More bad news

I have received the following email from the Hermitage of the Holy Cross.

At around 6:00 AM on Pentecost Sunday, a fire burned down the Convent of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary as well as the attached candle factory, which were located on the grounds of the Hermitage of the Holy Cross. By the grace of God, the fire caused no injuries to Mother Theodora or to any of the Hermitage community members, although the damage to the Convent is totally irreparable and nearly everything in it was destroyed. It is not yet clear what started the fire, but in the words of Mother Theodora, "God has allowed this so that we will repent for our sins." We will post updates to this page and to the main Hermitage website as more information becomes available.

In the meantime, Mother Theodora is left with no cell, no means of livelihood and only the clothes on her back. She is in great need of everyone's prayers as well as whatever financial assistance you are able to give. You may make your donations on the Hermitage web site or by mailing a check with "Convent Rebuilding Fund" in the memo line to:

Hermitage of the Holy Cross
Attn: Gift Shop
505 Holy Cross Road
Wayne, WV 25570-5403

Thank you, and may God reward you for your prayers and kindness!

A Bad Day at the Supreme Court

DOMA was struck down today, not a bad thing in itself. But the court cited all the wrong reasons for killing it. They should have killed it on 9th and 10th amendment grounds, and upheld Prop 8 on the same basis. Instead they cited the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, which was never intended to apply to anything like this, in a ruling that is certain to be seen by lower courts as indicative of sympathy for gay marriage by the SCOTUS. Meanwhile Prop 8, which should never have seen the inside of a Federal Courthouse as it's a state's rights issue, has been effectively overturned on a technicality.

All in all it was a sad day for the rule of law.

Our Slide Into an Authoritarian State

How does one tell whether one is living in a dictatorship, or almost? The signs need not be so obvious as having a squat little man raving from balconies. Methinks the following indicators serve. In a dictatorship:

(1) Sweeping laws are made without reference to the will of the people. A few examples follow. Whether you think these laws desirable is not the point. Some will, others won’t. The point is that they were simply imposed from above. Many of them would never have survived a national vote.

Start with Roe vs. Wade, making abortion legal, and subsequent decisions allowing late-term abortion. Griggs versus Duke Power, forbidding employers from using tests of intelligence, since certain groups scored poorly. Brown versus the School Board and its offspring requiring forced integration, forced busing, racial quotas, and so on. (I disagree with Fred on the Brown case A/O.) The decision that Creationism cannot be mentioned in the schools. Decisions forbidding the public expression of Christianity. The decision that citizens can be stopped and searched without probable cause. The opening of the borders to mass immigration.

These are major, major laws grossly altering the social, legal, and constitutional fabric of the country. All were simply imposed, mostly by unelected judges against whom there is no recourse.

Note that there is no practical distinction between a decision by the Supreme Court, a regulation made by an executive bureaucracy, and a practice quietly adopted by the intelligence agencies and federal police. None of these requires public approval.

For that matter, consider the militarization of the police, the creation of Homeland Security’s Viper teams that randomly search cars, the vast and growing spying on Americans by government, and the genital gropings by TSA. Consider the endless undeclared wars that one finds out often only after the troops have been sent. All simply imposed from above

Read the rest here.

Jimmy Carter Condemns All Male Priesthood

Not going to excerpt it. Go here if you really must read his drivel.

Lawmakers demand more oversight of secret court

Wedged into a secure, windowless basement room deep below the Capitol Visitors Center, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates appeared before dozens of senators earlier this month for a highly unusual, top-secret briefing.

The lawmakers pressed Bates, according to people familiar with the session, to discuss the inner workings of the United States’ clandestine terrorism surveillance tribunal, which Bates oversaw from 2006 until earlier this year.

Read the rest here.

Snowden Flees Hong Kong; Maybe Heading for S. America

MOSCOW — Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who leaked top-secret documents about U.S. surveillance programs, fled Hong Kong for Moscow on Sunday with the assistance of the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, landing at Sheremetyevo International Airport aboard an Aeroflot flight, according to Russian media reports and a WikiLeaks spokesman.

Snowden’s ultimate destination was unknown, but Ricardo Patiño Aroca, Ecuador’s foreign minister, tweeted Sunday afternoon that his government had received a request for asylum from Snowden. WikiLeaks released a statement saying Snowden was “bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum.”

Read the rest here.
Note: This is a developing story and the text at the linked site is likely to change.

Pentecost

Moldavia: Orthodox Church Bars Pro-Gay Pols From Communion

CHISINAU -- Moldova’s Orthodox Church says it has banned government officials from taking Holy Communion because of their stance on gay rights.

In a statement issued after Orthodox leaders met in Chisinau, the church said on June 21 that it would call for nationwide protests unless the government amended a law protecting homosexuals, bisexuals, and transgender people from discrimination.

The church also wants new laws against what it calls "immoral propaganda" and a ban on "homosexual, lesbian, transsexual, bisexual, pedophilic, zoophilic, incestuous, and perverse behavior."

