The Federalist Society: judge-makers

The New Neo Posted on by

This Politico article by Michael Kruse on the formation of the Federalist Society in 1982 is a curious piece. It conveys what I assume are the general facts—that a bunch of far-flung conservative law professors, judges, and law students met together at Yale in order to share ideas and try to get more conservatives into the legal and judicial fields—while at the same time subtly insinuating that such a meeting and such a plan was something vaguely underhanded and not altogether cricket.

It’s a long article, and only some way into the piece does it mention the reality that led to this meeting, which is that by 1982 liberals almost completely dominated the legal profession:

In the fall of 1980, Calabresi would recall in an interview with the ABA Journal, he was struck by what happened when the 88 members of his first-year class at Yale Law were asked whether they had voted for Reagan: Only two people raised their hands…

It had been this way for decades. “The law schools were exceedingly one-sided,” McConnell, the Stanford law professor, told me. Being a conservative then at a college or a law school, Scalia later said to biographer Joan Biskupic, made one feel “isolated, lonely … like a weirdo.”…

“It is an intellectual debate,” Bork said in his talk [at that initial meeting in 1982].

And at that point, it was one they were losing. “Conservatives have simply been outgunned at the federal level for half a century,” Scalia said.

“When liberals are in power,” he added, “they do not shrink from using the federal structure of what they consider to be sound governmental goals.”

The solution, according to Blackwell, the veteran organizer of young conservatives? “Study how to win,” he told the symposium audience.

In other words, the relentless liberal/left Gramscian march through the legal profession and the judiciary, that had taken hold during the administration of FDR fifty years earlier, had succeeded in completely dominating those fields, so much so that this 1982 get-together (of only about 200 people, and that included students) was one of the very few times a group of conservative law scholars had assembled in any significant numbers.

And what did they do? They decided to use a more practical approach than their previous “Sir Galahad theory: ‘I shall win because my heart is pure.’” They decided to organize their geographically-dispersed forces and focus on winning.

What a novelty for the right in the legal profession. Till then, the technique had been owned by the left.

However, the fact that they have succeeded to a certain degree in transforming the Supreme Court by getting many of their picks on it has been dependent on the election of GOP presidents to nominate them and also on a GOP Senate (or at least one with fairly moderate Democrats) to approve them. If that had not happened, the Federalist Society would have been spinning its wheels as far as SCOTUS justices and other federal judges are concerned.

The election and re-election of Barack Obama undermined whatever inroads the conservatives had made (the following was written shortly before the inauguration of President Trump):

Republicans cannot wait to begin dismantling President Barack Obama’s accomplishments, but there’s one thing they can’t undo, even with full control of Congress and the White House: his judicial legacy.

Obama will leave office with 329 of his judicial nominees confirmed to lifetime posts on federal courts. That includes two U.S. Supreme Court justices and four judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the two most powerful courts in the nation. Because of Obama, Democratic appointees now have a 7-4 advantage on the D.C. panel, and those judges will play a major role in deciding cases during the Trump administration related to environmental regulations, health care, national security, consumer protections and challenges to executive orders.

Obama also tilted the partisan makeup of circuit courts. Nine of the country’s 13 appeals courts now have majority Democratic appointees, compared with just one when he took office in 2009.

The Politico article states that Trump’s SCOTUS nominees were made on the recommendation of the Federalist Society. The author writes that Trump “subcontract[ed] this task to the Federalist Society, which had performed this duty for previous Republican presidents but never so explicitly.” Would the left have preferred Trump to have drawn the nominees’ names out of a hat? Winged it and found them on his own? Perhaps; then they could have criticized him all the more. Presidents ordinarily get advice from legal experts, and Trump did the same. The only reason it was more explicit in this case was that Trump made a point of publishing his picks before the election, in order to burnish his previously non-existent conservative credentials, and the MSM made a big deal of that process as well.

Kruse goes on to say that “the architects of the Federalist Society have attained a level of influence on the courts they never could have imagined, in a way they never could have envisioned.” Well, I doubt that they—or anyone else except Trump—envisioned Trump as the mechanism by which they would increase their influence, but they certainly did imagine that they could ultimately come back, at least to a certain extent, from the relative nadir of their influence at the time of their formation as a formal group.

