I happened to watch the season premiere of the Showtime Grifter Show's tenth season of Shameless. The druggies and cons and wasted lives of poor white Pig Shit Irish trash and the inner circle of friends and fockers on Chicago's south side - welfare cheats, fences, drug and sex addicts soap opera -light immoral humor / farce with real life consequences - nothing has changed much since I stopped watching in the middle of season seven I think out of boredom. Nothing except that after nine seasons of moronic loser behavior and such, Fiona (Emmy Rossum) had finally left the cast in search of other bona-fide acting opportunities. William H Macy's wife Felicia Huffman got her tit caught in a washing machine roller with bribery charges of trying to get one of her daughters - have someone pull a Teddy or Jack Kennedy and have someone take a college level test for her, a SAT test. Easier in the old days when there was no photo on Driver's Licenses btw. No word of what Ivy League college they were going to bribe their daughter into, maybe the University of Pennsylvania in Philly, just like Trump? Felicity got jail time - two weeks - wow. White Male Privilege for the breadwinner William H came into play and he beat the rap and was surprisingly not charged. Macy is an "actor" and star of Shameless in its tenth and tired season of jumping the Whale by a Whale of an actor and cast. Etc. .
Little
wonder “Crime” is down to near zero in America’s major cities. It is off the
books like reporting on Police shooting civilians as in Ferguson and Abu Ghraib.
Welcome to
the post 911 Bush/Cheney Dynasty world. Prison Paradise (on the taxpayer's dime - the 99% that is).
The Chicago
police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering
Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what
lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
The
facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square,
has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews
with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day
shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic
constitutional rights.
Alleged
police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility
who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police
abuse, include:
Keeping
arrestees out of official booking databases.
Beating by
police, resulting in head wounds.
Shackling
for prolonged periods.
Denying
attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
Holding
people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as
young as 15.
Brian Jacob
Church was taken to Homan Square after police picked him up in 2012 on
terrorism charges he beat at trial. He said police first photographed him for a
biometrics database, took him down a long cinderblock hallway on a second
floor, and handcuffed him to a bench bolted to the floor. He spent the next 17
hours there – approximately, as it was a windowless room and the lights were
kept on overhead – while police attempted an interrogation he described as a
fishing expedition.
Homan Square
struck Church as the police equivalent of a CIA black site. Inside, he saw
“big, big vehicles” that looked to him like the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected
used by US soldiers and marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. When his lawyers were
finally permitted access, Church spoke with them through a 12ft x 12ft metal
cage.
In Arizona’s
boom and bust economy it is surprising that I run into a piece of an old acquaintance from
Tucson, Rocco of Rocco’s Little Chicago Pizzeria along the main east west drag
East Broadway on Internet News.
I can
remember when Rocco’s was searching around for the right spot to put his
version of Chicago and its style of pizza and Italian food on the local Menu
and under the Stripes and Stars Chicago City Flag inside the restaurant.
His wife was
a fellow co-worker at a local HMO before it was sold out to the Corporate Global
Spreadsheet, before you had to dial a 1-800 number to help you with your
primary care doctor or your meds and reach perhaps in those days Minnesota which
is probably Mumbai these days.
The
corporate culture of that local HMO was such that everybody was a member of a
team and almost like family. So it was not hard to keep up with the progress of
Rocco starting a business with limited capital and in the boom and bust economy
of an old cow town, university town of Tucson.
I was pleasingly surprised to see that Rocco had posted a sign restricting service to the morons in
the state legislature over this recent religious right to discriminate law. The
sign above.
I wished him
and his wife and baby luck at the grand opening of Rocco’s in the late nineties
before traveling back east to a more stable long term work environment. I even gave him a
collage of old newspaper stuffed into the seat of a shaker chair I bought there
in a thrift store. Rocco said he was going to hang it in the bathroom.
Doubt is
something as brilliant and as valuable (sarcasm) as one of my works of art has survived the tourists.
Rocco Bathroom Art Reminiscent of College Days spent in Saint Petersburg Russia Comrade
Was back in
2007 visiting my son in college but missed getting to say hello to Rocco. Hello
Rocco. Good Man! Even Better Pizza!
Real Tucsonans Stay In Summer And are not Stupid enough to Turn away Business LOL
the wealthy need the poor to stay out of spiritual poverty -- @FrRobertBarron, citing Cardinal George
— Kathryn Jean Lopez (@kathrynlopez) September 22, 2013
Tea Party
Spin Doctress K-Lo Cites Cardinal George's Spin Doctor Bobbie Barron – “the
wealthy need the poor to stay out of spiritual poverty” – What the Hell Does
That Mean???
The Poor
should stay poor or jeopardize the salvation (or wealth) of the Rich???
