A Short Iraq War Journal

I was looking over old journal entries the other day and read those of early 2003. Some of our current dysfunctions and lack of restraint can be explained by the trigger of triggers: the Bush decision to send a half-million troops to Iraq that year. 

A few months before, in November of 2002, I was on a tour of the Capitol building in Washington. 

Susan, our guide, was an aide for a Congresswoman from the Poughkeepsie region* of New York, and looked for all the world like a typical Midwesterner. Blonde, late 20’s, and ample.  And a hawk on Iraq: “Let’s bomb them and ask questions later” she memorably said. 
That was an early glimpse that Washington’s attitude was … not really in step with America. We see that to this day in Ukraine. 

In Feb 2003 I heard all the noise. Drowning drams of the daily pulp, war news, liberals, conservatives cross-talking on Crossfire like Manichaen caricatures: “plastic army men wholly good or evil.”

The funny thing is that the Manichaen turned out to be right. Who knew? I had thought good and evil ended with Jim Crow. Seems at advanced middle age I've just discovered that injustice exists in the good ol' US of A. There's good v evil here after all, which is another way of saying that Joe Biden is not Tip O'Neill. 

By March of 2003 I was worn down by the bastards, the coarse voices of work colleagues who seemed to hate Bush for the sport of hating.  I thought: "if Gen-X naked protestors and spoiled Hollywood actors are against the war, shouldn’t I be for it?  But stopped clocks are right twice daily and the knee-jerk response is usually wrong. Lately the war talk has been relentless at work, with the team fiercely anti-Bush.”

By April 4, 2003 I wrote that "the war looms like an elephant over my consciousness. Everything else seems cheap, and I have this prideful desire to get it right – to be on the right side, morally speaking.  My opinion matters not an iota but it has been given weight by the constant argumentation by colleagues, three of who think the U.S. is the most corrupt country since Roman empire.  Two others are conservative stalwarts.  It’s funny that such a thing as a war, which involves thousands of deaths, should be reduced to rude argument in our safe houses.” Score one for my colleagues. 

In January of ’04 I was on a cruise and had dinner with a blue collar Italian guy from the East Coast. Here was the prototypical Trump voter of 2016?  He was very much against the war and said he couldn’t stand Fox’s biased news coverage of the war but called Bill O’Reilly “brilliant”.  He was a hater of high taxes, telling us how bad it is in Taxachusettes.  Trump would seem to fit the anti-tax, anti-war of the blue collar guy but I’ll never know how he felt about Trump…

* - Live by the sword die by it: Sue Kelly was the Congresswoman at the time and a fervent war supporter who ended up losing to an anti-war Democrat in 2006. 

Ancient Rome Explains Modern America Perfectly

This was written a hundred years ago, by the brilliant political theorist Irving Babbitt, on the parallels of the fall of Rome with our own American decline:

The critical moment for Rome was the moment of triumph when leaders of the State no longer felt the restraining influence of dangerous rivals like Carthage….As a result of all this emancipation, ‘men’s desires,’ in Montesquieu’s phrase, ‘became immense.’  It has been usual to regard as the most significant symptom of this inordinateness the growth of luxury…A still graver symptom, however, was the appearance of leaders who were ever more and more ruthless in the pursuit either of personal advantage or that of some class or faction. The new spirit that was undermining the Roman constitution manifested itself less in acts of injustice and cruelty to vanquished people than in the rage of civil strife…leaders who sought to advance the material interests of some special group at the expense of the whole community...[The Romans] exercised to no serious degree their frein vital, or will to refrain.

Wow. A perfect explanation for our time. America no longer felt the restraining influence of a dangerous rival like the USSR. You could see this so clearly in George W. Bush's extremely aggressive foreign policy that alienated not just the world but divided the country bitterly. 

I remember thinking, back in 2003, that Bush's war in Iraq was so breathlessly bold that it crossed a rubicon. Technically maybe he had the right to go in based on the failing Hussein inspections, but it felt like something Ronald Reagan would never have done. Reagan pulled troops out of Lebanon after all. It was a shocking lack of restraint.

As a result of our defeat of the USSR, "men’s desires became immense".  Bush and Obama were ever more ruthless in the pursuit of a class or faction (in Bush’s case, the prioritization and enrichment of the military industry, in Obama’s, a prioritization of black grievance and enriching wealthy urban liberals.) 

