The (publicly employed) people’s choices

These Chicago aldermanic candidates have a major public-employee-union endorsement, Early & Often tells us:

8th Ward: Michelle Harris
12th: George Cardenas
18th: Chuks Onyezia
19th: Matt O’Shea
24th: Sharon Denise Dixon
28th: Jason Ervin
30th: Ariel Reboyras
36th: John Rice
47th: Eugene Schulter
50th: Debra Silverstein

American Fed of State, County, & Municipal Employees (AFSCME) is the union.  It has the best interests at heart of all Chicagoans, employed by state, county or municipality or not.  You doubt that?

It had earlier endorsed these candidates:

1st: Proco “Joe” Moreno
2nd: Robert Fioretti
3rd: Pat Dowell
4th: Will Burns
5th: Leslie Hairston
6th: Freddrenna Lyle
7th: Sandi Jackson [wife of Rep. Jesse J. Jr.]
15th: Toni Foulkes
16th: JoAnn Thompson
20th: Willie Cochran
22nd: Ricardo Munoz
27th: Walter Burnett
29th: Deborah Graham
32nd: Scott Waguespack
35th: Rey Colon
38th: Tim Cullerton
45th: Marina Faz-Huppert
48th: Harry Osterman
49th: Joe Moore

That makes 29 of 50 aldermen, a clear majority for the Chicago city council, assuming they all win, as it careens toward budget-deciding in a time of looming financial catastrophe.  Aren’t you glad you live there, you Chicagoans, you Cook Countyans, you Illinoisans?

Innocence at home?

Cover of "The Adventures of Huckleberry F...
To be cleaned up

Huckleberry Finn is to be bowdlerized for various pragmatic reasons, no need to go into them here.

But de-niggerizing Huckleberry Finn doesn’t necessarily inoculate teachers from the danger of teaching that 19th century text in an offensive way. If anything, it might just give us all an inflated sense of protection from the most dishonorable aspects of our nation’s history.

Is this what we mean by post-racial? If so, it is a good example of the difference between repression and transcendence.

Thus John L. Jackson Jr. in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Legalize, legalize, legalize

Various prescription and street drugs may caus...
Samples

Former UK top drug official Bob Ainsworth to the House of Commons:

“We need to take effective measures to rob the dealers of their markets and the only way that we can do that is by supplying addicts through the medical profession, through prescription. We cannot afford to be shy about being prepared to do that.

“We spend billions of pounds without preventing the wide availability of drugs. It is time to replace our failed war on drugs with a strict system of legal regulation, to make the world a safer, healthier place, especially for our children. We must take the trade away from organised criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists.”

Imagine that.  Organized criminals would lobby against it.

John McWhorter argues further, cogently, for the end of prohibition.

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2010 in review

Image representing WordPress.com as depicted i...
Image via CrunchBase

I’m not making this up:

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 29,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 467 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 2378 posts. There were 68 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 15mb. That’s about 1 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was January 12th with 6 views. The most popular post that day was A decade of decadence.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were pajamasmedia.com, mail.yahoo.com, savewju.blogspot.com, blithe-spirit.com, and facebook.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for spanish people, blithe spirit, kc, felix owino, and bernard knoth.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

A decade of decadence January 2010
5 comments

2

Wheeling Jesuit philosophy prof arrested on abuse charge July 2010
2 comments

3

Punches thrown at Wheeling Jesuit February 2010
1 comment

4

Spics, slants, and others August 2008

5

Wheeling Jesuit, NASA, whistleblower suit January 2010
3 comments

Save the women project, continued

Another displacement of “father” in the mass, this just before the Lord’s Prayer:

Officially:

Through him, with him, in him,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father,

for ever and ever. Amen

You guessed it.  “Almighty Father” becomes “Almighty God” if the priest so chooses, slipping in the gender-non-specific for the sake of presumed bruised female sensibilities.

Sigh.

BTW, one has the devil’s own time in finding the official version at the U.S. Catholic bishops’ site.  Try it and instruct me in how to find it if you do find it, dear reader.

As for the Lord’s Prayer, I am waiting for “Our Parent, who art in heaven,” etc.  It’s coming . . .

River Forest larceny team

Uncle shoplifts Dominick’s while nephew waits in getaway card.  (Uncle has his own name on his hoodie.)  Uncle is “flattened” by store manager, is taken away by ambulance.

Nephew, with no idea of uncle’s situation, spots woman leaving purse in car for RedBox visit, enters her car, finds keys in purse, rummages in car trunk, is spotted doing this by police who had arrived to take uncle away, flees.

Read all about it at OakPark.com/RiverForest.com.

What were they thinking of?

Do you have to be utopian about it?

This project rocks.  Show God to homeless, somehow, some way, and they change their lives.  Sounds like a war on poverty to me.

Just one thing about it makes me cringe: they speak of ending homelessness, which is utopian talk.  Heaven on earth is a contradiction unless said figurately. 

Reducing it, yes.  Reaching out and helping people, yes.  But changing the world?  If making it better, fine, but what’s the need for this global, even metropolitan viewpoint?

Ignatius lives

In a Dawn T. Trice story about a homeless organizer:

In the summer of 1999, Richard was living in a halfway house on the West Side and considering suicide when a priest from the Ignatian Spirituality Project visited. The project is a Jesuit ministry that offers spiritual retreats for homeless people. The priest invited the men at the halfway house to attend a retreat.

“I went, and it changed me in a way that never made me the same,” said Richard. “It opened me up and inserted me back into humanity and a world I could understand and be a part of.”

The Spirit moved that fellow.  The Jesuit was a vessel for the moving.  Probably of clay, like most people.

Whose glory are we talking about?

In the mass as official, I find:

Priest:  Pray, my brothers and sisters, that our sacrifice
may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.
All:  May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands,
for the praise and glory of his name,
for our good, and the good of all his Church.

It’s just before the preface, followed by holy, holy, etc., the old “Orate Fratres.”   Fine.

256px-Holy_Mass

But I hear oftener and oftener this:

Priest:  Pray, my brothers and sisters, that our sacrifice
may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.
All:  May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands,
for the praise and glory of God’s name,
for our good, and the good of all his Church.

Why do priests do that?  Remove the “his” for the unnecessary “God’s”?  Whose else would it be?  I suspect it’s a sort of between-us-chickens thing: “his” is masculine, and there’s too much of that in the church.  So start saying “God’s,” and people will get the message.

Look, if that’s why they do it, why don’t they preach on the topic?  Tell parishioners who pay attention what they are doing and why?

Later: Another oddity, heard just yesterday,

He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children for ever.”

in the Luke passage becomes

He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and his children for ever.”

No faceless bureaucrat is doing this, but the priest on the spot.  Somewhere they are picking this up, but they are not telling us where.