Stephen Roney's Blog, page 239

Satan Not So Cool Any More

At first this story seemed too perfect; I thought it might be a hoax. But GQ seems like a neutral source. It's not the Onion, not the Babylon Bee.

Thrash metal drummer visits hell, not so keen on Satan anymore.



'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

Stats Suggest Lockdown Is Not Needed

JP Morgan study suggests states that have ended the lockdown in the US have seen new cases decline instead of rising.

It seems to me the datum that new cases are actually declining instead of rising when lockdowns end strengthens the thesis that the virus is sunlight-sensitive, and going into decline because of summer.

'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

Coronavirus in Decline

It is still frustratingly hard to get reliable information about what is going on with COVID-19. Official sources seem to so badly lag unofficial ones as to be useless or even harmful; bureaucracies are vast inert bodies, and perhaps also riddled with special interests pursuing their own agendas. In the media, political partisanship seems to be producing false information consistently. And experts in the field are all over the map, disagreeing on almost everything. You can find an expert to support any possible position.

One prominent expert now says the virus may be dying out naturally. As I noted here some time ago, this is actually the usual thing with epidemics. It does not necessarily have to do with vaccines or “herd immunity.”

I look at the graphs at Our World in Data, and it does look as though he may be right. Among the previously hard-hit countries, the death toll has been declining steadily for some time. Although none are anywhere near herd immunity.

Better treatments? Perhaps. But the number of new confirmed cases daily has also been declining at about the same rate. Despite the rapid “ramping up” of testing.

The result of lockdowns? I included Sweden in the mix last time, and the trend still held. I hear that Austria, Czechia, Norway, and Denmark have been out of lockdown for a few weeks, and this does not seem to have bent the curve upward for any. Denmark, Norway, and Austria are still going down in number of new cases. Perhaps more slowly than during the lockdown period in the case of Norway or Austria. Czechia is trending slightly up.



I hypothesized that this might have to do with the coming of summer and warmer, sunny weather. To test the hypothesis, I look at Argentina, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, and Australia, a selection of Southern Hemisphere countries. Presumably, they are now moving into the colder half of the year, so their reported cases should be going up, not down.

And they are—dramatically in the case of Chile or Brazil. Australia is an exception, but they have taken lockdown measures that may have prevented the virus from yet establishing a foothold. Mozambique, Angola, and Uruguay also have seen few cases overall.


Meanwhile, the WHO is announcing that, worldwide, numbers are still rising.

So it still looks to me as though a summer lull is the likeliest explanation, rather than viral suicide.

Either way, we should be able to safely come out of lockdown for the summer in the Northern part of the big blue marble.


'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

An Artistic Manifesto

Everyone was reading Hesse in the Sixties. Steppenwolf was the hallucinogenic Bible—a literary acid trip. People thought he was advocating Eastern philosophies, paganism, Jungian psychology, drug use, and an ethic of doing your own thing. Sadly, his reputation has waned since from this perception, just as the Sixties sensibility has waned.

I have reread him since, and he is just as good as he was. But he wasn’t saying the same things.

In his own journals, he speaks disparagingly of Indian civilization; and of Jungian psychology. He was actually advocating Christianity. In his own words, “Christianity, one not preached but lived, was the strongest of the powers that shaped and moulded me.” In many cases his essential point has been exactly reversed.

For example Journey to the East, as the title is translated into English, seems to be advocating a trip east to find truth. India or Tibet, right?

In fact, “Die Morgenlandfahrt,” the title in German, “Journey to the Land of Morning,” is the common term for the Crusades. Kind of changes the sense of it.

Of course, in the novel, he never gets to the east. Instead, the climactic final scene is a visual representation of John 3: 30: “He (Jesus) must become greater; I must become less.”

I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to and flowing into Leo’s, nourishing and strengthening it. It seemed that, in time, all the substance from one image would flow into the other and only one would remain: Leo. He must grow, I must disappear.

Demian seems to advocate paganism and doing your own thing, scorning conventional morality. At least, its title character does. But look at that name again, “Demian.” It is actually a Christian morality play, and “Demian” is the Devil incarnate. The main character, who follows his lead, ends the novel in the fires of hell.