You couldn’t find a less ethical group of leaders than our current crop, from Biden (head of a crime family enriching themselves) to the FBI/DOJ and other agencies who are at war (civil strife!) with much of America.

It always happens this way. The best thing to happen to the United States was also the worst: the dissolution of the Soviet empire. 

Political Centrists and the Demonic Spell

 Money quote from a Rod Dreher article quoting a ex-occultist who's now Christian: 

“Centrists (whether self-identified as liberals or conservatives) are often under a greater demonic spell than the extremists they love to feel superior to, as they are often the staunchest defenders of the power structure of the modern world, the most blind to its Satanic elements."

Centrists are killing us. Those of us on the far Right have huge flaws but are generally impotent. Those on the far Left are agents of the demonic. The centrists are the ones who, with the lofty self-confidence of being above the fray, are allowing evil to spread. 

Jody Bottum wrote this about sentiment and it rings with centrists if one substitutes "harsh rhetoric" for "sentiment:" 

"The distaste for sentimentality begins as a revolt against false feeling, and it finishes as a rebellion against all feeling. It starts as our refusal to be deceived by a coat of paint, and it ends as our refusal to use any paint at all. It opens as a wise man's ability to see fool's gold, and it concludes as a fool's inability to see real gold." 

**

Having a Catholic blog means being contractually obligated to talk Fr. Pavone.  I'm conflicted. Neither party looks completely in the right given the pettiness/arrogance of the bishops involved as well as the failure to obey by Pavone. 

The catch-22 is it’s hard to get the courage/boldness/willingness to take fire of a Fr. Pavone without the concomitant failure to humble himself before his bishop. But saints are rare. We see it in politics as well where Dems are the courageous party & GOP the timid party.

I believe that unless and until American bishops start getting arrested (which won't happen soon since as a group they are friendly with Democrat elites) then there won't be any particular urgency to get involved in politics.  But that's not dissimilar to many of us, including me, who were not quite as exercised over the "War on Terror" under Bush (that now has come to us) that we should've been. For good or ill, and I think ill, the American church seems content to be sheep before the evil, like the Jews in Nazi Germany. 

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Fr. John Corbett O.P. on cancel culture: 

There’s an idea that because my group was discriminated against then I get to redistribute the common good; I’m claiming that authority. That tells us that which people are in charge of the common good is not at all clear. The war over cancel culture is in reality an acknowledgment that on a very profound level our society is split, divided, and there is no moral uncontested center of authority. People are vying for status, sometimes as victims, that gives them the right to control over who gets what. Because it’s not recognized, generally, and certainly the solution is not agreed on I think we are as a society in deep trouble. 

Ostracism is a serious penalty in an interconnected society. When you claim the right to do that you are basically usurping an unofficial judicial system. It’s erecting a “shadow government”.  A contested sphere of moral authority where people are unofficially doing what they think the official government ought to do. Mob justice. That doesn’t mean there aren’t injustices that should be addressed in some way. I don’t know how to solve this problem, I just know it exists. 

14 Generations Between Events in Christian Era?

So I read the gospel reading the other day: “Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.”

The commentary mentions that there were 14 generations between each of the huge events in Israel’s history and that in Genesis a generation was considered 27 years. So that’s 378 years between big events. 

So like a noob I had to try to see if I could fit that into the Christian era. Is there 14 generations between huge events?  I got hopeful when I measured the first one at 410 AD, the Fall of Rome, which seemed potentially true. But then thought I should measure from Christ’s birth so I started at 0 A.D..  And then I thought well he was actually born between 4 and 6BC....And the New Testament generation is different length, so I could've done this exercise using that math...


Here are my stabs anyway with a large amount of play in the dates: 

372 A.D.

Roman emperor bans pagan worship, Christianity is made the official religion of the Empire. 

750A.D.

Charlemagne turned the state into a powerhouse of Europe. 

1128A.D.

Military defeat ultimately led to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 to Saladin’s Islamic forces. 

1517A.D.

Martin Luther 95 theses 

1884 A.D.

1875 Marx Lenin party in Germany started

1914 wwi

1870 papal infallibility

1871 Charles Darwin publishes on mans evolution

Conspiracy Theorists Tire of Always Winning

So now we know that “Sometimes The Paranoids Are Right, They Are After You” can be amended To “The Paranoids Are Always Right”. Conspiracy theorists are getting tired of always winning. 

