Jane the Actuary -

Pope, Bishops to Catholics: You’re on your own

November 15, 2018 By Jane the Actuary

You’ll understand if I’m a bit grumpy today, after several days of watching the latest developments with the latest bishops’ meeting, at which they profess to care about regaining the trust of American Catholics, even though the Pope forbade them from voting on measures designed to do just that, even though Cardinal Roger Mahoney — Mahoney! the cardinal from Los Angeles, censured in 2013 for covering up abuse — attended and gave remarks urging bishops to be more collegial (wasn’t… Read more

So, how ya doin’?

November 12, 2018 By Jane the Actuary

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Yeah, this is just an open thread for regular readers. Catch me up on how things are going with you, if you would. Vent your frustrations, celebrate your successes. Haven’t checked in with you all in a while I’ve been venting about my own stuff, so have at it! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Needle_and_red_thread.jpg; www.photos-public-domain.com [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons Read more

Do the bishops deserve our trust?

November 12, 2018 By Jane the Actuary

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So, readers, I had intended to write up something on the Youth Synod, but there was so little meaningful information throughout the synod, and after it was over, the final document was so disappointing that I didn’t feel there was much to say about it. Near as I could tell, the document was full of mindless platitudes like “we should listen to the young people” with a bit of a head-scratcher, out-of-nowhere paragraphs on synodality, tossed in for good measure…. Read more

Armistice Day thoughts: learning the wrong lessons

November 11, 2018 By Jane the Actuary

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Here’s an initial comment: the more I blog, the less I know. That is, I find that blogging forces me to think carefully about issues, so as to attempt, to the best of my ability, to write something that’s well-informed and persuasive. Yes, sometimes I write for an entirely different reason — to vent about things that make me angry — and I try to identify when that’s what I’m doing. And I know that readers who disagree with me… Read more

“Make Germany Great Again”? Or maybe just “Married Again”

November 9, 2018 By Jane the Actuary

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If you, like me, have been meaning to check in on how Germany’s doing with its newly-arrived immigrants, and if you, like me, have some New York Times pageviews left, you’re in luck, because there’s a new article at the NYT about the topic, or, rather, about the anti-immigrant sentiment in the former East Germany: “One Legacy of Merkel? Angry East German Men Fueling the Far Right.” The headline is misleading, because the article is about a much more narrow… Read more

When does anti-racism turn into Scarlet Letter-labelling?

November 8, 2018 By Jane the Actuary

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This is an article from the Tribune a week ago that I’d been meaning to write about: “Cook County promoted former Chicago alderman once recommended for firing after allegedly saying, ‘I can’t stand these Mexicans’” Its title in the print version is more succinct: “County promoted worker after slurs about Mexicans.” The long and short of it is this: former Chicago Alderman Vilma Colom worked for the county as a labor hearing officer in 2016 when two workers overheard a personal… Read more

The one in which Illinois is f’ed

November 7, 2018 By Jane the Actuary

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Very few things about this election were a surprise. The Democrats took the House – not a surprise. The GOP held the Senate – not a surprise, though I was surprised that they increased the number of seats. Pritzker took the Illinois governor’s office, and now control every statewide office – not a surprise. The Democrats regained their supermajority in the Illinois House, and then some, and increased their level of supermajority in the Illinois Senate – not a surprise,… Read more

Happy Election Day! Please Don’t Vote

November 6, 2018 By Jane the Actuary

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That is, don’t pull that (mostly metaphorical) lever for any candidate in any race where you don’t know enough about the candidates to make a reasonable decision. Don’t vote for the candidate who matches your race or sex, or the candidate whose race or sex you believe is underrepresented. Don’t vote for the candidate about whom you saw an ad on TV last night that they hate women or want babies to die or whatever wild accusations in scare-filter mode… Read more

On watching First Man

November 4, 2018 By Jane the Actuary

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Finally got around to seeing this movie today. Here are a couple random thoughts: It was definitely not the soaring inspirational treatment of the moon landing that one might expect from knowing nothing other than the general topic of the film. Instead the title is to be taken more literally: it was about the “first man,” that is, Neil Armstrong, and may or may not have taken liberties with his life and his personality. I had read that the film… Read more

Voter disenfranchisement? Not in this case

November 2, 2018 By Jane the Actuary

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Here’s an article I’m going to share with you because I saw it on twitter and it’s just sooo silly: “What It Feels Like to Be Disenfranchised by a Voter ID Law; I had a birth certificate, a photo ID, and utility bills proving my residency. But Tennessee decided that wasn’t good enough.” This is one of a series of articles in Vice that take the form of first-person accounts of Why I Didn’t Vote. The story is this: the… Read more