:) I have to laugh. Does Trump even understand what IVF is? Has he forgotten that all his religiously extreme voters and his pro-life adherents are against IVF?
Here's a bit from a past article in the conservative National Catholic Register ...
[T]he use of IVF is contrary to Catholic teachings. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2377) states that IVF is “morally unacceptable” because it separates the marriage act from procreation and establishes “the domination of technology” over human life .... IVF involves the use of artificial means to achieve pregnancy outside of the marriage act ....
During the IVF process, multiple human embryos are made and then evaluated in a “grading” process .... Almost half of the human embryos created through IVF are “discarded” during the process .... something that in the Church’s eyes amounts to the killing of millions of innocent lives ...
So maybe Trump is just being smart in his reptile-brain way ... confuse the voters, give them enough ambiguity that they can believe whatever they need to in order to still vote for him.
I'm wondering how do people who believe a fetus is a person from the time of conception, and are thus against abortion, be ok with the discarding of frozen embryos with IVF?
One would get the impression from the nightly news that the Israelis have suddenly gone on an unprovoked rampage in the West Bank, randomly killing innocent civilians for no reason.
[...] Vance, who was speaking at a forum held by the Center for Christian Virtue, attacks “leaders on the left” and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, for not having children.
“So many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me,” Vance can be heard saying in the clip ....
Yeah. Again, the situation is related to a conservative religious forum. Why do reactionary religious men obsess over women without children? Why don't they care that much about childless men?
Simply put, those men want women defined as breeders who are not persons in the same way men are. They don't want to compete with women in the world they themselves inhabit. Religion hekps them out with complementarianism. Think of Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Kanye West, etc.
Here's a video from Rachel Maddow's show about a year ago, showing Nick Fuentes, who had just had Thanksgiving dinner with Trump, describing the perfect religious conservative future: no contraception, women not being able to vote, not being able to work outside the home, etc ...
The Vance childless women thing may seem weird but harmless. It isn't harmless. It is part of an effort to limit women's role in society.
In an ad for Kamala Harris for president, she mentions how important home ownership is to people and that her mother was finally able to buy their first home when she was a teenager.
I was 11 years old when my family bought our first home. Before that we lived in rental places and sometimes with my grandparents. We had been living with my grandparents after coming back from 5 years in Bermuda, and I think my grandparents helped them pay for the house.
My stster and I hated it ... it was so not as nice as my grandparents house ...
Our house was built in the 30s, had no sewer hook-up, was very small, had asbestos siding (eeeeek!). But it had a big yard and it was within walking distaance of grandma and grandpa.
Little did I know that I would be co-owner of that house with my sister when I was old and gray (my siser lives in her own house with her husband). If my mom had not left the house to us when she died, I would probably now be in a county subsidized apartment, never having enough money to buy a home.
Even though the house is rotting away (it's like 90 years old now!), it is so nice to have a yard, trees, a place for all the cats to stay and be relarively safe, a place where no one can ever make me leave. And there are lots of memories here of all my loved ones. I feel so lucky to have a home :)
Israeli hostage Farhan al-Qadi was safely rescued by IDF special forces from Hamas captivity in one of the terror group’s tunnels in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday after more than 10 months in captivity, the military announced.
Al-Qadi, 52, was found inside a tunnel by commandos of the Israeli Navy’s Shayetet 13 unit and troops of the elite Yahalom combat engineering unit, the military said. The operation was led by the Israel Defense Forces’ Southern Command, the Shin Bet security agency, and the IDF’s 162nd Division ....
Al-Qadi, from a Bedouin community near the southern city of Rahat, was working as a guard at a packing factory in Kibbutz Magen on October 7. He was abducted by Hamas terrorists from an area near the nearby community of Mivtahim ...
This may be the only way any of the hostages still held by terrorists in Gaza will be saved, given that Hamas seems to have no intention of releasing them and giving up its leverage.
Meanwhile, I'm already hearing reporters asking ... "but but but, how many Palestinians got hurt in this rescue?". Because people are widgets and we must do a cost/benefit analysis to determine if it's worth it to rescue an Israeli hostage? What about an American hostage - how much collaterol damage is acceptable in that case? Should no one ever be rescued? Why is the de facto setting for the press pro-Hamas?
How much longer before a story surfaces that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a pet koala that was tragically killed when it fell out of a tree and eventually became a blue-ribbon casserole at a local fair?
