What's Really Going On with the Amazon Synod, & PC (Pachamama Catholics) too!

Amici,

Today is the Feast Day of St Raphael the Archangel. Go here: for a variety of prayers to him and also a novena, and the St. Raphael Chaplet. 

Alas, things in the Catholic Church are – quite honestly – in meltdown. The reaction to the tossing of the ugly, pathetic "earth goddess Pachamama" idols in the Tiber is what you'd expect of the PC (Pachama Catholic?) Church. "An act of bravado" and "theft" and so on.

Of course, the Amazon Synod has nothing to do with such "religious" aspect of things, but money and power are the REAL motives for what's happening. The following is an excellent interview about all that with Bernardo P. Küster, Brazilian Catholic Journalist – Mr Küster is an independent journalist in Brazil and he's been uncovering Church corruption and the bishops' links to the Marxists in Brazil. Amazing stuff. This "poor mouth" about the indigenous Amazon people is all cover for what they're really after: the 23 Trillion of mineral wealth in the Amazon basin (that's why the poor of Brazil's northeast get NO mention at all; the jackpot is in the Amazon. Review the interview for details. 

At 17 minutes in, Küster says, “The issue is never the issue. This is how these people think. They say we have to give the sacraments, but is it true? No; they want to use the pretext of the sacraments to change the Church, and destroy it.”

He is interviewed by John Henry Westen of Lifesite. This is a must see interview. And it dovetails perfectly with Maureen Mullarky's article here:

'The Catholic Church’s Amazon Synod Is Exploitation OfThe Poor Masquerading As The Opposite'

And also with Hilary White's excellent report on the simply unbelievably bad--rotten, stinking, putrid--state of the Italian hierarchy and how they're helping the hard Left there to try to win an election against Centrist/Family First politicians.

(Her new one on the same series about our papal disaster "Bergi" is here. 

So, behind the scenes, all this Sturm und Drang is smoke screening the Marxist/Leftist (and of course, "Homosexualist") takeover of the Church.

For those interested in the actual theological catastrophe enveloping Catholicism, see this Taylor Marshall and Tim Gordon vid I've linked to below.

Contra "PC Catholics (Pachamama Catholics): We Are the Religion of Idol Smashers

"Elijah wasn't 'racist'," Marshall says, "he hated idols because he loved God. Offenses toward God are the greatest offenses. We've lost that. Offending God: sins like apostasy, heresy. Commandment One. Once you commit those sins, the all rest of the Nine are easy. If you don't respect God, you're not going to respect your neighbor, the Lord's Day, your neighbors wife. All the sins fall from that. Our Lord Jesus Christ said, "The love of God is the first and greatest Commandment."

Great discussion of Taylor Marshall and Tim Gordon:

All things Pachamama: Are they Idols and was this Theft?

An excerpt:

"Elijah wasn't 'racist'," Marshall says, "he hated idols because he loved God. Offenses toward God are the greatest offenses. We've lost that. Offending God: sins like apostasy, heresy. Commandment One. Once you commit those sins, the all rest of the Nine are easy. If you don't respect God, you're not going to respect your neighbor, the Lord's Day, your neighbors wife. All the sins fall from that. Our Lord Jesus Christ said, "The love of God is the first and greatest Commandment."

An Préachán

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Things Have Gone Too Far in Bergoglio's Church (And 80 percent of the Brazilian Amazon are no longer Catholic, but Pentecostal

Amici,

After watching this just-out Taylor Marshall/Michael Hichborn video: I think things have gone beyond the usual pathetic Vat2 stupidity. Things have gone beyond the usual anything. Send it around to all your family and friends and People of Faith.

It's an hour and almost 14 minutes, but you won't have to get too far into it to know what's happening. Listen to it carefully, see the photos they provide, and know just what is going on in the Command Center of the Church. Things "move slowly" in the Church, but if a bishop sees this, now, and knows how depraved things are, right now, and doesn't insist Bergoglio has abandoned the papacy* and withdraw his support of Bergoglio based on what is going on, the actual pagan ritual inside the Vatican -- well...that's his eternal lookout. We don't have to tolerate it.

