Some interesting palace, or in this case Vatican intrigue.. The British press is doing its best at furnishing the world inside gossip about the state of the Papacy..
Francis was forced to cancel three events at short notice over the weekend, after his ongoing issues with sciatica struck the 84-year-old again. Matteo Bruni, a spokesman for the Vatican, confirmed that due to the return of his condition he would not deliver Mass on Sunday, as well as attend a meeting with diplomatic corps on Monday, which has now been rearranged. This is the latest in a string of cancelled appointments he has made due to the condition, which affects the back and legs, after he skipped New Year’s Day Mass.
And this:
His health has become a concern for insiders, including Vatican author Lynda Telford, who said she was fearful for the future of the Church if Francis stood down.
And the writer told Express.co.uk that the Vatican will struggle to maintain order if someone similar to Francis’ predecessor, Benedict, took over.
Ms Telford argues that Benedict’s traditionalist views “put off” those with a more modern mindset who could be tempted to join the Catholic Church.
So that leaves us with the question .. if anything written above is actually true and not just tabloid speculation, what would happen if Francis had to step down?
First order of business: What happens to the prophecy of the popes that seems to indicate Francis is “Peter the Roman.” And “the end” comes after, whatever the end may mean..
And second..could Benedict polish up his red shoes and become Pope all over again?
Two amazing questions that have no answers, just experts who theorize on them.
Ever since Benedict XVI announced he would become the first pope in 600 years to resign, Catholic theologians, canon lawyers and others warned of the potential confusion in having two popes living side by side in the Vatican, one reigning, the other retired but calling himself “emeritus pope” and still wearing the white cassock of the papacy.
Their worst fears came true this week.
In a saga befitting the Oscar-nominated movie “The Two Popes,” Benedict co-wrote a book reaffirming the “necessity” of a celibate priesthood. There was nothing novel with his position, but the book is coming out at the same time Pope Francis is weighing whether to ordain married men in the Amazon because of a priest shortage there.
20,000 National Guard troops were called to keep the Inaurgation of Joseph R. Biden Jr safe on January 20 .. a tension was building around the nation, the media informed us.. Threats and rumors of threats were abounding on social media.
The internet had become a raucous and caustic venue since the election.
We were doomed, it would.
And then, as the early morning snow and clouds broke to allow sunlight to shine down on President Biden and Vice President Harris, a miracle was brewing.. A moment was about to occur that, maybe, forever changed the course of American history. No, it was not Biden’s oath or speech.. and no, it was not Garth Brooks zipping around the audience with his massive cowboy hat.
It was a Bernie Sanders. Decked in his coat we have seen him in countless times, and dazzlingly massive mittens someone made for him from recycled plastic.
This image, quite frankly, made America great again.
SOME MEMES COME AND GO.. SOME NEVER GO AWAY
The internet is a vast wasteland of memes of yesterday. Only the strong survive.. so often they live on forever in brief compilation videos.. songs.. now and then old funny images from the mid 2000s or 2000 teens will show up in a GIF.
The Bernie Sanders meme, however, felt different. This was a coming of age meme moment in a way.
When the image of Sanders was captured by a Getty photographer at the Inauguration, it trended immediately. And while Joe Biden was making a speech he hoped would be a blockbuster call for unification, the Internet got moving.. mass production began.
By nightfall when Bruce Springsteen was attempting to sing his heart out at the star studded Virtual Gala, people around the nation were busy sharing the image of Senator Sanders. By morning, his image took over all forms of social media..
And within a day, people of all ages, races, colors and creeds were popping Sanders into their profile pictures, local businesses were putting him in their parking lots, spas were putting him in their waiting rooms, and restaurants at tables.
He is showing up in historical photos.. in the Game of Thrones.. In horror movies, and in the most GHOST.https://www.facebook.com/v2.3/plugins/post.php?app_id=249643311490&channel=https%3A%2F%2Fstaticxx.facebook.com%2Fx%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter%2F%3Fversion%3D46%23cb%3Df3461a927b3d568%26domain%3Dcoalspeaker.com%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fcoalspeaker.com%252Ff309848364eea44%26relation%3Dparent.parent&container_width=552&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FCoalSpeaker%2Fposts%2F3630815953704191%3Fcft%255B0%255D%3DAZWyNneISKfNBnzXxhWG_5ptpLZAkuQKc7PseYaVfeSuE7D0B9lK6dhEtHYXj9UrmSG-EG59N5mRuaLBw47lZYMn1-thJdH1eH1T0sPblXN0NHnpAiGLf6mCeenBsq4Dw_2fj7VH0u279C-Q5FX7BL29yWcHHmMcorPLt3dM4qrkV9-JDQlP2KHvw9V4pCzW4Sk3YOiJ84_AP_piSaA-j231%26tn%3D%252CO%252CP-R&locale=en_US&sdk=joey&width=552
Smialowski, the Washington D.C.-based photographer who was working the inauguration behalf of the global news agency AFP, isn’t a stranger to having a front row seat to history or even going viral, but his shot of Sanders has served as a unique lighthearted respite during a lead-up that was anything but. The eye behind the iconic shot spoke to Esquire about the photo that inspired the masses. “It’s not a great photo, but it is a nice moment,” he says.
