I've been trying to make a point of watching movies every now and again lately. Movies are quite good for me to relax. The shared (free) Netflix and Disney + accounts from siblings have beckoned, yet I often just go for a nighttime walk instead. My nighttime walks are epic. Nonetheless, I've made the feat of watching a good number!

First I watched The Irishman (aka GoodFarts) in one sitting, no problem. Interesting to some degree and tense, but yeah, what a yawn fest. I'm sure part of that feeling is the intended point, like look how sad and lonely this sort of life is, if life you could call it. But how pathetic is it all! Killing people to have some stupid crummy mammon. This movie just felt like the final nail in the coffin of all mafia films.

I watched The Walk, and...can I ask a question? How is it possible for people to watch this film without having to get out of their chair/seat and pace about the room while shielding their eyes from the screen? Holy Toledo this film did a number on my nerves. And those images, if I even just recall them in my imagination, I'm done for.

I watched Jack Reacher. LOL. Tom Cruise - he's just this strange combination of excruciatingly annoying and no problem you're great in a LOL kind of way. And Robert Duvall - he is not in enough movies. He's always superlatively great.

I watched some not-so-new flicks, like Deepwater Horizon (not too shabby) and London has Fallen (LOL).

I watched The Last Jedi, which was 500 x better than The Force Awakens. It's interesting how the intentional nostalgia of The Force Awakens was a colossal fail, but The Last Jedi turned out to be way more Star Warsy. And I was surprised at how interesting and habitable they made Luke Skywalker's hermit island. We haven't seen that sort of thing since Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back.

For some reason I felt compelled to watch the original 1975 Escape to Witch Mountain, which I hadn't seen before. I can't believe how much I actually ended up liking it. The first half hour I was like, "What am I doing, this is so lame, O frick I hate Disney so much..." and then things took a turn.

They took a turn when Jason showed up. Man, what a great guy that Uncle Jason! Good old Jason! Not like the rigid millionaire villains, he has the capacity for belief and thinking on his feet. Reminded me of Pope Francis. The chase scene with the winnebago is actually quite good, and when the winnebego takes off into the air, and the upside down helicopter...it was so painful it was delicious. Yet, even with the seriously outdated effects, there was something...magic.

Watching that scene and putting everything together, I was like, "I see, I see - so...Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Starman, A.I., et cetera et alia - they all just basically ripped off Escape to Witch Mountain. Good to know, good to know!"

Then I watched the original 1982 Tron which I hadn't seen before, strangely enough, and I was like, "I see, I see - so The Matrix just basically ripped off Tron. Good to know, good to know!"

Then I watched Holes (aka Escape to Thumb Mountain). Again, hadn't seen it before. But I remember from that time 2003 hearing so many good things about it. I liked it! The back and forth between time lines is hard to do without getting tiresome, but in Holes, on the contrary, it gets more and more interesting, making you even ponder time - right up there with Citizen Kane. Five stars out of five stars and two thumbs out of two thumbs!

Seriously, it was a really good movie. I got the sense that as good as the movie is, the book is even better.

But the cream of the crop for me was The Highwaymen. This is the kind of film that makes me start spouting all kinds of cinephile praises. This is easily one of the best films I've seen in a long time. This film is like the perfect coinciding maturation/fruition point between actors, director, writer, etc.

The director, John Lee Hancock, is the one who wrote A Perfect World. His staid, four-square direction in The Alamo here finds a fluidity of language, an elegant and taut selectivity that gives more as it gives less; but not minimalist. Sustained, really good cinema. Devoid of Hollywoodizing scene-for-scene drama. Instead, full on locale, on sense of place and traversing stretches of country and town, and retracing certain locales, full on the sense of dogged effort in the old bodies of these two rangers, it's clear these two rangers are good, really good, but there's also doubt if they can really do this; full on how really murderously dangerous the people are who they are hunting.

Kevin Costner (who was in A Perfect World, a Texas cross country escapee manhunt story) here as the greatest Texas ranger hits the right notes. The way he physically moves, sort of tight in the shoulders and chest, a smoker who can't run to catch up to a kid, clearly in "retirement", is a visual story to itself (which we find out about later in the film). Woody Harrelson (who was in Oliver Stone's Bonnie and Clyde take Natural Born Killers) here is equally great, if not more. This is his best performance to date. Both Costner and Harrelson settle into these aged roles so well.

But then there's all of Costner's western stuff and The Untouchables and Open Range (Duvall!). I caught a number of little references and nods throughout The Highwaymen. So yeah, all of these merging sort of overlaps. I feel like they just settle and simmer so perfectly and organically together in this film.

