“Justinflation” is running its path & with soaring food costs & taxes

Isnt it amazing the synchronised policy swimming by western governments, 2 weeks to flatten the curve, lockdowns, masks, monetising mass handouts leading to inflation. 180degree about turn and let it rip. and now we have the recession we had to have coming in ’23 and quite possibly war spreading beyond some kleptocratic eastern european shithole.

The only vest I wear is my sexy Thai Girlfriend’s on my head if anywhere.

JR is a confirmed sex tourist who is into ladyboys.

At its current rate, more than a billion Chinese citizens may catch the coronavirus by March

At its current population of 1.4bn, that’s pretty much the entire population.

Okay.

I came to Australia in March 1976

Yes, yes. I remember the Ferrero Rocher famine of 1976-77 only too well. Displaced several dozen people, as I recall.

Dark days.

Rockdoctor:

Is the Benny Hill Show still syndicated in Thailand?

Just asking.

Leaving Covid epidemiology, immunology, and trusted bloggers behind for a moment; please accept my wishes for a safe and happy new year to all Cats and lurkers.

Particular thanks to Dover – hope you and yours thrive in 2023.

God holds the key of all unknown,
And I am glad;
If other hands should hold the key,
Or, if He trusted it to me,
I might be sad,
I might be sad.

Ah, Johnny.

All you Cockneys are the same.

From Twitter:
Spooks Update
1. Google currently employs at least 165 people, in high-ranking positions, from the Intelligence Community.

Google’s Trust & Safety team is managed by 3 ex-CIA agents, who control “misinfo & hate speech.”

Here’s the breakdown:
CIA-27
FBI-52
NSA-30
DHS-50

singing along to ABBA

I’m watching it for the shoes. Ten inch platforms.

Reanalysis of mRNA trial data
Dr. John Campbell
Rotavirus vaccine Rotashield, (1999),1 to 2 serious events per 10,000 vaccinees, Vaccine withdrawn

Covid mRNA vaccines, 1 serious event per 800 vaccinees, Vaccine officially promoted

Here’s to three more years of tyranny and gaslighting!

Amazing BBQ this arvo. IT and Medical professionals. All completely aware / switched on, no munties.

1). Victoria is rooted.
2). Who the hell voted for Labour and Dickhead Dan? Esp. Dickhead Dan, so on the nose can’t even show his face in Mulgrave.
3). Victoria Police are corrupt dogs.

Refreshing and completely unexpected.

Watch Mama Mia. That’ll do the trick. You’ll know for sure if you have the lyrics down pat.

And on that note, wishing all Cats, Kittehs, Lurkers, Trolls and especially Dover a happy and prosperous New Year.

May God bless the good ship Catallaxy and all who sail on her. And those towed along in her wake.

Paywalled at the Australian?
George Pell: Pope Benedict was a good pope, but not a great one

Can someone put this up for those of us who do not subscribe.

95 is a good innings, as is 96.
We’ve lost a fine guy and a fine lady this year.

Pope Benedict: A Christian gentleman of the old school

Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, is universally regarded as one of the finest theologians and writers in the papacy’s almost 2000-year history.

By CARDINAL GEORGE PELL

Three anecdotes from the years in Joseph Ratzinger’s long life when he was not yet famous, but only infamous in certain circles, throw light on the enigma presented by his personality, capacity, and achievements.

Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI and later emeritus pope, died on December 31 aged 95.

In 1968 when he was lecturing in Tubingen, near Stuttgart, in Germany, he did clash with radical Marxist students, who, however, did not shout him down, as Catholic theologian Hans Kung alleged. On one occasion after a lecture by the Dutch Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx, he was on a discussion panel which included Kung. He had said nothing until the students began shouting, “Ratzinger must speak”. When he then summarised and analysed the debate for 15 minutes, the chairman announced that nothing more needed to be said and the gathering closed happily.

Almost 30 years later in 1996, he gave the then-Communist author Peter Seewald a long series of interviews on the Church in the world at the end of the millennium. A former editor of German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung refused to review this interview of a freelance journalist with “someone”, saying it was out of the question for them. The “someone” was the then-Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican and, in book form, The Salt of the Earth sold 500,000 copies in 20 languages.

After Ratzinger’s election as Pope in 2005, the publishers of Seewald’s first article were looking for an accompanying photo – 25 photos were rejected because Ratzinger looked “too good”; they did not conform to the hostile stereotype.

Ratzinger was born in the Bavarian village of Marktl am Inn on April 6, 1927. One of three children, he spent his adolescent years in Traunstein, a small town on the Austrian border. He described himself as a Mozartean, and not simply because of his knowledge and love of classical music. His brother, George, with whom he was ordained a priest on June 29, 1951, in Freising, was for many years director of music in Regensburg Cathedral.

