A Random New Orleans Parade

Did my familiar “post-tourism research” where I look up what I saw after I’m home. In this case, the case of the mysterious Mardi Gras parade.

I was mesmerized by the sheer gratuitousness of it: so much work with nothing to show but artistry for the sake of artistry (and crowd response). I was hypnotized by FOMO, something that hits me occasionally when reading Amy Welborn’s blog. Normally I’m oblivious to that but not when it comes to travel or exotic cities. 

There in New Orleans it felt sort of like being in a Fellini film. 

Turns out the parade we saw was Kreme Boheme. The theme was “Night of the Living Art”. From their website: 

We in New Orleans are surrounded by beauty so bountiful it’s almost commonplace, be it beautiful sights, beautiful sounds, or beautiful souls. Carnival season reignites our wonder at each other; each year it calls us to appreciate anew the breathtaking creativity that makes Mardi Gras not merely possible, but transcendent.

Why the Educational System is Wedded to Vice

Listened to an interesting lecture by Michael Jones back from 1996: 

“We don’t send tanks into the street to control people. What we do is control the flow of information and the educational system. Even more importantly than that, the ultimate goal of the educational system is your sexual life. That is the genius of this system. If we can determine from an early age how you will behave sexually, we will determine how you will behave. We don’t have to put a gun to your head, we will simply know that you will behave in certain predictable fashions. This is why I think the educational system is wedded to the propagation of vice: because vice means control. If you are involved in a vice you are very easily controlled.” 

That’s pretty spot on. And it also explains why the intel community is more powerful than Congress. The intel community holds the secrets, including the vices of key congressmen, and so they hold control. That’s been going back to J Edgar Hoover who was often threatened to be fired but never accomplished due to his blackmail. 

Interesting quote from GK Chesterton: “Everybody said the great modern war was between Capitalism and Socialism. We said there was no war; it was only between Centralization and Centralization.” 

That’s true today.  

Take the Internet. It was supposed to be this great decentralizing instrument, a democratic enhancer but now it’s largely controlled by Facebook, Twitter and Google search engine. 

The drive towards centralization is both from above (I.e. the unholy alliance of Big Tech and the government) and from below (we want the best search engine so we all go to it making it a de facto monopoly; we all want to be on Facebook because it’s where all our family and friends are). 

I recall back in the early days of Catholic blogs and how decentralized it was. How you set up camp on blogspot.com or Wordpress and voila! You had a mom & pop store for your ideas. But it wasn’t enough, not when it could be monetized and advertised. Enter Patheos and BeliefNet which were the middlemen offering collections of premiere bloggers, paying them a stipend, and then making money on ads due to the large number of people hitting this aggregator website. People wanted “one stop shopping” - one place for all their blogs. (“One ring to rule them all!”) 

Centralization seems a natural phenomenon due to the fact that excellence is centralizing in itself. Few people think there’s a better search engine than Google or a better online store than Amazon.  Likewise you have to have one outlet (like Facebook for family stuff and Twitter for political) so that you can reach the broadest audience. 

The downside of centralization is apparent since the FBI swooped in to use these platforms to shape public opinion on coronavirus, suppress info on Hunter laptop, get the sitting president banned from Twitter and suppress stories about voting manipulation (ironically the government was manipulating public opinion in making sure people knew the government wasn’t manipulating election outcomes). 

Basically it’s all just flawed human nature.

Why Did So Few Famous People Die of Covid?

One of the more shocking things about the coronavirus was how few famous people died of it. If you’d have told me, in April of 2020, that less than a dozen famous people would die of it I'd have been shocked. 

It seems like we ended up - ironically - having a greater chance of dying from the jab (like allegedly Hank Aaron did) than from the virus if you were a celeb.

Is it because they had fewer co-morbidities or they hunkered down more effectively or ?

I researched a wiki list of corona victims who were well-known. Here are the ones who stood out to me:

1. Liang Wudong. This was the young 30-something physician in Wuhan, Hubei, notable for being the first doctor to die from COVID. In hindsight I wonder if this was a case of simply the overwhelming amount of virus he took into his system while working with patients? Regardless, a very scary death. 

2. Mohammad Ali Ramazani Dastak (1963 – 29 February 2020) was the Iranian politician (parliament) who died of it. No logical explanation for it in terms of co-morbidities or age. 

3. Joe Diffie was a country singer, born in 1961, died in March of 2020.  No logical explanation for it other than being overweight. Maybe overload of virus from his shows? 

4. John Prine - the famous, beloved folk artist died in April of 2020 but had lung damage, was old and had co-morbidities. Explainable. 

5. Herman Cain - July 2020. Was 74 but in seemingly decent shape.

6. Colin Powell - Oct 2021. Had cancer and Parkinson’s. Explainable. 

7. Charley Pride - Dec 2020. Was 86, had previous health issues, and could’ve died of flu had he caught that. Explainable. 

And that’s it. Are you kidding me? 

In fairness, the covid variants and vaccines prevented a lot of deaths but those came out in early 2021. So there was almost a full year when you could easily die of it. Perhaps you could point to the effectiveness of the lockdown for the rich and famous. If you're not touring or meeting in boardrooms or at sporting events or in assemblies then it's surely harder to get it. 

Still, the greatest health threat in generations and we get only seven famous people dying of it, and some of them explainable situations?  Was there an overkill? 

One author says this: 

“The coronavirus crisis did not come out of the blue. It fits into a series of increasingly desperate and self-destructive societal responses to objects of fear: terrorists, global warming, coronavirus. Whenever a new object of fear arises in society, there is only one response and one defense in our current way of thinking: increased control.”

