Eric Metaxas and Me

One of the reasons I like Eric Metaxas is I can relate so well to his recent discovery that injustice exists in America. We’re about the same age and he, like I, had assumed the “bad old days” were in the rear view. We lived in a sort of blissful ignorance in thinking that the devil had gone underground in the USA, stymied by the three branches of government, civil rights legislation, the Church commission, the rule of law, equal protection, the right to speedy trial, etc... The capper was the election of a black president. 

We were lulled by these comforts, seeing that a new age was upon us in which authority (post-Nixon) wasn’t abused, that people respected those of another race or creed, and that the Feds were there to protect and serve.  With Vietnam and the draft ended, prejudice overcome, and Hoover dead, it seemed an idyllic age to be born into. All the big problems in society were now on the family level: divorce, out-of-wedlock births, welfare queens, decline of religious faith, etc...But those issues seemed confined to an individual level to some extent. One could somehow imagine that these were unfortunate aspects of human freedom but as long as we still had freedom on a national level they could be overcome locally.  

But, alas, something rotteth in Albuquerque. And in San Fran to Atlanta. The days of J. Edgar Hoover are back but with the updated mandate to try to squelch American free speech, set up a honeypot on January 6, bark at mothers protesting at school board meetings, and try to derail a validly elected president. And that’s just what we know about.


So we find to our chagrin that our fabled Founder’s governmental setup was no match for el Beelzebub. He inspired bureaus upon bureaus, enemies of freedom that he and they are, set up an unelected fourth branch of government and so forth. But then the Founders themselves warned us that their system was contingent on a good and moral populace, saying, I suppose, that it would eventually fail. The human timber cannot stand that sort of stress. 

Naomi Wolf: Prophet?

I’ve become impressed with leftist Naomi Wolf. She’s a rare breed, a lefty who still cares about civll liberties; she had an intuition back in 2007 that now seems downright prophetic. She wrote a book contra the Bush administration that at the time seemed a huge stretch but events have caught up to her predictions.  

I recall back around 2000 being an advisor to then candidate Al Gore for which no one should hold her accountable given that Gore surely would've been a better president than the alternative. 

Here was one long-time-ago Amazon reviewer of her book: 

According to Naomi Wolf, this administration does not have any regards for the Geneva Convention on war prisoners. Prisoners are routinely tortured and ill-treated by the US military. Sometimes, prisoners are flown out of US territory where torture laws are inexistent.

I was quite taken aback by how many terms used by fascists states have been repeated by this administration.

The following are the ten points that make up a fascist state:

--Invoke an external and internal threat or enemy, such as a political party (e.g. communist party etc.) or a religious group (in Germany it was the Jews. Today it is the Muslims).

---Establish secret prisons, such as Guantanamo and other US prisons located abroad. Prisons located outside of US territories do not fall under US laws, and thus torture can be freely exercised.

--Develop a paramilitary force. According to Wolf, the US has today the largest and most powerful mercenary army in the world, and large corporations with deep pockets back it. This mercenary army does not fall under the rules, laws, or regulations of the US military forces. They can basically commit war crimes without ever being charged! According to Wolf, dismantling such an army will be near to impossible. We'll have to see what the next US president will do about this mercenary army.

--Spy on the citizens. New bills passed by the Bush administration allow Big Brother to listen to phone conversations and read emails.

--Infiltrate citizens' groups.

--Arbitrarily detain and release citizens to instill fear.

--Target key individuals, such as politicians, scientists, and journalists.

--Control and censor the press (note: if this was really the case, why was this book allowed to be published?).

--Criticism and dissent become treason.

--Change the rule of law (changing the constitution and the bill of rights).

Pretty much speaks for itself... 

Good Tweets Found

Local priest responded to another priest on Twitter who had asked this question: “What's the Catholic teaching that you think Catholics who are in the pews on an average Sunday misunderstand?”  He said:

With respect to what raises the most overtly expressed questions and objections, it's LGBT issues, which we really do have to come up with a way of talking about that our contemporaries can process. With respect to what people don't even know to ask questions about: God's mercy.

It seems like when Catholics address LGBT issues it's either unqualified support, strategic ambiguity about what to believe, or nasty tropes that really are unjust and homophobic.

