Astroturfing social change

In the USA, the activists usually go through the courts to affect social change (e.g. gay marriage started with a court case in Massachusetts and now the SC officially said if you oppose it, you are a bigot...ditto for abortion).

Alternatively they do propaganda deluge to push their side and demonize opposition, using hard cases without discussing the possible consequences, and if you oppose it, you are imposing your narrow minded religion on others. In this, I am thinking about the divorce laws, which were opposed in the US by catholics: a story that few nowadays remember.

Another way is to use the UN to codify stuff in conferences who cherry pick who goes there, and often use  long poorly written documents with code words to push their agenda...the code words often aren't recognized by those whose  first language isn't English to push their agenda ...so Reproductive rights mean abortion, and children's rights mean the right of the gov't schools to teach your children values you don't like, and then they have the right to disobey their parents.

Turtlebay website has a long article on how this is done in the European Union,and how the latest radical feminism/gay rights bill was voted down.

On Monday afternoon, however, while the order of business for this week’s session is set, Bernd Posselt, a conservative MEP from Bavaria, raises his hand. (He is one of the very few who have actually read and understood the draft resolution!) Allocating five minutes to discuss such a controversial report, he says, is tantamount to a prohibition to discuss it. If there is not sufficient time to discuss the report, it should be taken off the agenda.
The President is slightly irritated. He says that, in line with the rules of procedure, the Presidency has decided, as it is allowed to do, that the draft should be the subject only of a short presentation by the rapporteur, not a discussion.
The video footage is here (see at 17:32), and the transcript is here. (Both Gentlemen speak German, but you can listen to the video in English and all other EU languages.)

mainly posted for later reading.
 

Disinformation led to murder

FrontPage magazine (a right wing magazine) writes about the Communist disinformation campaign against the Catholic church.

Actually, anyone living back then knew this: The real question is why the press and the intellectuals didn't notice it.

The claim that Pope Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope” originates in a 1945 broadcast from Radio Moscow or, in other words, the Soviet propaganda apparatus. Later, the Soviets reacted to his death in 1958 with a new disinformation campaign. It’s a lot easier to lie about someone when they can’t respond.
Pacepa, who was serving in Romanian intelligence at the time, says Soviet Premier Khrushchev approved the KGB-drawn plan in February 1960. It was code-named “Seat-12” and Pacepa says he was the Romanian representative for it. He is now publicly detailing his involvement.
Revealing this operation against Pope Pius XII isn’t only important for historical analysis. It teaches us a sober lesson about the effectiveness of enemy influence operations that are undoubtedly ongoing.
“It tells us that disinformation experts can convince us of anything. They took a person widely regarded as a champion of the Jews and other victims—someone who was despised by Adolf Hitler—and convinced the world that he was a virtual collaborator,” Rychlak said.

read the whole thing.

And this influence had fatal results:

The president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, Mark Tooley, has written about the communist use of the World Council of Churches.  He notes that hundreds of Protest and Orthodox churches belonged to it as it towed the Soviet line and even went so far as to finance Marxist guerillas.

yes. The last six months I worked in Zimbabwe, 30 plus missionaries were killed by communist groups that were given money by the WCC...

yes, their revolution was a "good cause" but like giving Alqaeda money or weapons to fight Assad, you not only encourage a lot of dead bodies, but often end up with a problem worse than the one you fought against.

So Mugabe wrecked the economy, starved many people, and ten percent of the population fled, mainly to south Africa, in order to live...and that doesn't include the deaths from cholera or other diseases caused by the destruction of the infrastructure.

Ever see the film "District 9"? It was inspired by a short film made to calm the often violent resentment against Zimbabwe refugees in South Africa.

The worst thing in this is the anti Catholic distortions. It's easy to write an "ain't it awful" book about any religion, but calling Pius XII and anti semite when he was hiding Jews in Vatican city is nonsense. It was well known that Hitler wanted to kidnap the Pope (something actually done by Napoleon). I have to laugh at the complaint that there are few sources on that plot, since many who probably sabotaged the plot died in the plot to assassinate Hitler.

of course one only has to look at President Obama to recognize that he was a red diaper baby and brought up to think everything that America has done in the last century was evil: not policies that went wrong at times, but wrongheaded, as if the bad guys of the world would respond to sweetness and light.

Belmont club points out that it was Tom Clancy that shot holes into their propaganda campaign, one that was supported by intellectuals who parroted the left wing line instead of looking at evidence and judging for himself (I am thinking of the Chomsky types here: I have read Chomsky and was impressed, until I stopped at one point and said: Wait...that's not true...and then re read the books with a more critical eye).

