The Pope and the President

 Bill O'Reilly shares some balanced insights. To quote:

No country on earth has successfully eliminated Covid and a number of them badly damaged their own citizens by ordering intense lockdowns.  That’s a fact. I guess a case could be made that Sweden’s refusal to take strong isolation action led to more death in that country.  That seems to be true. As for the United States, President Trump did not want to panic the markets and create intense economic hardship.  Remember, about 13 million Americans have contracted Covid.  There are 330 million of us and we are all dependent on the market economy which slid into recession shortly after the virus hit.

Pope Francis is responsible for souls, an American president for bodies.  Folks have to have money to support themselves and, under Mr. Trump, the U.S. economy has remained resilient while other nations have faltered.

It is true that Donald Trump did not aggressively promote mask wearing and punishing lockdowns. He was also far too optimistic about defeating the pandemic in the beginning.  He might have handled those things with more touch and, surely, has paid a political price. But the President did not “mortgage” his people.  He protected their hard earned assets and investments.  He also successfully fast-tracked a vaccine. Capitalism comes through again. (Read more.)

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A Matter of Scandal

 Excellent commentary, although Joe Biden is not President-Elect. From Archbishop Chaput at First Things:

The implications for the present moment are clear. Public figures who identify as “Catholic” give scandal to the faithful when receiving Communion by creating the impression that the moral laws of the Church are optional. And bishops give similar scandal by not speaking up publicly about the issue and danger of sacrilege. Thus it’s also worth revisiting the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the evil—and the grave damage—of scandal:

2284.  Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense.

2286.  Scandal can be provoked by laws or institutions, by fashion or opinion. Therefore, they are guilty of scandal who establish laws or social structures leading to the decline of morals and the corruption of religious practice, or to “social conditions that, intentionally or not, make Christian conduct and obedience to the Commandments difficult and practically impossible.”  This is also true of business leaders who make rules encouraging fraud, teachers who provoke their children to anger, or manipulators of public opinion who turn it away from moral values.

Those bishops who publicly indicate in advance that they will undertake their own dialogue with President-elect Joseph Biden and allow him Communion effectively undermine the work of the task force established at the November bishops’ conference meeting to deal precisely with this and related issues. This gives scandal to their brother bishops and priests, and to the many Catholics who struggle to stay faithful to Church teaching. It does damage to the bishops’ conference, to the meaning of collegiality, and to the fruitfulness of the conference’s advocacy work with the incoming administration. (Read more.)

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What the Prophet Malachi Teaches Us

 From Catholic Exchange:

For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the nations, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a pure offering; for my name is great among the nations, says the Lord of hosts.” (Malachi 1:11) Admittedly, on the surface, it is difficult to see what this verse has to do with the Eucharist. In fact, it is tough to see what Malachi was referring to at all. However, if we dig a bit deeper, we find that this is actually an important prophecy of the Mass. Despite its apparent obscurity, this verse highlights some particular truths about the Eucharistic sacrifice that make the prophet’s meaning unmistakable once we finally see it. (Read more.)

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Old Mistresses: Adelaïde Labille-Guiard

Portrait of Madame Adélaïde

Comte de Provence

 From Mutual Art:

Born in 1749, Adelaïde Labille-Guiard lived her entire life in Paris. As the daughter of a shopkeeper, she wasn’t immediately immersed into the art world via family ties. However, she grew up studying art with a family friend, miniaturist painter François-Elie Vincent. At the age of twenty, she married Louis Nicolas Guiard, a financial clerk, but decided to continue her artistic pursuits, later joining the Paris guild, Academié de Saint-Luc. Her decision to stay in the workforce rather than start a family bode well for her, as the couple were known to have an unhappy marriage. Over the course of the next few years, Labille-Guiard acquired new skills from pastelist Maurice Quentin de La Tour, ultimately deciding to show a miniature and pastel at the guild exhibition in 1774. With her growing success, she decided to join the studio of François-André Vincent, the academically trained history painter, portraitist, and Neoclassical pioneer, who also happened to be the son of her former teacher and family friend.

Three years into their work together, in 1779, Labille-Guiard got divorced from her husband and dedicated her life to art. With the help of Vincent, she transitioned from pastels and miniatures to oil paints and full-size works, all the while continuing to show her art at exhibitions and Salons, and searching for opportunities to impact the art world in ways beneficial to women. It was during this time that she decided she wanted to share her skills with young women who had aspirations of becoming artists themselves. She accepted young women into her studio for training, and later became the first woman artist permitted to set up a studio for herself and her students in the Louvre. As an advocate for women’s inclusion, recognition, and respect in the arts, she was incredibly passionate about teaching and was responsible for the fame of otherwise unknown artists like Marie-Gabrielle Capet and Marie Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond. (Read more.)

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A New York Times Embarrassment

 From Byron York at The Washington Examiner:

A NEW YORK TIMES EMBARRASSMENT. On Monday evening, the Times' Paul Krugman posted a column declaring that when Joe Biden becomes president, "he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge." The challenge, Krugman said, is that Biden will be "the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy.”