*As has been discussed among scholars, many authorities have discussed over the centuries how it would be -- in theory -- if a heretic pope existed, he would by definition have abandoned his office (one essential aspect of which is to guard the Deposit of Faith), while yet (the kicker) there's no authority in the Church to "judge" a pope, and thence that he has in fact abandoned the papal office.

Well, after watching the video, push has come to shove. We can't allow this farce -- this evil farce -- to continue. We at least can organize a letter-writing campaign to our bishops, in the spirit of the Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge. (St. Luke 18:1-8)

We have to make it plain that Bergoglio is no longer acceptable. This Amazon Synod Farce is – it ought to be –the straw that broke the camel's  back.

And besides, did you know that most of the people in the Amazon are no longer Catholics? They're evangelical or Pentecostal Protestant.

And as Bishop Azcona is quoted from this article above by Maureen Mullarkey here:

August brought us a key observation by José Luis Azcona, bishop emeritus of a Brazilian diocese in the Amazon River Delta: “The Amazon, at least the Brazilian Amazon, is no longer Catholic. . . . This point of departure is crucial for conducting the synod. If the Amazon has a Pentecostal majority, it is necessary to address that reality thoroughly. . . . Any nostalgia for an Amazon that no longer exists is fatal to its integral evangelization. Even in some areas of the Amazon the Pentecostal majority reaches 80%.”

Enough of this garbage is enough, my friends.

An Préachán

Our Lady and the Immaculate Conception Is Central to Our Salvation

Our Lady and her Immaculate Conception is central to our salvation, because just as Our Blessed Lord inherited His humanity -- His Jewish humanity -- through her, and thus could in Himself fulfill all the previous Covenants that God had made with the Patriarchs (the first Covenant being with all Creation, of course, and the second with Adam and Eve, and so on), over time creating, fashioning, the Jewish People in the process, preparing the way for His Incarnation -- so we, through our participation in the Incarnartion via the Most Holy Eucharist (itself the New Testament, New Covenant, not the 27 books of the Christian Bible), receive His Divinized Humanity. Being Incarnated ourselves in the Incarnation now, with our natures changed, is the core of the Faith, and it is something all Protestantism denies -- and denied from the very beginning.

And so our Blessed Mother's Immaculate Conception is the first step in the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, and our own incarnation in Him, we ourselves via the Most Holy Eucharist having Jewish blood in our arteries along with His Divinized Nature, with the Blessed Mother truly being OUR Mother now.

ALL OF THIS the Modernists and their tiresome, quasi-Lutheran, (cretinous, actually), teaching denies. Their understanding of what the Faith is is defective, based as they do base it on Evolution, our evolution in "understanding" and even "God's evolution". This is the unholy seed Protestantism bequeated them when it started, and that has since grown hideous, and it is what they want to foist on the Catholic Church, and what we Trad/Orthodox/Conservative Catholics repudiate.

There can be no "middle ground" with the Modernists.

RC

Trump, Syria, and the Kurds

Is President Trump somehow betraying the Kurds?

This is just another stick to beat the Trump piñata with.

We need to get outta there. That area of the world ate up Roman legions and a number of Roman emperors -- Julian the Apostate comes to mind, but so does the far more worthy Valerian.

It's a part of the world trapped in endless, endemic war, and was before the coming of Islam or the Mongols hoards. (Islam and the Mongol hoards made it worse.)

George H.W. Bush "betrayed" the Kurds, too, as did his son. Hell, the Kurds were "betrayed" by Picot and Sykes after WWI. The Brits "betrayed" them again when they left Iraq after WWII. The only "peace" the Kurds knew was when the Achaemenid Persian Empire ruled that entire area, and ironically enough, it was a Western conqueror, none other than Alexander himself, who overthrew them and ushered yet another millennium of brutal slaughter.

