I am making more use of links, music and visual. Click on them and then you might have a second link to search. Some locations, such as YouTube generate revenue for your "free" viewing by running ads, so be patient. On occasion there is a "skip ad" button. Sometimes it will load and start when you go there, sometimes you need to click on the white arrow in the red box.
I hope you enjoy the updates to my art and life as presented in this blog. IF you don't like the political stuff and don't want to receive future blogs just say so, no hard feelings. So far, only five have taken me up on the offer. With that in mind, remember: BELOW THE FOLD is where (most) of the controversial stuff is placed. Sometimes stuff is a hybrid, say humor and political. Nevertheless, I do this blog for me, it clears my mind and then I do it to share stuff I think is interesting, fun, needed to be considered, etc. I like, also, the feedback I receive, either on a specific article or the concept in general. Right now there are about 70 of you who receive this directly. Claude
I think this is my last blog for a while, Google makes me puke…Google has suspended the American Principles Project's YouTube account. “At 6:30am, American Principles Project received an email from YouTube notifying us that our page was shut down. They failed to give us any reason why whatsoever. Just that we had either ‘severe or repeated violations’ of their community guidelines,” APP President Terry Schilling said. “These people are evil.”
So, to solve the problem of who’s an innocent victim and who’s a perpetrator of evil white supremacy, we came up with the intersectionality matrix. You want to land on as many intersections of oppression as possible.
So what's your oppressed identity? Use this handy chart to find out!
NOT SATIRE: The above article was a selection from our upcoming book The Babylon Bee Guide To Wokeness. It comes out November 2nd, but it is now available for preorder! Follow the link or click the icon below to get your copy! We had fun making this book. May it be your guiding light to woke virtue in a sea of evil fascists. Also, if you don't buy it, you're a racist.
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Senator Sinema from AZ
…The anger (by “progressives”) is explained in part by her history on the left. Yet she’s built a bipartisan coalition in swing-state Arizona. The polling firm Bendixen & Amandi found that 52% of Arizona Democrats and 51% of Re- publicans view her favorably.
She showed signs of her heterodoxy before her 2018 Senate election. 😅 I have heard rumors of her heterodoxy, you can tell by her tattoos and how she dresses.😂
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Add: From STL, well, Webster Groves…
Phyllis Dillerisms...
Whatever you may look like, marry a man your own age. As your beauty fades, so will his eyesight. -Phyllis Diller
Housework can't kill you, but why take a chance? -Phyllis Diller
Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing.
-Phyllis Diller
The reason women don't play football is because 11 of them would never wear the same outfit in public.
-Phyllis Diller
Best way to get rid of kitchen odors: Eat out. -Phyllis Diller
A bachelor is a guy who never made the same mistake once.
-Phyllis Diller
I want my children to have all the things I couldn't afford. Then I want to move in with them.
-Phyllis Diller
Most children threaten at times to run away from home. This is the only thing that keeps some parents going.
-Phyllis Diller
Any time three New Yorkers get into a cab without an argument, a bank has just been robbed.
-Phyllis Diller
We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve years telling them to sit down and shut up.
-Phyllis Diller
Burt Reynolds once asked me out. I was in his room.
-Phyllis Diller
What I don't like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.
-Phyllis Diller
The only time I ever enjoyed ironing was the day I accidentally got gin in the steam iron.
-Phyllis Diller
His finest hour lasted a minute and a half.
-Phyllis Diller
Old age is when the liver spots show through your gloves.
-Phyllis Diller
My photographs don't do me justice -they just look like me.
-Phyllis Diller
I admit, I have a tremendous sex drive. My boyfriend lives forty miles away.
-Phyllis Diller
Tranquilizers work only if you follow the advice on the bottle keep away from children.
-Phyllis Diller
I asked the waiter, 'Is this milk fresh?' He said, 'Lady, three hours ago it was grass.'
-Phyllis Diller
The reason the golf pro tells you to keep your head down is so you can't see him laughing. -Phyllis Diller
You know you're old if they have discontinued your blood type.
-Phyllis Diller
THINGS THAT INTEREST ME:
GIGI’s Playhouse
On September 7, 2021, the Ft. Myers Chamber of Commerce celebrated our 4-year anniversary with a ribbon cutting ceremony! Representatives from local business, volunteers, participants, and family members attended.
We have launched a new program called GiGiFIT Adults. This program focuses on fitness, balance/coordination, and nutrition. With the help of our co-leaders, Promise and Joyce, the 9 participants are learning about fitness and making healthy choices. We have a new partnership with the Everblades organization’s Juniorblades hockey team. Members of the Juniorblades team volunteer each week to help with the GiGiFIT program.
Here at GiGi’s Playhouse, volunteers make our programs possible and successful!