Earlier this week, the Council of Europe's Venice Commission ruled that a Russian law against "homosexual propaganda," as well as similar local laws in Ukraine and Moldova, are illegal and should be repealed.

Moldova’s Orthodox Church is formally subordinated to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Source.
HT: Dr. Tighe and several blog readers.

US Charges Snowden With Espionage

Federal prosecutors have filed a sealed criminal complaint against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents about top-secret surveillance programs, and the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant, according to U.S. officials.

Snowden was charged with espionage, theft and conversion of government property, the officials said.

Read the rest here.

Lawyers demand secret NSA files for crime and divorce cases

The National Security Agency has spent years demanding that companies turn over their data. Now, the spy agency finds the shoe is on the other foot. A defendant in a Florida murder trial says telephone records collected by the NSA as part of its surveillance programs hold evidence that would help prove his innocence, and his lawyer has demanded that prosecutors produce those records. On Wednesday, the federal government filed a motion saying it would refuse, citing national security. But experts say the novel legal argument could encourage other lawyers to fight for access to the newly disclosed NSA surveillance database.

"What's good for the goose is good for the gander, I guess," said George Washington University privacy law expert Dan Solove. "In a way, it's kind of ironic."

Read the rest here.

On corrective baptism and closed communion

There are many topics that occasionally result in raised eyebrows among the Orthodox and sometimes irritate the non-Orthodox. Two near the top of any list would be the subjects of baptizing converts who say they were already baptized, and our discipline of closed communion. Fr. John Whiteford (ROCOR) has a couple of really good posts up that address these topics, here and here.

A Royal First at Ascot

H.M. The Queen's horse Estimate won the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot today. She is the first reigning monarch to win the prize in the more than 200 year history of the horse race. Something tells me that dinner conversation at the palace tonight will not be about all the crazy hats women wear.

Judges tell California to cut prisoner count by 10,000

(Reuters) - A panel of federal judges ordered California on Thursday to ease overcrowding in state prisons by reducing the number of inmates by about 10,000 this year, and criticized what they described as foot-dragging in dealing with the matter.

California has been under court orders to reduce the population in its 33-prison system since 2009, when the same three-judge panel ordered it to relieve overcrowding that has caused inadequate medical and mental healthcare.

Earlier this year, the judges rebuffed a request by California Governor Jerry Brown to vacate the 2009 order that had argued that the state had fixed the crowding problem and that further prisoner releases would harm public safety.

The judges said if current efforts to reduce overcrowding does not result in the state reaching a prison population target of 137.5 percent of capacity by the end of the year, the state must then release prisoners from a list of inmates at low-risk of recidivism.

"Failure to take such steps or to report on such steps every two weeks shall constitute an act of contempt," the judges said in their ruling.

Read the rest here.

Anarchy in Congress as House Republicans Seem Unable to Govern

The House Republican conference simply cannot be led.

That reality hit home — hard — this afternoon when the House failed to pass a farm bill. The bill failed 234-195 with 62 Republicans voting against it and just 24 Democrats voting for it.

Republican insiders immediately tried to foist the blame on Democrats, insisting that 40 “yea” votes had been promised and the vote count was dependent on those votes being delivered.  (Worth noting: The administration made clear in a statement Monday that President Obama would veto the bill if it passed, a declaration that undoubtedly had a chilling effect on Democratic votes in favor of the legislation.)

But, here’s the simple political reality: The majority party in the House should never — repeat NEVER — lose floor votes on major (or, really, minor) pieces of legislation. Republicans, literally, write the rules governing the debate — and, as the majority, must ensure that even in the worst case scenario that they can get the “yeas” they need from their own side. That didn’t happen as a number of conservatives revolted, believing that the cuts proposed in the bill were insufficient.

Read the rest here.

I don't like the way this looks

George Zimmer has been fired. Yes, you know who he is. He's the ever dapper "You're gonna love the way you look, I guarantee it" guy. The founder and Executive Chairman of the Men's Warehouse was summarily dismissed by the board of director's today, one day before a scheduled shareholder's meeting which was abruptly cancelled. No official explanation was offered.

Now the company is publicly traded and Mr. Zimmer is reported to hold a little over 3% of the stock which would make him a wealthy man by itself. But why would a very well known, and by all accounts successful business sack the founder and public face of the company in such an extremely abrupt manner?

Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in the company. I don't really believe in owning individual stocks and have never been a customer of the company. But this seems bizarre. It's almost like KFC firing Colonel Sanders without any explanation. WHY? What could be the motive?

If you have differences between a CEO and the board you normally ease the CEO out quietly. In the case of a man as well known as Zimmer who also founded the company, you throw him a retirement party and hand him a gold Rolex along with the keys to a beachfront condo.

Are there reasonable grounds for treating someone this curtly? Sure. If there is credible evidence of moral turpitude, i.e. some gross violation of ethics or maybe criminal misconduct then you absolutely hit the eject button. But as far as I know that is not alleged.

But what else could it be?

Getting back to my Colonel Sanders analogy, I suspect that either the colonel was caught messing around in the hen house or the Board of Directors has been hijacked by PETA.

