Well folks, they say that all good things must come to an end, and so it is with a touch of sadness that I pen this, my final post ever, for Being Frank.

That’s right, the Dumb Ox is moving on to greener pastures, and so this is my magnum opus, my parting shot, my fond farewell, my pièce de résistance, my coup de grâce, yes, this truly is my last ever load of waffly hot air and sensationalism that will grace the pixels of this highly respected weblog.

It’s been a fun and sometimes controversial ride – who could forget the time that I blogged about the Watergate break-in and Richard Nixon’s involvement, which of course led to his subsequent resignation as the President of… hold on, no, that wasn’t me at all, that was actually in a movie that I watched just recently.

Seriously though, I guess what I want to say in my final ever post on Being Frank is that ‘in all things, charity’ is something that we all need to repeat with mantra like repetition, every moment, of every day, of every week, of every month, of every year, of every decade that God allows us to continue drawing breath and filling a pair of shoes in this temporal sphere.

I know that at times on Being Frank I have failed miserably at this, and so to that end I humbly apologize to anyone who may have been on the receiving end of my human weakness in this area during those moments when I allowed the desire to win take priority over the desire to love without counting the cost.

I’ll let you in on a little secret, I have often deliberately made my posts a little bit edgier because I know that this sparks discussion, and I think that discussion is a healthy thing – but once again, discussion tempered with charity is the most important thing of all.

I know it can be easy to log on to a blog and start waxing lyrical about all of the problems we see in the Church, the frailty of her priests and bishops, and about all of the things that we know, with such unwavering certainty, that need to be implemented and changed ASAP!

But we must never forget that the Church is not ours, it is Christ’s, and He has promised that, no matter how bad things seem, He will never abandon His Bride, or allow it to be taken from Him, and we must also never forget that, just like our clerical leaders, we have many weaknesses and failings of our own that desperately need the healing touch of the Master.

We should also never forget that our priests and bishops are people too, and as such they are just as hurt by the searing sting of public criticism as any of us would be if we were the ones in the firing line for our actions.

So yes, ‘in all things charity’ is something we must never lose sight of, and once again I humbly apologize for the times when I have been blinded to that important truth in my prosaic exuberance on this blog.

In fact, let me leave you with the full quote from Saint Augustine…

‘In essentials, unity
In non-essentials, liberty,
In all things, charity’

Well, that’s all from me folks, so, as I sign off this one last time (parting is such sweet sorrow) I am reminded of some wisdom that my dear old grandfather used to impart at moments like these: ‘Meine hosen sind auf feuer’

Stay classy San Diego!
The Dumb Ox

I came across this interesting new article while browsing the Internet recently…

Pope Pius, who was labelled “Hitler’s Pope” because of his silence during the Holocaust, may have arranged the exodus of about 200,000 Jews from Germany just three weeks after Kristallnacht, when thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

The claim was made by Dr Michael Hesemann, a German historian carrying out research in the Vatican archives for the Pave the Way Foundation, a US-based inter-faith group.

He said that Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli – the future Pius XII – wrote to Catholic archbishops around the world to urge them to apply for visas for “non-Aryan Catholics” and Jewish converts to Christianity who wanted to leave Germany.

Elliot Hershberg, the chairman of the Pave the Way Foundation, said:“ We believe that many Jews who were successful in leaving

Europe may not have had any idea that their visas and travel documents were obtained through these Vatican efforts.

“Everything we have found thus far seems to indicate

the known negative perception of Pope Pius XII is wrong.”

Nothing like setting the record straight in the secular press.

Followers of this blog will remember that at the time of President Obama’s election to the Oval Office I made a prediction that it wouldn’t take long for the PR gloss to wear thin, and for even the staunchest of US lefties to realize that Obama is ‘all show and no go’.

It seems that my prediction may be starting to come true, well if you believe New York Times commentator Ross Douthat that is.

Douthat dedicated a recent editorial column in the Times to the issue of the left wing discontent with President Obama.

He even went as far as dubbing this their ‘summer of discontent’.

I think he’s right, and I am completely unsurprised by all of what he lays out, because any astute follower of the Obama campaign would have seen that the Obama on display was a highly polished and carefully constructed invention that presented nothing in the way of concrete substance to back up the messianic claims being made by Obama and his disciples.

Well, being on the campaign trail is one thing, but being in charge is another thing altogether.

Anyone with half an ounce of commonsense and worldly smarts could see that there was no way that Obama was going to be able to deliver the brave new world of peace, prosperity and freedom that he was promising prior to his election.

And anyone who knew anything at all about Obama’s personal beliefs and prior political dealings easily saw that Obama was always going to do things like increase funding for abortion in the US and overseas.

People who had followed his earlier political wheelings and dealings would have also seen that above all else, Obama’s main priority is the advancement of Obama (which is the same for 99% of all politicians, anywhere in the world).