If Alex couldn't pull it off, who are we to try?

We need to get out. It's as simple as that. 

A "great power" is precisely that because it can chose when to fight, and when not to fight. Read Sun Tzu.

In fact, I think President Trump will do that region more good by us getting outta there than us staying. If we leave, and ignore the idiotic provocations of both Iran and Turkey, both of the regimes might well fall; they're probably headed for a collision course with each other anyway. If they're chaos grows, then powers more in need of the region's oil can become involved. 

Israel can defend itself. It's a nuclear nation and nothing terrifies like nukes, which is why the Iranians want nukes so badly, of course.

AnP

Did Pope Francis tell Eugenio Scalfari that he, Bergoglio, didn't beileve in the Divinity of Christ? It is highly likely.

Aimci,

The Vatican Press office is saying that Pope Francis did not deny the Divinity of Christ. 

So that clears that up, right? Nope. Of course he said it. A: He's done things like this since his election, using old Eugenio Scalfari to float ideas that he, Bergoglio, wants to float, yet at the same time, doing it this way give him "plausible deniability" when the backlash flames too hot.

B: And also, considering the odd way Scalfari talked about this, that Bergoglio said Our Lord was no longer God when He became Man, etc., is something having roots in Modernist "Process Theology" -- and one can reasonably ask how the doddering old Communist journalist clearly knew the details of such an absurd but at one time trendy theological notion.

A Commentator at OnePeterFive explains how Bergoglio learned this "Process Theology" idea himself during his studies, and thus it is highly likely that he believes it and actually did pass it on to Scalfari:

Deacon Augustine • 3 hours ago

I believe that Scalfari is more credible than the Vatican Press Office on this matter for the following reasons:

In 1966 the Dutch Jesuit Piet Schoonenberg contributed to the journal "Tijdschrift voor Theologie" in the article "Jezus Christus, gekend als men, beleden as Zoon Gods" ("Jesus Christ, Known as Man, Confessed as the Son of God", vol 6. 1966) along with the Augustinian theologian Ansfried Hulsbosch among others. Schoonenberg was one of the founders of the "Nouvelle Theologie", and a contributing editor of the infamous Dutch catechism (did I mention that he was a Jesuit?). He was known as a "process theologian" and advocate of the "Ascending Christology" or "Christology from below" that was so popular at the time and during the following decades. He studied philosophy, theology, and exegesis in Nijmegen, Maastricht, and the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. In 1948 he received the doctorate in theology at Maastricht with a dissertation on theology as interpretation of faith according to recent French literature (la nouvelle théologie and its critics). After teaching for several years at Maastricht and Amsterdam, he became associated with the Higher Catechetical Institute at Nijmegen in 1957. In 1964 he was appointed ordinary professor of dogmatic theology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, where he became professor emeritus in 1976 and where his closest collaborator was the Dominican Edward Schillebeeckz.
In McBrien's "Catholicism", Schoonenberg's Christology (did I mention that he was a Jesuit?), as set out in the above paper, is briefly summarized as follows:

"More deliberately than Hulsbosch, Schoonenberg confronts the question of the pre-existence of Christ. He argues that the Second Person of the Trinity is none other than the human person of Jesus, who came to exist at a specific moment in time. God is initially a single Person, therefore, but as history unfolds God becomes two Persons, and then three. Christ is God's ultimate revelation, however, and not simply a fortuitous climax to history. In him the fullness of what it is to be human is realized, just because the fullness of the Godhead dwells in him."

Following Hulsbosch, Jesus was a human being who became God - he was not God who became a human being. Needless to say, he was repeatedly reprimanded by the CDF for the unorthodoxy of his teaching. The Scriptural texts which Schoonenberg used to justify his "Christology from below" are precisely those which Scalfari refers to in his above article.

