Remember the days when certain Christian conservatives harboured panicky fears about Gays going around and poking people with AIDS infected needles? Remember the fears of them spreading "their" disease through toilets and such?

It was proven to be a disease spread through sexual transmission, yet that didn't prevent many a conservative from treating them as lepers, given a wide berth of social distancing, lest one, or one's children, contracted AIDS.

The conservative cultural consensus was something like, "You need to keep your distance lest you infect us with the disease of your licentiousness!"

Anyways, welcome to 2020! In which a highly infectious, deadly, and incapacitating (to many of those who recover) disease spread through air droplets and surface contamination, and which can be prevented through simple effective ways, is met by those same conservatives with, "Look, buddy, we all die, alright? My pride and freedom licentiousness says I won't take preventative measures for your sake!"

Ya can't do that! etc.

Things are never so clear as when your status as spectator is removed. The propensity to think of clarity as "seeing the clear picture" implies being outside of the picture, and this carries the inevitable drawback of sectarianism as the default, the automatic go-to, for attaining clarity. But that is a totally false clarity. It's also incredibly cheap, like it was something you possessed.

The supposition is that we merely need this spectator clarity as pure stasis and by some magical osmosis it will rub off onto everything else inducing the right orientation and we will go right, we will be converted, the good will prevail. This is totally juvenile, and it only generates confusion and violence; for it ossifies one's capacity to be receptive to reality. Moreover, it makes the Gospel into something false and fragile, and so people reject it. Because one has fallen for the idol of certainty (with all its concomitant conspiricism), which is always cheaply bought, one is incapable of spreading the Gospel.

The sectarian stumping about for clarity is not interested in real clarity. Insofar that true clarity removes one's status as spectator, clarity provokes passion. True clarity stirs up. And that is not what the sectarians are interested in, not for themselves - not in the least.

Eight minutes and forty six seconds of video opened up something in people, and I think it is this: their status as spectator was removed. And those that cling to spectator status as their substitute clarity have been thrown into confusion. They project their confusion and inner chaos onto those who have accepted their status as spectator being removed. Hence, BLM's "tenets" (LOL) are "Marxist" and seek to "destroy the nuclear family", and so on and so forth, bippity boppity boo.

It's most unfortunate for them, to regard themselves as having the fullness of truth.

"We emerge from a night of mysterious origins"

This is the best thing I've read on the pandemic:


HUMANA COMMUNITAS in the Age of Pandemic: Untimely Meditations on Life's Rebirth


H/T: Henry Karlson

Question

Is there a word for the act of someone trying to bribe you with your own money?

If not, there should be.

The pale bean is like a dragon's egg:
a green hatchling rearing out its spine.
The shell is split, two wings are splayed
before it spirals up the fence-taut twine.

The dumb, the innocuous, the dead,
leavens a leaping out all unexpected,
like the flake of flint that is an arrowhead.
Our sin is conquered by a slip of Bread.

"The least in heaven is greater than he."
The mildest leaf by the cold bright sheen,
points to the moon face through the tree,
then to the sun, nowhere to be seen.

FYI

Every expression, whether oral or written, about Covid being a hoax; any speculation ("I'm just asking questions!"), or downplaying, or conspiracy theory, made in this regard, is done on the backs of doctors, nurses, and all health care workers and hospital staff.

Anyone saying, in so many words, "Where is this so-called virus?" is saying it as a privileged ignoramus standing on the welfare provided by hundreds and thousands of medical experts who have been taking action to break the waves and insure that ignoramuses are able to stand on their feet and breathe and talk (the feet and lungs of the US "president" included).

There is a concrete reality with real human beings at the receiving end of your indulgent abstractions. It just so happens that the image of overwhelmed hospitals with morgue trucks parked outside of them, and health workers who serve the sick getting heavy viral loads and dying, is the one image these people conveniently leave out of their paranoid and adolescent conjectures. (They'll use the image of course when they want to condemn the world they hate and are afraid of as an abstract "the darkness that exists outside the Church" sort of crap.)

