Acta deos numquam mortalia fallunt, et De mortuis nihil nisi bonum, et Regula Ernii Pyle. The reaction to the Death of Lindsey Graham.

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.

Lindsey Graham, 2016.

I hadn't intended to post more on Lindsey Graham after my note on, well not Graham, but his dying at age 71.  

Not too surprisingly, however, he was a topic of all three new shows this weekend.  Meet The Press had yet another interview with Donald Trump (they've had a pile of them yesterday), on Graham.  Trump claims to have spoken to him just before his death and of course, Graham was for the Stopping Americans from Voting Act that Trump hopes will pass and save his bacon this fall.

The other interviews were more interesting.  I thought one of them gave a really good insight into Graham's evolution from a Trump opponent into a Trump supporter, that being pure politics.  He was, the person claimed, simply play politics, basically, and by cosying up to Trump was able to influence him and get what he wanted overall.

That might be right, and is the only good explanation I've ever seen for it. The question is, at what point have you gone too far.  Frankly, I think Graham went too far.

Lucien Truscott obviously feels that and has one of the most blunt applications of the Ernie Pyle Rule I've ever seen by a well known writer.*

The hole in the Senate named Lindsey Graham

Truscott outright states that Graham was a homosexual and betrayed his like attracted.

That brings up my first observation.

I don't know if Graham was a closeted homosexual or not, but if he was, it didn't seem to impact his votes at all.  That's part of what Truscott is complaining about, but on the Twitter, the epicenter of nastiness, I've seen.

Here's the thing, however.  A lot of the speculation on Graham's sexuality comes from his never marrying.  He was asked about it over his lifetime and his response was that he never found the right girl, or the right girl was lucky enough never to have found him.

Anyhow, as an observation, which of course is part of what this blog does in a evolution of time fashion, merely being a single adult doesn't mean a person is a homosexual.  One of my law school colleagues never married, for example, and I've known him since he was a pre teen.  He's definately not same sex attracted.  An older friend of mine is the same way.  He's now in his 70s and has never married.  He's not a homosexual, he just has a very unique personality that's operated against marriage.

If you'd asked me when I was in my late 20s, I would probably have said it wasn't going to happen.  At that age I'd lost a pretty serious girlfriend and broken up with a girl was sort of serious about me, but not the other way around.  Had things kept going the way they seemed to be going, and I thought at that point they definitely would be, I'd have reached the age of declining prospects pretty quickly and likely have been a single guy my whole life.  I wouldn't have liked that, but it happens.

Still, most men do marry, or at least if they aren't married, you can find pretty serious love interests they've had.  I've noted that above in regard to myself.  Its not as if I hadn't dated at all in my 20s.  It's odd for somebody to have no friends of the opposite sex who they're interested in that way, but it does happen.  

The opposite also happens, I'd note.  One of my high school friends was undoubtedly a homosexual, but he did marry a girl.  They divorced and he died quite young.  If you read his obituary it doesn't say of what, but I suspect I know.

Anyhow, I don't care if Graham was a homosexual at all and as it wasn't an open part of his life, and he didn't make it some sort of big political deal, I don't know why it matters.

On a finale note, the current Wyoming election season features one man who is an open homosexual but doesn't work that into his campaign.  One of his opponents is like Graham, there's no known female friends at all that have ever popped up, which raises questions if you are campaigning on the far edge of the far right.  And, fwiw, Wyoming has had one very good state office holder in the past who was a homosexual, while it never came out, and there's questions about a well known political figure as well.

The rest of Truscott's article, I'd note, is really blunt.  And Graham may deserve the application of Pyle's rule.

Public Interest wasn't much kinder:

Lindsey Graham and the rot of modern conservatism

From Gingrich to Trump, Graham was a fixture as the GOP became increasingly malignant.

Their article stated:

Lindsey Graham died a coward. His three-decade career in national politics should be remembered for more than his shameless, pusillanimous capitulations — but not, unfortunately, for some noble pursuit or purpose he used his chameleon-like political skills to secure. He should instead be remembered for using his power to bow and scrape, to change his political colors, largely if not solely in service to himself.

I guess that reminds of, in a way, of the maxim Acta deos numquam mortalia fallunt. There comes a time when reform is too late.  Medieval texts used to worry a great deal about the powerful dying with their sins unconfessed.  Well, many regular people do.  There's a lesson there.

