Month: July 2010

Somehow beating RC bishops to the punch

From CNS News about rattling the U. of Illinois cage:

The Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group, has given the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until the end of Friday to re-instate a professor who was relieved of his teaching duties following complaints he engaged in hate speech by teaching students about Catholic teaching on homosexuality in a course about Catholicism.

If he’s not reinstated, they will seriously . . . consider a lawsuit, fund lawyer Jordan Lawrence told U. of I, calling the student’s complaint about Dr. Kenneth Howell, the (adjunct) professor in question, a hecklers veto unworthy of the university’s response, which he called heavy handed [and] authoritarian not the way classrooms should function at universities in the United States.

The fund’s blue-ribbon board of directors includes executives of Crusade for Christ International, Focus on the Family, and Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Not an RC bishop among them. What do you know about that?

Good morning, Chicago

No surprises, says Chicagoist, that Stroger is using patronage to reward supporters. No surprise either, sez I, that Blagojevich used his office to enrich himself. We are used to hearing about both of them, as we have long been used to hearing about political corruption in Illinois, especially Cook County, especially Chicago.

What’s new this time around is the brazenness and ineptitude of Stroger and Blago, to whom we should be grateful for making it all so clear, so that maybe, maybe a periodic paroxysm of pseudo-reform can have its 15 minutes of fame in our state, county, and metropolitan area.

(By the way, when was the last time any of us heard a sermon against political corruption? Like this by Rev. Dr. Bellows in NYC in 1875?)

Wheeling Jesuit philosophy prof arrested on abuse charge

Bad news out of Wheeling WV, about a Wheeling Jesuit U. philosophy teacher, an African priest, who has been jailed in Virginia on a sex charge.

The Rev. Felix Owino, a priest in the Religious Missionary Institute of the Apostles of Jesus, was arrested on July 8 in Fairfax, Va., on charges of aggravated sexual battery of a minor.

Fr. Owino, a native of Nairobi, Kenya, with a Ph.D. from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, was on summer break, visiting a Herndon (VA) family he knew well. The battery occurred in the family home, according to the charge. The alleged victim is an 11-year-old girl, a member of that family.

He taught at Wheeling Jesuit since 2008, first as a visiting professor, eventually (by July 4) an assistant professor. Most recently he taught an online course in Logic and Knowledge (PHI 105-81), in the first summer session, May 17 to June 28. He lived in a Weirton (WV) parish, saying mass and preaching on weekends. As of July 12, four days after his arrest, he had “no current responsibilities at the university and [was] not expected to return to campus,” the university announced, adding, “During his two years at Wheeling Jesuit, the campus authorities received no student complaints about his conduct.”

Information about him had been scrubbed from the university web site, including this paragraph, available through the Google cache:

Felix Charles Owino, A.J. is a member of the Religious Missionary Congregation of the Apostles of Jesus, the first African Congregation for Africa and the world. Fr. Felix has B.A , M.Th from Apostles of Jesus Affiliate of Urbanian University, Rome; M.A., Ph.D in Philosophy from Duquesne University. He has worked also as an administrator in Uganda Rector of Apostles of Jesus Minor Seminary; also as Rector of the National Shrine of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary in Nairobi Kenya. In United States, Fr. Felix worked in different Universities and Colleges of Higher Learning both in administrative and faculty capacities before joining Wheeling Jesuit University as Assistant Professor of Philosophy.

The arrest itself:

Fairfax County police responded late last Wednesday to the residence on Franklin Farm Road, where 44-year-old Felix Owino was accused of touching the child inappropriately, Officer Bud Walker, a Fairfax police spokesman, said.

Owino was considered a longtime friend of the family, Walker said.

He was being held without bond at Fairfax County’s Adult Detention Center, with a hearing set for Sept. 2.

Later:

A brief, thorough local story here on the arrest, adding a few details:

On July 8, Felix C. Owino was arrested in Herndon on one count of aggravated sexual battery, according to Fairfax County police. Police responded to the home on Franklin Farm Road, where Owino, 46, was accused of touching the girl inappropriately, said Bud Walker, a Fairfax County police spokesman. Walker said Owino, who remained on the scene and had not attempted to leave, is a longtime acquaintance of the Herndon family. The girl was not physically injured, according to police.

Owino is currently being held without bond at the Adult Detention Center in Fairfax County. A hearing is set for Sept. 2, according to the Catholic Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston in West Virginia. No attorney information has yet been made available. Owino’s charges carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, and up to a $100,000 fine, Walker said.

He didn’t try to leave.  He faces a stiff punishment.


Fat black people are victims

Vapid is as vapid talks.  Wanna hear empty pseudo-rhetoric, a bromide every minute full of air?  Listen here to Michelle O. telling the NAACP about fat kids.

Did you listen?  Did you get the part about the black community being threatened by its health — not by its bad eating habits and leaving exercise to favorite NBA players?

