Egret Heron Flying

Today on my bike by the edge of Salem Harbor I looked up and there in the morning sky was an egret heron flying. The symmetry of its wings, its long legs perfectly in line, every aspect of physiology streamlined, it was a perfection of flight and grace. Could this be just a curious accident of natural succession? Wouldn't it be like finding a perfect painting and thinking a paintbrush without the painter had painted such a merited masterpiece?

The Tree at Fort Sewell

The tree at Fort Sewell still stands. The micro-burst, the inverted tornado off the water broke the limbs, splintered the crown, cracked the soldierly countenance of this unique sycamore maple. It's one limb, the only remaining, still stays out-stretched over the craggy coast. One friend tells me he proposed to his wife underneath this tree's beneficent shade. Another said it was the place of his first date, sitting there with the girl who would later also be proposed to a year afterward on the same park bench underneath the same tree's beckoning limb. Someone wrote a poem that he gave to a selectwoman in town. I think he hopes it might save it from what seems a most probable cutting. The tree has it seems to have even gained in significance. Now it stands a sculpture that should it be purchased from the Museum of Fine Arts would be beyond the wealth of wealthy Marblehead to purchase. But here the sculpting is freely given, freely made. Now a more hollowed home for owls, squirrels, the common flicker. May it be kept in its new severe pruning. May it always remind the tourist and the native, the sailor and landsman, of the consummate courage in standing even among such wounds. It should leave us in wonder and how its woodness could stand the test of the severe whiteness of a wind's wrath.

Jeffrey Epstein's Too Predictable Death

Now we have a death in a cell, a man who was on suicide watch. A man who could reveal more than most how deep the deep state was. And then he dies too predictably of suicide. I sure would be calling Lt. Columbo right about now.

Evolving Ad Hominems

In the evolution of ad hominems from our friends on the Left we've gone from Tea Party deplorables to racists to white nationalists to white supremacists. I shudder to think what we will be known by tomorrow.

Identity Politics on Steroids

Identity politics is on steroids today. In MLK's America one would be not known by the color of his skin but by the content of his character. Now we are so bombarded by race (our library of all possible subjects has a weekly lecture on "Questions on Race and White Privilege")---all this makes me a little suspicious that such a divide is accented for ulterior motives. And such a proliferation of these identity politics has occurred since Mr. Trump has been in office. The suggestion of course is that Mr. Trump has singlehandedly transformed (wasn't this Mr. Obama's term?) America into a KKK compound. I just don't see it. I actually see the opposite. I just don't trust the Jussie Smollets reporting what I must call the racial news. I prefer rather to watch our President at say, the Prayer Breakfast he gave for Black Evangelical Inner City Pastors (available on YouTube) and how he genuinely received their dilemmas as his own, and their praise with humility.

I think we err when we start to determine everything with quotas---the need of having representatives of race and gender solely on their "oppressed minority status" rather than the content of character as Martin Luther King had envisioned. After all to take a rather mundane example of sports: does one look at the local city team, the Boston Celtics, and say, "Where's the white guy on the team?" No, I trust that the GM got the best he could and simply enjoy the basketball player swish the ball. For his skill is in swishing the ball. That is how to enjoy the game. I don't think you enjoy the game if you constantly get hung up on how many of this or that is on the team.

The Revolving Door of Revolutionary News

So we've completely forgotten about collusion with Russia, obstruction of justice. Now it is white supremacy, or white nationalism that is the new crisis. Saul Alinskey would be quite pleased with how malleable the mind of the collective is. As he once said of his brand of atheistic activism: "Don't let a crisis ever go to waste."

Background Checks

Background checks. Yes, I suppose they must be. But perhaps it is just my cynical side but I wonder? I'm thinking of what might possibly be some of the questions on future background checks. You might think these could never be the question, but I wonder. I just wonder.

1. Were you ever a deplorable, i.e. a Trump supporter?

2. Are you someone mired in your superstition reads the Bible regularly?

3. Do you actually believe in bigoted borders?

4. Regarding your mental health: Do you actually kneel and speak to an invisible person that you believe designed the world? Do you actually resist the settled science of Darwin who explains the evolution of the amoeba into a human quite adequately without invoking some omniscient made-up being?

5. Are you a white and are you a nationalist?

6. Are you a black and a conservative?

7. Do you selfishly wish the United States to retain her sovereignty instead of yielding to the sovereignty of the UN?

8. Are you a Climate Denier?

If you answered positively to any of these questions your mental health is in question and you are DENIED.

What the Mug Shots of the Mass Violence Perpetrators Tell Us

If you look at all the perpetrators of mass violence (I do not say "mass shootings") they come from a variety of ethnicities. One group is not favored over others. It is so disingenuous for our Pravda media to characterize so much of it as "white nationalism" and drummed up by Donald Trump's tweets. Contra the media's charge it rather appears on looking at all the mug shots of those who performed such evil that one can only say that evil is no respecter of persons. Pigment or lack thereof seems to be something the media is instilling simply because it fits their false narrative in the fiction they are continually expanding upon. It is a serial that makes for tantalizing reading for those who are being encouraged in their capacity for hate. Funny we act surprised and incredulous such violence comes about. I am not. The fuel is continually being added. And it is coming from those who claim they are those with the water to put out the conflagration.