So here we are, Obama’s been in the chair for a while now, and, ‘oh my gosh, like, you know, like, the world isn’t any better, or stuff.’

This should come as no real surprise or disappointment to committed Catholics, because we understand that salvation is not found in political leaders, and that the deep problems that plague the human person have nothing to do with politics.

I was reading the NZ Herald last week when I came across an article about a public presentation given by Sir Peter Gluckman, a senior science advisor to Prime Minister John Key (one of the people who’ll advise JK whether or not authorizing a space mission, led by Bruce Willis, to blow up an asteroid with a nuclear bomb is the only option left open to him to save the planet from an impending fatal collision)

I had a good laugh to myself when I read what he is reported to have said, for not only does he appear to have gone on the offensive against anyone who refuses to embrace the theory that global warming is a manmade phenomenon, but he has done so with some of the cheapest and most ridiculous rhetoric in the book.

Firstly, he starts with the classic insinuation that the unwashed masses really should listen to the high priests of science when they tell them that the sky is falling because the computer model god is angry, and that if we don’t all increase our weekly tithe to the temple in Wellington he will smote all the cute looking polar bears.

Then he starts ringing up the usual tally of cheap shots and straw man arguments in support of his new faith in computer model god.

Firstly he makes the totally ludicrous accusation that refusing to accept his beliefs about global warming is somehow akin to being a literal seven day creationist, an HIV-AIDS denier or believing that cigarettes don’t cause cancer.

Come on Peter, this has to be one of the most laughable ad hominem attacks on your scientific opponents I’ve ever heard made in a public forum.

(Ironically, the promoters of manmade global warming theory are actually more like big tobacco than the opponents of it are, because they have all the funding and lobbying power to shape public opinion on this issue.)

And for good measure he throws in the good old conspiracy theory that big oil companies are the sinister force at work behind the scenes, pulling all the levers that result in the scientific opposition to the the theory of manmade global warming.

He then goes on to include some of the most pee-brained and unfounded allegations you’ll hear about this issue, like when he makes the totally false allegation that creationists believe that the world has been created for human beings to exploit.

Such an assertion is complete and utter fabrication, and I should know, because many years ago I was known to frequent literal seven day creation seminars and conferences, and I even subscribed to their magazines and purchased their books, but not once did I ever read or hear a creationist suggest, or even come close to implying, that they believed that the earth was made for mankind to exploit.

There are plenty of rational reasons to question the validity of the belief in a literal seven day creation, but this isn’t one of them, because the idea that the world was created for mankind to exploit simply isn’t a belief held by any recognized creationist (many of whom, despite their scholarly weaknesses, are actually very committed nature lovers who spend a lot of time in the great outdoors).

Gluckman then starts to shift his focus on to making bold claims about the reliability of the theory of manmade global warming by asserting that there is no real debate about the theory, or that it is a scientifically unshakable proposition.

Funny thing is that not only does he later go on to admit that the ‘science on climate change [is] incomplete’, but he never mentions the fact that causality has not been proven, and that even correlation has some huge question marks over it.

For example, we know that hundreds of years ago the climate was hotter in places like the UK than what it is there today, yet these hotter than current temperatures coincide with an era of human history that didn’t have any industrial or motorized technologies (like cars, planes, engines, manufacturing plants, etc, etc).

Not only that, but without any human intervention at all, these high temperatures decreased over time by themselves.

It seems to me that Sir Peter’s biggest problem, like all who adhere to the theory of manmade global warming, is that he spends so much time talking about symptoms and effects that he forgets to focus on causes of those symptoms, or to present irrefutable proof of a manmade causality for them.

At best all we have here is a correlation between a change in climate and industrial advancement, but when you go back through human history and see hotter temperatures than today’s without any industry or combustion energy whatsoever, you quickly realize that the theories aren’t quite as foolproof as devoted adherents like to make them out to be.

Even Sir Peter hints at the problems associated with manmade global warming theory when he decries, albeit rather belatedly, and very weakly, the global warming alarmism that has been disseminated by the promoters of this theory.

Foolishly, I think, he then goes on to try and defend the promotion of unfounded alarmist rhetoric as a necessary tool for achieving an ideological end, and he even claims that is better to promote ‘bad science’ than it is to be optimistic and respond in a minimal fashion to the actual situation at hand.

And then, most comically of all, he engages in some alarmism of his own by claiming that (cue suspenseful strings, pensive look, a slow lean forward, and a two handed grip on the podium): “if we underestimate, then in 2050 our species might find itself facing an inhospitable future on an irreversibly degraded planet.”

Based on what I am reading about this issue from other parts of the world, this latest address from Peter Gluckman is part of a concerted international PR effort to try and undermine all scientific opposition to the theory of manmade global warming, and to evangelize the public back to the theory after incidents like climategate and Al Gore inc, etc began to shake public belief in the validity of what was being thrust upon them from on high.