In many ways that linkage is obvious; but, what is so powerful about the Pope's segue from science to religion and back is that the Encyclical will amount to and be the basis of formal Church teachings about humankind's responsibility to exercise environmental stewardship.

It seems that no matter the subject, the PIQ (poster in question) always manages to bring some amount of ridiculousness to the table ("McCarthy was right").  Is it attention-seeking? Is it to push people's buttons?  I don't know, but I'm pretty sure there's way more of that going on than any genuine desire to engage in dialogue.

(Protip:Spellcheck is your friend, and is available in the SeaMonkey browser).

For much of its history, knowledge of Venona was restricted even from the highest levels of government. Senior army officers, in consultation with the FBI and CIA, made the decision to restrict knowledge of Venona within the government (even the CIA was not made an active partner until 1952). Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley, concerned about the White House's history of leaking sensitive information, decided to deny President Truman direct knowledge of the project. The president received the substance of the material only through FBI, Justice Department, and CIA reports on counterintelligence and intelligence matters. He was not told the material came from decoded Soviet ciphers. To some degree this secrecy was counter-productive; Truman was distrustful of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover and suspected the reports were exaggerated for political purposes.

McCarthyism

During the McCarthy era, thousands of Americans were accused of being communists or communist sympathizers and became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, educators and union activists. Suspicions were often given credence despite inconclusive or questionable evidence, and the level of threat posed by a person's real or supposed leftist associations or beliefs was often greatly exaggerated. Many people suffered loss of employment and/or destruction of their careers; some even suffered imprisonment. Most of these punishments came about through trial verdicts later overturned,[2] laws that were later declared unconstitutional,[3] dismissals for reasons later declared illegal[4] or actionable,[5] or extra-legal procedures that would come into general disrepute.

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McCarthyism also attracts controversy purely as a historical issue. Through declassified documents from Soviet archives and Venona project decryptions of coded Soviet messages, it has become known that the Soviet Union engaged in substantial espionage activities in the United States during the 1940s. It is also known that the Communist Party USA was substantially funded and its policies controlled by the Soviet Union, and there are accusations that CPUSA members were often recruited as spies.[128] In the view of some contemporary commentators, these revelations stand as at least a partial vindication of McCarthyism.[129] Some feel that there was a genuinely dangerous subversive element in the United States, and that this danger justified extreme measures.[127] Others, while acknowledging that there were inexcusable excesses during McCarthyism, argue that some contemporary historians of McCarthyism underplay the depth of Soviet espionage in America[130] or the undemocratic nature of the CPUSA,[131] the latter concern being shared by some Trotskyites who felt that they, and anti-Stalin socialists in general, were persecuted by the CPUSA.[132] The opposing view holds that, recent revelations notwithstanding, by the time McCarthyism began in the late 1940s, the CPUSA was an ineffectual fringe group, and the damage done to U.S. interests by Soviet spies after World War II was minimal.[133] Historian Ellen Schrecker, herself criticised for pro-Stalinist leanings,[134] has written, "in this country, McCarthyism did more damage to the constitution than the American Communist Party ever did."[135]

[V]irtually none of the people that McCarthy claimed or alleged were Soviet agents turn up in Venona. He did identify a few small fry who we now know were spies but only a few. And there is little evidence that those he fingered were among the unidentified spies of Venona. Many of his claims were wildly inaccurate; his charges filled with errors of fact, misjudgments of organizations and innuendoes disguised as evidence. He failed to recognize or understand the differences among genuine liberals, fellow-traveling liberals, Communist dupes, Communists and spies -- distinctions that were important to make. The new information from Russian and American archives does not vindicate McCarthy. He remains a demagogue, whose wild charges actually made the fight against Communist subversion more difficult. Like Gresham's Law, McCarthy's allegations marginalized the accurate claims. Because his facts were so often wrong, real spies were able to hide behind the cover of being one of his victims and even persuade well-meaning but naïve people that the who led anti-communist cause was based on inaccuracies and hysteria.

Only 20 years earlier, in the midst of the Great Depression, the Communist Party had been the third largest political party in the United States, after the Democrats and Republicans. Therefore, ipretty much goes without saying that lots of Americans had been among its members.

Sen. McCarthy was a serial liar and demagogue who had a very serious problem with alcoholism. (He was also very likely a deeply closeted homosexual who delighted in baiting and persecuting other gay men, but for purposes of this discussion, I won't go there.) In fact, it was his affinity for the bottle which likely led to the acute hepatitis which eventually killed him at age 48 in May 1957. Per the London newspaper News Chronicle (May 3, 1957):

"Senator McCarthy died yesterday in Washington. America was the cleaner by his fall, and is cleaner by his death."

Per author David Halberstrom, in The Fifties:

"He instinctively knew how to brush aside the protests of his witnesses, how to humiliate vulnerable, scared people. In the end, he produced little beyond fear and headlines."

Per biographer Paul Rovere, in Senator Joe McCarthy:

"As for McCarthy's supporters, from the bat-haunted Minute Women of the U.S.A., to the Texas millionaires, to the China Lobby, to the 'hard' anti-Communist intelligentsia of New York, they sought him from the outmost fringes, where grievances and anxieties were the strongest and the least grounded in reason; where the passion for authoritarian leadership was greatest; where the will to hate and condemn and punish could most easily be transformed into political action."

All that said, I'd offer that amongst both his most fervent admirers on the right and his most severe critics on the left, Sen. McCarthy's perceived impact and reputation is greatly outsized relative to his actual public record. For a little less than two years during 1953 - 1954, he served as chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee of Investigations, which had a rather narrow directive and mandate to investigate the prevalence of communism within in the federal government and amongst its employees.