Anne Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic:

But then, like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experienced radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator. Graham went out of his way to telegraph his closeness to the president. He played golf with Trump, made excuses for him on television, and supported him as he slowly destroyed the alliances that Graham had defended all his life, even as he undermined the institutions of democracy at home. In 2021, Graham refused to vote to convict Trump, even after he assaulted the Capitol and tried to reverse the results of the election.

Another commentator noted all of the post death accolades by members of the press who knew Graham.  He was a frequent press guest, having appeared for example on Meet the Press some sixty times.

Here's what Lindsey Graham should be remembered for--not corporate media's whitewashing

The whitewashing of Graham is awful!

That item started off with Shakespeare, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

Adam Kinzinger was much kinder, which in turn has resulted in Kinzinger being attacked on Twitter.

Some Brief Thoughts On The Passing Of Lindsey Graham.

Ann Telnaes ran a series of her political cartoons.

Sen. Lindsey Graham dead

A shameless political opportunist and one of Trump's chief enablers has died

In short, the "legacy media" was kind to Graham and his legacy. The print and pundit media, not so much.

In my view, he probably didn't deserve much respect.  The thing he should be remembered that he did best was rising to the occasion of his father's death (his mother had died less than a year prior) and raising his 13 year old sister.

On that, I noted here the other day that his father was 69 years old when he died.  My comments on age got some shocked rebukes in other quarters.  "71 isn't old".

Yes it is. 

Just looking at the social history aspect of this for a second, Graham was apparently 21 when his father died.  That would have meant that his father 48 years old when Graham was born, old to be a father.

Florence James "F.J." Graham was married to Millie Waters.  She was 52 when she died in 1977.  Graham's sister was only 13 when he died, meaning that their father was 56 when she was born, very old to become a father.  Their mother was was approximately 33 when Lindsey was born, and approximately 41 when she was.  41 is quite old to have a child for a women.  I don't know when they married, but there was an age gap of about ten years there, which isn't that uncommon.  More uncommon is that they apparently married sort of late with the mother in her very early 30s, or they had a hard time having children.

Some Twitter Twits have absolutely freaked out about his dying, attributing it to a conspiracy.  Complete nonsense.

By the way, Sam Neal died yesterday at 79, 8 years older than Graham.  James Van Der Beek at 48.  Catherine O'Hara at 71.

Trump, in an interview, said several times "I thought he would live forever".  He claims to have told Graham that several times, but with Trump, you can never tell if that's true.  That probably says more about Trump than Graham.

Graham came up during the Reagan era.  Reagan remains the huge hero to conservatives, but more and more he doesn't deserve to be.  It was Reagan who caused the sweep of old Dixiecrats into the GOP which has lead to its ultimate destruction.  I can't say that Graham was a Dixiecrat, but I will note that he was endorsed early on by Strom Thurmond, who most definitely was.

Graham had been a major supporter of the US effort in Afghanistan and  he was a big supporter of Ukraine.  I agree with him on both of those things . Ironically, given how close Graham was to Trump, it was Afghanistan that really started the riff between Liz  Cheney and Trump which lead to Harriet Hageman.

After January 6, Graham appeared to briefly find his moral ground.  For a few weeks there it looked as if Trump might be impeached.  Graham lead a speech from the floor that absolutely condemned what happened and implicitly condemned Trump.  Like most of the GOP, however, he went back to Trump boot licking.  That will be his legacy.

Well, legacies matter I suppose to the living, and for a reason. For the dead, they're beyond that.

May the perpetual light shine upon him.

Footnotes:

*Ernie Pyle, the famous World War Two reporter, once reported on troops reaction to having to pack a dead lieutenant they didn't like out of the Italian hills on a mule  A Sergeant stated "Son of a bitch alive, son of a bitch dead".

Related thread:

The death of Lindsey Graham. A timely American reminder.

Labels: Baby Boom Generation, Death, Middle Age, Old Age

Things in the air. Some observations with varying degrees of introspection.

Cheerfulness strengthens the heart and makes us persevere in a good life. Therefore the servant of God ought always to be in good spirits.

St. Philip Neri.

I've recently had the opportunity, or rather no choice, but to observe some interesting personalities at work.

The first one I'll note I've known for a very long time, and over time I've watched this person sort of crawl into themselves.  

