May the Women's Tennis Association ever prosper.

On November 2, 2021, Peng Shaui, a female pro tennis player from China, announced that she had been raped by a former vice premier and high ranking Communist Party member back in 2018.

Shortly thereafter, the post was deleted, then she herself vanished. A statement purportedly from her was published by the state media two days ago, stating that she hadn't been raped, was fine, really, just taking some time off, thanks, don't worry.

The usual unconvincing platter of lies. 

Yesterday, the Women's Tennis Association responded to Peng's imprisonment.

I am so used to seeing cringing, bowing and scraping before the People's Republic of China that the slightest pushback against the monsters of Beijing deserves a celebratory signal-boost.

But note that the WTA's actions are not "the slightest pushback." 

This is putting money where one's mouth is, something American corporations and institutions never do when it comes to flow of sweet, sweet blood-stained yuan.

None of us should be under any illusions that China will change its behavior due to being publicly shamed in the west. If they cared about that, they wouldn’t have issued a transparently fraudulent “everything’s fine” statement in Peng's name. But having the WTA and its stars call attention to Peng’s disappearance will help further delegitimize the regime in the eyes of westerners who don’t normally pay attention to foreign policy. And it might shame other western institutions that are inclined to keep quiet when China commits crimes in plain sight to acknowledge what’s happening before their eyes. There’s news today that the UN is now demanding proof of Peng’s well-being from Beijing. Would that have happened if the WTA had shrugged off her disappearance as a matter of internal Chinese politics?

Women’s tennis isn’t a mega-bucks business in China the way, say, the NBA is but they’ll be leaving real money on the table if they pull out. Steve Simon, the WTA’s chairman, swung a deal in 2018 that would have seen China hold the WTA Finals every year for the next decade. Nine tournaments were played there in 2019 alone, with room to grow. And Simon is known for his business savvy, per the WSJ. If there’s anyone you might expect to carefully weigh the financial health of his industry against the safety of a single Chinese player, it’s him.

But you’d be doing him a disservice, if so. The second half of the CNN interview embedded at the end of this post is almost shocking in the moral clarity Simon displays by threatening to quit China. “There’s too many times in our world today … that we let business, politics, money dictate what’s right and what’s wrong,” he says at one point. “We have to start as a world making decisions that are based upon right and wrong, period.” And then the real stunner: “This is bigger than the business.”

Bravo to the Association and the athletes for standing up and saying no. Willing to leave money on the table in the process.

As compared to Marriott, which went the usual collaborator route. The American hotel chain behemoth actually used the phrase "political neutrality" in canceling a Uighur conference at one of their hotels.

Congratulations--that earns the profits-not-people chain the Elie Weisel retort:

Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

The Book Tower renovation continues.

The Book Tower is my favorite Detroit skyscraper. Built in 1916-1926, it is in the process of being renovated for reopening in 2022. 

God willing and the corona don't rise.

One of the best parts of the renovation is that it is a genuine restoration as well, with the architects and engineers having to relearn old techniques to truly return the building to its former glory.

Among the intricate undertakings for the project are the restoration of original plaster and an art glass skylight that was blocked.

Ferndale-based Russell Plastering is handling the plasterwork while New Jersey-based Femenella & Associates is undertaking the skylight restoration.  

Arthur Femenella, vice president of Femenella & Associates, said his firm, along with New York City-based ODA Architecture, used an old photograph of the dome and the remaining cast iron frame with dome to aid in the design. The restoration process will involve replicating the missing framework and glass, which will feature 7,000 jewels — of which 3,000 will have to be replicated. The dome and glass will be put back into place and a new undercroft built.

Femenella said the project is a rare one.

“In 75 years of experience in our office, we’ve never seen anything like this," he said. "Doing this type of design, again, is something very new to us. We’re going to make this whole entire thing based on the old means and methods, which we had to learn by reverse engineering.”

Read the whole thing. Note especially the restored bronze work.

When it reopens, I will get in there with my camera and post the pics here.

 

There's a lot to be said about the USCCB's Eucharist confab.

But I will leave most of that to Amy Welborn.

Were there really some Catholics on Twitter accusing Archbishop Jose Gomez of dog-whistling for "White Nationalism"? For saying this?

Archbishop Ireland believed deeply in what Reverend Martin Luther King and others have called the “American creed” — the belief expressed in our founding documents, that all men and women are created equal and endowed with sacred dignity, a transcendent destiny, and rights that must never be denied.

Yep, I can hear Charlottesville Tikists cheering from here. 

There's nothing they love more than hearing a Mexican-born immigration advocate quote MLK Jr.

But of course there were Catholics spitting outrage. I'm not looking for them, but there's no shortage of prominent [adjust values of "prominent" for being a Catholic twitterer] ones who have merged politics with faith who could say such things.

Keep talking--there are few things that make the Faith more toxic than cloaking your politics in its dead, flayed flesh.

Speaking of the Faith as a skin-suit, let's look at the nuncio's commentary at the conference:

Realities are more important than ideas. We can have all the theological ideas about the Eucharist – and, of course, we need this – but none of these ideas compare with the reality of the Eucharistic Mystery, which needs to be discovered and rediscovered through the practical experience of the Church, living in communion, particularly in this time of pandemic. We can become so concentrated upon the sacrality of forms of the liturgy that we miss the true encounter with His Real Presence. There is the temptation to treat the Eucharist as something to be offered to the privileged few rather than to seek to walk with those whose theology or discipleship is falling short, assisting them to understand and appreciate the gift of the Eucharist and helping them to overcome their difficulties. Rather than remaining trapped in an “ideology of the sacred”, synodality is a method that helps us to discover together a way forward.

Now, remember that the essential job function of a nuncio in the current era is to make sure everyone bellies up to the pontifical word salad bar--no matter deficient in mental nutrition it turns out to be.

"Realities are more important than ideas" being a particularly dumb piece of sloganeering. 

There's nothing more real than a motivating idea in the soul of a human being. People struggle and die for ideas every day, and change the grim realities they live in into something better because of them. If you think of the dumb slogan as a verbal truncheon to be swung at ecclesiastical opponents, it might make slightly more sense, at least as a tactic. But it's still  worthy of contempt.

Taken on its face, it is a pernicious argument for stasis and privilege. 

And, speaking of privilege: the bleak irony is that privilege is precisely what the nuncio and those who fret about "the weaponization of the Eucharist" are defending.

The right of privileged Catholic political elites to do whatever the Hell they want in their public lives despite the grim contradictions to the faith they loudly profess.

For a regime that talks about championing the poor, those on peripheries, and other related ideas, the reality truly is greater than ideas: the pontiff has no trouble kissing up to the privileged and the powerful and tossing the weak, poor and peripheral to the side.

And by taking the side of Catholic ruling castes to ensure that they get their wafers every Sunday, this privilege is made ironclad. Those Catholics who wrestle with conscience and decide to stay in the pews when the communion line forms? The message from the top is that you're chumps and almost certainly suspect for adhering to the Old Piety. 

More to the point: you struggling nobodies in the pews can't cut the Church out of the public grant money.

It's seasonal Catholic catalog time!

And hoo, boy--am I tired of seeing Archbishop Vigano everywhere.

His decision to become an Omnipundit--ghostwritten or otherwise--was a spiritual own-goal.

Publishers feeding into it only makes it worse. 

Here's an idea for both parties:

 

 

Nothing says "lively pastoral charity" like denying extreme unction to the dying.

I saw this yesterday, but it did not sink in until Kevin Tierney pointed it out.

The bishop of Charleston leaves the spiritual equivalent of a flaming bag of crap on the porches of his sheep. Only a contemptible ideologue or equally contemptible company man could try to legislate this. 

But it matters not at all which he is. Click on the picture to magnify.

What matters is that the gratuitous cruelty of the law invites disobedience, so here's hoping it is ignored when those members of the faithful seek it anyway.  

Salus animarum suprema lex.

I forget how fragile human life is.

And sometimes, that reality is brought home by stumbling across a local news story.

I am a proud Michigander, preferring the term made immortal by Abe Lincoln's shot at Lewis Cass to the more TPS-cover-sheet-ish "Michiganian."

So when people want to try something new and pioneering in my beloved State, I take interest. 