But it's the direction, the film as a whole, the construction not by scene, but continuous, the way it moves, the world-feel, the sense of time, the suspense that comes out of nowhere. This film is great cinema. Like all great cinema, it is born out of understanding the limits of the medium. I love how we don't get to see Bonnie and Clyde's faces real good until just before they - well, I know for some of you youngins it would be a spoiler, so I won't say.

I really recommend this film. I don't understand the low tomato rating, and I don't want to read people's stupid reviews. This film is great. It is superb cinema. It is immersive, a good story that moves along yet takes its time. Doesn't try to gin things up with revisionist drama stuffing. And because of it the characters, and their personal dramas, become palpable. A good, solid, straight up anti-Bonnie and Clyde flick.

Do watch it!

In conversation with a priest many years ago, he described a group of people this way: "They are like the flea on the elephant's head that thinks it's the elephant."

While I can't remember the particular group of people we were talking about, I remember being dissatisfied with the image, for it seemed to miss something, yet it sufficed.

Not having a better image right now, it certainly works as an analogy for conspiracists.

Conspiracism is fueled by spiritual narcissism. Conspiracism is the spiritual narcissist's self-absolution of his own delay in meeting reality, and then more and more a justification of it. He comes upon a future scenario for a pandemic written by some think tank a number of years ago, and says, "Ah ha! See here!"

Completely failing to realize the very ordinary realization that if a number of people from a number of expertises from around the world come together to produce what a scenario for a world pandemic might look like, chances are, they'll get it right by at least 8 out of 10 - thus proving, well, you know, their expertise - the conspiracist then proceeds to do precisely what he is accusing these supposed conspiring elites of doing. He applies and offloads an entire unspoken and hidden bias, motive, and agenda to his spoken (and error-riddled) interpretation and basically says, "Now let me write you up a future scenario! Listen to ME!"

And thanks to the previous work of the think tank which he hijacks, he begins to initiate his cult base by the narcotic of get me in on this super secret knowledge! In the Christian-Fundamentalist version this super secret knowledge is equated to "vigilance".

The look here this number-by-number future scenario - isn't it creepy! shtick by the conspiricist is precisely a page out of his own playbook. This is why the conspiricist is a consistent failure at meeting reality.

One result of the failure to meet reality at this particular moment is the psychopathic imposition of the risk of death onto other people in a pandemic by flouting safety measures. Flouting them out of narcissistic fideism makes it all the worse.

Conspiricists hear the words of experts who are merely bearing a message and they stone them. They stone the messenger. When they then meet resistance from people who feel the completely reasonable response to being offered arsenic to drink is to use their reason and say no, these conspiricists then bless themselves as martyrs and cry about how they are the messenger being stoned.

There is a reason why Jesus compared false prophets to vultures.

I've been saying to people for over a month now that the 1950's are coming back. Not that anything like that really comes back, just as there is no going back, but as a manner of speaking.

Families out along the sidewalks, not on their way to some event or entertainment, but just on a stroll, taking the air. I don't think I've seen so much of this before. The other day I was touched to see two lovers, the man with his arm around his woman while they walked slowly, in step, as a single unit. During my evening walk I see scooters, bikes, leaning against trees, left on lawns. Landscapes, gardens, yards are looking better kept than they ever have. People investing their time and creativity in vegetable gardens.

And now I'm reading about the drive-in theaters coming back. Drive-in burger joints where they place the tray on your open window. With the empty streets at night and cheap gas, street drag racing will make a comeback. Not trying to make light of the virus, but there's something to be said here - at the risk of being out of touch with the reality of suffering - that with every loss (here I'm not speaking about human lives but the way of life that we have considered normal) there is always something gained that you had forgotten. Whenever you lose something, you have gained something you forgot or didn't consider. I know that from experience. There's something in the air.

I just hope this regaining of something in a better way happens for those who have lost the most. I've been praying every day to God to cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly. I suppose some unerring super Catholic apologist would love to tell me that I'm entertaining liberation theology by praying that.

I really find it interesting how all the people observing isolation measures because they are selfless enough to care about what's transpiring before their noses without seeking to alter reality, without seeking to manipulate it in the first instance, are castigated as panicking sheeple. They are taking the proper measures precisely because they are not panicking, so it's interesting to see how they get scourged by conspiricists who vomit up their fundamentalist panic about panicking and their sheep-herding manipulation about sheeple. This sort of off-loading, this projection, is all very Vigano. Because every crisis doesn't have enough burdens as it is; they need to see how many other burdens they can pack on people's backs while excusing themselves with a swiffer of their own hand. The biggest cultists are bleating about sheeple. It's very interesting.

And right after people get accused of being fearful panickers, they get accused for using their reason. These panicking fearful sheeple are also creepily calm slaves of science and rationality; they are of this world; they have no faith. (But Spray Tan with his UV lights and injected disinfectants is the cutting edge of scientific thought!) LOL.

