Mainline Florida: Link to Mainline Florida.

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

But first, a word from our sponsor: Return to prayer, because the fruit of prayer is joy and faith, without which you cannot live. Mary

ART:

Love his work

Great touch

MY Version, The Grandfather 🤓

FLORIDA: Waiting at a stoplight and a White Bird landed on a bush next to me:

Christmas in Florida

Just another sunset from my driveway

LISTENING TO:

BABBLE: LINK TO STUDIO VERSIONS OF:

LINK to TRIBE

LINK to Take Me Away with video

Funny Rolling Stones concert mistake…LINK - less than two minutes long on YouTube

Remember Atlanta Rhythm Section? So Into You was their big one, they had quite a few hits, but I alway enjoyed Doraville. Here is a fun live version. LINK here, you might have to “skip ad”

And an “Oldies” version - they put on a little weight…

LINK

And. LINK TO fun version of Spooky

Kind of listen…read the transcripts of the new documentary:

Forgot that Alan Parsons was an engineer…did his solo albums reflect Beatles/George Martin influence or did he advance Beatles sound???

In the end, they were four friends who loved to play music, and were able to take an unimaginable journey.

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Remember this one? I like it still: LINK to (Better Watch Out For The) Skin Deep by The Stranglers

Many people tell you that they're your friend
You believe them
You need them
For what's round the river bend

Make sure that you're receiving the signals they send
'Cause brother, you've only got two hands to lend

Maybe there's someone who makes you weep
And some nights loom up ahead
When you're asleep
Some days there's things on your mind you should keep
Sometimes, it's tougher to look than to leap

Better watch out for the skin deep
Better watch out for the skin deep
(Better watch out) Watch out for the skin deep
(Better watch out) Watch out for the skin deep
Better watch out for the skin deep

One day the track that you're climbing gets steep
Your emotions are frayed
And your nerves are starting to creep
Just remember the days
As long as the time that you keep
Brother, you better watch out for the skin deep

Better watch out for the skin deep
Better watch out for the skin deep
(Better watch out) Watch out for the skin deep

And another of theirs. WATER, the link, you’ll have a brief ad first

HUMOR:

😬

Isn’t it McGraw Fox News?

She’ll soon be with her boyfriend….

More president dufus

There is a crooked one at the hospital…

Is this true?

THINGS IN WHICH I AM INTERESTED:

Today’s heading is from an article by Fr George Schultze. Human beings…

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One Sunday morning:

Friends, today’s Gospel tells the marvelous story of the Visitation. At the Annunciation, the angel had told Mary that the child to be conceived in her would be the new David. With that magnificent prophecy still ringing in her ears, Mary set out to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who was married to Zechariah, a temple priest.

No first-century Jew would have missed the significance of their residence being in "the hill country" of Judah. That was precisely where David found the ark, the bearer of God’s presence. To that same hill country now comes Mary, the definitive and final Ark of the Covenant.

Elizabeth is the first to proclaim the fullness of the Gospel: "How does it happen to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?"—the Lord, which is to say, the God of Israel. Mary brings God into the world, thus making it, at least in principle, a temple.

And then Elizabeth announces that, at the sound of Mary’s greeting, "the infant in my womb leaped for joy." This is the unborn John the Baptist doing his version of David’s dance before the ark of the covenant, his great act of worship of the King.

Reflect: Without the Holy Spirit, this exchange between Mary and Elizabeth would not have been possible. Reflect on the power of the Holy Spirit in your own life and in the Church.

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Dear Uncle Joe, Dick Durban, Aunt Nancy:

So, for the sake of confused brethren, let’s try this one more time: in “The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church,” adopted by a vote of 222 to 8, the U.S. bishops taught the following – 1) Facilitating the grave moral evil of abortion is a public act that fractures one’s communion with Christ and estranges one from the Church.

2) Those who are not in full communion with the Church because of their public actions should not present themselves for Holy Communion. To present oneself for Holy Communion is to state, publicly, that one is in full communion with the Church. If that is not the case, then the lie of presenting oneself for Holy Communion compounds the evil of the public acts that estrange one from the Church.

3) The bishops have a solemn obligation to inform estranged Catholics of their situation and work to catechize them in the truth. If that catechesis fails and the estranged Catholic obstinately continues to facilitate grave evil, then he or she must be told not to present himself or herself for Holy Communion.

Clear enough?

Thanks, George Weigle.

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Current recruits…we’ll see how it turns out.

I try to walk every morning, also…

Having recently been there…

Monique Robles: I do not have confidence that parents are able to give truly informed consent. Vaccines are intended to prevent disease and interrupt transmission. The current anti-SARS CoV-2 injections are not effective at either of these.

ADD:

Compare To Covid…

In November, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released information showing that, for the first time, over 100,000 Americans died in a single 12-month period from drug overdoses.

Surveying our nation’s attempts to slow this flood of deaths, one just sees many naive, wayward, and weak attempts at “harm reduction.” But if we’d return to first principles, we’d see that Catholic ethics can provide the moral clarity — based on the dignity of the human person and the rejecting of evil — to develop effective strategies that can begin to bring these numbers down.

To put that 100,000 in context: from the 1970s through the late 1990s, the number of annual drug-overdose deaths hovered around 5,000, sometimes reaching as high as 9,000. But then in 1999, that number jumped to almost 17,000 and was considered a major crisis at the time. Now health officials look back and wish we could “only” have 17,000 deaths in a year, as every year seems to smash the record of the year before.

Only days after the CDC’s announcement of breaking six-figures for the first time, New York City announced they would be opening two “supervised injection sites” where residents can shoot up. The city says they will provide clean needles to prevent diseases and can even reverse overdoses with naloxone. For those who want it, they will also discuss treatment options. These types of projects are popular in larger American cities. Meanwhile, the state of Oregon is also now experimenting with decriminalizing hard drugs in user amounts as part of their more-compassionate approach.

Even Catholic Charities in Albany, New York, operates a needle-exchange program, called “Project Safe Point.” The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith weighed in on a similar move by nuns in Australia in 1999, saying, “the good intention and the hoped-for benefits are not sufficient to outweigh the fact of its constituting an extremely proximate material cooperation in the grave evil of drug abuse and its foreseeable bad side effects.”

But this, naturally, hasn’t stopped many well-intentioned Catholics from pushing ahead with such programs. They seem to be adopting the logic of the enabling parent who hosts teenage experimentation with sex and drugs, because, “Well, they’d be doing it somewhere. At least I know they’re safe.” Anyone who went to high school in the past 50 years knows this approach often created the dangerous environments rather than being an alternative to them. And as someone who has lost more friends than I can count on one hand (nearing two hands) to drugs, the naivety of bringing this attitude to official public policy is beyond infuriating.

The “logic” used is quite similar to that used with “safe sex” education, which created an attitude and environment in which consensual sexual activity was not to be judged—only its harms mitigated. Unsurprisingly, just like with the overdose spikes in the age of judgement-free drug use, we’ve seen the out-of-wedlock birth rate rise in the age of judgement-free sex, going from single digits before the late 1950s and then rising constantly until constituting a near-majority of births today.

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Concerned about the direction of the USA? Some of you are, some are not, some just want to know what time the mall opens…

LINK TO PEW Survey

A new survey of US adults found that 51% 😬 of Catholics pray every day (are you kidding me?)

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Near our house, they were installing a cell tower, look half way up…he is attaching the top to the bottom 😳