Are Catholics Being Persecuted?

 Everyone says persecution has gotten worse. Has it really? 

Nigeria is a country of 200 million people, with 53.5% identifying as Muslim, 35.3% identifying as Christians, 10.6% as Catholic. Nigeria has the 10th highest murder rate in the world: 34.52 per 100k people

It is estimated that 89% of Christians killed throughout the world are located in Nigeria, so when we study Nigeria's Christian murder rate, we are looking at a rate of martyrdom (if that's what it is) roughly ten times higher than all the other nations of the world combined. Once we admit that figure, we must also admit that no other country in the world, not even China, gets close to the leader when it comes to Christian persecution. 

The highest number I've seen for Nigerian Christians reportedly murdered between January 2021 and June 2022 is 7600. Most other reports are lower, sometimes as low as one-third of that figure, but let's go with 7600.

There are roughly 4200 priests in Nigeria, but no agreement on how many are killed. Aleteia claims only four Catholic priests were killed in in Nigeria in 2022, with 28 abducted. Vanguard claims 39 Catholics priests were killed, 30 were abducted (most released unharmed after payment of ransom). Four killed vs thirty-nine killed is a rather significant disagreement. 

But, let's pretend that level of disagreement is nothing to be concerned about. There is agreement on the Catholic response. After several of the priestly abductions and murders, Catholic groups marched in the street to protest. None of the Catholic marchers were attacked, much less killed, as they marched. This speaks to a pretty disorganized anti-Catholic persecution movement. 

So, let's review: 

• 89% of all Christians murdered in the world die in Nigeria,
• 219 million people live in Nigeria, 
• 100 million are Christian (including Catholics), 
• General Nigeria murder rate: 34.52 per 100k people
• Christian murder rate (including Catholics): 7.6 per 100k people

According to these numbers, non-Christians are being murdered at a MUCH HIGHER rate than Christians are. Given that Christians make up roughly 46% of the population, just random chance would indicate that half the murder victims would be Christians. And, worse, if Christians were actually being targeted, then more than half the murder victims should be Christian. But according to the numbers, not even one-quarter of murder victims are Christian. With 46% of Nigeria's population Christian, the Christians barely manage a 22% murder rate in the general population. That's a pretty crappy persecution.

In fact, if the numbers are accurate, Nigerians appear to be going out of their way to avoid murdering Christians. Even Nigerian Catholic priests question the American narrative that Catholics are targeted for death. In a discussion of the June 2022 Owo church massacre, in which 50 Catholics were killed when gunmen attacked a Sunday Mass in Ondo state, a priest made an interesting observation: 

"Another Lagos-based Catholic priest, who also requested anonymity, agreed, saying: “I think it is difficult to state categorically that this attack was intended particularly for the Catholic Church.” 

And remember, according to the reporters, Nigeria is far and away the worst possible place to live as a Christian today. Catholics would like to believe we are targeted for persecution because that would make us special and Christ-like. We have a hard time accepting that non-Catholics might not consider it worth their time to persecute or kill us. The numbers above appear to be our strongest case to make the argument "Catholics are being targeted for persecution!." If that's all we have, we maybe ought to shut up.

Why Can't Blacks Act Black?

Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, Ben Carson ... the black community has a lot of examples of absolutely BRILLIANT citizens.

Why can't black people act black? Instead most act like woke Democrat plantation slaves.

When the black community voted Republican, they had a strong middle class and they didn't murder each other. Now that they vote almost exclusively Democrat, they have adopted the Democrat view of the black community. 50% of murderers and 50% of murder victims are now black males between the ages of 15 and 30.

Black women make up 6% of the population but have over 30% of the nation's abortions. 70% of the black children who manage to avoid being murdered by their own mothers will then grow up without a father, which vastly increases the chances they will grow up depressed and/or engage in criminal activity, because they have no father to teach and guide them.

None of this reflects the values of the black community.

None of this happened when the black community voted Republican and had a Republican viewpoint. But now that they've become Democrats, they lynch and murder themselves in much the same way the Democrats used to lynch and murder them. If the black community wants to do well, it needs to dump the Democrat viewpoint.

Do AI Essays Violate Copyright?

 I'm not a lawyer, I do not play a lawyer on television, however, there is reason to believe that any essay generated by an AI is not subject to copyright prosecution.

According to the copyright office, 

Copyright law does not protect ideas, methods, or systems. Copyright protection is therefore not available for ideas or procedures for doing, making, or building things; scientific or technical methods or discoveries; business operations or procedures; mathematical principles; formulas or algorithms; or any other concept, process, or method of operation.

Section 102 of the Copyright Act (title 17 of the U.S. Code) clearly expresses this principle: “In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.” Inventions are subject matter for patents, not copyrights. 

An AI typically assigns every item (in ChatGPT's example, that would be each word) in its training data set a numeric value. Once it has this string of numbers, the program then uses an algorithm to generate a new string of numbers which are converted back into words. Technically, the conversion and algorithmic operations upon the training data set arguably means the words of the resulting AI-generated essay are not copied, even if the resulting text is identical to one or more of the sections of the training data set. 

Furthermore, since this algorithm is a "business operation or procedure" that uses "mathematical... formulas or algorithms" in a "process, or method of operation", the conversion process is likewise not something that can be copyrighted. The specific code that expresses the algorithm can be copyrighted, but the conversion algorithm itself cannot be copyrighted.

If AI-generated essays turn out not to be subject to copyright infringement due to its algorithmic foundation, that raises an additional question. Why should the algorithmic operation of a machine be privileged over the algorithmic operation of the wet-ware which operates within an individual's brain? We may not fully understand how the brain's algorithms work, we certainly cannot replicate those algorithms, but we can obtain very similar response outputs by using them ourselves. 

So, do copyright and plagiarism rules seem reasonable in the 21st century? As knowledge becomes more of a computer-generated resource, it is hard to see how these ideas can continue to be useful within the culture.