They're mad.

I'm not really sure at what.  But I'll make an observation below that may explain it.

This person had a really rough early life, but it picked up considerable in the person's teens.  Still, coming from a "blended" family, this person sort of got the short end of the stick on a major family deal, and was quietly resentful about it.

Now the non blood "step" is seeking to address it.  The person is middle aged, and the other person is in early old age, as am I.  The middle aged person is now outright refusing to accept the fix.

What the crap?

"They could have done that years ago. . .".

Dumbest excuse for being a difficult pain in the ass ever.

Same person has something much like this shorter term.  

I've also had the occasion to observe a really angry person.  The really angry person is obviously pretty intelligent, but also obviously very uneducated.  It's a bad combination.

A lot of fairly intelligent, but uneducated, people like to use words that they don't know the meaning of, so they use them incorrectly.  This person does that repeatedly.  If you know what the words actually mean, it's really very sad.

It's also a bit sad to see how this works when the bloom is off the rose of righteous, if misguided, indignation.  When lots of people have their pitchforks out, a person in this situation is sort of a leader.  But real people, with family, jobs, children, move on.  They have to.  New things develop, olds things go by the wayside.  

Watching somebody getting into a one sided yelling match while everyone else is just bored is sad, in an odd sort of way.  You can tell they know that themselves.  The spotlight moved on.

There's a lot of Twitter Twits raging about how pastors didn't preach on Charlie Kirk last week. As I've said before, why would they?  And if they did, in a truly Christian fashion, what would they have said.

Mind you, I'm a Catholic, not a member of a do it yourself protestant church that is heavily invested in the American Civil Religion.

Truth be known, Americans always have been.

If you did preach on Kirk, the preaching probably would be awkward for all.  You could simply make it:

We see today the horror of the Western world's perversion of our God given natures, and how that warps the mind and leaves it prey to evils of all kind.  Let us keep that in mind in our society, as we address such lies as transgenderism.

But that's only one such ill that warps our nature.  How did we get there?  Allowing for mass societal infanticide, which Kirk complained about?  Yes.  But also making our reproductive organs chemical cesspools designed to destroy nature from the onset, and ignoring the injunction against divorce, warping marriage into a  big party for "fulfillment"  Those of you in the pews contracepting, or living with third or fourth "spouses", you are as much to blame for the death as transgenderism is.

So too those who now identify their religion with any political party.  Our  home is in the next world, not this one, and the Republican Party or Democratic Party are not an apostolic synod.  If you are finding your politicians to be saints, you need to sit alone and pray for yourself.

Bear in mind also that our time will come like a thief in the night.   We cannot rely on a future to repent, as we may not have that future.  The sins we commit for any reason, including with our words, may find themselves still on our souls.  Let us resolve to be right with God today.

Probably everyone would be mad

Which gets me to this.

Charlie Kirk, I'll fully accept, was Christian.  He said some very Christian things, and some very non Christian things.  He was a provocateur, and that's a dangerous thing for a person's soul.

As for the other two people mentioned here, I don't know about one, but I do know about the other, that being the first one.  That person is a Christian but more or less a lazy American sort of Christian. They believe in God, have a grasp of Christ, and figure if you don't steal or shoot people, you are probably good with God and they don't want to know much more than that.

That describes most Americans, quite frankly.

That hasn't always been the case, however.

Those Christians who are all upset about Kirk not being mentioned from the pulpit are too heavily invested in the American Civil Religion.  When the next world arrives for them, and it will soon, and they're not recognized, saying "I left my church as there was no preaching about Kirk" won't make up for not feeding the poor, letting people die in droves in Gaza, and the like.  Presenting your "I'm a real read blooded (white) American card" isn't going to get you a free pass.

And, additionally, the pastors whom they want to preach on Kirk probably ought to instead preach instead on greed, divorce, shacking up, and other stuff that the American Civil Religion is pretty okay with.

And, also, here's something else.

I saw a Twitter Twit who was outraged as a transgendered person murdered his parents in Utah awhile back, and the news, he thought, had not paid any attention to it.

Well, I'm sure they did in Utah, but that's not a national news story.  Part of our contemporary problems in this country are that we treat local stories as if they're of global importance, while ignoring global stories because they don't pertain to us.

Christians, mostly Catholics, are being murdered in droves in Africa. That is important. Why don't we hear about that?

