borough.

The district attorney, Alvin Bragg, told prosecutors in his office in a memo that they should ask judges for jail or prison time only for the most serious offenses — including murder, sexual assault and economic crimes involving vast sums of money — unless the law requires them to do otherwise.

The crimes he instructed prosecutors to avoid seeking jail time for include certain robberies and assaults, as well as gun possession. He also directed that they no longer request prison sentences of more than 20 years absent “exceptional circumstances.”

Mr. Bragg’s goal is to reduce the harm the criminal justice system does to defendants, an aim he seeks to balance with the need to keep the public safe.

Although the new policies had long been expected — Mr. Bragg released a draft version during the campaign — their immediate adoption caused some confusion within his office. About 500 prosecutors must now decipher a complicated legal memo and figure out how to apply it to their active cases. Adding to the confusion is the fact that much of the office is working remotely.

The policies, which prompted an immediate backlash among conservative critics and in some law enforcement circles, may prove difficult to champion politically with New York City continuing to experience a sharp increase in murders and shootings.

In a statement, the Detective’s Endowment Association, which represents 5,000 active police detectives in the city, said the changes would “undermine the ability of the police to make arrests that lead to reduction of crime.”

James McGuire, who worked as a prosecutor in Manhattan and was chief counsel to Gov. George E. Pataki, a three-term Republican, said Mr. Bragg’s policies might bring him into conflict with other elected leaders, including Mayor Eric Adams, who ran, in part, on a law-and-order platform.

“These policies may be a challenge to the mayor and what he’s campaigned on,” Mr. McGuire said.

Asked about the district attorney on Wednesday in an interview with CBS, Mr. Adams said he knew and respected him, calling him “a great prosecutor.”

Mr. Bragg defended his plan in a Twitter thread on Wednesday.

“These policy changes not only will, in and of themselves, make us safer; they also will free up prosecutorial resources to focus on violent crime and bigger cases that make us safer,” he wrote.

In an interview before he took office, he said he had used the transition period since the election to “stress-test” the policies.

“There will be gaps and gray areas and people who don’t agree,” he said, adding that he was happy to discuss the new guidelines with members of his staff but that he would be less tolerant of “recalcitrance” on the part of prosecutors who are not interested in adhering to the underlying principles.

Mr. Bragg has also said he does not plan to prosecute some misdemeanors, including prostitution and fare evasion, that his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had already stopped charging as crimes.

But he is adding several misdemeanors to the list, including the stand-alone charge for resisting arrest. Those who resist arrest by attacking police officers will still be charged.

Read the rest here.

Happy New Year

So; happy new year everybody. If the blog looks a little off, or it looked really weird earlier, it's because I had a massive brain fade this morning. While tinkering a bit with the layout in preparation for adding a few links, I accidentally deleted a large chunk of the side bar. If you think you faintly heard someone from the far side of the country screaming words and phrases typically associated with angry and or drunken sailors, it was probably me. I have since discovered that blogspot does NOT cache or save earlier versions of your blog. So, I spent a good deal of my day going through the waybackmachine that, thank G-- does preserve, and manually rebuilding my sidebar one link at a time. 

Here's hoping this is not an omen for how 2022 is going to go. 

Escalation

Russian Church forms "Patriarchal Exarchate of Africa"

Woodrow Wilson

Part I

Part II

If you're a fan of Mr. Wilson, I suggest you skip this. Or, take a valium before watching. FTR I don't rank him as the worst president. But he is definitely in the bottom tier. I think he did a lot more harm than his much maligned successor, Warren Harding.

Russian court orders closure of country’s oldest human rights group

Russia’s supreme court has ordered the closure of Memorial International, the country’s oldest human rights group, in a watershed moment in Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on independent thought.

The court ruled Memorial must be closed under Russia’s controversial “foreign agent” legislation, which has targeted dozens of NGOs and media outlets seen as critical of the government.

