Aww, No Gluten-Free Jesus.

An assistant prepares ciboria of hosts for Communion before Pope Francis’s celebration of Mass marking the feast of Pentecost in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican June 4. ( Credit: Paul Haring/CNS.)

Pope Frank has ruled that gluten-free hosts are out of the question. Low gluten is okay, though. A call for eucharist oversight has been added, apparently there’s some distress about the wide availability of hosts, why you can even get them on the internets! *gasp*

Because bread and wine for the Eucharist are no longer supplied just by religious communities, but “are also sold in supermarkets and other stores and even over the internet,” bishops should set up guidelines, an oversight body and/or even a form of certification to help “remove any doubt about the validity of the matter for the Eucharist,” the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments said.

You really have to love the absolute silliness of the whole transubstantiation business. It’s so wonderfully contradictory, and well, just absurd. Here’s a bit of it:

The letter also reiterated norms already in place regarding Eucharistic matter:

– “The bread used in the celebration of the most holy Eucharistic sacrifice must be unleavened, purely of wheat, and recently made so that there is no danger of decomposition.”

I would have thought that Jesus, being a god and all, wouldn’t be subject to decomposition.

– Bread made from another substance, even grain or mixed with another substance so different from wheat that it would not commonly be considered wheat bread, “does not constitute valid matter.”

– The introduction of any other substances, “such as fruit or sugar or honey, into the bread for confecting the Eucharist,” it said, “is a grave abuse.”

Why? A tiny sliver of a pleasurable sensation would be that mortal [as in sin] in nature? Sugar is inimical to Jesus? Hmmm. So, Jehovah can be defeated with iron, or a chariot, if you have one handy, and Jesus can be handled with a liberal application of sugar, fruit, or honey. Good to know.

– Low-gluten hosts are valid matter for people who, “for varying and grave reasons, cannot consume bread made in the usual manner,” provided the hosts “contain a sufficient amount of gluten to obtain the confection of bread without the addition of foreign materials and without the use of procedures that would alter the nature of bread.”

– Completely gluten-free hosts continue to be “invalid matter for the celebration of the Eucharist.”

Who would have thought Jesus to be so darn complex?

– Eucharistic matter made with genetically modified organisms can be considered valid matter.

I think I’d like some details here.

The U.S. bishops’ Committee on Divine Worship has said Catholics who cannot receive Communion wafers at all, even under the species of low-gluten hosts, “may receive Holy Communion under the species of wine only.” The church teaches that “under either species of bread or wine, the whole Christ is received,” it said.

There, the whole matter of baked Jesus is now settled.

The whole silly mess is here.

Gosh, I’m shocked.

Steven Mnuchin testifies before a Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing on his nomination to be Treasury secretary in Washington, U.S., January 19, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts.

The Trump administration is not considering a plan to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans in order to pay for tax breaks for the middle class, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on Sunday.

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Mnuchin said the administration plans to release its tax plan in early September and is aiming for a vote on Congress on it by the end of this year.

Gee, I am so not surprised. Is anyone surprised that filthy rich assholes are not planning to pay one cent more than they are forced to do? I am seriously surprised than anyone might so much as surmise that the regime would consider raising taxes on the rich. Guillotines keep intruding on my thoughts whenever they center on the Regime show…

Via Raw Story.

Relics of A Cold War Satellite Program.

Julie Anand and Damon Sauer, “Calibration Mark AD48 with Satellites,” from Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks (courtesy the artists).

Strange colossal shapes dot the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, x-shaped relics of a once top-secret Cold War spying project. Known as the Corona program, the surveillance initiative by the CIA and US Air Force involved using satellites to take aerial photographs of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. The cameras on these satellites were calibrated with concrete crosses 60 feet in diameter. Their exposed 70mm film was later jettisoned in space, the parachuting capsules caught in mid-air by plane. The calibration markers helped assure that the film was in focus, and that there was a landscape measure to accurately assess the size of pictured objects.

Approximately 256 of these markers were placed on a 16-square-mile grid in Arizona, spaced a mile apart. Long after Corona’s end and its declassification in 1995, around 100 remain. Phoenix-based artists Julie Anand and Damon Sauer have spent three years tracking them down for a project called Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks.

You can read all about this, and see more at Hyperallergic.

