My Barricaded Mind

I wish to open up this barricaded mind of mine. It has barricaded itself with insulation against the one degree temperatures that I felt seeping in this morning. I will remove insulation, I will unplug the drafts, I will open doors and windows to the globally warming winds coming down from the Arctic. The only reason I have been hesitant is that I haven't seen my settled science friends stop their habit of starting their gas guzzling SUVs many minutes before they enter. That is too many minutes of carbon footprint. Don't they realize that that many minutes multiplied among the million SUVs in the northern latitudes would make quite a forestalling of the climate apocalypse that looms over us? And also I would mention the still steady use of air conditioners humming away in the summer months even in my seacoast town that has a stiff breeze off the Atlantic, and surely doesn't need artificially cooled air to keep us from overly perspiring. And then I also notice that settled sciencers still use dryers to dry their clothes instead of letting the June and July and August sun to dry them on a clothesline. In case you've noticed clotheslines have not made a comeback as you would expect, but have conversely really become an extinct species or at the least terribly endangered. Another thing that makes me hesitate in opening my barricaded mind has been the lack of climate bunkers. But I supposed most of all is the fact that the settled sciencers seem to pay so much attention to such superficial concerns as southern statues, Russian collusion, harassment claims, Trump tweets, transgender pronoun linguistics, obesity among teens, and on and on. I mean with the globe herself being on such temperature teetering axis with water levels about to engulf us on the East coast all the way to the Green Mountains in the North and the Blue Ridge in the South, doesn't it seem a bit odd that we would be so obsessed with how many calories there is in a crispy creme, or the grams of trans fat in a big Mac? this is what, I must confess, keeps me with my closed barricaded mind against the irrefutably settled science of global (brrrr!) warming.

The Settled Science of International Falls, Minnesota

So there was a record low in International Falls, Minnesota this morning of -36 degrees. The previous low was -32 set in 1924. It is really good that the PC linguistic engineers were able to change "global warming" to "climate change" in time. Otherwise, I don't think it would be the settled science it is---at least for the people of International Falls.

Cold Spell

All I know is it doesn't feel at all like global warming is taking hold. I have the distinct belief that the polar creatures are actually migrating to more southern latitudes tot get warm; I just can't except the new scientific orthodoxy that the ice caps are melting---just the reverse. In fact, I wouldn't at all be surprised to see cold glacial til out my door tomorrow morning. I just have to wonder aloud whether that climatologist Al Gore might have gotten his figures inverted, and it was actually cosmic cooling that was going on. Call me paranoid but with such dips in the thermometer I have to firm up my faith that the sun has no broken filaments. That though it expends 400,000 tons of matter a second into energy, most of which is subject to the draftiness of space in the long trek, some 91 million miles of cold firmament, still has enough leftover for our little planet. But how can one be so complacent not to have our faith in the helios shaken on such frigid days? After all, the sun is not obligated to shine and heat this little home we call earth, is it? What if indeed it ran out of fuel? Don't things run out after awhile? And 400,000 tons a second is not a trifle. I mean if the sun quits it won't really matter if you turn your thermostat higher, or if you duct tape the cracks in your rickety windows, or place an old bath towel across the threshold of the door to keep the draft from committing home invasion. Thus, I wish to thank the Fuel Man who has provided us with this heating source called the sun. He doesn't need to continually maintain it. He didn't even need to install it in the first place. But I must say that when the burner's settings are turned down so low I am more disposed to be thankful for it; and thankful most especially for the Furnace Man that is always on call and knows his business of how to heat a planet. And imagine, he doesn't even charge for all his oversight of that burner...or the fuel---and once 2000 years ago he even made a house call.

"Thank God"

"Thank God"....This a favorite expression of my grandmother. To my remembrance never was God's name uttered casually, tritely. She meant it every time. To say "Thank God" was to rightly attribute everything as gift from Someone she knew with as much, or even more, certainty as the presence of her grandson that drank Salada tea with her. Yes, for her "Thank God" was a default response to everything because her grandson realized she knew that the reason her arthritis wasn't even worse than it was was only due to God's grace; that even in her material poverty she possessed riches---her cold-water flat, the begonias that sat on her windowsills, her cat, her grandchildren, her two sons, the pigeons that would gather at her door for their daily bread. But most of all she was grateful for God. And of course this faith in the Father of all fueled all her thanksgivings that found their primal expression in "Thank God.

I Am Woman

With all the great harassment holocaust we are experiencing it does appear that Helen Reddy has lost her roar.

Sweet Home Alabama

So there is a post going around "Sweet Home Alabama". It is in praise for a state for turning its back on a man they deemed unworthy of their own Pharisaical purity. Even after forgeries were discovered done by the accuser the charge is believed even more I think than those passages where Our Lord talks about the world calumniating the Christian for his own name's sake. Here on one side is a man who made the unpopular stance---even at the cost of career as a judge---to bravely resist the continual deleting of God from our culture in his resistance to the removal of a monument to the 10 commandments. I can't help but wonder how is it so many Catholics and Protestants alike, priests, ministers, and layman, are more willing for a man that votes for the termination of children in the womb over a man that the Left has successfully calumniated with hackneyed harassment claims. Instead as conservatives we should be ashamed how conservative Alabama went. The turn of the crowd against Christ and for Barabbas seems even more real to me after seeing such a post in praise of "Sweet Home Alabama" after their choice for an even more secularized culture. And as to harassment, isn't the worst form of it for a strange doctor to invade a woman's womb with his forceps?