"White Nationalism" as the Motive to All Evil

It is quite interesting how the latest violence has been blamed on "white nationalism". I find it interesting that no one of the media seems to blame things on atheistic nihilism, Trump Derangement Syndrome, violent video games, dipping into the demonic, or just plain evil. I don't know about you, but it just makes me suspicious which such lineage as Jussie Smolette (have we forgotten so soon?) and the characterization of the people of Charlottesville all with the same brush never for once thinking that perhaps a motive might be on the one side, to appreciate one's heritage just as we in the North once appreciated ours? Yes, maybe there were bad people on the one side and perhaps there were on the other. But I must be a narrow intolerant person to think there were not good people on both sides of the debate on taking down the iconic statues. It does appear that the one that wanted to destroy one's statues seemed more the bully of the two. Wouldn't you say the same thing about a child who demanded the other have his toy broken and confiscated because it didn't suit him?
Anyhow it seems interesting that the media who can neither read the intents of the heart (I don't think they are that omniscient) dare to presume they have that godlike quality. I don't know about you, and it might just be me, but I am suspicious of this characterization of "white nationalism" that fits so well into the racial narrative we have been getting non-stop since our President took office. By no fault of his own he is white. And by his philosophy, and I believe because of his love for his country he is what is now known pejoratively as a "nationalist" in that he dares to think the unthinkable: that America should be sovereign over America. These two qualities of a person seem to be considered ugly and despicable things nowadays. Somehow I remember when I was in grade school the teachers told not to stereotype. That this way of looking at people was narrow and without the virtue of seeing each person as a unique specimen made in God's own image and likeness. And yet such a way of looking at people has revived and only sees race in everything. And especially they unjustly stereotype those who are deficient in skin pigment and are audacious enough to think borders, like gates to a fence, or doors to a house, are not essential to the well being of a nation. Perhaps one day they would really obey that dictate of diversity they so often espouse as being the central mandate of their creed.

The Poison Poisoning the Soil

Could such destruction of life by any chance be at least partly a result of the soil in which abortion clinics spring up? Is it such a surprise that big life is callously taken when little life is held in such disregard? Perhaps, just perhaps even underneath this, deeper in the soil lies the vacancy of an exiled God---could this, by any chance, be a reason so many demons have sprouted from this unholy ground?

The Media Spin of White Nationalism on the Deadly Attacks in Dayton and El Paso

I'm glad you see this. Not many do. We get sucked in. Was the Marathon bombing a result of this? Nearly all have been the result of terrorism from leftists and Islamic extremists. Such a disingenuous article from Nat Review. You expect such an article from the NY Times, but Nat Review?

St Mary's Men's Group: Antonin Scalia on Faith

Today at St Mary's Men's Group Greg Prentice presented from a book on the faith of Antonin Scalia. I had to borrow the book afterwards as my respect and admiration for the late Chief Justice was exponentially increased. His son, Paul, a priest, wrote one of the forwards. In it he mentioned how his father's bookshelves were full of authors who combined genuine piety and clear thinking: Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, Belloc, Chesterton, Lewis. Yes, it is evident he read the right books. It is so important to read the right books.

Extreme Weather

Two days ago we had extreme weather where I live. But one thing is for sure: "extreme weather" is nothing new. There was the 1939 hurricane, the blizzard of 78, the heat waves of the 60's. There have been tsunamis, blizzards, lightning, floods, since time immemorial. But now it seems that even a ninety degree day is extreme weather though it is July or the dog days of August. I think we had another name for it back when I was a kid. The word was summer. And lightning, rain, thunder...we had a name for that: storm. And blizzards, snowstorms, cold...we had the name winter to pin onto those instances of temperature reduction. We never really thought of weather in the same way as we do today. For us weather might be cold or hot, wet or dry, but we would've laughed if you called weather an extremist. Perhaps we may even graduate terms and eventually if we have enough hot days in summer and cold days in winter and heaven forbid, storms...we may then call weather a terrorist.

yesterday God did some pruning

Yesterday God did some pruning of the trees in my little coastal town. A micro burst, a kind of inverted tornado coming off the water, brought with it a hard horizontal rain that came at the house screens and the trees with a ferocity that provoked a rush to close the storm windows (earning that appellation yesterday for sure) before water piled up on the sills and spilled over. Two sycamore maples across the street got decapitated, a lichen covered sentinel had a massive limb amputated that took out on its crash to the street a limb of a now not so fruitful apple tree. Limbs holding clusters of unripe apples lay in the street and patio. I opened the door and was about to go out and access the damage but the rioting rain, the lightning crossing the sky and connecting, the thunder breaking the sound barrier, and wind seemed to suggest that being inside at that moment was the logical choice. When it was over I went around on my bike and hardly a street was clean of broken limbs and whole uprooted trees, and downed wires. Many streets were closed off. Orange cones, police barriers kept cars and people from transgressing into the dangerous space of electric wires with heavy trees leaning on them. Crane buckets holding men armed with chain saws tackled Pleasant Street, a main thoroughfare and a priority. I watched the strategies in how to keep sagging wires from snapping. After that success by the Town's tree men I headed over to Fort Sewell. There the trees had little protection and it showed. The park was a kind of Gettysburg of trees with the fallen and broken limbs and dismembered corpses. It made me realize even more that man is a mighty small influence on things. And I am quite glad that Someone bigger and mightier moves the wind and waves and that a Climate Change Congress hasn't that power no matter how that narrative of humanitarianism salvation is pushed. Yes, it is a good thing that our Legislators cannot yet legislate the wind---and it is still God's prerogative to prune with that mighty invisible saw of weather.