To quote Belmont club:

For whatever Greenpeace thinks, neither al-Qaeda, nor China, nor Russia are very much afraid of the European Union or the United Nations and their works and pomps. Such power as their humanitarian credentials holds is provided by the shadow of the Navy; the thing that holds them back in the long run isn’t the prestige of the UN; it is the reflected glory of the stuff Tom Clancy described in the “Hunt for the Red October.”

and of course, with Barry in charge of the peace and niceness politically correct navy, things are less likely to get better, even for the PHilippines, which now is threatened with loss of it's seabed by China.

Remain at the cross

Mainly posted for later reading: it is3 am and I have insomnia so will have to think about these things later, when I am mentally alert.

From Whispers in the Loggia
on the necessity of the cross.

The cross does not speak to us about defeat and failure; paradoxically, it speaks to us about a death which is life, a death which gives life, for it speaks to us of love, the love of God incarnate, a love which does not die, but triumphs over evil and death. When we let the crucified Jesus gaze upon us, we are re-created, we become “a new creation”. Everything else starts with this: the experience of transforming grace, the experience of being loved for no merits of our own, in spite of our being sinners. That is why Saint Francis could say with Saint Paul: “Far be it for me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal 6:14)....

Franciscan peace is not something saccharine. Hardly! That is not the real Saint Francis! Nor is it a kind of pantheistic harmony with forces of the cosmos… That is not Franciscan either; it is a notion some people have invented! The peace of Saint Francis is the peace of Christ, and it is found by those who “take up” their “yoke”, namely, Christ’s commandment: Love one another as I have loved you (cf. Jn 13:34; 15:12). This yoke cannot be borne with arrogance, presumption or pride, but only with meekness and humbleness of heart.
 

Sounds about right.

I have tried to do these things, and my main "sin" was that I was trying to do these things and asked God to bless it (instead of putting myself in God's hands and having him work through me). This led to arrogance, alas. A lot of my bad memories that come back to me in prayer was memories of this arrogance...which is why when God spoke to me (noted in an earlier post) unexpectedly I was healed of this regret/sorrow/bad memories. He was there, and was smiling because he saw the striving of my heart, not the arrogance, and loved me for my trying to do the right thing, even if I failed sometimes.

For the two readers of this blog: Don't take any of this too seriously.  I get direct "messages" from god about once every two years, and then usually he speaks in my heart, not as a voice or halluciation: The rest of the time I have to discern him in the "still small voice" of my conscience and in what is said to me by those around me.

Francis visits Assisi

I love the town of Assisi...

Years ago, on home leave from Zimbabwe, we stayed in Rome at a hospital guest house (arranged by the nuns we were working with in Africa). They gave us instructions on how to get to Assisi by train and told us to rent a taxi to take us around.

With us went an older Swedish woman whose husband was recovering from a heart attack. (our common language was German). When we went to the first church, we ran into an Australian Franciscan priest who was going home via Rome and didn't have any money, so he joined us in the taxi.

What I remember the most was going up the mountain to the caves where Francis sometimes prayed (and preached to the birds?). Yes, there are fossils in the limestone rocks  up there. We also visited the convent that he rebuilt and gave to St Clare for her sisters...a stone building and very poor.

Then we visited the actual monastery of the Poor Clares, and saw Clare's blond hair that she cut off when she joined the sisters.

The Swedish lady said it was nonsense for women to just pray: What did they ever do? Years later, I read "The Assisi Underground" and learned that they hid Jews in their guesthouse, and later, when the Nazis raided, actually hid them inside the cloister. So I guess those prayers did make them aware of the need for caring for God's little ones, even though they risked arrest and worse if they had been discovered.

(nor was this the only convent that did so: I worked with a French Jewish psychiatrist who as a girl had been hidden with her sister at a French orphanage. Since they didn't "look French", when the Germans searched the orphanage for Jews, the nuns not only lied to the soldiers, but hid the girls in the room where the mattresses for the bedwetters were being aired out. The Germans, who loved cleanliness, didn't bother to search that room, so the ruse worked...)

Well, anyway, Assisi is one of the few place where I have felt the presence of God. (the other places are Medjugorje, the mountain shrine of St Elizabeth Seton, and  St Matthew's cathedral in Washington DC).

The Teaching company has a nice set of lectures on St Francis, and his influence, if you are interested. Needless to say, he is easily seen as PC. But he is loved not because he "loved" the poor, but because the poor recognized that he actually liked and loved them....and because he preached in the streets and talked of God in their own language, not giving high falutin sermons in churches.

The reason Pope Francis is popular is not just because the press takes his words out of context to prove that the rigidity of faith is wrong, but that he actually links loving everyone with loving God: and in Francis' case, one has to remember that right after he found Jesus (was born again) he was confronted with a leper, who he embraced and kissed.

