The Caribbean Crisis of the 21st Century?

was-donald-trump-blocked-from-using-the-nuclear-codes-against-iran-1

I must be the only one who is not bothered by the potential nuclear war because I kinda doubt whether the nukes really exist. I mean it's like the Caribbean crisis all over again. The story was that some brave Soviet officer refused to follow the order to launch nukes at the USA. Now it's an American general who did the same?

There is one country though which supposedly has them and wouldn't hesitate to use them, but they don't. I guess you can't launch what doesn't exist, can you? I know it's an unproven conspiracy theory but it sort of gives one the peace of mind;)

USA And Pope Leo

WT*???

If true, this explains many things. 

Palm Sunday

 

Some people were unable to worship though...

About Smartphone Addiction

Someone asked me a question about it. Yes, these darn things are very addictive, I know from personal experience, unfortunately. And the big companies want it this way. In fact, there are several lawsuits running about this very topic right now:

Instagram's parent company Meta and Google's YouTube face claims that their platforms deliberately addict and harm children. TikTok and Snap, which were originally named in the lawsuit, settled for undisclosed sums...

Mark Lanier delivered the opening statement for the plaintiffs first, in a lively display where he said the case is as "easy as ABC," which he said stands for "addicting the brains of children." He called Meta and Google "two of the richest corporations in history" that have "engineered addiction in children's brains."

... He emphasized the findings of a study Meta conducted called "Project Myst" in which they surveyed 1,000 teens and their parents about their social media use. The two major findings, Lanier said, were that the company knew children who experienced "adverse events" like trauma and stress were particularly vulnerable for addiction; and that parental supervision and controls made little impact...

He also showed internal Google documents that likened YouTube to a casino, and internal communication between Meta employees in which one person said Instagram is "like a drug" and that employees are "basically pushers."

 You can read the whole article over here. And here is another one on the same topic from CNN. 

So yes, it's not all in your mind. The only advice I can give (and it doesn't work perfectly) is to acquire a laptop (you can buy them quite cheap second-hand, at least where I live), install it in a permanent place (connect the printer and speakers to it so that you don't face temptation to take it everywhere with you) and use it for browsing. Use your phone for phone stuff and may be sending messages/WhatsApp. If it's possible for you, use WiFi at home while on your phone and disconnect it from 4G so that you can't surf the net while outside. You still can use it for emergency situations. I know it's easier said than done though but it might help;)

Here's Another Conspiracy

As you probably have heard, it appears that the Taliban just banned the internet in Afghanistan, together with mobile communication. While various MSM were predictably writing articles about "women and girls being hardest hit" (I guess men and boys in Afghanistan don't use it then) the Taliban themselves deny the report. 

The reasons behind the blackout are still not completely clear but there are comments on social media claiming that it has something to do with them preparing for an outside attack. So here is the latest conspiracy theory for us to ponder. I guess we learn soon enough what everyone is up to...

So What's Happening Between Pr. Trump And Elon Musk?

Time for a bit of political news:

Elon Musk is now raging on X against President Trump, after Trump talked greasy to the press over Musk's opposition to the "Big Beautiful Bill" over the past several days. 

"Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate," Musk wrote, adding "Such ingratitude." 

You heard it here first!

And The New Pope Is...

 an American:

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost has been selected as the 267th pope in history. He is the first American to serve in the role and will be known as Pope Leo XIV.

I couldn't find anything about his views on social issues but given that he was close to Pope Francis, he is probably more on a liberal side. 

Anyway, congratulations to my Catholic readers!

Some Good News For A Change

 Church attendance in Britain is increasing. Partly due to immigrants though (as per comments) and only in conservative churches.

The Pope Is Dead

 Condolences to all the Catholics reading this blog. Isn't there some prophecy about it, btw?

Did Prayers Save The Pope?

 This is interesting:

Alfieri said he believed that prayers for the pope help keep him alive, something that the doctor said is backed by scientific literature.

“In this case the whole world was praying. I can say that twice the situation was lost, and then it happened like a miracle,’’ the doctor said, adding that “of course he was a very cooperative patient.’’

Is Donald Trump Pro-Life?

 I know people were complaining about him in this regard, and yet one of the first things he did was this:

President Trump delivered a massive win on Thursday when he announced pardons for 23 pro-life activists who were prosecuted by the Biden Administration. Trump’s executive action was a major win for the pro-life movement and relief for those incarcerated.

That's some good news for sure!

Congratulations, President Trump!

 He stopped a war and restored Tiktok before even taking office. Impressive. Let's hope it only gets better from here:)

P.S. President Donald Trump sounds kinda nice, doesn't it?

Taliban And Female Employment

 Taliban keeps coming up in the news because of their weird rules about female behaviour, or, at least, they are quite weird to us here in the West. They have done quite a lot to restrict the work of women outside home.