Such was the case with a story about a nomadic young wife and husband, Kate Leese and Adam Kendall. I read it the day after it was published.

They had a big dream: planting a vineyard and starting a winery on Michigan's historic Beaver Island. Michigan's "King," James Strang, once ruled the Island, and the late Washington Post pundit David Broder loved it and was a frequent visitor.

The rural quiet of the Island has attracted many, so it was not surprising that the young couple fell in love with the place. Their vineyard planting had already begun, in fact:

On the surface, their dream might seem as far-flung as this island in the northern waters of Lake Michigan, but the couple has planted roots on a 120-acre tract deep in the woods of the island, the third-largest in the state. Their planting of 2,100 vines on a fallow field this past spring came after their own extensive research and consultations with others in Michigan’s flourishing wine industry.

“It feels like a place somewhere along the road where you could stop and have a glass of wine with new friends,” said Kate Leese, 35, who grew up in Charlevoix, a resort town across the lake, about 30 miles away. “Our goal is to have that kind of place that brings people together.” 

Wine grapes have been cultivated by others on the island in the past but not for commercial use, the couple says. They'll be the first to bottle and sell their wine on the island as well as the mainland.  

It’s not hard to imagine that kind of operation happening here, on the open lawn behind a turn-of-the-century farmhouse the couple is restoring. Beyond the clearing, where the young vines are sprouting from grow tubes, hardwoods frame the horizon. Apple trees, remnants of another farming era, and sugar maples, exploding in fiery colors, dot the bucolic landscape.

“We have wanted to plant a vineyard, but it was something that we thought about doing 20 years from now, in the future,” said Leese, who has a background in biochemistry and who, like her husband, is passionate about wine. “So many things came together for us in the last year."

Those things included finding a property on Beaver Island after a random stop in fall 2019, in the wake of a boat trip up the northwestern Michigan coastline. They were ready for a more stationary existence after spending three years on the road, pulling a renovated Airstream around the continental United States, working remotely. 

“Almost immediately after we pulled into the marina here, we knew this was the level of quiet we were looking for,” said Kendall, 37, a Jackson native who has a background as an attorney. “At night, there’s almost complete silence here. There’s no light pollution. You can hear every car (if one goes by). It’s the kind of place we had been looking for as our next spot.”

* * *

Part of an archipelago, Beaver Island is home to about 600 year-round residents. It’s the kind of place where everybody knows everybody, where everybody waves as they pass one another, where neighbors pitch in to help one another and where everyone does what they can to help the community.

Yes, Michigan is an excellent wine region, believe it or not. The west coast of Lake Michigan has proven to be ideal for growing wine grapes. So, growing them on Beaver Island was a risk, but promising.

But eight days after their story was published, I read that they died in a plane crash on the Island. It was stunning in the worst way. 

We recognize that we are not promised tomorrow, but we do not really know it until it slaps us in the face.

May they rest in peace and their families and friends be comforted. 

And may someone take up their dream and make it a reality.

 

A tax cut for the super-rich?

Yep, it is in the "Build Back Better" legislation.

In fact, it showers more money on the wealthy than all but one of the programs in the so-called party of the working class's proposal:

The House is expected to vote this week on President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation. The social spending bill includes investments in clean energy and affordable child care — but it also includes a $285 billion tax cut that would almost exclusively benefit high-income households over the next five years.

The measure would allow households to increase their deduction from state and local taxes from $10,000 to $80,000 through 2026, and then impose a new deduction cap through 2031. It’s the second-most expensive item in the legislation over the next five years, more costly than establishing a paid family and medical leave program, and nearly twice as expensive as funding home-medical services for the elderly and disabled, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The "SALT" (state and local tax) deduction allows high-earners in high-tax states to rob the Federal treasury via a deduction for those taxes. Likewise, since it decreases the pain on such earners, it lessens the pressure on the leaders of high tax states, allowing them to maintain them and shove the loss on to the rest of the country.

Back in the time of Orange Man Bad, this regressive deduction was capped at $10K, to howls from the wealthy and high-tax jurisdictions.

Now they are trying to "fix" that and turn the cash sluice back on.

Hypocrisy? Not at all.