How far does their influence extend? Further than liberals and the left would like it to, because liberals and the left seem to think that it is their own right to dominate the legal profession and judiciary almost entirely. Anything else is considered a usurpation. If my quite elite law school alma mater is any indication (I get regular mailings of their magazine which updates me on happenings there), the domination of the faculty and student body by liberals and the left is still nearly complete.

[NOTE: The comments to that Politico article are quite instructive. Just looking at some of the first few right now, I see these sorts of criticisms:

What did you expect from a bunch of ” self entitled kids” with no doubt fathers who were already right wing money grabbers…

The issue is that the GOP to stack the Supreme Court is allowing a tainted President to appoint a nominee who may not have the authority to do so.

An organization whose explicit goal is to politicize the federal judiciary should be considered subversive. Membership in the Federalist Society should disqualify would-be nominees to the bench.

what happened? a few rich little pricks living off mommy and daddys $ decided to never help anyone again but themselves.

So, basically, let’s make sure only the rights and whims of the white and wealthy are counted in 2018 by enshrining as perfect a document created when only the white and wealthy counted. That about it?

A group of Selfish sexist Rich or wannabe Racist AynRand Libertarians who Sold their Souls for money to Tea Bag MILLIONAIRE Fascist Republicans !!! Scumbag Dumbo TRUMPO is GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY LOCK THEM ALL UP !!! Scumbag Dumbo TRUMPO is a LYING Sexist BIRTHER Racist piece of Trash & a Tax CHEATING Wife CHEAT Business CHEATER Draft Dodger Chicken-Hawk COWARD !! LOCK HIM UP & his Band of BreitFART Fascist Republicans !!! REMEMBER this scumbag Dumbo TRUMPO opened CONCENTRATION CAMPS for Children !!!…

Etc., etc., etc..]

On algorithms and their glitches

The New Neo Posted on by

This is starting to sound like a Philip K. Dick novel:

“People say, ‘Well, what about Facebook – they create and use algorithms and they can change them.’ But that’s not how it works. They set the algorithms off and they learn and change and run themselves. Facebook intervene in their running periodically, but they really don’t control them. And particular programs don’t just run on their own, they call on libraries, deep operating systems and so on …”…

Corporations like Facebook and Google have sold and defended their algorithms on the promise of objectivity, an ability to weigh a set of conditions with mathematical detachment and absence of fuzzy emotion. No wonder such algorithmic decision-making has spread to the granting of loans/ bail/benefits/college places/job interviews and almost anything requiring choice.

We no longer accept the sales pitch for this type of algorithm so meekly. In her 2016 book Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil, a former math prodigy who left Wall Street to teach and write and run the excellent mathbabe blog, demonstrated beyond question that, far from eradicating human biases, algorithms could magnify and entrench them. After all, software is written by overwhelmingly affluent white and Asian men – and it will inevitably reflect their assumptions (Google “racist soap dispenser” to see how this plays out in even mundane real-world situations).

Hey, that’s from the Guardian, so what do you expect? Leftists assume that those “affluent white and Asian men” will of course introduce assumptions that will hurt the other, more righteous races and genders (ignoring the fact that so many people in the computer industry are on the political left, no matter what their race and gender). The central point, however, is a good one, which is that algorithms are not inherently fair and not inherently and always better than what actual human individuals would do.

This is not unfamiliar territory. The machine running amok and creating its own trajectory is a staple of science fiction. That’s where Philip K. Dick comes in (see also this).

More on the civil war brewing in the Catholic Church over alleged sexual abuse and its coverup

The New Neo Posted on by

If this article by Paul A. Rahe is true, we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

I would add, however, that although (as Rahe states) same-sex pederasty, not pedophilia, is the mechanism of a great deal of the alleged child abuse by priests, same-sex pedophilia as well as abuse of girls still accounts for a significant amount. It is difficult if not impossible to know the figures overall, but the most comprehensive data may appear in this lengthy 2004 report issued by John Jay College for Criminal Justice (also cited by Rahe). You can plow through it if you like; it is really very thorough, and describes US cases from 1950 to 2002 (very roughly the same time frame as dealt with by the Pennsylvania grand jury report).