The lady urges “intensity,” Drudge headlines.  It sits better than dieting and running, not to mention watching less TV and reading more books.

No self-respecting PTO would invite her back.

Literature rocks

My heavens, this is the sort of thing dreadfully in need of being said (HT Instapundit):

Real life is not like a science experiment . . . . Humans are not purely rational beings. They have phobias, biases and other irrational elements. Ego, hatred and childhood experiences are not something that can be turned into statistics. . . . . [W]orks of literature can help [Obama]. Precisely because they’re not concerned with reducing every event to facts and figures, and because they’re not limited in length and description like policy briefs, they can explore events and people with a thoroughness that factual books and briefs can’t. They describe the world as it really is–and so are essential to making knowledgeable policy decisions.

Or any other kind of decision. The author applies it to Obama as “emotionally detached” and having things go badly for him. Fatuous that, if it’s that which will save this bad presidency. I will ignore the Obama part, if you don’t mind, and welcome the wise words that will lead a decision-maker to do the right thing, or increase his chances of doing it.

He’s puffing a book that makes the point:

This lesson–how great works of literature provide invaluable guidance to understanding events and people–is brilliantly explained in a new book, Grand Strategies, by Charles Hill. In the book, Hill, a . . . former career diplomat who . . . lectures at Yale . . . takes readers on a grand tour through the great pieces of literature, along the way explaining their lessons for policymakers. It’s the perfect primer for the president and his team.

Not quite, though it sounds interesting. The perfect primer would be Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. But big-govt. enthusiasts won’t touch it. Leopards and their spots, and all that, you know.

LeBron betrays home town

So the big guy goes south

The decision, made at exactly 8:27 p.m. Chicago time, creates a new Big Three in the NBA and validates Heat President Pat Riley’s bold, grandiose plan to alter the balance of the Eastern Conference. It also rips the guts out of the Cavaliers franchise and its home city.

I disapprove.

Home town is best. He wants to be famous, but what of his personal life? Does he not relish the joy of domesticity, seeing familiar faces of people he grew up with, that and giving to his city? No, and I think he will regret it when he’s old and gray.

Sad about crime in Chicago

The alderman in whose ward the policeman was shot and killed with his own gun yesterday feels “sad” about it.

“I don’t know what to say. It just makes me sad,” said Ald. JoAnn Thompson, 16th, whose ward covers the area around the station. “That one individual does not speak for this whole ward. And I know there’s a lot of crime, but there’s still a lot of good people here, too.”

Not as sad as when a relative — father of her granddaughter’s children — was found in a van (not in her ward) 11 months ago:

Police discovered [Wilfredo] Gines’ body in the back of his Ford Expedition on Saturday night in a college neighborhood in Hammond, Ind., three days after he left his home in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood on the city’s South Side.

Family said Gines, 31, a relative of Chicago Ald. JoAnn Thompson (16th), was going to confront two men he suspected of stealing a car engine he had rebuilt in an auto garage in Chicago Heights.

She has a right to feel sad, but she also has a right to be pissed off — and dying for something that might reduce even a little the rampant antisocial behavior of her constituents.

Blago as case in point

As the Blagojevich trial offers evidence atop evidence of how weird, childish, nasty, irresponsible, venal, vain, and all-’round strange and off-putting is and has been our immediate past governor, as in this just in:

Rod Blagojevich’s corruption trial resumed today with a former aide testifying that the former governor hid in the bathroom or left the office early to avoid discussing certain issues,

we must conclude that it’s time for an in-depth investigation of root causes.

I speak not of Blago’s upbringing, birth order (sibling rank), schooling, previous condition of servitude to bad habits, and over-all life experience but of the slating procedures by the Democratic Party of Cook County, beginning with the all-important question, Who sent him?

Guns of August in Chicago (and July and the rest of the year)

Daley thinks his new rule about gun ownership passes the constitutional mustard, but it looks ketchupy to me:

The ordinance permits citizens to register only one firearm a month. It bans all operational gun shops and shooting ranges within the city. The new regulations also require those who want to obtain a permit for a firearm to take classes and undergo at least one hour of training at a shooting range prior to receiving a license.

Individuals are not allowed to purchase guns within the city limits and may not obtain firearms by any means other than “inheritance.”

The ordinance mandates that an individual can only have one “functional” firearm in the home while all other firearms must be kept in a “broken down” state.

One a month equals 12 a year, which will inhibit self-defense in few if any households. So that seems not to be a problem. And maybe ditto for having only one gun that works, except where they’re coming in through more windows than one at same time.

But you have to leave the city to buy or learn how to use one and practice using it? The point is to discourage self-defense, but that’s been the idea all along.

Daley worries about a wild-west atmosphere, which is a (grim) laugh. That’s not how it is now?

Not to mention the inability to enforce current laws, meant to disarm bad guys but apparently inefficacious — another (grim) joke.