― The Boscombe Valley Mystery
Czechoslovak who escaped communism - Peter Biskup 1926-2013
Liberals urged to double size to deal with rise of populism.
Liberal president Nick Greiner, of Mittleuropean descent - Hungarian Slovak, has set of goal of doubling party membership to 100,000, while warning of the danger of election defeat if the Morrison government displayed hubris and arrogance.
Car crashes and rolls onto graves at Rookwood Cemetery
Footage taken at the scene shows the car on its side lying across several graves in an area with rows of grave sites.
Andrej's Castle:
Andrej's Castle:
Working on the night shift
.
When you retire from your work you look
back on the jobs you did as if they were
nothing but stories. When the Easterns
said there is no past, that’s what they meant:
other than the pain that’s in your bones right
now, the here and now, everything else is just
words you distribute to your younger friends.
.
Anyway, I did the math the other day and
figured out I spent a third of my working
years on the midnight shift, working while
you slept, trying to be quiet so I didn’t
wake you, missing the sun. Every time you
woke to pee or get a glass of water I was
watering a golf course or sending trucks
out from some post office dock, and on
your way to work I was on my first beer.
.
I did the math and figured out I’m not
tired anymore, at least not the tired that
comes from fighting for the chance to
dream, or from envying sleep like it’s my
neighbor’s big house. I can go to sleep
whenever I want now, and sometimes
I just want to sleep forever
.
How IBM’s Technology Powered the Holocaust
According to a book by human rights journalist Edwin Black, Hitler needed logistical help in carrying out the genocide of Europe’s Jewish population. IBM, an American company whose leadership was obsessed with growth and profits, was happy to provide Hitler with their punch card machines and technology. FromThe Nazi Party: IBM & “Death’s Calculator” (excerpted from Black’s 2001 bookIBM and the Holocaust):
Solipsistic and dazzled by its own swirling universe of technical possibilities, IBM was self-gripped by a special amoral corporate mantra: if it can be done, it should be done. To the blind technocrat, the means were more important than the ends. The destruction of the Jewish people became even less important because the invigorating nature of IBM’s technical achievement was only heightened by the fantastical profits to be made at a time when bread lines stretched across the world.
Just as I suspected, a lot of what people dutifully recycle, after wasting water washing the containers, gets thrown into landfills anyway. My wife's a good Catholic girl. She doesn't worship the Green Goddess, but some of my neighbors do. Across the street there lives a pussy-hatted liberal lady, single and reclusive, who actually trekked to Trump's inaugural there to protest the Orange Racist in her pussyhat. Said neighbor pays for a special recyclables pickup. She allows us to use her barrel gratis. Now we already have two scheduled trash pickups per week. The recyclables one makes for a third. This causes further environmental damage. The heavy truck stresses our street, burns fossil fuels, and makes a godawful, cat-scaring racket worse than the "infernal cracking of whips" about which Schopenhauer so eloquently complained in his classic On Noise.
When wifey is not looking, I just throw the trash in the normal receptacle and cover it up with used cat litter and the output of the shredder, all the while thinking mean thoughts about Miss Occasional Cortex.
As I always say: No day without political incorrectness!
Mirabile dictu, you may be saving the oceans by not recycling! Read the article for the reasoning behind this startling claim.
As for Bergoglio the Benighted, he too should read the article, stop worrying about straws in the ocean, and start teaching the Four Last Things. Assuming he hasn't forgotten what they are.
On Securing a Toilet in the Soviet Socialist Craphole
Yet another reason why you don't want the U. S. to become the S. U.
Bernie Sanders take note!
Rod Dreher reports that a Russian friend visited him and recounted the following story:
Vladimir told a great one about how his father, during Soviet times, solved the family’s toilet problem.When the family’s toilet bowl cracked, you couldn’t just go to the hardware store and buy a replacement. What hardware store? The government installed that toilet, and it was the government’s responsibility to replace it. But good luck getting on a list to have your toilet replaced. Finally, Vladimir’s father, a senior engineer, cooked up a plan. He had a Communist Party connection in a city called Novokuznetzk, a guy who could get him a new toilet.Problem: Vladimir’s family lived in Dnipro, Ukraine; Novokuznetzk is on the other side of the USSR, near the Mongolian border — a 17-hour flight.But the family needed a toilet. So off dad went.How did he get the toilet home? He lugged it onto the Aeroflot flight, and sat on the toilet all the way back to Dnipro. Though a small man, Vladimir’s dad wrestled the toilet up into their apartment and installed it. There it remains to this day.A system that makes a man have to fly 17 hours one way to get a new toilet through back channel connections, then ride all the way back home sitting on top of that commode — that’s not a system that works.
