The Tale of the Hands

Trump and Melania at the Wailing Wall: after reading so much about the Trump's marriage being in shambles because of Melania's 'swatting' of her husband's hand I was pleased to notice here in this recent video that Melania and her husband are holding hands...Of course I'm waiting for the even-handed truth-tellers of the press for their update now on how loving the marriage of the President and the First Lady is and how it has healed quite nicely. Okay, I'm waiting, people of the press.

On Heineken's PC Statement on their Bottles Advocating for a Globalist World of Borderless Countries

But doesn't beer need the borders of a bottle? What would beer be if it didn't have a wall of glass?

The Better Catechesis of VP Pence

I see comments from a fellow Catholic concerning Vice President Pence, disparaging him for leaving the Church for another "faith" on the video post where "Catholic" students walked out of Notre Dame's commencement because of his unfashionable stance against LGBTQXYZ. Seems to me that Mr. Pence is getting much better catechesis whatever church he is attending than what this "Catholic" college seems to be teaching. Instead of critiqing him as a Protestant why don't we Catholics applaud him for his biblical stance in the face of the PC bullies that so many Catholic and Protestant leaders seem to wilt in front of. May we applaud those, like Mr. Pence, who genuinely follow the Lord at the center of the creed. I for one will applaud him and consider him a brother.

The Exodus at Notre Dame of Students at the Introduction of Vice President Mike Pence as Commencement Speaker

I wish I had been a benefactor of Notre Dame so that I could now withdraw my substantial contribution to that once Catholic college.

The Sanitizing of the South

I see it coming. Remove Lee, Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, the St. Andrew's flag. Yes, sanitize our history. Remove these names from history textbooks. Sanitize it all. But we're missing some other guilty history. What of the entire country in its treatment of the Indian? So deconstruct America. What of the North and its factory slavery of the Irish? Should this not warrant the dismantling of Grant's Tomb? Anything that offends our suddenly self-righteous diversity? And where are the Diversity Despots when you need them? By the way, because Africans were sold by other antagonistic African tribes to the white slave traders should we now ban any recognition of that Continent? And what of the Arabs who were at the beginning and even now still involved in the slave trade? What do we do with that? After all aren't they a politically correct people-group? And what is coming on the heels of this sterilizing of the South? A natural evolution of demonizing the Bible Belt will be the sterilzing of the Great Superstition as it will no doubt be referred to. Since we aren't used to standing against this display of the Tolerant no one will stand against them when the Virgin will be removed, and the crucifixes and crosses will be deemed as hate in marble and stone and wood. Yes, while we are comfortably silent we will have found that they have been crushed to dust and splinters.

Millstone

But whoso shall cause one of these little ones that believe on me to stumble, it is profitable for him that a great millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depth of the sea.


~Meek and mild and non-judgmental Jesus
Mt. 18:6

The New Kindergarten Story Hour

So it has come to this for Kindergarten story hour. No more Hans Christian Andersen, Chronicles of Narnia, Cindarella and her glass slipper. No. Now it is this, the stage is given to a drag queen in this Brooklyn school to propagandize these children with the latest perversion: gender fluidity. No, it is not Russia that is our threat. North Korea is not our threat. ISIS is not our threat. Obesity and trans fat is not our threat. This abuse of the child, this causing the stumbling of one of these little ones, this is the threat. And it is broadcast as an irrefutable popular good. And this kind of thing is growing out of a very corrupt 'compassion' that is from the darkest regions of Dante's Inferno. Resist.

History Editors of the South

Yes, the history editors are alive and well. They are sterilizing the South of Lee and Beauregard and Davis. Very few seem willing to protest. Well, this is a protest. Yes, we are all afraid of the politically incorrect labels. My friends on both sides of the aisle, with such a precedent are we so shortsighted that we can't foresee that Christian statues and icons will soon be also deemed inappropriate, intolerant, uncompassionate, narrow-minded blocks of marble and canvas chiseled and painted to a Superstition? Are we so willing to let the fashion fascists revise our history whether it be good or ill? I for one am disheartened that so few see this sterilization and its fascist source. Can't we see that the Virgin will follow right on the heels of General Lee?

InterFaith to the Rescue

The talk was on "Interrogating the Text". It was meant to alert us to the mind molders in the varied media we read, watch, listen to...The day before the talk I providentially received in the mail a sample of the town paper of my small sea coast town. It seems that HATE has been epidemic. So much so that the Inter-Faith Community had come together in order to arouse AWARENESS (don't you just love that word) over the racism, oppression, antisemitism, Islamophobia, that has been ongoing. "Ongoing" evidently meant an act of antisemitism in 1980. Another in 1989. We are now in 2017. (Perhaps "tidal wave of Nazism" might be overstating just a bit.) Be that as it may another example of HATE: a Muslim woman experienced an "instance of oppression". It was not further elaborated on what the said "instance of oppression" was. (Was it a beating, a murder, or might it have been a raised voice, an arched eyebrow?) Regardless of what it was it occurred to me that my town is relatively free, actually absolutely free of concentration camps and detention centers. For crying out loud, I don't even think we have a jail! Why, even the sleepy town of Mayberry had a jail.). So I set out to be on the look out for all the HATE I needed to make myself AWARE about. I was unable to find any. Was I so blind to bigotry? Yet all these compassionate religious leaders couldn't be confused, could they? Of course not. I do appreciate their all consuming compassionate open- minded enlightenment Robesperian zeal to nip this noxious weed in the bud before it pollinates us all with bigotry, intolerance, privilege, all the promiscuous phobias. I should perhaps visit one of their churches to find out where I can put the pesticide. (Nota bene: Absent were the Catholic church and the Evangelical. It seems that these two churches wish to make their congregations aware of other things.)

