Donald Trump

It turns out that the Correctio Filialis de haeresibus propagatis was released at exactly midnight of September 24th, and not on September 23rd as I had previously written. What confused me was the fact that I went to Rorate Caeli shortly after midnight and found it there, and naturally assumed that it had been posted somewhat earlier. If we check their timestamp though it seemed to have been set for publication at exactly midnight. I had caught wind of something being released from reading Fr. John Hunwicke's post from the day before, in which he claimed that something big was expected on the Sunday. For that reason I was surprised to learn that it had been released before, or so I thought, and it didn't help that so many blogs I read put the 23rd on it.

Time zones help explain that confusion, because many of the blogs I follow are from the Western hemisphere, where it was still the 23rd on the day of publication. I would much rather use the Rome time since the document was meant for Rome, and since it was released on the 24th my time as well, so I'll henceforth refer to the 24th as the release date, but I digress, although...Distinctions Matter!

The phrase "an irresistible force meets an immovable object" is I believe quite common in weather-speak and I believe it is used when a weather front meets a mountain area or some such thing. In my particulary context, it obviously refers to Bergoglio and while he has been immovable in his obstinacy against Catholic doctrine and practice, in this particular analogy he predictably plays the part of "a terrible force of destruction" with the signatoris of Correction Filialis acting as representatives of the immovable object that is the deposit of faith.

For my part I acquired it from "The Dark Knight" - one of the best movies ever made, by the way, and unquestionably one of the most well-made, if not the ouright winner of that particular category. In the final confrontation with the Joker, Batman saves him from an untimely death out of moral principle, despite spending most of the movie actually trying to stop him, at great danger to his own life and that of others. In that particular scene, the Joker says "this is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object".

My memory tweaked it a bit to read "terrible force of destruction" but I'll stick to that terminology since Bergoglio is unstoppable only on account of the timidity of the hierarchy of the Church, along with the complicity of many modernists in the Catholic establishment at large. He is by no means unstoppable, but that he is a terribe force of destruction I deem indisputable.

The more I think about it, the more I realise just how numerous are the similarities between Bergoglio and the Joker as portrayed in that film. Some time, I might get around to writing about that.

In any case, the correction was an attempt to stop Bergoglio's seemingly unstoppable march towards the destruction of what remains of the Catholic edifice. For what it's worth I don't think he will succeed with or without the correction, but the correction is a huge stumbling block. This has been proved very clearly as Bergoglio's enablers and attack hounds have had no other course but to attack the signatories in defence of Amoris Laetitia, and not the content of the correction itself.

Some have pointed out that there is nothing in the correction which shows that Amoris Laetitia actually teaches heresy, completely bypassing, it seems, the main charge of the signatories, which is that in his words and his deeds since the publication of Amoris Laeitia, Bergoglio has encouraged heretical readings of it (an already dubious text at best), in turn propagating heresies. If you're going to critique a document, the least you can do is read it and attack what the document actually asserts.

Others have pointed out that the number of signatories is small, the hypocrisy of which one writer, I believe on Rorate Caeli, took exception. He notes that the Bergoglio party has spent the better part of 5 years (and 5 long long years, I hasten to add) intimidating those who disagree with the dangerous direction this horrendous pontificate has taken us, only to point to the number of his opponents being small as proof that the majority is not with the opposition. We remember, by the way, that Bergoglio speaks constantly of dialogue and parrhesia, all the while either threatening or ignoring those who actually attempt to dialogue with him. It seeems hypocrisy is his only mode.

The most ingenious and at the same time non-sensical defence of Amoris Laetitia is that it is all due to a mistranslation! They claim that the whole furore was due to a mistranlation of the Latin. You couldn't make this stuff up!

Christopher Ferrara took dissected this ridiculous claim  at the Remnant. I suppose their implicit claim is that Bergoglio is somehow a Latinist who wrote the whole thing up in Latin, no doubt in their mind consulting the great treasure of Latin writings that the Church possesses. This is a staggering claim, in defending a man whose grasp of Italian evidently is as incompetent as his grasp of Spanish. No matter which language he speaks hardly anybody can figure out what he actually said. I suppose Latin being his primary language might explain why nobody understands him when he speaks any other language, but we are left with the small issue that the official Latin version of Amoris Laetitia was only published in July of this year, well more than a year after the original publication of Amoris Laetitia, and that the document itself was probably written in Spanish, given the large input of Tucho 'art of kissing' Fernandez, the ghostwrite and brains -...

