Nike founder Phil Knight, who’s suddenly shifting his political donations away from the Democratic Party for being too “far-left,” said he’s all in with a non-Dem being in the Oregon governor’s seat after years of radically left policies.
And haven’t we heard this before, for two-squiillionth time?
Knight, a long-tenured Democrat, admits that he’s not leaving the political party; rather, the Democrats have shifted their platform so far left that it behooves him to vote for another party.
One senses there may be a bit of a movement in this year’s blue state elections, which has been lacking in the past.
The New York Times tweeted out a rhetorically charged description of Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race candidates that led to familiar charges of bias against the liberal outlet.
Leading into the Thursday night debate, the Times sent a tweet that labeled Republican Sen. Ron Johnson as a “leading peddler of misinformation” and Democratic candidate Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes a “rising star.”
The Times dropped their policy of strict objectivity in reporting decades ago, but perhaps out of nostalgia for the declaration of principles its modern founder Adolph Ochs issued in 1896, always insisted it was still in effect. Obviously, no more.
It will be my earnest aim that The New-York Times give the news, all the news, in concise and attractive form, in language that is parliamentary in good society, and give it as early, if not earlier, than it can be learned through any other reliable medium; to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved; to make of the columns of The New-York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.
LONDON — Climate protesters threw soup over Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in London’s National Gallery on Friday to protest fossil fuel extraction, but caused no damage to the glass-covered painting.
The group Just Stop Oil, which wants the British government to halt new oil and gas projects, said activists dumped two cans of tomato soup over the oil painting, one of the Dutch artist’s most iconic works. The two protesters also glued themselves to the gallery wall.
The soup splashed across the glass covering the painting and its gilded frame. The gallery said “there is some minor damage to the frame but the painting is unharmed.” It was cleaned and returned to its place in the gallery on Friday afternoon.
These so-called “protestors” are barely out of their teens, if that old, and more to the point, emotionally in their pre-teens. In a more just society, rather than waste time and expense dragging them through the judicial system, they would simply be ordered, with zero due process, to spend 30 days or more of hard labor scrubbing off graffiti in the most visible public places.
In other words, letting the punishment fit the crime and far more fitting than their pretending martyrdom while sitting in a jail cell. It also would serve as a much more effective deterrent to their emotionally stunted peers.
President Biden will travel to Pennsylvania next week to campaign for Democratic Senate hopeful John Fetterman, the White House announced Thursday.
Mr. Fetterman, who is in a tight, closely watched race against Republican Mehmet Oz, has come under increasing scrutiny since a stroke left him with auditory processing issues and raised questions about his ability to hold office.
It’s anyone’s guess who stands to lose the most in this circus act, but the entertainment value ought to be first rate. We trust linguists fluent in Trunalimunumaprzure will be on hand to provide simultaneous English translations at the garble-fest.
The essay below is taken from the New York Times. As it may be behind a paywall, it is copied below in its entirety. It provides a sober and rational retrospective of the past calamitous 60 years in the Holy Catholic Church. It is vital, if not pleasant, reading.
The Second Vatican Council, the great revolution in the life of the modern Catholic Church, opened 60 years ago this week in Rome. So much of that 1960s-era world has passed away, but the council is still with us; indeed for a divided church its still-unfolding consequences cannot be escaped.
For a long time this would have been a liberal claim. In the wars within Catholicism that followed the council, the conservatives interpreted Vatican II as a discrete and limited event — a particular set of documents that contained various shifts and evolutions (on religious liberty and Catholic-Jewish relations especially), and opened the door to a revised, vernacular version of the Mass. For the liberals, though, these specifics were just the starting place: There was also a “spirit” of the council, similar to the Holy Spirit in its operation, that was supposed to guide the church into further transformations, perpetual reform.
The liberal interpretation dominated Catholic life in the 1960s and 1970s, when Vatican II was invoked to justify an ever-wider array of changes — to the church’s liturgy and calendar and prayers, to lay customs and clerical dress, to church architecture and sacred music, to Catholic moral discipline. Then the conservative interpretation took hold in Rome with the election of John Paul II, who issued a flotilla of documents intended to establish an authoritative reading of Vatican II, to rein in the more radical experiments and alterations, to prove that Catholicism before the 1960s and Catholicism afterward were still the same tradition.
Now in the years of Pope Francis, the liberal interpretation has returned — not just in the reopening of moral and theological debates, the establishment of a permanent listening-session style of church governance, but also in the attempt to once again suppress the older Catholic rites, the traditional Latin liturgy as it existed before Vatican II.
The Francis era has not restored the youthful vigor that progressive Catholicism once enjoyed, but it has vindicated part of the liberal vision. Through his governance and indeed through his mere existence, this liberal pope has proved that the Second Vatican Council cannot be simply reduced to a single settled interpretation, or have its work somehow deemed finished, the period of experimentation ended and synthesis restored.
