Is Benedict Still Pope? (And Other Mysteries)

Various and sundry thoughts...

First, from the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza:

“Better that a nation’s secrets be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of a government be concealed from the citizens. Those who can conceal the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.”

That’s impressively prophetic. Our government started the CIA and FBI and began to do secret bad things in a time of war (Cold War with USSR) and now do the same against our citizens in a time of peace. 

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Does a society’s way of flaunting sexuality inadvertently reveal its own gods? During the Victorian age art depicting nakedness was only done under the “cover” of classical Greek and Roman themes, i.e. nymphs and such. Was the god of the Victorians erudition, shown by reverence for the classics? In the 20th century, our god (science) was the cover for the Kinsey Report which (laughably was considered ’scientific’ at the time) led to all kinds of reprobate behavior. Now our god is happiness (or what passes for our estimation of it) and so the only cover needed for pornography and sexuality is what “makes us happy”. 

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Amused that the poor NBC news reporter has not been seen on air since he reported on the Paul Pelosi attack. Because, as we know, a gaffe is when a newsman accidentally tells the truth. 

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Prof Cements:

Duty is ours, results are Gods.

I’m sure Moses often did a great deal of self-talk on the utility of confronting Pharaoh to proclaim “let my people go.”

In the natural affairs of the world, it appeared to be a hopeless endeavor.  Pharaoh had armies.

Still, Moses confronted Pharaoh and proclaimed truth.

You know the rest of the story.

And it’s why I don’t ever avoid meetings with tyrants, especially when people say it’s hopeless to do so.

You never know when or how God will show up.

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Every pastor across the country should be holding moments of silence in their churches and bringing attention to the J6er’s imprisonment.

A Gospel that doesn’t deal with the world in which we live, isn’t a very powerful Gospel.

He makes an interesting point on a moment of silence for the J6er's but the problem is there is sooooo much injustice that it's almost impossible to pick and choose which injustice to highlight. Still, I'm for that one given that it mirrors a much larger problem, that being the government metastasizing into a malignant entity that disfavors a large group of people (i.e. MAGA). 

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I think the problem with libertarianism is it assumes we are all independent agents rather than interconnected -- which seems reasonable on paper but doesn’t comport with reality. The right for someone else to do anything they want unless they infringe on the rights of another is another way of saying, “I don’t care if you hurt yourself (and indirectly society) as long as I’m free to do what I want.”  This directly conflicts with the Founding Fathers constant warnings that no system would work without the virtue of the people, founded on religion.  Their view has been increasingly proven true of late.

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Listened to Patrick Coffin pod making the case that Benedict is still pope. 

Coffin is a really good communicator. Not only can he enunciate clearly and speak quickly with accuracy but more impressively understands how an audience will take things -- such as the tendency to just slough off Benedict’s resignation speech as “we all know what he meant” rather than to take the words seriously.

At the very least Benedict’s actions have conferred huge ambiguity on the issue given he still wears the white cap, wears the white robes, still signs as Benedict “PP”, lives near the Vatican instead of Germany and calls himself not bishop but “pope emeritus”.  I initially wondered if this was perhaps a mark of pride or unwillingness to give up perks but that’s utterly out of character for him since his personality is introverted and seems little concerned with how others view him. Biggest of all, claims Coffin, was the word choice when he said he was resigning without using the word “office”. Benedict is not careless with words, right? 

It’s not like we haven’t had a ton of anti-popes in the past - something like thirty. 

I’ve always tended to think that exceptional events and dramas are mostly limited to the "more interesting" past but recently I’ve become aware that I'm actually living in a time of drama. Anything is possible. If you’d have told me in 2019 that the following year Mass would be cancelled for months and that the whole nation would work from home because a virus was going around (and it wasn't ebola) I’d have said that’s the most ridiculous scenario and certainly something like that wouldn’t happen in my lifetime.  Similarly if you told me a guy who played “The Apprentice” on TV and had no political experience would become skip right to becoming president I’d have said you were crazy.  And if someone had told me that the FBI/DOJ would pay somebody big bucks to make up allegations that the president enjoyed being urinated on by prostitutes, well... Moral: we live in a crazy world now where anything is possible.