And when we talk about grace and mercy, everyone is at least a semi-pelagian, if not a full and outright pelagian, but they don't even know enough to know that they are, and hence to raise a question or objection about it.

On the LBGT issues, my own opinion starts where I think all discussions about morality should start: pursuing the good is more basic to morality than is avoiding evil.  Most people think that morality is figuring out all the things that you are not allowed to do, trying to avoid all those things, and if you have any energy left over, maybe trying to do a couple of good things too. For all the rest of life, you are at liberty to do what you want. 

But that’s wrong. 

That means, first of all, instead of trying to be anti-LGBT, we should articulate how the classical view of marriage, family, and sexuality is a part of the good life. (And, fortunately, we get a major assist from the social sciences on this!) Far too much rhetoric is wasted on opposing LGBT stuff out of pure cultural ressentiment, rather than articulating a vision for the good life.

Another side of this has to do with covering the role that healthy (chaste, Platonic) friendships play in people's lives, and emphasizing that these can be emotionally rich without being romantic and genital. Being part of a large extended family also helps to increase a person's social supports by "thickening" their social network.

Also, the church could do better with making a point to speak out against unjust discrimination and violence done against LGBT people, especially given her historic perception as being on the side (or at least silent) on these matters.

Finally, the Church is going to have to be honest about what a lifelong call to chastity really entails, and how this can be lived in a full and life-affirming way. (Without pretending that it isn't also a cross).

But, in the Catholic Church, we do have examples of how committed, lifelong celibacy and continence can lead to a rich and meaningful life, full of emotionally rich and meaningful relationships -- the priesthood and religious life.

So, another vector in our pastoral response actually has to be priesthood and religious life lived out well. If these were better lived out, we would be uniquely positioned to talk about how to live a good life with celibacy and perfect and perpetual continence.

**

Another good post on Twitter: 

“Today my 4-year-old asked ‘are dead things still real?’ and I’m going to think about it once a week for the rest of my life.

She was asking about both her dead dog and great-grandfather and I said that everything comes from God and when it dies it returns to God to exist in his love so even if we can’t see or talk to them anymore our love still gets to them and their love still gets to us.

I don’t talk about souls to my kids because “the soul” is not some immortal invisible organ that we “have,” we aren’t a ghost that lives in a zombie. The soul is the form of the body, it’s the way a thing is alive, how God thinks of and loves it.

I said that when things die they seem to lose their continuity and become formless but everything good continues to exist in the love of God and because God is outside of time nothing can ever happen to change that.

Anyway it’s pretty cool how I can just decide that my kids will be Christian Neoplatonists and no one can stop me.

This is also a good way to explain dementia to kids, e.g. your grandmother may have forgotten everything but she and you and all of us continue to exist in the loving memories of God.)

French Intellectual Emmanuel Todd on Why the Third World War Has Started

This from Arnaud Bertrand is pretty interesting, quoting at length Emmanuel Todd: 

Emmanuel Todd, one of the greatest French intellectuals today, claims that the "Third World War has started."

He says "it's obvious that the conflict, started as a limited territorial war and escalating to a global economic confrontation, between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war."

He believes that "Putin made a big mistake early on, which is [that] on the eve of the war [everyone saw Ukraine] not as a fledgling democracy, but as a society in decay and a “failed state” in the making. [...] I think the Kremlin's calculation was that this decaying society would crumble at the first shock. But what we have discovered, on the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of balance, and even a horizon, a hope."

He says he agrees with Mearsheimer's analysis of the conflict: "Mearsheimer tells us that Ukraine, whose army had been overtaken by NATO soldiers (American, British and Polish) since at least 2014, was therefore a de facto member of the NATO, and that the Russians had announced that they would never tolerate Ukraine in NATO. From their point of view, the Russians are therefore in a war that is defensive and preventive. Mearsheimer added that we would have no reason to rejoice in the eventual difficulties of the Russians because since this is an existential question for them, the harder it would be, the harder they would strike. The analysis seems to hold true."

He however has some criticism for Mearsheimer: 

"Mearsheimer, like a good American, overestimates his country. He considers that, if for the Russians the war in Ukraine is existential, for the Americans it is basically only one 'game' of power among others. After Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, what's one more debacle? The basic axiom of American geopolitics is: 'We can do whatever we want because we are sheltered, far away, between two oceans, nothing will ever happen to us'. Nothing would be existential for America.

Insufficient analysis, which today leads Biden to proceed mindlessly. America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system towards the precipice. No one had expected that the Russian economy would hold up against the 'economic power’ of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it.

If the Russian economy resisted the sanctions indefinitely and managed to exhaust the European economy, while it itself remained, backed by China, then American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse, and with them the possibility for United States to fund their huge trade deficit for nothing. This war has therefore become existential for the United States. No more than Russia, they cannot withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go. This is why we are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other."

He firmly believes the US is in decline but sees it as bad news for the autonomy of vassal states:

"I have just read a book by S. Jaishankar, Indian Minister of Foreign Affairs (The India Way), published just before the war, who sees American weakness, who knows that the confrontation between China and the US will have no winner but will give space to a country like India, and to many others. I add: but not to Europeans. Everywhere we see the weakening of the US, but not in Europe and Japan because one of the effects of the retraction of the imperial system is that the United States strengthens its hold on its initial protectorates. As the American system shrinks, it weighs ever more heavily on the local elites of the protectorates (and I include all of Europe here). The first to lose all national autonomy will be (or already are) the English and the Australians. The Internet has produced human interaction with the US in the Anglosphere of such intensity that its academic, media and artistic elites are, so to speak, annexed. On the European continent we are somewhat protected by our national languages, but the fall in our autonomy is considerable, and rapid. Let's remember the Iraq war, when Chirac, Schröder and Putin held joint anti-war press conferences."

He underlines the importance of skills and education: "The US is now twice as populated as Russia (2.2 times in student age groups). But in the US only 7% are studying engineering, while in Russia it is 25%. Which means that with 2.2 times fewer people studying, Russia trains 30% more engineers. The US fills the gap with foreign students, but they're mainly Indians and even more Chinese. This is not safe and is already decreasing. It is a dilemma of the American economy: it can only face competition from China by importing skilled Chinese labor."

On the ideological and cultural aspects of the war: "When we see the Russian Duma pass even more repressive legislation on 'LGBT propaganda', we feel superior. I can feel that as an ordinary Westerner. But from a geopolitical point of view, if we think in terms of soft power, it is a mistake. On 75% of the planet, the kinship organization was patrilineal and one can sense a strong understanding of Russian attitudes. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a reassuring moral conservatism."

He continues: "The USSR had a certain form of soft power [but] communism basically horrified the whole Muslim world by its atheism and inspired nothing particular in India, outside of West Bengal and Kerala. However, today, Russia which repositioned itself as the archetype of the great power, not only anti-colonialist, but also patrilineal and conservative of traditional mores, can seduce much further. [For instance] it's obvious that Putin's Russia, having become morally conservative, has become sympathetic to the Saudis who I'm sure have a bit of a hard time with American debates over access for transgender women in the ladies' room.

Western media are tragically funny, they keep saying, 'Russia is isolated, Russia is isolated'. But when we look at the votes at the UN, we see that 75% of the world does not follow the West, which then seems very small.

With an anthropologist reading of this [divide between the West and the rest] we find that countries in the West often have a nuclear family structure with bilateral kinship systems, that is to say where male and female kinship are equivalent in the definition of the social status of the child. [Within the rest], with the bulk of the Afro-Euro-Asian mass, we find community and patrilineal family organizations. We then see that this conflict, described by our media as a conflict of political values, is at a deeper level a conflict of anthropological values. It is this unconscious aspect of the divide and this depth that make the confrontation dangerous."

There you go. Is he right on everything? I don't know, but Emmanuel Todd is certainly always a very singular and interesting thinker, with a vastly different analysis from the depressingly predictable bad takes that usually dominate French media.

It's Too Easy to Fall into the Drug of Reality

So I read about the last years of Pope Benedict via Georg Ganswein excerpt. I wonder if he didn’t have a bout with depression before his resignation. That it affected his prayer was probably a sign to him to resign. What does it profit a man to stay in his job and be “active” while losing his soul?  He would collapse with hands in his face at prayer and Ganswein that this was not typical for him.

Benedict liked retirement as much as many do. His health improved with the lack of stress and restful monastic atmosphere.  He was certainly a bad fit, personality-wise, for the papacy. Let alone a Vatican with knives out. 

**

It’s pretty easy to just fall into the drug of unreality, meaning reality. Reality is one of the most unreal things of late given how we’ve witnessed raw history in real-time. On the one hand it’s a privilege to live in such dramatic and eventful time. For history lovers like me this is a golden age since you’re marinated  in real-time history. It’s like the (typically) rather mundane present is suddenly a kaleidoscope of meaning. It's sort of like bankruptcy: “it happens gradually, then suddenly”.  Our nation declined gradually, almost imperceptibly from 1988-2003, and then with a bit more pace from 2004-2016, and since 2016 it’s sort of been one huge crushing revelation after another, as if we’re all living in this dystopian novel.

Yesterday we learned that Biden had classified documents in his garage and somehow this rises to the level of a special prosecutor sicced on him.  As if anyone cares whether Trump and Biden had any “secret” documents hidden away given that one of our congressman slept with a Chinese spy and another Democrat senator had a spy as her top advisor. Chinese leaders are laughing at the quaint notion of American “classified” documents since they’ve already bought and paid for them and read them years ago. 

More interesting is how the Dems have discovered this new superpower, the deep state, and maybe are using it to exnay Biden. Throw him out before ’24 race.  Ultimately I do miss the old "mundane present”.  

**

The Australian cardinal, Cardinal Pell, died last week suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack. He was a giant in the Church and on the frontlines of fighting financial corruption in the Vatican, was imprisoned for almost 2 years on a false charge and thus an early preview of the coming persecution of Catholic bishops. 

I went over some of my highlights in his prison diary and here are a few:

My daily meditation on the Book of Revelation has continued, a disconcerting tale of woe punctuated by beautiful mystical moments such as the great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people. 

What might we make of all this? This book is part of the revealed word of God, so it cannot be set aside, easily dismissed, as we are obliged to wrestle with the text and understand what we can. Two preliminary points can be made. The supernatural is an essential part of the Christian message, and when Catholicism is reduced to an agnostic service organization, the tradition is betrayed, converts disappear, and the exodus quickens. “When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Lk 18:8) are the most sobering lines in the New Testament. Christ spoke of a rich life after death, beautiful or terrible, quite beyond our limited intellectual horizons, and the Book of Revelation starts us on this imaginative journey. Heaven will be different from a well-earned holiday over the Christmas break or even a special long trip to strange parts as we commence our retirement.                

A second point from the Apocalypse is that life is a struggle between good and evil that no one can avoid.

The “culture wars” of the English-speaking peoples, which we are losing, are not a recent invention. The Apocalypse was written nearly 1,900 years before the invention of the contraceptive pill. Most of us want a quiet life, some of us don’t manage to achieve it, but everyone has to choose one side, not the other. Struggle is necessary.

A few have quoted Cardinal Francis George, the late and great archbishop of Chicago, who predicted three generations of worsening trouble for bishops before a restoration. In defending his dire predictions to me, he noted that most commentators ignored his fourth-stage rebound, the return to better times aided by Christian teaching.                

**

Unfortunately, President Trump is a bit of a barbarian, but in some important ways he is “our” (Christian) barbarian. His two appointments already to the US Supreme Court will slow down the secularist advance, because the court there has immense power to shape society, much more than the Australian High Court possesses.          

**

The mother of a good young priest wrote me a beautiful letter quoting G. K. Chesterton, the English Catholic writer, brilliant, quirky, and provocative, whom I have quoted a number of times over the years: “We who drink the blood of God go gaily in the dark.” I am not completely in the dark, and I am not sure how many do manage to go gaily in such a situation. But the phrase certainly made me stop and ponder.

Elizabeth Anscombe, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, who was lecturing at Oxford when I was a student there, became a Catholic after reading Chesterton's Fr Brown stories. She was probably the most formidable intellect I have ever encountered, and we Christian youngsters at Oxford, interested in the world of ideas, walked taller and stronger as a result of her courage and brilliance.       