For instance about 2 weeks ago, they threatened to close Western NGOs which employ women:

The government was once again ordering the stoppage of all female work in institutions not controlled by the Taliban, according to the letter.

“In case of lack of cooperation, all activities of that institution will be canceled and the activity license of that institution, granted by the ministry, will also be canceled.”

There is never an explanation given in any of these news sources as to why the Taliban would do it, outside of them being cavemen and barbarians generally mean people who dislike women. 

Yet, while browsing the alternative media, I recently came across this article about Afghanistan, which states, among other things, that

The economy, which previously subsisted on foreign aid and opium poppy cultivation, has contracted significantly since the Taliban takeover in 2021, with widespread unemployment, underemployment, household debt and poverty affecting around 48 percent of the population.

In other words, there are not enough jobs around for men who have to support their households. Some families have no income at all and are reduced to poverty and begging while others probably have 2 incomes (I mean which type of women are employed by the Western NGOs, could it be those who speak good English and come from affluent background?)

It's virtually the same situation which Europe faced during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the solutions offered were pretty much the same, the restriction of female employment. In Europe men weren't expected to support their unmarried female relatives (often with the exception of widows/mothers) so single women still could work outside home.

If you look at it from this angle, then suddenly these restrictions appear quite sensible, minus potato sacks, of course, but then are we really in the position to judge? 

Election Day In The Usa

 My prediction: D.Trump will win. I can be mistaken, of course.We'll see tomorrow, I guess.

Who Is Really Behind "Family Planning" ?

 Here is a noteworthy article from NY Times (of course;) which decries recent Chinese attempts to improve their abysmal birth rates:

...Faced with a declining population that threatens economic growth, the Chinese government is responding with a time-tested tactic: inserting itself into this most intimate of choices for women, whether or not to have a child...

At the very least, the in-your-face approach makes it harder for women to tune out calls by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to get married and have babies. To some, it is outright invasive; on social media, women have complained about being approached by neighborhood officials, including some who they said called to ask the date of their last menstrual cycle.

Mr. Xi, who has overseen a crackdown on feminist activism, has said that promoting childbirth as a national priority is one step toward ensuring that women “always walk with the party.” (The country’s total fertility rate, a measure of the number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime, is among the world’s lowest. The rate is estimated at around 1.0, compared to 1.62 in the United States last year.) 

 South Korea has an even lower TFR with few attempts to improve it, btw.

The fertility campaign is also a reminder that the Chinese Communist Party has a long history of imposing its will on people’s reproductive decisions. For decades starting in the 1970s, it enforced a one-child policy, sometimes brutally. Officials fined couples who had unauthorized pregnancies and even forced some women to undergo abortions.

Here is something interesting. Some day somewhere on an American discussion forum I read that this policy had a Western origin. I did a short Google search and that it what I found:

In our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast... we describe an academic paper by a Dutch mathematics professor that might have been one of the inspirations of the controversial One Child Policy in China...

He meets Song Jian, a visitor from China with a Ph.D. in engineering from Moscow University. According to Olsder, they went out for beers and talked about population planning. Olsder thought nothing of it.

Song was a ballistics missiles specialist, but by the end of the 1980s he had established a theory of population control in Chinese political and science circles. Susan Greenhalgh, an expert on the One Child Policy who served 10 years at the Population Council, notes in her book that Song formed his theory largely based on ideas from the Club of Rome publication The Limits of Growth — a 1972 Malthusian work that hinted at catastrophe if resources and population were not balanced.

 A conspiracy theory? May be. However, I bet that China was not the only one country influenced. What is this "Club Of Rome" you will ask? Per Wikipedia, 

The Club of Rome is a nonprofit, informal organization of intellectuals and business leaders whose goal is a critical discussion of pressing global issues. The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 at Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, Italy. It consists^{[clarification needed]} of one hundred full members selected from current and former heads of state and government, UN administrators, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe.

The Limits To Growth was their 1st report, btw. But back to the article. In case you didn't know, the Chinese are now officially allowed to have 3 children:

As China’s economy developed, the party stepped back somewhat, though it never relinquished authority altogether, ruling in 2021 that couples could have three children.

But they don't want to. 

“We’re not like people born in the 1970s or ’80s. Everyone knows that people born after the ’90s generally don’t want kids,” Ms. Yang said. 

Because, you see, women have other concerns now:

For many women, the government’s nagging seemed out of step with their concerns... It failed to address the high cost of raising children and how they would juggle motherhood alongside their careers and other ambitions. (emphasis mine).

Just like in the West, Chinese women find reproducing too much trouble:

Zhang Rongxing, 38, who was walking with her preschool-age son near the artwork on a recent morning, said that local officials had asked both over the phone and in person if she was planning on having another child.

She was not. The two she already had were enough. “It’s too much work,” she said. “Mentally, financially, in terms of time.”