The FDA admitted that the Pfizer vaccine causes blood clots, something whispered about for eons by the theorists and Twitter-banned M.D.s. 

And the fear of an FBI man in every closet poking around seems to be proven right by the sweeping use of digital surveillance on social media. It's both weird and scary that an FBI agent has likely seen one of my tweets.  I can picture a bleary-eyed agent reading tweets of a guy like me with twenty followers and say, “I trained at Quantico for this!?” 

But mind-control, or information-control, is the hot government game.  Who knew we’d look back fondly on the scandalous “$500 hammer” spent by the military?  It certainly beats being surveilled and spied on via our own tax dollars. Give me a $500 hammer any day. 

And Matt Taibbi's latest batch of releases shows our own Ohio Secretary of State’s media director was on the schedule with the dragon Twitter overlords. It was under “escalations” in an email to Dark Vader Baker (the ex-FBI Russia collusion aficionado). 

So obviously with all the new information we’ve gotten the past few years, from Russia collusion to the fact that the FBI is monitoring our Twitter posts, I have to revisit conspiracy theorists I'd long written off. In a way, Trump himself, being the aboriginal theorist given his "Obama was born in Kenya" suggestion, may not have been accurate but he was certainly in the right room. 

Another is Tore Maras, who ran for Ohio Secretary of State as an independent this cycle.  What makes her particularly interesting to me is that her sister is on the front lines of the info war and fully credentialed.  She's a professor and has given lectures at the State Dep't on cyber criminals. No lightweight. Of course it doesn't mean Tore is on the up-and-up but it suggests the potential of being ahead of the curve. 

One problem is that it’s so hard to score these "prophets”, to try to back-date them and see how right they back in the day. 

So I spent too much time the other day listening to Maras’s podcast from key dates: just before and after coronavirus hit, just before and after the 2020 election, and just before and after Jan 6 riot. 

And while I’m not done the early returns are it’s not clear cut. She was right about some things while others painfully short.  Way back in January of 2020, before the virus was really even in the U.S., she was saying that it was a bioweapon developed jointly by China and the U.S. that escaped. Most of that is indisputably true. But she also said that it could be cured with a chorine dioxide, although in fairness it seems it was a one-off in January of 2020. She also said that everyone would get it or a variant eventually which certainly has proven true and that it was spread by air transmission, sneezing or coughing, etc.. 

Except for the chlorine dioxide she was far more right than the mainstream media at the time. And to her credit she seemed to drop the treatment angle almost immediately. 

**

I think the framing of the '24 election shouldn't be Trump v Biden but Trump v. the Deep State. Which should be pretty easy choice since one is democratically elected and one is not, at least for people still interested in democracy and rule of law. 

We all ought prefer a child tied down by the iron chains of the three letter agencies and media compared to a China-enriched Biden empowered by a disgraceful media and deep state.  Power corrupts, so look at who holds the real power. It ain’t Trump, else he’d be potus right now.

**

To end with something far more positive in this Christmas season...Saw online a tweet from Bishop Flores:

Creation,

with its intricacies timed,

is like an unborn child,

surrounded and sustained

by the eternity of God.

It’s distant until you’re present to it;

then it moves to a hidden rhyme.

It wants to be; so it tries.

It wants to sing;

it hears a music

coming from the outside.

How Columbus Corporations Went Woke?

It’s a story of good intentions gone awry, or illustrative of the ironclad law that any organization not expressly rightwing will become leftwing. 

The innocuous start was via then Ohio Gov. Voinovich, circa 1999. He saw the good results of getting CEOs in Cleveland together to help solve problems that the city government were having trouble dealing with. So the infamous Les Wexner, later famously entwined with Jeffry Epstein, started the group Columbus Partnership. (We still don't know, and probably won't ever, to what extent Wexner knew of Epstein's activities.) 

Their mission, as originally intended, was to focus on economic issues rather than anything more controversial. Roads and bridges, economic vitality, etc. Every CEO had their own pet charities and they had to focus, per the instructor of the project a Ohio professor (who died around 2006). They knew at the time there would be a temptation to stray off mission. 

