Wishful thinking

Some Catholics keep thinking that if they just fix the Filioque, then everything will be good. That might have been true 1,000 years ago, but Rome has drifted so far from Orthodoxy in its doctrinal additions that we simply do not believe the same things anymore. Our differences with Rome run much deeper than the Filioque and calendars. Papal infallibility and universal jurisdiction, the immaculate conspection, purgatory, indulgences, and so on. At the core, their ecclesiology is so completely alien to us that it's almost impossible to overstate the differences. How could we enter communion with a pope who promotes the blessing of homosexual couples and thinks he has the right to suppress the entire liturgical patrimony of his own church? And then we have the liberal modernism that has been pervasive since at least the Second Vatican Council. Francis' accession to the papacy has dramatically accelerated this alarming trend to the point where the pope himself has openly participated in pagan religious rites. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that half or more Catholic bishops and priests are heretics, even by the teachings of their own communion. Worth noting is that Francis has been going to great lengths to pack the College of Cardinals with these individuals.  Today, I'd say Rome is much closer to full communion with Anglicans and Lutherans than us.

HT: Blog reader John L.

The Mets

That was just ugly.

Cremation and the Church... maybe?

To my considerable surprise, it appears that cracks have begun to appear in the Orthodox Church's longstanding prohibition of cremating the dead. The above image is from the website of the Serbian Orthodox cemetery in Colma California, where the faithful can be interred in columbarium.

A quick update on Milton

I survived the hurricane unscathed as did the house. Lots of debris and power was out for most of the last 24 hrs, but is now restored. A minor tornado passed through the south end of the street and tore up some fences and a few small trees, but happily caused no more serious damage here. Unfortunately, it went into a neighboring community just up the road, mostly composed of retirees in mobile homes. Sadly, around twenty were badly damaged. No injuries though, thank God. I'm afraid many of the communities just north of us did not fair quite so well. Prayers... 

Raising the tax on the mathematically challenged

Mega Millions lottery is more than doubling the price of a ticket to $5

The Pope's New Cardinals

The only heretic passed over appears to have been Katharine Jefferts Schori. 

Full list here.

Israel's Silent Departure: Why some Jews are leaving

This summer, the Nobel laureate Prof Aaron Ciechanover joined a group of prominent Israelis gathered in the ruins of the Nir Oz kibbutz to demand a hostage release and ceasefire deal.

Nir Oz was the worst hit of all the communities targeted by Hamas on 7 October, with a quarter of its residents kidnapped or killed. Twenty-nine are still in Gaza.

If the hostages were not brought back, the basic social contract that underpinned Israeli society would unravel, the 77-year-old professor of medicine warned – with catastrophic consequences for the entire country.

He cited an accelerating “brain drain” of doctors and other professionals as a worrying sign that some of Israel’s elite already feel they no longer have a future in the country. And without them, Israel itself might struggle to have a future.

Ciechanover is a long-term critic of Benjamin Netanyahu and joined protests against his government before the war. But concern about this trend is not limited to political opponents of the Israeli leader. Earlier this year, Netanyahu’s former chair of the National Economic Council, Eugene Kandel, joined forces with the administrative expert Ron Tzur to warn that Israel faces an existential threat.

In a paper calling for a new political settlement, they warned that under a business-as-usual scenario “there is a considerable likelihood that Israel will not be able to exist as a sovereign Jewish state in the coming decades”.

Among the threats they highlighted were rising emigration, particularly among the people who have built up Israel’s hi-tech sector and the schools and hospitals vital to attracting the global elite. “Israel’s locomotive of growth is innovation, and that is driven by a small group of several tens of thousands of people in a country of 10 million,” the paper warned. “The weight of their departure from the country is immense in comparison to their number.”

Read the rest here.

Colorado Election Denier Sentenced to 9 Years

A judge excoriated a Colorado county clerk for her crimes and lies before sentencing her Thursday to nine years behind bars for a data-breach scheme spawned from the rampant false claims about voting machine fraud in the 2020 presidential race.

District Judge Matthew Barrett told former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters — after earlier sparring with her for continuing to press discredited claims about rigged voting machines — that she never took her job seriously.

“I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen,” Barrett told her in handing down the sentence. “You are no hero. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan.”

Jurors found Peters guilty in August for allowing a man to misuse a security card to access to the Mesa County election system and for being deceptive about that person’s identity.

The man was affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from former President Donald Trump.

Read the rest here.

Anti-Semitic violence is rising on and near college campuses

University of Pittsburgh students Asher Goodwin and Ilan Gordon were walking to the first Shabbat service of the school year on Aug. 30 wearing yarmulkes. As they made their way to the campus Hillel building, they said, an older man wearing a keffiyeh approached them from behind and started to beat them with a large glass bottle. 

“He grabbed my Star of David necklace that I was wearing and ripped it off,” Goodwin told NBC News. “I am struck on the back of my neck and the bottle shatters. Glass shards cut across my neck.”

The man, whom police later identified as Jarrett Buba, a 52-year-old white man from Pittsburgh, also allegedly struck Gordon in the right cheek, according to court papers. Buba was charged with two counts of felony assault. A judge denied Buba bail, and he remains in custody.

Goodwin said he doesn’t think his school is doing enough to protect Jewish students. “Currently we have low expectations for any kind of university pre-emptive response, or actions, to ensure [things] don’t get out of hand,” Goodwin said. 

Read the rest here.

