DL Open Thread: Friday, November 26, 2021

In case you were wondering:

The first recorded use of the term “Black Friday” was applied not to post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping but to financial crisis: specifically, the crash of the U.S. gold market on September 24, 1869. Two notoriously ruthless Wall Street financiers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, worked together to buy up as much as they could of the nation’s gold, hoping to drive the price sky-high and sell it for astonishing profits. On that Friday in September, the conspiracy finally unraveled, sending the stock market into free-fall and bankrupting everyone from Wall Street barons to farmers.

Obvious, yes, but, hey, it’s The Dan:

The story behind the song (channeling my Inner Al here):

A new Pew Research Center survey finds that a rising share of U.S. adults who are not already parents say they are unlikely to ever have children, and their reasons range from just not wanting to have kids to concerns about climate change and the environment.

Some 44% of non-parents ages 18 to 49 say it is not too or not at all likely that they will have children someday, an increase of 7 percentage points from the 37% who said the same in a 2018 survey. Meanwhile, 74% of adults younger than 50 who are already parents say they are unlikely to have more kids, virtually unchanged since 2018.

“Now I was joining them because I wanted to know what they were planning. And I joined the Three Percenters. During the screening, using basically my real profile as an Iraq veteran as background, they’re asking me questions about my weapon system, my secondary, meaning my handgun, how I was prepared to use it. What I would do in different tactical scenarios. They specifically asked, and I made recordings because these people are idiots, they were explicitly asking would you kill someone from Antifa or Black Lives Matter. This wasn’t an anomaly.”

They have been basically made afraid,” Goldsmith said of the law enforcement. “And especially with the Trump administration and Bill Barr’s Department of Justice. Law enforcement was afraid to watch these folks like I did. I’m not a law enforcement official. I can go and buddy up to these people online. Make a fake profile, a fake gab account. and just copy and paste their rhetoric. So, they think I’m one of them then you know, a few days go by of silence and the next thing you know, there are conversations that I recorded.”

Through the fall, the sparring continued. Conservative San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone launched a public prayer campaign calling on “all Catholics and others of goodwill” to pray for “the conversion” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “maternal heart.” Los Angeles Archbishop Gomez delivered a polarizing public address at a conference in Spain arguing that “wokeness,” “social justice,” and “intersectionality” were “dangerous” and “atheistic…pseudo-religions” that “have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied.” Meanwhile, in Rome, the pope told reporters that he had “never refused the eucharist to anyone,” and later met with both Pelosi and Biden—Biden emerging from his visit with the report that the pope had told him to continue receiving communion.

On the whole, it found that the priesthood is becoming more conservative; that younger priests are most stridently opposed to the politics of their pope; and that clerics on both sides of the political spectrum believe things are getting worse, not better, in the US church.