In the past CEOs might’ve had an instinctive rivalry or distrust, but not in the 21st century when profits often seem less important than the “common good”, often malignly defined. Then too, in a world of large corporations each with their own semi-monopoly, competition between CEOs is necessarily less. 

There was a growing awareness that if you wanted to effect change you needed to do it at the city level rather than on the feckless national level or even the bloated state level. Start local. Control the prosperous urban areas.

So around 2001 a small group of central Ohio CEOs met and formed the group that would morph into a group of some seventy CEOs that now focuses, it seems, more on forming more perfect ESG corporations and furthering the diversity/inclusion/equity/+ cult.  Their mission subtly changed from economic well-being to “economic and social well-being.” The twitter account at Columbus Partnership approved this: “Imagine thinking the amount of revenue the company generates = value to society.”  Danger, Will Robinson! There be monsters. Many don't see value to society in, say, mutalitating kids in the trans fad. 

Nationwide Insurance is a huge player in Central Ohio corporations and their former CEO, Steve Rasmussen, smelled a rat and was not so committed to Columbus Partnership. Their new CEO, a social justice warrior named Kirt Walker, has been enthusiastic and is now the co-chair.  Walker was so distraught by George Floyd’s death that he was inspired to declare a new holiday for employees on Juneteenth but was seemingly amended by saner heads to be used by any employee for any day of the year. So Floyd inadvertently gave employees an extra day off. Walker in 2021 also stripped CAP funding from GOP candidates who supported Trump.

How Tucker Got Red-Pilled

In an interview Tucker Carlson was asked when it was that he started to realize that the system had failed he said: 

“I think it was like how Hemingway described going broke: ’Slowly, then all at once.”  I wasn’t impressed by the level of the people in the system but what changed me was watching Trump in 2015.  I'd known him, not well, but for a long time. I thought he was kind of a buffoon, I still think that sometimes, but what changed my view wasn’t Trump, but the reaction to Trump among my neighbors. Trump would say something in his florid, orange way, like ‘Why are we funding NATO?’.  And that was the one that got me. I never questioned NATO, I grew up during the Cold War and I saw the need for it and my dad worked for the government. But in August of 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and we still had NATO in 2015?  What was the point? And I’d never thought of it in my life and Trump said it and I thought that was quite an interesting question. Why are we funding NATO. And my neighbors were like, “Shut up! He must be killed!” They were so hysterical about obvious and basically commonsense questions that that was the tell for me. Reasonable people working out of honorable motives ought be willing to explain themselves. 

And they couldn’t do that on any topic, like immigration policy. I’ve never been against immigrants but you should have control of your border. Trump was arguing for that. They couldn’t deal with any questions about the way things were then operating. And when I saw that, it completely exploded my view of the system. This system is a lot more fragile than I realized, it’s a lot less legitimate than I realized, and then just the whole four years of Trump and he’d say something truly insane like, ‘The intel agencies are spying on me’ and your like, ‘ok, they’re not spying on you. What, is the moon landing fake too?’ And then you’d find out a year later that the intel agencies were spying on him. But then everyone would be like, ‘well they had too!’.  So you’d be like, “What? First of all he was right. Second I don’t care who the president is, you can’t spy on the President because he works for you. That’s an attack on the system.”  

I would see stuff like that and we ultimately left the city. I really became convinced that the system was not going to be enduring. You can have a system with some lying in it, all systems do. We all lie if we’re pushed, that’s just who people are. I try not to be too judgmental about it. But you can’t have a system based on lying. That’s a foundation of sand. It will not continue much longer. And by system I mean our political system, our financial system, and foreign policy assumptions. They are not rooted in reality, not wise, no one can defend them in clear, non-hysterical language." 

The Constitution We Hardly Knew Ye (Requiescat in Pace)

Our natural thirst for knowledge gets us into trouble I think. First, it wants to strip mystery from everything including the things of God. There’s this thirst to know what God knows, rather than be limited to what God has offered to tell us. 

I have much thirst to know in order to judge, such as to know as much as I can about various government actors in order to judge who are the good guys and who are the bad. Curiosity killed the cat and I think in general it doesn’t do much for humans since it siphons off a lot of attention towards non-critical avenues. Detours. On the other hand, we love stories, we crave them. So the news is a variation on that. A story told in real-time. 

To the extent my interest in political subjects has been helpful it’s only been to help hammer the message into my skull that there’s no human help. Only God’s. And there’s no stable ground on which to walk, even in America. 

Some people are freaked out when they learn that solid objects like a table really aren’t solid. They just appear to be. They are actually composed of whirling electrons. Physics says mass is energy rather than “mass”. 

That’s an analogy to my understanding of American constitution and rule of law. I’d always considered it the stable foundation, a “mass” for the ground of our feet, protecting our liberties. Only it turns out the mass is really very unstable. There’s really just a bunch of whirling electrons (called elites) who decide what is ground and what is air.  They can, as it were, pull the rug out anytime they want. They own the scales of justice.

As Darren Beattie posted: "Unless your moron you understand that the Constitution, in every meaningful respect, has already been long terminated. Part of the GOP scam is to hold the dead letter of the dead document up to mesmerize the dumb, drooling cattle-keep them grazing on dead grass and diseased soil."

And Noor bin Laden: "Where are all the RINOs’ appalled gasps for the US citizens who are locked away in the DC gulag under pre-trial and horrible conditions? Muh Constitution doesn’t count then? What about the outrage over the FBI’s role in the Fedsurrection itself? Muh Constitution not relevant?"

In this “brave new world” where the media and gov’t lie routinely and often gratuitously, it’s tough to plan, financially and otherwise. It takes a lot more work to separate truth from fiction than before. But I guess the trick is to do so more in sorrow than anger. 

Immaculate Conception Day

Interesting take from Deacon Tom in his homily today. The “knowledge” that Adam acquired by eating the apple might be seen as the acquisition of judging and being prone to comparing: “good, better, best”. Adam’s nakedness and embarrassment was since he judged he was so far below God.  Deacon said we are called to serve and not judge. Challenging to put it mildly. 

It’s interesting to consider the angel Gabriel referred to Mary initially not by name - surely unprecedented? - but by a title. “Full of grace” is a rough translation. Maybe “the Plentitude of Grace”.  The Greek word is charitoō and is used only one other time, in the letter to the Ephesians where St Paul implies a comparison between us and Mary:

“Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blemish before him in love..to the praise of the glory of his grace, which he has highly favored (charitoō) us in the Beloved.”

Of course this is a translation of a translation of a translation since the angel presumably spoke in Aramaic for Mary’s sake even though it’s possible she knew some Greek.

The Greek for “Hail, full of grace” sounds mellifluous and more succinct: “Chairō, charitoō!’ 

Regardless, to be full of grace is in the vicinity of “immaculate conception” since to be without original or personal sin would imply the absolute fullness of grace. Jesus said not “I have resurrected” but “I am the Resurrection”. Similarly Mary didn’t say “I was immaculately conceived” but that “I am the immaculate conception” (per the apparition at Lourdes). 

A priest posted about it: 

“With these words she clearly stated that she is not only immaculately conceived, but is the Immaculate Conception. In the same way, a thing that is white is something other than whiteness itself, and a perfect thing is something other than perfection itself. When God spoke about Himself, He said to Moses, ‘I am Who am,’ that is, it belongs to My essence that I always have my being from Myself, without beginning. In contrast, the Immaculate Virgin has her beginning in God, is a creation, is a conception. Nevertheless she is the Immaculate Conception. She is, as St. Maximillian Kolbe put it, "the quasi-incarnation of the Holy Ghost." She and the Holy Ghost can both be properly called the Immaculate Conception:

'We can say likewise that she is the greatest, most excellent, purest Temple of the Holy Ghost. Mary herself corroborates this truth when she defines herself at Lourdes: “I am the Immaculate Conception” and thus assigns to herself the title that in the strict sense is an attribute of God (“I am...”) and is applied in particular to the Holy Ghost, who within the Trinity is the eternally perfect, “immaculate” conception of the Father and the Son.'

'If among creatures a bride takes the name of her husband by the fact that she belongs to him, unites herself with him, makes herself like unto him and together with him becomes the source of new life, how much more should the name of the Holy Spirit, "Immaculate Conception", be the name of her in whom He lives with a love which is fruitful in the entire supernatural economy?”

**

I also got curious about the about the derivation of the title “Stella Maris" since we named our dog after that title of Mary: 

“In the 5th century St. Jerome translated Mary’s Hebrew name Miryam, which means ‘drop of the sea’ into the Latin ‘Stilla Maris’. Either due to a peasant dialect or a transcription error, Stilla became Stella and Mary went from a drop in the ocean to the star of the sea. This speaks highly to God’s power in exalting the humble! The Church traditionally celebrates the feast of Mary Stella Maris or Mary, Star of the Sea, on September 27."

How Do You Solve a Problem like a Gov't Warring Against Its Own Citizens

I keep waiting for my shock and awe over the government/media corruption to wear off but it seems to be taking me awhile. Patience grasshopper. The shock of 2018-era, when it became clear that Trump was railroaded by the FBI, has now given way to the reeling fresh shocks of the Feds planting pipe bombs on 1/6, the deep state not only ignoring Hunter’s laptop but actively suppressing speech about it, and a stolen midterm in Arizona. 

It’s not so much aftershock as the sudden undermining of my naive belief that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”.  The sunlight hasn’t prevented an ounce of new corruption.  The Biden administration has doubled-down.  I suppose it often plays out this way in human affairs; for sure since the death of shame in the Bill Clinton era.  At this point, it's probably simply too many crooked elites have too much to lose. 

What’s surprising is that the Jan 6 riot has put a damper not only on conservative protests but liberal ones as well.  Or at least there was no “2020 summer of rage” after Dobb’s decision. Which is good from a societal perspective if not a right-to-assemble one. 

I'm amused at how screwed the Republican Party is. I think their issue is that I (and many others) have left the GOP in every sense but party registration. 

Tom Edsall posed a hypothetical question recently, asking how we got to the point where Trump was even a viable candidate. He is incredulous that the "rails went off".  I'll help him out. 

We got here because Obama weaponized the police state against conservatives. From the IRS to woke military to Russia hoax and FBI  — all that work of his admin is bearing its poisonous fruit.

It’s just that simple. You simply can’t use the FBI, DOJ, Homeland Security in that role without supersonic repercussions. (And kudos to the Founders who warned against a national police force!) 

Americans can only accept unfairness up to a point and it was bad enough having the media industrial complex against us but the spy agencies and justice is a bridge too far. Always will be.

Fortunately for the Dems, Americans have done little in response to such tyranny, even such as exercise our first amendment right to peacefully assemble post-J6. 

So I expect 4 more yrs of Biden or whoever runs as a D. And I’m not worried about it because all earthly empires fall and it’s certainly appropriate in our case given the level of corruption at the highest levels. It may be His will, especially given how Biden had the chance to reverse field but instead amped up the deep state.

In short — the question that Mark Halperin and others pose should not be how to bring Trump voters back into the American fold, it’s how to stop our gov’t from warring against/spying on/hating its own citizens.

We didn’t start the fire … it was always burning...

Politics, Poppins, and the Gal at Mass

Reading a book I am literally having trouble putting down. “American Injustice” by John Paul Mac Issac, the fellow who Hunter Biden had given his laptop off for repairs.  Almost done in two sittings. 

Part spy novel, part love story, part corruption expose, the book is taut and well-written. I was surprised to learn how strenuously he and his family had been in trying to get the FBI or GOP politicians or the press interested.  It’s really how the TV shows present it as far as how difficult it is for an average citizen to get damning material to even sympathetic audiences let alone our corrupt Bureau. I like that he names names, like Brett Baer and Jim Jordan, who never got back to him. In fairness, they surely get a million whistleblowers a day. Hard to find the signal in the noise. 

Issac was really cagey with help from his military father and without their efforts the laptop wouldn't have come to light (which helped bring media corruption to light). In fact, John Paul is not only more of a journalist than most credentialed journalists but an American hero. 

**

Interesting view of Mary Poppins from a Tim Pool podcast: 

“In 'Mary Poppins' the dad, Mr. Banks, is vilified but actually is the only virtuous character in the whole thing. He’s talking about how discipline, order, and the essential English virtue of restraint are the basis of an orderly civilization. Those are the habits we should aspire to. But he’s got this pampered, prideful, mess of a wife who can’t be bothered to be a mother and is churning through nannies. There’s this witch who descends from the sky and gives the kids psychedelic drugs I guess, teaching them nonsense words. She wears the thin veneer of 'rules and manners' but really she teaches chaos. You don’t feed pigeons in London, we call them 'rats with wings'. And in Feed the Birds she has the audacity to claim knowledge of what the saints think about these airborne rodents pooping on cathedrals and damaging the architecture. Everything is about undermining or overturning the natural order of things. Very subversive movie about the triumph of witchcraft over virtue. Mary Poppins makes a mockery of the business of tidying the room by using witchcraft so there’s no effort expended -- so the children don’t learn the lesson that success requires effort.”