No, hypocrisy presumes a person's occasional nod to a moral standard external to him even as he violates it.

When the object of power is power, there is no hypocrisy.

 

Went up north for the early family Christmas.

My parents wisely flee northern Michigan before too much snow flies--and some did fly while we were up there, coating the ground and trees.

A great four days of family togetherness before they go. Alas, the schedules for my brother's family and mine did not work out, so we went up later. Hopefully, next year will be better that way. But still a great time.

Apparently, I was better than I thought, getting a recent biography of Saint Francis and a Gladiator grav tank for my Ultramarines. 

The duality of man, right there. 

Weirdly, my spiritual compass points more toward the Franciscans than any other order. A story for another time, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

Also, Dad gifted me with an eight-foot long flatbed steel trailer. Very nice, and my middle son and I will be modifying it into a cargo-hauler with a frame of two-by-fours bolted onto it. Ratchet straps only do so much to secure luggage, but they worked this time. Next time, we'll have fewer to worry about. 

Especially since ratchet straps seem to be some cunning IQ test that I almost invariably fail. 

 

So apparently there's this attempted hatchet job of a book about Scott Hahn.

I've been reliably informed that it is a padded version of a doctoral dissertation by some assistant professor.

I have also been reliably informed that it is, like many dissertations, Not Good At All. 

I know that without reading it.

Gasp--that's not fair!

Normally, yes.

But all rules have exceptions, and here's one: any religious tome that has an insult in the title is candidly admitting to you that it is Not Good At All.

And as sure as the Almighty made lots and lots of beetles, this one flings the classic insult "fundamentalist."

As the philosopher Alvin Plantinga memorably put it, "fundamentalist" just means "sumbitch":

 We must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch’. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) 

Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ‘sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. 

In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. 

The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine’. 

--Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: 2000),  245.

Thus, to summarize: some guy with tenure at a small college devoted his dissertation to venting about that "stupid sumbitch" Scott Hahn. And then he gussied it up a bit for a wider audience. 

(Re-)publish or perish!

Truly a work destined for Dollar Tree's shelves, right next to the remainders from failed politicians paid to have someone ghostwrite about My Vision For America.

The trees that died for books by Harry Reid and Tim Pawlenty... And the academic equivalent of an "I HATE THAT GUY" Reddit page joins them--albeit in a much tinier print run.

The real scandal is that someone handed the guy a doctorate for it, but it's not my alma mater, so whatever. 

The correct response to this trivial ankle-biter is to not boost the signal. And that includes not linking to the debunkings of the, uh, work, either. Anything else will only boost the print run, and encourage more of the same.

Would you believe 3 out of 9 instead?

 

András Arató, live forever.

So, today was the day we were supposed to be getting nine new high-tech, energy-saving vinyl/etc. windows to replace the last remaining originals on our 1947 bungalow.

We diligently cleared spaces, and the crew arrived.

A spot of bother: someone at The Window Installer Company Corporation, LLC had entered the wrong specs for the six downstairs windows.

They were four inches too tall for the space to be occupied.

Not something you can trim off with the utility knife.

Never take it out on the lower-level staff is my operating principle, and it was followed here.

We insisted they install the three fitting windows upstairs, which were in the worst shape anyway. Phone calls were made, so at least that part of the nightmare is done, and was done well.

Now we have to wait, despite being reassured as to our project being moved up to "RUSH" status. 

Frankly, the fact we didn't pay a dime yet toward the windows that were installed is probably going to be the thing that puts oomph into the "RUSH."

But we're still looking at four weeks yet. 

Assuming supply chain and labor issues don't raise their heads for a third time.

Shutting down a heating fuel pipeline in late autumn?

The Biden Administration can't be serious about shutting down Line 5 from Canada.

As mentioned before on this ranter's stump, energy for rural Northern Michigan is exactly what Line 5 provides.

And a few consumer edicts against gouging won't replace supplies that are no longer there.

So, shutting down Line 5 just in time for winter can't possibly be on the agenda, right?

Especially with Canada formally invoking treaty rights to stop it?

To the contrary, the Administration admits, yes, they sure are considering it. 

Shocking, but not surprising.