Election Lies: Trump is preparing to deny another loss

Former President Donald Trump has escalated his long-running assault on the integrity of US elections as the 2024 presidential campaign enters its final stretch, using a new series of lies about ballots, vote-counting and the election process to lay the groundwork to challenge a potential defeat in November.

Nonpartisan democracy experts say they’re seeing many of the same warning signs that were blinking red before Election Day four years ago, when Trump flooded the zone with election lies and conspiracy theories that he amplified after losing to Joe Biden. His campaign of deception culminated in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“The threats have not abated; they have only increased,” said Lindsay Daniels, a senior director at the nonpartisan Democracy Fund, which works to strengthen US democracy. “We saw a lot of activity in 2020 around peddling false claims and frivolous lawsuits. We are already seeing signs now, stage-setting, that these things may be attempted again.”

Trump has made at least 12 distinct false claims over the last two months that raise baseless doubts about the validity of a potential victory by Vice President Kamala Harris. (Recent polls suggest the race is very close, and Trump could certainly still win.)

Trump, who wrongly insists the 2020 election was marred by massive fraud, said at a debate in June that he will accept the 2024 results regardless of who wins “if it’s a fair and legal and good election.” A majority of Trump supporters in battleground states like Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania now say they’re “not at all confident” or only “just a little” confident the results will be accurately tallied, according to recent CNN polling.

Trump has lied about the legitimacy of the vote counts in key states, the reliability of mail-in and overseas ballots, the size of Harris’ crowds at rallies, and more. Here’s a fact check of these and other claims.

Read the rest here.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church

I found this to be an excellent primer on a subject I am not much familiar with.

A day in the life of a dictator

One of Vladimir Putin's role models. He has gone to great lengths to rehabilitate Stalin in the official version of history now taught in Russia.

Putin is Terrorizing and Murdering Russian Refugees

In November 2022, my editors asked me to be careful about what I ate and stop ordering takeout. Initially, I didn’t think much of it. But I soon realized the importance of their advice when, just one month later, my colleague Elena Kostyuchenko discovered she had been poisoned in Germany, in a probable assassination attempt by the Russian state.

Such stories have become routine. Last year, an investigative journalist, Alesya Marokhovskaya, was harassed in the Czech Republic; in February, the bullet-riddled body of a Russian defector, Maxim Kuzminov, was found in Spain. In both cases, the Kremlin was assumed to be involved. Russian opposition figures know well that even in exile they remain targets of Russia’s intelligence services.

But it’s not just them who are in danger. There are also the hundreds of thousands of Russians who left home because they did not want to have anything to do with Vladimir Putin’s war — or were forced out, accused of not embracing it enough. These low-profile dissenters are subjected to surveillance and kidnappings, too. Yet their repression happens in silence — away from the spotlight and often with the tacit consent, or inadequate prevention, of the countries to which they have fled.

It’s a terrifying thing: The Kremlin is hunting down ordinary people across the world, and nobody seems to care.

Read the rest here.

David French: Decency has become countercultural in the Republican Party

...The yearslong elevation of figures like Mark Robinson and the many other outrageous MAGA personalities, along with the devolution of people in MAGA’s inner orbit — JD Vance, Elon Musk, Lindsey Graham and so very many others — has established beyond doubt that Trump has changed the Republican Party and Republican Christians far more than they have changed him.

In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress. If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.

This has changed the composition of the party. While many decent people remain — and represent the hope for future reform — Trump’s Republican Party has become a magnet for eccentrics and conspiracy theorists of all stripes. In a sharp essay (which my colleague Ross Douthat also highlighted), Matthew Yglesias calls this phenomenon the “crank realignment.”

Indeed, Trump in his diabolical shrewdness knows how to build and maintain his own base. He’s shed the Republican Party’s traditional commitment to life. He’ll sprint away from any policy or principle that he believes might cost him power. At the same time, he watches his crowd roar when he demonizes immigrants (MAGA’s true north star) and he sees “red-pilled” young men rally to his side when he punches hard and never backs down.Leaders don’t simply enact policies; they dictate the cultures of the institutions they lead. 

We’ve all experienced this phenomenon in our workplaces, churches and schools. I’ve compared the cultural power of a leader to setting the course of a river. Defying or contradicting the leader’s ethos is like swimming against the current — yes, you can do that for a time, but eventually you get exhausted and either have to swim to the bank and leave, or you’re swept downstream, just like everyone else.

Trump has set the course of the Republican Party’s cultural river for more than nine years. Fewer and fewer resisters remain, and they’re growing increasingly exhausted and besieged. You can see it online in response to the Robinson news. The mere suggestion that Republican primary voters can and should do better is greeted by scorn and contempt.

Both parties have always been vulnerable to nominating or electing the occasional crank, but Donald Trump’s ascendance meant that a crank led the party, and the best way to join with him is to imitate him. That’s how you get a Mark Robinson, or a Marjorie Taylor Greene, or a Lauren Boebert, or a Matt Gaetz. The list goes on. That’s how leaders change institutions. They make them into images of themselves.

Read the rest here.

Times have changed

Back in the 1950s President Eisenhower on a trip to southern California made time hit the links with the famous actor/comedian Bob Hope, a fellow enthusiast of the game. As they were riding out to where their balls had landed, suddenly a golf ball came flying out of nowhere and bounced off the front of the presidential golf cart startling Mr. Eisenhower. Without missing a beat Hope quipped that it was either a Democrat or a film critic. Ike chuckled and they went on with their game as if nothing had happened.