Well, they're black, African, and Catholic.  Ho hum. . . 

But there's more to this, Outraged Twitter Twits.  Charlie Kirk was murdered last week.  Most Americans no longer care one bit.

That may be uncomfortable for those who are a member of the populist Sturmabteilung, but it's the truth.  Charlie Kirk isn't going to become their Horst Wessel as most Americans just don't care.  They're desensitized to killing, which is actually at a record low in any event, and by now most average Americans are sick of the right and the left and worried about groceries, while starting to watch the national opiate, football.  Sydney Sweeney's cleavage falling out of her jeans jacket will have longer legs than this.

We aren't going to have a civil war. There's not going to be a lot more violence.  And they'll be disappointed.

Speaking of crawling into one's self (you'll have to go back up to the top for the reference), I've seen that happening to somebody I know, whose husband I know better.

And frankly I sort of see this in a fair amount with younger Boomer and older Gen X women . . . women who bought the lie that careers will make them happy.

Frequently it plays out with the same script.  Well educated middle class women of this vintage married well educated men.  The men of the same generation were still part of the "you need to get a good job to support your family" culture, as we've seen before, but the women were part of the "a career will make you happy".  What seems to have happened to a lot of them is that work didn't make them happy, no surprise, and at some point many, but not all, dropped out of it.

Kids grew up and moved on, if they had kids at all.  Now they're getting to what would normally be retirement years and they feel cheated and lost.

The story for a lot of men isn't much different.  I see it with professional men all the time.  Earlier this week a lawyer in his 70s told me gleefully how he loves his job.  Oh horseshit.  There's just nothing left.  The thing is, however, for women who bought off on this, there's really nothing left.  Quite a few of them, however, are in pretty good economic situations due to a husband that worked for decades to support everyone, and who has kept on.

Anyhow, in this case, the spouse, probably of over 30 years, packed up and left basically with no warning.

She'd been seeing a counsellor, a profession that does so much damage to people it isn't funny. The counsellor had told her to work on herself, which is pretty close to instructing somebody to be a narcissist.  She moved out, moved away, and is camping with her adult daughters.  They're getting a "grey divorce".  

The husband, whom in my view should have retired some years ago.  There's some fault there.  A lot of times when I see some old male lawyer keeping on keeping on, I really wonder what his relationship is at home.

All in all, I suspect, he worked too much, she got lonely, and wondered why life hadn't turned out like Cosmopolitan promised it was supposed to.  

Well, it was never going to.

I'd also note that he was raised Catholic, while she was not, but he fits into the Catholic satellite category. That is, the lessons of the faith were just too inconvenient for him to apply.  He, and his siblings, remain cultural Catholics, basically, but not practicing ones.  It clearly tortures him as he knows better.  Probably not that much should have been expected out of her, however, as she was never Catholic.

And so you have a couple living the 1970s version of the American Dream, which turns out to be a pretty shallow dream at that.  Same with the folks mentioned above.

And the shallowness of that dream explains a lot about post Boomer generations abandoning it and returning to more foundational existential beliefs.

The State bar convention is going on.  I never go it in person.  I don't have the time, and I'm such an introvert that I don't want to go to the dinners and the like just on the random chance one of my lawyer friends might be there, but now you can attend some of it electronically.  I did that yesterday as I needed the CLE credits. 

I wish I hadn't.

The first CLE I attended I picked up as I needed the ethics credit.  It was an hour of "mindfulness" which is usually a bunch of bullshit suggestions on how to deal with stress that you really can't implement in the real world.  That's what it turned out to be, in part, but it descended into "this job really sucks" for an hour.  All of the panelists, including a judge and a justice, had to have counselling at some point in their careers for work stress.

I hope some students were in the audience to see that.  If even Wyoming Supreme Court justices say the practice is so bad they need psychological help to endure it, well that's pretty bad.

The last CLE of the day was the legislative panel.  Usually I think of that as being new laws that are coming down the pipeline, which it partially was, but the first part started off as a plea from a lawyer/legislator for lawyers to run for office, noting how in Wyoming that's declined enormously.  That turned into an outright dumping on the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which needs to be dumped on.  The last part of that session, however, dealt with the ongoing massive decline in civil practitioners putting in for judgeships.  They just aren't doing it.  They were urged to do it.