James Kunstler breaks down the four mysteries of our time in this post. 

Max McGuire on the Failure of Conservative Protest

Max McGuire below ain’t wrong: 

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“Watching videos from the Arizona protest. It is very sad how sparsely attended it has been. 

I don't think it can be overstated how much of a chilling effect the Jan6 prosecutions have had on the Conservative movement. I support the effort to get to the bottom of election fraud in AZ and around the country. But I don't know if I would personally attend one of these rallies. Not because I don't support their mission - I do - but because attending comes with a real risk of being prosecuted, even if you do nothing wrong. And I believe the reason they're being so sparsely attended is because conservatives agree.

There are a ton of people who got caught up in the DOJ dragnet and were prosecuted for nonsense "crimes" they "committed" on January 6th, like "standing on a structural element" because they sat on a waist-height wall or "entering a restricted building" because they walked through opened doors to use the restroom inside the Capitol building.

No one actually knows precisely how many laws/crimes there are on the books. For that reason, it's impossible for anyone to know with any certainty that they are actually complying with all of the laws. 

We live in a world today where the DOJ is run according to the Stalinist mantra of "you show me the man, and I'll show you the crime." If the DOJ wants to prosecute someone for attending one of these protests, they can easily do it. Federal and State Laws prohibiting intimidation against election officials are so broadly written and could easily be applied against people protesting outside of the Maricopa County elections board. The Deep Staters don't care whether these charges stick. They'd just as happily force patriots to spend their life savings defending themselves against frivolous charges.

There's also always a fear that people at these events - either idiots on our side or leftist provocateurs - will stir up trouble. If I was going to attend one of these events, I would absolutely carry a concealed weapon. I carry everyday. But my general rule of thumb is that if I believe a concealed weapon is 100% necessary to keep me safe at an event, that's probably not an event I should attend. 

Then there's the other argument: that the risk to the country if fraudulent results are certified outweighs any individual risk of attending the protests. I appreciate that.

But I think that the unfortunate truth is that until there is real oversight and accountability to stop the tyrants in the FBI/DOJ from prosecuting innocent people, it will always be an uphill battle convincing people to attend these rallies and protests.”

Weird There Wasn't Any Internet Misinfo Until the '16 Election

On Babylon Bee forum site I seem to have hit a nerve with fake headline: “OpEd: It’s Weird There Wasn’t Any Internet Misinformation Until Trump Won In ‘16”. 

2016 really seems to be the B.C./A.D. of internet suppression and censorship. It started around allegations that Russian bots on Facebook swayed the 2016 election in favor of Trump and by 2018 news of Hunter Biden’s laptop was suppressed on almost every social media platform and newspaper in the country save for the New York Post. 

We’ve come a long way baby. 


The radicalization of the elites by the election of Trump is hard to exaggerate. It’s as if they decided the American people no longer get to choose their leaders because they “chose wrongly” in ’16.  The Internet had to be closed for repairs after the '16 election. 

And the term “conspiracy theory” is simply the lingua franca of our new civil war. 

The earliest known usage of term was in context of a hot war (the Civil War, on whether British aristocrats were intentionally weakening the U.S. to advance their financial interests). So from the beginning it’s been a cudgel in the information war.

Dennis Prager was asked by college student how he could discern the liars from truth tellers in this crazy period we’re in and Prager had an elegant response: look at who is trying to suppress the discussion. Liars want to shut down an argument. 

A UK writer said that all the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab and “the great reset” and “you will eat bugs and own nothing and be happy” are most likely balderdash because you can say those things freely on Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Google. Pay attention, he says, to the things that get banned --namely anything about covid or elections. It's obviously not a perfect indicator but it's a helpful directionally. 