The realization hurt. Everything that has happened to me since then has hurt. But if I sometimes find the key and go all the way down into myself, where the fate pictures slumber in the dark mirror, then I only have to lean over the black mirror and see my own image, which is now completely like him, him, my Friend and leader.

For more on that, you could do worse than to read my paper, “Hesse’s Demian as Christian Morality Play.”

Hesse is not the only Christian writer the Sixties got wrong. How about Tolkien? His Ring trilogy was also de rigeur reading for hippiedom, and everyone thought themselves Hobbits. Far from being pagan, it was entirely intentional Christian allegory. Nobody seems to realize just how hallucinogenic and countercultural real Christianity really is.

Another foundational author to the Baby Boomers and the Sixties zeitgeist is Jack Kerouac. A lot of the phraseology and the concepts of the time, things like “hung up,” and hitchhiking across the continent, come from Kerouac’s On the Road and Dharma Bums. He is read as casting off Christianity for Buddhism, and conventional morality for “if it feels good, do it.” Being moral is being “hung up.” But he was actually advocating Catholicism, and called himself a “general of the Jesuits.” To him, one became “hung up” on desires, not inhibitions. Dean Moriarty, whose libertine lifestyle was taken by everyone in the Sixties as example, was not his hero, but an example of someone taking the wrong road. The book ends with Dean unable to talk, unable to explain or justify himself, refused the final ride, disappearing in the rear view mirror. 


Dharma Bums begins with an encounter with a hobo who has carefully preserved, as his prize possession, a prayer to Saint Theresa. He is the “dharma bum” of the title.

Kerouac called the movement he inspired “the Beats.” People think this has something to do with rhythm and jazz music. Kerouac himself explained it as a reference to the Beatitudes.

He was plain enough; people refuse to see what they don’t want to see, and take it all the opposite of as intended.

Another example, speaking of beat, is rock and roll. People see it as the Devil’s music, soundtrack of Sixties rebellion, “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” Few seem to realize that rock’s roots are religious, and it got its energy from the gospel.

Go to YouTube and look for Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She invented it, and performed it in a thousand churches in the South and Midwest, That’s where all the early rockers heard it, singing themselves as kids in their church choirs. 


Jerry Lee Lewis’s cousin was a famous TV evangelist, Jimmy Swaggart. Elvis Presley recorded a good deal of gospel; remember “Crying in the Chapel”?

You saw me crying in the chapel
The tears I shed were tears of joy
I know the meaning of contentment
Now I am happy with the Lord

Little Richard actually became an ordained minister.

Rock was gospel, but with the lyrics skewed to speak instead of courting and sexuality. And it has lost its energy since it lost this awareness of its origins. You want to feel that old rock energy now, you’re going to have to go back to a Pentecostal or a Baptist church.

How about another Sixties icon, in another medium, Andy Warhol? Supposedly all about sexual rebellion, right? Actually, there’s no evidence of any such rebellion in his personal life; he was a devout Byzantine Catholic. And, once you hear this, you can perhaps see where his art comes from: he was transferring the concept of the icon to popular culture. 


The tragic truth is that all the underlying energy of the Sixties was directed towards a religious revival. It was a reaction to the deadening robotic scientistic world view, a rediscovery of the human soul. You even saw it budding, in movements like the Jesus people, the Hare Krishnas; and the like.

Then it was all strangled in the Seventies and Eighties by dark forces. By Marxism, by Yuppiedom, by the cheap materialist pseudo-salvation of New Age, and by postmodernist relativism.

I had a bit of an online scuffle once with a contingent of Leonard Cohen Facebook fans who were mocking Christians for playing “Hallelujah” at their funerals. After all, the song was obviously about kinky sex, and the Hallelujah chorus referred to an orgasm, right?

The pagan Cohenites apparently had no awareness that “she tied you to a kitchen chair, she broke your throne, she cut your hair” was a Biblical reference. They thought it was celebrating sadomasochism. Even though the first two words of the song are “King David.”

It isn’t just about the Sixties. It isn’t only the Sixties that most people seem to get wrong.

