As it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you;
he will prepare your way.
A voice of one crying out in the desert:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths.”
John the Baptist appeared in the desert
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
People of the whole Judean countryside
and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem
were going out to him
and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River
as they acknowledged their sins.
John was clothed in camel’s hair,
with a leather belt around his waist.
He fed on locusts and wild honey.
And this is what he proclaimed:
“One mightier than I is coming after me.
I am not worthy to stoop and loosen the thongs of his sandals.
I have baptized you with water;
he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” – Mark 1: 1-8
That, of course, is today’s reading. You did go to Church, right? Even if you didn’t, if you are Christian you have heard it a thousand times. But today it struck home to me…rolling around in my head through the Homily and then, just before I took communion, it was a blast of light. The world is immersed in lies. All lies…and here was Truth, right before me.
I noticed the altar servers – two fine young men and one little lady. And I pondered that I had once been that young and then, when I got a little older, I was beset by lie after lie after lie and, God forgive me, I fell for a lot of them. I prayed that those youngsters would resist them. If there was one bit of advice I could give them it would be just this: keep going to Church. Never stop. Pray constantly. Yeah, a lot of your friends are going to say, “do this!”; “be cool!”; “come on, its just a bit of fun!”. Ignore them! Go to Church. Pray! Be the odd man out. Rely on it, forty years from now when you look back on it all, you’ll be much happier if you remained steadfast now. Make straight his paths.
Because that is what it means – the path to your heart. Make it straight so God can get on in there and keep you safe and bring you to salvation. I had honestly never looked at it that way before. But I do think that my recent yammering on about how bad lies are has been part of the process which reached its climax just this morning.
Because another part of it happened last night. I was scrolling through X and I came across a post from Jill Stein. You remember her – the Green Party candidate from 2016. I think she’s running again in 2024 because that’s what people like her do; that is, she’s going to save us, guys. Anyways, she had posted that because of our veto of the UN ceasefire resolution, the USA was now the sole obstacle to peace. Get it? It isn’t Hamas. Not the rape/death squads. Not the obvious fact that if Hamas is spared via a ceasefire they will just rebuild their forces and send out more rape/death squads. It is the USA. We’re at fault. We’re stopping peace. What sort of evil upon evil person thinks this way?
Turns out, its the sort of evil that was born of upper class Jewish parents in Chicago and then went on to graduate from Harvard medical. Rich, privileged and sheltered, Jill plied her very profitable trade as a doctor and then decided to “give back”. Not the money, of course. But give back in the form of taking up the standard of Progressive reform. If you look at her views, she checks off every last Progressive box. Her views on the Gaza war are just the latest thing; it is hip in Progressive circles to be for the river to the sea right now. That she’s Jewish makes no matter because Progressives are first and last Progressives…their nationality, ethnicity and religion takes the back seat at all times.
People like Jill are the very worst of the worst. The most evil people in the world. Even more evil than Hamas rape squads or Cartel hitmen. How can I say that??? She’s this nice, even-toned, educated woman who just wants peace, justice and equity! Yeah, whatever. I know what her words are…but her words are just mindless repetitions of lies she’s been told…and as a doctor she should damned well know better. She should investigate things and think about them. She doesn’t. She never has. She just accepts and then quite mindlessly promotes. And it is people like Jill who promote the Progressive policies which create, in turns, Hamas rape squads and Cartel hitmen.
Things don’t happen in a vacuum. On October 6th some Hamas guys didn’t just say, “hey, lets rape some girls” and have at it. No more than Mexican drug cartels just all of a sudden start beheading people. It all built up over time. Decades of time. Decades of time where Progressive ideology has been dominant in the West even when particular Western nations might have had an officially non-Progressive government. Essentially since World War One the Western world has done whatever Progressives told it to. There has been hardly any resistance to it. And it was all sold with the same level of intellectual validity as that guy in high school who urged you to smoke a joint: “come on, man; it’ll be cool!”.
Another passage in the Bible relates how those who lead others astray would be better off having a millstone tied ’round their necks and be tossed into the sea. Hamas and Cartel murderers will have much to atone for at Judgement Day, but people like Jill are those who are leading these little one’s astray and it’ll go a lot harder for them. It is especially incumbent upon those with wealth and power to do the right thing. Some poor SOB born into grinding poverty who gets suckered into a gang or movement is a lot more forgivable than the people who simply ought to know better.
Tolkien understood this and he put it in The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn complains a bit about how those dependent upon his protection scorned him…but he doesn’t grudge it. As he says, if simple people are free to be simple, then he’s done his duty. That is what nobility is for – what it is supposed to do: shield the common people. Instead, our nobility deliberately leads the people astray. They in turns encourage barbarism and then discourage fighting against it. They urge us into moral disintegration and call us racists when moral disintegration breaks down the social contract.