We need additional volunteers for the following programs:
GiGiFIT Adult: leaders or co-leaders and helpers for the spring session which will meet from January to May
LMNOP: leader or co-leaders
Helpers are needed for Art Explosion and Yoga
One-on-one tutors are needed for the spring tutoring session for Literacy and Math which will begin in January.
Friends, our Gospel for today gives us an opportunity to reflect on the great prayer that Jesus taught us. Think how this prayer links us to all of the great figures in Christian history, from Peter and Paul to Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, John Paul II, and right up to the present day.
A desire to pray is planted deep within us. This just means the desire to speak to God and to listen to him. Keep in mind that prayer is not designed to change God’s mind or to tell God something he doesn’t know. God isn’t like a big city boss or a reluctant pasha whom we have to persuade. He is rather the one who wants nothing other than to give us good things—though they might not always be what we want.
Can you see how this prayer rightly orders us? We must put God’s holy name first; we must strive to do his will in all things and at all times; we must be strengthened by spiritual food or we will fall; we must be agents of forgiveness; we must be able to withstand the dark powers.
Who is killing whom and for what? Pure terrorism. The will kill YOU
German Bishops Join the Wolves Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky: It’s unsurprising that the Germans endorse same-sex unions but astounding that their bishops are willing to deny their apostolic authority.
An astonishing news item in the Wall Street Journal reports: “At a meeting in Frankfurt, German [Catholic] church leaders voted 168 to 28. . .to adopt a draft statement on sexuality that includes a resolution saying that ‘same-sex partnerships who want to take the risk of an unbreakable common life. . .should be able to see themselves placed under the blessing of God.’”
A priest who has campaigned against longstanding Church teaching rejoiced at the vote, even though it directly contradicted several statements by Pope Francis, saying it was “a milestone in the journey toward a church without discrimination, a church full of respect for the diversity of love and partnerships.”
This concern for “the church” rings hollow. Every priest promises God – through his bishop – to pray the Breviary. On the 27th Sunday of the liturgical year, priests (including, presumably, the German bishops) should have read this passage from Pope Saint Gregory the Great:
"Pastors who lack foresight hesitate to say openly what is right because they fear losing the favor of men. As the voice of truth tells us, such leaders are not zealous pastors who protect their flocks, rather they are like mercenaries who flee by taking refuge in silence when the wolf appears."
Identifying the wolves that threaten his flock is among the many duties, in conscience, that a priest shares in obedience to his bishop. If bishops object to such teachings, they ought to announce – out of mere honesty – that they don’t think their priests should be praying the Divine Office anymore. Click here to read the rest of Father Pokorsky’s column . . .
Image: A Flock of Sheep Surprised by the Storm by Eugène Verboeckhoven, 1839 [Royal Museum of Fine Arts Belgium, Brussels]
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From On Being Hopeful – and Happy – WarriorsStephen P. White
…It’s true that, ever since that unfortunate episode in the Garden of Eden, human endeavors have been marked by a profound and abiding futility. Nothing new on that front. It’s also true that there are signs of life in the Church, in the United States and elsewhere. Such signs are not even that difficult to find if one knows where to look. In 2019, for example, something like 37,000 people joined the Catholic Church in the United States at the Easter Vigil. That’s remarkable, especially considering that the Church in America was in the midst of its worst wave of the sex-abuse crisis since 2002.
But a stream of people coming into the Church, even in the darkest of hours, can’t hide the flood of people – disproportionately young people – leaving or drifting away. We’d ought not ignore the signs of life and hope; but neither should these soothe us into complacency in the face of much larger failures.
The Archdiocese of Cincinnati just recently announced a plan to reduce its 208 parishes to 60 “families of parishes.” When one of the nation’s oldest archdioceses has little choice but to shutter almost 70 percent of its parishes, something is very seriously wrong. This is not the first time an American diocese has been forced to dramatically reduce and restructure its parishes to meet fiscal and demographic changes.
A recent article on this state of affairs from Terry Mattingly, drawing attention to this “elephant in the sanctuary,” quotes a young Joseph Ratzinger:
It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. . . .And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals.
Keep in mind, the future Pope Benedict XVI was writing this in 1969. One of the divisions in the Church today is between those who think the “terrific upheavals” can yet be avoided and those who believe the only way toward renewal for the Church is “through.”
Whether renewal comes by avoiding catastrophe or by going through it, history tells us that renewal in the Church rarely trickles down from above. Renewal rarely begins with a grand strategy. It begins with discernment and the choice to trust radically in God’s Providence. It begins with a radical response to God’s call, a “fiat” that is given before, not after, we know where He’s leading us. What God does with this “fiat” is always new and surprising, but the fiat is always the same. Mary, of course, is the prime example of this among the saints.