It is notable that Schoonenberg was teaching his "Christology from below" at Nijmegen from 1964 to 1976. He continued writing until 1992. This would cover the exact period when another Jesuit would receive his own theological formation from the Society. Completing his novitiate on 12th March 1960, this other Jesuit went on to complete his tertianship at Alcala de Henares in Spain taking his fourth vow on 22nd April 1973. It wouldn't be until 1986 that he went to Germany to complete his doctoral thesis. This other Jesuit was, Jorge Bergoglio.

Now, please tell me what is more likely:

a) A 95 year-old atheist journalist somehow stumbled upon the theological ramblings of a dodgy Jesuit professor from the 60's and 70's, using the same texts and coming to the same sort of conclusions as his "Ascending Christology" school of thought?

or

b) He heard them, or something approximating to them, from another Jesuit who received his formation at the same time that these theories were doing the rounds in the Society of Jesus (and probably still are for all I know)?

I think that the pertinent dubium to submit to the Pope is whether the Ascending Christology of Piet Schoonenberg SJ is now acceptable to be believed and taught within the Catholic Church? If so, is this what he believes personally?

AnP
PS 
For those who have the time to watch video, Taylor Marshall is just back from Rome and reports here on how crazily pagan this whole "Amazon Synod" is. 
Excerpts"

“They are literally overtaking the Vatican Gardens and doing pagan rituals. If we had said (at any time in the recent past) that there would be pagan rituals in the Vatican Gardens, people would have said, ‘You’re just conspiracy theorists." Where are those naysayers now? – Tim Gordon.

“For all those people who said my book (Infiltration) was a shoddy conspiracy theory, shame on you. You carried water for pagans. … You can’t have the pope sit in front of pagan idols and say, ‘The Church makes sense’. And any bishop who is quiet about this, moving forward, is complicit.” … “This is a spiritual battle. Now is the time for war, and the main weapon is the Rosary. If you’re not praying the Rosary, you’re not on the team.” – Taylor Marshall

And remember that this report was put together just before Eugenio Scalfari’s latest bombshell, in which he claims that in his presence, Pope Francis denied the divinity of Jesus.

Part II Why a Diocese Should Have No More than 100,000 Catholics

Cont.

Bottom Line

Yet, one man has to captain any ship. So, how to manage. 

One way to do it is to give the bishop an auxiliary, such as Los Angeles have five such. Giving him auxiliary bishops is like tag-teaming them. Who is the guy we really need to go to when we have problems? Who's the boss?

Another way is in the wretched Vatican II Church, we have these miserable "National Bishop Conferences", where a bishop's authority goes to die in a miasma of bureaucracy. Bishops, and their office, are (to coin a phrase) Biblical. Peter as chief of the Apostles, is Biblical. St Paul discussing with Timothy and Titus what to look for in men who are to be ordained bishops, that's Biblical. 

National Bishop conferences are not. Nor are synods, not in the sense of synodal government, such as Russia had from the days of "The First Peter" (Peter the Great) down to the Revolution in 1917, or the Republic of Greece has today. That's apparently what Bergoglio wants to turn the Catholic Church into. 

On the other hand, a synod or Church Council that meets to hammer out a particular solution to a particular problem, that's Biblical: The First Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. But governing the Church, managing it and running it via a synod, that's not.

What the National Bishops conferences are is a long stride toward Synod rule, and what they offer is a chaos of confusion, for leadership is buried in a bureaucracy and no actual bishop seems to have any power or authority. Bishops Conferences fail the basic point of leadership: one man, a general of an army or a captain of a ship or a president of a nation, one man has to be responsible for what happens. Bureaucracy negates that.

Tradition Solution?
Meanwhile, Ohio has one archbishop, in Cincinnati, in an archdiocese has 472,000 Catholics. But what is an archbishop? Well, the title now is basically an honorific, but historically, the pope, in far off Rome, would send a pallium, a special long, thin cloth, to a bishop of a far-off nation and that made the recipient an archbishop. The archbishop thereafter governed things in that local Church as a stand-in for the pope. He was the pope's vicar, essentially. Medieval England had two archbishops, in Canterbury, the primary one, and in York, for northern England. Ireland had four archbishops, one for each ancient Irish kingdom (Armagh, for Ulster, Dublin, for Leinster, Cashel for Munster, and Tuam for Connacht). 