This resonates with me. I'd heard via Drudge Report of the previous “bird flu” with all the mask-wearing Asians and I looked at the death statistics and I was like, “why is this such a big deal?” Covid was worst than bird flu and maybe H1N1 but it was in the same category. 

The sea change for me, beside Diffie's death, was China’s draconian reaction to it. I figured China knew something we didn't given it originated there. Or maybe the CCP are just control freaks like our leaders? 

I recall the terrorists on 9/11 and thought, naively, that we would be after bin Laden and his circle exclusively and intensely, even if it took 50 years. And rightly so! I thought that terrorism was something we'd have to live with as a "cost of living" in the modern world. 

I apparently had a failure of imagination. 

I had no clue that the paranoia and fear would reach the point of creating TSA, DHS, and endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Again, an overreaction.  

And global warming. It would seem to result in the displacement of some of the poor who live along the coasts in the Third World and the loss of some animal and plant species but it was not the “end of the world”.  Wasn't Al Gore saying back in 2008 that we’d be experiencing end times by 2020 if nothing was done? Overreaction again? 

And finally, two countries in Eastern Europe go to war in a border dispute (Russia and Ukraine) and now we’re on the verge of WW3. 

Is it the death of common sense or is it a desire for control that has multiplied dangerously in our time?

When All Else Failed...Then the Asbury Chapel (with a nod to Yeats)

Our land was in peril so we looked to the brash: 

'Maybe the breath of impolitic words 

will save our withered land?' 

To power he rose but was brought low by a hoax. 

Our land was in peril so we looked to ourselves:

'Where may we draw water when the wells are parched away?

'There's nothing but our own red blood can make us right again!'

Patriot millions to D.C., brought low by Brutus's minions. 

Our land was in peril so we looked to the LORD:

'O plain as plain can be, there's nothing but Christ's red blood

to make a right country.' 

And so to a chapel in Kentucky

the revival was born. 

What Makes a Cause *Your* Cause?

It's interesting to me how certain causes touch us so much more deeply than others. For Amy Welborn it’s the trans issue. For me it’s the Jan 6 political prisoners.

I suppose looking for reasons in my case is that it hits close to home, certainly with respect to the political opinions of the Jan 6rs but also that I have a cousin in prison (rightfully so, and for a different issue, but still...).

Add to it how our own government set them up via informants, denied requests for additional security, planted pipe bombs and likely removed fencing, and it’s sort of a perfect storm for me.  Part of it also is I had an over-exalted view of the integrity of our justice system, of fairness and rule of law, so that added to it.

Also, it’s an ongoing debacle. A hurricane or natural disaster takes years to recover from for sure but persistent injustice is a different animal.  The wound festers. We’re now three years in and some still are in jail waiting trial. 

Perhaps it’s true that we can only identify with the marginalized if they are like us. If so, Jesus understood that and perhaps that’s part of the reason for the Incarnation: to be able to identify with us (or more accurately for us to identify with Him). This is really the first time in such an intense and lingering manner that I’ve been able to identify with a marginalized group.

It bothered me that blacks were being unfairly targeted by police with “stop and frisk” laws and that they weren’t being treated well by the justice system due to lack of money for good lawyers.  And it bothered me that TSA was using their power to harass innocent Muslims via “no fly” lists that conveniently bypassed fairness or logic. But the Jan 6 prisoners was an order of magnitude larger in that these folks were US citizens lured by the government being persecuted. The numbers were bigger (than the Muslims though not the blacks) and certainly the injustice orders of magnitude bigger.  Conditions in jail are so bad that they’ve asked to go to Guantánamo. Some have committed suicide.

That Wacky New Orleans

I miss it already...

William F. Buckley's Brother's Advice to Eschew the GOP

William F. Buckley's brother Reid wrote a book about a dozen years ago that holds up well today.  If I'd thought his declaration that America was over in 2010 was premature, I certainly don't think that anymore. 

Here were his thoughts: 

It is I suppose fitting that, just as my brother announced the finis of mid-twentieth century liberalism (and the tory conservatism of those times), it should fall to his brother to announce the failure and irrelevance of the new conservative movement he founded...

I was asked what can be done? The short answer is for conservatives to disassociate from the Republican Party:

1. Conservatives must quit writing blank checks to the Republican Party.

Conservatives should set up a fund, call it the Conservative Cutting Edge Fund--the CCE Fund--interest from the corpus of which to be lavished on political candidates... [be they] Republicans, Democrats, or Independents. They may even be mugwumps. 

2. In the interest of ideological integrity, Conservatives should distance themselves from neoconservatives: on the grounds of (a) their agnosticism, (b) their glabrous faith in the efficacy of government. 

3. Conservatives should confess that the era of small government is finished, done with . . . and work out an accommodation with big government that--somehow--preserves such personal liberties and responsibilities as are possible. I personally fear that no theoretical bridge will span the chasm, ever. 

4. Conservatives should change their name to something like the Founding Party, and should call themselves "Founders," not "conservatives," expressing in their philosophy and quotidian political positions the original concept of what the relationship should be in this republic between the individual and the state.

Number 3 is particularly prophetic given recent governmental theft of our personal liberties. 

He attributes our fall to be found "in the slow diminishment of pioneer stock relative to the population as a whole and the consequent erosion of pioneer values. These moral disabilities are the consequence of the swelling in our American heads of secular humanist hubris."