The Atheist's Sermon

On hearing an atheist, Stephen Fry, complaining of the sins of the Catholic Church. It is quite interesting how first, he uses the word "sins". The other interesting thing was the amount of self-righteousness this atheist exhibits. He further goes on to condemn the stigmitizing he claims the Church is guilty of by stitching a great Scarlet Letter upon that Bride, the Church, as if she were Hester Prynne herself. Mr.Fry further talks of how the Church is obsessed with sex---ironic that it doesn't seem to enter his mind that being a self proclaimed homosexual, he might not in some way be obsessed with this activity. He goes on to condemn any traditional moral goodness and the Church with the doctrinal purity of Marx, Lenin and Darwin. He ratches up his diatribe by giving us the Galilean himself (a man he seems to be quite on friendly terms with) as one that would be unaccepted in the rich treasury of the Church, while not ever wondering at the locked doors of his own heart. Well, Mr. Fry, I am grateful. You have, albeit against your intention, strengthened my faith in this Bride and most of all in her Bridegroom, this Galilean, in a way that many a sermon could not have done.

The Real Bullies

When will we finally realize the true bullies of our culture? When will we realize it is those who change B.C. and Anno Domini in our textbooks to B.C.E. and C.E.? It is those that self-righteously rewrite our history with a secular zeal that ashamedly overcomes the zeal of so many of us, we who have reason for such Pauline zeal. Those who so engineer humanity that our ancestors wouldn't recognize us. Those who have transfigured our temples to happy houses, that seek to tame the very Presence in our tabernacles. But let us remember Our Lord is not a tame Lion.

Deleted Dixie

At our music group a friend mentioned casually almost carelessly, how the song Dixie was deleted from a Roy Clark trilogy. He just seemed to take it as part of our new sterilized sanitized culture. To me it is infuriating that the Tolerant Left seeks to censure so much of American History and half the nation with a totalitarian imposed intolerance. Civil War statues defaced, removed. Songs deleted. Listen to the rendition of Dixie by Elvis Presley while you still can. Please people resist the language police, the social engineers, the revisionist historians, who seek to erase so much of America and ourselves, imperfect as we are.

Pilate's Question Revived

Quid est veritas? This Pilate's question is the theme of our relativistic society. Without the anchorage of the stable north star we will flounder in a formless sea, drowning in detours without destinations. May we learn this before our dory drowns.

Plugged Into

Yesterday met a dad and his thirteen-year-old son out birding. I was impressed that the kid was not plugged into the ubiquitous alternate reality everyone is plugged into these days, but was actually seeing and listening and observing and preserving all that was before him of the natural world. And the other quality that both father and son had in abundance was generosity of knowledge, pointing out to me what birds I first of all wouldn't have detected and second of all wouldn't have known: ovenbird, blue-gray gnat-catcher, magnolia warbler, hermit thrush. It is a good day when one makes not only bird friends but also the human kind.

Banned From Fenway

Okay, so let's get this straight. Someone has been banned from baseball at Fenway Park for his entire lifetime over a racial slur? While I am in no way condoning racial slurs does this penalty seem a tad bit harsh? I mean the guy (Am I right to assume it is a tea party white male? I think so. They are the guilty ones.) didn't murder anyone, didn't spill a nine dollar cup of Fenway beer down someone's back, didn't steal some elderly woman's handbag, didn't toss a smoke-bomb onto the field, didn't have any Republican slogans on his t-shirt. As far as we know he isn't with ISIS. Well on second thought maybe the authoritarian moral overseers of Fenway should ban others as well: those fans that toss out pornographic expletives in unison against the Yankees, chanting Yankees s_ _ k. Perhaps they should also ban anyone that says anything that makes anyone feel uncomfortable, or is not in line with current fashionable orthodoxy. What was that they said a long time ago---something about freedom of speech? But again we today have the luxury of interpreting a living document that will keep up with the times and herd us into the same nice fashions of speech. I am comforted after thinking about it further that we have such guardians of the current morality, that will come down on such infractions as hard as Himmler did in another time, another age.

When I Consider

"Eye has not seen, or ear has not heard what is prepared for them that love God..." This from St Paul. It is something I think that we could contemplate more---the beauty for which our souls hunger. We are given a foretaste of it in the things of earth: trout lilies, the crocus which come out for a cameo appearance in the last days of winter, black capped chickadees, the pure whistle of the titmouse, the flight of the kingfisher, the fragrances of honeysuckle, the maze of red lace the swamp maples make against the gray sky, the ocean in its incomprehensible bigness and its different personalities of color, the studding of the heavens with stars.

The New English

The New English: A trend now in the news calls someone shooting an "active shooter". Is "active" here a needed adjective? Doesn't "shooter" say what needs to be said? Are we then going to read that a particular shooter had for a few moments, while perhaps reloading, become an "inactive shooter"? Does a certain amount of time have to elapse between shots when the adjectives change?

Trendy English

On the New English. A trend now in the news calls someone shooting an "active shooter". Is "active" here a needed adjective? Doesn't "shooter" say what needs to be said? Are we then going to read that a particular shooter had for a few moments, while perhaps reloading, become an "inactive shooter"? Does a certain amount of time have to elapse between shots when the adjectives change?