Because if you thought that Central Park bear story was strange, or that photo of him with a barbecued carcass of a dog — or was it a goat? — was weird, or his brainworm affliction explained a lot ... well, it seems we all missed another RFK Jr. adventure from the wild kingdom, revealed in a profile of his daughter Kick, in 2012, and it’s a whale of a tale:
Kick’s taste for the extreme was fed by her dad’s eccentric environmentalism. Exhibit A: When she was six, word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Bobby — who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons — ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York ...
If this man were not wealthy and famous, I think it's probable he would have been arrested or committed by now. How appropriate that he has found his true home with soul-mate Donald Trump.
You may think Vance's religious choice is incidental to his and other Republicans' politics, but that is so not true. All those repressive and extreme policies Trump wants to implement? You can find most of them in basic Catholic teaching, especially those that have to do with women and with LGBTQ people.
While we may giggle at the description of Republican policies as "weird", we should realize that these same policies are the official and actual stance of the largest and most powerful (and probably wealthiest) Christian denomination in the world. That's not funny.
I'm shocked, shoked I say, to learn that RFK, supposedly a Democrat, has decided to withdraw from the presidential race and instead endorse and join forces with Republican Trump.
Yep, the environmentalist is going to join the guy who wants to reverse all environmental regulations. Of course there are many areas on which you would imagine they would disagree, but these are apparently overwhelmed by the number of issues in whcich they are so simpatico. Like they both love Putin, and they both hate vaccines, and they both believe in nutty conspiracy theories. And both of them are, as far as I can tell, as crazy as bedbugs. A match made in heaven.
One thing I've got to know, after listening to his speech in the video above ... if Trump wins and RFK has power in that administration, will all the overweight people in the US have to join the circus? Just asking because I'm a bit chubby myself.
From The Times of Israel, an interview with Dr. Aron Troen about the allegations of famine is Gaza, and also about his sister, who was murdered by Hamas during the Oct 7 attack ...
Amazingly detailed information on the question of whether there really is a famine in Gaza. Also worth hearing, though very disturbing and heart-wrenching, is what Dr. Troen has to say about his sister and her children and his hopes for a future where Israelus and Palestinians can live in peace. What I find depressing is that most people just don't want to know this stuff.
This article by Michael Sean Winters is a good example of what I feel Catholics just don't understand about the subject of reproductive rights, which is so very important to the Democratic party and to women. I think it's important to point this out, because this lack of understanding by otherwise liberal Catholics just leads to arguments that can never be resolved.
Here's part of the article ...
[...] Some of us understand abortion rights differently. We see it as part of a narrative that Pope Francis has labeled the "globalization of indifference."
Just as liberalism was blind to the evil of eugenics in the early 20th century, pro-life Democrats see abortion rights as a kind of indifference to the moral significance of the unborn child. We can easily identify with the plight of a woman facing an unexpected or crisis pregnancy. We all know someone who has had an abortion and know those persons as good people, decent people, caring people. But we cannot simply set aside the moral fact that a choice, an exercise of freedom, which entails the destruction of human life, or potential human life, is at the very least morally problematic.
For Catholics, freedom is complicated, one of several principal goals of civic society. We do not root our understanding of freedom in Lockean ideas about a social contract, still less in contemporary libertarian ideas that see any infringement on personal choice as impermissible. For Catholics, freedom, even religious freedom, is rooted in human dignity and the necessity of searching for the truth ....
Freedom is not ambivalent, but neither is it the only value in civic life. Human dignity and the common good also make claims on the body politic. We Catholics support labor rights because the dignity of workers demands it, even if the freedom of corporations is thereby impinged. We Catholics support the rights of migrants to succor and shelter because their human dignity demands it, even if the host country must allocate resources to address their needs. We Catholics support a just distribution of societal resources because the common good demands it, even if taxes are, by nature, confiscatory. We support action to confront climate change because the common good and concern for human life demand it, even if such a confrontation will impose significant changes on our common life. On all these issues, Democrats eschew the libertarian position. On abortion, they embrace it ...
The problem with trying to reason this out is that Catholic pro-life people are not starting in the same place as pro-choice people. Catholic begin with what they believe are facts, but which are instead religious teachings/beliefs .... that from the time of conception, a fetus is a person with all the rights thereof.
