LeCarré snippet

Big fan of this author. Been reading him since I was 16 and stayed up all night reading THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. This snippet is from ABSOLUTE FRIENDS. Author is always dropping historical tidbits and insights. One character talking to another.

[“Did you have an opportunity to visit Buchenwald concentration camp during your stay in Weimar?…In addition to Goethe’s celebrated beech tree, the camp’s crematorium is particularly noteworthy. You didn’t even have to be dead to be burned in it. Did you know the Russians kept the camp running after they liberated it from fascism?”]

WRITING AS MINISTRY

I really like this quote-can’t recall author.
“I once told someone that publishing is a ministry of sorts–the salaries are pitiful when one factors in the amount of time and work, yet it is a passion one cannot stay away from. Every project, every new book, becomes an obsessive love affair that you are determined to make work. You think about it late at night. You convince others of its worth. It often (though not always) changes your life….like a Jesuit priest ….you pray…you keep your faith…”

A rant to my bud

My current, non-medical expert belief = big pharma is afraid of MJ. Will wipe out their markets. Only problem right now is ensuring quality control of MJ.
I am flirting with MJ, but not doing it yet. I would rather do MJ than the sleeping pills to whom I am becoming more attached.  

Our Baby Boomer generation’s mantra was “sex, drugs and rock and role.” And then we look at the offspring generation and wonder, “Gee, how did that happen?” 

Puuleeese—no whimpering about deficits when the Republican controlled Congress approved the first grand giveaway, especially billions to the rich and the corporates. I have no problem with upping minimum wage; helping those on unemployment, etc. Want to stop job loss? Telling the heartless corporations to hire American and if they don’t, they pay penalties. Tell them no jobs go overseas without serious tax penalties. One of my biggest beefs with Trump was his incompetency and being in league with the rich and the corporations. This isn’t rocket science. You can handle it with revisions to federal tax policy. 

Homeless solution:  Make it illegal and with the second offense you are sent to a “Homeless Assistance Resource Center” (former military bases) and provided with counseling, social services, etc. You leave the camp after you have worked off your costs of the “holding incarceration” at the base’s industries. I worked in the local Food Bank for three years. Caught pneumonia twice, and once had to grab a wood stick to use as a club and run outside because some huge guy was beating on a woman. (The women staff at the food bank were appalled that I had done such a thing. What? Wait twenty minutes for the cops?)

I think you need to read some Howard Zinn to understand the real American history. Our country was founded by a bunch of difficult people kicked out of their country because of their hard headedness and religious intolerance; founded on the chance to make a buck; and used slavery and competition among the working classes to keep wages down.  Oh, and treated the continent as if no one was already living here. 

Thanks for opportunity to rant. Stay healthy. I saved my wife’s life today by taking her to her first anti-Covid shot. (she’s part of that minority conspiracy anti-virus mindset) I get my second shot on Sunday.

Oh–and just had a quick flashback. I yelled at Trump on TV as much as I did LBJ on tv. Trump imperiled the whole country, and LBJ threatened me physically with possible military draft. (Just watched “Platoon” the other night on Netflix–fifth time.)

So be it.

MY JESUITS

MY JESUITS.

These are the people I studied under in high school. No quarter for falsehoods, no excuses for ruling elites. Ahhh? But has that been their historical record? Did the current pope, a Jesuit, do right by several of his colleagues that he did not protect from the murderous Argentinian military, who proceeded with U.S. approval? I greatly admire Pope Francis, but he is running out of time and energy with just his one lung. Shake it up and take us away from Romanism back to the original Yeshua!!