50 Years of Arguing Over Sgt. Pepper.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band may not be the greatest album ever, but neither is any other, of course. Having celebrated its 50th birthday in June, the classic Beatles album illustrates how consensus bounces up and down throughout history. By the time Pepper came out in 1967, ten months after 1966’s Revolver in what was then considered an unreasonably long gap between projects, the band had stopped touring in order to work exclusively in the studio. This produced a giddy anticipation cycle that inspired instant coronation upon release. Even when it first came out — especially when it first came out — the coverage framed it in world-historical terms, terms like “great art” and “magnum opus” and such; in 2003, it topped Rolling Stone’s roundup of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, which merely confirmed an attitude several decades old among the rock press.

But the imposition of received taste rankles, and a subsequent generation of critics spurned the album’s myth, attributing its acclaim less to actual merits than to good timing and the culmination of what Greil Marcus in 1979 called a “pop explosion.” Pepper’s 50th anniversary has rekindled much debate: note Jon Pareles in TheNew York Times nailing the album’s “impulsiveness, its lighthearted daring, its willingness to try the odd sound and the unexpected idea”; note also Amanda Marcotte in Salon complaining that Pepper is “music for men” over “girl music,” which reveals nothing about the album and everything about the author’s unwitting failure to reject gender norms. Fifty years on, we’re still arguing about the Beatles; they’ve got us in their clutches, and we can’t get free.

Oh, well perhaps many people are still in the clutches of The Beatles, I wouldn’t be one of them. I didn’t mind their music, and found some of it catchy enough, but it wasn’t my thing, even as a child. I did learn to not admit as much, after ending up in a vicious fight with a bunch of other 10 year old girls who were seriously in love with them. I was completely captured by The Rolling Stones and The Who at that age. For those who are captured by The Beatles, Hyperallergic has a good article up about the 50th anniversary of Pepper.

No Credibility: The Regime in a Nutshell.

Melania Trump. CREDIT: AP/Alex Brandon.

“I wish Melania would really take this on. There’s no way that she can,” Parry Aftab, founder of WiredSafety, told the Globe. “She can’t. It won’t work. There’s no credibility.”

Think Progress has an article up about the so-called initiative of the queen, er, first tyrantess (yes, yes, I know, deal with it), which was supposed to be all about cyberbullying, with a particular focus on children and social media. The above quote says it all, really. No Credibility covers the whole clown show of the current regime. Not only has there been no move by the first tyrantess to do one damn thing, how on earth could anyone take her seriously, when she defended the Tiny Tyrant’s bullying on Twitter? Something to the effect that “if you hit at Donny, he hits back 10 times harder.” That’s hardly the sentiment of someone who is anti-bullying. It is the sentiment of someone who stands firmly behind a bully, with nary a shrug as long as it results in them getting what they want.

This is yet one more small item in a sea of them which shores up Ms. Tyrantess’s role in things. She is not a victim, in any way. She’s a woman with agency, who has made various decisions in her life, and she obviously quite likes the life she has at the moment, and shows no desire whatsoever to go rocking the boat now. This is why there won’t be any retraction of her various defenses of bullying on the part of the Tiny Tyrant; if there’s any attempt at such, it will be a mouthful of mush which evades any actual apology or responsibility. I suspect she came up with cyberbullying as a focus because she couldn’t think of anything else, and had to say something. I have no doubt she now regrets it, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if her focus undergoes a change in the coming days.

Full story.

What Consequence?

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley on Face the Nation.

“I think that is what it is,” Ambassador Haley said. “President Trump still knows that they meddled, President Putin knows that they meddled, but he is never going to admit to it and that’s all that happened.”

Dickerson tried to pin down the Trump appointee on what consequences Russia will face.

“Not just Russia, any country needs to know that there are consequences when they get involved in our elections,” Haley claimed, without citing interference by any other country or listing consequences.

Right. So everyone knows Trump is a liar. Everyone knows Putin is a liar. “There are consequences!” Really? What consequences? We have an illegal idiot with delusions of grandeur sitting in the white house, who apparently, cannot be ousted, even though there are near countless legal reasons to do so. What has happened to Russia, outside of Trump wanting to hand Putin whatever the fuck he wants? Some consequence.

Full story and video here.

First Word: Idiot.

President Donald Trump (AFP Photo/SAUL LOEB).