However, as noted, today the archbishop title is pretty much merely titular. Technically, has a suffragan bishops, bishops under his direction -- but as they all report directly to Rome, this is window dressing. Cincinnati's Ohio suffragan dioceses are Cleveland, Columbus, Steubenville, Toledo, and Youngstown. Steubenville is the most interesting of these, as it was created in 1944 because some rich family or other wanted a bishopric for their son. Had it not been for that, its territory would have stayed part of the Columbus diocese. Currently, Steubenville has about 38,600 Catholics, which is very manageable, though it is mostly Appalachian territory; hardly a "Catholic" region at all. 

The diocese of Cleveland, on the other hand, has 677,000 Catholics, out of a diocesan territorial population of 2,774,000 people! Toledo has 322,000 Catholics and 123 parishes. (That averages to over 2,600 people per parish -- how is a parish priest going to manage that?) And finally, Youngstown has 198,000 Catholics. and it has 94 parishes, or over 2,000 people per parish, again. 

Now, in Protestant terms, a church with over 2,000 members would be a "mega-church" with a huge staff running it. In Catholic terms, none of support Protestant mega-church support network exists for the parish priest.

Therefor it is fair to ask how is any of Ohio's dioceses are really manageable, on any sort of "personal" basis, by any of the bishops -- except in Ohio's case, Steubenville?

But if we reconfigured the Church in such a way that the bishops were directly responsible to the archbishops only, and the archbishops were directly responsible to the pope in Rome, we'd end up with a system wherein the Vatican still had about 5-6,000 "bishops" to deal with, but they'd be archbishops. The pope could hold each archbishop responsible for managing his bishops, and they in turn would be focused on their people, whom they'd be expected to know much better, letting the archbishop handle the big problems.

100,000
Some considerations: because there are 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, having a rule that each bishop can only have about 100,000 or so people, would end us up with 13,000 bishops, instead of the 5,100 bishops (Latin rite and Eastern) currently existent in the Catholic Church.

Using Ohio as a guide, we'd have to break up all the dioceses except Steubenville (we could add a few counties to it, actually). Cleveland and Cincinnati would be broken up into three dioceses apiece, and Columbus, Toledo, and Youngstown, into two apiece. That's 13 dioceses altogether. 

The archbishop of Cincinnati would have to manage 13 bishops, unless it was deemed necessary to break the state up into two archbishops, one in Cincinnati (southwest corner of the state) and one in Cleveland (north coast of the state). The actual Catholic laity would be better served by their bishops, and the archbishops could deal with the pope -- directly, because we would eradicate the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops! No more big hotel ballrooms full of prelates voting at long banquet tables! No more bishop voting at all. Just responsibility "personified" in the local bishop and then his archbishop. 

Now, I would think the Vatican would want to appoint the archbishops, but the local bishops could (and should) be elected by their cathedral chapters -- something most Cathedrals probably don't have. And the laity could have some input in that, too. Laity could suggest men for ordination as bishop, and the Cathedral chapter choose from among them, with archbishop approving. 

Besides this, every nation would have a national Primate or Patriarch. In a huge country like the U.S., it is probably necessary to create a "Major Archishop" position, as well, someone who managed a team of 20 or 40 archbishops. 

Of course, Bergoglio rather wreck the Church than save it, and he would never implement such a plan; and the bishops themselves would be terrified. They actually be publicly accountable! They couldn't palm it off to the national bishop bureau shop! 

But something has to be done. It is probably too late to save the Church from breaking up into National Language Churches in any event. In another 50 years, there will be a plethora of "National Language Catholic Churches" on the Orthodox model, a bunch of essentially "linguistic ghetto churches" supposedly in Communion but actually loathing one another. There will be, of course, a Latin Mass Latin-Rite Catholic Church existing throughout the world, and everyone, Christian or not, will naturally see that Church as the really only truly "Catholic Church". 