Here are some excerpts from the John Jay report (which I have not read in its entirety; these are from the summary):

Approximately one-third of all allegations were reported in 2002-2003, and two-thirds have been made since 1993. Thus, prior to 1993, only one-third of cases were known to Church officials. The allegations made in 1993 and 2002-2003 include offenses that allegedly occurred within the full time period from 1950-1993 and 1950-2002…

The majority of priests with allegations of abuse were ordained between 1950 and 1979 (68%)…

The majority of priests (56%) were alleged to have abused one victim, nearly 27% were alleged to have abused two or three victims, nearly 14% were alleged to have abused four to nine victims and 3.4% were alleged to have abused more than ten victims. The 149 priests (3.5%) who had more than ten allegations of abuse were allegedly responsible for abusing 2,960 victims, thus accounting for 26% of allegations. Therefore, a very small percentage of accused priests are responsible for a substantial percentage of the allegations…

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Quite a bit can be learned from that. The first point is that, although the offenses occurred much earlier, a large proportion of the victim reports came out many years later, after sexual abuse by priests had been heavily covered in the media. What does this mean? It can obviously mean that victims had kept silent all those years out of shame, and finally felt empowered to tell their stories. That is almost certainly true for a significant number of them, perhaps most or even all.

But it can also mean that there could have been a contagion effect and/or a false memory effect, at least for some. What’s more, with such old offenses, there was the problem of investigating when whatever evidence or witnesses existed were long gone (and many alleged perps were dead), and memories faded. That’s the exact reason that there’s a legal statute of limitations on many offenses. Another thing that emerges is that the alleged perps were of a somewhat older generation, not a younger one, having mostly been ordained between 1950 and 1979.

Rahe has written the following:

…[Based on the John Jay report] something like 81 percent of the victims were boys, and very few of them were, in the strictest sense, children. They were nearly all what we euphemistically call young adults.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, 81% were boys, according to the report. But—as shown in the quotes from the report that I’ve offered here—“16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7,” which means that roughly 1 in 5 were absolutely unequivocally children (also, about 1 in 5 were girls). However, we have no idea how many in that largest group, ages 11-14 (which constituted 50.9% of the whole), were 11 and how many 14. If the majority were boys, and many were 11 or 12, most of them would be per-adolescent or very early-adolescent boys right at the beginning of puberty and not “young adults” at all.

It may seem a technical point, but it’s relevant if you want to understand the picture. “Pedophilia” is defined as sexual activity with prepubescent children, usually 13 or younger.

Another thing we learn from the John Jay report is that most of the abuse was by multiple offenders, whose numbers were relatively small. Of course, it may be that single offenders were actually multiple offenders as well, and that their other victims have not come forward.

I would separate out the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of seminarians by priests. This seems to almost certainly involve pederasty—in other words, it is same-sex male activity, and it features an older priest and a younger, but post-pubescent and sometimes technically adult, seminarian. That is what the McCarrick scandal is about, the one that seems to directly involve a coverup by the present Pope.

The Rahe article seems to conflate the two phenomena. It’s an understandable type of confusion, but I think it helps conceptually to see them as two related but somewhat different problems within the Church.

[NOTE: Please see this article for a different point of view.]

A little cache problem

The New Neo Posted on by

On my computer and phone there’s sometimes a little time lag in new posts or new comments showing up on the blog. Hope it isn’t happening that way for you, but if it is, I suggest you try clearing your cache. If that doesn’t work, try going to page 2 of the blog and then back to page one. Sometimes that does the trick.

For me, the problem occurs only on my cell phone and not on my laptop.

I’ve been compiling a list of these small glitches that are still occurring on the blog, and in a little while I plan to take them to the web developer and ask him to try to fix them. Till then, sorry for any inconvenience.

Sexual abuse: the Catholic Church and the daycare cases

The New Neo Posted on by

Someone has to write it, so I guess I will.

How are the accusations against Catholic priests—such as those that appear in the Pennsylvania grand jury report—substantiated as true or almost certainly true? How many involve evidence in addition to the victims’ reports, how many include confessions, and how many are possibly the result of fabrication, fantasy, exaggeration, and/or the bandwagon effect? Those things are always a risk with accusations about activity that occurs in secret and in private.

This is not to say that I believe that any of the accusers are lying. They all may be telling the truth, and all the accused may be 100% guilty of what is alleged, and more. But it has to be taken into consideration that there is a possibility that some of them are not.