Memorial was founded in the late 1980s to document political repressions carried out under the Soviet Union, building a database of victims of the Great Terror and gulag camps. The Memorial Human Rights Centre, a sister organisation that campaigns for the rights of political prisoners and other causes, is also facing liquidation for “justifying terrorism and extremism”.

Memorial International’s closure marks an inflection point in Russia’s modern history, as efforts to publicise crimes under Soviet leaders such as Joseph Stalin have become taboo 30 years after the secret government archives were opened after the end of the Soviet Union. While not quite seeking a return to the Soviet past, Putin has become deeply sensitive to any criticism of it by groups including Memorial.

Genri Reznik, a lawyer who represented Memorial on Tuesday, called the decision to close it “political”, adding that the hearing reminded him of the Soviet show trials of the 1930s.

The decision also follows a sustained assault on Russian civil society this year that has led to opposition leaders such as Alexei Navalny being imprisoned, prominent activists and journalists fleeing the country, and NGOs and media outlets hit with fines and closures under Russia’s “foreign agents” and “undesirable” laws.

The judge, Alla Nazarova, ordered the organisation closed for “repeated” and “gross” violations of Russia’s foreign agent laws, a designation Memorial has called politically motivated but nonetheless claimed to have followed.

Read the rest here.

Quebec prepares strict law promoting French over English

Quebec is poised to introduce a strict new French language law restricting the use of English in public services in what critics have dubbed a "culture war" on its anglophone residents.

The province's ruling nationalist party, Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), say the tough measures are “urgently required” for the survival of the French language given the dominance of English in global popular culture.

“It’s nothing against the English Quebecers,” said Quebec's premier, Francois Legault. "It’s about protecting French."

But the province's anglophone residents say Bill 96, which is expected to come into force in the next year/2022, discriminates against bilinguals and denies them basic freedoms.

The legislation seeks to unilaterally change the Canadian Constitution to affirm Quebec as a nation and French its official language, using a mechanism designed to shield it from constitutional challenges.

The radical bill proposes more than 200 amendments to the province's landmark 1977 French-language charter, including stricter requirements for businesses to operate in French and tight limits on the number of francophones who can attend English-language colleges.  

Among the most controversial proposals are the extra powers handed to government language inspectors to raid offices and access the computers and phones of any businesses - including media organisations - suspected of violating the new law.

The draconian measures have inflamed the rhetoric around the debate, with prominent Canadian lawyer Anne-France Goldwater comparing the new snooping powers to the "Gestapo".

Simon Jolin-Barrette, the Quebec minister responsible for the French language, tabled the bill in response to studies by Quebec's French-language office that indicate the number of people who solely use French at home and work is on the decline.

“The time has come to take strong action,” Mr Jolin-Barrette said during recent legislative hearings on the bill.

Read the rest here.

Christ is born!

Wishing you and yours the joy of the feast.

Hierarchal Royal Hours and Vesperal Divine Liturgy of St. Basil, December 24th, 2021

Arrests, Beatings and Secret Prayers: Inside the Persecution of India’s Christians

INDORE, India — The Christians were mid-hymn when the mob kicked in the door.

A swarm of men dressed in saffron poured inside. They jumped onstage and shouted Hindu supremacist slogans. They punched pastors in the head. They threw women to the ground, sending terrified children scuttling under their chairs.

“They kept beating us, pulling out hair,” said Manish David, one of the pastors who was assaulted. “They yelled: ‘What are you doing here? What songs are you singing? What are you trying to do?’”

The attack unfolded on the morning of Jan. 26 at the Satprakashan Sanchar Kendra Christian center in the city of Indore. The police soon arrived, but the officers did not touch the aggressors. Instead, they arrested and jailed the pastors and other church elders, who were still dizzy from getting punched in the head. The Christians were charged with breaking a newly enforced law that targets religious conversions, one that mirrors at least a dozen other measures across the country that have prompted a surge in mob violence against Indian Christians.