Years earlier, I had a similar scuffle with a fellow student who was shocked by my reference to Coleridge as a Christian writer. She thought him a pagan nature-worshipper and an advocate of drug use. A view that would have horrified Coleridge, a key Anglican theologian of his day.

And another scuffle with a with-it band of fellow students who thought it outrageous of me to claim Oscar Wilde as a Christian mystic, instead of, as they supposed, a prominent advocate of sexual libertinage and the gay lifestyle. You probably thought so too, didn’t you?

But his love of paradox is extremely similar to Chesterton. His fairy tales are full of Christian references. Wilde declared himself a Christian, converted to Catholicism, had a priest administer extreme unction at his death, and denied throughout his life being homosexual.

And I recollect another argument with a grad student who marked down my undergrad essay for referring to William Blake as a mystic. Despite the fact that his preface to Jerusalem has become the classic Anglican hymn.

There is serious and widespread denial here. It is embedded in the culture, and certainly embedded in the academy.

It is impossible to understand English literature in general, or Western art in general, or any art in general, in other than religious terms. Outside of Western Europe, there is no concept of non-religious art in the first place. English literature is incomprehensible without background knowledge of Christian symbolism, Christian morality, Christian philosophy. Yet it is never studied in these terms.

My ambition was to study it in these terms; I signed on for graduate school to study the new field of “religion and literature.” Unfortunately, that movement within the academy, timid as it was, died with the first generation of scholars. I arrived on campus just as they were retiring, and was unable to find a supervisor for a doctoral thesis.

Instead, the religious beliefs of writers and artists seem to be deliberately ignored, if not suppressed, everywhere. Instead, utterly foreign philosophies are imposed, things the writers themselves would not have recognized: Marxist interpretations, feminist interpretations, searches for supposed homosexuality, Freudian or Jungian interpretations, structuralist framings, existentialist framings, postmodern deconstructions. All of which arrive at having nothing to say about the text.

Realizing all this has long shaken my faith in the value of creating art. Being oblique, it can easily be misinterpreted, and lead people, as here, in exactly the wrong direction. Makes me wonder, what is the point?

But then, the same can be said of Jesus’s parables. They can be, and usually are, misunderstood, even to the extent of meaning the opposite of what they say. For one example, people commonly seem to suppose that “the Good Samaritan” is simply telling us to help those in need. “The Prodigal Son” has actually been preached to me as a lesson in the higher morality of never leaving home. Nobody seems to notice that every parable says something deeply transgressive of conventional wisdom, of their own time or of this.

Yet Jesus actually says he speaks in parables for this very reason: so that they will be misunderstood by people.

"The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables:

Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand."

Art is actually a way to separate the sheep from the goats.

In the Garden of Genesis, God forms Adam out of the clay—“Adam” apparently means “red clay.”

“God said, ‘Let’s make man in our image, after our likeness. … God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.”

“Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

God made man as a potter casts a pot. Man is God’s work of art. And in breathing a soul into him, God makes man in his own image. Man has the soul of an artist. His mission is to create art.

When the Bible portrays the goal of creation, the heaven that will emerge at the end of time, it is a city, not a garden. 

“I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband.”

“Her light was like a most precious stone, as if it were a jasper stone, clear as crystal; having a great and high wall; having twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels; and names written on them, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel. On the east were three gates; and on the north three gates; and on the south three gates; and on the west three gates. The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them twelve names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb. He who spoke with me had for a measure a golden reed to measure the city, its gates, and its walls. The city is square, and its length is as great as its width. He measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand twelve stadia. Its length, width, and height are equal. Its wall is one hundred forty-four cubits, by the measure of a man, that is, of an angel. The construction of its wall was jasper. The city was pure gold, like pure glass. The foundations of the city’s wall were adorned with all kinds of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, chalcedony; the fourth, emerald; he fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, topaz; the tenth, chrysoprase; the eleventh, jacinth; and the twelfth, amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls. Each one of the gates was made of one pearl. The street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass.”

This describes a vast work of art.