READ MORE: Pray for ‘very ill’ Benedict, says Pope | Pope ‘signed resignation letter years ago’ | Church sins, secrets exposed in battle with Vatican ‘mafia’
Like all his German countrymen, Ratzinger suffered during the Nazi period and once saw his parish priest beaten by the Nazis before celebrating Mass. Towards the war’s end, he was conscripted into the anti-aircraft service.

He wrote a doctorate on Saint Augustine’s concept of the Church, qualified as a university professor in 1957 and then lectured successively in Freising, Bonn, Münster, and in Tubingen during the upheavals of 1968. The following year, he was appointed professor of theology at the University of Regensburg, eventually becoming dean and vice-rector.

He wrote prolifically during his whole priestly life. At one stage, I thought I had read most of his writings and was amazed to see the number and variety of his earlier works, none of which I had read.

The Second Vatican Council in Rome (1962-65), attended by all the Catholic bishops, was the most important event in Church life in the 20th century and Ratzinger was present as a young priest-theologian for all four sessions, appointed as theological adviser to Cardinal Josef Frings, the Archbishop of Cologne.

Joseph Ratzinger is born in Germany and at 14 is conscripted into the Hitler Youth. Later drafted into the army, he deserts his post in April 1945 and is briefly a POW.

Although not as well known to students as senior theologians such as Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Henri de Lubac, and Kung, he was active in the reforming majority movement which prevailed in the consensus-making for the conciliar decrees.

Two complementary and sometimes contrasting themes were predominant among the majority: those who favoured “aggiornamento”, bringing the Church up to date, and those who believed that vitality lay in “ressourcement”, returning to the teachings of Jesus and the apostles as lived and explained in the first centuries. Ratzinger was always prominent in the second group, an explicit disciple of the French Jesuit de Lubac, who insisted until the end that the council was an example of doctrinal development, of evolution and continuity, that did not provoke a rupture from previous Church history, as proposed by the Bologna school of historians, a theory which has made something of a comeback in recent years.

The Holy Father was not a disciple of Thomas Aquinas, although he always acknowledged the massive contribution of Thomism; much less was he a scholastic, never setting out his writings as a clear, dry series of propositions. An Italian curialist pointed out to me that he never studied in Rome as a seminarian or a young priest and he was never interested nor much involved in the intrigues which swirl around the papal court. He stubbornly believed in the goodness of people, although he often, but not always, came to accept the different estimates of his secretaries and friends. For his 40 years in Rome, actively engaged at the centre of Church life, he remained something of an outsider.

In 1972, while still at Regensburg in Bavaria, he was one of the founders of a new international magazine, Communio, which reflected a parting of ways from the line of the Concilium magazine, with its more radical appeal to aggiornamento (modernisation) and the spirit, not the texts of the council.

A destructive revolutionary zeal swept through many parts of the Western world after the council where eventually 30,000 men left the priesthood – vocations to the priesthood and religious life plummeted and Church life imploded in Holland, Belgium, and Quebec. In 1972, Pope Paul VI, who had been slow to grasp the extent of the disaster, announced that the “smoke of Satan had entered the Church”.

However, it was only on March 24, 1977, that Pope Paul VI appointed Professor Ratzinger as Archbishop in Munich and Freising and then in June created him a cardinal. This was a year before Pope Paul VI’s death, the brief reign of Pope John Paul I, and the advent of the Polish Pope John Paul II. The new Cardinal Ratzinger was an active, pastoral archbishop during his five years in Munich, committed to implementing the Council decrees, not opposing them, as Pope Paul VI desired.

Pope John Paul II appointed him Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, once known as the Inquisition, and he commenced there in February 1982, beginning a brilliant partnership with the Polish pope. They were very different, Polish and German, extrovert and reserved, public leader perhaps mystic and intellectual, and a philosopher and a theologians’ theologian, with an unusual gift for clear and elegant writing. It was here Benedict did his best work, just as some claim Paul Keating was a better treasurer than prime minister and Tony Abbott was Australia’s most successful opposition leader and a less effective prime minister.

The then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s most outstanding achievement was as president of the committee (1986-92) which produced the Catechism of the Catholic Church, on the beliefs of the faithful, a classic which ranks with the authoritative 1566 Catechism of the Council of Trent. As prefect, he was also involved in the drafting of Pope John Paul II’s encyclicals, including the major moral teaching in Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae. The Marxist substratum in the theology of liberation from South America was exposed and rejected, another important contribution.

He broke with tradition and continued to write while prefect. While it would be untrue to claim that the chief executive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published only anathemas (for centuries the pope himself was the prefect), they generally published little outside their rulings; until Ratzinger.