As noted, I wasn't there to ask a question, but if I had been, I'd have asked why should they, when Governor's have agendas and the current Governor is only really interested in appointing prosecutors.  It's extremely obvious.  The one before that would almost always pick a woman, if possible, and was very open about that.  If you are a male civil practitioner, just forget it.

Justice Kautz, who is now the current AG, noted how being a judge, and particularly a justice, was a great job for a law nerd.  The last panelist, a current Fed defender who was a private lawyer with a very wide practice, noted how he had put in many times and urged people to do so, even though it was disappointing if you did not make it.

It's disappointing for sure.

For me, hearing Justice Kautz talk was outright heartbreaking, as what he expressed made up the very reasons I wanted to be a judge and replied repeatedly, with no success.  I never even got an interview, even though at one point I was being urged by judges and members of the judicial nominating committee to apply.  I'm frankly bitter about it even while knowing that I should not be.  It's hard not to come to the conclusion that the system has become a bit of a fraud, frankly, particularly now that the committee has been rounded out to include non lawyers in it.  I've felt for some time that the Governor's office had an influence on who was picked, even though I have no inside knowledge on that sort of thing.  It's just a feeling, and not a good one.  When judges are picked which leave almost all the practitioners wondering what happened, it's not a good thing.

It leads to me listening to everything Justice Kautz said about the reasons he wanted to be a judge, and myself realizing I once felt those things, but I no longer do.

Back on the stress part of this, a lawyer I've known for a long time, but who is quite a bit younger than me, recently took a really neat vacation.  He came back to the office and announced he's leaving the law.  I was so surprised I called him.  He revealed that being on vacation had taught him he didn't have to live a miserable life.

Industrial History: 1977-2024 I-695 Lost Francis Scott Key Bridge over...

Industrial History: 1977-2024 I-695 Lost Francis Scott Key Bridge over...: ( Archived Bridge Hunter ; no Historic Bridges; Satellite ) A ship  alliding  with this bridge and causing a catastrophic failure has upped ...

A good account of actual events in this matter.

I have to say that this disasters demonstrates how truly moronic social media has become.  Within mere minutes of the disaster, some people who really need to go to some sort of Moron Reeducation Camp were spinning wild conspiracy theories about this disaster.¹ 

The ship lost power. The pilot, who is a licensed pilot for the harbor, did everything he could to address the situation.  The crew immediately radioed, which kept this from being a much worse disaster than it turned out to be.

Footnotes:

1. The absolute stupidity of the conspiracy theories should cast a little light on how people have spun moronic conspiracy theories about all sorts of things, from Pearl Harbor to the assassination of JFK, in the past.  People like to imagine that things have to be intentional, or it could  happen to anyone.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLVIII. Library withdrawals.

From the Cowboy State Daily:

Montana Quits American Library Association Over Marxist President, Wyoming Noncommittal

Oh heck, Wyoming, go ahead and pull out.

Here's the Tweet:

An actual Marxist woman. . . who probably has little use for the head of the American Library Association and its head.

I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of @ALALibrary. I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity! 

And my mom is SO PROUD I love you mom.

First of all, I don't know if she's a Marxist, or a lesbian, but anyone dense enough to claim an association with British Library butt sitter Karl "look at the massively screwed up mess my children were" Marx is a twit.

And screaming "I'm a lesbian" right now is the functional equivalent of screaming "I'm whatever seems to be edgy and unpopular but really isn't". If Tucker Carlson came out with a blistering rebuke of Cocker Spaniels tomorrow, about half the people in the Progressive camp would come out as Cocker Spaniels.

Maybe she's a lesbian, which maybe is a social construct, or maybe not, but it doesn't have much to do with this role.

Or maybe right now it actually does, if her claim to be a "lesbian" is much more of a social construct of identification, rather than a weird declaration of sexual attraction orientation.  One of the things that is truly gross and disgusting has been the insertion into public school library of books that basically amount to homosexual sex manuals.  Efforts to remove them, and they should be removed, meet with "only the Nazi's burn books", which we have to assume would mean that if Public School No. 9 purchased a subscription to Playboy, it'd be okay.

That ties in with the Marxist claim, as even though actual Communist regimes quickly abandoned it in their own administrations, revolutionary Marxism, following Marx's written lead, had the personal sexual morality of alley cats.  The association of Marxism with radical sexual views isn't simply an item of right wing condemnation, but a feature of actual revolutionary Marxism, if not of actual governing Marxism.

