Of Course, I Could Be Wrong

23/11/2023

Father Jesús Mariscal is the parochial vicar at St. Paul Cathedral in Yakima, Washington.

14/08/2022

There may be differences in possible outcomes but there is no difference in kind between calls for Salman Rushdie to be murdered for something he wrote and calls for J. K. Rowling to be cancelled because of something she wrote. Yet many who oppose Rowling's right to say what she believes to be the truth will be condemning the attack on Salman Rushdie. Furthermore, they will be banging on about how important freedom of speech should be. Go, figure!

29/07/2022

It always amazes me how they know their names.

29/07/2022

There is a somewhat edited quote by Margaret Atwood that says, "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."

Actually, I am afraid that my wife might kill me although, to be honest, that is more to do with my guilty conscience than anything in my wife's character.

28/07/2022

From "Catholic News Agency"

After photos of a shirtless Italian priest celebrating Mass in the sea using an inflatable lounge chair went viral this week, the local Catholic archdiocese has called for liturgical decorum and respect.

Father Mattia Bernasconi, a priest of the archdiocese of Milan, publicly acknowledged in an interview on the twenty-sixth of July that his liturgical choice to swap out his vestments for swim trunks was “perhaps imprudent” and said that he would not do it again.

27/07/2022

27/07/2022

As you all know, I am not very good at political correctness, but I have to admit that I am uneasy about the "Black Panther" movie franchise. It strikes me that it stereotypes Africans in an, almost, pornographic way. The depiction of African women in the films is particularly unsettling. On the whole, the message seems to be that if an African woman wants empowerment she has to rip her clothes off or act like a do******ix (preferably both). As for the African men in the films, many of them, especially the good guys, come across as an embodiment of the "black men have big dicks" meme.

26/07/2022

From today's "Evening Chronicle."

26/07/2022

If we, as a nation, are truly serious about cutting down on carbon emissions by reducing the number of personal journeys we make, they should announce that Brighton is going to host the next Eurovision Song Contest and be done with it.

25/07/2022

If men have no right to have an opinion on abortion then neither do women who cannot conceive.

25/07/2022

Obviously, it is easier to have your opinions formulated for you and as a package rather than item by item. And you will appear to have lots of friends.

But, honestly, what a waste of a brain!

25/07/2022

Semantically, abortion is not and can never be a reproductive right. It is not even the right not to reproduce. To claim it is a reproductive right is akin to insisting that the right to throw up is the same as the right to eat kebab after having partaken of a skinful on a Friday night after work.

It may be that one day there will be a universal right to terminate pregnancies, at least in certain circumstances. But if that happens then it will still not be a reproductive right. It will have its own title; "abortion right" or "reproduction reversal right," for example.

I am banging on about this at the moment because the term "reproductive rights" has been hijacked and perverted by certain (and, boy, are they certain!) people in order to shame anyone who does not agree with them about abortion and to force those who agree with them in part, to agree with them fully, by cancelling the possibility of having a complicated or not yet fully formed opinion on the issue. For example, in the Big Brother world of word weaponisation, a person who is totally in favour of r**e victims being allowed to terminate a consequent pregnancy if carried expeditiously but who is not in favour of the late-term abortion of babies who will be born with Down's syndrome automatically becomes someone who is against reproductive rights because alternative descriptors have been erased by they who must get their own way.

This disingenuous and malicious corruption of language, which is being employed by both liberals and conservatives alike with the deliberate and engineered intent of making people fearful of open debate is, possibly, the greatest threat to the fruits of the Western Enlightenment that we face at this time. That many are embracing the Newspeak of the Cultural Wars without knowing that they have been duped into doing so by linguistic tyrants is so very sad and disappointing.

We are better than this.

23/07/2022

As I get older I am finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with current terminology, especially that trending in the ongoing "Culture Wars." So, help me out here, I am right in thinking that "reproductive rights" are, counterintuitively, the right to have an abortion after you have accidentally reproduced?

21/07/2022

The Bell family from County Durham in England, who spent the last seventeen years dutifully visiting the grave of the late family patriarch, Thomas Bell, have been told that someone is, in fact, buried in his grave. Furthermore, nobody has any idea where Tom is buried.

The blunder was discovered after the recent death of Tom's widow, Hilda, whose last wishes were to be buried alongside her husband. Members of the family were left stunned when they got a call from the undertaker to tell them gravediggers had found a stranger’s coffin in the grave where their dad should have been.

Grave diggers acting on behalf of the Diocese of Durham, who are responsible for the graveyard, have since dug up six plots but they have still not located the dad.

Hilda is currently being held at a funeral home, where she has been for the past five weeks.

20/07/2022

This is only theoretical and it is, as far as the science is concerned, technically impossible, but new research published in a leading scientific journal today appears to demonstrate that the speed at which Amazon delivery drivers expect you to travel between them knocking on the door and them writing out a "We are sorry we missed you" card, posting it through your letter box and getting back in their van to drive off with your parcel, is faster than the speed of light and by some orders of magnitude. The only other example of this contradiction of Einstein's special theory of relativity is the rapid expansion of the universe immediately prior to the big bang and who believes that old hokum anyway?!!

19/07/2022

So, the candidate most against governments being overprotective and interfering with personal choice is also the candidate who is obsessed with telling everyone where they can and where they cannot take a leak. Go figure!

18/07/2022

IMPORTANT HEATWAVE ADVICE

There are really only two facts you need to know if you want to survive the hot weather.

1 - It is very important that you drink water, lots and lots of it. Drinking lots of water may well save your life. Honestly, I cannot overemphasise how necessary it is for your survival that you drink plenty of water.

2 - Beer is ninety-five per cent water.