Man is co-creator of heaven. Nature is from God; art is nature processed through the smithy of our souls.

And the religious life is life itself approached as a work of art. That Christian mystic, Oscar Wilde, almost said as much: “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.”

It is traditionally understood that history is, to monotheists, the working out of man’s salvation. But this is far more true of culture. The development of culture is the development of salvation. Because this is so, culture is an ongoing war of good and evil.

This is why the understanding of the parables, the literature, the art is inevitably perverted. Because evil gets its innings.

All true art comes from the Holy Spirit—it is inspiration.

Yet it is then denied or perverted for the general population by the opposing power. Sometimes the initial inspiration is perverted by the original artist; more often by the academy or the experts or the popular culture.

When religion wanes, accordingly, art wanes too, having lost its inspiration. We see in more recent years that most of the arts are moribund. They are failing to create, because the artistic class has drifted away from the sources of inspiration.

We tried to get back on track in the Sixties.

It is time to try again.

'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Another shopping day; about the only time I get a glimpse of the outside world. Cold May day, with leaves on the trees and flowers in bloom.

The store was more crowded this week, perhaps because of the long weekend. Half the meat aisle was empty; no powdered milk; a sign below the yeast and the baking powder warning to buy now, while supplies last.

People seem to be slacking off on the social distancing.

Trump has announced he is taking hydroxylchoraquine and zinc. The mainstream media have already declared hydroxychloroquine ineffective and dangerous. Now they must struggle to explain why Trump would be taking it himself. What will they do if a study comes in showing it is effective—for we have not yet seen a controlled study that used it as recommended?

No doubt the media would not report it. But the Trump administration could make sure the word got out.

That the media would have so recklessly got themselves into this position suggests their underlying suicidal tendencies.'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

Happy Empire Day!

Queen Victoria,
My father and all his tobacco loved you,
I love you too in all your forms,
The slim and lovely virgin floating among German beer,
The mean governess of the huge pink maps,
The solitary mourner of a prince. 

Queen Victoria,
I am cold and rainy,
I am dirty as a glass roof in a train station,
I feel like an empty cast iron exhibition,
I want ornaments on everything,
Because my love, she gone with other boys. 

Queen Victoria,
I'm not much nourished by modern love,
Will you come into my life
With your sorrow and your black carriages,
And your perfect
Memories. 

Queen Victoria,
The Twentieth Century belongs to you and me.
Let us be two severe giants not less lonely for our partnership,
Who discolor test tubes in the halls of Science,
Who turn up unwelcome at every World's Fair,
Heavy with proverbs and corrections,
Confusing the star-dazed tourists
With our incomparable sense of loss.

 -- Leonard Cohen

'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

Meet the Press

I can’t stand to watch Justin Trudeau’s coronavirus briefings. There is something about the quality of his voice… feigned concern. He is too obviously an actor, and not a good actor. I feel my intelligence insulted every time.

Doug Ford is a little better, but still hard to take, for the same reason.

Trump was knocked for his apparent lack of compassion at his virus briefings. But I vastly preferred his approach, which was to give encouragement and hard information.

His new press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, seems to have taken over the task. She is immensely entertaining to watch. But mostly for her takedowns of the press.

The media are behaving outrageously throughout this; they have become the last place to go for reliable news. Given the technological pressures they face from the new media, it looks like deliberate mass suicide on the level of Jonestown, Guyana. But then, it looks as though the Democratic Party is doing the same, with their nomination and resolute support of Biden and the House’s passivity and obstruction.

I wonder if this is all connected. Trudeau, and Ford, speak to the voters like children; and the left apparently likes this. The legacy media, and the Democratic Party establishment, are indeed acting like children, refusing to deal with unpleasant realities. They are instead throwing tantrums and making demands.

They are spoiled adult children: narcissists.

And one secret about narcissists is that they actually always want someone else to take charge. They do not want adult responsibility.

As a result, they are actually doing everything they can to re-elect Trump.

'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Steve Bannon likes to start his shows by saying “Some decades nothing happens. Some weeks, decades happen.” It seems we are at such a time. Perhaps the biggest time of turning since 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Perhaps since 1967-68.

A compendium of the present moment:

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has been declining in the US, UK, Sweden, and Canada for some time. For many weeks, it seemed to be only growing; we seem to have turned the proverbial corner, crested that hill. In the US and UK, it has been going down since mid-April. In Sweden and Canada, since May 1st. This is especially significant because it has been happening at the same time that testing has been growing quickly, so that we should naturally be seeing more new cases.

The daily death toll, a lagging indicator, is also now heading steadily down.

I include Sweden to see if this is a result of the lockdown. It seems not.

Throw in Spain and France. In Spain, the number of cases has been declining since the end of March; in France, since April 2nd.

Guess what this is all aligning with?

The coming of warmer weather.

It seems as though we can generally expect an abatement of the virus for the summer months. For what that should be like, throw in the antipodes, Australia and New Zealand: a small hump around the end of March, really of infected people arriving from abroad, until the borders were shut, and now almost nothing.

We should be good for summer, here in the Northern Hemisphere, at least if we stop flights from below the equator. Until perhaps October.

This gives us some time to prepare our defenses. At a minimum, even without a vaccine or a cure, with our newfound experience, we should be able to attack the thing the way the South Koreans did, testing, tracking, isolating, masking, keeping the economy going.

In the meantime, Tim Poole worries about war breaking out between the US and China; Drudge reports a Pentagon war game suggests China could win a war with the US in the Pacific.

Let’s unpack that. There has never been a war between two nuclear powers, and there is probably a good reason: Mutual Assured Destruction. So I doubt a straight-on confrontation between the US and China. I also doubt that the Pentagon’s war game really suggested a Chinese victory. If it had, bad idea to let that get public. More likely, they are projecting into the future, in order to convince the government to take China more seriously and spend more money on the military. We used to hear similar warnings about NATO’s capability against the Warsaw Pact.

It is true that the Chinese government has been acting aggressive. But the real effect of the coronavirus seems to be to have derailed their attempt to achieve world dominance by stealth. Now suddenly everybody’s on to it; in part thanks to their missteps in handling the virus and its public relations aftereffects, in part because the virus provides a vivid mental image of Chinese infiltration.

Their current aggression may therefore be a sign of weakness and frustration; people near the top may feel a need to show they still have a handle on things—because they do not.

Joshua Philipp expects the Chinese government to collapse within a year. I find that more likely than war. China is set for a spell of severe economic contraction. The government is going to run out of money: with the shutdown, where’s their stream of cash to come from? Their belt-and-road initiative is going to collapse, because they can no longer afford it, and because other nations are now going to be suspicious of their motives. Everyone is now worried about pulling their supply chains home, or diversifying them. People suspect Chinese products are designed to spy on them. Foreign investment is going to shift to India, Indonesia, Vietnam, South America. Demographic trends were already working against China, raising the cost of Chinese labour. A coordinated opposition seems to be coalescing around Hong Kong and Falun Gong.

For many years, few in China have supported the communist government for ideological reasons. Their popular support was based on the old Confucian idea, that the party was a body of experts who could manage well. They are vulnerable to any impression of incompetence.

Early in this pandemic, I theorized that it was a way for God to topple some malignant social entities. More than a theory; it follows from monotheism.

It may well be that it had to be this harsh to do the deed. But it still seems as if designed to topple the CCP.

Perhaps others. Perhaps also the Iranian regime; the Venezuelan; perhaps the EU in its present form.

In the US, it is hitting “blue” states far harder than “red” states; almost as though they were targeted.

Not that the mere presence of the virus should discredit the local politics. However, it seems to have prompted Democratic local regimes to resort to more draconian lockdown measures, in LA, New York City, and Michigan. This is their natural tendency, after all: top down, government driven. And this is perhaps producing a popular backlash. Some “red” regimes, like Florida and Georgia, are easing the lockdowns, and, so far, getting away with it, tending to discredit the big government approach.

The pandemic has also tended to show the established “experts” as frequently wrong; as either self-interested or incompetent. And the essence of “progressive” politics has always been rule by the experts.

I wonder whether the current crisis means the end of the American left as we know it.