And what does Marxism really have to do with "collective power".  Marxism was based on the theory that library butt sitters and smelly café debaters had a right to tell workers what to think, organize them, and then tell them what to do or have a bullet put in their head.  If you really want Marxism, there's a place left espousing it, and the Kim's may love a visit from you, although I doubt that Yo-jong, who is the Marxist functionary she'd probably draw, would really approve of her attraction declarations.

And Solidarity is an anti-Marxist position.  It comes from Catholic Social Teaching.

Why does everything have to involve screaming politics and gender raging in Western Society anymore?

Truly, Radical Self Centeredness and Narcissism is the Zeitgeist of our times.

Last prior edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLVII. Eh?

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist XL. Panem et circenses.

Yes, the "Big 4-0".

Roman numeral wise, that is.

Because we're not stoned enough already.

Poppies.  Poppy seeds were added to Italian bread in the middle ages by the poor, specifically to keep themsleves stoned most of the time.  This was because their lives were bad.  The German army passed out booze, and sometimes drugs, late in World War Two to "motivate" troops, or in other words stone them before they went into horrors.  Somehow, we're headed back into the Italian situation.

Headline from The Denver Post:

Gov. Polis tells Bill Maher he’s “excited” about medical ‘shrooms after voters pass psilocybin legalization

And also:

Colorado voters decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms

Colorado becomes the second state after Oregon to establish a regulated system for substances like psilocybin and psilocin.

Because Americans aren't stupid enough already, and Denver isn't enough of a giant doped up smelly dump.

Seriously, the march of intoxicants in this society ought to be an alarm bell going off. Something is really screwed up and the only thing a lot of people, and governments, can think to do is to keep people stoned.

A walk thought Denver's capitol city should show anyone, including Governor Polis, how messed up Colorado is as an example of this.  Truly, and I'm not a teetotaler, if there's one thing that could have been done to help keep the country from getting where it now is, that we could go back and do, not repealing prohibition would be it.

Panem et circenses?

It seems so.

Bias?

Colorado Springs shooting suspect Anderson Aldrich is a registered member of the Mormon church, spokesman confirms

So what?

I note this as this does seem to be the sort of headline that imports next to no useful information but which reporters, because of a bias, believe it does. It's impossible not to read this and think that the suggestion is that Anderson Aldrich shot up a gay club because he's a Mormon.

I'm rather obviously not a Mormon, but I'm confident that the LDS church does not advocate this sort of thing in any sense.

This is, I'd note, just a stone's throw from suggesting that all members of any conservative religion that generally holds conservative social views is a menace to society, a suggestion I've seen in news articles more than once.

Bias confirmation

Most folks here no doubt don't follow it, but there's a thing called "Catholic Twitter", which is made up of Catholics, on Twitter.

The main thing about Twitter is the gross exaggeration of any one topic until it's at the screaming level.  Most of the people on Twitter don't take Twitter all that seriously to start with, and they shouldn't, and any one topic that's on it is not likely to be all that important or reflective of what is going on in the real world.

Anyhow, below is a part of a conservation that got rolling and rapidly morphed into "blind my eyes to the evidence".  How it got started I'm not sure, as it involves the now actually relatively old story of Catholic cleric's abusing some sexually.

It's worth noting that this story is horrific in general. But at the same time it was a minority of clerics, and most of this story is now really old. To the extent that it remains a real present story it is is because the Church has a lot of older leaders, much like American society in general, who haven't done a good job of confronting this, in part because they seem to have ignored it and don't quite get the story.

Anyhow, one Priest noted.

Fr Matthew P. Schneider, LC

@FrMatthewLC

The majority of victims of clerical sex abuse were post-pubescent males who were still minors. Allowing men who were sexually attracted to post-pubescent male teens become priests likely had a part to do with the abuse (whatever name you give that).

Quote Tweet

Joshua McElwee

@joshjmac

·

19h

Asked about prior comments that gay clergy were responsible for the Catholic clergy abuse crisis, new US Catholic bishop president Archbishop Broglio claims: "It's certainly an aspect of the sexual crisis that can't be denied." Academic studies have found no such relationship.