Make straight those paths, guys. We’re in for a long, dark night of suffering. It is coming. Only the very oldest among us are going to be able to skip out on it. But the world must be turned upside down. What is must be destroyed and a new society erected on the ruins. It is Fall of Rome II – and just like the first time, it will be those who have faith in God who will inherit the ruins.
Blogs For Victory 
That, of course, is today’s reading. You did go to Church, right?
I did, and that was today’s reading in our church as well. I emailed a link to your post to our pastor, as much of what you said was in his sermon this morning.
BTW, love the song.
Great minds think alike!
Of course, foolish minds do, too!
I have written about my belief that a lot of Democrats are not evil, that they accept the idea that virtue is a good thing, and have just been lied to about what constitutes “virtue”. To them, then, “virtue” means total lack of judgment for behavior, so it is virtuous to accept any form or level of what used to be considered depravity and degeneracy. Naturally, the more depraved and degenerate, the more virtuous the acceptance. And praising it conveys even more virtue, while attacking those who do not accept it is yet another level of virtue.
This twisted concept of virtue extends all the way through our political life. To abandon our national sovereignty and open our borders is just generosity to those who “just want a better life”. Of course these virtue signalers lock their houses when they leave, lock their cars when they park them, but that’s different.
I have been watching a Netflix series called “The Kaminsky Method” about two old men with a fifty-year friendship. One is a very successful Hollywood agent dealing with the death of his wife of fifty years, one is never-quite-successful actor now running an acting school, so it’s set in Los Angeles in that demographic. For the most part it avoids politics and political commentary, but even so it reeks, in a genteel way, of smugness and assumption of being better than those Republicans, seeping through in an occasional comment like one of them being OK with his daughter being in love with a man his age “as long as he’s not a Republican”.
They have taken this virtue signaling and smugness to such an extreme that we might be getting close to the ability to hold up a mirror to them so they can see themselves. But the sense of self-worth the Left sells as the core of its pitch is always going to be hard to deal with because it means having to abandon a concept of self that is not only vitally important to the person but has the appearance of great value to society as well.
I don’t think “Schindler’s List” could be made today, or at least would not be popular, because such a large segment of today’s society just would not understand it.
Bill Maher just kind of touched on this smugness-without-doing-anything mentality. Good for him.
BTW, “The Kaminsky Method” is very sweet and very funny, starring Alan Arkin and Michael Douglas looking older than dirt, and it makes a lot of comments about being our age today.
I’m going to stick with my view of evil. With the caveat that some of them are so badly educated (especially those with advanced degrees) that there are some mitigating circumstances. But, still, God, Himself, doesn’t allow anyone to get completely off the hook. Forgiveness is for the asking, but it has to be asked for and that means a person has to examine their conscience (think) and then feel remorse.
Even the veriest simpleton is liable to judgement because even the dumbest of us know right and wrong. Jill Stein, like all good Progressives, has decreed Israelis to be subhumans – settler/colonialists in the current Progressive parlance. She does this and it doesn’t even register in her own mind that she’s done it…but she does know with certainty that she doesn’t want anyone to decree that she is subhuman. In other words, she knows it is wrong to dehumanize Israelis like that. But she does it. Because that is what being a Progressive demands; and we are not excused for failure to think. God gave us Reason on purpose and just for this.
To me, people like her should be liable to a tribunal far in front of Hamas terrorists. It is people like her who made this happen.
Far be if from me to defend a Progressive, but……there is the simple-minded view of only one side of the coin, which is that it is virtuous to defend the rights and humanity of the Palestinians. And that is as far as it goes. There is a moral imperative to look at both sides of the coin but that is not how these people are taught to think.
It’s such a simple equation: Some people are suffering, so if I climb up on my Moral High Ground and say this is wrong and they should not be made to suffer I am a good person. The complexities of this simple-minded equation are simply not considered, such as the fact that these people essentially created the situation they are in now, and that they created it by attacking and killing and torturing and raping innocent people. The consequences are also not considered, such as the fact that their presumed virtuousness is based on asserting that other people are subhuman and have no right to live.
I hate the Left and everything it stands for, but I also see the allure to people who are not evil of believing that their positions are positions of virtue. Yes, they are wrong. I’m not saying they are right. I am just pointing out how hard it is to convince people that what they have believed their whole lives makes them virtuous really makes them evil. We can’t be surprised when they are not eager to accept that. And that is what we are up against.
