How do you, JOSEPH BIDEN, as President of the United States, give a State of the Union address claiming the country is unified when you have spent the last 13 months sowing disunity into the country, and you’ve been implementing policies with the sole intent on destabilizing the very country you are supposed to be stabilizing

Posted on March 7, 2022 by abyssum

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State of Disunion

By: Judd Garrett

Objectivity is the Objective

March 3, 2022

How do you, as President of the United States, give a State of the Union address claiming the country is unified when you have spent the last 13 months sowing disunity into the country, and you’ve been implementing policies with the sole intent on destabilizing the very country you are supposed to be stabilizing? How do you try to convince the American citizens that their country is strong when you sold your soul to the far-left wing of your party that is hell-bent on destroying America? How do you lead a country when you are beholden to people who hate the country because they believe that it was founded on the dual evils of racism and sexism, and is still systemically racist and sexist? How can you encourage citizens to be proud of being Americans when you believe the only course of action is to tear America down and rebuild it in a Marxist re-imagining of America? Most of Joe Biden’s policies have been tearing our country apart and on purpose. He doesn’t believe his job is to make America great, or even to manage its decline, rather it’s to accelerate its destruction.

The first week in office, Biden shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, stopped drilling in Anwar, and canceled oil and gas leases on federal lands. He was on a crusade to destroy America’s oil and gas industry under the guise of promoting “green energy”. Two months after sanctioning our oil and gas industry, he removed the sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline. Biden’s energy policy has caused America to lose its energy independence and once again become reliant on energy produced by our enemies. American citizens are now helping to finance our enemy to conduct a war against an ally that is also a potentially existential threat to both America and Europe. We are supposed to rally around Biden’s tough talk against Russia’s actions against Ukraine when his fingerprints are all over those actions. And his refusal to change his policies leads one to believe that he wants a destabilized America and Europe. If you want to destroy our country, implement policies that make our country’s energy-dependent on a murderous dictator, and puts us on the precipice of another World War.

Joe Biden’s irresponsible monetary policy of printing trillions of new dollars out of thin air to finance his far-left agenda without approval of Congress, and without raising taxes has shot inflation through the roof, driving up the cost of goods by 7.5% which ends up being a 7.5% tax increase on every American. Monetary policy driven inflation is a regressive tax that hurts the poor the most and the rich the least and destroys the value and stability of our currency. If you want to destroy our country, devalue the dollar to the point that it is on the verge of no longer being trusted as the world’s exchange currency.

The Biden administration has continually extended and expanded the Covid relief programs for unemployed workers where the beneficiaries are no longer required to prove they are actively looking for work. The relief program was originally implemented to help people who lost their jobs during the government-mandated Covid lockdowns; it was never meant to be a permanent program that pays people not to work. The extension of this program has created an unprecedented dynamic; a combination of high unemployment coupled with a worker shortage crisis. If you want to destroy our country, cripple its economy by subsidizing unemployment to the point that millions of people turn down good-paying jobs to stay on the public dole.

The Biden administration has opened our borders to 2 million undocumented, unvetted, untested, unvaccinated illegal aliens. They have been bussing and flying many of these illegal aliens into the interior of the country to red and battleground states for the express purpose of flipping those states to blue. If you are purposely allowing your country’s borders to be overrun by 2 million foreign nationals, and at the same time, speaking forcefully about defending one of your ally’s borders to ensure their national sovereignty, then you may be intentionally compromising your own country’s sovereignty. If you want to destroy our country, then erase our country’s borders, and make American citizenship meaningless.

Under Joe Biden’s watch, more young Americans have died of drug overdoses than at any other time in our history. Yet, he refuses to change his open border policy, which is allowing the most lethal drug of all, fentanyl, to flood across the southern border in record amounts. Joe Biden’s unwillingness to address this crisis gives the appearance that he wants hundreds of thousands of young Americans to die unnecessarily. If you want to destroy our country, poison our communities with highly addictive and extremely deadly drugs which take the lives of our youth, destroy our families and promote violent crime in our communities.

Big tech and social media platforms, at the behest of the White House, have spent the last year censoring political speech they don’t like under the specious grounds of preventing the spread of “misinformation”, all of which deprives American citizens of their primary Constitutional right of freedom of speech. If you want to destroy our country, threaten our Constitution and our very democracy by encouraging censorship of political speech which denies law-abiding citizens the right to say and hear whatever they want.

The Biden administration has promoted the teaching of Critical Race Theory in our public schools, throughout the Federal Government, and in the Armed Services. Our children, federal workers, and soldiers are being taught to judge their fellow citizens based primarily on their race and gender, teaching that one race is irrevocably evil, while other races are perpetual victims. They are indoctrinating American citizens to believe that certain races are inherently superior to others. If you want to destroy our country, then divide its citizens based on race and gender differences.

Joe Biden’s intelligence agencies have named the number one threat to America as “domestic terrorists”, defined as anyone who disagrees with the far left. This is why they are intent on categorizing everyone present at the Capital on January 6th where a political protest devolved into a riot as “violent insurrectionists” so the FBI can target and harass those people for their political beliefs. If you want to destroy our country, weaponize our intelligence agencies against your political opponents.

In August, Joe Biden oversaw the horrific and embarrassing withdrawal of our military from Afghanistan where thousands of Americans were left behind, dozens were killed, and $80 billion of state-of-the-art weaponry was left behind for a violent terrorist organization, making them one of the most well-armed armies in the world. Our withdrawal was executed in such a shoddy and unprofessional way, that it must have been done on purpose to humiliate our military. If you want to destroy our country, embarrass our military on a world stage for our enemies like Vladimir Putin and President Xi to see.

Every step of the way, Joe Biden has pursued and implemented policies with the intent to destabilize, and eventually destroy our country, so it can be rebuilt from the ground up through the eyes of the far-left socialist wing of the Democratic Party. This is why Donald Trump was seen as so much more of a threat than a typical Republican like John McCain or Mitt Romney who were on board with managing America’s slow decline.

If America is great, if America is the premier country in the world by far, then there is no reason to tear America down to its studs and rebuild it through the vision of a far-left socialist lens. And therein lies the impossibility of Joe Biden’s speech last night, trying to convince Americans that their country is strong and unified when all along he has been actively trying to tear it down into nothing.

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The use of human shields in warfare of any kind is a horrifying satanic tactic, and, ironically, it is most effective against people who are truly humane. The tactic uses our humanity against us, because we don’t want the innocent to be harmed.

Posted on March 6, 2022 by abyssum

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

“The same Globalists who installed Biden… installed the Zelensky regime… [&] those who did not volunteer for this are Literal Human Shields for the Zelensky/Soros government… [if] Trump had survived the election coup in 2020 we would have no Ukraine war”

March 06, 2022

Above: Ukrainian President Zelensky (2nd from left) and three other men perform a homoerotic skit on Ukrainian television.

What is the Real Agenda of the corrupt Joe & Hunter Biden’s Russiagate backing of the Trudeau-like Obama corrupt Ukraine Operatives in their Warmongering Posturing?

If President Trump had survived the election coup in 2020 we would have no Ukraine war (because he respects Russia’s legitimate security interests and wants to disband NATO) – Scott Lively

Constitutional lawyer Scott Lively thinks that the “same globalists who installed Biden… installed the Zelensky regime in Ukraine… those who did not volunteer for this are literal human shields for the Zelensky/Soros government”:

The use of human shields in warfare of any kind is a horrifying satanic tactic, and, ironically, it is most effective against people who are truly humane. The tactic uses our humanity against us, because we don’t want the innocent to be harmed.

Human shields can be used both defensively and offensively. An example of the use of human shields by “defenders” is what Ukrainian Soros agent Zelensky is doing in Kiev. He forcibly conscripted all male civilians into the militia, equipped them with Molotov cocktails, and ordered them to face down Russian tanks (instead of simply agreeing to never put nukes on Russia’s border, which Putin offered as the solution on Day One).