Pastor David was not converting anyone, he said. But the organized assault against his church was propelled by a growing anti-Christian hysteria that is spreading across this vast nation, home to one of Asia’s oldest and largest Christian communities, with more than 30 million adherents.

Anti-Christian vigilantes are sweeping through villages, storming churches, burning Christian literature, attacking schools and assaulting worshipers. In many cases, the police and members of India’s governing party are helping them, government documents and dozens of interviews revealed. In church after church, the very act of worship has become dangerous despite constitutional protections for freedom of religion.

To many Hindu extremists, the attacks are justified — a means of preventing religious conversions. To them, the possibility that some Indians, even a relatively small number, would reject Hinduism for Christianity is a threat to their dream of turning India into a pure Hindu nation. Many Christians have become so frightened that they try to pass as Hindu to protect themselves.

“I just don’t get it,” said Abhishek Ninama, a Christian farmer, who stared dejectedly at a rural church stomped apart this year. “What is it that we do that makes them hate us so much?”

The pressure is greatest in central and northern India, where the governing party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is firmly in control, and where evangelical Christian groups are making inroads among lower-caste Hindus, albeit quietly. Pastors hold clandestine ceremonies at night. They conduct secret baptisms. They pass out audio Bibles that look like little transistor radios so that illiterate farmers can surreptitiously listen to the scripture as they plow their fields.

Read the rest here. 

Pope Francis' new attack on Catholic traditionalists

As predicted in a recent post, the pope has launched the next phase of his war on Catholic traditionalists. Among the new rules are draconian restrictions on the traditional rites for baptism, confession, marriage, and holy unction. The traditional rites for confirmation and ordination to holy orders are now prohibited entirely. Cleary Francis wants to drive these people out of the Catholic Church. This is a man without charity and who believes that he is the absolute master of the liturgy and the rites of his church. That is a dangerous combination. 

How could anyone who is Orthodox contemplate entering into any kind of communion with a church that holds such beliefs and wages war on its own faithful? 

Details.

ANAXIOS!

Archbishop Makarios: The Orthodox Church cannot exist without the Ecumenical Patriarchate

“We Orthodox have a history of two thousand years. If during these two thousand years, the Orthodox Church did not have an Ecumenical Patriarchate, it should have created it. Because she would not have been able to proceed otherwise. I can not imagine the Orthodox Church without the Ecumenical Patriarchate. She cannot exist! Despite what is said and heard; despite the voices, the cold and icy voices from the north; the strange voices; the voices of secularisation, there can be no Orthodox Church without the first of Orthodoxy, who is the Ecumenical Patriarch.”

Read the rest here.

Honestly, he should just go off and join the Roman Catholics. He is clearly 3/4 of the way there already.

The Russian Church throws cold water on union with Rome

Russia’s Orthodox Church dismissed talk of union between Orthodox and Catholic Churches but it confirmed earlier in the week that a meeting between Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia and Pope Francis is possible.

Bishop Hilarion, the Chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations, said that the schism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism has existed for centuries and there are fundamental dogmatic differences between the two churches.

“No one talks about the union of the two Churches because the divisions have existed for a long time, many contradictions have accumulated, they have been living independently for almost ten centuries,” he said, adding “There is no talk of union, but there can be discussions to finally end the state of rivalry, of competition, of hostility, which has existed for many centuries.”

Hilarion, who is in effect the diplomatic envoy of the Russian Orthodox Church, said that he would meet Pope Francis in late December.

“I expect to congratulate him on his 85th birthday on behalf of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill, as well as to discuss with him a broad range of issues regarding bilateral relations between our churches,” he noted.

“Among these issues is a possible meeting of Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill. Neither the venue nor the date of this meeting has been determined for now,” Hilarion added.

Pope Francis told a news conference onboard a plane as he was returning from a mission trip to Greece and Cyprus that he might meet with Patriarch Kirill in the near future.

Read the rest here.

Pope John Ireland? (updated)

Pope Francis is now more or less openly at war with the conservative wing of the Catholic Church and is known to hold so called traditionalists, those favoring the pre-Vatican II liturgical and sacramental rites, in particular contempt. In his recent, and perversely named motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis effectively revoked the decree of his predecessor granting broad permission for the use of the ancient rites of the Roman Church. The new rules are far more restrictive and appear to be a preparatory step towards the full suppression of the Tridentine Mass. 

I have already noted the ecumenical consequences of this hostility towards the liturgical patrimony of his church and his belief that he has the power to arbitrarily dictate all aspects of its liturgical life. Any such claimed authority is a non-starter with the Orthodox and a further, very serious, impediment to any talk of restoration of communion. If he believes he can wave his hand and outlaw the ancient rites of the West, why would he, or any of his successors, think they could not do the same to the rites of the Christian East? Indeed, many of the uniate churches have already been subjected to varying degrees of imposed "liturgical renewal" since Vatican II and even well before that. But his hostility to Catholic traditionalists appears to be of a nature where he is not interested in building bridges, so much as burning them. It is widely suspected on both sides of the cultural/theological divide that Francis' ultimate objective is the complete suppression of the old rites which he sees as a rallying point for resistance to the "spirit of Vatican II." There are now rumors circulating that he is preparing to forbid the ordination of priests using the old ritual. This would have the direct effect of crippling the religious orders whose formation and spiritual lives are centered around the old mass and the other sacraments served according to the rites in existence before 1962. It must be a source of continued irritation to liberals to see how these orders thrive, while so many others struggle to find vocations. 

One is left to wonder if Francis is not secretly hoping to drive these faithful Catholics out of his church, in much the way Bishop John Ireland was reportedly none too sad to see large numbers of Catholics whose manner of worship he did not agree with, depart for Orthodoxy. 

Update: Since this was originally posted further confirmation of my above concerns has surfaced. Vatican to implement sweeping worldwide ban on traditional sacraments in accordance with Traditionis Custodes.

HT: Dr. Tighe

Christmas During the Ancien Régime

Christmas at the French court when France was still Christian.

Apologies

I just noticed several comments that landed in my spam folder and they have now been published. Sorry for the delay.

Inflation is near 40 year high

Inflation jumped to the highest level in nearly 40 years, fresh data released on Friday showed, as supply chain disruptions, rapid consumer demand and rising housing costs combined to fuel the strongest inflationary burst in a generation.

The rising costs spell trouble for officials at the Federal Reserve and the White House, who are trying to calibrate policy at a moment when the labor market has yet to completely heal from the pandemic, but the risk that price increases could become more lasting is increasing.

The Consumer Price Index climbed by 6.8 percent in the year through November, the data showed, the fastest pace since 1982. After stripping out food and fuel, which can move around a lot from month to month, inflation climbed by 4.9 percent.

Prices were up 0.8 percent from October, according to the report. That’s slightly slower than the prior monthly increase, but still an unusually rapid pace.

The question is what happens next. Fed officials have become increasingly concerned about rising price — both because the uptick has lasted longer than expected and because it shows signs of broadening to areas less affected by the pandemic.

Read the rest here.

China Faces Massive Corporate Default

HONG KONG — For weeks, global markets have been watching the struggles of China Evergrande, a teetering real estate giant weighed down by $300 billion or more in obligations that just barely seemed able to make its required payments to global investors.

On Thursday, three days after a deadline passed leaving bondholders with nothing but silence from the company, a major credit ratings firm declared that Evergrande was in default. Instead of resolving questions about the fate of the Chinese behemoth, the announcement only deepened them.

The firm, Fitch Ratings, said in its statement that it had placed the Chinese property developer in its “restricted default” category. The designation means Evergrande had formally defaulted but had not yet entered into any kind of bankruptcy filing, liquidation or other process that would stop its operations.