It is one thing to see the clear hand of providence in the lives of those who generously respond to God’s call when we have the benefit of decades or centuries or millennia of hindsight. In the moment, however, saints-in-the-making are as likely to appear as eccentrics and holy fools as they are to appear as polished leaders with impeccable credentials.
The good news is that there are more holy fools out there than we recognize. And that, as in every age, they are the hope for the future flourishing of the Church: disciples answering the call to be leaven. However dark these days may be, and whether you think we are closer to the beginning or the end of these “terrific upheavals,” as Christians, we always have hope. It is not a hope for worldly success, or even that we will live to see the ecclesial (and social and political and cultural) renewal we hope will come. It is the hope that comes from knowing that however grim the battle, the war has already been won.
Will the Vatican have the gumption to say “No Thanks” to apparently former Catholic Joe Biden and the US State Department, or just go along????
Now to Missouri…Hey Archbishops, instead of focusing on three - five confessed and convicted killers each year…
Why not focus on telling voters to stop voting for the politicians who consistently vote to fund Planned Parenthood, to drop the Hyde Amendment, who say a woman can hire a hit man to kill her unborn child, even if it is 8 months old in her womb?
You guys could save thousands of lives each year and over the next, say 20…add it up. Those babies are not convicted of anything, nor did they confess to murder, armed robbery that resulted in death.
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Obama and the liberal wack-jobs actually wanted to nominate this guy for a life-time appointment to the Supreme Court😬
And…
And…
And…
China wants to conquer you as much as radical Muslims want to kill non-believers. World a dangerous place - see proceeding article.
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Nikki Haley (next US President?)
NIKKI HALEY: “Well, it sounds like I hit a nerve. Secondly, it's amazing to me how the liberal media can't stand it when someone Black or brown happens to talk about the fact that America is the best country in the world. The fact that we are blessed to be free and blessed to live in America. I'm going to keep saying it. We should all talk about the blessings of America. We're not a perfect country, but every day our focus is to make today better than yesterday. And that's how I was raised. I was raised to have hope.
I was raised in America, did have challenges as we were going, but I also was raised to live and see that me, a brown family in a small southern rural town, the people when they used to whisper about us are used to exclude us. I saw something very American happen because they started to smile at us. They started to talk to us and they welcomed us in. And that's the part of America that I was raised in, and that's the part of America I'm proud of. And that same state elected me as the first female and first minority governor. And you can't say that we're a racist country. You just can't and they can't stand it when a brown Republican says that.”
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This is what happens when feelings trump clear thinking…what did they think would happen? Look at the MSU football team…and what about the truly under privileged students not on scholarship or the piano major, etc. This is horrible. Will the jealous linemen let the defense through to crush the money grubbing QB, “we’ll show him”.
Amazing player production from front office, really startling, and I love the comb o name from Expos and Devil Rays…
So, I was wondering, how does this number compare to COVID deaths and where are our priorities. Should we wear blood clot masks? Mandate them?
BELOW THE FOLD: WARNING:
Fake office, fake “press”, this stuff is truly unbelievable
You hear billions and trillions of dollars thrown around by politicians. They act like this money is petty cash and can be given at the drop of a hat to anyone for any reason.
This is too true to be funny. The next time you hear a politician use the word 'billion' in a casual manner, think about whether you want the 'politicians’ spending YOUR tax money. A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, But one ad agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its releases:
A. A billion seconds ago it was 1959
B. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
C. A billion hours ago our ancestors were.living in the Stone Age.
D. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.
E. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, At the rate our government Is spending it.
While this thought is still fresh in our brain... let's take a look at New Orleans … It's amazing what you can learn with some simple division.
Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D) Was asking Congress for 250 BILLION DOLLARS To rebuild New Orleans.Interesting number... What does it mean?
A. Well .. If you are one of the 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman and child) You each get $516,528
B. Or... If you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans , your home gets $1,329,787.
C. Or... If you are a family of four…your family gets $2,066,012.
Hello, Washington , D.C … Are all of your calculators broken?
Building Permit Tax CDL License Tax Cigarette Tax Corporate Income Tax Dog License Tax Federal Income Tax (Fed) Federal Unemployment Tax (FU TA) Fishing License Tax Food License Tax Fuel Permit Tax Gasoline Tax Hunting License Tax Inheritance Tax Inventory Tax IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax) IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax) Liquor Tax Luxury Tax Marriage License Tax Medicare Tax Property Tax Real Estate Tax Service charge Taxes Social Security Tax Road Usage Tax (Truckers) Sales Taxes Recreational Vehicle Tax School Tax State Income Tax State Unemployment Tax (SUTA) Telephone Federal Excise Tax Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Tax Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax Telephone State and Local Tax Telephone Usage Charge Tax Utility Tax Vehicle License Registration Tax Vehicle Sales Tax Watercraft Registration Tax Well Permit Tax Workers Compensation Tax (And to think, we left British Rule to avoid so many taxes)
STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY?
Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago... And our nation was the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no national debt.. We had the largest middle class in the world... And Mom wanted to stay home to raise the kids… she could!
I am making more use of links, music and visual. Click on them and then you might have a second link to search. Some locations, such as YouTube generate revenue for your "free" viewing by running ads, so be patient. On occasion there is a "skip ad" button. Sometimes it will load and start when you go there, sometimes you need to click on the white arrow in the red box.
I hope you enjoy the updates to my art and life as presented in this blog. IF you don't like the political stuff and don't want to receive future blogs just say so, no hard feelings. So far, only five have taken me up on the offer. With that in mind, remember: BELOW THE FOLD is where (most) of the controversial stuff is placed. Sometimes stuff is a hybrid, say humor and political. Nevertheless, I do this blog for me, it clears my mind and then I do it to share stuff I think is interesting, fun, needed to be considered, etc. I like, also, the feedback I receive, either on a specific article or the concept in general. Right now there are about 70 of you who receive this directly. Having said that… Claude
I looked back, first post in 2014, they primarily featured one or two artworks, then in 2017 added content. So, here we are today.
ART:
Other:
FLORIDA:
Could be in humor section, nevertheless…
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Florida snorkeler Carter Viss fights for water safety after hit by boat at Breakers Reef
When Trump was president, Serbia knew what they couldn’t do
Greg was there, told me how Serbia thinks Kosovo is still part of Serbia
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Bishop Barron
TWENTY-SEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME LUKE 10:38-42 Friends, today’s Gospel is the story of Martha and Mary. I’d like to offer a fresh take on this famous little story. One of the principal marks of Jesus’ teaching and ministry is the overturning of social conventions. And one of the most striking and surprising of Jesus’ moves was a radical inclusion of women.
While this typically women’s work was going on, men would sit out in the main room of the residence and talk. If a prominent rabbi or Pharisee were present, the men would sit at his feet and listen to his words.
Now we can see why Mary’s attitude was so offensive to Martha and probably to everyone else in the room. Martha wasn’t simply mad that Mary was giving her more work to do; she was mad that Mary had the gall to assume the stance of a man, to take up her position in the men’s space. ************
And… MARK 10:2-16 Friends, in our Gospel, Jesus defines the fundamental sacredness of marriage. I’m convinced that the deep sacramental and religious meaning of marriage—even within the Church—has been, in recent years, dramatically compromised. We say that marriage is a vocation, but do we mean it?
We can look at human sexual relationships at a number of different levels. Two people can come together purely for physical pleasure, for economic reasons, or for psychological companionship. And we might witness two people coming together out of authentic love.
But none of these levels is what the Bible means by marriage. When I was doing parish work, I would invariably ask young couples, "Why do you want to get married in church?" Most would say something like, "We love each other." But I said, "Well, that’s no reason to get married in church." Usually, they looked stunned. But I meant it.
You come to church to be married before God and his people when you are convinced that your marriage is not, finally, about you; that it is about God and about serving God’s purposes; that it is, as much as the priesthood of a priest, a vocation, a sacred calling. ************************
And one more…
LUKE 9:43B–45 Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus predicts his being handed over to men—that is, his Crucifixion. Here is the point I want to make: we are meant to see on that cross our own ugliness. What brings Jesus to the cross? Stupidity, anger, mistrust, institutional injustice, betrayal, denial, unspeakable cruelty, fear. St. Peter puts it with disquieting laconicism: the Author of life came and you killed him. In the light of the cross, all of the vermin are revealed. This is why we speak of the cross as God’s judgment on the world.
So far, so awful. But we can’t stop telling the story at this point. Dante and every other spiritual master know that the only way up is down. When we live unaware of our sins, we will never make spiritual progress. So we need the light, however painful it is. Then we can begin to rise. Once Dante makes it all the way to the center of hell, he suddenly finds himself climbing out.
On the cross of Jesus, we meet our own sin. But we also meet the divine mercy, which has taken that sin upon himself in order to swallow it up. ********************************
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From WSJ
Thanks to ridiculous and expensive (YOU are paying for this crap) bank regulations…every week I receive these mailings to “inform me” of holdings in managed accounts. This one had about 20 pages of the same stuff. Assured Nominees…Confirmation Hearings. On and on and on.
Back to nutz…
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WHAT???? Think about this…
*********************. In case you missed it in the title up front
Reflection: Silence exits so that we might speak to God. And it is in silence that God communicates His gaces to us. —St Vincent de Paul
Prayer: Heavenly Father, teach me to appreciate the value of silence in my life. Let me set aside a few silent moments each day for thinking about You and speaking to You.
The “right to reproductive freedom,” as it is called, is an interesting “right.” One might have thought it would be a “right” that would prevent the Chinese government from sterilizing women or enforcing a “one-child” policy. But, oddly, it’s not. In practice, it’s the right to terminate the life of another human being.
Now, granted, there are those who argue that a baby, even just ten minutes before birth, is not a “human being.” The baby only becomes “human” after birth – and perhaps not even then. “Ethicists,” such as Princeton’s Peter Singer, argue that no newborn should be considered a person until thirty days after birth. So too, philosopher Michael Tooley argues that a human possesses a right to life “only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.”
How we would gauge “scientifically” the presence or absence of an adequate “concept of self,” especially in, say, marijuana-smoking teens or homeless people on the streets, is hard to say. It’s a slippery slope, one would think.
These men, and other abortion supporters, often hold positions of influence at major universities. Still, history often provides valuable lessons and insights in such matters. I suggest reading accounts of the arguments high-level philosophers and scientists in the nineteenth century used to “demonstrate scientifically” that black people were a “lesser” form of human being, thus not “persons” in the sense meant by the Declaration of Independence.
Several major philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Kant, Voltaire, and Hume were proponents of race inequality and expressed negative judgments about Africans as a “primitive” race. The Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus and the German physiologist Johann Blumenbach argued for distinct “species” of Homo sapiens. Soon, scientists were ranking them, especially evolutionary biologists who argued for polygenism, the multiple geneses of different species, rather than the monogenism advocated in the Biblical creation account. Many argued that blacks were less “evolved.”
In 1799 Charles White, a Manchester physician, published the earliest “scientific” study of human races. White had scrupulously measured the body parts of a group of blacks and whites, lending the semblance of hard science to his conclusions that the Negro, the American Indian, some Asiatic tribes, and Europeans were of different species and there was a gradation of the races.
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Thomas Jefferson, in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” recorded his “observation” of black people that “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection,” justifying their enslavement. One wonders whether he would have judged them to possess a sufficient “concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states.”
In 1851, noted physician William Cartwright, professor of “diseases of the Negro” at Tulane University, reported to his fellow doctors in the Medical Association of Louisiana that Negroes had smaller brains and blood vessels, which explained their tendency toward indolence. The true cause of their “debasement of mind,” he concluded from the results of his studies, was the “defective hematosis, or atmospherization of the blood, conjoined with a deficiency of cerebral matter in the cranium. . .[that] has rendered the people of Africa unable to take care of themselves.” Very scientific sounding, but pure bunk. However eminent these men were then, they are viewed with contempt now.
Such theories still persist. I read recently an article bemoaning the persistence of white racism, “despite the advent of modern DNA science, which has shown race to be fundamentally a social construct. Humans, as it turns out, share about 99.9 percent of their DNA with each other, and outward physical characteristics. . .occupy just a tiny portion of the human genome.” Absolutely. So let’s stipulate once and for all that any being with human DNA is fully human, not a second-class “human” whose rights can be denied.
But back in 1857, all the very sophisticated philosophy and science of the day resulted in the Supreme Court deciding for the entire nation in the Dred Scott case that black slaves were not and could not be citizens of the United States. It was widely thought, even among some who opposed slavery, that trying to reverse this “slavery right” would simply be too disruptive. Best to leave things as they were.
At a Southern Rights Association meeting in 1851 (and by “rights” here, they meant the right to own slaves, not the rights of slaves), Josiah C. Nott, a South Carolina physician, anthropologist, and a future medical director in the Confederate army, told the assembled defenders of “rights” that the institution of slavery must be protected because it “has grown up with us from our infancy, it has become part of our very being; our national prosperity and domestic happiness are inseparable from it.”
Why it’s almost as though he was arguing that the institution “could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have. . .made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on” the institution of slavery. But no, that was Justice Kennedy writing in 1992 about abortion in Planned Parenthood v Casey.
Not only has denying the full humanity of all biological human beings always been a mistake, it has shown itself repeatedly to be one of the worst mistakes we ever make. And yet it is one we continue to make and are loathe to abandon once we make it.
*Image:Portrait of a Young Woman by Jean-Etienne Liotard, late 18th century [St. Louis Museum of Arts, St. Louis, MO]
YET… President Joe Biden reversed a Trump-era ban on abortion referrals by taxpayer-funded federal family planning clinics Monday, returning some $60 million in annual funding to Planned Parenthood. Former President Donald Trump’s policy amounted to a prohibition against giving taxpayer funding to healthcare providers who actively promoted or partnered with the abortion industry. Planned Parenthood tweeted: “Thanks, [President Biden], and everyone who organized to make this happen!”
