The Vatican’s summit on sexual abuse is over.  Hold the presses and your breath.  How long has this shit been going on? This pope, who I must admit, I do not like, has been responsible for concealing information on scumbag priests who for years molested the vulnerable and the young.  This man disguised as the champion on human rights has the gall to lecture the US on the border fence, but is yet to admit that he was partially responsible for the proliferation of abuse by “men of the cloth”. Now, he wants to talk about it.  Right.

I have always reiterated that I love my faith but often dislike my church.  That has grown since the outbreak of disturbing news on abuse.  Abuse perpetrated by men who were held in esteem by children, parishioners, and lay ministers.  For years, parishes have allowed these men to prey on innocent altar boys and young girls, and as we have found out of late; even nuns.  Try to approach any Catholic clergy on the subject of women in the priesthood, and the curtain goes down faster than on a bad late night stand up comic.  The tongue-in-cheek explanation on women’s role in the church has been reduced to the male holistic one track mind that men are the center of the Catholic faith universe.  I will not even go into the mundane and now so familiar rhetoric of how traditionally, the apostles were men.  Go figure.  Two thousand years ago a man could buy a woman for two cows and a camel.  Does the Vatican find that adequately traditional as well? 

This pope, which I refuse to even mention his name, is an oddity and not in a good way.  His idea of women’s rights in the Catholic church amounts to telling mothers that they can nurse in the pews. How thoughtful.  I am sure that with the current sexual ripple of perversity, that gesture is true progress in the war against sexual abuse!  In the meantime, the church is suffering from the lowest attendance  and lowest number of vocations to the priest hood.  Of course, in today’s “judge first” than investigate later #MeToo world, no man in his right mind would even dream of joining anything that might expose him even minutely to allegations.  And to be fair, some of the current accusations against priests have not been fully investigated, but the reputational damage has already been done.

Whenever I attempt a discussion (and always a heated one) with one of our local priests on the subject of women and priesthood, I get the same talking points from the same playbook.  Tradition.  The apostles. Women have other roles.  You get the gist.  The same bullshit we have been listening to for years.  Yet every Sunday we pray for men’s vocations.  What hypocrisy. What about women’s  vocations?  What about young girls who aspire to serve the church as priests?  Where in the New Testament is written that only men can serve?  Oh yes, I forgot, the apostles were men. Christ did not ask any of his women folk to follow him. What nonsense. In the meantime, the church bemoans its diminishing popularity. You think?

The Vatican can kill two birds with one stone.  Ordain women, and stop celibacy.  The former will increase vocations and servitude to the Lord, and the latter will surely eliminate most of the sexual abuse, and also increase vocations to boot.  Of course, one must also admit that the pedophiles who harmed children would still remain pedophiles regardless of their status. 

I refuse to keep on praying for more men in the church.  I am praying to God to make his leading shepherd, aka the pope, to wake up and realize the implications of paternal stubbornness in continuing to refuse women to the priesthood and priests to marry.  An unescapable insidious irony is the pope’s latest trip to rich Dubai. He found comfort in embracing the Imam and expressing unity and understanding under one God.  Really?  He has empathy with Islam?  A faith regarded as the most abusive against women, girls, and gays.  He should have been in Iran this week when the Imams publicly hung two young men for being gay.  Would he also consider embracing those sons of bitches as united under one God? Is that something he wants to have in common with Islam? Frankly, I have no wish to have their kind of god in my life.

I am still confused about this summit which was led by none other than Maltese Archbishop Caruana.    He is the head investigator.  The sexual abuse inquisitor so to speak.  His role is as vague as the summit itself. Was it an investigatory summit or a training session? As part Maltese, I know that although the Catholic Church in Malta is very powerful, the young generation of Maltese have stopped attending.  Most of the reasons are basically the same like that of the rest of the world.  The abuse of children, and allowing male priests to continue their totalitarian hold on communities that include schools, convents, and politics.  I do not know Archbishop Caruana, but I am hoping that Maltese tenacity will help him decipher between a serious attempt at bringing to justice church perverts or just a papal publicity stunt. 

