… the most recent criminal gang to attract the attention of law enforcement includes a woman. True, her sentence for stealing federal funds meant for underprivileged children, and using them to buy high-end SUVs and Florida condos, will be merely time served, whereas the big boys are getting bigger, man-sized sentences. But they dealt her in, even though she’s a girl! This is where gender equality begins.
Harvard’s oddest lays out the glorious Cathophate-to-Come.
Frank Pavone went on to become one of Trump’s highest-ranked advisors on Catholic issues.
Father Pavone’s manifest erotic attraction to bodily gore, and his unique psychotic stagings of handheld human remains atop the holiest of sacred locations, would long ago have attracted the attention of urgent care mental health clinics had he not been ribboned and robed within the church…
Yet even the church, after letting far too much twisted bloodlust go, has recently defrocked him.
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Pavone has a long history of grooming and touching young women who work for him. All seem to have skeddadled before he had a chance to surgically remove their wombs and drink their uterine fluid from chalices in Jesus’ name. But now they’re speaking up.
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Since the church has defrocked him, I’m thinking the Pope will have no comment on this latest Pavone scandal. Pavone? Pavone who? Perhaps Trump wants to say a word.
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Given that Pavone isn’t any longer allowed to wear the priestly garb that gave him a serious leg up in anti-abortion show-stoppers, what to do? His response to being defrocked makes clear that lugging baby guts about from altar to altar and photographing himself panting over them remains his life’s passion. What to do?
Pavone has reportedly been in touch with several drag queens who specialize in clerical outfits, so that they can advise him in the maintenance of his look.
All nations have the right to self-determination. All nations should be aware that if you choose to establish yourself as in important/coercive ways a religious state, you’re eventually going to look like shit. Think Pakistan; or worse. Iran.
Bill’s coming due for Israel, as we’ve all noticed. The process is well underway there in the established forms: The destruction of an independent judiciary. The surrender of the state to corrupt, bigoted, violent, and reactionary fanatics. The dismantling of national education standards. The degradation/disappearance of women. And now, out goes the money.
“From my clients I’m hearing concrete instructions to mobilize money out of Israel, to Switzerland or London,” said Eran Goren, a co-founder of Fidelis Family Office, which manages the money of wealthy Israelis. “We work closely with private banking departments of big banks, and they say it’s from every direction — people are just pulling money out.”
A withering tech industry would make Israel poorer, weaker and more religious, [another observer] said. That ought to worry anyone concerned about the stability of the Middle East, he added.
“Weaker states tend to be more aggressive, and a weaker Israel will be a more aggressive Israel.”
But emergent Israel wants the money to go. A rich educated nation will always erode the poverty and ignorance at the core of fundamentalist Judaism. Education evolves people away from the bellicose certainty that their sect comprises God’s unique anointed world-redeemers.
If backwards is what the Israelis want, backwards is what they get. If you take a long historical perspective on the thing, the core of Israel’s collapse was inherent in its willingness from the outset to cave to fundamentalism. And it was willing to do that because, as it affirmed in 2018:
[T]he Knesset passed legislation reaffirming Israel’s identity as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” which means that the country belongs to Jews like me [the author is Peter Beinart] who don’t live there, but not to the Palestinians who live under its control, even the lucky few who hold Israeli citizenship... Ultimately, a movement premised on ethnocracy cannot successfully defend the rule of law. Only a movement for equality can.
I wrote this two years ago, as ISIS fanatic Begum (she says she isn’t an ISIS fanatic anymore; British intelligence disagrees), stuck in a Syrian detention camp, had her request to return home at least to argue her case denied. The latest news is that — in line with UD‘s confidence she’ll never be allowed back in her home country — a court has on appeal upheld the decision to revoke her citizenship.
But don’t worry. They’re working on it. Soon Israel won’t have a courts system, and all will be well.
Fine upstanding Mormon man is praised to the skies in his obituary, which fails to mention he shot his entire large extended family to death. He had quite the history of family abuse, too, but none of his Mormon associates seems to have cared enough to protect anyone in the monster’s home. Maybe they figure that’s how you deal with domestic conflict. Let God sort it out or whatever.