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BEAUTY MATTERS, AESTHETIC EDUCATION MATTERS by Robert MixaSeptember 28, 2021
Aesthetic education matters. Noble art cultivates noble souls. Until recently, most civilizations have understood this, encouraging educators to introduce the youth to art, beauty, and good taste. This is what is known as an “aesthetic education.” But how many educators do this today? When taste has been reduced to mere preference—wherein the distinction between superior or inferior taste is meaningless and even offensive—criticism of taste is considered off-limits. This view has gained hold not only in popular culture but even in the schools, threatening the very purpose of education. And while it’s important to be reticent about being too critical and a snob, education—and the soul—depends on the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility that can identify what constitutes “good” art.
At the heart of education is the development of an aesthetic sense—that is, a receptiveness to the goodness and beauty that ultimately opens the soul to transcendent beauty itself. Beauty is not just a formalism devoid of all content but a form embodied with meaning and intelligibility, as the expression of the mind of God. Without this transcendent horizon, the human spirit does not blossom, and art, the spirit’s expression, becomes bland and uninspired. Thankfully, there’s a long tradition of aesthetic education we can draw from to recover the cultivation of taste that desires only the finest that flows from the fount of wisdom—wisdom in Latin is sapientia, which has its root in sapor, taste. Such water helps the wings of the spirit grow.
The cultivation of the aesthetic sense matters for without it civilization and its refinements would never be passed on and developed in new expressions. As cultivation, aesthetics plays a role in cult or divine praise. It refines the capacity to recognize the holy and the divine glory even when it appears in the apparently ugly, such as the crucifixion and death of the Lord. Having an aesthetic sensibility makes us better disciples. I took this very seriously as a theology teacher, and that’s why I showed the late Sir Roger Scruton’s BBC documentary “Why Beauty Matters” each year to my students. And while Scruton’s documentary scandalized many of my students who thought all taste was subjective and relative, it at least got them to think about aesthetic sensibility and why it matters. Much of the faith rests on the objective value of beauty that subjects are meant to perceive.
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Question: What holy place far from Rome was visited on pilgrimage by Sts. Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, and many popes, including St. John Paul II? Perhaps you would be keen to join this illustrious company. Answer: The shrine of St. Michael in Monte Sant’ Angelo, on the slopes of Mount Gargano overlooking the Adriatic, located on the “spur” of the boot which is Italy. The shrine itself is located in a cave, an ancient site of pagan worship, where according to hagiographical tradition the Archangel Michael appeared in 490. He instructed that a shrine be built to his honor, and that those who invoked him would be defended in battle against pagan military incursions. Pope Gelasius I approved the shrine in 493. LINK to the full article, which is worth your time
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IF you think about this stuff…
The Gospel, Untamed Fr. Paul D. Scalia: In order to remain whole for heaven, we need occasionally to cut off some of the things on earth.
There is always the temptation to domesticate the Gospel — to smooth out the rough edges, sanitize the language, and naturalize the supernatural. In a word, to make it comfortable. In this way, the Beatitudes become simply gentle sayings about the poor, meek, and sorrowful. The twofold command of love becomes a mere exhortation to kindness. Even the death of Christ becomes just a good example.
Saint Mark tells us that those who followed Christ were amazed and afraid. (Mk 10:32). Well, we want to be comfortable, not afraid. Not comfortable as God desires to make us (with the peace beyond all understanding), but comfortable on our own terms, according to our earthbound understanding. We want the Gospel to make our life better, not to upend it. So, we try to tame His words and make them fit for polite company.
Then comes along a Scripture passage such as today’s Gospel. (Mk 9:38-47) Our Lord’s discussion of fastening millstones around necks, cutting off limbs, and plucking out eyes shocks us back to the reality of the supernatural and the demands of the Gospel. There is no smoothing out these words or giving them a worldly interpretation. Either our Lord means that sin is punished, sometimes eternally, or He is speaking complete nonsense. Either our choices here have eternal significance, or they mean nothing. There is no in-between.
Our Lord draws us into this truth by using the example of a universally agreed upon villain — the man who ensnares children, the one who “causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin.” In recent years the Church has had many painful reasons to reflect (perhaps not enough) on these words. The abuse of children draws universal condemnation, even from those (ironically) who have failed to protect them.
People object to many of our Lord’s words. But I’ve never heard anyone complain about the condemnation of the abuser: “It would be better for him if a great millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.” Of course, the only reason that fate would be better for such a man is because a worse punishment awaits him in eternity. Temporal decisions have eternal consequences.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
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AND, this thought
Satan is not an “evil god” who rivals God's power. “Some religious traditions around the world have held the existence of two supreme deities, a good god and an evil god,” writes Philip Kosloski. But that assertion is absolutely not true. “The Catholic Church clearly teaches that Satan is a creature and God is the creator. God created Satan originally as a good angel, who then rebelled against his creator, choosing hatred and isolation rather than union with God,” he writes.
