From the streets a message

A very good Chi Trib rundown on Rev. Michael Pfleger has a neighborhood co-worker offering him some very bad advice:

“Father Pfleger has always been a community activist first and a Catholic priest second,” said Tio Hardiman, a longtime Chicago activist who has worked with Pfleger on anti-violence campaigns. “The black community accepts Father Pfleger as one of their own. But now I think he’s going to have to make a decision about whether he’s going to be a black community activist or a Catholic priest.”

Why bad?  Because Fr. P. ain’t nothin’ without holy mother church as his sponsor, and with all his fulmination and histrionics he knows it.

Meanwhile, if there’s a fellow member of the cloth who can get through to him, he has not done so as far as the general public knows.  Except the cardinal, who seems somehow to have made his point.  Maybe, maybe not.

Or maybe there’s no getting to him by anyone.

Tags: ,

Let us now praise a famous man

You knew an orgy was on its way, when this man died.

Here’s one thing you can say about journalists: Surely no one loves us as much as we love ourselves.

That’s one lesson of the Tim Russert coverage.

A friend told me Sunday: “I now know more about Tim Russert than I do many members of my family.”

After Russert’s shocking death Friday at age 58, television kept serving up witnesses to his expertise, intelligence, diligence, kindness, faith, love of family, Buffalo and the Buffalo Bills. The self-indulgence was breathtaking.

On Monday’s “Today,” Matt Lauer interviewed Russert’s son, Luke. The show basically gave over the first half-hour to the Russert story. Presidential candidates aren’t questioned at such length on morning programs.

And the children of America’s fallen heroes don’t receive such a platform, either.

Etc.

On NBC yesterday, the gathered commentators seemed eager to cover themselves with Russert glory.  The more they praised him, the better they looked.

Tags: ,

Latin for everyone

No exceptions, apparently:

The traditional Latin Mass – effectively banned by Rome for 40 years – is to be reintroduced into every Roman Catholic parish in England and Wales, the senior Vatican cardinal in charge of Latin liturgy said at a press conference in London today.

And sems will have to teach future priests how to do it, said the senior Vatican cardinal in charge of Latin liturgy, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, in London.  Not just England and Wales either:

[A]sked . . . if the pope wanted to see “many ordinary parishes” making provision for the Tridentine Mass, Cardinal Castrillon, a Colombian, said: “All the parishes. Not many, all the parishes, because this is a gift of God.”

He also said:

his commission . . .  was in the process of writing to seminaries not only to equip seminarians to celebrate Mass in Latin but to understand the theology, the philosophy and the language of such Masses.

It would take as few as “three or four people who were not necessarily drawn from the same parish” to request it, at which point the priest would be required to do it.

===========

Later, from Reader M: 

Re the work of seminaries to teach the Latin Mass:
 
If it was true, as Father Rick Simon said at Catholic Citizens Forum last week, that in the years after Vatican II seminaries concentrated on teaching priests-to-be how to help Catholics in confession side-step the precepts of Humanae Vitae — they shouldn’t have problems teaching seminarians the Latin Mass. It’s less subjective — less work for the right side of the brain.
Tags: ,

AIDS for everybody!

Here’s to “one of the most distorted, duplicitous and cynical public health panics of the last 30 years”:

After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease – with salacious, tombstone-illustrated [UK] government propaganda warning people to wear a condom or “die of ignorance” – the head of the World Health Organisation’s HIV/Aids department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret.

It’s “a high-level admission that there is no threat of a global Aids pandemic among heterosexuals.”

Instead of being treated as a sexually transmitted disease that affected certain high-risk communities, and which should be vociferously tackled by the medical authorities, the “war against Aids” was turned into moral crusade.

Without foundation, and that was known as early as 1987, when there was

“no good evidence that Aids is likely to spread rapidly in the West among heterosexuals.” In Britain, most of the small-scale spread of “heterosexual Aids” has been a result of infected individuals arriving from Africa. In the UK in the whole of the 1980s – the decade of the Great Aids Panic – there were 20 cases of HIV acquired through heterosexual contact with an individual infected in Europe.

For that matter, on this blogger’s book shelf is a 1990 book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, by Michael Fumento, which argued, a Washington Monthly reviewer said, that:

the vast majority of Americans are more likely to meet Shirley MacLaine in a different life than to contract the deadly HIV-virus, and that the only reason the news hasn’t gotten out is that a conspiracy of self-interested scientists, opportunitistic politicians, sensationalist journalists, conservative moralizers, and fearful homosexuals have manufactured the scare.