After all, there is a history of significant numbers of false accusations of abuse. Some of these false accusations have ruined the lives of the alleged perpetrators, for example in the McMartin and Fells Acres cases. Both were textbook cases of what not to do in such investigations (see this and this). I do not think it likely that the false accusations in those cases were made with any bad intent by the accusers. They were a result of a combination of hysteria and the power of suggestion, coupled with ignorance about how it is that leading questions can lead to false testimony and the implantation of false memories, especially memories that are “recovered.”

These cases occurred mostly in the 1980s, when not that much was known about how to handle these large-scale situations of abuse within institutions such as day care centers, and very poor interrogation methods were used.

I have done a relatively brief search, looking for information on the dates of most of the accusations, as well as the methods used to question the accusers. For example, did many of these cases involving priests occur during that same 1980s era, when there was a sort of accusation hysteria going on regarding day care, and false accusations were not so very uncommon? So far I have not been able to find that information about dates (or much of anything else), although I did find this:

DiNardo and Doherty noted that the [Pennsylvania] grand jury’s report spans 70 years, and many of the abuse accusations were made before 2002, when the bishops adopted new policies.

Not only did the bishops adopt new policies beginning at that time, but it was not long before that (I believe some time during the 1990s, if I’m recalling correctly) that law enforcement and therapists became more aware of the problems inherent in investigating accusations of abuse, and became more adept at questioning alleged victims in other cases.

If any readers are interested in how far the situation can go regarding false accusations and the belief in them, not just by victims but by alleged perpetrators in certain cases, I suggest reading the book Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory, on the subject of the Thurston County ritual abuse case.

I have no dog in the fight about the Catholic Church. I have absolutely no wish to absolve the guilty, priests or otherwise. I always have a wish to protect the innocent. That refers to the children and the other victims, of course. But it can also include the adults—even priests—some of whom may have been falsely accused.

[NOTE: I would really like to know more about the Pennsylvania cases, and if anyone has a link to a more thorough description, please offer it in the comments.]

The end to the bail system in California

The New Neo Posted on by

Bail bondsmen in California can’t be too happy about this development:

California will become the first state in the nation to abolish bail for suspects awaiting trial under a sweeping reform bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday.

An overhaul of the state’s bail system has been in the works for years, and became an inevitability earlier this year when a California appellate court declared the state’s cash bail system unconstitutional. The new law goes into effect in October 2019.

“Today, California reforms its bail system so that rich and poor alike are treated fairly,” Brown said in a statement, moments after signing the California Money Bail Reform Act…

Washington, D.C., already has a cashless bail system. Other states, including New Jersey, have passed laws that reduce their reliance on money bail. And other states are considering making similar changes.

Under the California law those arrested and charged with a crime won’t be putting up money or borrowing it from a bail bond agent to obtain their release. Instead, local courts will decide who to keep in custody and whom to release while they await trial. Those decisions will be based on an algorithm created by the courts in each jurisdiction.

In most nonviolent misdemeanor cases, defendants would be released within 12 hours. In other instances, defendants will be scored on how likely they are to show up for their court date, the seriousness of their crime, and the likelihood of recidivism.

This is not a case of legislation by the judiciary, but it is a case in which legislation was passed as a result of a judicial ruling. Whether California would have passed such a law without the push from the court system is something I don’t know, but at any rate it has happened and the citizens of California will have to deal with it.

It’s not as though the bail system was so great. It did favor people with money, because even though poorer people (or anyone, really) could borrow the money from bail bondsmen, a non-refundable deposit had to be paid up front, and the people most likely to be unable to raise even that were of course the most poverty-stricken.

However, what is going to replace it? A system that gives the courts unprecedented discretion to decide who will remain incarcerated pending trial and who will go free. Are courts really able to forecast “how likely [suspects] are to show up for their court date…and the likelihood of recidivism”? I have grave doubts.

And so does the ACLU:

…[T]he American Civil Liberties Union of California, an original co-sponsor of the bill, pulled its support, arguing that last-minute changes give judges too much discretion in determining under what circumstances people will be released or kept in custody.

“We are concerned that the system that’s being put into place by this bill is too heavily weighted toward detention and does not have sufficient safeguards to ensure that racial justice is provided in the new system,” the ACLU’s Natasha Minsker told NPR…

Did they not think of that before they sponsored the bill?