If you look at where the deep state has pushed back most ferociously and hates the most it would be: 

1. Rightwing protests. They fear this so much the FBI begged right-wingers to march on the Michigan capitol as a dress rehearsal for 1/6.  Obviously 1/6 was the big play, including going to the extraordinary length of planting pipe bombs. And the Canadian trucker strikes was met with an unbelievably fascistic  response from Trudeau.  Even to this day any conservative protests are deemed as federal traps, so in some ways 1/6 was effective for the gov. 

2. Election machines. In Arizona, Maricopa County officials never complied with the State Senate’s election audit subpoenas by turning over the election routers and received no punishment. Similarly, anything regarding Dominion machines was scrubbed by Google from the Internet shortly after allegations came up in 2021. 

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JD Vance won handily against a supposedly centrist Dem in Tim Ryan. Did his Trumpism hurt Vance?  No. Can't compare him to DeWine because DeWine is a​ Ohio household name. And in Colorado, O’Dea tried to be the old Mitt Romney Republican, the anti-Trump, and ... got killed.

One way to look at the midterms is simply that the more solid the state’s election integrity, the better Republican candidates did. Colorado is the notorious test kitchen for fraud so Republicans got trounced. Florida is the test kitchen for election integrity and DeSantis won huge. We know​ which states are good and which are not. NY is good. Nevada/AZ are terrible. Ohio is generally recognized as really strong voting-wise compared to neighboring states like MI and PA and so Vance’s victory was easier. Why did Johnson win in WI ? Maybe because WI's elections are simply cleaner (this time especially) than MI & PA.

This & That

Fr Peter Totleben:

People often present us with the wrong choice in the Church. They suggest that we have to choose between a larger and more inclusive church which is flexible about its doctrinal and moral commitments, or a smaller and more rigid church which insists on those commitments.

That is not the actual choice that is on the table for us. The actual choice is between a smaller church which is convicted about its doctrinal and moral commitments, and an even tinier church which is ambivalent about these commitments.

The Church is going to get smaller. Our choice is between a smaller Church that has influence on account of its convictions, or a tiny and almost non-existent Church that may be better liked (or less disliked), but which has no real influence because no numbers or convictions.

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Watched some of Trump’s 2024 announcement.  He had built it up so much beforehand that it was disappointingly just a regular old announcement speech. Some had thought he might declare he was running as a third party candidate, others that he would swing for the fences on ’22 election fraud. But it was standard fare.  

A non-partisan British observer on Twitter said that he thinks Trump popularity is not what it was but that “ongoing economic, financial and geopolitical decline of the US might change that over the course of next 2 years.”

For the GOP, it’s the case where they can’t win with Trump and they can’t win without him. But I don’t know if that’s necessarily bad. The path to real victory (spiritual) is probably short-term/medium-term ruin. After the midterms most on the Right were saying something along the lines, “ok, well, it’s got to get a lot worse before it gets better.”  In a way it was clarifying. 

I have to laugh at how snookered the West is by China. One of the election software systems in the U.S. and Australia is Konnech, a firm with ties to the Chinese company (which means ties to Chinese government).  What’s funny/clueless is how Australia election software had problems on their Election Day due to covid lockdown in Wuhan. The money quote: “The lockdown led to Queensland Parliament Members asking—why Australian election software was being coded by Chinese coders?”

Uh, maybe because the Chinese are typically ten steps ahead of the oblivious West? 


Ultimately I hope Otto Von Bismarck is right that “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” 


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Why is June 21/22 considered “midsummer” centuries ago when it’s the first day of summer for us? 

A: “Historically, this day marks the midpoint of the growing season, halfway between planting and harvest.”

I suppose if you plant in mid February and harvest at end of October then that puts you at around 6/22 as midsummer.   

But we don’t have the long English growing season here in Ohio (theirs is 250 days while we're at 170 days). For tomato’s it’s closer to 120 days; I plant at end of May and harvest mostly end of August meaning my midsummer is around July 15. All-star game time! Which feels more midsummer by my lights than any other time.

Memories of the Clinton Administration

I was looking through my old running logs today.  I kept every run, race, weight workout on paper from 1978 through about 2014. Since then I've succumbed to the electronic. My heirs will wish I'd started sooner. 

The logs have proven far more interesting for the occasional side comment explaining why I didn't exercise (i.e. I was up late the night before on a date).  If I'd thought they'd be interesting in the future for the statistics instead of the relationships I would've been wrong. T

Some notices are cryptic. I mentioned going to lunch with “Curious” but finally remembered that is was a blonde named Georgi (i.e. "Curious George"). Facebook helpfully tells me she's living in northwest Ohio and has two teenage girls. Apparently divorced given the use of the maiden name and the different surname of the daughters. 

1993 was the “year of Chubby’s” (a bar in Newark) that I loved to frequent. The big midsummer event was Branson, MO which was a memorable vacation for that deep immersion in “the other”, the bluegrass, the rhinestone, the comic, the corny. A return to authenticity via country inauthenticity?  A lust for the clean living I ascribed to cowboys and country artists? It was somehow more authentic to see those theatre acts in Branson than the rock acts of Columbus. Maybe I thought they were humbling themselves by not being cool.  I was trying on new clothes, literally and figuratively, starting with cowboy boots.  God was surely preparing me during that year in which I'd meet my future wife. 

I was labeled “a dreamer” in school and wonder now if that goes with drink and old country music.  Chubby’s was my “thing” from the summer of ’91 through the summer of ’93.  I marvel now at the sense of time I had then, pre-marriage, pre-iPhone. It was nothing to drive a half-hour one way and spend 4-8 hours altering my consciousness.  That's one way to slow down I guess. Time stood still on those stools. I took in the Tiny Wellman band, watched “Commander Sue” (so called because she always sat alert in a front row stool) as well as the myriad of dancers who, along with the band, became a sort of movie set for me, like I was inside a movie.  Or maybe a dream...

Top 7 Reasons Trump is Still Likely '24 nominee

1. A great well of gratitude exists from GOP voters for whom Trump taught them to "grow a pair" and who unwittingly showed them the rot of the Deep State. 

2. It's in the American DNA to crave fairness and it's fair Trump get the term hindered and/or stolen by the spies despite his own sins because the people get to decide, not bureaucrats.

3.  DeSantis is charisma-free which matters because humans are not Spocks who are ruled by reason.(Russell Kirk said conservatives understand this.)

4. DeSantis hasn't stood up much on FBI/DOJ abuses or Jan 6 fed weirdness.

5. Election results (like midterms) don't matter to subset of GOP voters who would rather lose with someone interested in election integrity, FBI corruption, border, etc.. than win with a generic corporate Republican who will then own his seat for generations.(See Graham, Lindsey)

6.  Related to last reason, Dobbs decision gives GOP voters freedom to vote recklessly, not vote at all, or vote Democrat.

7.  America probably must be crucified before rising again, in the time-honored way of God shown by his Son. Christians have the luxury of not seeing bad news as "bad" news since God is in control.

Saw a tweet  yesterday that expresses how Trump's legal and reputational hits can help him:

The only people you can trust are the ones who stand to be annihilated with you. The ones that have everything to lose and only one path to salvation.

working class 🤝 Trump

Can't Beat Evil With Elections

If the GOP ekes out Senate control ultimately it's a pretty minor victory. The big tell of "Danger Will Robinson!" is that someone like Fetterman could get a Senate seat in the once proud state of PA. The way forward is a spiritual reawakening and it seems like it would almost be counterproductive for the GOP to win based on something like inflation or even crime instead of due to basic decency and morality. There was no wholesale nationwide spiritual conversion between 2020 and 2022 that we know of. 

That all assumes that the state elections are on the up-and-up which, as we know, is a giant leap. Part of the problem is it's hard to separate state differences in election apparatus from state differences in vote inclination.  Many times the purple states seem to have more trouble with fraud than blue or red. Cause or effect? 

Ohio is sandwiched between MI and KY.  KY voted 62% for Rand Paul. OH voted 53% for JD Vance. MI voted 44% for the GOP candidates opposing the winners.  So you lose about 10% every state to the north. In other words, the Bible Belt still matters. 

Tucker Carlson sees it mostly in terms of the way elections are run and the advantage of having the media as your Democrat advertising arm. He says this not to excuse Republicans saying it's a case of having to work much harder in spending money on alt media to get the message out and GOP legislatures fixing broken elections. 

So I could easily see a positive case for the country needing to go further downhill. At this point there’s probably no restoration without decimation. No resurrection without crucifixion. America probably needs to be crucified in order to rise again in the time-honored way of God, shown most explicitly through his Son.

Politics is downstream of religion, meaning that with ebbing faith it’s just unrealistic to have healthy politics. You can hope for it and work for it but you certainly shouldn’t expect it. To the extent any one political leader or party receives credit for solving our problems well, therein lies danger. Because then people would think politics, and not the Savior, is our savior.

Helpful television guide for schadenfreude aficionados

The Election Integralists Who Knew Too Much

Very curious story down in Texas. 

Obviously what follows is one side of the story but given how prolifically the FBI and media lie to us, True the Vote’s version seems highly more likely. What gives them even more credibility is the L.A. D.A. have arrested the perpetrator. But no good deed goes unpunished for True the Vote ...Dinesh D’Souza reports:

"True the Vote became aware that 2 million election workers had their private data including social security numbers/bank account numbers on a data base stored on Chinese servers. For fifteen months Catherine Englebrecht & Greg Philips worked with field agents in Texas on this operation and then one of their FBI informants told them that the FBI office in D.C. knows about this now and their turning this against you instead of Konnech (owner of Chinese servers).  He said they better go public with this information now so at least people will know about it.   

They outed Konnech and they were then approached by the L.A. D.A.’s office, who has contracts with Konnech, and they looked into and corroborated it, and arrested Eugene Yu.  So Konnech filed a civil suit against True the Vote accusing them of breaking into their server, who told them, who was their whistleblower. The judge said basically said, “I need to find out who was the individual who gave you the data about Konnech.” And Englebrecht and Philips told them the name. But then the judge went further and said he wanted to know the name of the FBI informant, but Englebrecht and Phillips said they would not say that guy’s name because that guy would become an immediate target, not only to be fired by the FBI (because we know how corrupt the D.C. operation of the FBI is going all the way to the top to Christopher Wray), but also potentially in personal danger. So they assured him they would protect his confidentiality and the judge had them put in jail.  Englebrecht and Philips had offered to the judge that they would tell the man’s name in confidence, in private session, so that he would know that they have a genuine informant, but the judge would not accept that."

The judge is Kenneth Hoyt and like much of our judiciary doesn’t want folks getting serious about election integrity. He’s in his mid 70s, African-American, appears to like the system as it is, and seems used to getting want he wants in court. Frank Gaffey calls him an agent of election interference. 

The lawfare fees are surreal; you can support True the Vote here: https://freepatriots.us . 

Imagining a Clinton-Bush Conversation

Mark Halperin has an ever interesting substack and in the latest he pretends to overhear a conversation between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush at a posh restaurant. I decided to try my hand at this Halperinian genre. 

WJC: The larger context is all over the world the natives are restless. The root problem is they know too much in too timely a way. Hell it took years after his death for JFK’s indiscretions to become public knowledge. The basic problem is the information speed is too fast for a democracy to function. Contra the WaPo, democracy thrives in darkness. Especially with election integrity where ignorance is bliss. 