They apparently sought to incite the madness of crowds, as current a problem as when witches were hunted a long time ago.  Man-made, preventable global warming, anyone? 

Tags: , ,

A sociological conundrum

In the summertime spillover of West Side (Austin district) crime, bike-snatching has been to the fore in Oak Park.  But OP police have been at the ready.

Two 13-year-olds were nabbed yesterday afternoon as they pedalled east on Lake Street after copping the bikes of two 12–year-olds in the first block of Pleasant (yes, Pleasant), which is Fulton in the city, after eyewitnesses called the police.

About 90 minutes later, a 16-year-old Chicago boy approached a 13-year-old from Oak Park on a bike near Highland Avenue and Van Buren Street [a few blocks in], grabbed her rear wheel and reportedly said, “I need this more than you.”

This too was witnessed and called in, and the perp was spotted near Menard in the city (a few blocks in) and was chased by an OP cop to the 5500 block of Monroe (a half mile in) and nabbed.

It’s his perceived need that’s arresting here, offered as explanation if not justification to his victim.  How did he know she needed it less?  Or what made him think so?

Tags: , ,

Consumer spending explained

The poorer you are, the more conspicuous is your consumption.  Blacks and Latins are generally poorer than whites.  So:

An African American family with the same income, family size, and other demographics as a white family will spend about 25 percent more of its income on jewelry, cars, personal care, and apparel. For the average black family, making about $40,000 a year, that amounts to $1,900 more a year than for a comparable white family. To make up the difference, African Americans spend much less on education, health care, entertainment, and home furnishings. (The same is true of Latinos.)

Two U. of Chicago economists and another from U. of Pennsylvania researched the matter.  The conspicuous consumption part they got from Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term.  The idea is to prove you’re prosperous, so you can hold your head up in the world.

So preachers of the good life to blacks and Latins might zero in on bling and say forget it, go for the gold of upward mobility through delayed satisfaction. 

But what about that “same income, family size, and other demographics” that seems to make it racial or race-cultural or historically determined race-cultural or something else?  I do not know, but Virginia Postrel takes a crack at it at The Atlantic-dot-com.

Tags: ,

Prince of Darkness saw clearly

Here’s a slam from within the profession against a biased press:

[The] press corps has been ideologized into a part of the liberal establishment.  More and more, the members of the Washington press share in total the worldview taken by the dominant liberals who control the Democratic Party.  More and more they share axioms that profoundly influence their coverage of day-to-day events in the worlds of politics and government.

That was not yesterday but in 1972 from columnist Robert Novak at a Kenyon College conference on “The Mass Media and Modern Democracy,” from his The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington.

He zeros in on the journos of the day:

[A] rigid conformity has emerged among the Washington press corps, which reflects in part conformity in the colleges producing the new journalists.  But beyond this, the young journalist who violates these axioms can scarcely expect a rapid rise up the ladder of advancement.  . . . .

The result is a gap of widening proportions between the national journalist and the mass of Americans, paralleling a gap between liberal politicians and the masses, specifically the white workingman. [Italics added]

36 years ago, and still a problem.  Notice “the colleges producing the new journalists.”  Tenured radicals, twisted minds.

Tags: , ,

The golfer whom nobody sent?

Daley administration wants to fire this guy?

He’s the water dept. foreman who wore his GPS-equipped cell phone on the golf course when he was supposed to be working.

Winston Cole, a $106,115-a-year foreman of sewer bricklayers, got an earlier warning for allegedly driving to Indiana on city time to buy cheaper gas for his personal car and avoid paying Chicago gas taxes, according to co-workers.

What did he do wrong?  He wasn’t door-banging for votes, maybe.

More to the point, who is his sponsor?  Who sent him?

We know who sent Homero Tristan, just named as the city’s $147,156-a-year Human Resources commissioner, replacing a woman who left the job after a “scathing” report by the federal hiring monitor. 

That would be Alderman Danny Solis, 25th Ward, whose political action committee Tristan heads, with help of his wife Isolde — kidding. 

Solis’s sister, an old Hillary C. hand, recently headed her campaign but got pushed out last month and may be switching to the Big O.

Tags: , ,