Pope's encyclical, Chapter One, Vatican News summary --
------------- [excerpt]----------- ...The document reflects on the many distortions of the contemporary era: the manipulation and deformation of concepts such as democracy, freedom, justice; the loss of the meaning of the social community and history; selfishness and indifference toward the common good; the prevalence of a market logic based on profit and the culture of waste; unemployment, racism, poverty; the disparity of rights and its aberrations such as slavery, trafficking....
It deals with global problems that call for global actions, emphasizes the Pope, also sounding the alarm against a "culture of walls" that favours the proliferation of organized crime, fueled by fear and loneliness. [end, excerpt] -----------
_____________________________
I'm not sure I'm understanding specifically that last part -- I don't think the Mob was organized because of fear and loneliness. -- Or -- well -- maybe, in a way. And perhaps the Pope is speaking about crime in general, not the Mafia.
In America when you say "organized crime" it means the mafia, but maybe it doesn't mean that in Italy. (They don't call it "the Mafia," they just call it "our relatives" - no, only kidding....)
You know, most of the stuff in the summary makes sense, but some of the phrasing is a little bit awkward to an English-speaking American ear. According to online info, he writes the encyclical in Latin. (Deep tradition.) And so, translating from an ancient dead language into modern-day English, some phrases are going to come out seeming a little bounced.
_________________________
_________________________
On You Tube, I found some documentaries and videos about NASCAR. History and culture of this sport are pretty fascinating.
Part of that is the way the story is told.
A well-told story: that's the key.
A channel called Company Man has a video about NASCAR -- it discusses how the racing has changed over the years: more safety precautions, the Car Of Tomorrow, stages, The Chase -- scroll down to Comments, and it's -- colorful. The new drivers have no personality, can't work on their own cars, the races are too boring, and some seething rage over something called "boogity boogity"...
__________________________
_______________________________
"The Election That Could Break America"
written by Barton Gellman
The Atlantic
(continued)
...In part, Trump's hostility to voting by mail is a reflection of his belief that more voting is bad for him in general. Democrats, he said...at the end of March, want "levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again."
Some Republicans see Trump's vendetta as self-defeating. "It to me appears entirely irrational," Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, told me. "The Trump campaign and RNC and by fiat their state party organizations are engaging in suppressing their own voter turnout," including Republican seniors who have voted by mail for years.
But Trump's crusade against voting by mail is a strategically sound expression of his plan for the Interregnum. The president is not actually trying to prevent mail-in balloting altogether, which he has no means to do.
He is discrediting the practice and starving it of resources, signaling his supporters to vote in person, and preparing the ground for post-Election Night plans to contest the results. It is the strategy of a man who expects to be outvoted and means to hobble the count.
Voting by mail does not favor either party "during normal times," according to a team of researchers at Stanford, but that phrase does a lot of work. Their findings, which were published in June, did not take into account a president whose words alone could produce a partisan skew.
Trump's systematic predictions of fraud appear to have had a powerful effect on Republican voting intentions. In Georgia, for example, a Monmouth University poll in late July found that 60 percent of Democrats but only 28 percent of Republicans were likely to vote by mail. In the battleground states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, hundreds of thousands more Democrats than Republicans have requested mail-in ballots.
Trump, in other words, has created a proxy to distinguish friend from foe. Republican lawyers around the country will find this useful when litigating the count. Playing by the numbers, they can treat ballots cast by mail as hostile, just as they do ballots cast in person by urban and college-town voters. Those are the ballots they will contest.
The battle space of the Interregnum, if trends hold true, will be shaped by a phenomenon known as the "blue shift."
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment