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I check Bluesky so you don’t have to! The left love cosplaying revolutionaries!

Of course federal law enforcement is aggressive, and of course [insert slang term for the anus here] things happen; every arrest is an [insert slang term for the anus here] action, the taking of a suspected malefactor against his will, and if the suspect has a family, of course they’re going to be upset. Oddly enough, the American left weren’t too terribly upset when then-former President Trump was arrested as both state and federal persecutors prosecutors tried to throw him in jail, even though he had a son who was a minor at the time.

The very lovely Rachel Maddow linked this story in her skeet on Bluesky:

N.J. Girl, 6, Found Alone by Neighbors Crying ‘Where’s Papi?’ After Dad Was Detained by ICE While Picking Up Food, Mom Claims

Adonay Mancia Rodríguez was detained near his home in Morristown, N.J., by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Sunday, Jan. 11

By Janelle Griffith | Friday, January 16, 2026 | 1:56 PM EST

The mother of a 6-year-old girl in New Jersey says her daughter was found walking alone outside their apartment crying and asking for her father over the weekend after he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents while picking up food for himself and the child.

Gabby Rosa told NJ.com that her partner, Adonay Mancia Rodríguez, had been watching their daughter, Annabella, in their apartment in Morristown while she was at work at a nearby Walmart on Sunday, Jan. 11. According to Rosa, Rodríguez had left their apartment to pick up food from a nearby restaurant when he was detained by ICE agents.

Rosa recalled receiving phone calls from a concerned neighbor, whom she said had seen the girl wandering the streets looking for her father.

“She told me she’d seen my daughter, walking by herself on the street, crying, crying out for her dad, asking, ‘Where’s Papi? Where’s Papi?’ ” Rosa told the outlet.

She said she rushed home to care for Annabella and later that day, saw video on social media of Rodríguez and others being detained as part of an ICE raid.

I was careful to screen capture the blurb from the original to note that Mr Rodríguez had left his 6-year-old daughter alone in their home, not that she was out with him when he was picked up.

There’s more at the original, and you can follow the link if you are interested. What I found more interesting were the cosplaying revolutionaries on Bluesky. Captain West skeeted:

They don’t fucking care! These ICE agents are just animals on the prowl for victims. At what point do State and Local law enforcement start protecting the people they supposedly serve?

The left were overjoyed when the Supreme Court let stand the decision in Lozano v City of Hazleton, which held that the federal government held sole authority over immigration law. In that case, Hazleton PA was trying to restrict housing and employment of illegal immigrants in the city. The American Civil Liberties Union sued and won. Since the Bush Administration was not taking serious enforcement immigration law enforcement, the left were happy, and cities and states could do nothing. Now the Feds are enforcing immigration law, and it’s coming back to bite states helping the #illegals.

Harbinger of biscuits skeeted:

Nobody will save us. Americans with guns need to step up.

Of course, Americans with guns were much of President Trump’s base. Rural residents and hunters are the ones with the most guns, the ones who actually use their guns, know what they are doing with guns better than the spray-and-pray gangbangers of Philadelphia, and they are the ones who gave huge percentages of their votes to Mr Trump.

The left want to fight, fight, fight, but they’re cosplaying revolutionaries. As G Gordon Liddy used to say, they wouldn’t know out of which end the bullet comes if they had to fight!

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Now even coffee is Raaaaacist!

There are times when you see something and can’t quite be certain that it is sarcasm.

Is coffee racist? How drinking coffee perpetuates white supremacy

Created by Black people for Black people—and now a pillar of white supremacist capitalism. If you consume coffee, you are helping an industry built on racism.

by AFRU Staff | Monday, January 19, 2026

If you’re a person of color, you know what I’m talking about. You walk into a new coffee shop and your senses are overwhelmed with whiteness and you get the glare from the Karens. The white hipster barista lines herself up between you and the bathrooms, ready to tell you non-customers aren’t welcome.

If you have a white coffee drinking friend, he or she may have even let you in on the old coffee joke white coffee drinkers share when PoC aren’t around: “there are three things that are necessary in order to make a cup of coffee, and they are: first, a black man to roast the coffee; second, a yellow man to grind it; and third, a white man to drink it.”

Well, I’m here to validate your lived experience; coffee is in fact horribly racist, and there’s data to back it up.

Every facet of the coffee industry, in fact, is rooted in racism. From the moment the whites viciously stole coffee from Black and Brown People to the present-day Karen sipping her morning cup of white supremacy, whites have been able to drink the fruits of our labor and our culture with impunity.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s sarcasm, given two mentions of “Karens” in the first four paragraphs. If it weren’t for a single paragraph:

It’s a well-known fact that whites would be eating bland food, like plain bread and gruel, if it weren’t for their theft of culinary secrets from people of color, and especially Black folks. That’s precisely why when the whites found out about coffee, it became one of the reasons they decided to victimize and appropriate Black civilization wholesale.

Will my roughly 55¢ mug of coffee at home reduce my racism score by 90% since I don’t buy $5.50 cups of coffee from Starbucks?

it actually could be serious, as the rest of the article tells about how Evil White Men enslaved Noble Africans to bring coffee to our settler colonialist homes.

Sadly, we are not informed how strong American coffee drinkers evolved from our effete tea-swilling ancestors across the pond. How different would Our history have been had we not has the Boston Tea Party, and instead just told King George and his Parliament, “No thanks, we’ll just drink coffee instead”? Heaven forfend! we might just be singing God Save the King right now, and feting Prince Harry and Princess Meghan as Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of California.

The problem is that the satire is too good: our good-hearted and oh-so-nobly-intended friends on the left might just take this seriously.

But, in the end, if you simply must buy your cup of white supremacy on your way to the slave-wage job your capitalist oppressor lets you have, remember that the baristas at Starbucks are still on strike, and get your coffee from Wawa instead.

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How to Win Friends and Influence People Don Lemon never read that book!

In 1936, Dale Carnegie published his famous self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. This is clearly a book that Don Lemon, a television journolist[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading best known for being a host on CNN from 2014 until 2023 never read. He had been plagued by allegations of misogyny, something made more credible due to his homosexuality, and was eventually fired because CNN was having other trouble with him.

Well, here he goes again:

Don Lemon And Rabid Anti-ICE Loons Invade Minneapolis Church Service

by Nina Bookout | Sunday, January 18, 2026

The anti-ICE protestors are getting worse by the minute. Today, the rabid shrieking harpies and loons decided it was totally fine to invade church services in Minneapolis.

Anti-ICE protest disrupted a Sunday church service in Minneapolis after a group of activists entered a congregation and forced worship to stop, according to footage shared online.

The incident occurred at Cities Church, a Southern Baptist Convention congregation, where protesters stormed into the sanctuary chanting anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement slogans. The group alleged that one of the church’s lead pastors was affiliated with ICE, a claim the protesters repeated while interrupting the service.

So, without any genuine facts in evidence, these rabid loons decided one of the pastors is with ICE and thought it was totally fine to invade a church service and disrupt the proceedings. This as other anti-ICE goons have been stalking people for driving the wrong kind of vehicle (yes, really), or dressing the wrong way thus making it ok to be accosted while having lunch.

Conveniently, Don Lemon, former CNN hack, was prancing alongside these asshats.

There’s more at the original.

I have no idea whether one of the ministers at Cities Church supports Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or is “affiliated” with ICE. Although Hennepin County went strongly for then-Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff, 502,710 (69.80%) to 197,244 (27.39%) for then former and now current President Donald Trump, he still had some support. Statewide, Mrs Emhoff carried the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but not by a ridiculous margin. There are clearly some people in the state who support President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies.

The congregation at Cities Church? Well, who knows, but the Southern Baptist Convention tends to be politically conservative, moreso than some other Protestant denominations. But I would imagine that Dale Carnegie would be shaking his head at the demonstration and incursion that Mr Lemon led as not being a very effective way of persuading the worshipers they interrupted and bothered. I would guess that, if anything, the protesters both strengthened the resolve of the good congregants who support the detention and deportation of the illegals, and caused those who don’t want to see the illegals deported to see the boorishness of those on their side.

The Golden Age Times tweeted:

Disgraced ex-CNN host Don Lemon & anti-ICE Leftists STORM into a Minneapolis church, shouting anti-ICE slogans.

“This is the beginning of what’s going to happen here.”

“You have to make people uncomfortable.”

I can’t speak for others, but I wouldn’t feel ‘uncomfortable,’ I’d just be pissed off. This is just another version of idiotic climate cultists trying to destroy art or blocking major roads, making people late for wherever they were headed.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy! Bad causes attract bad people

I have said, more than once, that a facial tattoo means automatically guilty. It also makes the person automatically stupid, because a facial tattoo makes a suspect instantly recognizable.

Nick Sortor claimed to have been the one who captured the theft on tape, including an image of 33‑year‑old Raul Gutierrez, along with the license plate of the getaway vehicle. Mr Gutierrez is currently a guest of the federal government, at least until some Obama-appointed, America-hating crackpot judge like James Boasberg orders him released.

Latin Kings Gang Member Arrested For Stealing FBI Weapons

by Billal Rahman | Friday, January 16, 2026 | 12:01 PM EST

An alleged Latin Kings street gang member was arrested Thursday after federal authorities said he stole equipment, including body armor and weaponry, from a vandalized FBI vehicle in Minneapolis. . . .

The Department of Homeland Security said in a post on X that it had “caught one of the individuals that was part of destroying the FBI vehicles [and] he will now be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. His life has changed forever due to his foolishness. Don’t be like him.” . . .

Multiple FBI vehicles had been vandalized and broken into during the protests, and federal property was taken from inside some of the vehicles, according to an FBI public notice seeking information on the incidents.

Fox News reported that 33‑year‑old Raul Gutierrez was arrested on January 15 in a joint operation involving the Department of Justice and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).

“The suspect is a member of the Latin Kings gang with a known violent criminal history,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote in a post on X.

If Mr Gutierrez is a known gang member with a violent criminal history, the obvious question is: why wasn’t he already behind bars?

Good causes attract good people, while bad causes attract bad people, and protesting the enforcement of our immigration laws, our forty-year-old immigration laws is a bad cause; just the people that cause has attracted shows us that the cause itself is bad. Minnesota’s and Minneapolis’ response to legitimate immigration law enforcement fostered an attitude that the police weren’t going to do anything, which may have inspired Mr Gutierrez and his fellow Latin Kings gangbangers to make their raid on the FBI’s vehicles.

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A Catholic parish commits a crime Church policies on immigration do not supersede American law

That the Roman Catholic Church, of which I am a proud member, supports far less restrictive transnational immigration is well known, and His Holiness Pope Leo XIV has been pushing hard on the subject. Thus, the following article comes as no surprise to me:

UPDATE: ICE deported Minnesota church employee, surveilled parish during Mass, mayor says

ICE’s presence outside the church impedes parishioners’ free exercise of religion, said the pastor of St. Gabriel Catholic Church in Hopkins, Minnesota.

By Kathleen Murphy · DC Bureau · Friday, January 9, 2026 · 3:01 PM EST

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surveilled St. Gabriel the Archangel Catholic Church in Hopkins, Minnesota, on Epiphany after deporting the parish’s beloved maintenance worker to Mexico five weeks earlier.

The Trump administration last year eliminated a federal policy that generally prohibited immigration enforcement in “sensitive locations” such as schools, churches, and hospitals. Attendance at St. Gabriel’s Spanish Mass has dropped by half since the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, and parishioners have expressed fear of churchgoing about eight miles from where an ICE agent shot and killed U.S. citizen Renee Good on Jan. 7.

Father Paul Haverstock, pastor of St. Gabriel’s, said he had vested for the 1 p.m. Spanish Mass Jan. 4 when a parishioner told him about men wearing ski masks in a car outside the church. He said he was disturbed to receive the report, went to the sacristy to get his cellphone, and placed it next to his chair in the sanctuary.

“If there is an incident of agents coming in, I want to make sure that it’s recorded, and I want a clear recording of me letting the agents know that we’re in the middle of a religious service,” Haverstock said.

Two of the hyperlinks in the quoted story above were not in the original, but researched and added by me.

It has to be asked: why were Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents outside the church?

Church employee Francisco Paredes, 46, who had lived in the U.S. for 25 years with one conviction for driving under the influence, was handcuffed by ICE Dec. 4, 2025. Eight federal vehicles pulled into a large parking lot adjacent to St. Gabriel’s on 13th Avenue South after Paredes picked up coffee on his way to work, Paredes said, and he was driven to a processing facility. . . .

Until Paredes’ arrest and before ICE parked outside St. Gabriel’s, more than 400 people had usually attended the Spanish Mass, Haverstock said. Haverstock said he is considering offering a temporary Sunday Mass dispensation in his parish for those who are afraid.

So, St Gabriel’s holds well-attended Masses in Spanish, and the church previously employed an illegal immigrant; the article stated, in its mealy-mouthed way, that Mr Paredes “lacked legal permission to live in the U.S.” It is reasonable to suspect that significant numbers of illegal immigrants live in the area and attend those Masses.

Father Haverstock stated that Mr Paredes was a great employee, fully bilingual, and a tremendous help around the parish. That’s fine, but then there’s this:

Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, requirements come out of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). IRCA prohibits employers from hiring and employing an individual for employment in the U.S. knowing that the individual is not authorized with respect to such employment. Employers also are prohibited from continuing to employ an individual knowing that he or she is unauthorized for employment. This law also prohibits employers from hiring any individual, including a U.S. citizen, for employment in the U.S. without verifying his or her identity and employment authorization on Form I-9.

The IRCA was passed in 1986, which was 40 years ago; Mr Paredes has been in the United States for a stated 25 years, which means that he was hired by the parish church well after the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 became law.

Under the Handbook for Employers M-274, Section 11.8, it is specified that:

Unlawful Employment Criminal Penalties
Engaging in a Pattern or Practice of Knowingly Hiring or Continuing to Employ Unauthorized Aliens

If you or your business are convicted of having engaged in a pattern or practice of knowingly hiring unauthorized aliens (or continuing to employ aliens knowing they are or have become unauthorized to work in the United States) after Nov. 6, 1986, you may face fines and/or six months imprisonment.

Engaging in Fraud or False Statements, or Otherwise Misusing Visas, Immigration Permits, and Identity Documents

You may be fined and/or imprisoned for up to five years if you:

  • Make a false statement or attestation to satisfy the employment eligibility verification requirements;
  • Use fraudulent identification or employment authorization documents; or
  • Use documents that were lawfully issued to another person.

Other federal criminal statutes may provide higher penalties in certain fraud cases.

For Mr Paredes to have been employed by St Gabriel’s, at least one of these things had to have happened:

  • The parish hired Mr Paredes without a reasonable effort at verifying the documents provided; or
  • The parish hired Mr Paredes without checking his documents at all or filling out Form I-9; or
  • Mr Paredes presented false or fraudulent documents good enough to have passed a reasonable inspection by Pastor.

All of these are crimes!

The article provided by EWTN News does not tell us how long Mr Paredes was an employee of St Gabriel’s. The parish staff page tells us that Fr Haverstock first became Parish Administrator in 2020, and assigned as Pastor on Independence Day of 2021, so, if Mr Paredes was hired before those dates, Fr Haverstock could not have been the person who hired him. However, if he became aware that his employee was an illegal immigrant after he became Administrator, but before Mr Paredes was detained, yet continued to employ Mr Paredes, he would be in violation of the law. Fr Haverstock would not be required to report the illegal immigrant’s presence in the United States, but he would have had to discharge him.

There are no exemptions for churches or church employees under our immigration laws. Church policy, even coming from the Pope himself, does not supersede American law.

Perhaps article author Kathleen Murphy did not realize it when she wrote, but she published the report of a crime. And while this is the documentation of one crime in one parish, who would be surprised if this hasn’t happened widely throughout the thousands of parishes and hundreds of dioceses in the United States?

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Elon Musk helps get information out of Iran and to the rest of the world

The New York Times is finally paying real attention to the situation in Iran. THis is a screen capture from their website front page on January 13, 2026. Click to enlarge>.

As we have previously noted, the credentialed media has been publishing rather little on the popular uprisings in Iran. Slightly more has been coming out, but information has still been sparse. More information has been coming out over social media, though, interestingly enough, far less on Bluesky than on Twitter, at least as far as I’ve personally seen. Iran has been fighting that, with a curious number of accounts, including some which were pro-‘Palestinian,’ supporting the theocratic regime over the human rights of the Persian people rising against that tyranny.

Now, Elon Musk is helping the protesters. From The Wall Street Journal:

Iran Is Hunting Down Starlink Users to Stop Protest Videos From Going Global

Video from the streets is one of the few ways of getting information out about the scale of the protests and authorities’ actions

By Benoit Faucon | Monday, January 12, 2026 | 11:00 AM EST

With the government shutting down the internet and throttling phone services, Iranians are leaning heavily on Elon Musk’s Starlink service to share videos of growing protests and the regime’s escalating crackdown with the world.

But Iran has intensified efforts to jam the service, which is banned in the country, and users are being hunted.

If the Journal‘s paywall is stopping you from reading the original, it can be read here for free.

Over the weekend, authorities began searching for and confiscating Starlink dishes in western Tehran, said Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at Miaan Group, a U.S. nonprofit opposed to internet censorship.

“It’s electronic warfare,” Rashidi said. He said disruptions are worst in parts of Tehran where protests are taking place and in the evening, when the demonstrators gather.

The battle over information—while secondary to the confrontations taking place nightly in dozens of cities across Iran—has potentially serious consequences. President Trump has threatened to intervene in response to a crackdown by the regime.

Let me stress at this point that I do not support any American military action to support the protesters. Yes, I want them to succeed, I want the whole Iranian government to fall, but this needs to be done by the Iranian people themselves, and not something which the Islamists can say was pushed by the United States. Iranians themselves need to Make Iran Great Again!

Video from the streets is one of the few ways of getting information out about the scale of the protests and the actions of Iranian authorities.

That has always been a problem: with the cutoff of communications by the Iranian government, the credentialed media have far fewer ways to verify stories which come from a single source.

More than 500 people have been killed in the unrest, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran. Another rights group, Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, circulated video footage Sunday showing a large number of bodies at a morgue in south Tehran.

Trump is scheduled to be briefed Tuesday on his options. One under discussion is to send in more Starlink terminals. Trump said he would ask Musk about the possibility.

“We may get the internet going if that’s possible,” Trump told the reporters.

Iran shut down most internet connections for the country’s 90 million inhabitants late last week, after protests over a crippling economic crisis exploded into large-scale unrest with demonstrators chanting for an end to the regime. The government has also made it difficult to connect calls or send text messages.

The only exceptions are the government itself, its media services and regime loyalists who are registered on a “whitelist” of internet addresses, said diplomats and others communicating with some of those with uninterrupted access.

Well, of course, and I’m seeing that junk on Twitter, gobs of it. The Iranian government and their propagandists have been blaming the uprisings not on the collapsing economy or severe water shortages, but on the United States and Israel; the Great Satan and the Jooooos are always the ones responsible! To the leaders of the Islamic Republic, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have diverted rain clouds, and the US and Israel have manipulated the weather.

We don’t know yet how this will turn out. It’s clear that huge numbers of Iranians are displeased with their government, but the government has guns, and has not been afraid to use them. We can all hope that the theocratic regime will be overthrown, though there’s no way of telling how that will work out for a new government.

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Ilhan Omar Mynett claims the Minnesota fraud investigations are all just PR But dozens of people have already been convicted, starting before Donald Trump became President

Nina Bookout of The Victory Girls noted that Representative Ilhan Omar Mynett (D-Somalia) believes that all of the fraud investigations in Minnesota are just political public relations stunts:

Ilhan Omar Claims Fraud And ICE Investigations Are Just PR Stunts

by Nina Bookout | Monday, January 12, 2026

Ilhan Omar will do her absolute best to spin her way out of the fraud issues blanketing Minnesota. Yesterday she, with a straight face, asserted that all the fraud cases are just PR stunts by the Trump Administration.

The administration says the surge has been necessary to conduct both immigration enforcement and to investigate a growing fraud scandal in the state, the cost of which federal prosecutors estimate could top $9 billion. The scandal dates back to 2021, when Biden administration Justice Department investigators first honed in on an at least $250 million COVID-era scam revolving around the Feeding Our Future program, a case that now includes more than 75 defendants.

Most of the defendants are of Somali descent, leading President Trump and other Republican lawmakers to focus attention on the state’s large Somali community, while threatening to suspend federal funding to the state across a broad array of programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, and child care funding.

She’s super tired of all this guys. We need to drop the subject and quit the investigations.

There’s just one problem with the Mrs Mynett’s claims: it seems that people are actually being convicted of fraud!

Nonprofit’s Leader Convicted of Siphoning Off $240 Million in Federal Food Aid

Aimee Bock was accused of overseeing a scheme that exploited lax pandemic-era controls, and reaped millions with fake invoices for nonexistent meals.

By David A. Fahrenthold | March 19, 2025

Aimee Bock and Salim Said

The leader of a Minnesota anti-hunger nonprofit was convicted in U.S. District Court on Wednesday of masterminding a brazen scheme that reaped more than $240 million in pandemic relief funds with a network of bogus food kitchens that billed the government for 91 million meals.

The nonprofit’s leader, Aimee Bock, 44, was convicted by a jury of seven counts, including wire fraud and bribery. Another defendant, Salim Said — a 36-year-old who oversaw one of the bogus kitchens — was convicted of 20 counts, also including wire fraud and bribery.

When Ms. Bock was charged in 2022, federal prosecutors said her scheme was the largest known fraud against the government’s Covid-19 relief programs.

At least 70 people were charged in the scheme, and more than 40 have already pleaded guilty or been convicted. Last year, another case related to the same scandal made national news, when someone attempted to bribe a juror in a separate trial by leaving about $120,000 in cash at her home in a Hallmark gift bag. Five people were later charged with bribery in that case.

Wikipedia noted:

Although the state agency responsible for monitoring the school meal program repeatedly tried to cut off funds, the organization was not shut down until FBI raids and federal indictments in 2022. As of late 2025, out of 78 suspects indicted in the fraud, more than 50 had pled guilty. Another seven individuals were found guilty at trial, including the leader of the scheme, Aimee Bock, while many others awaited trial. As most perpetrators, excluding Bock, were Somali Americans, the scandal resulted in increased political attention on the community, including from the administration of Donald Trump.

Note that these fraud allegations, trials, and convictions were the result of investigations during the Biden Administration, not the evil President Trump. Apparently the lovely Mrs Mynett doesn’t believe that the Biden Administration was being fair to Somalis.

I guess that this isn’t much of a surprise: it seems that the state of Minnesota and city of Minneapolis are suing the federal government to stop enforcing our immigration laws as well.

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(Purported) canon lawyer is very upset that infants can be baptized without their consent

Sunday, January 11, 2026, is in the calendar of the Catholic Church, the celebration of the Baptism of the Lord, our remembrance of when Jesus chose to be baptized by his cousin, St John the Baptist. Today’s Gospel reading was from Matthew 3:13-17:

3:13 Then Jesus arrived from Galilee at the Jordan, coming to John to be baptized by him.
14 But John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I have the need to be baptized by You, and yet You are coming to me?”
15 But Jesus, answering, said to him, “Allow it at this time; for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he *allowed Him.
16 After He was baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and settling on Him,
17 and behold, a voice from the heavens said, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Hardly an offensive passage, but naturally that was the day The Irish Times chose to print an essay from Dr Mary McAleese, who claims to be an “academic civil and canon lawyer, (and the) author of Children’s Rights and Obligations in Canon Law: the Christening Contract (Brill 2019),” to claim that the Catholic practice of infant baptism is evil, evil, evil!
n

Baptism denies babies their human rights

Rite & Reason: No one is Catholic by birth and the notion of ‘Baptismal promises’ is risible

by Dr Mary McAleese | Sunday, January 11, 2026

Throughout the world, there continues a long-standing, systemic and overlooked severe restriction on children’s rights with regard to religion. This warrants, but has yet to receive, serious examination. It impacts Ireland in a special way and contemporary circumstances make Ireland an ideal place to conduct that examination.

Let me set the scene with a couple of brief, inter-related stories. They concern the relationship between children’s rights and religion in Ireland, and certain unchallenged aspects of the canon law of Ireland’s major Christian denomination and provider of education, the Latin Catholic Church.

It restricts children’s rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 and United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989, to which both Ireland and the Holy See – which governs the Catholic Church and is effectively the author of canon law – are State Parties.

Good heavens! Baptism “restricts children’s rights”? Which rights? It certainly does not prevent those baptized as Catholic from joining most Protestant churches, nor does it somehow drag reluctant people to Mass on Sundays. More, the Catholic Church accepts most baptisms conducted by Protestant churches as valid. Muslims do not accept baptism as valid for anything, because they have no equivalent ritual. Jews have ritual cleansing, the Tevilah, but it is not the same under Judaism as baptism is for Christians.

Atheists? Buddhists? Whateverists? Being baptized as a Catholic does not prohibit anyone from joining another religion, or deciding that they have no faith at all.

If you are a Christian, baptism means a great deal to you; if you are not Christian, baptism means nothing to you, and as either a sprinkling or an immersion in water, it has done you no harm.

The distinguished Dr McAleese is very concerned that baptism means you are irreversibly a Catholic according to canon law, and that’s true enough, but my response is: so what? The Church cannot force you to go to Mass, and cannot force you to believe anything. The Church has no gendarmerie which can arrest you if you walk into a Pentecostalist or Baptist church on Sunday, nor the authority to show up at your door on a wintry Sunday morning in which you chose to stay under the covers.

Attempts to leave the Church or change religion or challenge Church teaching or magisterial authority, constitute canonical crimes of heresy, apostasy, schism. Among the punishments attached to such acts is the much-misunderstood penalty of excommunication, which in fact leaves membership intact but subject to restrictions.

It should be obvious that, if someone does wish to change religion, to not be a Catholic any longer, the penalty of excommunication is meaningless. It means, in effect, that you can’t go to church in the church where you didn’t want to go.

I suppose that for “an academic civil and canon lawyer,” that might be of overwhelming concern, but out in the real world, it’s pretty much meaningless.

There are many things that parents can command as they rear their children, from going to church to eating their hated peas for supper, a mortal sin in my mind.

There’s more at Dr McAleese’s original, but really, it’s silliness. Baptism, and membership in the Catholic Church is voluntary, even if the Church already has someone listed in its rolls.

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Larry Krasner beclowns himself Philly's chief law enforcement officer doesn't want our immigration laws enforced

Remember when Philadelphia’s criminal-loving, police-hating, George Soros-sponsored District Attorney Larry Krasner previously made a fool of himself with his spittle-flecked declaration that he would seek to find state charges against the January 6th Capitol kerfufflers who were pardoned by President Trump, despite the fact that the vast majority had already served their sentences?

Then we have this gem from the Philly persecutor. That’s right: Mr Krasner wants to go after anyone who might have been involved with the late Jeffrey Epstein. But, let’s tell the truth here: if Mr Krasner found anyone connected to Mr Epstein who has “ties back to (his) jurisdiction,” which is the confines of Philadelphia County — Philadelphia city and county are co-terminus — Mr Krasner wants to throw the book at them, but only if they are Republicans. As with his previous mentioned threat, nothing came of that, either. The late Mr Epstein’s homes and businesses were not in the City of Brotherly Love.

And now, here he goes again!

DA Krasner condemns fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis, says officers who commit crimes in Philly will ‘be convicted’

Krasner said the actions of the ICE agent who shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good were unlawful.

by Jesse Bunch | Thursday, January 8, 2026 | 3:50 PM EST

District Attorney Larry Krasner, responding to the killing of a 37-year-old woman by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, vowed to prosecute law enforcement officers who commit crimes in the city of Philadelphia.

“You will be arrested, you will stand trial, you will be convicted,” Krasner said during a news conference Thursday.

His remarks came a day after a masked ICE agent shot Renee Nicole Good multiple times in her SUV.

In widely circulated videos of the incident, Good appears to be driving away from a group of immigration agents as they order her to get out of her vehicle.

The District Attorney does not seem nearly as concerned with the law when it comes to our immigration laws. From the Tampa Free Press:

Shortly after entering office in 2018, the liberal prosecutor created the Immigration Counsel position in order to provide consultations on cases specifically involving foreign nationals. Krasner initially stated the position would work to achieve “immigration-neutral” outcomes, which in practice means evaluating and possibly lowering charges against migrants, including illegal immigrants, to ensure their conviction would not result in their deportation.

Krasner’s office repeatedly suggested early on that the Immigration Counsel would only focus on cases involving “low-level” offenders, but a case list obtained by a conservative immigration group in 2021 revealed that his office consulted in a myriad of cases involving foreign nationals accused of gruesome crimes, such as rape of a child, rape, sexual assault, arson and murder.

An additional case list released in 2024 revealed the Immigration Counsel has continued to be involved in serious criminal cases. Krasner’s office consulted with or worked on 21 aggravated assault, domestic violence and other crimes of violence cases; 26 possession of drugs with intent to distribute cases; 12 firearm cases; nine rape and indecent assault and sexual assault on a child cases, nine robbery or burglary cases and one vehicular homicide case, according to a case list for the 2023 calendar year.

Translation: Mr Krasner loves him some illegals, and would rather keep those who commit serious crimes other than those connected with their immigration status in the United States.

Mr Krasner said during the press conference.

I will charge you with those crimes. You will be arrested. You will stand trial. You will be convicted. Donald Trump cannot pardon you for a state court conviction. Do you hear me, ICE agents?

Arrests can get messy if the subjects being apprehended resist, and it looks to me as though Mr Krasner is encouraging illegals to resist arrest. And he’s attempting to intimidate ICE agents from coming to Philadelphia to enforce our immigration laws.

I would suggest that ICE do a deep dive into the members of Mr Krasner’s staff, to see if any of them might be here illegally.