RIP: James Gandolfini

LOS ANGELES — James Gandolfini, whose portrayal of a brutal, emotionally delicate mob boss in HBO’s “The Sopranos” helped create one of TV’s greatest drama series and turned the mobster stereotype on its head, died Wednesday in Italy. He was 51.

In a statement, the cable channel, and Gandolfini’s managers Mark Armstrong and Nancy Sanders, said he died Wednesday while on holiday in Rome. No cause of death was given.

Read the rest here.

A very talented actor. I am shocked. Memory eternal.

FED hints at end to stimulus; stocks bonds fall

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Wednesday that the central bank expects to begin scaling back its massive economic stimulus later this year and end the program by mid-2014 if the recovery continues apace.

The Fed has been spending $85 billion a month to buy long-term bonds and boost the economy. The effort has been credited with propping up the housing market and fueling record highs in the stock markets...

...Stock markets, however, were not as enthusiastic as investors took the remarks as a sign that the Fed is preparing to tighten its policy stance after years of easy money. Major stock indexes dropped when Bernanke began the press conference, then kept sliding. The Dow Jones average and Standard Poor’s 500-stock index closed down nearly 1.4 percent Wednesday, with the Dow dropping more than 200 points. The yield on 10-year Treasuries jumped nearly 8 percent amid a selloff in the bond market.

Read the rest here.

The Greatest Legal Letter Ever

Hands down. I was laughing so hard I had trouble breathing. Go here.

Firefox Web browser to move ahead with ‘Do Not Track’ option

The maker of the popular Firefox browser is moving ahead with plans to block the most common forms of Internet tracking, allowing hundreds of millions of users to eventually limit who watches their movements across the Web, company officials said Wednesday.

Firefox made the decision despite intense resistance from advertising groups, which have argued that tracking is essential to delivering well-targeted, lucrative ads that pay for many popular Internet services. When Firefox’s maker, Mozilla, first suggested in February that it might limit blocking, one advertising executive called it “a nuclear first strike” against the industry.

Read the rest here.

OK so your web browsing might no longer show up in Walmart's daily advertising report. That's a plus. Now if we could only get an opt out for Obama's NSA briefing.

Turkey's War on Christians Continues As Churches Become Mosques

While unrest in Turkey continues to capture attention, more subtle and more telling events concerning the Islamification of Turkey — and not just at the hands of Prime Minister Erdogan but majorities of Turks — are quietly transpiring. These include the fact that Turkey’s Hagia Sophia museum is on its way to becoming a mosque.

Why does the fate of an old building matter?

Because Hagia Sophia — Greek for “Holy Wisdom” — was for some thousand years Christianity’s greatest cathedral. Built in 537 A.D. in Constantinople, the heart of the Christian empire, it was also a stalwart symbol of defiance against an ever encroaching Islam from the east.

After parrying centuries of jihadi thrusts, Constantinople was finally sacked by Ottoman Turks in 1453. Its crosses desecrated and icons defaced, Hagia Sophia — as well as thousands of other churches — was immediately converted into a mosque, the tall minarets of Islam surrounding it in triumph.

Then, after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, as part of several reforms, secularist Ataturk transformed Hagia Sophia into a “neutral” museum in 1934 — a gesture of goodwill to a then-triumphant West from a then-crestfallen Turkey.

Thus the fate of this ancient building is full of portents. And according to Hurriyet Daily News, “A parliamentary commission is considering an application by citizens to turn the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul into a mosque…. A survey conducted with 401 people was attached to the application, in which more than 97 percent of interviewees requested the transformation of the ancient building into a mosque and afterwards for it to be reopened for Muslim worship.”

Even lesser known is the fact that other historic churches are currently being transformed into mosques, such as a 13th century church building — portentously also named Hagia Sophia — in Trabzon. After the Islamic conquest, it was turned into a mosque. But because of its “great historical and cultural significance” for Christians, it too, during Turkey’s secular age, was turned into a museum and its frescoes restored. Yet local authorities recently decreed that its Christian frescoes would again be covered and the church/museum turned into a mosque.

Similarly, the 5th century Studios Monastery, dedicated to St. John the Baptist, is set to become an active mosque. And the existence of the oldest functioning Christian monastery in the world, 5th century Mor Gabriel Monastery, is at risk. Inhabited today by only a few dozen Christians dedicated to learning the monastery’s teachings, the ancient Aramaic language spoken by Jesus, and the Orthodox Syriac tradition, neighboring Muslims filed a lawsuit accusing the monks of practicing “anti-Turkish activities” and of illegally occupying land which belongs to Muslim villagers. The highest appeals court in Ankara ruled in favor of the Muslim villagers, saying the land that had been part of the monastery for 1,600 years is not its property, absurdly claiming that the monastery was built over the ruins of a mosque — even though Muhammad was born 170 years after the monastery was built.

Turkey’s Christian minority, including the Orthodox Patriarch, are naturally protesting this renewed Islamic onslaught against what remains of their cultural heritage — to deaf ears.

Read the rest here.
HT: A blog reader