The ACLU’s concern is that without the bail system, more people will be detained rather than fewer. “Racial justice” is of course an elastic term, particularly when used by the left, but the problem is that people of color commit more crimes and therefore are over-represented in the criminal population no matter how release-before-trial is determined, so what would “racial justice” look like, and can it be implemented without letting violent criminals go free to commit more crimes—crimes whose victims also are highly likely to be other people of color?

It’s one of those “be careful what you wish for” scenarios:

Raj Jayadev, co-founder of advocacy organization Silicon Valley De-Bug, said like the ACLU, his group is a former supporter of the bill. Ultimately, as it is written, he told the Sacramento Bee, the law discriminates against the poor.

“They took our rallying cry of ending money bail and used it against us to further threaten and criminalize and jail our loved ones.”

As for the 7,000 or so bail bondsmen of California, whose industry is now finished, they are on record as planning to sue.

Funny thing, isn’t it, that a law that began with a ruling by judges ends up giving judges far more power than before?

Love is in the air

The New Neo Posted on by

Can it be that one in fifty people have found true love on an airplane?

I find it a bit hard to believe. I’ve struck up a few interesting conversations, but the closest I’ve come to an emotional bond was when I was nineteen years old and flying alone on a milk run type flight in the midwest, in a relatively small propeller-type plane. There were maybe 40 seats or so, the weather was very foggy and quite rough, it was nighttime, and we were supposed to land in Detroit but got diverted to Toledo, Ohio because the Detroit runways were iced up.

Once on the ground in Toledo, we paused for a while, and then the captain announced that we were going to “try for it.” This didn’t sound reassuring to me, so I gathered myself up and told the stewardess that I wanted off. She said that they would accommodate my request, but there was no way to get my luggage off the plane, too.

So I went back to my seat, decided to have a drink (something I just about never do), and gripped the hand of the 50-something guy next to me the whole way.

Maybe that is a kind of love.

Brazil’s Trump?

The New Neo Posted on by

I just read this article about the current frontrunner in the Brazilian presidential elections, a man named Jair Bolsonaro who is described in the article I just linked as “far-right,” and given to racist and misogynistic utterances:

Loathed by much of Brazil for his insults against women and gays, his alleged racism and crude exhortations for “bandits” to be shot down, Bolsonaro has surprised many by becoming a frontrunner.

The only politician currently more popular is the leftist ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a leader who also divides Brazilians — only in the other direction.

Lula would easily win the election, according to polls, but he is in prison for corruption and very unlikely to be allowed on the ballot.

Polarization, anyone?

I had never heard of Bolsonaro until a few minutes ago, but I have become inherently suspicious of accusations like the ones leveled against him by the left and/or the international press. They may indeed be very true, but it’s hard to judge without actually hearing him and seeing him (and understanding Portuguese, probably).

Short of that, I’ll just say that some of his utterances sound awful—for example, that he told a newspaper that one congresswomen was “not worth raping” because “she is very ugly”. But other statements of Bolsonaro’s seem to be more common sense, such as the idea that people should be allowed to defend themselves against crime:

But with Brazilians desperate to ditch the status quo after years of recession, rampant corruption and ever-growing violent crime, his provocative positions make him stand out.

In Madureira, which is surrounded by sometimes almost lawless favelas and where residents live with the constant danger of gunfire, Bolsonaro’s pitch for looser gun control to allow self-defense met with particular approval.

“Guns don’t feed violence, just as flowers don’t bring peace,” Bolsonaro said, responding to critics who say that flooding society with even more guns will only increase the bloodshed.

When the left has been in control for years and it has led to “recession, rampant corruption and ever-growing violent crime,” why wouldn’t a significant number of people want a change? And why wouldn’t they incline towards someone who promises to allow them to defend themselves against a growing number of criminals? “Elites” are fond of telling people what they can and cannot do, but elites are for the most part protected against the disturbing phenomena they have created in a way that the regular populace is not. So why wouldn’t a Trumplike figure have mass appeal? And why would people heed the warnings of their “betters,” who have not seen fit to offer them any other way to deal with myriad problems except to suck it up, and grin and bear it?

It is quite obvious that whatever it was that led to Trump’s appeal in this country, there are similar (although of course not exactly the same) influences leading to the rise of similar (although of course not exactly the same) politicians in different countries. And the powers-that-be in those countries seem similarly surprised at the entire phenomenon.

I certainly don’t know how this will wind up; it could be disastrous in the end. But I wouldn’t trust the MSM to be able to tell me.

Home again!

The New Neo Posted on by

I returned home from Italy late last night.

So what’s on tap for today? Unpacking, laundry, grocery store, blog. Staying inside most of the day is made easier by the fact that the “real feel” weather report is that although it’s “only” in the high 80s at the moment, the “real feel” is 100 humid degrees (that’s once I readjusted the settings, because my computer still seems to want to give me the temps in Centigrade).

My nonstop flight from Rome to Boston on Alitalia was smooth and completely on time, as my flight out to Italy had been. And they even served food, some sort of thing they called lasagna but which consisted mostly of noodles, but was pretty tasty. They also gave us a snack that looked promisingly like it might be an apple turnover. But it turned out to be the worst imitation of a calzone I’ve ever bitten into, made of a WonderBreaddish sealed wrapper surrounding a dollop of tomato sauce that tasted like ketchup.

I can’t complain too much about a flight that gets me (and my luggage) there on time and in one piece, which is by far the most important thing. But the seats had the least leg-and-arm-room of any plane I’ve been on in my life. And I’m a small person; I have no idea how bigger people do it. With the person in front of me reclining somewhat, getting out of my seat to walk around or visit the bathroom was nearly impossible without formidable gymnastics—and I was on the aisle.

Another peculiarity was that towards the back of the plane, in the middle section (the one with four seats across), there was a curtained enclosure that was roughly rectangular in shape. Thick beige curtains hung on all four sides so that it could not be seen into, and I kept forgetting to ask what it was when the harried flight attendents came briefly by. Speculation included a dead body in a coffin, but apparently they get transported in the cargo hold, so it’s a mystery to me. Any pilots out there who might know?

I’ll say more about my Italy sojourn later. For now, though, I’ll just state that I’m very happy to be home. It reminds me of one of those lightish poems they made us memorize in grade school, like this one which has stuck with me like some sort of patriotic glue. Looking up the full version of the poem at that link, I realize that our teacher spared us by leaving out the last two verses. So I’ll just copy the ones I know, and note that this poem would never, never ever, be assigned to memorize today in a New York City public school:

“AMERICA FOR ME”

‘TIS fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues of the kings,—
But now I think I’ve had enough of antiquated things.

So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be,
In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars!

Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air;
And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair;
And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home…

Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the bléssed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars

And that’s pretty much the way I felt on returning home. Italy was lovely, the people welcoming, the terrain beautiful, the art and architecture glorious, but it seemed expansive and relaxing to get back home.

[NOTE: By the way, looking up the author of that piece of verse, I see that Henry Van Dyke—who was also a Presbyterian minister and Princeton professor of English literature—was rather prolific as a writer of popular poetry and some stories. He also penned the lyrics to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”: “Joyful joyful we adore thee.”]

The Italian war on banisters

The New Neo Posted on by

Italy has a lot of hills and a lot of old buildings built on a grand scale, and it has a great many staircases both inside and outside.

Many of the staircases have old steps that slope downwards, made of slippery material like marble or stone worn smooth. In addition, the depth of the steps is often rather shallow, without enough room for the feet.

Uphill is tiring, and it would be nice to have a banister at times. Downhill is both tiring and somewhat frightening without same banister. And yet Italy is very very banister-challenged.

I don’t know why it’s so, but it’s so. Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just me?

What’s going on with Pope Francis and the sex abuse scandals?

The New Neo Posted on by

I certainly don’t know—even though yesterday I visited the Vatican and did the tour thing. Nary a word was said about the current crisis facing the Pope. It was silence in the Sistine Chapel all the way.

One thing about visiting the Vatican, though, is that it underscores the long history of the Church as well as the tremendous riches it possesses, both in money and art. That place is big, and parts of it reminded me of some strange combination of the Roman Empire and royalty. The influence of the Church has been mighty across time, and it’s still quite large although nothing like it was in the past.

