Spike is Best

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Mostly B pencil

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Tarkovsky Tuesday

B pencil

pencil, B I think among others

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

O God of Silence, in stillness Your adorable and mysterious Trinity lives, loves and acts. In the silence of time, Your great Mysteries have been accomplished. Blessed is the one who quiets everything within himself and listens to the impelling voice which leads to You. Charbel heard this voice and closed himself in solitude. He separated himself from a self-seeking world and spoke with You. You taught him to deny himself and to die, like the grain of wheat. You asked him to bind himself to You in a life of poverty, chastity and obedience. Freed from himself, he discovered You, 0 Lord, embraced the way of the Cross and filled his spirit with the memory of Your Son’s passion and death. The holy Mysteries became his life, the Eucharist his real food and the Mother of God his consolation. Day and night he sought You in the Scriptures and in the lives of the saints. Through unending prayer his whole life became a living hymn of praise to You and ended in a sacrifice of love that continues to proclaim Your glory. We beseech You, through his intercession, to inspire us to a life of prayer and sacrifice. Help us to live lives of quiet dedication to the service of Your Church, forever.
Amen

Prayer found here.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Pope Francis and the poverty we need to learn from

Fr. Dwight Longenecker has an excellent article on Pope Francis' "prophetic option for the poor".

The subject of the economy is infected with a dualism (purposely bred by schools and institutions) that prevents people from perceiving that the very subject of the economy is a battleground to be broached; broached with all of our common mess beating down the financial wizards that spew incomprehensible gibberish; not a disconnected thing concerned in some pure sense with material well-being, but the materialized enactments of man, through human law, toward his brother and sister. An economy is intrinsically socially constructed.

Because an economy has more to do with it than "finance", it means that "finance" becomes more important than we figured before, not less so. The material impoverishment of people is not a concern that is pitted against the primary concern of spiritual salvation. They are not one and the same, but neither are they to be pitted against each other.

You are infected with a dualism (which keeps your faith sealed up like an antique) if your first reaction is to say that it is liberation theology.

The rich don't simply get richer while the poor become poorer, like it was some horrible but ultimately accidental coincidence. The rich get richer precisely because the poor are made to become poorer - and not just through theft and usury; but through the corruption of the meanings of words.

That is what money-as-debt is.

That is what the gold standard has ever been, and would ever be.

Pyramid schemes trying to fool us into believing that money exists by nature, when money only ever exists by law.

They don't want us to ever see the truth of what monetization is: a group of people deciding through a primary transaction made law, how many are going to be able to make transactions; or else a group of people deciding through a primary transaction made law, that the common good will be included to the exclusion of anyone making profit from that primary transaction made law. Usury or beneficence of the common good. It's one or the other.

Know people who advocate the gold standard? Ask them if they have personal investments in gold.

And wouldn't that be nice for owners of gold to become the monetizers of other people's real wealth and productions.

Anyways, a government of a nation must issue its own money debt-free according to the good produced and the quantity in circulation controlled through extinguishing (which is really the only reason we would need a tax, and is in fact why taxes ever came about).

Nope, that is not a "planned economy". It is merely the government monetizing the wealth that the people produce.

The gold standard is very much planned though.

I just don't know what it's all about

"...The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totally twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion—the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969." -- Coleman Young, Detroit Mayor 1974 to 1994