Something I wrote and then posted even though I wrote this title before posting it

Life is very simple, and we waste much time complicating it. Re-heating old flash-frozen memories, and flash-freezing present circumstances for later re-heating. Life is very simple in precisely the same way that suffering is inevitable. There are people who believe that power is true life, for power attains results, and power therefore must be power over suffering. But Jesus the way, the truth and the life totally contradicted this; in his word, his deed, in his sacrifice. God Himself did not choose results-based power. He totally contradicted it.

Just as we complicate life, so we generate for ourselves (and others) greater and more inextricable sufferings in trying to avoid suffering - which could just as well read: in trying to avoid life. Life is simple in that it does not answer our existential queries. Life simply is, and marvelous it is, marvelous and dangerous beyond telling, for who can speak fully of the adventure they are presently immersed in?

And our modern age has kept us from the most elementary level of belief. Our age is primarily defined as the avoidance of suffering at all costs, and the dulling of conscience through noise, and the only result is suffering beyond belief. And suffering beyond belief - that is to say, in a Neitzschean sense, beyond belief to knowing as achieving (a main fault of the Red-Pill Anti-Francis New Seer Movement, We-R-Truth Inc.) - is the worst suffering: the despair of unreality. It is earthbound suffering that at the same time can never get down to earth; it is focused on the flesh, but it is flesh that is hollow to the core.

Flesh from Flesh

The eye excites to see, where no feet tread,
the spry veins from trees’ crown-thrown seeds thread
upwards near the parent bole, from a bed
that was ancestral leaves and scales and cones;

how the pliant sprout dons, like a badge,
just a few of what the parent in abundance has:
set of ten meagre needles light locked on top
for its life-sustenance-star, a cap,

the same the sentinel sheds without a thought.

"But Rex, what if the Pope were to say that the Synod is way, way broader a picture, and that it shows a sad and blighted attitude towards family on the part of Catholics that they would accede to the Media's ploy to instrumentalize the Synod by focusing obsessively on one subject?"

"Well, then it would be so."

"But what if it wasn't so?"

"Well, I suppose it would mean it was a sort of Synod that hadn't taken place yet but you were too obsessed with one single subject to see it."

Ah, Rex isn't so imbecilic after all!

Icon: Mandylion - the Holy Face of Jesus

Mole and Leaf

Dug up a live mole in the garden. After turning over a wad of earth he was just sitting there. The plump little fella played dead, until I tried scooping him up with the spade. Then he burrowed back into the earth. I had never seen a mole in the act of digging before. Moles can burrow into the earth like the Dickens.

Like the Dickens.

I could not concede to killing him, though all what it would have taken was a quick splice with the spade and it would have been lights out for Mr. Mole. Or - since it's a mole - would that be lights on?

This dried leaf,

was a leaf I took from the forest - in order to dry it.

Why? Because when you dry this leaf from the forest it makes a smell.

What does it smell like? I would describe it if I could. But I can't, so I won't.

That's all.

Aloha III!

Good interview

Last night I listened to this Heather King interview with Tom Wilson of Big Pop Fun. I enjoyed it; just a great Catholic conversation between the two, which means any and every subject under the sun.

Heather King's blog.

Walkabout

One, two, three...four?

Beeches

It made a sound, though I wasn't around to hear it.

Wonderful Recording

Rachmaninoff's Preludes. Played by Sergio Fiorentino. I like his versions.

Pro-choice means shut up and know your place

Everyone knows that, or should.

Is money a fiction?

Only if you believe representation is a falsehood. In which case the gold standard is also a fiction. And so are traffic lights.

Money is a kind of regulator; it regulates, somewhat analogously like bran is advertised as keeping you regular. Or, if you will, it is better referred to (analogously) as the bloodstream of an economy.

But this regulator we call money itself must be regulated. It is, after all, a sterile instrument. Money is to be regulated by controlling the quantity. That does not mean some kind of net over the money in circulation, but controlling the amount that is both issued into circulation and extinguished from circulation.

Anyways, did you ever know someone who was personally mired in debt and their debt just took care of itself?

Didn't think so. That would be to live in a fiction.

*

I was wondering about corporal punishment by the state. Is that torture?

For instance, some place might have a law that serves five or so whips from a bamboo cane for someone caught defacing public property. I was sincerely wondering what the Church teaches on this.

Is spanking your kids torture? What?

"Don't you dare quote Aquinas to me young man!"

UPDATE: I think Kevin O'Brien more or less adequately answers the question "Is corporal punishment torture? Is spanking your kids torture? What?" right here. I already knew why torture is wrong, which is what Kevin writes about. But I'm wondering what the Church teaches about corporal punishment, vis-a-vis.

Does is it or does it not explicitly say that physically hurting someone can be a justice that is justifiably meted out to serve as a correction for an injustice committed? If it is just, then that means there must be an executioner of the punishment (someone wielding a bamboo cane). What if, by being the executioner, a person is put into the occasion of sin because of the chance of falling into taking pleasure in inflicting the punishment?

Aloha II!

Off-the-cuff Pope Watchers

Don't listen to them. They do not take the Church seriously - at least insofar as what you see written on their blogs. Insofar as that, they are immature and careless in their frivolity, revealing a shallow consideration. They take one thing seriously: themselves. They take themselves seriously to the point of practically denying the humanity and divinity of Jesus. Oh, they wouldn't deny these in a statement. But where it matters, in practice where it wouldn't earn them vanity points, it is quite clear: they are practical non-believers who believe in themselves.

Do not listen to people, lay or religious, who say that the Pope speaks off-the-cuff. The term "off-the-cuff" denotes something very specific: casual to the point of carelessness. The term "off-the-cuff" in relation to Pope Francis is a telltale sign, unwitting or not, of an ideology at work to slander and falsify his image, when in truth our Pope is working only to reveal one image: the image of Christ.

Pope Francis does not speak off-the-cuff. As Pope he never has. What Pope Francis does do is speak spontaneously. Spontaneity and "off-the-cuff" are two very different things. They have two very different foundations.

Just as these writers and their little off-the-cuff blog thoughts render the present into something de facto fake and empty, by way of their solemn, histrionic canonization of the past (thus, without the present in what it actually really is, which requires the prayerful comprehension of depth perception, they whitewash, revise and disassociate the past), likewise, for them, spontaneity can only ever be something careless in the worst sense of the word.

Pope Francis is diligent in what he says, not in some gloss-like manner of "being careful" (something which, when overemphasized, exists strictly as a horizontalism), but he is diligent in placing himself in the Word of God so to speak what God is speaking. Which is why, for him, he so often speaks spontaneously. His spontaneous style (not off-the-cuff) denotes a very, very firm foundation, and deep roots. That's why one can be spontaneous. Spontaneity is not frivolous.

But the off-the-cuff Pope-Watchers are floating every which way in an ether, declaring themselves to be the serious watchmen of the night - like Batman - and - that's right - more Catholic than the Pope.

They're building on sand.

And their eyes were opened

Are you awake?