GWB: Yeah the problem with elections is you can't prove it's legit since it's un-auditable. On the other hand, people trust computers with their banking so it's reasonably easy to trust them with voting. The answer is just to use the tools we have to tamp down dissent. Love our FBI but I wonder if they can scale up to the level necessary to keep the MAGAs down. We took a big hit with Twitter but hopefully they’ll be able to derail Musk, maybe on foreign policy risk grounds. It’s a cliche, but in an age of information we need to own the narrative. Put me down for “order over truth”. Or, failing that, if we're going to be judged in realtime then maybe our guys should go the other route and be more ethical given the transparency?

WJC: Hogwash. What the folks don’t realize is how good they got it compared to Europe let alone to the rest of the world. It would be worthwhile to explain that the price of the comforts they have - the 2-car garage, the easy access to fuel and food - is a political order that prioritizes order over the timely truth. Let them find out what's really going on after we’re dead and gone. Is it a conspiracy theory if we call everything a conspiracy theory?

GWB: Ha. Don’t know if you saw the latest Peggy Noonan column, but she reinforces this. She has that perfectly patronizing touch in saying “ahh.. the conspiracy theorists we shall always have with us, it’s in our DNA”. She's got that patrician streak, careful to be considered lace curtain and not shanty Irish. More importantly she implicitly attacked alternative media, which I sheepishly admit has been more right than wrong on many things, including on Covid, than the dominant media.

WJC: Yep the media has had its pants pulled down more often than me on Epstein’s plane!

GWB: Ouch.

WJC: Too soon?

GWB: Too gross and too soon. 

How the Chinese Got Into Our Election Software

So a fascinating saga involving the valiant org “True the Vote” who fight for election integrity via Rasmussen: 

The Konnech Election Systems Bombshell

On Monday Oct 3, 2022 the New York Times decides to launch a hit piece on the organization True the Vote, who they say falsely accused an American company (Konnech) of hosting the data of 2 million US election workers on a secret computer server in communist China.

Less that 24 hours later, the LA County DA announces the Michigan arrest of the CEO of that very same company, after an investigation, for storing LA County election worker data "on servers in the Peoples Republic of China."

The arrest of CEO Eugene Yu by the LA DA triggers October 4th reminders of prior month reporting that the FBI was concealing Chinese infiltration of U.S. election software. True the Vote had previously reported their discovery of this Konnech / Chinese server connection to the FBI way back in January 2021.

This April the FBI DC office finally gets the Konnech file from their field office and the DC office doesn't target Konnech, it targets True the Vote. Why? 

Meanwhile, a humiliated New York Times reporter files his follow-on article, amending to say that in fact election data was on servers in China, no doubt after screaming all day at the 'intelligence community sources' who set him and the paper up for such a swift propaganda catastrophe. 

On October 7th, Konnech CEO Eugene Yu's connection to China's National People's Congress and Chinese telecom giants was reported. And thus Konnech CEO Eugene Yu is caught lying about storing the personal data of 2M US election poll workers in China. Legacy media goes totally silent. China likely has had the access passwords to multiple US election systems and devices for years. 

What to do now?

Meanwhile the Wisconsin legislature, for one, officially found ESS voting systems online that were connected to a secret, hidden Wi/Fi access point at the Grand Hyatt hotel which was the location used by the City of Green Bay on election night 2020. 

The Konnech Chinese data hosting security issue was reported to the FBI by True the Vote in January 2021. The FBI ended up attacking True the Vote for identifying the issue which - here one month from midterms - is entirely unresolved and subject-embargoed by legacy media.

Cornered by the Konnech arrest, legacy media amps up their lie that the 2020 elections were the most secure in American history. They have no proof now that the Chinese government had no access to our 2020 election systems. Quite the opposite. 