I don't think one needs to be a divinely inspired prophet to foresee that!

AnP

Why a Diocese Should Not Have More Than 100,000 Catholics...

Amici,

The Situation

The Church is in a mess, we all know that, and many reasons exist on the spiritual side of things (lack of Faith being primary) for why this is so. But more prosaic reason might also exist.

We have about 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, and 5,100 bishops. The bishops are obviously overwhelmed. They are supposed to govern their dioceses. How can they remotely do so with statistics like these? Surely, we can have little doubt that a titanic portion of the Church's troubles originate in this prosaic fact: Too many Catholics for too few bishops.

No Catholic bishop can be effective in being a bishop if he has a diocese of much over 100,000 people. And no pope can manage the world's five thousand bishops. No pope, no Vatican, can do so very closely, to any seriously good effect, to say the least. Remember, the Vatican appoints bishops; how good a job have they done the last 50+ years?

The Church itself has lasted -- on a secular, organizational level -- as a top-down ruling system, since its beginning. Obviously, it has a transcendent religious, supernatural dimension, but just purely in secular terms, the local bishop has been the cart-blanc ruler, with only a limited hierarchy above him, culminating in the pope in Rome. (I know Orthodox and Protestants reject this history, but as I reject their pseudo-history, we're even.)

From the early days of the Church, the bishop was the main guy -- priest, ruler, organizer and witness, guardian of the Faith. More formally, one could write that a bishop holds the fullness of the sacrament of holy orders and is responsible for teaching doctrine. The First Vatican Council in 1870 affirmed that each bishop is a direct heir of the Apostles (even as Pio Nono, Pius IX, sought to turn them into secretaries to the Vatican, which has proved to be a disaster).

And of course, each bishop created a hierarchy within each diocese, mirroring that of the Jerusalem Temple before it was destroyed. But above each bishop, due to the exigencies of human life, human rule, the nature of human organizations, there was a hierarchy culminating in one man. That was the pope, the bishop of Rome. (Again, regarding papal supremacy, the deniers of that, the Orthos and Prots, can go fish.)

When the early second century Corinthians had trouble with their bishop, they wrote to Rome and Pope Clement to resolve it. They didn't write to a neighboring Greek bishop or to Antioch, at that time "Queen of the East" and home of a flourishing Christian church wherein Christians were first called by that name, "Christians".

But within his diocese, it was the bishop who was priest in all Seven Sacraments, including ordination. As congregations grew, bishops appointed solid, elderly men to be "presbyters" (the word means "elder") to do baptisms, say Mass, hear confessions, preach, etc. But the bishops always kept the power to ordain.

Everyone in the town knew their bishop and he knew everyone. (Christianity was 'townie'; everyone outside was 'pagani', originally meaning rural folk.) He was their priest. Only after the Emperor Constantine made Christianity a state religion did they begin the create parishes with priests assigned to them. (That parish model of the Church is today under great stress for various reasons, and will probably be replaced.)

This history of small bishoprics one can see in Italy, where smallish towns have bishops, whereas in the U.S., only large cities are likely to have them. 

Today, a bishop is lucky if his diocese only has 50-60,000 or so Catholics. However, one bishop responsible for two or three hundred thousand Catholics in a diocese is NOT going to be effective. (Consider: the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has 4.4 million Catholics and five auxiliary bishops.) He'd be (and most of them actually are) a remote figurehead, useless to his flock and to himself as an actual leader of anything. In the U.S., each bishop is basically a CEO, and money management to keep the diocese afloat is his primary concern. 

And all that is one reason we had Mother Angelica become so powerful and influential: first, she was orthodox, not a heretic, and second, she did for Catholics through the medium of television what bishops should have been doing face-to-face. It is also why Catholic Answers and Catholic Apologetics in general have been mostly a freelance laity affair. "When the great have fallen," said Aragon, after Gandalf fell in Moria, "the less must lead." Since the hierarchy is not doing its job, the laity has to.