Most pro-choice people do not believe an egg, an embryo, an early fetus is yet a person, and they base this belief on science and on a particular understanding of personhood (see video below).
So yes, Democrats are for the rights of persons ... we are not "indifferent", we don't put "freedom" ahead of the rights of persons, we care about the common good, we are not libertarians on this one issue. In fact, we pro-choice Democrats are totally consistent: we do not see the rights of fetuses as equal to the rights of women, because most of us do not believe fetuses are persons in the same way women are. So women's rights prevail.
As long as pro-life people refuse to acknowledge that difference in the most basic beliefs, they will keep misrepresenting the argument, and they will keep losing that argument.
Winters ends with this ...
It is still possible for pro-life Democrats to vote for Harris this autumn in good conscience, especially given the alternative, but I fear the time is coming when conscience will demand leaving the party. Or acknowledging it has left us.
Yes, there is a place in the Democratic party for people who are pro-life ... some of the leading Democrats in the party, like Joe Biden, are pro-life.
But ...
Pro-life people cannot expect the Democratic party to be pro-life in policy. We are not a theocracy and we don't base our political policies on particular religious beliefs. The Catholic church would love to force the whole world to live by its teachings, but we are centuries past that. That's Project 2025 stuff.
- Dizengoff Street bus bombing Orthodox Jew from the Hevra Kadisha, collecting remains of the victims who died in the explosion to bury them in the religious matter
When I write "martyrs" I'm not posting about medieval Catholic saints, I'm posting about suicide bombers ...
Hamas has claimed it was behind a bomb explosion in Tel Aviv on Sunday night which Israeli authorities say killed the suspected attacker and injured a civilian.
A statement from the armed group said it had been a “martyrdom operation" carried out in co-operation with Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
It also warned that suicide attacks would “return to the forefront” if Israel continued what it called “massacres” of Palestinians ...
Hamas and other terrorist groups purposely try to kill civilians, and glorify the "martyrs" they send to kill those civilians as well as themselves.
Not a new thing - when Hamas said suicide bombings would "return to the forefront" of their strategy, they were speaking of their history of suicide bombings in Israel - Wikipedia has a partial list of them: List of Palestinian suicide attacks - with this introduction ...
This article contains a non-comprehensive list of Palestinian suicide attacks carried out by Palestinian individuals and militant groups, usually against Israeli civilian targets. The use of indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations is illegal under international law.
The first suicide attack was carried out in 1989. The high point was in 2002 during the Second Intifada. The Al-Aqsa Intifada saw a dramatic upswing in suicide bombings, with A, 40% of the total number originated in East Jerusalem. A 2007 study of Palestinian suicide bombings during the Second Intifada (September 2000 through August 2005) found that 39.9% of the suicide attacks were carried out by Hamas, 26.4% by Fatah, 25.7% by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), 5.4% by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and 2.7% by other organizations. The attacks steeply declined by 2008 ...
The Dizengoff Street bus bombing was a Hamas suicide attack on a passenger bus driving down Dizengoff Street, Tel Aviv in 1994. At that time, it was the deadliest suicide bombing in Israeli history, and the first successful attack in Tel Aviv. 22 civilians were killed and 50 were injured. The attack was planned by Hamas chief Yahya Ayyash, a week before the signing of the Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace ...
I recall reading that the remains of the victims had to picked up with tweezers by Rabbis in order to be saved for burial. The bomber left a messages, calling himself a martyr who would end up in paradise.
Meanwhile, the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is still financially rewarding suicide bombers and other terrorist "martyrs" with his "Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund.
The PA - the organization that the Biden administration thinks is worthy to rule Gaza after the war.
And Hamas - the bloody terrorist group that the protesters at the Democratic convention love so much.
Yep, the Democratic comvention is about to begin. As mentioned in the above video, the last memorable Democratic convention in Chicago was in 1968, and I remember it well. I was 17 at the time, and my friends and I were all against the war in Vietnam and for the protesters. I still remember the brutality of the police and the protesters chanting "the whole world is watching".
When this 2024 convention occurs, there will be protests as well, but I will not be on the side of the protesters this time.
The pro-Palestinian protesters don't care about the Israeli and American civilians killed on October 7, or about any of the hostages still held in Gaza, including children and the elderly. What they do care about is supporting a repressive ultra-conservative theocracy led by bloody terrorists who are too cowardly to fight a stand-up war but instead hide behind their own citizens and the hostages they kidnapped.