So next Konnech drags True the Vote into court, and the L.A. D.A. had to confirm the China server. 

And the LA DA's warrant was published. A bombshell - https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23131926/yu-complaint-101322.pdf…"any employee for Chinese contractors working on PollChief software had “superadminisraion” privileges for all PollChief clients ... a “huge security issue.”"

The FBI knew this for years. 

This brought out new reporting by RedState:  Election Software Firm Used by LA County - and by Counties in Swing States - Gave 'Superadministrator' Privileges to Contractors in China...Along with an admission by the NY Times that a True the Vote tip from Greg Phillips sparked the LA DA investigation that ultimately led to Mr. Yu's arrest.

How painful for them was it to print that?

On October 15, reporter John Solomon mentioned something that the wire services omit, the findings detailed in the warrant by LA DA investigators that Chinese software technicians have "superadministrator privileges" to remotely access U.S. election system client data.

Later reporting showed another Konnech software specialty - overseas and military voting systems ... Which reminds us of a 2020 election overseas ballot anomaly in Arizona that we had covered previously in 2021. 

On Aug. 10, 2021, Los Angeles County’s election office uploaded a network diagram of its Election Management System (EMS) called “EMS Future State v15” to the county registrar’s website. A network diagram is a digital roadmap that identifies data flow within an organization.

"If Los Angeles county’s uploaded diagram is accurate, it demonstrates that Konnech’s PollChief software has a direct ‘data integration’ and ‘data exchange’ point with the county’s overall EMS software."

Reader Reminder: The last thing U.S. voters knew before the Konnech arrest was there was no evidence of any U.S. election data now under Chinese control.

LA DA investigators then called Konnech "a huge security issue & the largest data breach in United States history."

Update: U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt orders True the Vote leaders jailed in contempt of court in Texas for failing to divulge the name of a confidential FBI informant. Does this ever look bad for the FBI.

The Age of Blunder: Rob Long's Unified Theory

Listened to Rob Long on the GLOP podcast and he makes a pretty keen unified theory of why things are the way they are: 

“There was a period in the 20th century where there was great advancement, knowledge... We split the atom, flew jet planes, went to the moon, created the computer, etc...Concurrent with the great rise of knowledge was also this giant decline in religious faith and observance. Once you’ve decided we’ve come from apes...

On September 11, 2001, we entered the 'age of blunder' where very smart people who know things make colossal, colossal mistakes. It’s the Great Humbling. What was most humbling for America, Iraq or Vietnam? I don’t think Vietnam, which was a mistake, but a policy mistake that everyone knew going in. It was the Iraq War. We had a war based on satellite imagery which tells you everything you need to know, right, so we had to go in!  

Covid. Enormous blunder of science, investigation, and public health officials. Huge world-wide blunder. We locked people in their houses, we did all sorts of crazy stuff based on ‘science’ and ‘knowledge’.  

Vladimir Putin. The night before he invaded Ukraine he was thought of as a really smart guy: ‘I don’t like him, but he managed to to swing the 2016 election, etc....’ - all these things he didn’t do! - and then by the next morning, after the invasion, we have to wonder if he’s dumb.  He really thought when he asked how many tanks he had that he had that many... he really thought he had all the information he needed to go into Ukraine. 

All are huge mistakes of pride, arrogance, the feeling that you have all the details covered. And it’s the world, or God, coming back and saying, ‘No, you don’t understand. You know nothing. You know nothing.’  I hope we get out of this age soon but we’re in an age of enormously smart people making huge errors based on their own or their culture’s arrogance of how much you can know.  

Take political polls. The anger when the polls are wrong is so bizarrely neurotic: ‘I’m angry that I didn’t know the future. I’m angry that tomorrow is a question mark, and that really makes me mad because I want to know.’  I think that’s a new feeling and a new era we’ve entered.” 

I think that's spot on in part because the need to be in control, and to know the future, appears critical when you don't believe that God has control and knows the future.