In November 2002, the Cardinal was elected by his brother Cardinal bishops as dean of the College of Cardinals, preaching his famous sermon at the funeral mass of Pope John Paul II, denouncing the “dictatorship of relativism”.

On April 19, 2005, he was elected pope, the 265th pope, successor of Peter, taking the name Benedict XVI after the founder of rules-based Western monasticism, which provided one of the cornerstones of the Western civilisation in which we still live and which is being steadily eroded.

The new pope continued to write and teach at a level which was historically rare among popes and senior ecclesiastics, as evidenced in his encyclicals Caritas in Veritate, Spe Salvi, and Deus Caritas Est, his discourses to the British and German parliaments, and especially his three volumes on the life of Jesus Christ.

In countries as different as Poland, the United States and Australia, his teaching won over the majority of the young lay Catholics, a minority in their cohorts, who opted to continue to live as Catholics. The changed Church circumstances of recent years have only deepened these Benedictine loyalties. He is loved and has inspired many vocations.

This Mozartian pope understood well the centrality and importance of the liturgy in the life of the Church, the celebration of Mass and sacraments with faith and reverence. Whenever Church life has collapsed, so has liturgical discipline with the official Eucharistic texts abandoned or mutilated and the Sacrament of Penance banished.

He re-established the legitimacy and availability of the Latin Tridentine Mass in 2007 so that each priest has a right to celebrate the “old Mass”. This has spread, wider and faster than most expectations, and in France, half the number of seminarians preparing for priesthood follow the Tridentine rite.

Pope Benedict also established an Anglican Ordinariate, with its own English language rite derived from the Anglican ceremonial for Anglican priests and laity who converted to Rome – “crossed the Tiber”. Hundreds of priests came across. This was ecumenically sensitive, but ecumenical dialogue and cooperation have continued.

He did good work in the battle against paedophilia and dealt effectively with the corrupt founder of the Legionaries of Christ, although he was regularly under attack from the secularising forces. His speech at Regensburg exploring the links between Islamic teaching and violence eventually produced orchestrated waves of protest, ironically validating his central thesis. His attempt to improve relations with the schismatic Society of Saint Pius X was mismanaged.

The Holy Father did not have much interest or aptitude for governance, rarely meeting with most of the curial heads, leaving that dimension of his role largely to his secretary of state, with long-term unfortunate consequences. The papal household itself was somewhat dysfunctional and thousands of documents were leaked to the press by Paolo, the butler, probably in a bizarre attempt to help the pope.

Some progress was made financially, although the then-Monsignor Vigano’s reforms were not supported. Significantly, Pope Benedict did commission a secret report on corruption in the Vatican, which has never been published, was not made available to the Conclave which elected his successor, but was consigned to Pope Francis.

My personal conjecture, which is not supported by evidence, is that when Benedict saw the report, he concluded that he did not have the organisational capacity, nor the energy at 85 to cleanse the Vatican stables. Whatever his reasons, he resigned from the See of Peter in 2013, the first such resignation since that of Pope Celestine V in 1294, whom Dante consigned to the outer reaches of Hell for his “great refusal”. Benedict deserves no such fate, although it was an extraordinary decision for a prelate and scholar deeply versed in Church history, aware of the challenges in maintaining unity in a worldwide Church; for a pope who in every other way was the champion and exponent of Catholic tradition.

It is unlikely that Benedict anticipated that Pope Francis would be his successor, or that he would live more years in retirement than as pope to see some of the consequences of his decision.

Like many Germans, he admired and understood the English-speaking world, supporting efforts for an accurate, non-ideological English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which he entrusted to Archbishop Eric d’Arcy, then Archbishop of Hobart; and of the third edition of the Missal of the Roman Rite.

He was a good friend to Australia with a disconcertingly broad knowledge of our situation. He visited us for the successful World Youth Day in Sydney in 2008, which attracted more overseas visitors than the Beijing Olympics in the same year, and, finally, against the prognostications of the experts, Pope Benedict blessed and opened Domus Australia, the Australian pilgrim centre in Rome in 2011.

Pope Benedict was a holy and prayerful priest; a Christian gentleman of the old school, who always remained a learned and reserved German professor. He was a good pope, not a great pope, but neither a failure. He preserved the Apostolic faith, taught regularly and magnificently, so that he is universally regarded as one of the finest theologians and writers in the papacy’s almost 2000-year history. He inspired many seminarians, who moved through to become zealous priests, and the numbers at his Wednesday audiences remained high. However, the hopes and bright expectations at his election were not all realised, and both his resignation and long years in retirement were surprises.

Calli:

We have no defence at all against the latest iteration of the illness.*

*Exactly the point I made several days ago when this first started up. A repeat of the original when Wuhan was blockaded from the rest of China, but was allowed into Italy and the rest of the world with horrid consequences.
This is deliberate.

woolfe says:
December 31, 2022 at 3:14 pm

Oh, and for those bitching about Adams blog, helpful hint, don’t go there.