PS ... for those hoping for a ceasefire/hostage agreement soon, I believe that it will not happen. Hamas cannot and will not give up their leverage: the few hostages they haven't yet killed. Hamas will drag things out but never agree. Israeli leaders knows this, and that is why they continueme to methodically prosecute the war. That is probably the only real chance to get some of the hostages back. See: Hamas rejects new U.S. proposal for Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal.
Perhaps you saw the story in the news about Israeli Minister Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount, where he and his companions prayed. This action was apparently so shocking and outrageous, that not only was he repremanded by Netanyahu, but also by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others ... Israeli minister denounced over call for Jewish prayer at Jerusalem holy site.
I really know next to nothing about the Jewish faith and not that much about the history of Israel, so I was perplexed ... why is it that only Muslims, not Christians or Jews, are allowed to pray on the Temple Mount? It's all about history, politics, and what is called the Stutas Quo.
I wrote in an earlier post that Israel has been losung the information war since the attack on October 7.
Example - watching the news on MSNBC yesterday, their correspondent in Israel gave the opinion of a Palestinian friend of hers in Gaza as if it was fact .... Israel has told people in the humanitarian zone to move again, but "there is no place to go". That just isn't true. From The Hill ...
[...] Israel’s military said on Sunday it was widening the humanitarian zone in response to Hamas’s “exploitation” of the zone “for terrorist acts and the continuous firing of rockets towards the State of Israel,” according to a post on the social platform X. Israel released leaflets to areas of Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city, and made phone calls to residents warning them to flee, saying, “remaining in this block has become dangerous.” ...
In response to this information problem, one person has been trying to make a difference - Eylon Levy ...
Eylon Aslan-Levy, also known as Eylon Levy, is a British-Israeli figure who served as official Israeli government spokesman, from the start of 2023 Israel–Hamas war to March 2024, when he was suspended.
Levy was born in London, United Kingdom. He attended University College School in London and University of Oxford, where he received his bachelor's degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 2013. He moved to Israel in 2014 at the age of 23 to join the Israeli military during the 2014 Gaza War. In 2016, Levy began work as the chief news anchor at IBA News, and then later presented news at i24NEWS.
In 2021, Israeli president Isaac Herzog appointed him as his international media advisor at the Office of the President of Israel. After the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, he became an official Israeli government spokesman and one of Israel's most internationally recognized faces in the war.
At the top of the post is a video of a talk he gave in Milan, titled "Does Truth Matter Anymore?".
I wish people would listen, because the truth does matter. And you may say that the truth ... facts ... are changeable depending on your pov. No. Facts are the closest correlation of information with actual reality. And I don't think people are paying attention to the facts on the Israel/Hamas war, mostly because they just don't like them.
Another song, this one from 1976 - If You Leave Me Now - by Peter Cetera and Chicago. I do like the band, but really, my main interest is in him.
A native of Chicago, he's of Polish and Hungarian descent, and so it's probably not surprising that his first instrument as a teen was an accordion - he won awards for his polka music :)
Later he got a guitar and joined Chicago in 1967, becoming not just their bass player but also one of their main vocalists and songwriters.
In 1969, Cetera had a setback that had an impact on his singing voice and style. He was beaten up by some guys at a baseball game - his jaw was broken in 3 places and had to be wired shut for months. As the band still had commitments, he had to learn how to sing with his mouth almost closed. Even after healing, he kept that style, as opening his mouth too widely would get it stuck 0pen ... How a baseball brawl led to Chicago’s breakthrough hit.
He left Chicago in 1985 to pursue a solo career, and though I'm not a fan of ballads and love songs, I do recognize that many of his later songs were very popular, like the 1986 song Glory of Love ...
I will always appreciate him from his time with Chicago. I'll post more of his songs from then as I find them, though it's hard to find good quality live performances of stuff from the distant past.
Ukraine, which was first attacked by Russia, has now turned the tables and is moving into Russia militarily. Villages have been damaged and innocent civilians - some children - have been wounded and displaced.
I have to wonder .... where is the intense scrutiny and condemnation of Ukraine by the press and the UK, France, and other European nations who have been so keen to criticize Israel for dong this same thing?