I do not disregard the heroism of those who chose voluntarily to fight for their homeland – which is honorable and virtuous regardless of the legitimacy of the political goals of the leaders of either side. However, those who did not volunteer for this are literal human shields for the Zelensky/Soros government, even if they reluctantly join battle under duress so as not to appear cowards, or in the hope they will have a better chance of survival.

It’s hard to conquer an opponent who uses civilians as human shields. No matter how hard the other side tries to strike surgically against purely military and physical infrastructure, innocent people sometimes get hurt: e.g. Israel re the Palestinians and the US re ISIS and the Iraq wars. In such cases you can only tell which leaders are truly monsters based on whether the dead civilians were intentionally targeted or merely “collateral damage” in an attempt to strike surgically at military targets.

The truly EVIL players in these games are the ones who WANT civilian carnage (ISIS is notorious for this) and will stage it or even orchestrate it for the propaganda value (such as the Palestinians do routinely). Zelensky’s bad intentions on this score are growing clearer, and, even worse, he now seems intent on triggering WWIII by coercing NATO (or the US) into striking Russia.

In the fog of war, it can be very difficult to discern what is real and what is fake or which side actually harmed those who are truly victims. The Jussie Smollett mindset is common among the leftist political elites and the media. In fact, it is probably reasonable these days to believe the opposite of anything the American corporate media says is true, probably including the Ukraine war, but certainly on any culture war issue.

The emotional power of war propaganda, and the media’s expertise in steering public opinion with it, cannot be overstated. And, of course, no-one is more manipulable by propaganda than politicians. Once the elites get the politicians to stampede, the public usually follows. That’s how they managed to turn the entire world into one giant concentration camp in the name of public health for the past two years. It was all done through fear-mongering culture-war propaganda that turned politicians (including, unfortunately, President Trump with Operation Warp Speed), into puppets – although many like Newsom and Cuomo were more-than-willing puppets.

Another example of culture war propaganda to which President Trump has succumbed, and on which nearly all politicians and much of the public have been stampeded into “group think” (aka “political correctness”) relates to the LGBT agenda. But I’ll get to that – and some redemptive comments on President Donald Trump — in just a moment.

Sometimes the “defenders” behind the human shields are actually the aggressors, such as the Muslim rocket squads in the Gaza Strip and West Bank who operate from schools, hospitals and apartment buildings. Or the “defenders” who retreat to a position behind civilians after offensive actions, kinetic or political, including war posturing (such as openly working to put nuclear weapons on your enemy’s borders). Either way, the civilians are human shields.

Perhaps most evil is the offensive deployment of human “shields” as “human swords.” Again, the Muslim world offers the best examples. Muslim warlords didn’t just use their own civilians as human shields, they created entire slave-armies of captured enemy soldiers and civilians and used them as human swords in the front ranks of all their battles, so that defenders would need to kill their own countrymen to defend themselves.

Even worse, they both stole boy children and demanded boys as a form of tribute, whom they cruelly broke psychologically through sodomy and torture, and then trained as willing slave-warriors. History’s most famous proof of this is the case of Vlad the Impaler (mythologized as “Count Dracula”) – given in tribute as a boy to the Ottoman Turks. Vlad witnessed their use of impalement torture, then escaped to later lead counter warfare against the Muslims in which he used the mass impalement of thousands of captured Muslim troops to demoralize and successfully turn back an invasion.

In the American culture war, the Marxist left has taken a page from the “steal the children” Muslim playbook. They have exploited and abused their control of the “captive audience” of American schoolchildren to create a slave-army of Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) which they now deploy as human swords. Case in point is the group of school children and Woke adult handlers who last week chanted “F*** DeSantis” in the rotunda of the Florida State House in protest of a parental rights bill to ban “gay” propaganda to schoolchildren below the 4th grade.

If President Trump had survived the election coup in 2020 we would have no Ukraine war (because he respects Russia’s legitimate security interests and wants to disband NATO) and a much stronger position against all forms of Wokism in general here at home. Despite his (temporary?) compromises on so-called “gay rights” and the “vaccine” Donald Trump is the most powerful anti-globalist in the world. Vladimir Putin is second. Globalism would be quickly crushed if American and Russia agreed to cooperate on that goal as candidate Trump implied in 2015-16. That is the forbidden truth behind the campaign to “cancel” the Russian nation.

The very same globalists who installed Biden through election fraud, burned our cities, staged the ongoing genocidal plandemic, and turned American school-children into “gays,” trannys and SJWs, also installed the Zelensky regime in Ukraine. They WANT WWIII to destroy the old world order so they can bring in the new one through their “great reset.” And they’re trying to manipulate YOU into demanding war against Russia, while pretending to resist the “will of the people.”

My fellow patriots, in the name of God I implore you not to be deceived by the oldest war-propaganda tricks in the book. Look carefully behind the human shields and swords in Ukraine and America. In both places you will see the ugly, satanically-contorted faces of George Soros, Klaus Schwab, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the whole globalist cabal sneering back at you. [Scott Lively’s Mission Dispatch, March 6, 2022,Subscribe HERE. Contact/Comment HERE. DONATE HERE]

Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.

Francis Notes:

– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:

“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)

Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”
[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]

– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html

– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html

– LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:

The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”

– On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:

“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”

– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.

Election Notes:

– Intel Cryptanalyst-Mathematician on Biden Steal: “212Million Registered Voters & 66.2% Voting,140.344 M Voted…Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden” [http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/intel-cryptanalyst-mathematician-on.html?m=1]

– Will US be Venezuela?: Ex-CIA Official told Epoch Times “Chávez started to Focus on [Smartmatic] Voting Machines to Ensure Victory as early as 2003”: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/will-us-be-venezuela-ex-cia-official.html

– Tucker Carlson’s Conservatism Inc. Biden Steal Betrayal is explained by “One of the Greatest Columns ever Written” according to Rush: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/tucker-carlsons-conservatism-inc-biden.html?m=1

– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020:
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1

What is needed right now to save America from those who would destroy our God given rights is to pray at home or in church and if called to even go to outdoor prayer rallies in every town and city across the United States for God to pour out His grace on our country to save us from those who would use a Reichstag Fire-like incident to destroy our civil liberties. [Is the DC Capitol Incident Comparable to the Nazi Reichstag Fire Incident where the German People Lost their Civil Liberties?: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/is-dc-capital-incident-comparable-to.html?m=1 and Epoch Times Show Crossroads on Capitol Incident: “Anitfa ‘Agent Provocateurs‘”:
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1]

Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it.SHARE

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A SOMEWHAT TROUBLING MESSAGE FROM HER GUARDIAN ANGEL

Posted on March 5, 2022 by abyssum

Guardian Angel

March 4, 2022

“The noose descends

But men, not seeing,

Prattle about trivial things,

Fingers dripping with sin

And feet treading on the sanctity of life.

But the noose descends

And men have not a free hand to stop the rope,

For he is boxed in by a bear on one side

And a dragon on the other.

And the noose descends

And ever so silently the rope is tightened

And man fights for air

But it is too late.

And the dove flies away unseen

Finding no place on earth to rest.”

– S

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(Charlie Johnston) “Back in the day, when I was advising officials and candidates in a fluid situation that had many possible outcomes, I would give a lot of real-time focus to what we actually knew. From that, we would work on what was possible, what was likely and what was absurd. By keeping focused on first things, it kept us dealing with reality rather than partisan narratives or wishful thinking, even when we could not reach a conclusion yet. It is a form of cogitating, of spit-balling in an effort to figure out what is actually happening and what it means.”

Posted on March 5, 2022 by abyssum

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HOW TO MAKE SENSE OUT OF CONFUSION

Posted on March 3, 2022 by abyssum

The Crowded Road to Kyiv

To retain our deterrence abroad,

we must tighten our belts at home,

pump oil and gas, start to balance our budget,

junk wokeism as a nihilist indulgence,

and recalibrate our military.

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

February 27, 2022

One of the oddest commentaries about the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the boilerplate reaction that “borders can’t change in modern Europe” or “this does not happen in the 21st century.”

