A question from Anonymous of Long Island:

Given the interest in the new Bond movie, No Time To Die, featuring Craig as the last James Bond before the Wokist revolution, what is your position on the movie's somewhat flexible portrayal of the issue of capital punishment at the hands of special GB agents?

They speak of little else at times like these on the campuses of the student populations of Oaklands and Gracelands and California generally, except that in the modern PC world of the modern university campus, there is much talk of the issue of capital punishment in terms of its moral and legal status from the student woke point of view. The matter has blown up in Britain of late since the heinous death of a poor young girl called Sarah Everard, killed at the hands of a serving police officer who used entrapment methods to kidnap and brutalise and rape her and then kill her, abandoning her body in some woodland. So in Britain, whatever about the safety conscious campuses of California, the issue is now quite popular as a solution to official entrapment methods illegally deployed - people in Britain are very conscious of their human rights since BLM arose to confront evil, wherever it occurs, even at the hands of the formerly whitewashed police. Prudence and Political Correctness require a more adroit and more nuanced discussion of these subjects, something that can be found in standard commentaries on the key teaching of the new universal catechism of the Church at CCC 2267 - recursum ad poenam mortis non excludit - generice, recourse to the death penalty is not excluded, pace the nuances introduced last year by the new papal monsignores requiring moral certainty before proceeding, and certainly in this last movie from the Bond collection before workism takes over the genre, maybe next time round, if rumours are true from Sir Keir Starmer that a female Bond will be chosen, then what we have is the idea current for a long time among secret service agents that a "shoot to kill" policy must always be the reserved right of a crown regime. The baddies are baddies and they are the ones who start the shooting so though they might get processed as occurred in the last movie in this collection, number XXIV, as the evil baddie Blofield is deprived of his wish to be shot by Bond and instead is handed over to the police - this is the preferred optic of the Bond movie genre - baddies get shot for the most part though - a shoot to kill policy, a licence to kill, is therefore operative. The debates about capital punishment in most of the Californian campuses tend to center on the issue of whether there is an innocent man sitting on Death Row, twiddling his thumbs before his execution in front of cheering relatives of the deceased he is said to be guilty of killing. Students do worry about this possibility - that one out of every 100 is possibly innocent and sitting on Death Row because of the issue of general framing and entrapment that is routinely deployed by the darker forces of American services - for students one bad apple that is not a bad apple is sufficient to nullify the entire institute of capital punishment, worthy sentiments, though in the heat of a Bond movie, the baddies are obvious since they are the ones doing the evil and doing the shooting first. Church agencies use similar ideologies, invoking the licence to kill, when a great evil arises on the surface of a given society, and going to the roots of it all in their teams of exorcists, so no real and genuine surprises there, though this might surprise some of the more woke correspondents and readers. Modern ethnically cleansing forms of Evil - it all sometimes has to be confronted. And the Catholic Church, we must recall, is there to confront evil, it is not formally and firstly just a caring and sharing extension of the nice and nicer departments of the DSS or NHS, even though it is the largest provider of health care institutes in the entire world. So does Bond have a licence to kill? Yes in a word, a veritable "shoot to kill" policy is there among the agents.