Misc.

Held my nose to vote against the Liberal party. I say vote against because there is no one to vote for. There is no CHP candidate in my riding. Is there a lesser evil in this election? When someone like Trudeau could be the potentate? Absolutely. Have you listened to the guy? Holy Toledo.

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Looks more and more like the gluten-is-the-devil hype is dying down. Looks like it is turning out to be - oh, I don't know - just another one of those extremist diet health crazes that come and go like the plague. Looks more and more like - oh, as common sense dictates - highly refined processed grains combined with short leavening time-periods using commercial yeast consumed on a regular basis to the detriment of consuming actually good food is the problem (combined with little to no exercise), and consistent consumption of highly refined sugars to boot. Golly. What would we do without the experts? Saw a headline the other day about how antioxidants could help to cause cancer. No one knows anything really.

I still remember this one blog post by a Catholic blogger lady who has a book or three published getting alarmist about gluten to her thousands of readers, linking to another lady who basically said all grains - even rice - are little better than poison. She had it all figured out (the other lady, not the Catholic blogger lady), charted, squared, articulated - the science and everything, like she was a scientist - with that unmistakable, unerring estrogen energy that says I am full-proof, hear me lecture. To which I wondered out loud in my own blog post (which I'm too lazy to link to) that I find it reprehensible that Jesus would use for the institution of His Eucharist something that was little better than poison.

Here is one assumption that I bet we'll find out later was totally wrong: that all food we consume must be chock-full of vitamins and minerals and other nutrients, and if there aren't any, or few, either in its raw or cooked state, then it's not good for us. This will be disproved. Just watch.

People without responsibility on social media going on about this, that and the other thing. Maybe some readers of the anti-gluten lady decided to cut out all gluten from their diet, not having any allergy to it before - and then developed an allergy to it because they had cut it so drastically out of their diet? Who knows, right? Human biology is amazingly complex.

People all over the social media lecturing and influencing their readers about this, that and the other thing - from gluten to Vatican II to the Synod on the Family. They just know it all. Pope Francis has been making some serious mistakes. He's a Machiavellian villain. He's a fuzzy simpleton. He causes confusion. He's an anti-John the Baptist paving the way for the anti-Christ. He's a product of the polyester 70's. He's not even the Pope. He's Judas. He's a Peron populist crowd whipper-upper. He's well-intentioned but mistaken. He errs in doing this, that and the other thing. He should have unleashed the wrath of God on Congress. He should not have spoken to the U.N. (he opened the fragrance of the Gospel to them! How dare he! He was handing over to them authority for their evil agendas!) He should have come out wearing the mozetta. He should be reading LifeSiteNews. He should be studying with prayerful diligence the words of Rorate Caeli, Pewsitters, 1Peter5 and the Holy Catholic Remnant. He should be doing this, that and the other thing. You know how it is. How it is when people have every simulation of received knowledge - but do not have the ability to go out of themselves.

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I watched Seven Samurai last night. I have seen it several times before. What a great movie. There are a couple moments that flop in my opinion - like the villagers making way for the old granny to kill the captive in order to avenge the death of her son. Meh. But hey, they were pagans, so whatever.

I even let the intermission play out. I love intermissions. I've said many times before (not on this blog I don't think) that filmmakers should bring back the intermission. People of course would regard it as a mortal sin, because a movie is way too long if it exceeds two hours - and, really, just sitting there with the music playing? That's asking way too much.

Everything is such a joke now. Films ought to be absorbing. The intermission is great for a number of reasons. Just practically because people have to urinate. But it allows a kind of recollection, a coming away from the film that is actually an immersion in the film. The next person to make the Lord of the Rings films - and thereby leave the Peter Jackson series to moulder in the dust - should utilize the intermission. Break each book into two parts (and the books already are broken into two parts). Each part will be one theatrical release, one movie, that runs about four hours long, two hours before and after the intermission, or thereabouts. Thus will be released six movies, each one around four hours long.