On the current Pope, from a piece by Steven Hayward at Powerline:

Among the reasons I decided against becoming a Catholic is my worry that someday we might get a Pope like . . . Pope Francis. I loved John Paul II and Benedict XVI, but feared that what has come to pass would come to pass. It is bad enough that Francis is a left-wing liberation theologue (liberation theology being merely Marxism with salsa), but there is credible testimony that he has covered up for pedophile priests, bishops, and cardinals…

…We know from many previous proven cases that pedophilia among Catholic clerics took place, and that the Church hierarchy covered it up, stonewalled, and in some cases attempted to declare bankruptcy to avoid civil damage judgments (unsuccessfully in most cases). It should also be noted that sex abuse cases have occurred in Protestant denominations. I know that the Mormon Church has quietly settled a number of sex abuse cases, and cases involving the Boy Scouts continue through the courts, but these cases haven’t received any commensurate media coverage because the media hate the Catholic Church (also the Boy Scouts), which makes their troubles a big story.

In fact, some time in the past I remember reading an article (can’t find the exact piece right now, but this one mentions similar statistics) that stated that other clergy abuse children and/or teenagers with about the same frequency as Catholic priests. So what? All clergy have a higher responsibility than the normal run of people, and we have (or used to have) higher expectations for them, and the Church as an institution has a heavy responsibility too. And some recent allegations regarding a ring of child-abusing priests in Pennsylvania (see this) are shocking on a larger scale than usual.

So, what’s going on with Pope Francis? The story is a convoluted one; please read Hayward’s post as well as this one. The summary version is that there is evidence that Pope Francis protected a particular cleric accused of abusing young seminarians in the Catholic Church. Some of this is based on the following (from Hayward’s article):

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò of Ulpiana (a diocese in the Balkans) has released his full testimony about the matter here, in which he declares that “the [sex abuse cover up] corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy”—meaning Pope Francis himself.

Vigano’s testimony is quite an extraordinary document; here’s an excerpt:

To restore the beauty of holiness to the face of the Bride of Christ, which is terribly disfigured by so many abominable crimes, and if we truly want to free the Church from the fetid swamp into which she has fallen, we must have the courage to tear down the culture of secrecy and publicly confess the truths we have kept hidden. We must tear down the conspiracy of silence with which bishops and priests have protected themselves at the expense of their faithful, a conspiracy of silence that in the eyes of the world risks making the Church look like a sect, a conspiracy of silence not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the mafia.

Vigano tries to explain his own silence till now this way

I had always believed and hoped that the hierarchy of the Church could find within itself the spiritual resources and strength to tell the whole truth, to amend and to renew itself. That is why, even though I had repeatedly been asked to do so, I always avoided making statements to the media, even when it would have been my right to do so, in order to defend myself against the calumnies published about me, even by high-ranking prelates of the Roman Curia. But now that the corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy, my conscience dictates that I reveal those truths…

It is incendiary stuff.

Vigano’s statement “I had always believed and hoped that the hierarchy of the Church could find within itself the spiritual resources and strength…to amend and to renew itself” strangely parallels the reaction of many in the Church hierarchy towards the offending priests themselves—the idea that spiritual healing and renewal would occur. Many years ago, however, it became clear this wasn’t the way it happens for sex offenders. The overriding motivation of the higher-ups and the coverup seems to have been the desire to protect the Church itself from scandal.

That certainly didn’t work.

And Pope Francis’ response to Vigano? Silence:

The pope refused to address these allegations on Sunday, telling reporters, “I will not say a word about this.” One of his prominent allies in the United States, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, questioned the veracity of several of Viganò’s claims in a statement. And the pope’s defenders have characterized the letter as a smear against Francis, in part because of Viganò’s past clashes with the pope.

Vigano is conservative; the Pope is not, and they have a history of conflict. That is part of the background to this sordid mess.

US and Mexico trade: this deal could be a big, big deal

The New Neo Posted on by

More work to be done, but this is promising:

But the deal left open the question of whether Canada, the third country in NAFTA, would agree to the changes — and Trump himself said he wanted to throw out the name NAFTA altogether.

“They used to call it NAFTA,” Trump said. “We’re going to call it the United States-Mexico trade agreement. We’re going to get rid of NAFTA because it has a bad connotation.”

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the agreement was “absolutely terrific” and would modernize a trade deal that had “gotten seriously out of whack.” He said he hoped Congress would approve it with broad bipartisan support.

Does Congress do anything with bipartisan support anymore?

And if this really is successful, will any of Trump’s critics give him credit?