Another note about lepers. When I worked in Zimbabwe, we didn't have leprosy anymore, but one of our older nurses had worked in a lepersarium back in the late 1930's. I had a case of a terrible non healing wound that I wondered if it was leprosy (it turned out to be kaposi's sarcoma), and so I asked Sister Humberta to check him: she said it wasn't leprosy because he didn't smell like it...that lepers smelled different and a lot worse... Since his wound stank from the pus, this said a lot about leprosy...

So the Pope is visiting Assisi, and  again it is his remarks that get the headlines:

The Pope once again put aside his prepared speech and began his impromptu remarks by debunking a notion that had circulated in the press in recent days: that he would imitate St. Francis by divesting the bishops, the cardinals and himself, as well. However, he said, today serves as a good occasion to invite the Church to strip itself of worldliness.
All of the baptized comprise the Church and all have to follow Jesus, who stripped himself and chose to be a servant and to be humiliated on his way to the Cross. “And if we want to be Christians, there is no other way,” he said.

Without the Cross, without Jesus and without stripping ourselves of worldliness, he said, “we become pastry shop Christians… like nice sweet things but not real Christians.”
“We need to strip the Church,” he said. “We are in very grave danger. We are in danger of worldliness.”

The Christian cannot enter into the spirit of the world, which leads to vanity, arrogance and pride, he continued. And these lead to idolatry, which is the gravest sin.
The Church is not just the clergy, the hierarchy and religious, he said. “The Church is all of us and we all have to strip ourselves of this worldliness. Worldliness does us harm. It is so sad to find a worldly Christian.”

“Our Lord told us: We cannot serve two masters: either we serve money or we serve God.…We can’t cancel with one hand what we write with another,” he remarked. “The Gospel is the Gospel.”...
The Pope then asked the Lord to bestow upon Christians the courage to strip themselves of the spirit of the world, which he called “the leprosy, the cancer of society and the cancer of the revelation of God and the enemy of Jesus.”

This part is about agnostics:

here is a link to one of the speeches in Assisi about fundamentalism 
and critiques the PC claim that religion leads to violence, and notes this about agnostics:

These people are seeking the truth, they are seeking the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the religions because of the ways in which they are often practised. Their inability to find God is partly the responsibility of believers with a limited or even falsified image of God. So all their struggling and questioning is in part an appeal to believers to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible. Therefore I have consciously invited delegates of this third group to our meeting in Assisi, which does not simply bring together representatives of religious institutions. Rather it is a case of being together on a journey towards truth, a case of taking a decisive stand for human dignity and a case of common engagement for peace against every form of destructive force.

Misquoting Francis:

headsup Father Z

Culture of death update

For those of you who are non conspiracy theorists, you probably know Hans Kung as a leading "catholic dissadent" or as the headline calls him, a "catholic reform theologian" who gets quoted in the press as the good guy opposing the evil popes.

For those of you who are into conspiracy theories, you probably know Kung as a big shot in the one world religion movement.

Now he backs assisted suicide.

Küng, now 85 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, writes in the final volume of his memoirs that people have a right to “surrender” their lives to God voluntarily if illness, pain or dementia make further living unbearable.
The Catholic Church rejects assisted suicide, which is allowed in Küng‘s native Switzerland as well as Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and four states in the United States.
“I do not want to live on as a shadow of myself,” the Swiss-born priest explained in the book published this week. “I also don’t want to be sent off to a nursing home … If I have to decide myself, please abide by my wish.”

"surrendering" one's life to god might men rejecting extraordinary treatment, and accepting the pain and humbly accepting the help from others when you are old or sick.
Rejecting extraordinary treatment is already accepted in the Catholic church. Suicide is not. It is telling god to go fkkkk  himself "I will not accept suffering".

Well, why not? Once the NWO takes over, they have to get rid of all those unproductive people.

And assisted suicide for depressed transgender folks? No problem....The man says his family rejected her, which is why she chose to become a man, and this UK article suggests she did have the mother from hell.

Angels

DavidWarren muses about the angels.

An apprehension of celestial war, & of the necessity of angels, has been among men of all religious doctrines & traditions, since time out of mind. Yet it would go without saying today, that the slaves of empirical reason deny the possibility of such persons as angels & devils; as also the events in which they take part. The very idea of an angel is mocked, after it has been misrepresented, in the “demythologizing” school that flourishes even within the Church. Yet we know the angels; & intimately so, for we know instinctively which we should obey. But also that we do not have to obey. No angel, aloft or fallen, can compel the smallest action on our part. The former may inspire, the latter tempt, but we, under God, are the captains of our souls, & sovereign within our domain. Notwithstanding, it is war, & we are well to take our orders.

mainly posted for later reading as I am still sleepy from a nap, and tired because of the brownout without airconditioning this morning.