**

Spent some hours opening and reading the latest batches of letters. As always, they provided plenty of food for reflection. For the third time, a letter included a message about me from Our Lady to Irish visionary Christina Gallagher (or so it claimed), where Our Lady pronounced that “the reason the power of darkness overshadowed him (me) with false accusations” was the work I had been doing to correct financial wrongdoing and sexual misbehaviour in the Vatican. All the major agents for financial reform at the Vatican were attacked, especially in the press, and a number of these senior figures in Rome feel my Australian problems are connected there. We have no proof of such a connection, although I don’t discount the possibility, but Our Lady must know more than I do if the locution is genuine. A bishop should be respectful of such locutions and apparitions, but deeply sceptical, because one of the bishop’s special roles is to test the charisms, being slow to give the seal of approval.

**

The Australian economy rides on the back of our mines, but our leaders have avoided recession for twenty-eight years, and this was not inevitable. Very few Australian politicians become rich from their time in Parliament, and they don’t fully deserve their low ranking with the public. Our main challenges are elsewhere, connected with the decline of Christian influence...it is a fact that social capital as a result is eroding. This can be quantified. Schoolteachers with some decades of experience testify to this. We share this decline with much of the Western world, but that is no consolation.

 Major changes in social values often have unforeseen consequences. Democracies need an accepted core of common assumptions or traditions, because the principle of diversity is insufficient by itself and needs to be buttressed by a commitment to civil discourse, human rights, and freedom of speech. Some, but too many, are prepared to close down discussion, deny freedom of speech, because particular ideas are offensive to them.

**

From a 100-year old novel, giving good advice that I generally, alas, don’t take:

“I have not yet looked at the newspaper. Generally I leave it till I come back tired from my walk; it amuses me then to see what the noisy world is doing, what new self- torments men have discovered, what new forms of vain toil, what new occasions of peril and of strife. . . . I grudge to give the first freshness of the morning mind to things so sad and foolish.”

That’s the protagonist character Henry Ryecroft, describing one of his mornings after he received a small annuity, retired early, and lived his remaining days in simplicity: walks, gardening, and reading.

Pope Benedict Thoughts

I first encountered then Cardinal Ratzinger not through his own writings but a book-length interview. It was a highlighting feast and I copied a half-dozen quotes (along with some from Ratzinger books I subsequently read) into a little text file which I  sent along to my 20-year old stepson who was, at the time, a seeker but now is in RCIA, praise God. The quotes I sent:

"The current era of relativism grows out of various roots. For one thing, it seems to modern man undemocratic, intolerant and also incompatible with the scientist's necessary skeptiscism to say that we have the truth and something else is not the truth, or only fragmentary truth.  God must be unnameable.  Accordingly, everything religious is just a matter of reflections, copies, refractions.  Accordingly, there can't be one true religion either.  In this context, Christ is, to be sure, a great, towering figure, but we have, as it were, to bring him back down to size, in the awareness of him has appeared in others too."

"The modern worldview takes a very dogmatic posture and excludes interventions of God in the world, such as miracles and revelation.  Man can indeed have religion, but it must lie in the subjective sphere and can therefore have no objective dogmatic contents that are binding on all; in this view, dogma in general seems to contradict man's reason.  The Church finds herself in this headwind of history.  Nevertheless, the one-sidedness of this position naturally emerges, for a religion that is reduced to the purely subjective no longer has any power to form; it is then only the subject affirming himself.   A naked rationality reduced to the natural sciences cannot answer the real questions like where do we come from, what am I, what must I do to live properly."

"In today's whirl of instant bliss, religion, too, is socially respectable only as a dream of happiness without tears, as a mystical enchantment of the soul.  Perhaps the Church comes under heavier fire because she talks about sin and suffering and rectitude of life....Just one curious example - when it comes to the state, as soon as crimes begin to multiply and society feels its safety threatened, there is an immediate demand for tougher laws.  In relation to the Church, whose laws are moral in nature, the exact opposite happens - there is a demand for further relaxation."

"Hobbes said that a state must have religion, and there are especially two kinds of citizens that a state can't afford to have: first, atheists and second, papists who are subjects of a foreign potentate."

"There is an ideology that fundamentally traces all existing institutions back to power politics.  And this ideology corrupts humanity and also destroys the Church.   Here is a concrete example: If I see the Church only under the aspect of power, then it follows that everyone who doesn't hold an office is oppressed.  And then the question of, for example, women's ordination, as an issue of power, becomes imperative.   I think this ideology produces a totally false point of view, as if power were the only category for explaining the world and the communion present in it.  If belonging to the Church has any meaning at all, then the meaning can only be that it gives us eternal life.  We are not in the Church in order to exercise power as if in some kind of association.

"We now crusade with an understandable and legitimate passion against the pollution of the environment, whereas man's self-pollution of his soul continues to be treated as one of the rights of his freedom...As long as we retain this caricature of freedom, namely, of the freedom of inner spiritual self-destruction, its outward effects will continue unchanged.  Man too is essentially a creature and has a creaturely order.  He can't arbitrarily make anything he wants out of himself.  He must recogonize there is a spiritual ecology too." 

**

In April of 2005 I was heady with idealism: 

Cardinal Ratzinger is Pope now.  What an April to remember.  Heard the totemic words “Habemus Papam”, a phrase we haven’t heard in over twenty-five years, a third of the average life span. This man who is now pope has some measure of control over me, has some responsibility for me,  and is protecting my interests. Hearing the grand words “Habemus Papam” recalls the universality of the Church in a vivid way.  Germans, Poles, Italians, Americans, bonded beyond blood to something higher and infinitely greater.

**

In February 2013 I was vacationing in Fort Lauderdale when I heard the news: 

Hey, well, now that was surprising. Not every day do you read the Pope is retiring. Benedict, we hardly knew ye. I wonder how this jibes with that Malachian prediction that this is the last pope before the end of the world. Seems we may not have much time left.

I can see the Holy Father retiring in part because he has the freedom that Christians ought feel, that freedom not to follow conventions but to possess a spirit of liberty. Thus the fact no pope has retired since 1415 wouldn't be much of a deterrent to this holy pope. And he may've considered that his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, already taught by his example of the dignity of old age and that the value of human life is apart from what can be “produced”.

Finally, the timing seems interesting given that this comes on the heels of producing the three volume work on the life of Christ. At the beginning of his papacy he wondered if he'd complete it before his death, and perhaps once it was done he felt he'd accomplished what he'd set out to do.

Of course I'm sure the main reason for his leaving is simply because he can't travel anymore and in this day and age travel seems almost a job requirement for that position.

Well, I'm now much less sure of the main reason for his leaving...

In this "anything's possible!" world we now inhabit, I had hoped against all reasonable hope that he would outlive Francis and there would be a “discussion” at the next conclave about the legitimacy of Francis’s pontificate. It felt an easier lift had Benedict lived. Hey, a guy can dream right? But the beatings will continue until morale improves, or rather, until our ecclesiastical character improves.

Benedict was, in one way at least, proof that a successor pope is usually radically different than his predecessor: he resigned from the papacy rather than age in office as Pope John Paul II did.  Benedict in 2013 was arguably as spry as a grasshopper on the 4th of July, as witnessed by his long-lived post-papacy.  Or certainly if compared to St. John Paul II in his last years.

I wonder too if he sort of discouraged the view of the pope as our spiritual-earthly father and that instead we should look to Jesus.  John Paul II seemed to more actively court that image while Benedict did not. The latter was less sentimental about things in general, saying that the pious belief in the Holy Spirit picking the pope isn't shown by history.

But popes are certainly entitled to be different viewpoints given how little God is interested in homogeneity, witness his saints. 

He will, perhaps, be judged poorly by some on account of who came after him but no one can know the future and it seemed like a decent bet at the time that we would get a much better pope than the one we got. There’s a way this would’ve worked out well, at least from a human perspective. 


Benedict was exhilarating and disappointing for Traditionalists. There were no higher highs than with Benedict and no lower low (i.e. the resignation), which John Zmirak expressed in a color subheading here. 

The Rebels Twenty

Compulsively watching the House Speaker train wreck.  Seems mostly a proxy war between swamp and non-swamp and reformists versus non-reformists. Looks like a heavy lift to try to reform an institution where you make up less than 10% of the members but it’s a heroic effort so far given the damage to their congressional careers. These reformers have nothing but veto power.

If it delays the House investigations then I'm not sure why anyone should care given that the media and the DoJ will ignore said investigations and the Congress has no power to indict. 

It’s pretty odd to see Congressional Republicans with a spine. The omnibus bill with yet more money for Ukraine and astounding increase to the military suggests that it’s all business as usual. That just-passed bill cannot have helped McCarthy’s chances. 

Trump is supporting McCarthy because McCarthy is a good fundraiser and will help him in his presidential bid. The interesting thing is whether this is the right battle at the right time. Is it more important to try to reform Congressional branch in ’23 or win presidency in ’24? Likely the latter but that assumes Trump can overcome the huge obstacles including his unpopularity among many and his plentiful enemies willing to put their thumb on the scale. 

Given the uncertainties of ’24, it makes some sense to “fire all your guns at once” and try to interrupt our nation's self-destruction. 

Our congressman Mike Carey is doing what’s expected of a loyal ex-lobbyist. He speaks McCarthy. Easy glad-handing with limited principles and plenty of ambition. He came to power in Ohio via the old fashioned route (i.e. money and influence peddling). That Trump endorsed him only shows that Trump is mostly about Trump and incidentally (although, crucially, more than any other pro politician!) for the American people. Carey was quick to adapt to the D.C. ways by throwing money at our 51st state (Ukraine) in the very beginning as if second nature. You got to love how he acclimatized to D.C. in advance. Can't say the dude didn't know which team he was playing for.

The Disappointment of Greg Bear

I recently became aware of sci-fi writer Greg Bear. He had wide-ranging interests and was a “navy brat” who was close to many in military (as it turned out, probably as deep state as it gets). He was credited with being prescient with respect to rise of “rightwing extremism” way back in 2009 and later said words to the effect that he was not surprised that it came to fruition in the Trump years but that it couldn’t be prevented even predicting it ahead of time.

So I thought I’d read up more on him and keep an open mind as far as trying to look through his eyes at the threat he saw it.  Because I still feel uneasy being in the camp with Matt Gaetz rather than Jonah Goldberg. It feels like a huge paradigm switch for me but I’ve seen nothing in the past couple years to give me pause and I thought Bear, in his seeming prognostication, might provide something.

His views were, alas, vacuous. I’d hoped he could be taken as a neutral arbiter but instead the military connections seem to have served only to infect him with the familiar virus of militarism and deep state affinity. A small example was a tweet on 8/9/16: “D Trump just crossed the awful red line. His dog whistle is spraying blood--and Republicans again have to lie to explain.”  


Yawn. 

He also asserted that “Trump is suffering and failing rapidly...Dementia anyone?” 

Ironic given our current commander in chief. 

Bear seems another case of “what went wrong?” to which we can add figures like Bill Kristol, Sydney Powell and so many others on whom the Trump ascendancy was not kind. There's Anti-Trump Derangement Syndrome but also Pro-Trump Derangement Syndrome. Perhaps we got a taste of that when Obama was in office as well given how some of the Obama cultists imagined him the Messiah. Still, I can hardly believe a lawyer like Sydney Powell could go to the lengths she did without the releasing the kraken smoking gun. There could be none given the proprietary computer code is under lock and key and an un-auditable system means a smokeless gun. 

Bear might well have been inciting the FBI rather than vice-versa given that they interviewed him way back around the Tea Party time regarding threats of rightwing extremism since he had a reputation as being prescient. He might've encouraged some of their subsequent rogue tactics or at least supported their world-view which has led us to where we have a de facto fourth branch of government. 

In 2016 he chastised the Republican senate for not funding virus research, in this case Zika which he not-so-presciently said would “bite us on the ass”.  Funny how it was virus research, funded in part by our country, that manufactured the covid misery.  

He was also apoplectic about “Erdogan working to purge Turkey” in July when they were near NATO forces in Adana, so apparently Bear was a NATO cultist and that was part of his hatred for Trump.  

In the end it seems his prescience was overrated somewhat and his wisdom overrated greatly.