6:41 AM · Nov 16, 2022·Twitter for Android

Fr. Schneider is correct.  Most of the abuse that occurred was male on male, and most of that was on post pubescent males who were legally minors.

Let's take a diversion here for a moment.

Just recently a French Cardinal publically confessed and condemned himself for what was translated as "an affair" with a 14-year-old female back many years ago when he was a priest, not a bishop.

That's horrific.

The headlines, however, rapidly went from "an affair" to "rape", or at least the Twitter ones did.

Here's the thing.  Under the applicable French law, she was over the age of consent and could do just that.  So the act was icky, gross, immoral, inexcusable, but not illegal.  It wasn't rape as the law of that land, at the time, defined it.

FWIW, as that surprised me, I looked it up. The age of consent in France is now 15.

I always think of the age of consent being 18, but by and large in most of Europe, Ireland I think aside, the age of consent is lower than 18, with ages in the mid-teens not uncommon.  I'm not going to post them all, but that's interesting in part because Europeans like to criticize the US for having legal pathways to "child marriage" while they have legal pathways to what we'd regard here as rape.

Anyhow, this is an example of following the evidence.

And the evidence generally is that most priest abusers were engaging in homosexual abuse, as legal line or not, "post pubescent" is a legal, not a physical, line.

Occam's Razor holds that the simplest answer is generally the best, because it's generally correct.  The simplest explanation here is that most of the abusers were homosexuals.

Indeed, they pretty clearly were.

No, that doesn't make all homosexual men abusers, but if you put anyone in a situation in which they have no legitimate means for an outlet, problems arise. The real question, therefore, is how did enough homosexual men end up in the priesthood (and in Boy Scout leadership positions) for this to be statistically observable.

I've posted on it before, but my view is, on the priesthood, that this occurred as it gave homosexual Catholic men a place to professionally hide.  That seems to be where the evidence leads. They weren't there because they were homosexuals per se, but because it gave them a socially acceptable excuse for not being married and, even more than that, not exhibiting any interest in women.

Well, of course, the Twitterverse couldn't accept that. The competing explanation, violating the principal of pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, was that the abuse was male on male only males were around, and therefore they were the only targets of opportunity.

That explanation leaves a lot lacking.  For one thing, males aren't the only humans around. The French example, which has become two examples, demonstrates that, and an example in our own diocese of many years ago demonstrates that as well.

And while all male environments do give rise to this, it's not quite in the same fashion.  Those examples tend to be instances in which not only are only males around, but their virtually cloistered for long periods of time.  Groups of straight conscripts, for example, don't start engaging in male on male sexual contact as there aren't women around.  Indeed, studies have shown that in areas where there are only males for long periods of time, what tends to happen is that their testosterone levels plummet on their own, and they're simply less interested.

But because we must maintain this fiction socially now, we can't entertain the possibility that the abusers were homosexuals.  We can't even really engage in the possibility that a small number of homosexuals are abusers.

The Zeitgeist.

What about the Boy Scouts?

I haven't researched it, but I'd guess that those abusers were attracted to those leadership roles specifically for the target of opportunity situation.  So that situation was different yet.  The difference, therefore, is that in the priest example I suspect homosexual men put themselves into that situation to avoid suspicion as to their inclinations, and then yielded in crossing a line which they should not have, and which in the US is illegal, but in the same country, at a time when pornification of child models was common, isn't surprising.  In the Boy Scout example, that was probably a group of men who were abusers in the first instance, but with homosexual inclinations.

And no, that doesn't mean all homosexuals are abusers.

Less government?

The State gave out $6,600,000 in rent relief, funded by the Federal Government, last month.

This program has stopped now, but its interesting in that there's been so much howling in the state about Federal money.  As other examples have shown, people can howl about the dangers of Federal money and take it at the same time.

Credit Cart Sales and Firearms

A recent headline read:

Guns bought through credit cards in the US will now be trackable

So what?

In the United States, you have a right to keep and bear arms. We all know this. But that really doesn't mean that private companies can't track it.

They're already tracking everything else.

If we really don't like this, what we ought to do is simply ban credit cars, which are inherently inflationary to start with.

Misplaced Complaints

A lot of people are complaining about Elon Musk buying Twitter and treating it like a toy.

Well, he's super rich and for him, it probably is a toy.  He's probably loving seeing people complain as they dance to his tune.  And that probably explains why he let Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene back on Twitters.