**

It's easy to disparage Twitter as being a big nothing, not the real world, and not influential. That's been the take of Jonah Goldberg for a long time. But given the obsession of the Left, the US government, and a billionaire who overpaid for it at great personal reputational and financial cost...one suspects (following swarm expert John Robb) that it's somehow a linchpin of freedom of speech.  

**

Went to daily Mass and surprised that the the young woman with kids who comes every day spoke up during the petitions. I've never heard her offer one before. She prayed that child sex traffickers be held to account and the victims healed.  She’s a fellow Q-anon’r lol! Love it, may her tribe increase.  I do need to offer during one of these masses prayers for “all political prisoners in this country and elsewhere” - which is a little less nakedly political than “for all the Jan6rs" even though keeping religion and politics separate is likely most of the cause of our current troubles. Maybe “for Brittney Griner in Russia and the Jan 6 prisoners in this country”would be more ecumenical. 

I have to admit that being a conservative and not having to cringe about it or apologize for it is kind of nice.  Call it the post-Trump effect. Civilizational self-confidence, or at least political self-confidence. Of course the danger is self-righteousness, a Manichaeist world view, and a failure to give the opponent the benefit of the doubt. But sometimes the Manichaeists are right and often the opponent doesn't merit the benefit of the doubt. As for self-righteousness, it's a danger for even (especially?) centrists or moderate Republicans because the tendency is to think you are the voice of reason and probity, not like the "riffraff" MTG or AOC. 

**

So it looks like Trump got played by Kanye West, who brought along an anti-semite white supremacist in a meeting with Trump and of course the media is all a gaga, shocked and appalled and thinking this is the end of Trump.

The funny thing is Obama met with a black supremacist anti-semite by the name of Louis Farrakhan and no one said a peep. Liberals haven't yet got the message that conservatives are post-double-standard.  Anything that doesn’t kill Trump just makes him stronger. And nothing has killed him yet.  (And a bone for Bone: Bad poetry, like Trump, ain't kilt no one yet.) 

Even Megyn Kelly is a free agent now and able to tell the truth. In a recent appearance she talked about how astonishing it is that the FBI not only knew about Jan 6 in advance but had been involved in the planning via confidential human sources. 

The journalists worth following are the ones cancelled, be they Matt Taibbi, Megyn Kelly, Lara Logan, Sheryl Attkisson.  All trained as quality journalists in juggernaut platforms (FOX, CBS, NBC) but now "outside the system". I think that they offer something no one else can - a voice once within the system, knows how the game is played, but now is outside the system and willing to whistleblow.  Tucker Carlson is the prime example of this too, a serious print journalist at one point who is now the key player outside the system. 

Ye was going in the right direction - away from the Kardashian lifestyle - but then moved to the other extreme, that is to the virus particularly susceptible for rightwing folks, anti-semitism.  He was trending in the right direction but then he got E. Michael Jones’d. Ye’s latest was a semi-defense of Hitler. I haven’t seen him giving the same defense around Biden but then Biden might have fewer successes in that he hasn’t made the trains run on time. 

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A startling Glenn Beck admission that he didn’t get REM sleep for ten years (not a helpful admission if people already call you crazy) but after moving out of New York he did find REM and one dream in particular happened twice: that of him being taken up with three others to see some man in charge. The three others were taken away and shot but he was to remain while they presumably planned to torture him. A Christian minister later told him the dream was NOT to be taken lightly despite Beck not telling him of the dream in advance. 


Beck went on to say that we need to exercise the muscle of obeying God quickly and speedily because time is short and we’re living in a different time now. It had very much the Lott’s wife vibe to it and certainly is in tune with the readings we’ve had at mass the last month or so: keep alert! And is certainly in vibe with our current Moloch era. 

The muscle he is referring to is more easily exercised if we have fear of the Lord (love casts out fear, but fear casts out carelessness and apathy - which is no small thing!). I heard a homily the other day that fear of the Lord is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit given at Confirmation and that they are permanent gifts. Which is reassuring and hopeful given what we face.