9. What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of Donald Trump? (Numbers are not percentages. Figures show the number of times each response was given. This table reports only words that were mentioned at least five times.)

idiot         39
incompetent   31
liar          30
leader        25
unqualified   25
president     22
strong        21
businessman   18
ignorant      16
egotistical   15
asshole       13
stupid        13
arrogant      12
trying        12
bully         11
business      11
narcissist    11
successful    11
disgusting    10
great         10
clown          9
dishonest      9
racist         9
American       8
bigot          8
good           8
money          8
smart          8
buffoon        7
con-man        7
crazy          7
different      7
disaster       7
rich           7
despicable     6
dictator       6
aggressive     5
blowhard       5
decisive       5
embarrassment  5
evil           5
greedy         5
inexperienced  5
mental         5
negotiator     5
patriotism     5

This is part of an extensive Quinnipiac Poll, you can see the whole thing here.

World Bodypainting Festival.

Painted bodies, fire-breathers, burlesque dancers, freaks plus the finest club sounds – Roll up, Roll up! Into our magical Wonderland!

Body Circus 2017presented by DIAMOND FX  got again a stunning venue. On the east bay of the lake, at the new festival city Klagenfurt you can discover the enchanting castle LORETTO.  This majestic venue will host the traditional, surreal and bizarre ball. “Body Circus“ which is traditionally held on Wednesday’s and known as the main attraction of the festival week.

For the 20th edition of the World Bodypainting Festival, once again we invite you to push the boundaries and let your imagination run free. Guests show up in fantasy costumes from Drag Queens to bodypainting, decoration, masks, extreme make-up, bizarre fashion, and latex outfits. Unleash yourself from your normal day surroundings. Dive into a wild night with the most enchanting artists, latest club tunes from our international DJ’s and provocative stage shows.  For those who need help or want to get ready with others, the styling jam session is the place to be.  Transformed and ready for circus, are also the girls behind the bars, serving Champagne, Cocktails and juggling buckets of Vodka through the dancing crowd filled with decorated bodies –  Roll up, Roll up!

You can spend hours checking out the whole scene here. I’d love to go!

Sunday Facepalm.

In the coming days, 100 US Senators will be delivered an important package. But this delivery won’t be a simple note from one of their constituents. Within days, every single US Senator will be delivered Baby Hope, a twelve-week old baby, with a personal message from her to defund Planned Parenthood and redirect tax payer dollars to community health centers.

[…]

Here is the letter to every US Senator from Baby Hope:

Dear Senator,
My name is Baby Hope. I’m only 12 weeks old, but I want to live. Sadly, there is a high likelihood I will be killed by Planned Parenthood before I ever get a chance to be born. Even worse, Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider that kills 900 preborn babies like me each day, would get paid by American taxpayers to kill me.

However, you can stop Planned Parenthood from killing me and many others. Here’s how: Vote for a health care bill that will not subsidize abortion and will redirect abortion giant Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding to community health centers.

For my sake and hundreds like me, I beg you to refuse to fund abortion and Planned Parenthood in the health care bill.

Please protect me.

Sincerely,

Baby Hope

Dear anti-autonomy asshole christians,

It would be ever so nice if you all would get one tiny fact into your malnourished, underused brains: no federal or taxpayer monies go towards terminations. Please repeat that to yourselves as many times as necessary for it to penetrate those pea brains. Federal monies go to womens’ health, as in breast exams and other cancer prevention, among other things.

As for Baby Hope, please shove her where the sun don’t shine. What women do in regard to their own bodies is none of your business, and trying to remove one of the only sources of healthcare for women is not helping them. Nor are your “community health centers” or your “women’s clinics”. Your personal hatred of women is your business, of course, however, your thirst to see it translated into an increasing amount of women dead, along with a higher number of children born into dire circumstance needs to stop. Learn to mind your own damn business, and try something different, like looking after children who are bereft of care. There are plenty of them. There are also many children in this country who go without adequate food every day. That situation could use more attention. Women do not need you fucking assholes constantly attempting to control every aspect of their lives. You could always turn to advocating for comprehensive sexual education, accessible, affordable birth control, and more education for girls. Those are all proven methods in reducing abortions.

As always, since you find women being allowed full human rights and control over their own bodies so terribly distressing, I give you my constant suggestion: leave it up to that piece of shit god of yours. You’re the ones who think he’s so great and mighty and all that. Seems to me you must be pretty damn sure there’s no such god at all, else you’d be happy to put it all in his hands, no?

Via ChristianNewsWire.