In a whole new world out there in modern
business regarding exploitation and brainwashing of employees, mostly immigrants, not native Brits, in
London etc.
Pret doesn't merely want its employees to lend
their minds and bodies; it wants their souls, too. It will not employ anyone
who is "here just for the money." Noting that one Pret worker in
London got fired soon after he tried to start a union—the company maintained it
was for making homophobic comments—Myerscough suggested the worker's true
offense was being unhappy enough to want to start a union, since "Pret
workers aren't supposed to be unhappy." The sin commenceth with the thought,
not the deed.
*Emotional labor is not itself new. Prostitutes
have faked orgasms for millennia. With greater sincerity (one hopes),
undertakers calm the grieving, nurses comfort the sick, and migrant nannies
lavish on other people's children the love they aren't present to furnish back
home. Flight attendants, in the pre-feminist era, calmed jittery flyers by
being pretty, friendly, even a little bit flirtatious; this ended with
deregulation in the early '80s as airlines stopped competing on service and
started competing on price.
In all these instances, emotional labor served
(legitimately or not) identifiable emotional needs. That's not true at Pret.
Fast-food service is not one of the caring professions. The only imperatives
typically addressed in a Pret shop are hunger and thirst. Why must the person
who sells me a cheddar and tomato sandwich have "presence" and
"create a sense of fun"? Why can't he or she be doing it "just
for the money"? I don't expect the swiping of my credit card to be
anybody's vocation. This is, after all, the economy's bottom most rung.
"Smiling Conservative" Archbishop Kurtz of Louisville KY
Joe Kurtz’s impeding appointment as the next Cardinal of Chicago and as
next President of the USCCB is something I decided to do a little research into
before the MSM anoints a “great moral” leader to kill internet space and
airtime. I found it strange that in his standard Wikipedia bio the great next possible Slavic Leader
of the Chicago Archdiocese is born, has two parents and then goes directly to
St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philly as an Allentown diocese seminarian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Edward_Kurtz
I love how these chaff farmers raised from poverty and into riches now
are the bastions of money and privileged RC culture. I do love the “smiling
conservative” brand on these chaff farmers and or ex-coal mining town types.
They show you their teeth as they stick the cold piece of steel in between your
ribs, as they close down schools, sell off American RC heritage/real estate and
send the cash off to the Vatican Bank for the next phase of RC Inc. in the soon
to be victimized third world religious plan. Whatever. Gleaning through some, much deleted (?) facts once available on Kurtz’s
personal history on the internet, that it all may have once been there when he
was in Knoxville; but that once he gets to Louisville it has all been purged. I may be wrong about all this. I am no IT
expert. The Wiki bio seems to occur
around Louisville and the open facts of Kurtz’s early life in the mining town
of Mahanoy City Pennsylvania in my own ancestors' much impoverished upstate Schuylkill County, were never put in that bio to begin with. I can see the Chicago Tribune now writing a piece about the Cardinal’s humble
beginnings in Shithole Pennsylvania and now ordained by God to rule as Moral
Master of the universe for Second City USA. Oh the horror! Anyway, it took a lot of digging but I do not think there is a lot of
mystery in why there are many bio holes in the next presumed bishop prince of
Chicago.
Shuttered Assumption BVM RC church Mahanoy City, PA - Not a 7/11 yet
I believe he went to Assumption BVM RC church there in Mahanoy City. It is or was closed
in 2009. I do not see any evidence of a parish school, so maybe future Cardinal
Kurtz went to public school there. Nothing wrong with that. Except maybe
somebody like future Cardinal Salvadore Cordileone went to public school in
California. I see people like Cordileone and or a Kurtz getting into junior or senior
year in public school and when it comes time for the Junior or Senior Prom
time, they find God and the RC church and a vocation rather than a prom date. And
all that perhaps based on their own personal confused sexuality which combined with
the thousand year old institutionalized confused sexuality of the western
church, the thing that makes for much stress in a modern age when confused
sexual RC hierarch types go around harassing non-confused heterosexual and
homosexual types as part of their CEO management package. Also, I would guess from a timeline thing, that Kurtz knew two years
ahead of his old neighbors in Mahanoy City that they were going to close
Assumption and thus the careful rewrites of Kurtz’s personal history ahead of
time. As of 2011, there was a many years appeal to the Vatican about the
legitimacy of closing Assumption as part of a five church or so combined
parish. The appeal and or Vatican lawsuit may still be going on which is also
why Kurtz may be so hush hush perhaps about his boyhood parish etc. Have a nice day. .
"Catholicism" is a series of segments of art film, travelogue and incoherent religion
lectures that ramble all over creation’s time line and imagination.
BUT - Where is the
real Roman Catholicism Father Barron?