But the false law of efficiency that herds people into predetermined units of time says that's a horrible mortal sin. Gone is the capacity for attention, attentiveness. Thou shalt not linger. Move along. On to the next piece of candy. Click, click, click.

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Few things are as obnoxious as cheaply bought cynicism. It is the usual stock-and-trade of hoi polloi, the inflated currency by which the mass populace avoids the acceptance of suffering, or simply, the acceptance of reality. The cheap cynic seeks to preemptively overextend the action of disillusionment onto everything, and by this he seeks to control, and by this he seeks to avoid the contact of reality. He would darken the light of every doorway with his rot-gut and have people accept it, with him in the picture as the capstone wounded anti-hero, while he himself won't carry a jot or tittle upon his own back - though he will, of course, make a big show of seemingly carrying the world on it. He seeks to be a master of reality in order to dispose of it.

Precisely in this is he indecipherable from the manipulative sentimentalist.

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Progressive Christianity, or Universalism, succeeds only in nullifying Heaven.

The height of heaven and the descent of Christ from it always keep their radical standard, toward which we move, by sanctifying grace, which displaces us from making a home of the hell in our hearts. Or, if you will: from making a home of the but-I'm-not-a-bad-person indifferentist illusion already-giving-the-lie-that-one-has-a-skin-flint-hard-necked-stubborness in our hearts. The emphatic "progressive" removal of the consideration of eternal hell ends only in emphatically removing the glory of heaven.

Above all though, I suspect that it incubates a wounded pride at the thought of heaven's truth and goodness; its height and breadth; that it goes under the auspices of being wounded - wounded pride. Pride is wounded precisely because it is pride. Spiritual pride would rather that the grace given wound it and that it take pleasure in this being wounded, and by this "prove" that the grace is ineffective, than that it submit to the grace.

Submitting to the grace, by the way, leads to a very different kind of being wounded. Here one notices something interesting. That the worst does not manifest as an opposite to the good, but as anti to it, like Antichrist. Most essentially, we resemble Christ in sharing His wounds. That's putting it briefly, but it's true, essentially. As Venerable Bishop Fulton Sheen talked about in a late homily: when we die and go before Christ the "measure" will be His asking show me your wounds, show me the scars, on your hands, in your side; the wounds that you bore, for My sake and for others'; not that you bore out of resignation, but out of love for Me. The life of Me that you took on, that you let Me give to you. My abundant life of which there is no end. When I was a babe before you, did you become as a little infant? When I was scourged with the punishment reserved for the worst offenders, did you become as the worst of sinners receiving my mercy? Did you let my wounds shed light on your wounds - the wounds you knew not were there, trusting in Me?

We do not have faith in order to "get into heaven"; rather, we have faith in order to love the One who is more real than we can imagine.

Anyways, spiritual pride, that ever subtle thing, concocts a fantasy that it has put itself beyond the reach of God, but using the instance of the grace of God to perpetuate the lie. It may retain some semblance of "struggle" (this may actually make it look all the more woe-is-me heroic) but essentially it denies that act of humiliation by which God identifies himself with one's own soul, one's own self, in that place within that we ourselves have not the capacity to reach (Christ is more present to us than we are to ourselves), and abiding there, inspiring and watering our own self-abasement, the growth of new life, together with Christ, in Christ.

Self-pitying, pride is a kind of sick, perpetual enjoyment of oneself at the expense of trampling over others and the precious grace of God, which is to say, over the self-emptying life of Christ crucified. And that is a horror to behold: that pride in doing this, actually consumes grace like a black hole, all the while pretending that it is, in some way, beyond the working reach of grace. It is a deeply pervasive lie born of the father of lies, and it is amendable to people in all walks of life, from the hedonist materialist to the traditionally formed religious. And, of course, the progressive.

The progressive Christian, or Universalist, does not care all that much about there being or not being a Hell, if it's transitory or if it's been emptied; what he emphatically does not want there to be is an eternal High Heaven.