Isn't it interesting how Catholics will receive the sacraments again, but only after learning what being eucharistic means? Isolating for the life of others is eucharistic. The least eucharistic response to the suspension/dispensation of receiving the sacraments has been the inability to adapt, not gratefully remembering all the graces and sanctification one has received in the sacraments to now and trying to put it forward, but only to bemoan how much one misses the sacraments, which is, basically, "The Eucharist is all about MEEEEEEEEE!!!"

But the institution of the Eucharist was the greatest Adaptation of all time. I've often had this wild thought that some of the most devout Catholics have been imprisoning Jesus in the Eucharist. (pointing the finger at myself too!)

I find it really interesting how down through the years of the pontificate of Francis the words Ominous and Disturbing have been used by rigorists (who are certainly never ever sheeple or cultic manipulators) to describe things that were merely something about the faith or about the church which they needed to learn, or rethink, or which were just really nothing to get disturbed about.

When he came out onto the balcony it was Ominous and Disturbing. When I read Amoris Laetitia it was Ominous and Disturbing. When they projected images of animals onto the wall of the Vatican it was Ominous and Disturbing. When they planted a tree and made indigenous gestures of reverence it was Ominous and Disturbing.

But when more and more photos come out of cultic mobs gathering under the general flag of fascism, under one who is becoming more and more their dictator, and carrying assault rifles in the public square in the very same instance of flouting safety measures which may, and likely will, result in human deaths (lending the carrying of their assault weapons in public something far more ominous than being just symbols of their "rights"), with all the hallmarks of becoming the unofficial enforcers of the dictator's implementation of chaos - the presage of a veritable Clockwork Orange movement of ruffian thuggery for "freedom" - yes, all this: where are you oh-so-vigilant and sober faithful, who are most certainly never ever sheeple, with your vocabulary of Ominous and Disturbing in this particular instance?

Oh, what's that? Dead comfortable silence, eh?

Huh, imagine that.

But Covid-19 just sets in motion the underlying illnesses to which they were vulnerable...

so they say.

And in saying that, they make a very deep confession.

Take Owen Benjamin, Canadian comedian and commentator. Rugged anti-p.c. down-home rural-loving God-fearing Christian. Doesn't hold with no one who plows a crooked furrow. Been on Joe Rogan, interviewed with Jordan Peterson. Has a following. Thinks of himself as a really funny guy.

Here's a twitter thread containing a sampling of his vids.

Said during Holy Week that Christians must congregate and that you're not a Christian if you don't congregate. All the usual fideist holy roller talk about it's just Fear, it's a mortal sin to isolate at home, it's a hoax, it's socialist mind control, you just fear death, etc.

Here's a picture of him rocking his beloved Jew mask:

You can search and find all the videos of him rocking his mask yourself. In one of them his kid starts crying from being so scared by the mask and his wife tells him to stop.

Sandy Hook, moon landing, crush on Hitler's rigorism, Hitler just wanted to clean things up, all the other crap you would expect as well.

Just so you know, these people are not "sideline freaks" in their position within the culture.

They are popular. "Being banned" is the hot new popular. It's "meat and potatoes".

We need clarity and truth and solid doctrine, not fuzzy ambiguity, build your house on rock! not blown about by every wind and, and - oh look, a 5G conspiracy theory - alright I'll entertain that.

LOL

Image source

At least twice now that I'm aware of Pope Francis has used the image of peacocks to refer to the preening vanity of a clericalized, liturgically ideologized Katholyc clique and I wonder if the fashionably traddy Flannery O'Connor appropriators are all like, "NOOOO HOW LONG OH LORD HOW LONG!!!" LOL

By isolating, you are preserving human life. You are a citizen preserving the life of your country.

You should be getting paid for it by the government, and paid well.

Airlines and cruise ships have been positive vectors of the virus. They should not get anything.

Not one penny should be going to private banks, loaning, stock buy back, billionaire CEO's. They use that bail out money to create more debt in order to strip a nation that has been made totally vulnerable. As Michael Hudson put it: turning the country into a grab bag.

The protection from the talons of debt is what's especially required in a pandemic crisis, not the creation of more of it, inviting every bird of prey onto the people who are doing their right duty of preserving life by isolating and changing their lives.

The first economic measures should be their monetary protection, precisely right now, and this would be a means of honouring their protection of human life (self isolation/distancing) right now, instead of the empty hypocrisy of we-are-the-world thank you essential workers bullshit google logos. The secondary benefit of that is that the economy wouldn't crash.

The money that ought to be paid to the people isolating themselves should be guaranteed to have full purchasing power by the refusal to give a larger sum to the banks and corporations.

The creation of debt is a crime against humanity.

"No matter what our politicians do, the people are slowly learning..."