Krugman seemed to anticipate that some would respond that some Democrats refused to accept Donald Trump's legitimacy. But that never happened, Krugman claimed. "And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate," he wrote, "just that he was incompetent and dangerous."

Does anyone at the New York Times read Krugman's column before it's published? Of course some Democrats said Trump was illegitimate. Hillary Clinton said so last year. "He [Trump] knows he's an illegitimate president," Clinton told CBS's "60 Minutes" on September 29, 2019.

And it started much earlier than that. On January 16, 2017, when Trump had been in office less than a week, a senior House Democrat, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, conceded to CNN that Trump had been "legally elected," but argued that the Russian attempt to interfere in the 2016 campaign "makes his election illegitimate."

Then there was Rep. John Lewis. On January 13, 2017, a week before Trump took the oath of office, the late Democratic icon said of Trump, "I don't see this president-elect as a legitimate president." Lewis refused to attend Trump's inauguration, leading a number of other House Democrats -- close to 20 of them, including Nadler -- to boycott the inauguration as well, saying they wanted to "stand with" Lewis. Given Lewis's stature in the Democratic Party, and in the country as a whole, his comments sparked an extensive discussion on the question of Trump's legitimacy. (Read more.)

How an election was stolen. From The Epoch Times:

The American public is becoming increasingly aware of evidence of massive computer fraud, out-of state and dead voters, and truckloads of fake ballots tilting the recent election toward Joe Biden. There are even whispers of Venezuelan, Iranian, and Chinese involvement.

No one, however, is yet talking about the fact that a network run by pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) activists solicited hundreds of thousands of votes for Joe Biden in several key battleground states. Under our very noses, these CCP-backed American communists claim to have defeated their nemesis Donald Trump and won the election for the Biden/Harris ticket.

We know that the CCP wanted Donald Trump defeated. His hard line on trade, his support for the Hong Kong democracy protesters, his upping of the U.S. military budget, and his loyalty to a free Taiwan made President Trump a major roadblock to the CCP’s global ambitions.

It shouldn’t be surprising then that the CCP might be tempted to mobilize its extensive American networks to help defeat Trump at the polls.

This network was led mainly by members of the pro-CCP communist group Liberation Road (formerly known as Freedom Road Socialist Organization), their sister group LeftRoots, and allies in the Communist Party USA and Democratic Socialists of America.

Many of the Liberation Road/LeftRoots members involved are tied to the Chinese Progressive Association of San Francisco (CPA), which has used mass voter registration tactics to dominate Bay Area politics for many years.

Many of the comrades are also heavily involved in Black Lives Matter. Some also have deep ties to CCP operatives in San Francisco.

The network targeted seven key states and mobilized at least 12,000 volunteers. Their voter registration and Get Out The Vote operations probably made the critical difference in several key states—or at least gave Biden enough votes to more easily disguise alleged massive Democratic Party fraud. Several network members have openly claimed credit for winning their respective state for Biden. (Read more.)

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Is Intelligent Life a Fluke?

 From Yahoo News:

Humans could well be alone in the observable universe, a statistical study has suggested. The evolution of intelligent life is a wildly improbable fluke, research by Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute showed. The researchers said that the unlikeliness of the series of “evolutionary transitions” that led to intelligent life means it is likely to be “exceptionally rare”. They believe that there is between a 53% and 96% chance that humans are alone in our Milky Way galaxy, Discover magazine reported. Aliens may have once existed, but could already have been wiped out, the researchers said. Anders Sandberg, of the Future of Humanity Institute, said: “An empty sky doesn’t mean we are doomed.” (Read more.)

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Christmas in St. Michaels

 From Coastal Style:

Maryland’s Eastern Shore is home to many picturesque towns, but none embody an old-fashioned holiday feel quite like St. Michaels. With its quaint shops, world-class dining and jolly spirit, St. Michaels is transformed during the holidays into a Christmas wonderland.

Established in 1677 and named after the town’s Episcopal Church, St. Michaels is located on a long stretch of land, just past Easton, on the Miles River. St. Michaels has always been a destination for people looking to escape the noise and congestion of the city, with visitors as far back as the 1880s arriving via steamships to stay in summer cottages. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that tourism really took off as the maritime museum, boat tours and more hotels and inns were established.

Today, St. Michaels is renowned as a weekend destination for the well-heeled crowd, who flock to the posh Inn at Perry Cabin and enjoy fine dining at restaurants like Bistro St. Michaels, Theo’s and 208 Talbot. St. Michaels has also evolved into a family destination that offers history at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, boat trips with Patriot Cruises, bike rentals and family accommodations at resorts like the St. Michaels Harbour Inn, Marina & Spa. (Read more.)

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‘Illegal Ballots’

 From The Epoch Times:

Attorney Sidney Powell filed a lawsuit on Tuesday alleging an “egregious range of conduct” in Wisconsin at the direction of Wisconsin state election officials.

Powell is asking the court to block Gov. Tony Evers from transferring currently certified election results in Wisconsin to the Electoral College, and have Evers and the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) reverse the certification, “pending a full investigation and court hearing.” Powell is also asking the court to order an independent audit of the election “to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the election.”

