Writing fake news and stories about scandals is like being sexually aroused by excrement, Pope Francis has said.

And since people tend towards coprophagia, or eating faeces, then the media should avoid spreading it, he said in an attack on the spread of disinformation.

Francis apologised for his use of precise psychological terms that describe when people are aroused by excrement.

read more:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/pope-fake-news-francis-sexual-a...

Dear Pope, quit while you're ahead...

President Barack Obama directed US intelligence agencies to conduct a full review of cyber attacks and foreign intervention into the 2016 election and deliver a report before he leaves office, homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco said on Friday. Monaco told reporters the results of the report would be shared with lawmakers and others. Obama leaves office on January 20. (Reuters)

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-10/obama-orders-review-of-cyber-attac...

THE PHRASE “FAKE NEWS” has exploded in usage since the election, but the term is similar to other malleable political labels such as “terrorism” and “hate speech”; because the phrase lacks any clear definition, it is essentially useless except as an instrument of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.

One of the most egregious examples was the recent Washington Post article hyping a new anonymous group and its disgusting blacklist of supposedly pro-Russia news outlets – a shameful article mindlessly spread by countless journalists who love to decry Fake News, despite the Post article itself being centrally based on Fake News. (The Post this week finally added a lame editor’s note acknowledging these critiques; the Post editors absurdly claimed that they did not mean to “vouch for the validity” of the blacklist even though the article’s key claims were based on doing exactly that).

Now we have an even more compelling example. Back in October, when WikiLeaks was releasing emails from the John Podesta archive, Clinton campaign officials and their media spokespeople adopted a strategy of outright lying to the public, claiming – with no basis whatsoever – that the emails were doctored or fabricated and thus should be ignored. That lie – and that is what it was: a claim made with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for its truth – was most aggressively amplified by MSNBC personalities such as Joy Ann Reid and Malcolm Nance, The Atlantic’s David Frum, and Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald.

read more: 

https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news...

So the Bush administration did what any honest government would do in search of a jolly short war: It hired a PR agency, Hill & Knowlton, to invent and sell the jagged little hook. The end product was perhaps the most egregious lie ever told on behalf of war and conquest.

On October 10, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah, gave a presentation before the UN Human Rights Caucus that was worthy of an Oscar. Crying, she described what she had apparently witnessed in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her testimony was passed out in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where ... babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."

Incredible? Yes. In fact, too incredible.

What the media failed to inform us - until the marching orders were well under way, of course - was that Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family, and “H&K vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado had coached Nayirah in what even the Kuwaitis' own investigators later confirmed was false testimony,” Stauber and Rampton reported.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/369886-fake-news-nobody-west-media/

Hence definitions are important. 

Wikipedia’s is reasonable: 

‘Fake news is a type of hoax or deliberate spread of misinformation in social media or traditional news media with the intent to mislead in order to gain financially or politically.’

That does not include CNN. It does include Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. It includes hundreds of websites that have lied maliciously about Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton throughout the recent election campaign. Media watchdog fakenewschecker lists more than 370 websites which fit that definition. Confusingly, some have names such as World Truth, Accuracy in Media and Truth Feed.

Fake news does not include satire, as in The Onion or as in The Shovel's ‘People Pursued By Centrelink Advised To Become Multi-National Companies’.

read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/battlelines-a...

Here I feel that the IA commentator has missed the point... The Hillary camp did manipulate Bernie Sanders out of the picture. Hillary was an instigator of the war on Libya and was frothing at the mouth to go and bomb Damascus. Hillary lied as much as... Actually Trump did not lie, he just told his bombastic horrible ways to deal with things. Hillary lied. And the media who supported her also lied, including CNN.

Duterte on Tuesday accused the Church and its bishops and priests of corruption, womanizing and said he was abused by a priest as a student of Ateneo de Davao University. He also said three Cabinet secretaries had been molested.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/374968-duterte-accuses-catholic-church/

see toon at top.

Pope Francis has criticised journalists who dredge up old scandals and sensationalise the news, saying it’s a “very serious sin” that hurts all involved.

Francis, who plans to dedicate his upcoming annual communications message to “fake news”, told Catholic media on Saturday that journalists perform a mission that is among the most “fundamental” to democratic societies.

Read more

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/17/pope-francis-fake-and-sens...

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Calling on news consumers to step aside from online echo-chamber opinion mongering, Pope Francis stepped into the fake news debate by equating the hissings of the fabled snake in the Garden of Eden to the current state of media credibility — or lack thereof — even quoting Russian novelist Dostoevsky in the process.