Pity the investigators who had to go searching through the whole vomitous scheme, which, most simply, featured ultra-pious ultraorthodox men stealing tens of millions of dollars from the most vulnerable, the neediest, small children of New York City, so that the ultra-pious could use the children’s funds for late-model SUVs and high-end condos in Florida.
As the ongoing NYT series of exposes demonstrates, you don’t get this, and other endemic forms of government fund theft/vile deprivation of desperately needed goods, without … well, it takes a village. People continue to be shocked by endemic welfare fraud in ultraorthodox communities; for some reason they don’t want to accept a world in which purely self-interested, civil authority hating cults steal our tax money. It seems to have taken a no-holds-barred NYT investigation to attract the attention of the civilized world as well as state and federal authorities to these crime-ridden communities. As any good Freudian will tell you, our deep denial of this reality, our bizarre stubborn insistence on regarding this community as worthy of our respect, will take a long time to change. Meanwhile, we will hand our hard-earned taxes to the lowest of the low. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.
Answer: Nope.
Whether common good constitutionalism supplants originalism remains to be seen. But the idea that it can impose the society it wants through its own interpretation of “the common good” is a sign of just how far the right has moved toward authoritarianism.
… go ahead and say FAAAAACK you to America, with its absurd independent judiciary and disgraceful separation of church and state … Get thee to Jerusalem, where no one’s going to get between you and queer-hating orthodoxy.
I mean, you can waste your time and money appealing, but I’m gonna guess that even our pious Supreme Court’s gonna disappoint you. Realistically speaking, your options are Israel, Hungary, Iran, Afghanistan, and Vatican City, and I’m thinking Israel is your best option.
… all stand steadfastly with their much-admired Rudy Giuliani, a man so fine as to have been given honorary degrees from them.
Three of these schools are Catholic, and Catholics tend to be YUGE Trump supporters, so don’t hold your breath waiting for them to revoke the honor, even after he’s disbarred in total disgrace, imprisoned, etc., etc.
Middlebury College in Vermont, Drexel University in Pennsylvania, and the University of Rhode Island have all revoked honorary degrees that each school, in a moment of madness, conferred upon America’s close-to-highest-profile anti-semitic (Look ye to Soros, oh Blind Ones!) insurrectionist. These are godless public or private schools, lacking the spiritual perspicacity to see the Christlike miracle that is America’s Mayor.
And then there’s godless Syracuse, which is as we speak attempting to work RG out of its system. That school, too, fails to perceive the way in which Rudy acts as a vessel of the lord. The three Catholic schools sure as hell do, though, and when Rudy’s carted off to jail they will speak of his having been burned at the stake just like Saint Joan.
Figure it this way: If, for decades and decades, the most laureled person on your campus was Theodore McCarrick, ol’ Rudy don’t look too bad.
You just crossed over into… The Twilight Zone…
Two days before [a] symposium [about Adrian Vermeule’s ideas] was set to begin, my phone pinged with a message from [Mario] Fiandeiro informing me that my credentials had been revoked and the symposium closed to all press. (As far as I could tell, I was the only member of the media who was actually planning to attend, and Fiandeiro wouldn’t tell me who didn’t want me there.) My frustrated appeals to Fiandeiro and the higher-ups at the Federalist Society — which touts an open press policy on its website — failed…
… [Vermeule’s] arguments read an awful lot like a defense of a pseudo-constitutional dictatorship, or at the very least as a plausible legal justification for a right-wing coup. Vermeule doesn’t go to great lengths to obscure this conclusion. At the end of the section on subsidiary, he cites the Catholic theologian Johannes Messner to argue that in some cases, a limited form of dictatorship may “be compatible with the principle of subsidiary.”
Maybe there’s a more charitable way to read these passages so that they don’t lead to such a startling conclusion. But if there is, I certainly didn’t hear it in Cambridge.
NEEneeneenee NEEneeneenee NEEneeneenee NEEneeneenee
“I must say I’m very upset about the antisemitism in the U.S. today. It’s not fair. Kazakhstan is the number one Jew-crushing nation. Stop stealing our hobby. Stop the steal. Stop the steal.”