Odds and Ends
First off, the Stimulus Bill is BIG:
“You know, this is huge money,” McConnell said. “This is — someone said the other day that, if you started the day Jesus Christ was born and spent $1 million every day since then, you still wouldn’t have spent $1 trillion.”
…
So here goes our math: 2,012 times 365 (yes, we are aware there are leap years..don’t be like that) times $1,000,000. A: $734 billion (give or take a few hundred million).
The stimulus package is actually short of $1 trillion too, $819 billion. But that’s still more than a million bucks a day since the day Jesus was born.
Very big.
Then we have THIS and THIS, because I can’t stop thinking about this SSPX stuff:
The decree revoking the excommunication bears the signature of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the congregation for bishops. Another cardinal, Darío Castrillón Hoyos, is the president of the pontifical commission “Ecclesia Dei,” which, ever since its creation in 1988, has dealt with the followers of Lefebvre. Both of these cardinals have said that they were taken by surprise, after the fact, by the interview with Bishop Williamson, and that they were never aware that he was a Holocaust denier.
But wasn’t it the primary responsibility of these two cardinals to carry out an in-depth examination of Williamson’s personal profile, and of the three other bishops? The fact that they did not do so seems inexcusable. Such an examination wasn’t even difficult. Williamson has never concealed his distaste for Judaism. He has publicly defended the authenticity of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” In 1989, in Canada, he risked being taken to court for praising the books written by Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. After September 11, 2001, he supported conspiracy theories to explain the collapse of the Twin Towers. Just a click on Google would have turned up all of this background material.
Another serious lapse concerned the pontifical council for the promotion of Christian unity. Reversing the schism with the Lefebvrists is logically part of its competencies, which also include relations between the Church and Judaism. But the cardinal who heads the council, Walter Kasper, says that he was kept out of the deliberations: this is all the more surprising in that the issuing of the decree lifting the excommunication took place during the annual week of prayer for Christian unity, and a few days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
That’s not all.The media release of the decision also seems to have been entirely negligent. The Vatican press office limited itself, on Saturday, January 24, to distributing the text of the decree, in spite of the fact that the news had already leaked out a few days earlier, and a fiery controversy was already growing around the statements denying the Holocaust made by Williamson.
THIS is for The DUCK, because he brought up the whole Billy/Bacon/Monkey thing yesterday. (He informs me that the math is a bit shaky, yet another indication that he’s just the man for this link. I was mostly just amazed that someone had that much to say about it.)
And then there’s THIS, which can’t possibly get enough attention. And because will get almost none. Such is life.