Instead, the council poses a continuing challenge, it creates intractable-seeming divisions, and it leaves contemporary Catholicism facing a set of problems and dilemmas that Providence has not yet seen fit to resolve.
Here are three statements to encapsulate the problems and dilemmas. First, the council was necessary. Maybe not in the exact form it took, an ecumenical council summoning all the bishops from around the world, but in the sense that the church of 1962 needed significant adaptations, significant rethinking and reform. These adaptations needed to be backward-looking: The death of throne-and-altar politics, the rise of modern liberalism and the horror of the Holocaust all required fuller responses from the church. And they also needed to be forward-looking, in the sense that Catholicism in the early 1960s had only just begun to reckon with globalization and decolonization, with the information age and the social revolutions touched off by the invention of the contraceptive pill.
Tradition has always depended on reinvention, changing to remain to same — but Vatican II was called at a moment when the need for such change was about to become particularly acute.
Credit…Keystone-France/Gamma, via Getty Images
But just because a moment calls for reinvention doesn’t mean that a specific set of reinventions will succeed, and we now have decades of data to justify a second encapsulating statement: The council was a failure.
This isn’t a truculent or reactionary analysis. The Second Vatican Council failed on the terms its own supporters set. It was supposed to make the church more dynamic, more attractive to modern people, more evangelistic, less closed off and stale and self-referential. It did none of these things. The church declined everywhere in the developed world after Vatican II, under conservative and liberal popes alike — but the decline was swiftest where the council’s influence was strongest.
The new liturgy was supposed to make the faithful more engaged with the Mass; instead, the faithful began sleeping in on Sunday and giving up Catholicism for Lent. The church lost much of Europe to secularism and much of Latin America to Pentecostalism — very different contexts and challengers, yet strikingly similar results.
And if anything post-1960s Catholicism became more inward-looking than before, more consumed with its endless right-versus-left battles, and to the extent it engaged with the secular world it was in paltry imitation — via middling guitar music, or political theories that were just dressed up versions of left-wing or right-wing partisanship, or ugly modern churches that were outdated 10 years after they were built and empty soon thereafter.
There is no clever rationalization, no intellectual schematic, no sententious Vatican propaganda — a typical recent document references “the life-giving sustenance provided by the council,” as though it were the eucharist itself — that can evade this cold reality.
But neither can anyone evade the third reality: The council cannot be undone.
By this I don’t mean that the Mass can never return to Latin, nor that various manifestations of post-conciliar Catholicism are inevitable and eternal, nor that cardinals in the 23rd century will still be issuing Soviet-style praise for the council and its works.
I just mean that there is no simple path back. Not back to the style of papal authority that both John Paul II and Francis have tried to exercise — the former to restore tradition, the latter to suppress it — only to find themselves frustrated by the ungovernability of the modern church. Not to the kind of thick inherited Catholic cultures that still existed down to the middle of the 20th century, and whose subsequent unraveling, while inevitable to some extent, was clearly accelerated by the church’s own internal iconoclasm. Not to the moral and doctrinal synthesis, stamped with the promise of infallibility and consistency, that the church’s conservatives have spent the last two generations insisting still exists, but that in the Francis era has proved so unstable that those same conservatives have ended up feuding with the pope himself.
The work of the French historian Guillaume Cuchet, who has studied Vatican II’s impact on his once deeply Catholic nation, suggests that it was the scale and speed of the council’s reforms, as much as any particular substance, that shattered Catholic loyalty and hastened the church’s decline. Even if the council’s changes did not officially alter doctrine, to rewrite and renovate so many prayers and practices inevitably made ordinary Catholics wonder why an authority that suddenly declared itself to have been misguided across so many different fronts could still be trusted to speak on behalf of Jesus Christ himself.
After such a shock, what kind of synthesis or restoration is possible? Today all Catholics find themselves living with this question, because every one of the church’s factions is in tension with some version of church authority. Traditionalists are in tension with the Vatican’s official policies, progressives with its traditional teachings, conservatives with the liberalizing style of Pope Francis, the pope himself with the conservative emphasis of his immediate predecessors. In this sense all of us are the children of Vatican II, even if we critique or lament the council — or perhaps never more so than when we do.
Here, again, the liberals have a point. The most traditionalist Catholics are stamped by what began in 1962 as surely as this anti-traditionalist pope, and the merely conservative — such as, well, myself — are often in the position described by Peter Hitchens, writing about the European high culture shattered by the First World War: We may admire the lost world’s intensity and rigors, but “none of us, now, could bear to return to it even if we were offered the chance.”