I ran into two
episodes of Robert Barron’s “Catholicism” on PBS on one of those raising cash
on a rainy Sunday afternoon deals and offering a full five DVD set of ten
episodes for a $250 tax deductible contribution to the local PBS station.
Media expert Barron’s
independent, independent film which has no traceable roots in IMDb (Internet
Movie Data base) that I can compare the credentials of people using terms and
titles like Director or Cinematographer to see if Cardinal George and or his
cronies got their three million dollars worth in this vanguard media vehicle of “the
New Evangelism” and or “Getting the old MoJo Nostalgia Thing going for the
pre-Vatican II Medieval Church”.
Father Robert Barron
is a polished articulate wordsmith but a third rate theologian as any PC
theologian in the RCC is these days. Though he wears glasses and a wristwatch,
I guess the appearance of intelligibility is allowed on occasion with
permission in its certified authorized theologians mixing with the little
people through the firewall of the media. Is allowable to a certain extent in
the desperate marketing and sale of this “New Evangelism” thing?
Walks like a
duck. Sounds like a Duck. It must be the
New Evangelism thingy. Frozen concentrated grape juice in a frozen concentrated
orange juice container I fear. What’s
the difference? Catholicism – one size fits all. Right? One fruit juice is as good as another.
Whatever. Enough on tangents.
Three million bucks
does not go very far these days even in terms of a non-union made film.
I will say that most
of what I have seen could have been shot with stock footage and much of it with
scenes of happy heterosexual couples holding hands in the streets and parks and
all the running happy children in these parks added to strike a “I want that
too” chord in the viewer – the illusion of temporary happiness at least.
Viewing these two
propaganda pieces on PBS I wanted to learn something I did not already know
about Catholicism. Many of the PBS series Ihave seen illustrating topics such as Baseball, the Civil War or even Judaism have been informative and thought provoking.
Not once in these two
episodes do I once hear what the Roman Catholic Church is all about or what it
believes in.
I did watch these two
episodes:
“Amazed and Afraid:
The Revelation of God Become Man”
“That Than Which
Nothing Greater Can Be Thought: The Ineffable Mystery of God”
The first episode is a pile of 10, 15, 30 second sound bites against a backdrop of the all the art of
churches, the Sistine Chapel ceiling paint job etc. And while it is sometimes exquisite to encounter
a sixteenth century Spanish cathedral alter piece covered in icons and gold, one like me
after one too many shots of such decadence and with a Protestant conscience, I am
reminded of all the slave labor and ruined lives of millions of enslaved peasants
and Indians in South and Central America that went into the creation of this “art”.
It is here where the
sound bites and the 90 second and two minute polished homilies struck me of the
whole disjointed mess of this propaganda film. That beyond art, the RCC is idolatry
and love of the idol – the thing – its own thing. That an ignorant illiterate serf in medieval
Europe may have learned his bible stories from the stained glass of the
Cathedrals.
I thought I recognized
the style of Barron’s polished 90 second and two minute focused homilies which
remind me of the finishing punch line statements after many long agonizing boring religion classes I remember in catholic high school. I also feel for his seminary students mucho.
But looking at and
listening to Father Barron blather on with so many rambling, disjointed, bunch
of little phrases, thoughts, opinions, against the backdrop of medieval art,
happy couples in parks etc. that I am reminded of the possibility of some drunken monk in some medieval theology class in a cathedral pointing to a stained glass
picture of Noah’s flood and then telling the story of Adam and Eve. Some serfs
may have gone to their graves confused on the finer subtle points of that theology lesson etc.
The second episode
mentioned continues the rambling sound bites against the backdrop of stock
footage. The drunken medieval monk acting gig in the cathedral medieval theology class
gets more polished and starts into an alphabet soup of disconnected ideas without any spellable words
produced in the consumer’s spoon.
But
defining or understanding God is a really big subject and I have heard better
explanations of the vastness and mystery of God from Muslims on video tape and
filtered through a coarse sieve of translation.
One very disturbing scene
in this second episode has Father Barron doing his theology schtick against the
backdrop of Auschwitz and rambling about how evil can be done in life etc. How
can God let that happen?
He even concedes that
the idea that God letting evil happen for a greater good is a tad bit too much
for human understanding.
He slips into a story
about the old testament story of Job and rambles on a bit. Jumps to a Seurat
pointism painting in a museum. And finally ends on a cute story of the American
Philosopher William James and his dumb dog who cannot read.
Then he slips back to
the Auschwitz scene without an answer to the mystery of God letting the Shoah
happen.
No apology for what so many
Catholics in the Nazi Party did to the Jews.