From their high-minded religiose bullshit about masks covering the Imago Dei, and how the church has "failed the test of the coronavirus" [so be a man then and publicly say you support Vigano and think Francis a failure you fake prophets], to their juvenile crap about contact tracing being the sinister state imposing on the church - just remember, in all of these things that they say and write, the nurses and doctors (perhaps you know a few) who are in hospitals overrun with Covid because safety measures weren't taken in a particular region because that region's negligent political leader decided to prioritize mammon.

These are the same people who are oh so absolutely sure to remark in their criticisms of their culture war enemies that, "Your ideas and speculations have real consequences, and it's the death of millions of people!"

But turn that back on them? Watch those same absolutists turn into the world's biggest relativists. And watch them do it in the name of absolutes.

Whenever you read or hear their conspiricist bullshit, simply recall to yourself the concrete reality of overrun hospitals and the staff serving the sick getting viral loads.

Though, by fall and winter, that may not be so necessary. For it may be in our faces everywhere. Their speculations and conspiricism will have done their work, having used the grounds gained against the virus to spread the virus (because enjoying the safety and benefit of the preventative actions of medical experts is the perfect time to blabber about it all being a hoax), and people will be getting diarrhea just from reading the headlines. And then it will be time for the full surfacing of the Scapegoat.

May it not be so, God help us.

It's not summer until the lawns and fields of grass have gone bronze and tawny and glinting gold. That grass, those lawns, they should nearly reflect the sunlight, be burnished and wonderfully hurt your eyes! Come on, what's the matter with you, Pacific Northwest? Almost mid July now! But go ahead and be that way! Summer is cancelled. Fall is here! I get it! You win!

*

These so-called "fragrance free" hand sanitizers at the entrances to various places - they most definitely are not fragrance free. What is that smell? Three day stale baby vomit? Come on, put some fragrance in that shit! This is persecution!

*

Gotta love the stalwart crusaders who pontificate about not hiding your faith and how "I love the mass so much you cowards I am unafraid to tell the whole world" shaking in their boots and crying persecution over having to write their name and number on a piece of paper in the vestibule of the church. LOL.

And it's even worse, indeed, an absolute VIOLATION, if it's for confession! Like there's some stone cold commie agent pilfering parish lists and poring over them, saying, "Now I wonder what this one said in confession!"

Go to confession! they never tire of saying. You should go to confession! Don't be afraid! You need confession to be made clean! St. Damien of Molokai shouted his sins across the water and everybody heard! These are the same ones who are protesting over putting down some ink that a fellow parishioner (who also wrote down their name and number) can read (which they won't, because who the hell cares) and see that you went to confession? Like, huh? Methinks you need some fresh air.

Ooooo, "contact tracing" - that's so sinister sounding, isn't it? Well, I suppose it is, if you want to purposely remain ignorant about what it actually is and like an adolescent (as Pope Francis said) cling to your own stupid selfish paranoia instead.

Like, are you ready to be a martyr for your faith?! Are you ready to sacrifice?! Because the times are coming when...oh I have to write my name and number down? Oh but my right to privacy! My religion is my own private affair!

LOL. Not that contact tracing lists are any such thing. They are completely provisional, and after a few weeks or whatever and no one from the list came down with Covid, then you toss the lists. So scary, like the parish registry. But I guess the commies couldn't get access to the parish registries?

*

It's a twenty for your twenty. The year you got what you gave. Or something like that.

Ah, the dirty caravans seeking to get into the US - rapists and drug dealers! Many carry diseases! Close off the border! Build that wall! Keep them out!

Gotta take care of the Homeland! Like killing the pandemic response plan and letting Covid "wash over the country", making for a third of the world's death toll in three months (and rapidly escalating).