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Our Lady's Message to Marija
on September 25, 2021 In Medjugorge
“Dear children!
Pray, witness and rejoice with me because the Most High continues to send me to lead you on the way of holiness.
Be aware, little children, that life is short and eternity is waiting for you to give glory to God with your being, with all the saints. Little children, do not worry about earthly things, but long for Heaven. Heaven will be your goal and joy will begin to reign in your heart.
I am with you and bless all of you with my motherly blessing.
Thank you for having responded to my call.”
Pretty simple, isn’t it. CEL
HUMOR:
If you know the back story, this is HILARIOUS
TOO MANY DIVORCES…
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Learning from the best liars, looking at you JB
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President Joe Biden told a reporter that America will go back to normal after as many as 98% of Americans submit to mandatory vaccination and take COVID-19 shots. "Well I think, look -- I think we get the vast majority, like what's going on in some of the ... some industries and some schools -- it's 97, 98 percent,” Biden said in answer to a reporter who asked when America could go back to normal. “But I'm not the scientist,” Biden added. “But one thing for certain: A quarter of the country can't go unvaccinated.” The president’s comments received an immense public backlash.
George Orwell, the writer, and Josef Pieper, the Catholic philosopher, came from very different backgrounds. They had very different views. But both shared a keen interest in the use, and abuse, of language. The reason was simple. Words have power. Words matter. Consider:
The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” For Americans, equality is a sacred word. We revere it despite the fact that, in reality, we’re not equal because none of us is identical to anyone else. We have different skills, intellects, deficiencies, and characters. Nor do our lives produce equal happiness or success; no society can guarantee otherwise and remain free. We are each unique, unrepeatable, and uniquely loved by God. We are thus inescapably unequal. Nonetheless, the ideal of political equality properly understood – equality of natural rights and dignity endowed by a Creator, and equality before the law – grounds the American experience. And it has had immense practical value, producing the greatest democratic republic in history.
But words and their meanings can be slippery creatures. In recent years, “equality” as a word in our political vocabulary has undergone its own curious “trans” surgery. The result is that delicious new word, equity. The two words sound similar. And they do share family DNA. Both derive from the Latin root aequus, meaning flat or level. But equity and equality are not the same thing, any more than “freedom of religion” and “freedom of worship” are the same thing. The differences may seem small, but they widen as the two concepts diverge.
Equality suggests sameness, as in the same access to voting, services, and opportunity. It’s typically measurable by material standards like income, poverty rates, crime stats, and education. Equity is more ambiguous. It more clearly implies a should, a heightened sense of right and wrong and the urgency to do something about it. Equity insists that resources should be directed, or redirected, to heal inequities caused by past inequalities. What those inequities and inequalities might be, why they exist, and how to fix them are matters open to dispute and adjudication. So equity is, in effect, a clergy word freighted with moral tension, and there’s nothing wrong with such words. . .in the hands of the right clergy. The trouble is that the “clergy” in today’s post-Christian, secularist culture is our smugly progressive leadership class and its supporting cast of social science shamans and media homilists.
In practice, “equity” is part of a posse of magic nouns. The rest of the posse – words like diversity, inclusion, and tolerance – share a similar moralizing ambiguity, though tolerance was last seen hobbling into the sunset. It’s essentially dead now from exhaustion. Ironically, each of the magic words, taken individually and understood properly, makes excellent sense. We’re a nation of immigrants. Tolerance, diversity, and inclusion are simply statements of American fact. They’re often pursued imperfectly, but they’ve always been part of our nation’s life.
But tolerance no longer serves a purpose in the culture war against enemies of progress, notably those retro Christian beliefs about sex. After all, why tolerate bigots? And in the hands of today’s missionaries of enlightenment, diversity actually means a celebration of separateness and fracture, aggravating divisions along racial, sexual-preference, and ethnic lines, and resulting in more, not less, social conflict. Inclusionmeans forcing families and religious communities to accept behaviors they find morally destructive. All of which creates turmoil; all of which naturally meets resistance; all of which then requires more extensive and coercive centralized authority to get the job done.
Plenty of sane people sense this. They grasp, at a gut level, Josef Pieper’s warnings that “if the word becomes corrupted, human existence itself will not remain unaffected and untainted,” and that “language, disconnected from the roots of truth. . .invariably turns into an instrument of power.” In effect, as Pieper notes even more brutally, words become “an instrument of rape.” But too many sane people hesitate to speak because they fear being branded as callous or stupid or reactionary. They feel powerless to push back.
And for good reason. When preached by today’s apostles of urgent change, and then chanted endlessly in everything from fashion blogs to mainstream news reporting to athletic shoe commercials, these magic words infect our language with a kind of hypnotic voodoo. The somnambulated masses can then glide forward to a sunny future, above the vulgar trenchwork of logic and debate – unencumbered by either, and washed clean of skepticism.
And that’s exactly the purpose of the words.
Language shapes thought. Thought shapes choices and actions. Choices and actions shape and reshape the world. In this sense, today’s magic nouns are the distant kin of Orwell’s dystopian language “Newspeak.” Its purpose, per Orwell, “was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world view and mental habits proper to the devotees” of a particular ideology, “but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”
Does this sound a little too bleak for a nation with so many good people, and such deep resources for renewal? Maybe. Would that it were so. In any event, we’ll find out soon enough. Liars are doing very well in our nation’s public life at the moment – all those “devout” Catholic members of Congress who sacralize permissive abortion surely head the list – and lies have the habit of growing and spreading like tumors until people name and resist them. So it’s useful to remember that “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight.” (Prov 12:22)
The virtue we need at the moment is courage. As Paul said, we’re called to speak the truth with love. (Eph 4:15) With love. But we do need to speak the truth. . .and demand the same from others.
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From WSJ article…love the excerpt quote 😊
From Readers Digest
NOT funny to the shaq…I agree, Hollywood, movies, theatre, etc are nutzzzz
"These celebrities are going freaking crazy and I don’t want to be one. I denounce my celebrity-ness today. I’m done with it," he told the New York Post on Friday.
"I don’t want to be in that category. Celebrities are crazy, they really are. Don’t call me that anymore. These people are out of their freaking mind with how they treat people, what they do, what they say. That’s never been me. I never want to be looked at like that."
O’Neal added he didn’t want to be stereotyped as someone who is "out of their mind" and would rather be known for his kindness away from the basketball court and television cameras.
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I featured Shaq in an earlier blog showing how wrong systemic racism branding is. From almost nothing to multiple great careers, earning BIG dollars, using the $ for the good of others, etc. YOU can succeed here in the US if you want to no matter what color are you or where you begin.
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BELOW THE FOLD: WARNING:
The Biden mess
All inter-related:
“Leftist activists can come to your house with bullhorns. Film you in the bathroom. Loot your business. Burn police stations. The FBI does nothing. But if conservative parents raise their voices at a school board meeting, they’re hunted down as terrorists. The law is dead.” -Matt Walsh
THINK that is hyperbole or partisan whining?…
President Biden downplayed the actions of left-wing agitators who filmed themselves harassing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-AZ, as she entered a bathroom stall. “I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody,” Biden said. “The only people it doesn’t happen to are people who have Secret Service standing around them. So it’s part of the process.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Monday that he will be sending Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and Department of Justice (DOJ) officers to “identify” and “prosecute” “threats” connected with protests against public school officials. Christopher Rufo, a leader in the growing movement against the current state of public education, took issue with the move. “The Biden administration is rapidly repurposing federal law enforcement to target political opposition,” Rufo said.
AND THEN…
Let’s close our own pipelines…
ABC News left out a remark from former President Barack Obama describing "open borders" as "unsustainable" from the televised portion of his interview on ABC's "Good Morning America." "Immigration is tough. It always has been because, on the one hand, I think we are naturally a people that wants to help others. And we see tragedy and hardship and families that are desperately trying to get here so that their kids are safe, and they're in some cases fleeing violence or catastrophe," Obama told co-host Robin Roberts in the excluded portion on Tuesday. "At the same time, we're a nation state. We have borders. The idea that we can just have open borders is something that ... as a practical matter, is unsustainable," he added.
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Think about it…
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Voodoo and Its Enchantments
Francis X. Maier: Language shapes thought. Thought shapes choices and actions. Choices and actions shape and reshape the world.
George Orwell, the writer, and Josef Pieper, the Catholic philosopher, came from very different backgrounds. They had very different views. But both shared a keen interest in the use, and abuse, of language. The reason was simple. Words have power. Words matter. Consider:
The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” For Americans, equality is a sacred word. We revere it despite the fact that, in reality, we’re not equal because none of us is identical to anyone else. LINK for the remainder of his thoughts
Mainline Florida: Link to Mainline Florida. 
This concern for “the church” rings hollow. Every priest promises God – through his bishop – to pray the Breviary. On the 27th Sunday of the liturgical year, priests (including, presumably, the German bishops) should have read this passage from Pope Saint Gregory the Great:
And…
And…
Amazing player production from front office, really startling, and I love the comb o name from Expos and Devil Rays…
