THE RUPERT OCCASIONAL DIGEST June Something Or Other

Religion, Society, and Culture

Politics. Our American cousins and the Omar. Nine Lives Ilhan continues to hang on. One moment, her net worth was $30 million; the next, it dropped to under a million. Which is it? A reasonable question even her former allies are now asking. How does a sitting congresswoman with an annual salary of $174,000 per year manage to increase her net worth into the tens of millions of dollars in such a short period of time? Speaking engagements? Investments? Did she seek financial advice from Nancy Pelosi? Hunter Biden? Former President Joe Biden? Was her previous estimate conflated with the income of her husband? Her troubles are piling up just as quickly as her wealth seems to be evaporating. Whether she is innocent or not, pray that justice may be served for the good of all souls.

• www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD15LXg5WLQ&t=9s Omar named in fraud scandal
• x.com/FoxNews/status/2057124901798936972 Fraud scandal
• https://rumble.com/v6i2771-watch-ilhan-omar-says-shes-here-to-protect-the-interests-of-somalia.html Divided allegiances
• https://www.foxnews.com/video/6396054512112?spark_wn=1 Personal Finances, Meals Act

Liturgy. Bad Pajamas. Just when it seems beauty has returned to triumph over the bizarre and the bland, an obnoxious cape flutters forth from obscurity to nest in some sanctuary that preserves the ugliest fashion birds of the post-Conciliar age. Yet somehow, our Byzantine Catholic friends, even in the smallest of parishes, still manage to wear vestments of stunning beauty. Of course, there are exceptions among Catholics of the Latin Rite. Some parishes, among them communities of the Personal Ordinariates, the FSSP and ICKSP, are committed to beauty, and so vestments tend to focus the imagination heavenward. A glitter-covered plastic bag can’t compare to a handcrafted Gothic or Roman chasuble adorned with fine embroidery that confidently tells the story of the Resurrection or another aspect of salvation in Christ.

Technology. The sci-fi movie Moonfall tells the story of a distant ancient human civilisation that created an artificial entity to run its on and off-world communities. Fast forward to now, and the earth is confronted with the moon shifting orbit for unknown reasons and causing chaos. A conspiracy to conceal the arrival of that malevolent AI increased the risk of the Earth being devastated by a collision with the wandering Moon, which is actually a Dyson Sphere, a massive machine powered by a captured dwarf star at the heart of the Moon created by our ancestors to perpetuate the human species. The alien AI managed to bore into the Sphere/Moon and disrupt the power source of the Moon that keeps it in its place. Hence, the Moon's decaying orbit. Once we Terrans get our act together, and a ragtag mission travels to the Moon to employ an energy weapon (EMP) against the evil AI, the crew eventually encounters another AI that is human-friendly, the operating system of the Moon itself, which shares with the mission commander the story of our ancestors who were wiped out by the malevolent entity. So here we are, at the dawn of another age. Can we manage our machines or will they manage us? Will technomancy enable us to enjoy a happy cooperation with our inventions? The nuclear age, i.e., nuclear war against Japan, provides a clear warning about our capacity to inflict catastrophic damage upon ourselves. A host of apocalyptic movies and books over the past century attempt to warn us away from straying too far down the technological rabbit hole.

As popes go. Just because someone has a computer and a Wi-Fi connection doesn’t automatically make him a noteworthy pundit. Frankly, listening to the din clinging to the issue of the SSPX and Pope Leo XIV, or Pope Leo and [insert personal gripe here], is distracting at best. Far too many self-proclaimed pundits feel entitled to weigh in on issues beyond their pay grade. If one had to guess their motivation for saturating the internet with personal grievances (and yes - this paragraph is a grievance), it might be to fill their pockets with “likes” and other forms of social capital,... and cash, of course. In the words of a young mom, worn thin by her whiny child and clinging to the last shred of patience, she sighs, "Give it a rest." (And no... neither 'likes' nor cash factor into the publication of this lament and blog site.)

Of Bishops and Cardinals. So, Bishop Martin, riding on the coattails of his predecessor, acknowledged the success of the vocation boom in the Diocese of Charlotte. Sadly, he didn’t catch on to the specific reasons for the blessing of ten new priests and stayed vague, simply saying, “Who knows why?” If he had, he would have revealed his oppositional behavior to the very culture that helps men discover their calling and become open to God's guidance. In another puzzling entry from the "I Don't Get It" files, Cardinal Tobin of Washington dismissed Monsignor Rossetti, a well-known exorcist, for suggesting that UFOs and UAPs could be preternatural phenomena. Drawing on his direct experience as an exorcist, having witnessed phenomena comparable to what some describe as unidentified aerial phenomena, Monsignor Rossetti was fired by Tobin because his observations threatened, so Tobin claims, the clarity of Church teaching on demonic activity. By doing so, Cardinal Tobin exposed his own ignorance of Church teaching, not to mention his repeated neglect of the responsibility to uphold it on matters of life, choosing instead to cozy up with the human-induced climate change crowd.