Good advice that, and it works well too.

Happy New Year to all.

May we spend a lot more of them together in good health and prosperity.

“watch this … The Riemann Hypothesis, Explained”

Looks tricky. Still, I’m confident I can manage to count backwards from one to ten so no need to stay up for the fireworks.

Happy New Year!

It’s a good thing we have had a practice run with COVID 19.

Now we know how hard we need to lock down over the next three years to really nip this COVID 22 in the bud!

It is going to be tough giving up our freedom to be safe, but we’re all in this together!

after calling partner David Sharaz her ‘rock’

I didn’t know she was on the pipe. Makes sense, now.

Bloody hell.

I’ve only put up one post all goddamn year. Must do better.

Started with a Dad joke.

Going to be a good year.

Hopefully we get to see a former billionaire or two go to gaol this year.

Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell · Dec 28, 2022

My favorite New Year’s resolution was to stop trying to reason with unreasonable people. This has reduced both my correspondence and my blood pressure.

Ray Epps reportedly boasted that he was at the forefront of January 6 and “orchestrated it”.
Dems don’t care. They just want Trump neutralised for good.
Nor do they care that Trump did four years POTUS service on no pay, saving the nation the best part of $2m.

Happy New Year – indeed, as the song says – let’s hope it’s a good one without any fear — because hope is all we have and all we need notwithstanding that we’re ruled by fear-mongering, pea-hearted popinjays–

I’d wish everyone a Happy New Year but somehow I’m not optimistic that it will be happy.

Matrix Transform:
Bob, did you get the Linux memory stick?
Yes, thanks. I couldn’t remember who I got it from so couldn’t say thanks.
Just having a bit of trouble with Dell software – it won’t allow me to bypass their initial boot up process.
I’ll keep working at it.
I may have to put in a new fromatted hard drive, I fink.

Bruce O’Newk:
Stepped outside the kitchen yesterday to see four Willy Wagtails on the ground on top of a piece of cardbord. Couldn’t work out what was happening until two of them started swooping around my head. The two on the ground didn’t do anything – just looked at me.
So I sat on the steps and tried to work it out. I realised this was the first flight day of the IVth generation of WW that had been around for years. Hadn’t been able to find their nest but it must have been nearby.
Anyway one took off and the other hid under the box.
Good to see them back.
I mow a strip of the grass and the two adults follow me grabbing bugs.

Winston – Sadly willy wagtails aren’t compatible with my noisy miners, so I don’t have any. One down in the local reserve had become fairly friendly last year but I haven’t seen him for a couple of months. The noisies are great fun and keep the indian mynas on the hop, but they’re territorial and fierce with rival species unfortunately. At least my ones have learned not to persecute kookas and other regular Cafe birds – they just ignore them.

Portland Woman Pushes 3-Year-Old Child Onto Train Tracks (VIDEO)

Portland, Oregon – 32-year-old Brianna Lace Workman was arrested for shoving a 3-year-old child onto the MAX train tracks.
Workman was arraigned on Thursday and charged with first-degree attempted assault, third-degree attempted assault, interfering with public transportation, second-degree disorderly conduct and recklessly endangering another person, according to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s office.

New Year – same old shit.

luckily I had a small stash in the header fridge

Disaster averted!

m0ntysays:
January 1, 2023 at 12:42 am
Hopefully we get to see a former billionaire or two go to gaol this year.

Pelosi? Gore? That FTX crook?

Flying out this evening.

I’m going to tick the leaving permanently box. Back to Maldives for 5+ and then strong possibility of work in UAE or ‘stan.

Why should I pay a cent in tax to the dogs that are running this shithole?

An ongoing corruption scandal at the heart of the European Union has seen a Vice President of the European Parliament arrested, among others, and the offices of two human rights organisations shuttered, as Belgian law enforcement probe officials

One things for certain, you won’t find Vikpol doing this sort of probing.

Why should I pay a cent in tax to the dogs that are running this shithole?

Salaam alaykum!

There is only one correct income tax rate my brother. It’s name is zero.

Why should I pay a cent in tax to the dogs that are running this shithole?

Don’t insult dogs and Australia is not a shithole. BTW I was chucked out of my job 7 years ago and had to move to another city to keep my career going.

Gabor:

Can’t see why the order of booting can’t be changed even on a Dell, but getting a multi boot app should fix it?

I had this problem several years ago with Dell – they really don’t like you moving away from their propriety OS (Which of course is Windows) and IIRC, the Dell system is written into the BIOS. Probably just one line of code. I’ve forgotten how I got around it.