The Chinese government is trying to restrict abortions, too, which genuinely worries the NY Times journalist, by some reason:

Some scholars, activists and ordinary women have worried that the government could move more forcefully to limit women’s choices. The central government has pledged in several recent health plans to reduce “medically unnecessary abortions”...

It's funny that Western MSM are decrying Chinese government's interference into "personal choices" while pushing the fertility reduction measures such as female tertiary education and hormonal birth control combined with feminism everywhere in the world, based on a paper written in 1972 by some unelected "intellectuals.

Archbishop Vigano

 Probably only of interest for Catholics:

 The archbishop posted the two-page decree from the Vatican’s Dicastry for the Doctrine of Faith ordering him to appear for extrajudicial trial, citing as evidence “public statements that show a denial of the necessary elements to maintain communion with the Catholic Church.”

He became famous because of Cardinal McCarrick affair.

Alex Jones Loses Infowars

 Thoughts?

On Thursday Jones, 50, asked a judge to covert his bankruptcy into a Chapter 7 liquidation after a legal back-and-forth that he engaged in to try and avoid paying the billions of dollars a court has ordered him to pay the families for defamation.

Sounds a bit excessive, not?

Donald Trump

 So Trump was found guilty on all charges. What now?

Meanwhile In Ghana

 Just some news from around the world.

There is currently a rebellion going on against Pope Francis. Some say, it will cause a schism in the Catholic Church:

 A group of 90 Catholic clergymen, scholars and authors have published a joint letter to "all Cardinals and Bishops of the Catholic Church," urging them to oppose a Vatican document approved by Pope Francis that allows priests to bless same-sex couples for the first time.

In the letter, the Catholic conservatives say that Fiducia Supplicans, a Vatican doctrine released on December 18 and signed by the Pope, would lead to the blessing of "objectively sinful" relationships. They add that the cardinals and bishops should "forbid immediately the application of this document in your diocese" and "ask directly the Pope to urgently withdraw this unfortunate document, which is in contradiction with both Scripture and the universal and uninterrupted Tradition of the Church."

Some Catholic priests went so far as to film themselves praying for the Pope to die and laughing about it:

A group of ultra-conservative priests from Spain and Latin America have been forced to apologise for saying they wished the Pope would die “as soon as possible”.

The comment was made during a filmed chat between members of a group called The Sacristy of the Vendée, which describes itself as “a counter-revolutionary priestly gathering”.

In it, Gabriel Calvo Zarraute, a priest from Toledo says: “I also pray a lot for the Pope, so that he can go to heaven as soon as possible.”

Another priest then also expresses his support for the Pope’s quick death, with other participants laughing at the comments.

The video was posted online and has had more than 60,000 views. 

Not only priests, but also some high ranking military officers appear to be upset by the current state of things in the West. Italy  suspended an army general for writing a politically incorrect book:

 ROME, Feb 28 (Reuters) - An Italian army general reprimanded by the defence minister for publishing a book disparaging LGBT people, migrants, minorities and feminists has been suspended from duty for 11 months, his lawyer said on Wednesday...The book says homosexual men are not normal and claims there is an "international gay lobby" trying to brainwash the world. It also appears to question whether Black people can be Italian, referring to Paola Egonu, an Italian volleyball international born in Italy to Nigerian parents.

 Well, I don't know about Nigeria, but in Ghana they don't care about "rules based world order'' any more:

Ghana's parliament passed a bill on Wednesday that further clamps down on the rights of LGBTQ people in the West African country.

The "Human Sexual Rights and Family Values" bill enjoys support from a majority of lawmakers in Accra and has been sponsored by a coalition of Christian, Muslim, and Ghanaian traditional leaders.

Same-sex intercourse in Ghana was already punishable by up to three years in prison, but while discrimination against LGBTQ people is common, no one has ever been prosecuted under the colonial-era law.

The new bill, commonly referred to as the anti-gay bill, now also imposes a prison sentence of up to five years for the "wilful promotion, sponsorship, or support of LGBTQ+ activities."

 Meanwhile in the USA progressives are upset about the pastor who won the Republican primary for governor of North Carolina. He is considered controversial because in a "fiery speech" he declared that there are "but two genders":

Robinson faces off against NC Attorney General Josh Stein, who won the Democratic nod Tuesday, and would become North Carolina's first Jewish Governor. Stein and Robinson will compete to replace term-limited Gov. Roy Cooper.

"Robinson is an abortion-banning, election denying, social media conspiracy theorist and come November every voter in the state will know exactly who the real Mark Robinson is," texted Morgan Jackson, a senior Stein adviser, to Politico.

Robinson, meanwhile, is on a quest to defend America against people "who want to destroy it."

What's Happening In Texas?

Is this a real thing? Will it lead to something bigger? Or is it just a political stunt???