There is a special hell for anyone who abuses the weak and the vulnerable.  A recent article noted that the abuse had extended to assault on young nuns. Often forced to have sex and then equally forced to have abortions to cover up cassock indiscretions.  Something out of a sordid mediaeval  novel. Torrid and evil.  As always, the man may be the villain but the woman ends up paying the price.  The problem with sex turned bad is that the woman always ends up with the short end of the stick (excuse the vulgar pun).  Whether rape, incest, or consensual, the sexual act has more impact on the female than the male.  He walks away sated and she is left with whatever she is left with.  Celibate priests and monks  felt the need and the nuns were available.  Very convenient.  Children were more vulnerable because they were frightened.  Most attended parochial schools run by Jesuit priests.  The intellectuals of the Catholic church. Which is not  a surprise to discover that allegedly Jesuits seem to make up for the majority of sex offenders.  I guess they were thinking with their dicks not their heads. Most of the boys were young altar boys without recourse to divulge the abuse to anyone. Sends bile to one’s throat.

The Catholic Church is going through a public relations nightmare.  This is worse than Bill Cosby and Jeff Bezos combined.  It is rocking the church’s very foundation of trust, truth, and faith.  The summit albeit vague, was supposed to be training church leaders on how to prevent sex abuse.  What a load of crap.  If the Vatican really wants to drain the swamp, it must open its doors to all the faithful and not the interpreted chosen few.  Let the air out of the gender bubble and allow women and young girls to answer their call to sacramental service.  Allow good men with families to serve as priests and servants of the Lord.  Dismantle the empire and build a true united church of Christ and his followers.   

In the meantime we must endure the appearance of action by the Vatican in the hope of appeasing us malcontents.  Catholics have the right to demand more of their church and especially of their pope.  His gratuitous lip service has become as meaningless and annoying as his pandering to the flavor of the month activism.  I have very little time and patience with this man and with every other promotable ‘man of the cloth’.  Faith has very little to do with tradition.  I will keep the faith, but I will never subject myself to the twisted thought that married men or women are somehow less godlike than celibate men. How has celibacy worked so far? It is an insult to everyone’s intelligence.

We only had  a “summit” because the pontiff got caught with his hand in the cover-up cookie jar.  Now he wants to listen to ‘the cry of the young who want justice”.   If it wasn’t so abhorrently sad it would be ludicrous.  One last thought: the pope is said not to expect any “miracles” from this summit. How insidiously obtuse! Thank you pontiff, you sure know how to restore our faith in you and our church!

Just when I thought that the world could not get any crazier, I was proven wrong again.  Stupid that I am, I never considered Mary Poppins and Bert  as racists. But that was then and this is now.  Thank God for the New York Times for setting me straight.  Daniel Pollack-Pelzner of The New York Times wrote an article devoted entirely to the nuances of Travers’ s racist implications in writing Mary Poppins.  The article went right to the heart of the racist nanny: ‘Mary Poppins’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting with Black Face”. Who can resist not reading such an expose? According to Daniel, the black powdering up of Mary’s face in the ‘Step in Time dance’ was a “caricature” statement of South Africans.   Gee, and to think that for more than 50 years  most of us assumed it was  a dance routine about London chimney sweeps.  Well, thank you Daniel for setting me and the rest of the world straight.  Now I can get on with my life knowing that Mary and Bert premeditatedly and insidiously put on black faces as a racist gesture.  And here I thought it was just a typical Disney corny song and dance.   What do I know?

Daniel gives great detail alleging that the original book had to be edited to remove Travers’s racial innuendo.  Whatever. We must all be dense as  brick walls, because I am certain that for the past 50 plus years, no ethnic group or skin color ever realized  or gave second thought to any racial undertones in Mary Poppins.  But then people had an ounce of common sense whereas now they all drink the Koolaid.  The all too familiar social apologetic New York Times is no exception.  For generations of movie goers, mostly families, no one seemed to care that the dancing  chimney sweeps had black faces. That’s because parenting and education was such that logic dictated chimney sweeps would eventually get black sooty faces.  Same as miners.  Wonder how long it is going to take before going after them too? But as I said; that was then and this is now.  A time where social justice and activism has been elevated to another kind of stupid.  

How has American society arrived to a mental black hole sans logic and relatively inane?  The “black face” domino effect seemed to have taken a life of its own.  Whether past entertainers and entertainment was scathingly intentionally racial is possibly and probably true.  No one denies that.  However, I wish to believe that America has moved past ignorant biases and is more compassionate and reasonable than 50 years ago.  Never forgetting history is different than tweaking the present to fit some offhand unsubstantiated narrative.  How long are we going to stretch the racial rubber band from the past to the present to justify activism? How long are we going to milk the racial card? At what point in time are we going to move on?  How much more can we lower our capacity to think logically or at all?