So, a Church with huge dioceses. Put it in perspective: Imagine a full (four-star) general -- with no colonels, let alone brigadiers or major generals, just captains and majors -- commanding an army of one hundred thousand men! How's that going to work? A typical US Army division today is about 17,000 to 21,000 and up to 40,000 with attached units, and they're under the command of a Major General. (Two stars)

Compare that to the Columbus, Ohio, diocese, from where I (more or less) came from before moving to Europe. It has one bishop, two retired bishops, 147 diocesan priests, total. Less than 100 are active and some 50 are assigned from religious orders or from outside in some way. It has 105 parishes. It covers 23 Ohio counties.

AND IT HAS A POPULATION OF 252,000 CATHOLICS!
(That's out of a total regional population of 2,456,000!)

How can one bishop even remotely hope to "govern" that, in the sense of being available to rank-and-file Catholics, confirming them, visiting with them, actually getting to know ANY (but wealthiest) of them? In other words, be a bishop? How can he remotely take into consideration the non-Catholics of his diocese, for that matter? (A bishop is supposed to be bishop of them all, one way or another. And a bishop has to be the primary apologist for the Faith to the non-Catholics, and is any bishop in the U.S. that?)

See Part II

AnP

Climate Change Hysteria and Michael Mann in Hiding

Friends,

Michael Mann lost his libel suit against Dr Tim Ball. This is big news, indeed.

Michael Mann, inventor of the notorious "hockey stick graft" that started "Global Warming," sued Ball for calling him a fraud and that he, Mann, should be in the "state pen" rather than "Penn State." However, Mann refused to, when so ordered by the court, to produce his "science" proving the hockey stick. The judge finally found against Mann and ordered him to pay court costs.

It had clearly been Mann's intention to drag this through the courts till the people sued "settled out of court" but old and distinguished Tim Ball wouldn't do that. Mann, clearly, is loathe to actually produced his "research". (Because Mann is an employee of a state college, supported by public funds, and because his research affects the lives of millions, if not billions, of people, it is insufferable for him to hide this research from the public.)

Details here from Mark Steyn, whom Mann also sued, but this time, in the U.S.:

https://www.steynonline.com/9742/michael-e-mann-loser

 And here's the actual British Columbia's official court judgment: 2019 BCSC 1580 Mann v. Ball

 Mann is not showing up at this debate in NYC either: Live stream climate debate from NYC – minus the Manntastic players

Okay, so the guy who started it all is gone into hiding, basically. "The bloom is off the ruse."

Meanwhile, an Australian broadcaster roasts spoiled children and climate change

WATCH: Australian Broadcaster Takes Down the Spoiled Climate Protesting Students In Epic Fashion

One such child might -- possibly -- be Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old much in the news recently, as well. Actually, she has some mental problems and an eating disorder, which some are saying her focus on "Climate Change" is making worse, as here: https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/video-greta-thunberg-rips-world-leaders-at-the-u-n/

An excerpt:

The Swedish teenager is not some science prodigy who graduated young from some Ivy League school with an advanced agree in physics or anything like that. Rather, the daughter (and granddaughter) of famous actors and opera singers suffers from Asperger's syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and selective mutism. 

This might well constitute child abuse, to put such a kid through all this hysteria, to use someone disturbed for political ends. There's been widespread use of kids to demand climate change -- and that's a form of using them as "human shields", as various commentators have pointed out.

Final thought: in the U.S., the Democrat Party is making a big noise about Climate Change and the draconian regime they'll set in motion once they are in power: but every single city (not to mention pretty much the entire state of California) wherein Democrats enjoy decades-long one-party rule, are absolute filthy, rat-infested, medieval-disease Hell-holes.

So that's the crowd of clowns who are going to help the planet?

