Saturday, May 6, 2017

Saturday roundup

The congregation of an Episcopal church in a little hamlet in the hills of southern Indiana gets played for saps:

A few days after the election of Donald Trump, a church community in Indiana was shocked to find that someone had spray-painted ugly and un-Christian things on their church.
St. David’s Episcopal Church in Bean Blossom, Ind., was vandalized with Nazi slogans, anti-gay slurs, and Donald Trump graffiti on November 12, 2016 -- but it wasn't from a hateful Trump supporter.
After a six-month investigation, the Brown County prosecuting attorney’s office determined that it was the congregation’s own organist—a Hillary Clinton supporter and gay activist—who did the deed. The culprit, 26-year-old George Nathaniel Stang of Bloomington, is also the person who first reported the vandalism to police last November.
It was immediately thought to be a hate crime because the small Episcopal Church is a progressive congregation that welcomes gays. The graffiti spray painted on the church walls read “Heil Trump” and “Fag Church.”
But during their inquiries police quickly came to feel that the vandalism was done by someone familiar with the church and began looking at the crime as an inside job. After an investigation, police arrested Stang.
The church organist allegedly admitted to the crime telling police he did it because he wanted to “mobilize a movement after being disappointed in and fearful of the outcome of the national election.”
In a three-page confession entered into court documents, Stand reportedly said he was trying to spark his congregation into activism.
“I suppose I wanted to give local people a reason to fight for good, even if it was a false flag,” he wrote according to court records. “To be clear my actions were not motivated by hate for the church or its congregation. I, of course, realize now, this was NOT the way to go about inspiring activism.”
Brilliant David French essay at NRO in which he examines the sociocultural cudgels that could be used to explain the death of Bob, a fictional middle-aged American with high blood pressure, a divorce, an inability to stay abreast of changes in his career field and other problems that boil down to the choices he's made in life.

Squirrel-Hair doubles down on his praise for Australia's health care system. If some of his highest-profile water-carriers had either acted like the conservatives they claimed to be or kept their populist-nationalist traps shut, we could have had Ted.

Remember those bad actors from Iran that post-America under the Most Equal Comrade released in order to sweeten the nuke deal? Well, the House Oversight Committee is going to investigate the matter.

Leaked emails are now a feature of the French election. Whodunnit?

Perpetual adolescence, a societal problem that's been addressed at least since 2004 when Joseph Epstein wrote a Weekly Standard piece about it, followed in 2007 by Diana West's The Death of the Grown-Up, is still with us. One of the handful of US Senators that could rightly be called great human beings, Ben Sasse, revisits the subject in a WSJ column called "How to Raise an American Adult." He says there are five main components to the project that parents should impart to their offspring: resist consumption, embrace the pain of work (that is, do something dirty and physically demanding even if it takes time away from the extracurricular activities the college you're applying to wants to see), connect across generations, travel meaningfully, and become truly literate.



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