The Fashionable News Cycle

Just when my anxiety gets agitated it needs to transfer to yet another crisis: once, it was the crisis of the ozone layer growing and the near immediate danger of losing the delicate composition of our atmosphere---and then the heavens seemed to have healed. Then terrorist acts shot up and blew up our news. Of course the news came clothed in such political burkas that we never could see the ideologies behind them. And then right on cue the next crisis was how the NRA wanted citizens to keep their guns and their 2nd amendment. (No matter that bombs and rental trucks are often the weapon of choice). Then when people forgot in a couple of days the blowing up of bystanders at a marathon, or the casino carnage or the baptist church being 'cleansed' of its racists with an automatic rifle then another direction. A politician who forsakes his cancer-plagued wife to take up with another younger gal reveals that the globe is warming is lauded as one of our modern secular saints (good thing he didn't stand up for the 10 Commandments is all I can say); of course it followed that the somewhat compromised phrase GW morphs magically into the more accountable Climate Change and this convinces even more, for who can refute the fact that climates do, in fact, change? Then in short time once again we are rebuked for the rampant racism, sexism, homophobia, islamophobia as the epidemics of this country so many third-worlders seek to risk their lives to come to--- in spite of this well known infamous fact of our country. Then we have the placards, the facebook posts, the NO PLACE FOR HATE rebukes of anyone that dares to utter even a squeak that we should have a moratorium on the 'refugees' from countries that export to us many that would be our enemies. Of course this news never gets stale these political sins of us, bigoted Tea Party bullies. And we are only confirmed as such for our terrible lack of tolerance for the trans-teachers of our children and shamed to at last conform to be celebrants of our educated Heffner-Youth. And now, at long last we are reaping the great harvest of our sexually liberated world where the great harvest of harassment accusations from feminism's empowered Woman (of course we immediately convict all the accused and don't wonder at all if there is any political manipulation involved because of course we are not conspiracy theorists). And certainly we have revised our 'who am I to judge' stance to become the judges and arbiters of all the Social Justice transgressions we can come up with. All I wonder is: what will follow when 'harassment' loses its cache? Perhaps it never will. Either way, I'm sure seeing how we gravitate to the latest fashion we will assiduously adopt whatever we are given in the next news cycle and proclaim it as evangelisticly as once our ancestors proclaimed another very different gospel.

Make no mistake about it. All of the ubiquitous harassment accusations have everything to do with the answers given below. And one set of answers will bring Alabama more in line with an America we once were that would've known what marriage meant and would've stood up to the forces that would seek to make it continually legal to dismember the child in the womb---versus an America ahead of us which sees that marriage can mean what the social engineers determine, and that the child is an expendible item when not convenient. This is really the litmus test.

What If? (The Bombing at the NY Port Authority)

I sometimes like to ask 'what if?' What if the explosive device was a little more potent? Say it had the capacity of sending shrapnel into people you actually knew and cared about and not just far away statistic-generic people you have never met? Say it had the capacity to be another 9/11---or even dwarf it had it been say a nuclear device? What it if this man had a name like, Patrick O'Shawnessy? or perhaps Richard Brookfield? and was a devout Catholic, or an on fire evangelical? Would the media be running with it as if this was the pure Hatred that they have created all their No Place for Hate zones over? And lastly, what will it take before we stop calling our President the R word because he dares to stop importing terrorism into this country? What if one day we can remember when bus terminals (as well as churches and casinos) weren't so dangerous as I guess they are today? And what if one day what I just wrote won't appear like hate speech by half the country?

The Our Father's Modification

With the breakdown in society, the creeping of totalitarian thought, the feminist-fracturing of the family, the rise of the promotion of perversity in all its forms, the cataclysmic loss of chaste men and women to the proliferation of promiscuous playboys and playgirls, the loss of religious liberty (this one liberty the libertine Left seems quite unconcerned about), the ability for bakers to bake who they wish to bake for, the voluntary de-Christianizing of the West, the toxic tales children are fed in the government schools---is it really so urgent that a line of the "Our Father" be changed? Is this the thing that cannot wait? And have we become so dumb that a little catechesis will not cure? Can't we have one thing like the Lord's Prayer that is unchanging in this world that seems to be nothing but fashionable change?