If you want some clarity, understanding, truth, and not isolate/quarantine yourself in the sectarian hothouse of conspiracy theory and apocalypticism (which feed into the rise of fascism and genocidal scapegoating) then you have to watch Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson:

"...a system whose time has come and now gone." --Richard D Wolff

"The real economy is going to be sacrificed to the financial sector." --Michael Hudson

"Every crisis contains both danger and opportunity: the opportunity to move out from the danger." --Pope Francis, interview with Austen Ivereigh

The words "re-open the economy" form one of the biggest, most insidious lies we've been fed in a long time.

The economy has not closed. Rather, the insupportable flab of financialization is facing the prospect of the scalpel, and the real economy has begun to show its true face (the preservation of life, in all its forms and colours and modes, meaning every good occupation no matter how "small" or mundane), and the very real possibility of what it can re-adapt to, very much overnight (even in the face of criminal incompetence and negligent homicide by political leaders) brings with it the picture of the real role of government and economic solidarity. Which is to say: the realization of where the money should be circulating.

The situation of a people prospering in an economy - or making do in a crisis by dividends that is rightfully theirs through government - without the Stock Market is one which the Powers will not tolerate. The low key, puttering, Bradburyesque 1950's savour of it catching refreshingly onto people's noses and making them think new thoughts has the Bezos of the world and their self-protecting Spray Tan shills pissing their pants. You can be sure this is the one and only reason why Spray Tan isn't doling out what, say, Germany is doling out. Yet Spray Tan wants his name signed to the pittance because re-election.

They will have you believe that your financial situation, your being able to get by prior to the crisis, was dependent upon them and their economics. It's a lie. They are vultures in a crisis or in "ordinary times" - it doesn't matter to them. They seek their self-protection and advantage in every circumstance. They try to play people with their very real and sudden insecurity. Don't look back and think, "I had it better economically before all this." Think rather, "I would have been economically better off before, were it not for these criminal parasites." That's nearer the mark. But better yet: "The complete corrupt disregard for human life to further their self-interests makes me want to be creative in serving others."

And also, talk about welfare and inflation is all bullshit. You want ample money supply to be circulating in the system at a time like this. People who receive these cheques are immediately spending it back into the economy. Which is not what happens when the Bezos get their multi-billion bail-outs. What's circulating in the economy can be taxed back out.

Just remember: you think you're world is coming down around you, so to speak, and you are re-adapting (so to speak). It's the exact same for the multi-billionaires and their political lapdogs and their incestuous fortunes. They are "re-adapting" - but according to their mode. When they say we need to "re-open the economy" what they are saying is that they need you to return to being the Slave Class.

They are going to try and pull every trick out of their bag. Keep your shrewd button on.

Fan of Chesterton and Belloc?

Well both of them wanted every person, ipso facto, to have three acres and a cow. From the get go. Without cost and without debt.

So good luck to those shaking in their boots about UBI while desperately trying to maintain their standing as Catholics.

Universal basic wage, citizen's income, social dividend, citizenship revenue, guaranteed revenue - whatever you want to call it, in whatever the form, these are not new and they are not theories and they are not about supplement. Check out the Social Credit history of Canada for starters.

It's an inclusive Primary Transaction. And there is always a Primary Transaction in every economy no matter what. The question is: who, what parties, is that Primary Transaction going to be between?

The point of the principle of UBI (or whatever you want to call it) is not so much wealth redistribution; the point of it is that it leads to an economy that is immanently maintainable. As many people owning as possible. It can take hits without cataclysmic seismic shifts and the upending of the country.

It's kinda sorta like the bottle deposit system. The problem that people have with UBI (or whatever form of social dividend) is that it is not sexy. And that's always why people reject an answer and solution that is actually proportionate to reality - because it is simple and not sexy.

It's like buying an older Chevy truck pre-2000 instead of buying the latest model with all the new electronics and planned obsolescence built into the transmission, literally planned to the kilometer: the old truck is repairable, servicable, maintainable, will last not only a lifetime, but multiple lifetimes, while the other? The repairs are so expensive you may just as well switch over your lease to next latest model. And to the next latest after that. And none of those trucks will you ever actually own.

Everything, everything, everything on this good green earth needs at some point to be maintained, serviced, repaired, restored, kept in check, re-balanced, etc. The economy most certainly included. And there's something to be said how the emphasis is as much on basic as on universal.

And it's not sexy.

And just admit it, you champs of subsidiarity don't actually believe in subsidiarity.

Title: Turn of trail, turn of season

Medium: Oil on panel

Dimensions: 30 in x 24 in

This painting is not finished

God has accepted the ordinary more than you have.

Always remember

The Great Depression was not fallout.

It was deliberately sustained.

I know one thing - this song remains a classic. I hadn't listened to it, or any Costello, for a long time (I was a somewhat fan in early teens). Hearing this one again now - man, just so good.