Brenden Smialowski said,
When I captured the moment, I had just decided to swing back, take it, and then I transmitted that photo from my camera to my editor. So there were three moments there and if your timings are not just right, it wouldn’t have come together.
The next morning I had a bunch of emails from bosses and such. I think when there’s a webpage that automatically drops Bernie into a photo, I think that makes it pretty clear that it made it.
But one more comment that he said, and this one we think, is what summarizes the moment:
I grew up without the Internet and have seen it all evolve since and in the early days, it was fairly lighthearted, fun, goofy and jokes. Maybe it feels like the early days.
So when the Bernie Sanders memes started circulating, those who lived through the early days of the net felt a magical nostalgia. Others felt the feeling for the first time.
Innocence, it seemed, was reborn.
The cultural reset
For four years, memes were made to attack other political sides. Some had a biting sense of humor.. some had a cruel bite.
Each and every day, a new scandal erupted. CNN went into “breaking news overdrive” .. they declared the end of Trump. Democracy. The nation.. they ate up their ratings with no remorse.
The nation was driven into a constant ad sick medical condition of @realdonaldtrump Twitter addiction.. His account remained the must-go to location on social media as he opined on everything important and not, and threatened other nations with nuclear war.
Twitter got immediately dull when former President Trump was banned.
And the nation grappled with the aftermath of his presidency.. all of those public battles. All of the rolls of paper towels thrown to hurricane victims.. all of the weather maps with sharpie written all over them were over.
Foes suddenly had no one to hate and fans suddenly had no hope .. we were lost as a nation. Neither side felt comfortable. Neither side felt right..
The normal transition of power is always painful for the losing side. But this time half of the losing side wanted to lose.
Then came that Sanders photo. That little snapshot of a moment in time. With it, a seemingly noticeable cultural reset.
We cannot be naive
The world will adapt to change. There will be political fights … there will be claims of biased news coverage.. All of the old political factions will brand themselves for the new post-Trump age. Everyone involved with journalism and politics still looks to be grasping in the dark for their posture.. What the end result looks like may be a redux of pre-2016 years.
The staged events. The canned talking points. The typical news briefings with little said.
In a strange way the media may not yet realize what they just lost: The President who gave the press access of virtually everything! Trump loved the attention.. Chopper talk, hours-long press events… Sure, the relationship with horrid but both sides fed on each others egos and worst instincts.
That is why the innocence of the Sanders image is so vital in restoring something, at least among the distanced factions of Americans.
Good jokes or memes are tension breakers. Bernie became that..
Goodwill can end as quickly as it begins. Hopefully it sticks around for a while.
Even if it doesn’t, we can look back at the short-lived moment when Bernie made America Great Again.
Larry King, the celebrated television and radio host, has died at the age of 87, weeks after battling COVID-19.
King’s production company announced his death in a statement on Saturday.
‘With profound sadness, Ora Media announces the death of our co-founder, host, and friend Larry King, who passed away this morning at age 87 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles,’ the company said.
‘Ora Media sends our condolences to his surviving children Larry, Jr., Chance, Cannon and the entire King family.’
No cause of death was given, however, it comes three weeks after King was hospitalized with coronavirus.
Those who aren’t old enough to remember may not realize how important each night of LARRY KING was, how he had the top political players, Hollywood stars, and pop culture icons. Nightly for years.. And he took calls, too..
Larry King was an unlikely TV.. A MASSIVE ego and a huge amount of talent and intelligence..
Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease expert, said he suffered mild side effects after receiving a second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.
“I was hoping that I wouldn’t get too knocked out. I did for about 24 hours. Now I’m fine,” he said at a White House event Thursday.
Fauci, an adviser to President Joe Biden on Covid-19, said he felt fatigued and achy, “not sick.”
The mild side effects are consistent with what vaccine manufacturers reported in their clinical trials, and are signs of the body’s immune response to the inoculation.
After several people had apparent allergic reactions at one California clinic, state health officials on Sunday told providers across the state to pause administering doses from one COVID-19 vaccine lot that arrived from Moderna.
The move, made “out of an extreme abundance of caution,” means that 330,000 doses distributed to 287 providers across the state can’t be used amid an already slow vaccine rollout.
“A higher-than-usual number of possible allergic reactions were reported with a specific lot of Moderna vaccine administered at one community vaccination clinic,” California State Epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan said.
Martin Luther King skipped the ninth and eleventh grades and never graduated from high school. He enrolled in Morehouse College in 1944 when he was just 15.
He completed his doctorate at Boston University when he was 25.
His actions and words eventually worked to modernize and change a world that severely needed it.
While more work is to be done, his dream gets closer to being fulfilled as time goes by..
Dr. Harold N. Bornstein, who for a time was President Donald J. Trump’s personal physician and who had attested that Mr. Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” died on Friday. He was 73.
His death was announced on Thursday in a paid notice in The New York Times. It did not give a cause or say where he died..
In anticipation of the government’s official UFO report coming in less than six months thanks to the COVID-19 omnibus bill, you can now download all of the publicly available CIA documentation on UFOs.
This news could have been lost amid all of the other chaos of the past few weeks..
The Black Vault, a clearinghouse for declassified documents, has released a downloadable document archive filled with PDFs containing CIA files on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), the government’s preferred term. . Some of the reports date all the way back to the 1980s, and according to the site’s founder, John Greenewald Jr., the spy agency claims this is all of its documents on UAPs.
According to Greenewald, around 10,000 Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) reports were required to obtain the PDFs and the process was an excruciatingly long one. He scanned the documents by hand.
Greenewald has had one of the best and most famous websites since the beginning of the internet.. It has lived through countless high strangeness to continue its existence today..
Kudos and applause for a job well done.
Some examples.. Within the pages are a bizarre story of a mysterious explosion in a small Russian town. Residents reported seeing a “moving fiery sphere”, sparking UFO fears, but local military men concluded that a store of ammonium nitrate was the source of the blast. The CIA’s investigation was inconclusive.
The drama continues as the climactic series finale of the Trump administration gets ready to air.
Trump has become the only president now impeached twice, Mitch McConnell hints the trial could be January 19, only hours before the inauguration of Joe Biden!
There is a good chance that the trial will occur in full AFTER Trump leaves office.. Creating an interesting beginning for the initial days of the new Administration..
The impeachment passed the House with 10 Republicans voting in favor of it, compared to 2019 in the last impeachment trial no Republicans voted for it..
Since Twitter’s purge, Parler was shut down by app stores and eventually Amazon decided who gets to be on their vast internet servers. Again, applauded but a few, just a very few, are shocked that Jeff Bezos has that much power!
And since this big ‘cleaning’ online, the following has happened: Rumors have persisted and rapidly been sent around the world that 1) the Pope was arrested during a blackout this weekend, 2) The Italian Prime Minister is in jail, 3) ATM machines all over the nation are not working and 4) Bible ‘experts’ all over were posting videos that they were given secret messages about the end times coming.
Additionally, upcoming dates in January of armed mass protests were being planned, just as Congress plans the Impeachment sequel, almost a spinoff series at this point of the Trump Reality Show.
So with all of these dangerous accounts gone, it seemingly became even more increasingly easy to spread misinformation for fun.
I get the sense of quite a few users at 4CHAN having a blast with spreading the website “the conservative beaver” about the Pope’s indictment that your grandparents most likely have spread to their friends on Facebook..
THE SCARY SIDE OF MAYHEM
Parler was reportedly being used to help assist in planning chaos.. As a result, effectively all other businesses shut them down. There will undoubtedly be antitrust suits and allegations of corporate monopoly, but somehow life started to move so fast since 2021 began, it is difficult to keep up. And it makes you look old fashioned not to join along..
Just a few news clips on Parler before proceeding:
The FBI has also received information in recent days on a group calling for “storming” state, local and federal government courthouses and administrative buildings in the event President Donald Trump is removed from office prior to Inauguration Day. The group is also planning to “storm” government offices in every state the day President-elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated, regardless of whether the states certified electoral votes for Biden or Trump.
“The FBI received information about an identified armed group intending to travel to Washington, DC on 16 January,” the bulletin read. “They have warned that if Congress attempts to remove POTUS via the 25th Amendment, a huge uprising will occur.”
Washington has suddenly become tense since January 6. The newest memo has added misery to the discomfort..
The abrupt resignation of Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf added to the mounting tension in Washington ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next week.. Wolf announced that “the evolving security landscape” had led to a decision to begin security for the inauguration on Jan. 13. The efforts were originally scheduled to begin on Jan. 19…
ONLY HOURS TO GO UNTIL THE END OF THE TRUMP SHOW.. PEOPLE SUDDENLY ON PINS AND NEEDLES OVER WHAT THE CLIMACTIC SERIES FINALE WILL INCLUDE..