The Pandora’s box on sensitivity and offense has  now been ripped wide open revealing a gaping hole of extremism and leftist lunacy.  If Mary Poppins is the next victim to left loon activism, who is next under the social justice guillotine? Well, I forgot to add that Daniel and The New York Times added Mickey Mouse to the insane “black face” heap of hysteria.  A 1930-ish black and white early cartoon of the iconic mouse was referenced: the mouse had a black face.  Mickey Mouse was also racist. 

Fascism started with the gradual “cleansing” of what some considered inappropriate behavior.  Eventually everything became inappropriate, leaving very little freedom for the rest of the folk.  Fascism dictated one single opinion and restricted freedoms to only one thought.  Sounds familiar? Left wing organizations force their agendas and opinions on the rest of us, expecting us to “conform” to their ideals.  This is forced social justice demanding conformity to their social class.  They consider themselves the moral judges of us all.  They are the upright defenders of righteousness. They are our moral gate keepers.  They want to save us from ourselves.  In the meantime they pick and chose who to save.  Mostly far left causes leave the majority of the population out of the saving range of redemption.  Those of us who are politically middle-of-the road or conservative are not worth saving, because we refuse the drink the mass hysteria and mob Koolaid.  But I digress.

“Journalists” like Daniel must really have time on their hands.  The New York Times, once a prestigious newspaper, is now a caricature of its former self.  Blatantly biased, it offers a platform to pseudo intellectual articles like the one on Mary Poppins.  The Editor in Chief must really be a push over to publish such crap. The newspaper is only good to  fuel the fire of irritating nonsense and partisan inanity. Prestige is out of the window.  If the New York Times  finds Daniel’s ‘nanny’s shameful flirting with black face” story  news worthy, then it lost its ability to be taken seriously and there is no coming back from that kind of stupid.

The latest “black face” debacle started with the Lt Governor of Virginia’s college antics, and continued with an ugly sweater by Gucci.  Both items of contention way down on the list of imperative moments  in our lives.  The farmer in the mid-west and the coal miner in Virginia could care less if a pin head governor painted his face black at a fraternity party at some snooty ivy league school.  Half of the kids who attend those schools are clueless on life anyway, and rely mostly on  mommy and daddy’s pocket book.  I doubt that anyone living from paycheck to paycheck cares that Gucci made a sweater that is as ugly as sin and no one in their right mind would spend $500 on it.  The point is, that social activism seems to have become the tool of the elite.  I do not know or have known anyone who has the time to be an activist.  Normal people have normal jobs and barely have time to eat breakfast in the morning let alone think about Mary Poppins being racist or that Mickey Mouse had a black face 80 years ago.  It is as unimportant and futile as watching   the Academy Awards. Boring and sans any consequential impact on our lives.

I have come to the conclusion that we have now developed another social class to American society.  The activists.  A self absorbed individual social class distinctively above others  in morality.  They are the new social philosophers.  You know, bullshit artists. These are the marching men and women who live for a cause.  They use every waking moment thinking of a cause and ways to torture us with stupid.  Whatever the flavor of the month might be.  Sexual harassment, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, white privilege, and now “black face”.   They do not need an excuse to portray themselves as society’s martyrs.  They carry the banner of victimization for others, while leaving half of society behind as unworthy.  They consider themselves the intellectual elite.  They have a monopoly on our well being.  In the meantime, they join organizations like the anti-Semite BDS  or call those who do not agree with them deplorable, uneducated, racist, bigots, and dare I say it: stupid.  They are in a social class of their own.  Professional activists whose mission in life is to find something wrong with theirs and inadvertently make their discontent our business.

Besides elevating dumb to another level, Mr. Pelzner and The New York Times managed to ruin Mary Poppins forever.  How can we enjoy “Step in Time” knowing full well that it was a conspiracy against South Africans?  Go figure. 

Oh the joys of winter. We are methodically and slowly being buried in snow, which makes our disposition a little testy.  An overnight snow storm has not let up and even our German neighbors who are prone to shoveling snow at the first flake, have given up and decided to call it a day.  On a day like today I would like to take all global warming minions and bury them in my back yard, hoping that when they eventually emerge in the thaw they will be less apt to remain dire activists.

Activism of any kind can be annoying, and I find nothing more irritating than the holier than though arrogant climate change aficionado. Anyone lived long enough to remember any climate being so drastically different than it is right now?  Sometimes warmer and sometimes colder. Makes no difference, because we tend to bitch about it any way. And if they are so intellectual superior, they should realize that rivers, seas, mountains, lakes, and anything that erodes will eventually change topography and weather.  And to think that I have no graduate or doctorate scientific shingle hanging on my door! Maybe it is the cold, or the incessant snow, but I am getting very dubious of the global warming and climate change mantra.  Maybe because I am a business woman or because there is always an angel and it is generally money, that I am suspicious. The global warming/climate change dialogue is a billion dollar industry, and as Jerry McGuire once said: “follow the money”. 