"We need to unmask what could be called the snake-tactics used by those who disguise themselves in order to strike at any time and place," the popular Argentinian-born Pope wrote for the Catholic Church's upcoming World Day of Social Communications, taking place later this spring.

In suggesting that it used a "crafty" false news campaign to convince Eve to eat one of the shiny apples hanging from the Christian bible's so-called tree of knowledge, the snake received the dubious honor of being the first to commit "the tragic history of human sin," according to the 81-year-old pontiff, cited by Nytimes.com.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/world/201801281061127424-pope-details-fake-news-...

Read from top. Religions are based on fake news of god this and god/snake that... Religions do not make sense. Imagine for a second that Eve did not listen to the snake and did not take the apple... All our toils would never ever happened. We would not exist. Adam and Eve would still be in heaven. So in order for god to solve the "original sin", the "original sin" had to have been committed. Makes sense? It's stupid as all get out...

“One striking thing about the Francis era is that the papacy’s big-picture argument, especially in [the 2015 encyclical] Laudato Si, is a sweeping critique of the modern technocratic-capitalist paradigm,” Douthat continued. 

“But then the pope’s big gambles, the divorce/remarriage push and perhaps this, both involve making major concessions to the stewards of that paradigm, in its Western-democratic and Sino-oligarchic forms, in the hopes of making new evangelization possible.”

Those lines are classic Douthat: critical of papal vision and strategy, but peering more deeply into the murk of Catholic theology, and more steadily, avoiding the sort of rhetorical rashness that (understandably) characterizes so much Francis commentary on the Catholic Right. That is what makes Douthat’s To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism (Simon & Schuster) such an important book—perhaps the most important book—for understanding this revolutionary moment in the Catholic Church’s 2,000-year history. 

And it is exactly that: a revolutionary moment. Whatever one’s opinion of Francis, no reader can leave Douthat’s deeply considered book believing that the Catholic Church is living through normal times, with an ordinary pope. Catholics—conservative ones, anyway—often emphasize that the Catholic Church never changes theologically, that it is a steady rock in a turbulent sea of history. 

This is contestable, to put it charitably. But even if one accepts that narrative, Jorge Bergoglio’s papacy risks turning that claim into a laughingstock. This is no minor thing, as Douthat demonstrates. The changes Francis and his supporters are pushing through stretch the flexibility within the Roman church’s theological system past the breaking point. As Douthat writes in the preface:

This is a book about the most important religious story of our time: the fate of the world’s largest religious institution under a pope who believes that Roman Catholicism can change in ways that his predecessors rejected, and who faces resistance from Catholics who believe the changes he seeks risk breaking faith with Jesus Christ.

“The most important religious story of our time”? The claim is hyperbolic at first glance, at least to non-Catholic eyes, but one finishes this unsettling book believing that Douthat sees with piercing clarity the likely consequences of Francis tearing down the doctrinal walls around marriage that have stood for time out of mind.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ross-douthat-peers-into-...

Read also:

 the russians glow in the "spectral evidence"...

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The faith's first Argentine pope, Francis stated that he was ashamed that future generations would live in a world divided by seemingly endless standoffs, conflicts and wars.

Pope Francis, 81, asked to be forgiven while addressing the "shame" that would be directed toward present-day leaders and lawmakers by future generations because those alive now are "leaving young people a world that is fractured by divisions and wars, a world devoured by selfishness… in which the young, the sick, the old are marginalized," according to a Vatican statement.

Following several recent anti-terror arrests, Italy's capital city has increased security for the annual Holy Week rituals of the Catholic church. An estimated 10,000 additional security force members have been added and military vehicles have been parked as barriers against possible truck attacks at well-known tourist hotspots.

The pope made mention of those within the church who are attempting to rebuild what he referred to as "humanity's sleeping conscience" by helping poor, immigrant, and incarcerated people.

The energetic pontiff pointedly detailed "shame because so many people, even some of your [God's] ministers, have let themselves be deceived by ambition and vainglory, thereby losing their worthiness."

A Saturday night Easter service will continue into Easter Sunday celebrations as Francis is scheduled to make his twice-yearly "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) address.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/viral/201803311063106279-pope-ashamed-of-world-c...

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Read also:

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who served at the papal nuncio (that is, Vatican ambassador) to the United States from 2011-2016, has dropped an atomic bomb on Francis’s papacy, charging that “corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy.”

In a lengthy statement, Vigano says that Francis has known for years about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sexual abuse, but brought him into the pontifical inner circle anyway, and sent him around the world on papal missions.

In fact, says Vigano, the Roman curia has known about McCarrick since the year 2000, but McCarrick was protected by gay supporters honeycombed throughout the Vatican. Pope Benedict XVI ordered McCarrick out of public ministry in 2009 or 2010, but McCarrick, abetted by powerful gay allies in the Curia, defied Benedict.

Vigano demands the resignation of Pope Francis, writing:

At the Angelus on Sunday, August 12, 2018 Pope Francis said these words: “Everyone is guilty for the good he could have done and did not do … If we do not oppose evil, we tacitly feed it. We need to intervene where evil is spreading; for evil spreads where daring Christians who oppose evil with good are lacking.”

If this is rightly to be considered a serious moral responsibility for every believer, how much graver is it for the Church’s supreme pastor, who in the case of McCarrick not only did not oppose evil but associated himself in doing evil with someone he knew to be deeply corrupt. He followed the advice of someone he knew well to be a pervert, thus multiplying exponentially with his supreme authority the evil done by McCarrick. And how many other evil pastors is Francis still continuing to prop up in their active destruction of the Church!
Francis is abdicating the mandate which Christ gave to Peter to confirm the brethren. Indeed, by his action he has divided them, led them into error, and encouraged the wolves to continue to tear apart the sheep of Christ’s flock.

In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal Church, he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with all of them.

I have posted the entire text below. I’ve read it twice now, and I’m telling you, this story is as big as it gets.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/vatican-bombshell-mccarri...

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...

Is that “distinguished Italian gentleman” Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, then the Vatican secretary of state, fingered by Vigano as a promoter of gay bishops and cardinals, as well as the figure who protected McCarrick in the Curia? Last year, it emerged that Bertone was at the heart of a case in which $500,000 was diverted from a papal charity to renovate his luxury penthouse. The money was intended for a Rome children’s hospital supported by the charity. It was taken from the Papal Foundation, a powerful charity co-founded in 1988 by none other than the ambitious Archbishop of Newark, Theodore McCarrick. Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post writes:

In 1988, McCarrick co-founded the Papal Foundation, a nonprofit organization that raises millions for the Vatican. He sometimes rushed to the side of the country’s wealthiest Catholics in their times of personal crisis, following up to raise money later, according to two people who witnessed such interactions.

“The Papal Foundation was a huge point of leverage for him in terms of going to Rome,” said Steve Schneck, the longtime head of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at Catholic University. Schneck worked often with McCarrick. “There is not a Catholic organization in the United States he hasn’t raised money for.”

It’s how he bought influence. In 2002, the source who first tipped me off about the trip some lay Catholics took to Rome to warn the Vatican not to advance the abuser McCarrick to Washington, told me the trip failed because, in his estimate, McCarrick had raised tens of millions for the Church, and had ingratiated himself with the right people in the Curia.

Read more and see the video:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/pope-francis-mccarrick-ga...

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Irish journalist John Waters lays it out cold, accusing his colleagues of going soft of Francis on the sex abuse question, post-Vigano, because they want to protect his gay-friendly agenda:

The pope replied: “I will respond to your question, but I would prefer last—first we speak about the trip, and then other topics. … I read the statement this morning, and I must tell you sincerely that, I must say this, to you and all those who are interested. Read the statement carefully and make your own judgment. I will not say a single word about this. I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have the journalistic capacity to draw your own conclusions. It’s an act of faith. When some time passes and you have drawn your conclusions, I may speak. But, I would like your professional maturity to do the work for you. It will be good for you. That’s good.”

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/pope-francis-media-best-f...

Today (2/9/18), the edifying Murdoch press is a unison-choir of anti-Labor chants as usual, with La Devine mentioning Dastyari for being afraid of Morrison, Credlin pushing the anti-climate change agenda by praising the new minister for "energy", Angus Taylor, and his "new" cheap energy policy (Pick some fight [with Labor] and look good), while talking of forcing AGL to sell its Liddell Power Station (in a fascist manner that would not even be acceptable in former Communist Russia) and of course being committed to free-speech except for "that spy" Chelsea Manning, Pemberty, the editor, blasting K-Rudd for demanding a Royal Commission on Pemberty's boss Uncle Rupe, and finally a friendly warning to glorious Morrison by Piers Akerman for making deals with the naughty anti-Abbott faction of his party, especially "that" Marise Payne, while bashing Labor. It's all sweet on the CONservative front as the blood-bath is now replaced with fair weather sailor Morrison, the dad, more than happy with burnt toast from the kids on this day, Father's Day — and hell-bent on increasing the size of Captain Cook's statue at Kurnell. 

The only off-balance posting comes from Devine-La-catholic about the Pope who should "explain" or resign. I believe she hopes for a much more conservative Pope and though she would not pray to god for a nasty accident, she could secretly live in hope...

One has to remember that St Francis and his rebels were excommunicated from the Church back then in the Middle Ages. That this Pope chose the name Francis the First is not an accident.

Read from top.

From Rod Dreher

A German-speaking subscriber to Der Spiegel sent me a copy of the German news magazine’s big cover piece on Pope Francis. I ran it through Google Translate, which gave me a reasonable sense of the thing.

It is very, very tough — but fair. If this story had appeared in a conservative magazine, it would not have been remarkable. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a good piece. But the fact that it appears in a German magazine with a generally liberal editorial line — well, that’s a bellwether.

There’s little if anything that people who haven’t been following the Catholic scandal story closely this summer don’t already know, but Spiegel does a good job of gathering it in one place. What the magazine also does, and which I haven’t seen from the US media, is speak frankly about the problem of homosexuality in the priesthood. And the magazine strongly criticizes Francis for his self-pity and stonewalling on abuse and other questions.

Here’s how the report begins. Again, the translation is via Google, so it’s bound to be rough:

The earthquake that shakes the Vatican City is scarcely noticeable in the epicenter. Behind high walls there is silence in the ecclesial state. The curtains in front of the papal apartment in the guest house Santa Marta are closed, a Swiss guard is guarding the entrance, a policeman patrols. The control center of the global Church is like a fortress.

Only behind closed doors do cardinals and archbishops speak. About what has happened to the foundations of the Church. It is about, first and foremost, thousands of documented cases of sexual abuse by pastoral workers worldwide. However, it is also increasingly about Pope Francis. He, who started out as a brilliant reformer, threatens to lose his authority — because he often speaks at an inopportune time, but is silent in important moments.

About lies, intrigues, and “a Holy Father, who like no one questions the truth of faith in front of him,” says a grizzled cardinal at the court of Francis.

Look at this quote:

“I did not believe a word of this Francis from the beginning,” says a staunch cardinal who does not want to be named, within the Vatican walls: “He preaches mercy, but is in truth an icy, cunning Machiavellian and worse, he’s lying.”

There is in the piece a good bit about the abuse scandals that Bergoglio left behind in Argentina. An experienced lawyer for victims says that Francis shows a benign face to the public, but a very different one in private, when confronted about abusive priests.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/spiegel-blasts-pope-francis/

Mind you Der Spiegel is not always right either... Read from top.

"To tell the truth" says Gus, the problem isn't the present pope, but the religious structure which has survived some 1700 years of machinations, wars, internal disputes, deceit, and has never been "clean" despite self-declared "infallibility", but is principally a mercantile operation that is idealised by morons as if waiving a palm on Palm Sunday is all you need to get to heaven. 

It has been recorded that homosexuality in the church has been as prevalent as that of many kings...

Gus is a fierce atheist...

The Italian daily Corriere della Sera released an investigative report this week detailing some of the more head-scratching investments the Vatican has recently made through the Malta-based Centurion Global Fund, including $1.1 million — or about three percent of the total production budget — put into ‘Rocketman’, a film containing explicit gay sex scenes.

Sera reports that Centurion Global Fund – a Malta based firm with two thirds of its capital entrusted by the Vatican – invested in things like the biopic and Lapo Elkann’s eyewear and “lifestyle products” company. The money came from worldwide Peter’s Pence collections, a charitable fund for the poor. 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/475240-vatican-invested-elton-john-gay/

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See also:

"There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate." 
Daphne Caruana Galizia on Oct. 16, 2017, in her last blog entry, posted 24 minutes before her murder.

It's tempting to ask Corinne Vella how she avoided going crazy in the last two years. It is one thing, after all, to lose your sister to a hit job -- to learn that she was murdered in cold blood by a car bomb. But it is quite another to live with the conviction that neither the police, nor the country's government nor public prosecutors seem to have much of an interest in getting to the bottom of the crime.

Read more:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/galizia-murder-investigation...