No shit!
Why Did Communism Fail?
Richard Pipes, Communism: A History, Modern Library, 2001, p. 154:
In sum, Communism failed and is bound to fail for at least two reasons: one, that to enforce equality, its principal objective, it is necessary to create a coercive apparatus that demands privileges and thereby negates equality; and two, that ethnic and territorial loyalties, when in conflict with class allegiances, everywhere and at all times overwhelm them, dissolving Communism into nationalism, which is why socialism so easily combines with "Fascism."
The enforcing of equality requires an agency of enforcement, the revolutionary vanguard, that is vastly unequal in power to those who are being equalized. And this for the simple reason that people will resist expropriation: they will not willingly surrender what they consider to be the product of their labor. The deplorable masses will have to be forced, for their own good, to become good socialists. But once the vanguard gets a taste of power and its privileges and perquisites, it will not willingly surrender them and the wealth that comes in their train. Greed is ancient and endemic in the human condition. It antedates capitalism. It is therefore not a product of capitalism, and cannot be erased by erasing capitalism. The upshot is that the method by which Communists aim to enforce equality insures that equality will never be reached.
Catholics Defending Communists!?
This is indecent. This is obscene. This is unspeakable. The Jesuit magazine Americahas published what it titles “The Catholic Case For Communism.” Author Dean Dettloff begins by criticizing a piece that Dorothy Day published in that same magazine in 1933, in which she talked about people being drawn to Communism out of admirable idealism, but failing to grasp that Communism wants to destroy the Church. Dettloff writes:
But in her attempt to create sympathy for the people attracted to communism and to overcome a knee-jerk prejudice against them, Day needlessly perpetuated two other prejudices against communism. First, she said that under all the goodness that draws people to communism, the movement is, in the final analysis, a program “with the distinct view of tearing down the church.”Then, talking about a young communist in her neighborhood who was killed after being struck by a brick thrown by a Trotskyite, she concluded that young people who follow the goodness in their hearts that may lead them to communism are not fully aware of what it is they are participating in—even at the risk of their lives. In other words, we should hate the communism but love the communist.Though Day’s sympathetic criticism of communism is in many ways commendable, nearly a century of history shows there is much more to the story than these two judgments suggest. Communist political movements the world over have been full of unexpected characters, strange developments and more complicated motivations than a desire to undo the church; and even through the challenges of the 20th century, Catholics and communists have found natural reasons to offer one another a sign of peace.
Hats off to Rod Dreher for condemning the Jesuit magazine America for publishing an article defending commies. Excerpt:
Wait a minute. No fair-minded and intellectually curious person could object to an essay in a Catholic magazine criticizing the excesses of capitalism. It’s also easy to see the justification for publishing an essay defending democratic socialism from a Catholic point of view. And nobody could reasonably complain about an essay like Dorothy Day wrote in 1933, explaining why some idealists are drawn to Communism.But an essay defending Communism? Really? What to make of this?My own views are very strong. A couple of weeks ago, I knelt in Warsaw at the grave of the Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, the chaplain of the Solidarity labor union movement. He was beaten to death by agents of the Communist government for opposing them. This is what Communists did to Father Jerzy
So yes, in Poland, Communism and the Catholic Church had a “complicated” relationship.
EveryCRSReport.com – Executive Privilege and Individuals outside the Executive Branch October 9, 2019 IN11177 – “White House assertions of executive privilege for presidential communications have historically been confined to individuals who were executive branch employees when those communications occurred. While the idea that executive privilege could extend to individuals outside the executive branch predates the Trump Administration, it appears that recent testimony by Kris Kobach, former Kansas Secretary of State, and Corey Lewandowski, former manager of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, are likely the first times the executive branch has actually made such an assertion to Congress. For decades, Presidents have asserted executive privilege by instructing current and former executive branch officials to refuse to respond to congressional questions about communications with the President and the deliberations of the executive branch. While the Supreme Court recognized in United States v. Nixon that the privilege is rooted in the Constitution, it also held that the privilege is not absolute and that the value of confidentiality within the executive branch needs to be balanced against the other branches’ need for information. While the Nixon decision related only to court access to presidential records, this principle has also applied to congressional access. Since that time, Congress and the executive branch have developed a shared understanding of some aspects of executive privilege through decades of negotiations and the precedents established by self-imposed limits on executive privilege in prior presidential Administrations…”
