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. 

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. 

**

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."