It’s the nature of that next step — bankruptcy, a fire sale or business as usual — that remains unknown. In the United States and many other places, bondholders could push an unwilling company into some form of reorganization, usually in court, and divvy up the pieces.

That may still happen. But Evergrande is faltering in China, where the Communist Party keeps a firm hand on corporate meltdowns to keep them from spreading out of control. With Evergrande, the risk is high: A sudden unwinding of the company could hit the country’s financial system or, potentially, the many homeowners in China who have already paid for Evergrande apartments that are yet to be built.

The company’s largely resigned investors are now waiting to see what Evergrande, under the advice of a group of financial types tied to the state, will do next.

“We all expected that Evergrande was not going to be able to pull a rabbit out of their hat,” said Michel Löwy, chief executive of SC Lowy, an investment firm that has a small position in Evergrande bonds.

“Now, the ball is in their court to come up with some form of restructuring proposal,” he said.

Evergrande did not respond to a request for comment. Fitch said the company had not responded to its own request for confirmation about whether it had met or missed an $82 million payment to bondholders due on Monday, which prompted the ratings firm’s Thursday move.

Fitch on Thursday also put Kaisa, another large and distressed developer, into its “restricted default” category after the company failed to pay bondholders $400 million earlier this week.

Read the rest here.

For more background information, see this. 

New Zealand Embraces Prohibition

New Zealand on Thursday announced plans to prevent young people from ever being able to buy cigarettes as part of an initiative to make the country entirely smoke-free by 2025.

The measures will mean that anyone born after 2008 will not be able to purchase cigarettes or tobacco products in their lifetime, while the level of nicotine in cigarettes available to older people will be reduced.

The number of retailers able to sell cigarettes could also be cut substantially, officials said. The legislation is expected to be enacted next year.

Health officials and campaign groups have welcomed the move, recognizing the proposed reforms as one of the world’s toughest crackdowns on the tobacco industry.

New Zealand already requires plain packaging and has high taxes on cigarettes, but the health ministry says more action is required if it is to reach the goal of making the country smoke-free.

“This is a historic day for the health of our people,” Dr. Ayesha Verrall, associate health minister, said in a statement.

“We want to make sure young people never start smoking so we will make it an offense to sell or supply smoked tobacco products to new cohorts of youth. People aged 14 when the law comes into effect will never be able to legally purchase tobacco.”

Read the rest here.

Ireland Gains Freedom

Ireland Is Made A Free State

100 years ago

China is secretly preparing a military base in the Atlantic

BATA, Equatorial Guinea—Classified American intelligence reports suggest China intends to establish its first permanent military presence on the Atlantic Ocean in the tiny Central African country of Equatorial Guinea, according to U.S. officials.

The officials declined to describe details of the secret intelligence findings. But they said the reports raise the prospect that Chinese warships would be able to rearm and refit opposite the East Coast of the U.S.—a threat that is setting off alarm bells at the White House and Pentagon.

Principal deputy U.S. national security adviser Jon Finer visited Equatorial Guinea in October on a mission to persuade President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and his son and heir apparent, Vice President Teodoro “Teodorin” Nguema Obiang Mangue, to reject China’s overtures.

“As part of our diplomacy to address maritime-security issues, we have made clear to Equatorial Guinea that certain potential steps involving [Chinese] activity there would raise national-security concerns,” said a senior Biden administration official.

The great-power skirmishing over a country that rarely draws outside attention reflects the rising tensions between Washington and Beijing. The two countries are sparring over the status of Taiwan, China’s testing of a hypersonic missile, the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and other issues.

World-wide, the U.S. finds itself maneuvering to try to block China from projecting its military power from new overseas bases, from Cambodia to the United Arab Emirates.

In Equatorial Guinea, the Chinese likely have an eye on Bata, according to a U.S. official. Bata already has a Chinese-built deep-water commercial port on the Gulf of Guinea, and excellent highways link the city to Gabon and the interior of Central Africa.

Read the rest here.