Like most people, I have been left somewhat perplexed at how quickly the divisions in the U.S. have metastasised into the sorts of flares which in many countries are the prelude to violent revolution, in almost all cases as part of orchestrated political revolutions. I have no doubt that the leftist violence we see is pre-planned and directed towards a politcal end. Some have claimed that there are paid actors, but I am more sceptical, believing that there is not exactly a shortage of stupid leftists who are itching for a fight.

This event took place last week, but the fallout took place mainly during this week, so it is worth taking time to address it.

First the facts: I don't have all of them, so we shall have to dispense with a factual reading.

The only facts I do have and the only one that is relevant:

• The protest was over removing a statue of what I understand to be the greatest general of the Confederate army, Robert E. Lee.
•  The protest over removing the statue was legal and had a permit.
• Among those protesting was a contingent of white supremacists of various sorts, and how large they were in proportion to the rest I honestly have no doubt, nor have I bothered to check. They might all have been white supremacists, or they may have been 1%. It really is irrelevant.

Nobody can with any credibility label me a white supremacist, so I can with full confidence state that those protesting over the removal of the statue were not to blame - not one bit. Let's call them statuists, because it seems very offensive to the truth to label them all white supremacists.

The violence was initiated by the left, as is par for the course, and the statuists retaliated. Many of the statuists, and perhaps of these a greater number were white supremacists, came armed, and that proved wise as the police did nothing to police the rally. That is perfectly understandable, and would prove wise, given that they were attacked, and given that the leftists in the U.S. have been using violence for well over 2 years now to shut down any debate regarding any substantive issue. We saw this at the Trump rallies with various leftists groups, and we have seen this violence at universities. One would have expected the leftists to attack the rally violently, so it is no surprise that the statuists were prepared for confrontation.

The leftists had no permit, so their protest was illegal. If they wanted to avoid violence they could easily have applied for a permit and held their rally at a later date, instead of focusing all their attention on a legal rally. The police were clearly given orders not to police the rally so that the violence would be visible for all. There are 2 possible reasons for this, the one being that the politicans are in favour of leftist violence, and the other being that they are in favour of any violence which creates social unrest in the U.S. which will enable them to have some sort of political machination against Donald Trump.

It is a running joke by me, and one I picked up from CrossTalk on Russia Today, that the only reason that Trump is still president is that the U.S. does not have an embassy in Washington. In other words, what we are seeing in the U.S. is an orchestrated campaign to create chaos in order to legitimise regime change, from exactly the same playbook that we have seen used in Ukraine (twice), Egypt, Kenya, Syria, Libya, Iran, Yugoslavia and Greece, to name but a few. It is probably the same book playing out in Venezuela now, although in Venezuela's case, the collapse of the country has absolutely everything to do with the socialist policies of the rules than anything else, so although it would seem the U.S. is formenting chaos, we would probably have seen the chaos regardless.

In any case, Trump had every right in the world to state that the violence was on "many sides", although a more truthful account would have pinned the initiation of the violence firmly on the leftists.

This brings me to the case of the Alt-Right, who are clearly playing the role of false opposition in all of this. While I am not sure that the leftist protesters were paid vandalisers, I am less sceptical about those 'white supremacists' being paid actors.

An article on The Remnant chronicled the meteoric media-driven rise of a prominent member of this group, and one issue which perplexed them was how it has come to be that this 'movement' and its leaders have received so much free publicity when the media completely ignores the Catholic opposition and in fact any principled opposition. In fact, we saw it with Ron Paul: What the media wants silenced it ignores.

It also questioned the credibility of many of its leaders, who seem to have come out of nowhere and who seem to have had leftist leanings. None of them are particularly interested in public or private morality, and for the most part they seem to be leftists who detest non-white people, but who are perfectly okay with leftists policies on the whole, apart from, perhaps, wholesale confiscation of private property, communism-style.