Maybe the U.S. courts can force Michael Mann to cough up his "research" and then we can see how "scientific" all this fiasco is.

RC

Can China Feed Itself?

Can China feed itself? Not really, as of now. And certainly not if they go to war.

We hear endless what a titan, what a colossus, Red China is. And President Trump is trying to slow down their greedy, godless, and already brutal march to world domination. Those deeply vested in China oppose Trump, obviously. Victor Davis Hanson has a good article on China and the President here.

But for what it is worth, as a disciple of Sun Tzu (and I eat popcorn with chopticks and practice Chinese calligraphy when I have the time, which is rare), I maintain that in a street fight, especially if your opponent is a huge, beefed up colusses, it is easy to take him down if you go for a knee. You don't have to take out both knees. One cracked knee will put him on the floor and keep him there. Marquis of Queensbury it isn't, but such is life.

What I mean is, should China – God forbid – ever actually try to go to war with its Asian neighbors, or the U.S., it has a knee in danger, indeed. Its agriculture.

Can Communist China feed itself? And if they can't feed themselves, why not? The Answer: Because they have a huge population much larger than their share of the world's arable land. And they have a top-down, Communist economic system. That's the basic idea. Of course, technology and genetics can help with both (though the Communism will hamper that), but any sort of war or aggressive behavior on their part, and those aids go out the window.

Had the time to do a bit of searching for this. According to this article in Nature: the Chinese hope to become self-sufficient in grain, but right now they import 95 million tonnes (metric) and that's 17 percent of their "domestic production". It's actually an interesting article, especially if one reads between the lines. 

They say the Chinese claim to store for emergency (like what, war?) most of what they import (but can we really be sure of that? We know how they lie like rugs about their other production stats). As noted, they have 7-8 percent of the worlds agricultural land, but feed 22 percent of its population. Clearly, any national crisis, like a sustained war effort, would challenge such a situation, putting it under extreme stress.

Apparently, north China produces 60 percent of their grain, but that's due to extensive irrigation. According to reports, water tables are lowering and droughts occur. But hahaha, the article also argues that "Global Warming" (yeah, right) will provide them with both more water and more arable land. Since we know Global Warming is a scam, all of that can be discounted.

Then there's this Bloomberg article: 

This one is ridiculously upbeat about how China will get more countries to grow food for it and how it will use technology to feed itself – but for our purposes, the whole point is that they WON'T get food from other countries if they go to war, A, and B, an agriculture that is heavily based on technology can go bust if the power grids are taken down, or the infrastructure damaged in other ways. (Damage to infrastructure often happens in war, 'tis said.)

All very, very shaky.

And thanks to an acquaintance, here's an air quality map of China. Phew! How do they breathe???

Remember, Communist China produces pollution like the Communist regimes did in Central Europe and Russia. The Chicoms have grievously polluted their environment. My acquaintance also wrote, "A recent World Bank study found pollution in China was caused approximately 750,000 preventable deaths a year and almost five hundred million Chinese citizens have no access safe drinking water. Did you get that? Forty percent of the country has no safe drinking water."

So therefore, it seems to me, that China has more problems than they care to admit, and any crazy war of imperial conquest would collapse them from within. 

AnP

Reflections on an Old Communist's Heart-Attack

Everything going so well in Trump's America – his Economics of Main Street seem to be beating the Globalists' Economics of Wall Street – yet the Left is insanely angry, cranked up on envy and spite to the point they're having heart attacks?

What else is that but yet another example of Original Sin? Chesterton said it was the only Church doctrine you could prove by opening the daily newspaper.

As for the Socialism these narcissistic, spiteful demons of envy promote, it is technically called "Economic Determinism" in the great miasma of Metaphysical Materialism that dominates our cultural elite. Chesterton (to quote him again) said that Economic Determinism is like saying, because I have feet, I only walk around on them to find shoes for them.

We should be able, in the battle of ideas, to defeat such imbecility.

Or we would if the Church's current Pope weren't spouting it every day as "gospel".

AnP