And here's the twenty to your twenty, president dipstick: both Mexico and Canada are adamantly and steadfastly keeping their borders closed to your country, refusing to hear the interests of US governors that seek to re-open them, and saying, look to your own disease petri dish backyard, because of your negligent homicidal criminal virulently destructive self-protective vile and scummy fake president cancelling every proper course of action letting the virus "wash over your country". Oh, and lots of other countries that don't share a physical border with you - yeah, they're closing their borders to you as well.

He didn't just ignore or "did nothing", in the sense of a negative. He actively jettisoned and obstructed any and all proper courses of action. You want to see cancel culture? Look no further than Don the Con.

Trump is one who dirties the waters. He is one who dirties the waters as his first step in every single circumstance, and it's a form of self-protection.

That's why the US has the numbers it has. But that is not why the other countries are closing their borders to the US. They are keeping their borders closed to the US simply for the protection of their own countries. Those countries cannot afford to have their effective courses of action (and they are effective) turned to nothing by infection from a country that, because its "president" carries a deadly moral virus, is in the worst state in all the countries of the world with regards to the pandemic.

It so happens that is the same country which could have, and ought to have been, with all that is available and at its disposal, a leader and trailblazer, in cancelling the Covid pandemic.

*

You know the champs who valiantly come to the defense of Capitalism, saying how it raised us out of poverty and disease, how we would all be dead at thirty and dropping dead from all the various diseases that Capitalism progressively cured us of and vaccinated us against, and so on in pioneering this cure, and so forth in developing that vaccine, bringing us general longevity and relative ease?

Yeah, those are the same people who are anti-vaxxers.

"Really," protested Martin Wood, "I do think you should be the last man in the world to tinker about with those beautiful Gothic arches, which are about the best work your own religion has ever done in the world. I should have thought you'd have had some feeling for that sort of art; but I can't see why you should be so uncommonly keen on photography."

"I'm uncommon keen on daylight," answered Father Brown, "especially in this dingy business; and photography has the virtue of depending on daylight. And if you don't know that I would grind all the Gothic arches in the world to powder to save the sanity of a single human soul, you don't know so much about my religion as you think you do." --Father Brown: The Doom of the Darnaways, G.K. Chesterton

Funny, isn't it, how the truly perturbed and deeply shaken prophets who had absolutely zilch to say about children being separated from their parents at the Mexican border - the family members being torn apart without knowing where their children or spouses or moms and dads are - these same truth-warriors waxed paranoid about the persecution of family members being separated from one another because of covid lock-down. The government was breaking apart the families and isolating them!

Separated and truly frightened children in cages: zilch.

But comfortable family members ordered to stay in their comfortable homes and communicate through zoom and phone with each other: I must shout from my rooftop in the manner of the prophets of old! This is persecution!

Call the Jubilee

Cancel all debts as odious. All of them. They are unpayable. It is odious debt. With many of them, such as mortgages, the principle has already been paid multiple times over. Cancel all of it. Make the people owners. Cancel government by private banks. Let them be just another private business among private businesses. A government by definition cannot go bankrupt, but it can tether itself more and more to a bankruptable private entity. The government must be free from this. Outlaw fractional reserve lending.

Release the prisoners. Release them from unjust incarceration, especially those that have decades-long sentences for petty crimes. Release them so they can breathe and not die from viral infection. Set the prisoners free.

Demilitarize the police. Deescalate. Seek out the oppressed the way a dehydrated person seeks out water.

I feel it. The moment of decision is coming: those who do not forgive, those that do not release from debt - which especially includes those who have the legal power to do so - are going to face the due desserts of the man in Christ's parable who was forgiven a huge unpayable sum, but then demanded a paltry sum that was owed him from his fellow slave.

Call the jubilee, or you yourselves will face your own destruction.

That is what's before us.

It just so happens that the "door of mercy" we are to go through consists in a great unexpected gift: the totally doable task of showing mercy to our neighbour.

In other words, the Gospel is before us like never before.

In the year of perfect eyesight.