It seems at least plausible to me that the Alt-Right is a false opposition movement designed either to:

• Discredit the movement on which Donald Trump rode to his presidency
• De-Christianise the opposition to the political elite by making the oppostion seem abominable, and therely alieaning Christians
• Absorb all the evil of the general leftist trend of the society into a movement which seems to oppose it at first sight, but which in practice does not
• Distract media attention from the issues on which Trump vowed to focus
• Divert political attention towards sideshows and force Donald Trump into neo-con policies abroad in order to focus American attention
...

We had news of a Colombian professor , José Galat, who was excommunicated for criticising Bergoglio and raising questions about the legitimacy of his papacy. If we leave aside the fact that the man didn't actually utter any heresy, and contrast this with the fact that heretics abound against whom nothing is done, we are still left with the issue of the bishops of Colombia effectively making something which ought to be legitimately debatable forbidden to speak about.

The fact is that we have 2 people who wear white in the Vatican. The fact is that one of them resigned under very suspicious conditions. The fact is that the other was elected under very suspicious conditions. There is also the fact that Bergoglio has issued numerous and repeated statements which are impious and heretical. Then we have the multiple prophecies which warn about false shepherds, including false popes.

It is difficult to see why somebody should be excommunicated about this when doubts about Bergoglio are perfectly legitimate, but then again it's difficult to find much of anything which makes sense in NOChurch.

I wrote about this in one of my daily comments.

Not to be left behind on the irrationality race, the U.S. political establishment issued new sanctions against Russia, Iran, Syria and North Korea, sanctions which Donald Trump signed into law this week.

Let it be clear that sanctions are considered acts of war! Let it also be clear that none of the countries here have done anything illegal, and that includes North Korea - which having pulled out of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty is free to pursue nuclear weapons, and as a sovereign state has an unassailable right to develop missile technology! Let it also be clear that they were all bunched together to create the impression that there is the same sinister thread in all of them!

The sanctions on Russian in particular would seem to be nothing more than protectionist measures, something even the Europeans have realised. They claim they will take measuers against the U.S. if these sanctions harm its economic interests. We should not feel sorry for the EU, of course, given that it is not opposing the immorality of sanctions but rather that they were imposed without their involvement, denying them the chance to make sure that while harming Russia, their companies are not harmed. My understanding is that also within 2 days of these sanctions against Russia, the EU imposed other sanctions of its own against Mother Russia.

The sanctions againsty Iran seem to be even more sinister, as even Donald Trump has admitted that Iran has complied with the nuclear deal they signed some 2 years ago or so, the one good thing that the previous evil regime of the U.S. did.

I sometimes have difficulty deciding whether Trump does these things because he believes the lies he is told or because he feels helpless. Either way, he has made himself seem even more helpless as these sanctions tie his hands if he ever wanted to improve relations with Russia, who themselves have seen fit to finally expel U.S. diplomats from Russia, some 8 months after the U.S. expelled Russian diplomats from the U.S. on the same false premises. He could have refused to sign the bill, in which case it would have gone into law anyway as it was veto-proof, but at least he would have signalled his independence.

By signing them he essentially proves himself either a hostage or a stooge of the political establishment, the very swamp he vowed to drain. If he thinks that making bad compromises will help him then he is greatly deluded.

Finally, some football news and a world record transfer of €222 million. I must admit I didn't think it would happen and probably the selling club never actually thought the clause would be met. I commented on this on the day it broke, and I'll briefly restate my comments here.

Though I do not bother reading much from secular newspapers, no doubt there are those decrying the amount of money in football. The statement "they make milions while hospital nurses make much less" is not unusual, as if there are not easily-understandable explanations as to why this is the case.

All the same, if you have something against the money involved - and I must admit to being repulsed by it - just remember that it is €200 million less for ISIS and other jihadists. It is not as though the Qataris were going to use the money to fund a raft of Catholic orphanages around the globe, after all. Neither were they likely to use the money to help their poor fellow Yemeni Arabs who are being bombed to smitherines by Saudi Arabia and its Western allies. This is probably the least harmful way the were going to spend the money.