Our church has a men’s breakfast on the second Saturday of every month. Mostly a chance for like-minded men to engage in fellowship, but each month someone is tasked with a devotional of some sort. The guy who offered the devotional yesterday was a life-long sinner and dirtbag (his words) who found Jesus Christ about a decade ago. When he was born again he went all in. You name a problem, personal, community, nation, world, and he can recite scripture that deals with it. During the discussion another fellow related how he met his late wife years ago in the cafeteria at the place where he worked. He noticed that she always brought her lunch and read the Bible while she ate. After he finally got up the nerve to introduce himself he asked her how long she had been reading the Bible. When she said she had read it since she was five years old, he, without thinking, said, “and you’re still not done with it?” She told him she had lost count of the number of times that she had read it, and that each time she learned something new. I consider myself a person of pretty strong faith, but I pale in comparison to that. My fear is that the generations behind me, my kids and my grandkids, not only don’t know God, but they have no desire to. I don’t see that ending well for civilization. It’s one of the things I pray about most.
I thought Cluster, especially, would get a chuckle from this segment from today’s Coffee & Covid:
When Hobbs stole the Governors office, one of her first acts was to remove the rail car barriers on the border that former Gov. Ducey had set up tp help stop illegal crossings, so she is as much to blame as Biden. But she wont tell you that, the media wont tell you that, and her legions of mindless supporters will claim it’s all about money. Rinse and repeat. If you haven’t noticed, the single goal of all the lies Democrats engage in, is simply to acquire more money, which is of course, more power.
Hence the old adage: FOLLOW THE MONEY!
The pendulum continues to swing the other way (also from Coffee & Covid):
Cut the Department of Agriculture by 50%, ditto for the BLM, and move their headquarters back out where they belong—-Missouri and Colorado. Get completely rid of the Departments of Education and Energy, taking the little they actually do regarding education and/or energy and fold those few things into other departments. We need A CDC, just not the hot mess we've got now, and stop all the animal torturing in the name of "research" (AKA grants). The CDC, the FDA and the NIH are collectively responsible for billions and billions of pork distributed to people in the name of "research" and all too often dependent on the most brutal treatment of animals we can imagine. Now that the EPA has proven itself to be nothing but a conduit for Leftist limitations on liberty, the little it has done to protect out environment can also be farmed out to some other agency.
EVERY agency and program has to be restricted to its original charter. Get all agencies out of the Beltway.
I understand the need for lobbyists—-our representatives have such huge constituencies there is no way for the people to individually reach their Senators or Representatives. But make it organized and transparent. Maybe have all meetings with lobbyists held in conference rooms in a specific building with transcripts of the meetings, so a client has to register for a scheduled meeting and the only thing discussed is the matter at hand. No free trips or any other form of bribe or inducement to be favorable to any request.
And I am serious about expanding the United States to 60 states. Right now we have six to ten states with most of the area occupied by conservatives but run by the urban Progressives in their respective large cities. Make California into three states, carve out Oregon and Washington east of the mountains for a third new state, give Illinois a new state separate from Chicago, carve out eastern Colorado and blend it with western Kansas and Nebraska, freeing the rural areas from the urban control of their three state capitals, break most of New York away from NYC, etc. We don't need to go to some remote island for a new state. Rather, set Puerto Rico free and forget about making it a state. As for making DC a state, that is a Constitutional issue. But by splitting up the states which don't really have representative government we also make it easier for people to know and communicate with their representatives.
ENTIRELY RANDOM STUFF
• With an eye toward the frugality that our government is famous for, Joe Biden recently announced that taxpayers will be funding a high-speed rail project for “Over a billion three hundred million trillion three hundred million dollars.” Thank goodness the job went to the lowest bidder, right? And let’s hope that the high-speed train will be harder to derail than Old Joe’s mind.
• Monkeypox is back in the news with an exciting new fatality rate that’s over ten times higher than last time (one out of ten infected people will die). Darn those pesky screen doors at the Wuhan lab! It’s also worth noting that this time we’re supposed to call it “Mpox” because liberals say that “Monkeypox” is racist because monkeys make them think of black people. So the m-word is the new n-word, at least in liberal circles.
mmmmm….if monkeys make you think of black people, doesn’t that make YOU the racist?
For people who consider themselves to be sexually non binary, their thinking is extremely binary. They see everything through a black and white lens … literally.
Its the high speed rail which will get people from Las Vegas, NV all the way to….Rancho Cucamonga. About an hour from Los Angeles given normal traffic patterns. About two hours from San Diego.