But this point does not vindicate the council, let alone the ever-evolving liberal interpretation of its spirit. The church has to live with Vatican II, wrestle with it, somehow resolve the contradictions it bequeathed us, not because it was a triumph but precisely because it wasn’t: Failure casts a longer and more enduring shadow, sometimes, than success.
You begin from where you are. The lines of healing run along the lines of fracture, the wounds remain after the resurrection, and even the Catholicism that arrives, not today but someday, at a true After Vatican II will still be marked by the unnecessary breakages created by its attempt at a necessary reform.
Amid the growing deterioration that surrounds us, both in and out of the Church (and they are interconnected), we must not lose hope. A reader reminded your Tatler of that and of the signal event which took place on 7 October 1571, the Feast of the Holy Rosary or, better known to some, The Battle of Lepanto, in which Western Civilization was saved from certain obliteration.
Had the Christian fleet not defeated the Ottoman Turks that day, Europe would have been inalterably changed. With Christianity eliminated, “there would be no universities, human rights, holy matrimony, advanced science, enfranchised women, fair justice, and morality as it was carved on the tablets of Moses and enfleshed in Christ.”
That did not occur, thanks to the splendid leadership of Prince Don Juan of Austria, son of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and whom Pope Pius V chose to lead the fleet.
One could not find a better précis of the event than the one here. It gives one hope in these discouraging times that seemingly implacable evil can be still be defeated, Deo volente.
Addendum: another quote from the linked article, concerning Don Juan of Austria, must be shared here.
Like Cervantes, he was only twenty-four years old, roughly the same age as some modern youth on our college campuses who demand “safe spaces” to shelter them from lecturers whose contradictions of their views make them cry.
A soulless thief pick-pocketed a dead man crushed by a truck in Manhattan — as ghoulish onlookers cheered her on, video obtained by The Post shows.
The woman [emphasis added] was recorded apparently pick-pocketing the body of a pedestrian who had been crushed under a tractor-trailer in Midtown — and the sickening crime has left police unable to identify him or notify his family of his death, sources said.
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Giddy onlookers — seemingly unbothered by the sight of the dead man — egged her on.
“Go ahead, gangsta! Go ahead!” one man says as he watches the roadway robbery unfold.
Sign in Navajo announcing the closing of a power plant where they worked.
Job killers, life destroyers.
Say this for the “Greens:” they don’t discriminate. A substantial number of members of the Navajo Nation who worked at the San Juan Generating Station, near Waterflow, NM, are now out of work, owing to the plant’s shutting down. The reason for the shutdown? It’s coal powered, meaning it pumps noxious emissions, consisting the same stuff that spews out of volcanos in infinitely greater amounts, that global- warming-climate-change activists insist are destroying our atmosphere and rendering the earth inhabitable. So they say; there isn’t a shred of hard evidence to prove whatever “climate change” might be occuring is the fault of these emissions or simply occuring naturally, as it has for the last few billion years or so.
Change however, big change, of a different sort has come to the Navajo Nation near the closing plant, where many of them worked.
From the Albuquerque Journal:
“A lot of the Native American families have multi-generations living in the home so it doesn’t just affect the husband and wife. It affects their children and their grandchildren,” said Arleen Franklin, who teaches second grade at Judy Nelson. Her husband purchases equipment for a coal mine that feeds another power plant scheduled to close in 2031.
Denise Pierro, a reading teacher at Judy Nelson, said it’s stressful for parents to see a steady income erased. Pierro’s husband, who served as the general manager of the mine for the San Juan plant, is among those forced into early retirement.
“They’ve taken the rug out from underneath our feet,” she said.
Area power plants, mines and associated businesses represent 80% of property tax revenues that fund the Central Consolidated School District, which spans an area the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Almost 93% of the students are Navajo.
The overwhelming majority of so-called “Greens” are upper-middle to upper-class whites. Coming from means they can, instead of getting real jobs like the Navajos above once had, spend their days parading about protesting this or that means of production and employment, demanding they be shuttered.
Most of these people have never met a power plant employee in their lives and would shun the opportunity were it offered, especially if it were at a plant that was closing on account of them. They are spoiled, privileged children in adult bodies who fantasize they are saviors and those fantasies provide them with the energy and strength to continue destroying the livelihoods and lives of those well beneath their station, people for whom they care not a whit.
During an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Friday, Polk County, Florida Sheriff Grady Judd weighed in on the influx of looters who are taking advantage of Hurricane Ian’s devastation, urging armed Florida homeowners to take action.
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I would highly suggest that if a looter breaks into your home, comes into your home while you’re there to steal stuff, that you take your gun and you shoot him, you shoot him so that he looks like grated cheese. Because you know what? That’s one looter that won’t break into anyone else’s home and take advantage of them when they’re the most vulnerable and the most weak.
THE TAOS TATLER. 