But why in the world should the 21st century be exempt from the pathologies of the past 20 centuries? Are we smarter than the Romans? More innovative than the Florentines? Do we have more savvy leaders than Lincoln or Churchill? Are they more mellifluous than Demosthenes? Does anyone now remember that some 130,000 were slaughtered just 30 years ago in the former Yugoslavia, as NATO planes bombed Belgrade and nuclear America and Russia almost squared off?

Has globalization, the “rules-based order,” the Davos reset elite, the “international community” so improved the very way humans think that they have rendered obsolete the now ossified ancient idea of deterrence? Will the Kardashians and Beyoncé tweet our pathway to global peace?

How about transnational NGOs? NATO? WHO? The U.N.? Are all their recent records of service proof of our more exalted modern morality? Will some new engineered Wuhan virus alter human nature, end its innate ancient pathologies, and so eliminate war as we knew it? Are we not the League of Nations because Putin is now chair of the Security Council?

In truth, anything can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time—and has and will until the end of time.

So let us walk down the crowded road to Kyiv.

The Russian Agenda

Putin feels that Russia was once a great player (defined mostly as “feared”) in world affairs. But now it—i.e., he— is not. He thinks if he can grab back some of the old Soviet Union’s now lost 100 million people and 30 percent of its territory, then his Russia would again become a superpower—especially given the natural wealth of his former Soviet republics.

He knows that the longer some of these republics are Westernized and become acculturated to the passions of popular culture, the more difficult it will be to coerce them into becoming Russian subordinates. So Putin feels a sense of urgency that in the past was not always his conniving trademark—but now perhaps accentuated by his age or health. U.N. Security Council Chairman Putin’s pique at his supposed wounds is endless given his incessant citations of NATO bombing on kindred Serbia, the 2004 orange revolution, or the 2008 Ukrainian coup.

He feels we are decadent, soft, pampered—to the point of not replying to his provocations. So, he presses. In his Stalinesque mind, we purportedly do not deserve the power and influence we supposedly inherited at his expense, while his Russia, he boasts, is tough, religious, and deserves far more from the modern age than its current diminished status. Like Stalin, he has developed a visceral dislike of sermonizing Western elites, none of whom he thinks can box, judo kick, fish, shoot, or ride bare-chested at his level.

So, to the degree Putin believes in a cost-to-benefit analysis that any envisioned invasion will prove profitable, he will invade anywhere he feels the odds favor his agenda. And when he does not—if America or NATO offers a deterrent, if oil is plentiful and cheap, and if Western leaders are sober and strong rather than loud and weak—he will not so gamble. It’s that simple. Feed Putin a hand, and he will gobble a torso.

Will Ukraine Survive?

In theory, Ukraine should not last, given the numerical odds against it. Mysteriously it almost seems unprepared for a massive invasion. Its roads are apparently not blocked and mined. Putin has been massing troops since November, so why did not NATO flood the country with weapons in late 2021 to ensure endless supplies of anti-tank and anti-plane missiles?

Still, the Russians may, we hope, have a hard time of it in Ukraine—if for no other reason than the country is larger than Iraq in both size and population. It has lots of supply conduits across the borders with four NATO countries that can finally begin pouring in weaponry. An invader that cannot stop resupply from third-party neighbors can rarely subdue its target.

So, if in a week Putin cannot shock and awe the elite or decapitate the government, he will have a hard time subduing the population. Time is not on his side. Sanctions are worthless in the short term but eventually, they can bite.

His tripartite semi-circular attack on Ukraine is uncannily similar to Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland from East Prussia, Germany, and the dismembered Czechoslovakia. But even Hitler, who was helped later by the invasion of the Soviet Union from the east, lost 50,000 dead and wounded from a poorly equipped Polish army.

Fossil Fuels

Gas and oil, and thus who tried to curtail both, explain a lot of the current mess. The nihilist Biden’s decision voluntarily to cancel new pipelines, federal leases, ANWAR, and leverage loss of bank financing for fracking, and to give up well over 2 million barrels of daily production will be seen not just as an economic disaster. It was a strategic catastrophe.

When Europe, or indeed the West, is dependent on Russian goodwill to drive and keep warm, it can never be free. Ending American energy independence is not just an AOC obsession. Russian hackers in January targeted our Colonial pipeline, shutting down in a day over 1 million barrels of transported oil. The more we discount the strategic consequences of having or lacking oil, the more our enemies fixate on it.

A couple of questions for Joe Biden: Before he took office, was the United States begging Russia to sell it more oil? After he took office, why was it?

Why did Biden blow-up energy dependence? Could not tomorrow Biden reverse course, greenlight the Keystone pipeline, reverse his mindless opposition to the EastMed pipeline that would help allies Cyprus, Greece, and Israel to help other allies in southern Europe, and throw open new federal leasing to supply exports of liquid natural gas to Europe?

What is moral, and what amoral: alienating Bernie Sanders and the squad or keeping our allies and ourselves safe from foreign attack? What is so ethical about following the green advice of billionaires like global jet-setter John Kerry at the expense of the middling classes who cannot afford to drive their cars or warm their living rooms?

A Deterrent Military?

Factor in the Afghanistan humiliation, the walk away from $80 billion in arms and equipment, a $1 billion Kabul embassy, a multimillion-dollar refit of Bagram Airbase, the woke politicization of the Pentagon, the McCarthyite hunt inside the ranks for white rage/supremacy, the inane rantings of retired admirals and generals, the revolving door of four-stars to defense contractor boards—and in just three years, the military lost a half-century of American public support.

All this and more have eroded the global fear of the U.S. military. We have all but destroyed American trust in our armed forces (only 45 percent of the Americans poll great confidence in the military). The woke threat is in addition to spiraling pensions and social justice overhead that make the defense budget lean on actual defense readiness. Enemies did not erode our military’s once feared deterrence, our own top military and civilian leadership did. Time is short, enemies numerous. Can we find any brave soul who will restore the military?

American Goliath?

America may be woke. It may feel it has transcended dirty fossil fuels and can thrive on wind, solar, and batteries. It may assume it is morally superior, and like 19th-century pith-helmeted British foreign officers can sermonize to the world, from pride flags and George Floyd murals in Kabul to no need for security in Benghazi.

But we also are mired in $30 trillion in debt. We print $2 trillion a year in mockery of inflation. Our major cities are crime-ridden and the streets medieval with the homeless and sidewalk sewers. Race relations are the worst in memory.

We have no southern border. Nearly 50 million residents were not born in our country—and this challenge at a time when we have given up on assimilation and integration. The woke virus has warped racial and ethnic relations and is destroying the idea of meritocracy. We are in the hold of a Jacobin madness, in a top-down elite race to perdition. To praise America’s past is a thought crime. The ignorant, who have no idea of the date when the Civil War began, nonetheless lecture to the nodding that 1619 not 1776 was America’s real foundational date.

In short, the America of even 1990 no longer exists. To retain our deterrence abroad, we must tighten our belts at home, pump oil and gas, start to balance our budget, junk wokeism as a nihilist indulgence, and recalibrate our military.

NATO

NATO is now a mere construct. It was birthed and exists to do three things in Europe: keep America in, Germany down, and Russia out. Now Germany is up. America is out. And Russia is in.

The vast majority of the alliance’s members followed Germany’s anti-American prompt to renege on promises to spend a mere 2 percent of their budgets on military readiness. How strange that only thousands of deaths in Ukraine can soon persuade the arrogant German leadership that their own performance-art pacifism kills.

NATO’s richest and second-largest member, Germany, polls a desire to become closer to Russia than to the United States. Does that mean they favor Putin’s invasion rather than NATO’s resistance? Sixty percent of Germans poll no desire to honor NATO’s Article Five clause of mutual assistance, and thus would not wish to aid a fellow member in extremis.

Germany, on its way to green Lalaland, ignored all warnings about conducting a $1-billion-dollar per-day natural gas purchase from Putin. Think of the following absurdities: Germans no longer like Americans all that much. But they do expect them to subsidize their defense and to protect them from Russians, with whom in turn they are cementing lucrative energy deals. The latter will eventually make them dependent on Putin for 50 percent of their energy needs.

So what is NATO? In truth, 25 or so of the 30 nation members are defenseless. They rely on the United States to protect them from enemies in their backyards. Only the NATO nuclear monopolies of Britain and France offer a deterrent umbrella over both NATO and the EU—on the quiet assurance that a far bigger nuclear American umbrella covers all of them.

We should simply ask those who will meet their promised military commitments to stay, and the others to go quietly in peace and follow the Swiss model. Why are there any U.S. combat troops in Germany? Are they there to protect the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russian attack? To reward Germany for spending less than two percent on defense?

China

For five years Americans were obsessed not just with Putin, but the left-wing myth that Russians were under all our beds—the tattooed, gap-toothed cruddy villains of Hollywood movies, the supposed Satanic colluders of the Steele dossier, the nefarious bankers who stealthily communicated at night with the White House. So we voluntarily gave up the old Russian triangulation card when we once played dictatorial China off against dictatorial Russia. The Kissingerian principle dictated that neither of the two should ever become closer to one another than either is to us. We gave all that up and instead hung on every word for two years of Bob Mueller, James Comey, and the lunatics at CNN.

Meanwhile, China birthed, and hid the origins of, a virus that destroyed the U.S. economy and undermined our entire culture. Thousands of Chinese are here mostly to aid in expropriating U.S. technical expertise. Add in the Uighurs and the now vanquished Tibet, and China outdoes even Putin in its human rights atrocities. If Ukraine falls, Taiwan will be the third nation that the West “lost” during the Biden Administration.

Left-Wing Mania

On cue, an embarrassed Left now offers some surreal takes on why Putin went into Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 and again into all of Ukraine in 2022—while mysteriously bookending the four invasion-free Trump years. We are told that hiatus was because Putin got all he wanted from Trump and rewarded him by not invading any of his neighbors.

Really?

Were Vladimir Putin and his advisors more or less delighted that their poodle Trump thankfully flooded the world with price-crashing oil? They were thankful Trump at least had killed Russian mercenaries in Syria?

Putin himself was content that the United States got out of his advantageous missile deal? Was he thrilled that Trump sold once-taboo U.S. offensive weapons to Ukraine? Did the Kremlin grow ecstatic when Trump upped the U.S. defense budget? And was Russia especially thankful that Trump jawboned NATO into spending another $100 billion on defense? Did Putin clap when Trump killed Soleimani and Baghdadi, and bombed ISIS out of existence?

We are left being lectured to now by the ubiquitous retired Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, the political operative remonstrating America on its anemic response to saving his native Ukraine. All this from one of the key operatives of impeaching the one president who, unlike his progressive presidential predecessor, along with the Biden Burisma consortia, really did arm Ukraine and send it offensive weapons embargoed by the Left.

The useful Vindman may have been offered to the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. But he never grasped that any country naïve enough to believe the Left’s empty promises about autonomy and freedom reified by mere liberal fiat will be sorely left all alone by its utopian patrons—once a nearby powerful thug invades.

Biden

Now we hear that midterm Biden has played the crisis wonderfully. The surreal progressive take on this crisis is that Winston Biden has corn-popped the “killer” Putin, metaphorically taken “the bully” behind the proverbial gym and given him a whomping, slammed his head on the global lunch counter, and in Biden’s deterrent fashion, called him a chump, one of the dregs, a junkie, fat, and a lying dog-faced pony soldier—and capped it all off with “You ain’t white!”

Joe threatened the toughest sanctions in history that on Wednesday would deter an invasion and by Saturday were never meant to at all. But Biden promises someday a “conversation” to decide whether at some time he still will issue the toughest sanctions in history. Until then, he invites Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy safe passage out of Kyiv—the quickest way to destroy the dogged Ukrainian resistance.

Left unsaid are the years of rapacious Biden family profiteering in Ukraine, a decade of leftist passive-aggressive love and hate of Russia, from obsequious reset to greedy Uranium One to pathetic “tell Vladimir . . .” to unhinged vetoing of sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

What a crowded road to Kyiv.

___________________________________________________

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I TRUST THAT YOU ARE PRAYING THAT World War III, WHICH IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER, DOES NOT BEGIN. IT APPEARS LIKELY TO BE STARTED BECAUSE OF THE MISTAKES OF THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION PLUS THE MISTAKES OF THE LEADERS OF THE NATO COUNTRIES. THE MORE NON-NATO COUNTRIES JOIN NATO THE MORE RUSSIA AND CHINA STUPIDLY CONSIDER PRESSING THE NUCLEAR BUTTON FOR THEIR OWN PROTECTION. GOD SAVE US!!!!!! GOD SAVE THE HUMAN RACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted on March 3, 2022 by abyssum

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

Professor McMeekin & Pat Buchanan show that understanding why each side is doing what they are doing could help avoid “Escalation to Nuclear Weapons”

March 03, 2022

Pat Buchanan Predicts NATO Expansion To …

player.fm

Candace Owens

@RealCandaceO

Vladimir Putin is not a sympathetic character. Neither is the corrupt Zelensky who allowed his country to be sold. Neither are the Bidens who (among other western families) purchased it. I feel bad for nobody but the innocent citizens who are suffering beneath this mess. [https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1499394074003984384]

Buckle-up, Buccaroos. Looks like Russia has the receipts on the ARSH 2020 “election”. No wonder the Washington DC cabal is agitating for nuclear war.

It is a truism, to which I can personally testify, that malignant human beings will engage in all-out war against a person or persons who have eyewitnessed and “have the receipts” on the malignant actors’ hidden misdeeds and frauds as a preemptive tactic to avoid being exposed.

IF Russia has the receipts on the 2020 “election”, then YES, I believe the Washington DC deep state/New World Order would engage in literal nuclear war in order to maintain their power. Millions of casualties would be a feature, not a bug. Remember, they are Malthusians. They want a 90+% reduction in the human population, as soon as possible, with a preference for killing white, culturally Christian people first. – Catholic Pundit Ann Barnhardt

The Francis Flournoy Professor of European History at Bard College, Sean McMeekin, who is the author of “Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II” understands that Joe Biden and friends as well as Vladimir Putin are not “sympathetic characters.”

He and Patrick Buchanan show that instead of stupid name-calling that understanding why each side is doing what they are doing could help avoid “escalation to nuclear weapons.” Buchanan explains the danger:

As his motivation is to hold power and use it to carve a niche in history alongside the greatest Russian rulers of the past who enlarged the nation or empire, Putin is probably not going to accept defeat and go quietly. Nor was it a sign of resignation that Putin, on Sunday, ordered Russia’s nuclear forces to high alert because, “Top officials in leading NATO countries have allowed themselves to make aggressive comments about our country.”

This is not the first time Putin has introduced the idea of using a nuclear weapon. On Feb. 19, days before the invasion began, Putin ordered drills of nuclear-capable ballistic and cruise missiles, bombers and warships. In his speech announcing the military operation in Ukraine, Putin warned that countries that interfere with Russia’s actions will face “consequences you have never seen.”

Would Putin exercise what has been called the “Samson Option”–pulling down the pillars of the temple and taking your enemies with you? What Putin is suggesting is that in the last analysis, if military defeat beckons for Russia, and his own dispossession of power and political if not actual death are to follow, he may use the ultimate weapon in Russia’s arsenal to prevent it.

What should U.S. policy be?

Avoid a widening of the war by preventing any escalation to nuclear weapons. Secure the independence of Ukraine. Effect the removal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory.

If this requires that Ukraine give up any ambition to become a NATO nation, Putin’s declared purpose in launching the war, so be it. We might have avoided this war had we done so before it was begun.

This is not where we appear to be headed. Finland, and Sweden, it is now being said, should be invited into NATO. Were that to happen, the U.S. would be obligated to help defend the 830-mile Finnish border with Russia. This would be an act of hubris of the kind that has led to great wars. [https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/is-putin-considering-using-nukes-on-nato-/]

McMeekin shows that Biden and the “ineptitude in Western capitals” are to be blamed for this danger as well as Russian aggression:

American leaders have done far more than talk. First under President George W. Bush, in the “Orange Revolution” of 2004-5, and then even more brazenly under President Obama and then-Vice President Biden in the overtly U.S.-backed “Euromaidan” revolution, which toppled Russia-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, the U.S. and its allies threw down the gauntlet to Moscow, which responded by annexing Crimea and moving into Lugansk and the Donbass. Putin’s claims that Ukraine has, since 2014, been carrying out “genocide” against Russian-speakers may be groundless, but his case that the U.S. and its allies have turned Ukraine into a lethally armed catspaw is not. As the leading U.S. realist scholar of international relations, John Mearsheimer, presciently warned in September 2015, “the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”

In the months leading up to the Russian invasion launched on Feb. 24, it appears to be mostly Western fecklessness which has encouraged Putin’s aggression: German politicians signing lucrative pipeline deals with the Kremlin, taking positions on the boards of Russian energy companies, and ratcheting up their abject dependence on Russian energy by shuttering nuclear plants; the Biden administration’s humiliating botch of the withdrawal from Afghanistan; Biden’s hint that a “minor incursion” into Ukraine might not occasion a decisive response; the withdrawal of U.S. diplomatic personnel from Kiev to Lvov, and so on. There has been no shortage of ineptitude in Western capitals, and this has undermined deterrence of Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine. But we also should not forget the larger story of NATO expansion and the U.S.-backed “color revolutions” in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, which have fueled Russian fear, anger, and resentment. It may be too late to wind the clock back and reverse NATO expansion, but it is never too late to learn the lessons of history.

Unfortunately, it is the people of Ukraine who are paying the price of Western hubris, just as Mearsheimer warned in 2015. By dangling NATO membership and the mirage of an American security umbrella before them, the U.S. and its allies have unleashed the furies of Russian ressentiment, resulting in a devastating and bloody invasion of Ukraine, even while doing almost nothing to assure the country’s defense. They deserved better from us. [https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/putin–russia–and-ukraine–historical-roots-of-a-tragedy/]

Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Francis Notes:

– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html

– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html

Election Notes:

– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020:
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1

Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it.SHARESHARE

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“From time immemorial elitist despots have started wars to deflect attention from domestic political crises.”

Posted on March 2, 2022 by abyssum

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

Ukrainian President Zelensky’s Homoerotic Skit & “Biden’s Ukraine war and Putin/Russia scape-goating is part of a larger strategy for killing the Red Wave in 2022”

March 02, 2022

Above: Ukrainian President Zelensky (2nd from left) and three other men perform a homoerotic skit on Ukrainian television.

Constitutional lawyer Scott Lively asked “IS GOD USING BIDEN TO PUNISH AMERICA?”:

Above: Ukrainian President Zelensky (2nd from left) and three other men perform a homoerotic skit on Ukrainian television.

Putin-Bashing: the Virtue Signaling Snare of the Neo-Conservatives. Virtue-signaling is trying to prove you’re on the “good and virtuous” side of a social controversy by taking pot shots at the person or movement being smeared as the bad side or jumping on the propaganda bandwagon. We love to criticize liberals for virtue signaling by doing such things as putting a BLM sign in their window or calling Trump supporters “fascists.” But on the Russia/Ukraine issue, it is the conservatives getting suckered into anti-Russian virtue signaling that serves only the interests of the hard left and the RINOs, while deviously dividing the MAGA movement against itself.

To put it another way “America is adrift on an ocean of baby blood, on a rudderless ship infested with loathsome parasites and predators – and yet the only people capable of taking back control of the ship can’t keep our focus on the task at hand. Instead we’re hanging over the rail to get our best look at distant fire-fights on somebody else’s ship — and cheerleading for the side our own domestic enemies put in power.”

IS GOD USING BIDEN TO PUNISH AMERICA?

Last Sunday I published an article at ScottLively.net titled “Is God Using Russia to Punish Ukraine?” It made some of my friends and supporters nervous, because the cancel-culture globalists have launched the mother of all propaganda and punishment campaigns to “cancel” an entire nation: pro-family, anti-globalist Russia.

And in the cancel culture (as I know all too well from personal experience) everyone who associates with or defends in any way the target of a smear-job will get cancelled too. That’s how this new form of war is waged against the little people by the elites.

The latest reminder of that was watching the despotic Justin Trudeau regime declare martial law to crush peaceful opposition to vaccine tyranny in Ottawa. Remember Ottawa? Remember vaccine tyranny? The trucker convoy bearing down on DC? Hillary’s spy-treason? Election fraud? CRT propaganda? The second amendment? “Gay”/Transgender grooming of children by our public schools? None of that seems to matter now because of the Ukraine war, and that’s no accident. As I said in a recent WND article “From time immemorial elitist despots have started wars to deflect attention from domestic political crises.”

Let’s leave aside the question of whether Christian Russia – which has both honored God and protected normal marriage in its new constitution — has any right to use military force to stop the Obama/Biden/Clinton/Soros-created LGBT Woke-ocracy of Ukraine from putting anti-Russian nukes on the Russian border. And denying the ethnic Russian citizens of Ukraine the fundamental human right to vote for independence — a tyranny backed by eight years of bloody government suppression.

Let’s instead ask whether God is using Barack Obama’s avatar Joe Biden to punish our own country. I’ll answer with another question: “Politically speaking, what is the last best hope for saving America?”

Isn’t it the MAGA movement?

What “MAGA movement?” Do you mean that formerly united group of Trump supporters now fighting with each other tooth and nail over whether or not Vladimir Putin is (the globalists’ version of) the Antichrist? Or whether the Ukraine president (a former TV comedian who thought performing a homoerotic dance skit with three other men would be a good message for the children of his nation) is a hero for forcibly conscripting his entire male civilian population to be slaughtered in an unnecessary no-win battle with the overwhelming might of the Russian army, when he could win the peace by simply agreeing to remain neutral and not join NATO?

And who are the very worst enemies of the MAGA movement and America itself? Aren’t they the same people beating the war drums against Russia, and who for years have been pushing Ukraine as hard and fast as possible into full-blown Cultural Marxism? Why do half of us suddenly trust the very same media, Democrats, neo-con RINOs, and the leftist “international community” about Russia and Ukraine when we know they lie about EVERYTHING else we care about?

And even if they were right, which they aren’t, why are we letting them pit ourselves against each other at the expense of our common goal to take back American… from THEM.

Jesus warned us that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Joe Biden has divided us by starting a war, just as I predicted he would when everyone else was saying there would be no Ukraine war, and he did it in such a way as to frame Russia as the aggressor, just like Obama did with the Ukraine coup in 2014.

Answer me this. Was JFK the aggressor by launching the Bay of Pigs invasion during the Cuban Missile Crisis before Cuba had even fired a shot, or was the true aggressor in that case the-formerly-but-no-longer-Communist Russia?

So, back to my leading question. Is God using Biden to punish America? That’s really a rhetorical question because the answer is obvious. God is unhappy with America because we have turned our backs to Him as a nation and allowed His enemies to gain control of our social, cultural and political institutions. His enemies are our enemies, and the proof of that is the illegitimate puppet regime of Joe Biden, so evil and so corrupt in so many ways that we grow exhausted just listing them.

America is adrift on an ocean of baby blood, on a rudderless ship infested with loathsome parasites and predators – and yet the only people capable of taking back control of the ship can’t keep our focus on the task at hand. Instead we’re hanging over the rail to get our best look at distant fire-fights on somebody else’s ship — and cheerleading for the side our own domestic enemies put in power.

In my last WND column I said “President Trump, who would never have gotten into this situation in the first place, will be the main beneficiary of this crisis IF the MAGA movement keeps its eye on the prize of retaking the country and doesn’t get caught up in anti-Russian jingoism.” I’ll close by re-stating that point:

Biden’s Ukraine war and Putin/Russia scape-goating is part of a larger strategy for killing the Red Wave in 2022 and if we’re not smart enough to see that and make a course correction back to unity and focus on the essentials, he/they might just pull it off. [Scott Lively’s Mission Dispatch, March 2, 2022,Subscribe HERE. Contact/Comment HERE. DONATE HERE]

Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Francis Notes:

– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html

– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html

Election Notes:

– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020:
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1

Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it.

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ARCHBISH0P CARLO MARIA VIGANO OFFERS US THIS REFLECTION ON THE TRUE MEANING OF LENT. READ THIS TODAY, Ash Wednesday, AND MEDITATE ON IT SEVERAL TIMES TODAY!!!

Posted on March 2, 2022 by abyssum

 Reflection on the True Meaning of Lent for Ash Wednesday, March 2, 2022 By Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò Venite, convertimini ad me, dicit Dominus.Venite flentes, fundamus lacrymas ad Deum:quia nos negleximus, et propter nos terra patitur:nos iniquitatem fecimus,et propter nos fundamenta commota sunt.Festinemus anteire ante iram Dei,flentes et dicentes:Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.—Transitorium ambrosianumin Dominica Quinquagesimæ ”Come and be converted to me, says the Lord. Come weeping, let us shed tears to God: because we have transgressed, and because of us the earth suffers: we have committed iniquity and because of us its foundations have been shaken. Let us hasten to prevent God’s wrath, weeping and saying: You who take upon Yourself the sins of the world, have mercy on us.” It is difficult for a man of today to understand these words of the Ambrosian Missal. Yet they are simple in their severe clarity, for they show us that God’s wrath because of our sins and betrayals can only be appeased by contrition and penance. In the Roman Rite this concept is made even more clearly in the prayer of the Litany of Saints: Deus, qui culpa offenderis, pænitentia placaris: preces populi tui supplicantis propitius respice; et flagella tuæ iracundiæ, quæ pro peccatis nostris meremur, averte. “O God, who is offended by guilt and appeased by penance: look kindly on the prayers of your people who implore You; and turn away from us the scourges of your wrath, which we deserve because of our sins.” Christian civilization was able to treasure this salutary notion, which keeps us away from sin not only for fear of the just punishment that it entails, but also for the offense caused to the Majesty of God, “infinitely good and worthy of being loved above all things,” as the Act of Contrition teaches us. Down the centuries humanity converted to Christ knew how to recognize in the mournful events of history – in earthquakes, famines, pestilences and wars – the punishment of God; and always the people struck by these scourges knew how to do penance and implore Divine Mercy. And when the Lord, the Blessed Virgin or the Saints intervened in human affairs with apparitions and revelations, in addition to the call to observe the Law of God they threatened great tribulations if men were not converted. At Fatima, also, Our Lady asked for the Consecration of Russia to Her Immaculate Heart and the reparative Communion of the First Saturdays as an instrument to appease the anger of God and to be able to enjoy a period of peace. Otherwise, Russia “will spread its errors throughout the world, promoting wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be destroyed.” What should we expect from disregarding Our Lady’s requests and continuing to offend the Lord with more and more horrible sins? “They did not want to fulfill My request! Like the King of France, they will repent and do it, but it will be late. Russia will have already spread its errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecutions of the Church.” These wars, which today afflict humanity to enslave it and submit it to the infernal plan of the Great Reset inspired by Chinese Communism, are once again the result of our indocility, of our obstinacy in believing that we can trample on the Law of the Lord and blaspheme His Holy Name without consequences. What wretched presumption! How much Luciferian pride! The de-Christianized world and the secularized mentality that has infected even Catholics does not accept the idea of a God offended by the sins of men, and who punishes them with scourges so that they repent and ask for forgiveness. Yet this concept is one of the ideas that the creative hand of God has impressed on the soul of every man, inspiring that sense of justice that even pagans have. But precisely because it is present in all men of all times, our contemporaries are horrified by the idea of a God who rewards the good and punishes the bad, a God who reveals himself in His anger, who asks for tears and sacrifices from those who offend Him. Behind this aversion to the wrath of the Lord, offended by the sins of mankind – and even more so by those whom He made His children in Baptism – is the implacable hatred of the enemy of the human race for the redeeming Sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ, for the Passion of the Son of God, for the ransom that His Blood has merited for each of us, after the fall of Adam and our personal sins. A hatred that has consumed him ever since the creation of man, in a mad attempt to frustrate the work of God, to disfigure the creature made in His image and likeness, and even more to prevent the divine reparation of Christ, the new Adam, and Mary, the new Eve. On the Cross, the new Adam restores the order broken by sin as Redeemer; at the foot of the Cross, the new Eve participates in this restoration as Coredemptrix. The failure of Satan’s action is accomplished in the obedience of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity to the Father, in the humiliation of the Son of God, just as Adam’s temptation was consummated in disobedience to the Lord’s will and in the proud presumption of being able to break His orders without consequences. The world does not accept pain and death either as a just punishment for original sin and actual sins, nor as an instrument of ransom and redemption by Christ. And it is almost a paradox: the very one who by the temptation of our first Parents introduced death, sickness, and pain into the world does not tolerate that these very same things can also be the instrument of atonement when they are accepted with humility in order to repair fractured Justice. He does not tolerate the weapons of destruction and death to be snatched from him in order to become instruments of reconstruction and life. Contemporary man is newly deceived by Satan, just as he was in the garden of Eden. Then, the Serpent made him believe that disobeying the order given by God not to reap the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil would not have any consequences; indeed, the Serpent told him that by such disobedience Adam would become like God. Today, the Serpent deludes man that these consequences are inescapable, and that he cannot accept death, sickness, and pain as just punishment, overturning them to his own advantage by uniting them to the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ. Because in accepting the sentence, the offender accepts the authority of the Judge, recognizes the infinite gravity of his fault, repairs the crime committed, and expiates the sanction that is deserved. By so doing, he returns to the Grace of God, nullifying the work of Satan. For this reason, the closer the end of time approaches, the more the efforts of the Evil One are multiplied to cancel not only the Truth revealed by Christ and preached down the centuries by the Holy Church, but also to eliminate the very concept of justice that is the basis of the Redemption, the idea of the need of punishment for violation, of the reparation of guilt, of the gravity of the disobedience of the creature towards the Creator. It is obvious that the more men are led to believe that they have not committed any sin, the more they will think that do not need to repent of anything, that they have no debt of gratitude towards God who has so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son, obedient even to death, death on a Cross. If we look around us, we see how this cancellation of Justice, of the sense of Good and Evil, of the idea that there is a God who rewards the good and punishes the wicked leads to a definitive, irreparable and irredeemable rebellion against the Lord, a premise for the eternal damnation of souls. The judge who acquits the criminal and punishes the righteous person; the ruler who promotes sin and vice and condemns or prevents honest and virtuous actions; the doctor who considers sickness as an opportunity for profit and health as a fault; the priest who is silent about the Last Things and considers as “pagan” concepts like penance, sacrifice, and fasting in atonement for sins – all of these are accomplices, perhaps unknowingly, in this latest deception of Satan. It is a deception that on the one side denies God lordship over creatures and the right to reward them and punish them according to their actions; while on the other he comes to promise goods and rewards that only God can grant: “All this I will give you, if you will fall prostrate and adore me” (Mt 4:9), he dares to say to Christ in the desert, after leading Him to the summit of the mountain. The present events, the crimes that are daily committed by humanity, the multitude of sins that defy the Divine Majesty, the injustices of individuals and of Nations, the lies and frauds committed with impunity cannot be defeated by human means, not even if an army would take up weapons to restore justice and punish the wicked. Because human forces, without the grace of God and without being enlivened by a supernatural vision, are sterile and ineffective. But there is a way to combat this deception, into which humanity has fallen for more than three centuries, that is, since it has had the pride and presumption to deify man and usurp the Royal Crown from Jesus Christ. And this way, infallible because it is divine, is the return to penance, sacrifice, and fasting. Not the vain penance of those who run on treadmills, not the foolish sacrifice of those who make themselves sterile in order not to overpopulate the planet, not the empty fasting of those who deprive themselves of meat in the name of green ideology. These are once again diabolical deceptions, with which we silence our consciences. True penance, which Holy Lent ought to encourage us to carry out in a fruitful way, is that by which each of us offers privations and sufferings in atonement for our own sins and those committed by our neighbor, by Nations, and by the men of the Church. True sacrifice is that with which we unite ourselves with gratitude to the Sacrifice of Our Lord, giving a spiritual sense and a supernatural end to the pain that we nevertheless deserve. True fasting is that with which we deprive ourselves of food, not to lose weight, but in order to restore the primacy of the will over the passions, of the soul over the body. The penances, sacrifices, and fasts that we will undertake during this Holy Lent will have a value of reparation and expiation that will merit for us, for our dear ones, for our neighbor, for our Homeland, for the Church, for the entire world, and for the souls in Purgatory those Graces that alone can stop the wrath of God the Father, because in uniting ourselves to the Sacrifice of His Son we will transform what Satan caused for all of us into a supernatural treasure, leading us into sin by disobeying the Lord. This treasure will restore broken order and violated justice; it will repair the faults that we have committed in Adam and also personally. To the infernal chaos there must be opposed the divine kosmos; to the prince of this world, the King of kings; to pride, humility; to rebellion, obedience. “To this in fact you have been called, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you may follow in his footsteps. […] He bore our sins in his own body on the wood of the Cross, so that, no longer living for sin, we might live for justice; by his wounds you have been healed” (1 Pt 2:21-25). I conclude this meditation by quoting the Epistle of the Mass of Ash Wednesday: this is taken from the book of the prophet Joel, and it reminds us of the role of the priests as mediators and intercessors in admonishing the people of God and calling them to conversion. It is a role that many clergy have forgotten, and that they even refuse, believing that it is the heritage of a Church that is out of date, a Church that does not keep up with the times, a Church that still believes that the Lord must be “appeased” with penance and fasting. “Blow the trumpet in Zion, proclaim a fast, call a solemn assembly. Between the vestibule and the altar, let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep and say: Pardon, Lord, pardon your people, and do not abandon your inheritance to disgrace, do not make it the slave of the nations; that they may not say among the peoples: Where is their God? The Lord has shown zeal for his land and has pardoned his people. The Lord answered and said to his people: Behold, I will send you grain, wine, and oil, and you will have them in abundance, and no longer will I make you the disgrace of the nations: says the Lord Almighty (Jl 2:15-19). As long as we have time, dear brothers and sisters, let us ask God for mercy; let us implore His pardon and make amends for sins that have been committed. Because a day will arrive when the time of Mercy will be completed, and the day of Justice will begin. Dies illa, dies iræ: calamitatis et miseriæ; dies magna et amara valde. That day will be “a day of wrath: a day of catastrophe and misery ; a great and truly bitter day.” On that day the Lord will come to judge the world with fire: judicare sæculum per ignem. May it please God that the admonitions of Our Lady and the mystic Saints lead us, in this hour of darkness, to truly convert, to recognize our sins, to see them absolved in the Sacrament of Confession, and to atone for them with fasts and penances. So that the arm of God’s Justice may be stopped by the few, when it ought to fall upon the many. And so may it be. + Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop 2 March 2022Feria IV Cinerum, in capite jejunii

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A REFLECTION BY ARCHBISHOP CARLO MARIA VIGANO FOR TODAY, Ash Wednesday

Posted on March 2, 2022 by abyssum

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—Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 81, in a reflection for Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Below, the complete text

“Down the centuries humanity converted to Christ knew how to recognize in the mournful events of history – in earthquakes, famines, pestilences and wars – the punishment of God; and always the people struck by these scourges knew how to do penance and implore Divine Mercy.” —Archbishop Viganò, from the same Ash Wednesday reflection

“There is a way to combat this deception, into which humanity has fallen for more than three centuries, that is, since it has had the pride and presumption to deify man and usurp the Royal Crown from Jesus Christ. And this way, infallible because it is divine, is the return to penance, sacrifice, and fasting.” —Archbishop Viganò, from the same Ash Wednesday reflection

***

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ANTHONY ESOLEN, IN BEAUTIFUL, EASY TO READ PROSE, DESCRIBES MAN’S ATTEMPT TO CAPTURE IN WORDS THE MIRACLE OF MAN’S AND THE WORLD’S CREATION, MEANING AND PURPOSE!

Posted on March 1, 2022 by abyssum

SPIRITUAL READING

“In the Beginning Was the Word”—Excerpt from a New Book by Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen, PhD February 26, 2022 0 Comments

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Editor’s note: a powerful new book by well-known essayist and literary critic Anthony Esolen entitled In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John was recently published by Angelico Press, from whom we obtained permission to share a part of it with our readers. Our own contributing editor Dr. Peter Kwasniewski wrote the Foreword to the book and tells me that it is “dynamite.” This compact but profound commentary on the Prologue of John should be of great interest to all Catholics but especially those who assist at the ancient Roman Rite, where these opening verses of the Fourth Gospel are read after nearly every Mass.—TSF

Paul and John, the storm of fire and the calm immensity of the sea, speak as one. “Behold, I make all things new,” says He who sits upon the throne in the Apocalypse (Rev. 21:5). Paul spoke of God’s saving work in the same vein, as the full and ultimate making of things forever new: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Cor. 5:17).

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What do we make of such a claim about Christ? I have heard many an unbeliever say that the story of Jesus is but the story of every semi-divine hero in the history of the world. That is not true. Quite the contrary. Let us pause to look at the matter.

Alexander the Great traveled all the way to the oasis of Siwah in Libya to consult the oracle of Ammon, whom the Greeks associated with Zeus. He wanted to say that he was the son of Ammonian Zeus, and not the son of the half-barbarian warlord Philip of Macedon, whom, historians believe, Alexander’s ambitious mother Olympias put out of her son’s path by assassination. Alexander wanted to stamp his aristocratic card. It is an acknowledged trick of the self-promoter, and the ancients themselves saw it as such. The Julian clan in Rome traced their lineage back to Iulus, the son of that Aeneas who, according to old self-promoting Roman folklore, settled his refugees from Troy upon the Italian shores. This Aeneas was the son of Anchises by the goddess Venus. Every important clan wanted a ticket like that. It is like establishing your membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution.

The Pharaohs in Egypt were considered the earthly personifications of the benevolent god of justice, Osiris, guaranteeing the healthy flooding of the Nile, so that people could cast their seed broadside and the bumper crops would come. The Egyptians believed that divine power flowed through the Pharaoh, sure enough, but no one would say of Tutankhamen the boy-king that he was in himself the origin of the universe, and its significance. There are many stories in human lore about heroes who rise from obscurity and neglect to the heights of glory. Beowulf is one, but Beowulf dies in the end, and the smoke rises above his funeral pyre and is swallowed up in the sky, while the Geats he ruled look forward to annihilation at the hands of the Swedes, their old enemies. The world is also full of stories of men who achieve enlightenment, which they then pass along to their followers: Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Zoroaster, even Longfellow’s pleasant Hiawatha. Not one of them takes upon his shoulders the sins of the world. Not one of them is or claims to be the Lord of the world.

There is, in the story of Jesus, no sense that he gains enlightenment, no dramatic turning point that puts his life on the path to glory. He is not ever the Prince Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree. He is not ever Mohammed, hitherto an ordinary man working among the caravans, visited by a reciting angel in a cave. We have only one account of his boyhood, whence we gather that he was already that same Jesus we know, calmly confident, speaking and listening and replying. There is in his story nothing of Napoleon or Dick Whittington or Epictetus or Oedipus or Arthur or even Moses. The story of Jesus is not like the story of man. It is instead the key that opens the story of man. It brings those stories into the light, for all men, and for each man. “I am the door of the sheep,” says the Lord. “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and shall find pasture” (Jn. 10:7, 9). Jesus does not conform his story to ours, but we may find the answers to our stories in his: “If any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20).

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And so Saint John brings us back to “the beginning,” but what does that mean? Let us consider what he surely has in mind, and what he expects those who hear him to have in mind if they are Jews: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The Hebrew for that word—for we must remember that John was himself a Jew, thinking first in his native Aramaic and then in the sacred parent language of Hebrew, but writing in his third language, Greek—is bereshith, at the rosh or the head of things. I believe that it meant more to the Jewish mind than our first means to us, or at the start, or to begin with, or even in the beginning, if we think of beginning only in a temporal sense, for instance as the first domino to fall in a series.

We should not allow our digital clocks and calendars to mislead us. When the Jews celebrated the feast that marked the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, it was not like what Americans do when they gather in Times Square to watch a conglomeration of electric lights “fall,” and the numerals change on the historical odometer, whereupon everyone takes a drink, and wakes up the next morning foggy and disillusioned. Says God to Moses: “Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles,” that is, of barns, granaries, vats,

Seven days, after that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine: and thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates. Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast unto the Lord thy God in the place which the Lord thy God shall choose: because the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine hands, therefore shalt thou surely rejoice (Dt. 16:13–15).

Seven, of course, is the number of days in the week, and the week is the divine unit of time. It is suggested by the lunar month of roughly four weeks, but otherwise it is not observable, not evident to the eye. If I may stretch a point: the week is like the angels, invisible. We have the week by the memory of what God has done in the beginning: “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all the work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it” (Gen. 2:2–3). For that reason they who worship Him must also keep the day holy, “for in six days the Lord made the heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it” (Ex. 20:11). We in our anti-culture of work that makes many a bad thing and unmakes many a man and woman, and of hedonism that brings no pleasure, are apt to view the command as a prohibition: do no work on the Sabbath. It is better viewed as an invitation: Thou shalt feast! Rest, here, is not simply an interruption in labor. It is the feast, the refreshment, the crown of life. The heavens and the earth and all that is in them are oriented toward the feast. It is the feast that is their root and trunk and crown, their sap and leaf and flower. In the beginning and in the end, there is the feast. […]

We walk along a narrow land bridge, with a precipice on each side. To the left is the fall into abstraction and mere philosophy. To the right is the fall into mythology and idolatry. We have here neither Heraclitus nor Homer, but what alone will make sense of each, and both together. So, just as we must not reduce the gospel to a footnote to Greek abstraction, so we must not to reduce the gospel to a story about god-characters, Mr. and Mrs. Zeus, whether the characters are to be interpreted literally or allegorically. The gospel is not a work of man’s fevered imagination, nor is it rationalism in symbolic garb. “In the beginning was the Word,” says John, and if all he meant by it was old dry Stoicism sweetened with some Jewish honey, it is hard to understand why Christians would ever be persecuted by anyone. A shrug would suffice: “We are using figures of speech.” Figures of speech cover a multitude of vagaries.

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Likewise, we may be too accustomed to John’s first verse to feel how stunning it is, as stunning as was the first chapter of Genesis, with its frank, terse, and confident rejection of everything strictly mythological about the creation stories of the peoples roundabout. Here we might pause to take a look at that.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”—at a stroke, the sacred author dispenses with the theogonies you find everywhere else, the generations of gods, such as Cronus usurping authority from his father Ouranos, and Zeus his son doing the same in turn to him, assisted by his strategic political alliance with some of the Titans, the generation of gods contemporaneous with Cronus. There is nothing of that in Genesis, or of Osiris betrayed and dismembered by his evil brother Seti, and his sister-wife Isis gathering up again all his scattered limbs; or of the Babylonian Marduk enlisting the allegiance of the younger gods to slaughter the ancient sea-goddess Tiamat, and then fashioning the universe from her remains. There is no foundational violence or conquest. There is also no star-worship, no planetary mysticism. For God made the luminaries for times and seasons, the sun to govern the day and the moon to govern the night, “and he also made the stars,” says the author, as if it were an afterthought. It is a poke in the eye of the Chaldean stargazers. As a myth—as a story about how the moon got her spots, or why the whale is so big, the creation account in Genesis would have been a failure, but then it is not intended as a myth, that is, an explanatory story, so much as it is a stripped-down poetic revelation of what the world is: the good and wholly gratuitous creation by God, oriented toward its fulfillment in the worship of God, the feast of the Sabbath.

It is also not a piece of political propaganda. In the beginning (of the earth, that is, and of mankind), in Babylon, there was violence and empire, with Marduk emerging as the dominant god, just as the Babylonians had overrun and built upon the Sumerian civilization that came before. In the beginning (of civilization, that is), in Greece, there was political cunning and reason, in the person of Zeus, outflanking the hideous older gods of brute domination. So did the Greeks project the political organization called the polis back upon the conflict of the generations of the gods. In the beginning (of large-scale agriculture), in Egypt, there was a good god murdered, whose fertility and whose benevolence entered the Nile River and the mud at her banks, making Egyptian civilization possible. None of that, absolutely none of it, is to be had from our sacred author of Genesis.

One might expect the author, if we were talking simply of human agency, to present to us the holy city of Jerusalem, the “City of Peace,” as present in the seed from the beginning. For man likes to cast the gods in his image, which will usually be a national or tribal image. But Jerusalem is not here. Rather the first city-builder we learn of is Cain, also the first murderer of his kin, his brother Abel. And the first prominent city in Genesis is Babel, emblem of the greatness and the folly of Babylon, and forever after the type of human confusion. Babel is the anti-word, the sign of human language itself falling into change and decay, into misunderstanding and strife.

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Just as the beginning of all things is not, in Genesis, a civic myth aimed at justifying any specific place or form of human organization, so also the beginning in John is not local or specific or bound to a culture. We here are talking about all men, everywhere, and about each single man. The scope is universal, and the touch is intimate. No broader range is possible, nor any deeper gaze into the dark corners of every human soul. What cultural trappings we find are minimal, no more than is necessary for any kind of human communication to take place. We expect a people who raise corn to give us a Hiawatha, and they do. We expect a people who live beneath the steady glare of the tropical sun to give us a Quetzalcoatl, intense and merciless, demanding his daily tribute in the blood of the people’s enemies. We might expect the Hebrew herdsmen to give us a god of the sheep and the cattle, but they do not. There was no time, and there never will come a time, when the account in Genesis of the creation and the fall of man will not speak home truths about who we are. The ancient here does not grow old. There was no time, and there never will come a time, when the opening of John’s gospel will not prompt the attentive reader to ponder the very being of God, of his relationship to man and to all things, and of the inner life that is God’s own, a relationship of love.

Photo by Sebastien Gabriel on Unsplash

Anthony Esolen, PhD

Anthony M. Esolen is a writer, social commentator, translator of classical poetry, and professor of English Renaissance and classical literature. Dr. Esolen is on the Magdalen College faculty and is Writer-in-Residence. His books include Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child; The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization; Ironies of Faith; and Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child as well as In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John. He has also translated Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberate (Johns Hopkins Press); and Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

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“In the Beginning Was the Word”—Excerpt from a New Book by Anthony Esolen

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“The same Globalists who installed Biden… installed the Zelensky regime… [&] those who did not volunteer for this are Literal Human Shields for the Zelensky/Soros government… [if] Trump had survived the election coup in 2020 we would have no Ukraine war”

Professor McMeekin & Pat Buchanan show that understanding why each side is doing what they are doing could help avoid “Escalation to Nuclear Weapons”

Ukrainian President Zelensky’s Homoerotic Skit & “Biden’s Ukraine war and Putin/Russia scape-goating is part of a larger strategy for killing the Red Wave in 2022”

﻿

“In the Beginning Was the Word”—Excerpt from a New Book by Anthony Esolen

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