There are signs. Google, for example, is cutting back on its “diversity programme.” Not ideological, the techie money guys were simply betting on the side they thought would be least controversial, and so most profitable. They may swiftly switch their bet from left to right.

Mainstream media outlets, the vital pillar of leftist control of “the narrative,” are dying like summer flies on the windshield from the lack of advertising revenue; and this is beginning to include “woke” online outlets too. For one thing, in the face of the pandemic, they are looking increasingly frivolous and irresponsible. If you want reliable news of what is going on with the coronavirus, it has been necessary to go to small independent sources.

Schools, colleges, and universities have been the other strong pillar of left-wing social domination; home of the “experts” and responsible for the indoctrination of the young. They too are particularly hard hit by this pandemic, with people forced to learn how to learn at home, busting their monopoly. Even if students return in the fall, colleges have been surviving and thriving on the foreign trade. Without those international tuitions, demographics should have forced them into decline a generation ago. And the foreign students are probably not coming back for some time.

New York City is apparently emptying out; twenty percent of the population of Manhattan has left. This is a natural reaction to an epidemic; London emptied out during the Black Plague. But having learned to telecommute, and that living at close quarters is not healthy, are they all coming back? The pandemic may inspire a general migration out of cities; something that economics seems to require in any case. Politically, this means a dispersal of the leftist base into Republican territory, where they will be, in most cases, a local minority. It seems likely they will over time adopt local attitudes more often than changing them.

In the meantime, circumstances seem to be combining to destroy the Democratic campaign for this presidential election to an almost uncanny extent. Biden’s mental capacity is visibly and rapidly declining; what were the chances of that? He has been caught by serious “metoo” accusations; he has been revealed to be deeply involved in Watergate-like political corruption in the Flynn affair. This on top of the prior apparent corruption of Burisma and Hunter Biden’s other business dealings.

The nomination process already looked seriously rigged. The Democratic leadership in general looked corrupt in getting him the nomination. Now they look incompetent in doing so as well.

A weak presidential candidate should hurt them in the House and Senate elections as well; but it seems to me that the House Democrats are messing things up badly enough on their own. The impeachment drive looked at best irresponsible, when we now see there was urgent action needed on the coming pandemic. During the pandemic, they are looking at best irrelevant, in staying away from Washington, at worst obstructionist. They have not looked like part of the solution, but part of the problem. The recent Republican victory in a Democratic seat in California may suggest a canary’s dying breath in an anthracite mine.

Interesting times, lads, interesting times.

'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

Pandemonium

Diversity is our strength.

Or so we are told.

Common sense suggests that unity is at least as important. Diversity is more like friction: energy dissipated without direction. Chaos is the ultimate diversity.

Granted that I love the diversity of the Catholic Church: the thought of people all around the world worshipping as one.

But then, it is not the diversity I love, is it? It is the act of deliberate unity. The old American motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” similarly celebrates a movement to unity, not diversity: “out of many, one.” One might as well say, “out of lead, gold.” “Out of manure, flower.” Diversity is the given, unity the ideal.

The liberal goal of equality is a call for unity: the idea is to treat all men the same.

The medieval scholastics considered unity one of the transcendental values, the ultimate goals of human existence.

So why this new and pressing desire for diversity? Very new in the idea that diversity is to be preserved and celebrated.

A thought occurs. Unity is equivalent to purity, and purity to morality. Sir Galahad said,
“My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.” Our prime directive, Jesus said, is to “love God with your whole heart.”

The devil, conversely, literally means diversity: the word comes from dia-bol, to set apart. Devils are multiple by nature: "pandemonium."

We are dealing with something diabolic.

The subtext to this emerging celebration of diversity, I suspect, is that it releases us from obligations to do what is right. We get to act at random, and nobody can object. That’s “diversity.”

The idiom “to hell in a handcart” comes to mind.


'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

Catholic Insight

Landed a piece in Catholic Insight magazine,  available free on the web at

https://catholicinsight.com/do-dogs-and-cats-go-to-heaven/

Go and have a look. And discover Catholic Insight too, if you are not familiar with it.



'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.