Books as Friends

At St Mary's Men's group this Saturday morning we talked about books, the ability to sit down with a friend like Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Robert Louis Stevenson, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien. I went around the table and asked for the one book one couldn't do without; Daniel Liporto cited David Copperfield---Dickens best; Niall Macmanus cited the Bible bringing out the fact that we are quite biblically illiterate today---and as one who taught 6th grade religious-ed i would have to agree; Bill Rosser brought up Cicero. Mike Olivo "When Legends Die" (author unremembered); Greg Prentice came up with Mark Twain's Joan of Arc. Mark Brunini, a good orthodox dictionary; I submitted a dystopian grouping: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley's Brave New World, and Lewis's That Hideous Strength--- these help us in being alert to all the hypnopaedia and double-think infecting our minds; Eric Josephson seconded the Bible.
One of the problems with today's reading climate---this the real 'climate change' is that kids don't often read the classics but are given books that further a certain political social agenda. One of the fallouts of such books is that kids, and grown-ups alike, are subjected to fickle friends that divide rather than unite generations with a common canon. Such ungood and unlasting friends are only in the business of manipulating the mind. Instead may we have true friends upon our shelves, and may we visit them regularly, enjoying them with a cup of tea and in the atmosphere of truth.

Something Rotten in the State of Denmark

Could something be, to borrow Hamlet's phrase, rotten in the state of Denmark? When I see the great harvesting of harassmentors, the obsession with climate change (originally 'global warming')...and then suddenly not much is heard about it---(I seem to remember the ozone layer was big news for a time and now...?)Well, something just doesn't add up, or maybe it all adds up too well. Adding to it all is the silence of church leaders concerning the great godless genocide and Sangerian eugenics that dismembers thousands of little ones a day in 'clinics' across the country; the loss of our religious freedom exemplified in something as seemingly innocuous as baking a cake---you'd think these things were rather superficial fundamentalist obsessions when things like the really important Christian considerations like immigration, being nice people, accusations of 'sexual misconduct' by one sex against the other (sounds an awful lot like...oh, identity politics?). And these the same righteously indignant that not long ago were continuously quoting the 'judge not' phrase from the Bible seem to have become quite the judges themselves. And aren't these the same folks that have fought for children to be taught sex-ed and given condoms as if they were handing out candy? You see I'm just trying to understand. Doesn't it seem that ridding children of their innocence and creating such a sexualized culture that even Hugh Heffner might blush---that these things would eventually bring out a culture that was quite laden with the fallout of sexual soot? These the very ones crying to high heaven that they have the right to destroy black and white babies but any Civil War monuments in the South don't fit our moral imprimatur. Perhaps I need more understanding. But I have to think that it just seems our cultural cleansing of our history has an Orwellian feel to it. I guess we are quite compassionate of the PC squeamish, and are so righteous that we can righteously cast the characterizations 'racist', 'sexist', 'homophobe' as accurate depictions of the American character. But doesn't all of this seem a bit sudden? Maybe even choreographed? The choreographed feast perhaps of termites among the truth? Yes, I must conclude that all considered it does make me think that there is something rotten, something very rotten in the state of Denmark.

Something Going On...

Somehow I don't recall when Obama called for this moratorium on illegal immigration a claim that here was Hitler reincarnated, no USCCB bishop concerned that this was the supremely unchristian act, no pope denied the President's salvation. Hmmm. Just makes one wonder that when the globalist president says it it met with approval, when the 'make America great again' president says it it is received as the rage of a racist fascist. Something seems to be going on---not only in the country but even, more sadly, in the Church.

The Big Brother that is Beelzebub

Just finished Orwell's "Nineteen Eight-Four". I think the interrogation scenes at the end come to be some of the most unsettling, hair-raising, Hitchcock-like horror, that I have ever read. I can only liken such bureaucratic brutality to what must be the domain of the cold demonic bureaucracy that must be hell. What strikes me is if Orwell, a mere man, can out of his mind imagine such tortuous terror, what must the great Enemy of God and man have in store for those who have given themselves to him by rejecting the Lord of Love and Light? Such a disciple of the Big Brother that is Beelzebub must think again of what such a Darkness might mean, something even darker and more sinister than even Mr. Orwell could have imagined.

Crime Does Pay

In response to the Sacramento City Council's decision, 9-0, to pay gang members not to murder people I wonder at the old adage that said, "Crime Doesn't Pay". I guess it does. Will it not be long before pickpockets, breakers and enterers, embezzlers, dare we even to include the current fashionable, harassers, be given a salary by the city councils in order to not do their crimes?
On second thought, perhaps this innovation may be regarded as a progressivist way to solve the unemployment issue. Perhaps when funds get low I can enlist in a gang, and, I suppose, the amount of income will be according to how bad a gang it is. A really murderous gang will no doubt be even more greatly compensated---and perhaps should they also be dealing drugs this could only put one in a top tax bracket---perhaps the One Percent.

The Earth as Seen from Space

The earth as seen from space. So to any agnostics still out there how does this kind of thing happen without a supernatural intelligence, a design as expressed by a deity, a marble ball of living chlorophyll, and blood and bone, speech and language, the flight of birds, a cat approaching stealthily on his paws, a dog's fierce loyalty, the unifying love of a husband and wife, the birth of babies, the birth of birds, the birth of foals, the birth of kittens; the germination of oak, maple, beech, birch, hemlock; the array of colors, the assault of the sun upon deserts, the freezing of the polar regions, the right mix of atmospheres, our ability to breath it in and find it delicious?