The suit (pdf) was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin against the WEC and Evers. It alleges an “egregious range of conduct” in Milwaukee County and the City of Milwaukee, along with Dane County, La Crosse County, Waukesha County, St. Croix County, Washington County, Bayfield County, Ozaukee County, as well as other counties throughout the Third District and throughout Wisconsin that employ election software and hardware from Dominion Voting Systems.

The suit alleges “massive election fraud” that violates the Wisconsin Election Code and the U.S. Constitution. It alleges a “scheme and artifice to defraud” in Wisconsin that was done “for the purpose of illegally and fraudulently manipulating the vote count to manufacture an election of Joe Biden as President of the United States, and also of various down-ballot democrat candidates in the 2020 election cycle.”

“The fraud was executed by many means, but the most fundamentally troubling, insidious, and egregious ploy was the systemic adaptation of old-fashioned ‘ballot-stuffing.’ It has now been amplified and rendered virtually invisible by computer software created and run by domestic and foreign actors for that very purpose,” the complaint states.

Several of the allegations in the suit, including the above allegations, as well as much pertaining to Dominion, appear similar to those laid out in prior lawsuits that Powell filed in Georgia, Michigan, and more recently, Arizona. (Read more.)

 

Also from The Epoch Times:

A witness brought forward by the Trump campaign in its election contest in Nevada alleged that the memory disks used to store vote totals from election machines during the early vote period had the vote tallies inexplicably changed overnight, according to a presentation at an evidentiary hearing in Carson City on Dec. 3.

According to Jesse Binnall, who presented the evidence on behalf of the Trump campaign, the witness, whose name is shielded by a protective order, said that the vote tallies were collected from the machine at the end of every voting day and stored on Universal Serial Bus (USB) drives overnight.

“What they would do is they would log these disks in and out. Good practice. And the disks had a serial number on them. And numerous times that disk would be logged out with one vote total on it and logged back in the next morning during the early vote period with a different number on it. Sometimes more, sometimes less,” Binnall said.

“What that means is that literally in the dead of night, votes were appearing, and books are disappearing on these machines.”

Binnall said that the USB drives were not encrypted and the voting machines were not password protected. “And they were hooked up with laptops, then where the laptops themselves could have been compromised,” he added.

The allegation about the vote total alterations was one of several Binnall presented during an evidentiary hearing, the first of its kind for the Trump legal team’s six-state post-election effort. (Read more.)

 

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania lawmakers have called upon Governor Wolf to convene a special session. From Representative Daryl Metcalfe:

 “Dear Governor Wolf:

“We call on you to exercise your constitutional authority to immediately convene the General Assembly into a special session for the purpose of enabling the General Assembly to swear in its members and organize. Article II Section 2 provides for a legislator’s term to begin on December 1st. Article II Section 4 requires the legislature to convene at noon on the first Tuesday of January, at which time we are scheduled to be sworn in and organize. Due to the extraordinary election activities occurring, it is necessary for the General Assembly be sworn in and organize immediately in order to be actively engaged in continued oversight of this election to ensure the integrity of the process.

“Article IV Section 12 of the Constitution of Pennsylvania provides that the governor ‘may, on extraordinary occasions, convene the General Assembly.’ Additionally, Article II Section 4 of the Constitution of Pennsylvania provides that a special session may be ‘called by the Governor whenever in his opinion public interest requires.’ This election clearly represents an extraordinary occasion, and the public interest requires that you convene the General Assembly immediately.

“There are numerous unanswered questions regarding the election that require a sitting General Assembly to examine and fulfill our duty to conduct oversight. A General Assembly in session is necessary to seek answers to these questions to help restore our citizens’ faith in the electoral process." (Read more.)

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Slavery in Santo Domingo

From The BBC:

Few people realise that the Dominican Republic was home to the first black people in the Americas, who were initially brought here from present-day Senegal and The Gambia in the 1490s by Christopher Columbus. It was also where the Atlantic slave trade began in 1503 – 116 years before the first slaves arrived in the US Colonies. And, after Haiti, next door, it was the next nation to abolish African slavery in 1801.

The story of the country’s colonial past began where I stood that morning, and where the women were dancing in remembrance of their ancestor. In an effort to boost tourism, in 2014 the Colonial City experienced more than $100m in renovations over a three-year period. Building facades were repainted and restored, transforming into bistros, art galleries and shops. Yet, to this day, however, la Zona Colonial, as locals call it, reveals little about its African past. Visitors who flock here leave after learning a single version of the Dominican Republic’s history: that of Spain.

Touted as “a city of firsts”, the Colonial City is the oldest, permanent European urban settlement in the Americas, and there’s no doubt that this 10-block neighbourhood is a historical and architectural gem. The former walled city – its original fortified entrances remain standing – boasts the first paved roads and the first military fort, cathedral, convent and university built in the New World. Its narrow cobblestone streets are lined with Spanish-style colonial architecture, including pink, green and yellow pastel-coloured stone buildings, many of which retain their original metal doors, arched entrances and windows, stucco walls and wrought-iron balconies. Sprawling plazas remain punctuated with statues and busts of Spanish colonialists. (Read more.) 

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