I guess by episode eight or nine Father Barron will be explaining why
God’s intentions at Auschwitz were so obtuse and why it is perfectly clear why the
Jew hating(?), Jew/humanity ignoring Pius XII must be made a modern saint
according to the new, modern, retro-Medieval “New Evangelism”
Being the hack
seminary teacher and dog trainer that Barron appears to be and in grand favor
of his mentor and patron Cardinal George of Chicago, I think that no
intelligent person has anything to fear from this waste of three million
dollars that disappeared off the ledgers somewhere. No threat I think to any
higher order of primates here at least.
This new untried Attention
Deficit, all over the map non-map, approach to the heart of Christianity that the RCC has become, much like a
millstone tied around the rest of Christianity’s legitimate attempt to follow
the simple teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, is sad.
No doubt like Fox
News which attributes its high ratings to being the only channel playing in
most nursing homes in America, the canned Catholicism DVD treasury will appeal
to the long term only memories of the inmates there who hopefully still have
control over their estates before they part this earth and leave their wealth
to the “New Evangelism” of the Roman Pagan Catholic Church.
No hidden Picasso
here. Perhaps though just another encounter with a resurrected Elvis painted on
velvet kind of decorative art thingy.
Sir Kenneth – rest in
peace. Your reputation on art history remains safely intact.
Chick-Fil-A is yet to break into the Bigtime diverse Chicago, Philly, NYC, Boston franchising arena.
Cardinal George of Chicago is rooting for Chick-Fil-A BTW as his choice for Catholic Values Fast Food.
Wendy's in Columbia SC, one of a 74 chain Wendy's subdivision operated by Jim Furman, Tarheel Capital, is rooting for the competition, as seen above, in serving unwholesome mechanically separated tortured chicken as opposed to good old A-merican Beef.
Rumor has it that Wendy's will beat Chick-Fil-A into the East African franchising market namely Uganda where Evangelical Christian fast food must bribe the local pols with cash and have a uniquely American version, of the Christianity Hate Brand seal of approval.
Cardinal George
of Chicago, a Christian Evangelical Conservative has come down on the side of Dan Cathy’s
conservative Christian hatred of gays and the funding of gay hate projects,
some co-sponsored by the Catholics.
These days, the
conservative Catholic Hierarchy have in all but exact word and deed negated the
brotherhood and sisterhood generated towards other faiths out of Vatican II.
Along with
forgetting Vatican II is the negation Pope Paul VI’s wrongful Catholic blame of the Jews
for the mythical figure of Jesus and his death. Read Cardinal George's revised remarks below on that chestnut. RIP Paul VI. RIP Vatican II.
So when I hear
Heir George speak about Rahm Emanuel’s values I know what the coded
anti-Semite message is (wink, nod).
Prove me wrong!
Show me one photo of Cardinal George standing next to Mayor Emanuel, shaking hands and "smiling".
Cardinal George on Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ flick:
…There is a priest in the archdiocese who has a
lot of experience in filmmaking, and he has sent out to the parishes all the
information on the film and how to participate in viewing it. I have sent out
the documents from Rome and the USCCB on how to read the Passion stories in the
Gospels. I would encourage people to see the film.
I would then say
something else. We should see it not only as Christian believers; we should try
to watch it with the eyes of the Jewish people.
The history of
anti-Semitism, a very sorrowful history, has made many Jews very sensitive to
any recognition that even some Jews were involved in the death of Jesus.
Obviously some Jews were involved in the death of Jesus. He had enemies among
his own people. His apostle Judas betrayed him and some of the leaders of the
people were against him. Read the Gospels. At the same time, all Jesus' friends
were Jews, as were the first apostles and disciples - everybody was a Jew
within this story, except the Romans who, in fact, killed him. They killed him
in their own fashion - a terrible execution, torture. And all of that torture
is attributed to the Romans in the film.
But the push to
have him condemned is attributed to some of the Jewish leaders, even though the
Romans are primarily responsible. Jesus had enemies among his own people. He
also had friends and disciples among his own people. Jesus was a Jew. And you
can hardly tell the story of Jesus' life, certainly not the story of his death,
without saying that some Jews did this and some Jews did that.
–
Cardinal George 13 February 2004 - St. Vincent Ferrer Parish, River Forest,
Illlinois
I hope I am not offending anybody. Ran into the above bumper sticker on the way to the Staten Island Ferry on a car with Illinois plates. I thought it was something anti-semitic. Instead it refers to some Yiddish pop Music banned by some orthodox rabbis in Chicago. I hear that the bumper sticker is a way of using non-verbal negatives to the rabbis who have banned the music. (Poshiter Yid = a simple Jew)
Below is a clip of I think by the same artist. I did not know Yiddish was still spoken. I remember it from my youth when my father would go and haggle with some Jewish merchants for the best bargain in town for school clothes etc. My father did not speak Yiddish but he may have known a few words to strike up the conversation or finish up the deal.