I can follow the money directly to pinheads like Al Gore and Michael Moore. Both have done well for themselves as global warming alarmists.  Al Gore owns mansions, flies in private jets, and has several gas guzzling automobiles.  All fossil fueled. Al Gore’s predications of a 2012 glacial Armageddon fizzled out into nothing, almost like his 2000 election bid against George Bush did.  High expectations and little to show for it.  The dialogue had to change from global warming to climate change in the hope of keeping his activism financially viable.  He was successful at that.

An environmental industry has definitely sprung.  A good example, and one which I know much about is the automobile hybrid industry. The hybrid industry exemplifies the nebulous environmental movement. Hybrids are the “orange is the new black” of the EPA which has gone after the automobile industry with a vengeance. Hybrids have given a peace offering, a gesture, and a “that a boy” to the government as the industry looks for new marketing opportunities and less government interference.

Hybrids are a combination of battery and benzene. Combustion and electricity.  The models are extremely expensive because this battery/petrol combination must harmonize without diminishing performance, safety, or power.  Batteries are mounted on the rear axle and charging cables are used to charge the batteries overnight, or if lucky at a public charging port.  If the vehicle had to run on battery alone it would not go further than 20 miles.  Therefore, the vehicle is generally operating as a combination.  Now comes the moment of truth. The truth most environmentalists are not eager to divulge is that the battery takes approximately seven hours of electracy to charge, depending on the model and size of the engine.  When charged at home, it requires a special heavy duty mounted outlet that can take the battery’s large capacity  and surge.  This is not a kitchen outlet for a toaster or a coffee pot.  Depending on how many times a week one charges the battery, it will impact both the usage and cost of utilities.

Hybrids are becoming popular because the US government is giving a one-time tax deductible incentive of I believe $5,000, in the hope that more consumers will bite into the scheme. Do not fool yourselves: the car manufacturer is getting tax breaks as well. There is no free lunch here. The government is not exactly forthright with consumers either, because charging these batteries can use up to 30 hours a week in electricity.  Eventually the hybrid owner will realize that he or she is using more fossil fuel than the average Joe and his combustion engine. 

Hybrids cost at least 24% more than vehicles with combustion engines. Realistically they do very little for the environment because unless one takes the $80,000 plus hybrid only down the street and back, the vehicle must use battery and combustion to go further.  So why the popularity? Because this generation loves to feel good about themselves.  Because we are bombarded by the Al Gore’s of this world who feed us a narrative, and we are either too ignorant or lazy to dispute. Because it is the popular thing to do, like bath tub gin and the Charleston during prohibition. And because we have been brain washed in believing that we are saving the planet from the big bad oil companies.  You know, like the ones Al Gore was so friendly with when he was Vice President.

So on a day like today, I have difficulty reasoning global warming. The fact that it is snowing, cold, and I really want it to be summer dwells a little on my mind.  Today I yearn for a smidgen of global warming.  I want all the white stuff to dissolve. How can I take global warming seriously when Eskimos are building igloos in my back yard?  There are still exceptions. Some pinhead on a major news network was asked about the current arctic cold weather in places like Chicago.  The Polar or Arctic Vortex, whatever it’s called. His answer? Wait for it…if you said global warming off the top of your head you should go to the head of the class.  Brace yourselves for the explanation. It seems that because the arctic is allegedly warming up, the cold air was suddenly dispersed and it had no place to go but south to North America and Europe. How convenient. Cannot make this up.  It took the pinhead 20 minutes to put the global warming spin on this crap.  At least he did not blame Donald Trump for it, but I am sure given air time, he could stretch that string far enough if he tried.  I blame Al Gore for  the morphing from global warming to climate change. When the earth did not melt away in 2012 he had to change the script to remain relevant.  After all no one can argue that climate often changes and sometimes drastically.  Ask the  dinosaurs.

As I sit and watch the falling snow,  I realize that I am in Bavaria, and snow is second nature to this region.  Further down from us in Garmisch, people had to be dug out of their homes as snow piled feet high on the roofs.  This is a region where winters are long, cold, and harsh.  Not many Germans are discussing climate change at the moment, but I am sure that most are looking forward to spring, summer, and warmth. Global or otherwise. But for now, we curse the weather and we go about our business.  Where’s the snow shovel?