This means that if you live in San Diego or Los Angeles – ie, the areas Las Vegas would want to draw you from – you’re going to have to drive for one to two hours to get on the train…and then, true enough, you’ll go very fast to Vegas. But then, on the way back, you have to one again get off the train and hope your car survived the weekend in Rancho Cucamonga while you were tossing the 401k onto the blackjack table. If you car is still there, you’ve got a one to two hour drive. In normal conditions. But they won’t be normal because the way Vegas works is that everyone leaves Las Vegas at about the same time on Sunday morning for that long, hung-over drive to Los Angeles. This is why it is routinely bumper to bumper on the 15 southbound. That traffic jam will merely be shifted from the Primm, NV/Baker, CA area to Rancho Cucamonga as the trains arrive and dump thousands at a time at their cars.
They could, of course, just make the 15 south of Primm four lanes each way and solve the whole traffic problem and get you home at about the same time or maybe 30 minutes later than the bullet train rigamarole will do it…but grifters can’t make much money off widening I-15.
Democrats voters out having fun. The chaos in the country, the endless wars over seas, and the money laundering in DC is wearing me out. It is time to bitch slap Democrats back into reality
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12853241/Seattle-car-hit-pedestrian-laugh-video-police-investigation.html
Seattle is definitely FUBAR (hat-tip, Jeff Childers)
Actually, it all started when the left latched onto the grammatical term “gender” to create another victim class and sow division, hatred and chaos.
Completely unsustainable.
Just marinate in the stupidity of this comment for a moment … no wonder SF is such a disaster. When did Democrat hand over their balls?
Liberal San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston blames capitalism for city’s sprawling homeless problem and says it’s ‘counterproductive’ to arrest people openly doing illegal drugs in public
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12853431/San-Francisco-homeless-drugs-Dean-Preston-blames-capitalism.html
Yes, capitalism is based on the concept of everyone being productive in some way, while Preston’s “Progressivism” (socialism) is based on allowing people to be mere parasites feeding on the work of others.
You know what’s counterproductive? Handing out Narcan in drug-infested neighborhoods.
As soon as Rafael Mercado gets word in his South Side (Milwaukee) neighborhood that people are overdosing on a bad batch of fentanyl-laced drugs, he races to distribute Narcan before more lives are lost.
Narcan, a drug used to reverse the effects of opioid overdoses, is in short supply in Milwaukee. This worries advocates like Mercado who distribute the life-saving drug.
“We’ll take Narcan if we have it and fentanyl test strips and post up at the hot spots on National and Greenfield Avenue,” Mercado said. “We can’t hit the streets without Narcan or with minimal supplies of it.”
Mercado is the leader of Team HAVOC, a grassroots group that conducts street outreach, needle cleanups and other addiction awareness activities in Milwaukee.
He said obtaining doses of Narcan, the brand name for naloxone medication and a key tool in slowing the pace of drug overdose deaths, is a challenge in the city for groups like his that support individuals who use opioids.
This is a problem that will solve itself, if allowed to proceed to its natural conclusion.
On Monday, a group of anti-Israel activists tried to disrupt the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., calling for a “ceasefire now” and trying to stop funding to Israel, claiming aid equals bombing in a sign they spread out across the floor.
The activists dropped “blood money” on the floor, lay down, and wouldn’t move.
The police then started clearing them out and arresting them. The police had to physically pick up some of the activists to remove them because they refused to move
There was also one guy who got arrested for climbing up a black statue. He was charged with resisting arrest.
As Fox notes in the above clip, this was going on while lawmakers were considering what to do about aid to Israel.
…………………………
But the activists weren’t charged with obstructing and trying to influence a Congressional proceeding, which could result in a significant sentence.
About 49 were arrested. They were charged with a violation of D.C. Code 22-1307.
“It is illegal to demonstrate inside the Congressional Buildings,” Capitol Police said. “More than 40 people were arrested for D.C. Code § 22–1307 — Crowding, Obstructing, or Incommoding. One person climbed a statue in the atrium. He was arrested separately for § 22–405.01 — Resisting Arrest.”
Even if convicted, that only gets you a possible fine and up to ninety days.
Police cleared them out, and they got citations. But if they pushed on a fence in the Capitol on Jan. 6, that would be a different matter, of course.
Chances that these protesters will get anywhere near the treatment the J6 defendants faced? Or even pro-life protesters? Not high — assuming that they don’t just have the charges dropped, which tends to happen with leftist protests. There will be no calls of “insurrection” from the liberal media on this one.
VDH said a month ago that “the next 12 months will be something like you’ve never seen before”, and he is right. America is hurling towards a violent confrontation.
America is hurling towards a violent confrontation.
Between ??? and ???
He doesn’t really say. All he says is: