Stephen Roney's Blog, page 106
December 19, 2022
All I Want for Christmas Is U
December 18, 2022
Carol of the Bells in the Original Ukrainian
Especially meaningful this Christmas...
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.Angels Heard on High
The Grandfather of All Conspiracy Theories
In recent years, we have been learning that one “conspiracy theory” after another is actually true. Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia ring. Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide. The Russia hoax. The vaccines and the lockdowns. The excess deaths. UFOs turn out to be legit. The FBI was manipulating and shadowbanning on Twitter.
“Conspiracy theory” became a pejorative in the wake of Oliver Stone’s implausible film on the JFK assassination. Whether it was intended to cast derision on the concept of conspiracies, it had that effect. For the term as common parlance dates back to theories on that assassination.
Now that we learn conspiracies are genuinely possible and apparently common in government, have we been wrongly dismissing the big one?
Was the Kennedy assassination actually the moment the CIA and the Deep State seized control of the US government? Was it a secret coup?
Scott Adams has argued for years that any country with a large spy agency can, will and must be taken over by that agency eventually. There is every incentive, and nothing to prevent it. These spies have a license to do whatever they want, essentially unlimited government funding, a license to keep it all secret, a license to kill. Are they going to sit idle and not make use of this power? Are they going to use it only on external enemies?
Russia has been visibly owned by the KGB since at least Yuri Andropov. Britain has been run by MI5 for generations; the British don’t particularly care, because they are used to deference and historically trust their ruling class. But America has always had these quaint delusions about democracy and the popular will.
Those of us who remember the Kennedy assassination remember it as a generational trauma, the end of our innocence. Nothing has ever felt right since.
Perhaps our instincts were right.
Perhaps now it will all come out.
Perhaps that might start to make it right.
"I now feel that most of my adult life, what I have thought was real, has been erased."--Roger Simon
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 17, 2022
Dobry Vechir Toby
What we need now is a good rousing Ukrainian Christmas song, in honour of their struggle this season.
December 16, 2022
The Season's Upon Us
What Rough Beast?
It seems clear to me that our contemporary fear of “judgementalism” comes from the secular culture, and owes nothing to Church teaching, or the Bible, or traditional Judeo-Christian morality. It traces back to the “do your own thing” popular culture of the 1960s; before that to such figures as Marcuse, Freud, and before them Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx.
Jesus himself had no problems with judging the moneychangers,
Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”
or the scribes and Pharisees,
“You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?”
or those who mislead or miseducate children.
“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
He judges the living and the dead, and divides humanity into sheep and goats.
“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’”
Is this peculiar to him? Is it only he who is competent to judge, being God incarnate? No; John the Baptist, “the greatest born of women,” also has no trouble condemning the Sadducees and Pharisees,
“But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?’”
or judging the acts of Herod Antipas.
“For Herod had arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because John had been telling him, ‘It is not lawful for you to have her.’”
And in this, he is doing the same divine work as all the prophets of the Old Testament: issuing a warning to those who are on the wrong path.
“Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.’”
If we lose this, we lose the ethical essence of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
I see our contemporary refusal to make moral judgments leading to the destruction of a growing number of souls; and in the end the destruction of society at large. As W.B. Yeats put it, we are living in a time in which, increasingly,
"The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intensity."
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 15, 2022
A Canadian Christmas Song
Gabbard on Trudeau