(In fact, I'd argue that the House Un-American Activities Committee actually did far more damage to people's reputations than Sen. McCarthy ever did, because it was in business far longer on Capitol Hill than was McCarthy himself, and its members could cast a much wider net.)

Author / historian Arthur Herman -- who actually admires and defends Sen. McCarthy -- estimates that approximately 10,000 Americans lost their jobs in the 1950s due to past and / or present affiliations with the Community Party and its proxy organizations. Of that number, he further says that some 2,000 were federal government employees. And of that number, McCarthy was perhaps directly or indirectly responsible for 40 people losing their jobs.

And of those 40, only one subject of McCarthy's investigations, Owen Lattimore, was later indicted on seven counts of perjury -- all of those charges were subsequently tossed out by Federal Judge Luther Youngdahl. One guy. That's all.

That the now-declassified reports of the Verona Project (1943-1980) serve to confirm the extent of Soviet spying in America during that period really does nothing to vindicate Joe McCarthy and his egregious behavior. McCarthy and his subcommittee had absolutely nothing at all to do with the Verona Project, which was conducted first by the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service and later by the National Security Agency.

While McCarthy was correct about Owen Lattimore's expressed sympathies for the Soviet Union, both he and his Senate ally Pat McCarran were very wrong to have publicly equated those statements with actual espionage, because Lattimore had never been a Soviet agent. Rather, he had been deliberately targeted and slandered by those two congressional charlatans, and his academic career in this country was effectively destroyed as a result.

All Sen. McCarthy ever accomplished successfully was to court personal publicity, which he did in large part by leveling wild and unsubstantiated charges against both federal agencies and various individuals affiliated with those agencies. He was a petty, vainglorious and vindictive drunk whose baseless claims and personal behavior eventually embarrassed and alarmed his own Senate colleagues to the extent that they felt compelled to formally censure him in December 1954, a move which effectively ended his career and rightly discredited him in the eyes of most decent Americans.

Under the Senates rules pertaining to the release of investigative records, in January 2003 the records of the closed executive sessions of McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations were made public, fifty years after those sessions were conducted. Upon that release, then-Subcommittee Chair Carl Levin (D-MI) and ranking member Susan Collins (R-ME) co-wrote the following about the late Wisconsin senator in their report's preface:

"In 1948, the Senate established the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to continue the work of a special committee, first chaired by Missouri Senator Harry Truman, to investigate the national defense program during World War II. Over the next half century, the Subcommittee under our predecessor Chairmen, Senators John McClellan, Henry Jackson, Sam Nunn, William Roth, and John Glenn, conducted a broad array of hard-hitting investigations into allegations of corruption and malfeasance, leading repeatedly to the exposure of wrongdoing and to the reform of government programs.

"The phase of the Subcommittee's history from 1953 to 1954, when it was chaired by Joseph McCarthy, however, is remembered differently. Senator McCarthy's zeal to uncover subversion and espionage led to disturbing excesses. His browbeating tactics destroyed careers of people who were not involved in the infiltration of our government. His freewheeling style caused both the Senate and the Subcommittee to revise the rules governing future investigations, and prompted the courts to act to protect the Constitutional rights of witnesses at Congressional hearings. Senator McCarthy's excesses culminated in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, following which the Senate voted overwhelmingly for his censure. [...] These hearings are a part of our national past that we can neither afford to forget nor permit to reoccur." (Emphasis is mine.)

There were communist spies within in the government.

As I understand it, "communism" is a political philosophy.  The First Amendment gives Americans the right to any political philosophy they care to support.

Ergo, "communist spy" is analogous to "Republican spy," "Democratic spy" or "Libertarian spy."  IOW, it is a meaningless term suggesting that one's political philosophy should prevent service to one's country.

Because scientific knowledge has progressed quite a bit (for non-conservatives) in the last few hundred years.

In the 18th century, the Papacy actively supported astronomy, establishing the Observatory of the Roman College in 1774. In 1789-1787, the Specola Vaticana in the Tower of the Winds within the Vatican was established under the direction of Msgr. Filippo Luigi Gilii (1756-1821). When Msgr. Gilii died, the Specola was closed down because it was inconvenient for students in the city because the dome of St. Peter's obstructed its view. Its instruments were transferred to the College Observatory. A third facility, the Observatory of the Capitol, was operated from 1827 to 1870.

Also:

[The Jesuits] contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn's rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. Star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics - all were typical Jesuit achievements, and scientists as influential as Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz and Newton were not alone in counting Jesuits among their most prized correspondents.[96]

jimakaPPJ: "It occurs to me that the Pope in Galileo's time was as much a scientist as the Pope is now."

FYI, Pope Francis has a master's degree in chemistry. Judging by the fact-free nonsense you post here on a regular basis, your own credentials are such that you have no business presuming His Holiness a scientific ignoramus.

Sorry, if you are insulted. (none / 0) (#109)
by christinep on Wed Jun 17, 2015 at 01:25:19 PM MDT

I seriously doubt that you would be sorry for any previous and future insults (to me or anyone else) as you clearly think you are being clever when make them. For an example, I am replying to comment that you think is clever.

But I must admit I was remiss when I didn't mention that you are hardly the only "offender" when it comes to the very dismissive "newbie/noob" usage -- that term has been showing up lot lately. You have every right to think I was singling you out for a ... whatever.

I wasn't, so I apologize for that.