Can it be that Europe sees what Ukraine is doing as understanble, given what Russia has done to Ukraine? Can it be that they think this is just typical behavior in a war?
I think the truth is that most liberal countries dislike Israel and there is really nothing that Israel could do in this war that they would find acceptable, to the point that they will accept and promote the stance of a bunch of effing terrorists instead.
Video and story on the news about and IDF strike at a former school in Gaza that was housing Hamas terrorists. It shows women and children, and some dead bodies, a damaged building. The news commentator does not say where the video comes from ... ABC news has no reporters inside Gaza, so I assume it comes from a Palestinian stringer. Gaza's Hamas-run media office is the sourc of the numbers of the dead and injured. ABC news does not question the video or the numbers. No mention of how many of the dead were terrorists
Why does the press report death counts that come from Hamas, a terrorist organization?
The reporter on the story did briefly mention the IDF's comment on the strike, but the skepticism was pretty thick. Here is what the IDF said about this strike ...
— San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (@sandiegozoo) August 10, 2024
PANDA-MONIUM HITS THE U.S.! Meet the newest pandas on American soil — five-year-old male Yun Chuan and nearly four-year-old female Xin Bao.@reevewill has more on the giant pandas as the prepare to make their debut at the San Diego Zoo. pic.twitter.com/4lDuKIwANI
Harris has chosen Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, as her VP.
Why? I have no idea, because I did not even know who he was until I looked him up. I think she should have picked someone else - Mark Kelly or Pete Buttigieg.
Apparently, it's all about getting people in the battleground states who don't vote for Democrats to do so anyway, because they will be fooled into thinking Walz is "their kind". But according to Steve Kornacki (see video), that strategy is flawed, because Walz was unable to get the votes of the target group in his own state.
[...] UNRWA previously fired 12 staffers and put seven staffers on administrative leave without pay over the claims. The group of nine staffers the U.N. announced it had fired Monday includes some from each group, said Juliette Touma, communications director for UNRWA. The U.N. did not clarify how many have now been fired from the agency in total ...
[...] Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan branded the OIOS investigation “a disgrace,” noting that it had focused only on 19 UNRWA employees, despite Israel having provided the UN with “detailed information” about 100 UNRWA employees that Erdan said were Hamas members ....
“The UN investigation, which focused solely on 19 UNRWA employees, is a disgrace!” said Erdan following the UN announcement on Monday ....
“Israel provided the UN with detailed information regarding over 100 UNRWA employees who were direct members of the terrorist organization Hamas,” he said. “Despite Israel’s extensive cooperation with, and provision of information to, the UN, its investigation’s conclusions are yet another disgrace.” ....
When I see media reports of Israel striking an UNRWA school in Gaza, I am reminded not only that the school is not currently functional and full of children, but also that UNRWA schools are sites used by Hamas and other terrorist groups for staging attacks on Israeli forces.
The US Congress passed legislation that keeps our country from contributing to UNRWA until next year, but many other countries are still funding what is essentially a terrorist frornt.
And this isn't a new thing. Here's a bit from The Washington Post and from Reuters from 2014 ...
[...] Critics from Israeli officials to Middle East experts to local analysts say the U.N. agency, which is internationally funded, serves a one-sided Palestinian narrative that is biased, implicitly anti-Israel and exhaustively emotional. And fueling even greater criticism, it recently discovered rocket caches of unknown provenance in three of its schools.
Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Ron Prosor, has called for spokesman Gunness’s suspension, according to the Algemeiner, a U.S.-based Jewish newspaper. Among other complaints, he accused Gunness of “an ongoing pattern of anti-Israel bias,” adding: “He has abused his position to promote incitement against Israel and present a one-sided view of reality…. UNRWA staff members have repeatedly failed to abide by the UN’s principles of neutrality and impartiality.”...
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed alarm on Wednesday that 20 rockets found hidden in a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip had gone missing and directed the world body to deploy experts to deal with the situation.
The main U.N. agency in Gaza, UNRWA, found the rockets in one of its vacant schools a week ago. It found a second batch in a vacant school on Tuesday, but said in a statement that because staff were withdrawn quickly, they were "unable to confirm the precise number."
In both cases UNRWA said it "informed the relevant parties," but did not identify who had been contacted. Islamist militant group Hamas is the dominant group in the coastal enclave and has been fighting with Israeli troops for the past two weeks ...