Just ignore it.

Twitter really doesn't matter.  I noted this all the other day here:

Much ado about Twitter.

Elon Musk has bought Twitter and is busy making changes to it internally. This, in turn, has resulted in a lots of righteous anger about his behavior.

Here's the real question.

Who cares?

We have a Twitter Feed.  You can see it on the bottom right-hand corner of this page. That doesn't stop the fact that Twitter is basically stupid.

A person can't say anything worth saying in as few of words as Twitter restricts you to.  All Twitter really is for us is redirection to this blog. Does it work? Who knows.  But as far as weighty conversation, not happening.

Indeed, the fact that people seem to think its weighty shows how dim the American intellect has become, as if there wasn't plenty of proof for that otherwise.

Now, I have some feeds that I follow I really like. Some do nothing other than what this one does, direct you to other things Some are basically photo feeds, much like Instagram.

But as far as news or anything worth reading, not going to happen.

Some people seem to think that Musk shouldn't be allowed to own Twitter or, if he does, he shouldn't be allowed to wreck it. Well, why not?  He owns it.  If you are uncomfortable with that, as many are, the real argument is that a person shouldn't be allowed to amass the size of fortune that Musk has.  Musk was born into a wealthy South African family, and he's made more money, showing I suppose that being born to a wealthy family is a good way to get richer. 

It also shows how screwed up American immigration laws are, as Musk apparently lives in Texas. Why was he allowed to immigrate here?  No good reason at all, and in a society whose immigration laws made sense he'd be back in South Africa, or perhaps someplace in what's left of the British Commonwealth.

His personal life also shows how Western morality has declined.  Musk has ten children by three women, the first six by his former wife Justine Musk, then two by Claire Elise Boucher, the Canadian singer who goes by the absurd stage name Grimes, and finally twins via Shivon Zilis.  If nothing else, this proves that vast amounts of money will get the male holder of the same money and sex, but it's not admirable and that this sort of conduct is no longer the type that is regarded as scandalous, although it should be.

None of which is a reason to get all in a twitter about Twitter.  If he wrecks it, well, he bought it.  

Who cares?

A bigger topic regarding Must, really, is should a just society allow one person to have so much of the planet's resources.

I risk sounding like Huey Long on this, but I really don't think so.  There shouldn't be billionaires at all.  Before you reach a billion in assets, indeed, before you reach $500,000,000, you simply ought to be taxed down to size.  And no, I don't believe that disincentivises a person from "developing the economy".  And if it does, well, I don't care.

We're now past the election, but speaking of that and I guess twitter, it's really time for John Barasso to stop coming on Twitter and complaining about the price of gasoline.

Here's how the price of gasoline works.

It's made from petroleum oil.

Petroleum oil is produced in certain spots of the globe and sold all over the planet before it's refined.

Most of the world, the United States included, uses more oil than it produces. This is true of the US even though its a major petroleum producer.

US petroleum is expensive to produce.  Normally, Mexican, Venezuelan, Arabian and Russian oil, are not.

If the price per gallon is low (West Texas is $79.19/bbl as I write this. . . low), a lot of North American oil becomes uneconomic to produce.  Just about $60.00/bbl is that point for the US.

If the price per gallon is high, it means that a lot of North American oil is economic to produce.

Wyoming only makes money on petroleum when the price is relatively high.

An unstable price doesn't benefit anyone.

Russia invaded Ukraine, and for a variety of reasons this has driven up the price of oil.  OPEC+, which includes Russia, has operated to try to keep the price high.

Want lower prices?

Lower demand or increase cheap supplies.

We have no cheap supplies in North America.

Joe Biden doesn't set the price of gasoline.

Scary

North Korean is rapidly becoming a frightening menace.

The question is what, if anything, can be done about this short of military action, and will we reach a point where this seems necessary to any administration other than a Trump administration, which probably wouldn't.

Last Prior Edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist XXXIX. Pretending

Prior Related Threads:

The Things You Can't Say Leading to the Scandals You Don't Want To Read About. Irish Boy Scouts. . . Equestrian Training. . . and Gymnastics and so on. Hmmmmm, what would that tell us?

The Overly Long Thread. Gender Trends of the Past Century, Definitions, Society, Law, Culture and Their Odd Trends and Impacts.