THE JESUITS–always controversial

MALACHI MARTIN. THE JESUITS. [selected excerpts]
…Essentially, (Arthur) McGovern (S.J.) says that Marxism was and is a social critique, pure and simple. Marx just wanted to get us to think more clearly about the means of production, how people produce; and about the means of distribution…Marx cannot be written off as “untrue.” It was Engels and Lenin who added the disgusting ingredients of “scientific materialism” and atheism…We can accept Marx’s concept of class struggle, because there is a class struggle. The does mean revolution, but “revolution does not clearly mean violence…it means we have to have a new kind of society, definitely not democratic capitalism as we know it.
McGovern sees in Jesus, as portrayed in St. Luke’s Gospel, a paragon of revolution. St. Luke’s is “a social gospel,”…quoting Jesus in support of his cause: “I have come to preach the good news to the poor, to set the downtrodden free, to redeem captives.”
“See,” McGovern adds, “how many time Jesus speaks about poverty; identifies with poor people; criticizes people who lay burdens on the poor.” Clearly, therefore, Jesus acknowledged the “class struggle: and endorsed the “revolution.”
Consciously or unconsciously, like most modern Jesuits and many Catholic activists, McGovern has effectively laid aside fourteen hundred years of rich Catholic, authentically Christian interpretation of the Bible. He has reinterpreted the Gospel and the salvific mission of the Son of God in an economic sense, a this-worldly sense, a non supernatural sense, an un-Catholic sense….]
…strange alliance between Marxists and Jesuits…
…”We as Jesuits must recognize that we participate in many sinful strutters of American society. Hence we run the risk of sin unless we work to change that.”
…the “Theology of Liberation”—whose handbook was written by a Peruvian Jesuit, Father Gustavo Gutierrez…
One of Tyrrell’s Modernist friends, French priest Henri Brémond, wrote him pooh-poohing the excommunication as a “little Roman formality” of no eternal significance…For him, for Brémond, and for all the Modernists, Rome no longer mattered.
Tyrell, like all Modernists, believed in the possibility of a synthesis between the essential truth of his religion and the essential truths of modernity…In fact, some time before his open rupture with the Jesuits and with Rome, he admitted that the Society of Jesus and all it stood for had become like so much “dust and ashes” in his mouth…It is certain that Tyrell did not believe that Jesus was God-made-man. He did not believe either in the resurrection of the body or in the existence of Hell or of Heaven…”We cannot frame our minds to that of a first century Jewish Carpenter,” he wrote.
For, in the Teilhardian sense, Jesus has not yet been really incarnated—only at the Omega Point will that take place; and even then it is not Jesus of Nazareth we are talking about, but Christ “the essential Mover of a Hominization leading on to an Ultra-Hominization [or man become greater than man].”
From his correspondence, it is clear that Teilhard was not overly shocked by bloodshed, regarded violence as a necessary concomitant of Evolution…The Original Sin of Adam and Eve had no place in Teilhard’s poetic, romantic apocalypse.
Concerning the Roman Catholic Church—its papacy, its hierarchy, it doctrinal formulations, its piety, its place in the human cosmos—Teilhard was summarily and completely disillusioned. At the present moment in human history, he said, “no religion explicitly and officially offers us the God we need.” The problem the Church had, he said, was that “she continues to live in a universe in which the rest of us do not.”
The change demanded of the Church by Teilhard was total…God was not free to create or not create the cosmos. To be God, he had to.
Teilhard derided the Catholic idea of sexual continence, poking fun at “the colonies of virgins” and “the currents of continence in marriage.” God’s order to Adam and Eve “to increase and multiply’ no longer applied…He continued as a Jesuit and a member of the Church partly out of inertia, perhaps; but partly, too, for strategic reasons—the same strategic reasons that George Tyrrell had for fiercely clinging to the skirts of Rome.

THE SECRET PILGRIM.

This snippet from John LeCarre’s book, THE SECRET PILGRIM, just seems to ring a bell for me. Any other Baby Boomers feel it?


“And what they teach is what they can’t do anymore, because either the body or the spirit or both have lost their singleness of purpose; because they have seen too much and suppressed too much and compromised too much, and in the end tasted too little. So they take to rekindling their old dreams in new minds, and warming themselves against the fires of the young.”

GROWING RESPECT FOR FRANCIS

The protagonist of two of my books (a third is in the works), Father Gabriel Garza, aka Reverend Rambo, is starting to like his Pope Francis. 

Last week, Francis the Pontiff put the hold on the beautification of Pope Pius XII because the required miracle in his name hadn’t happened yet. 

A straight-up fact, but Fr. Gabe wonders if it could be a subtle joke too? Francis doesn’t seem to like the previous pope’s position, or really Montini’s lack of position, on the slaughter of six million of our theological older brothers and sisters, the Jews. Not much was heard from him during WWII. Maybe Montini spent too much of his earlier clerical career in Germany?

What isn’t a joke is that Francis has sent the word to all clerical and lay minions, if you sexually assault someone, you face criminal charges. No church-running-interference for you.

Reverend Rambo’s respect for Pope Francis, who heads a world-wide church operating with just one lung, grows more and more. That game-playing Church Curia can just sap your energy.

Yeah, Vladimir, it IS getting personal

If I was President Joe, and I’m not, although I spent 18 years in Washington, D.C.and my boss’s daughter worked directly for Hilary Clinton and traveled with the first family—


I’d say, if I was Joe, “Your know Vlad, my son served over in Afghanistan in a war zone and you put a bounty on American troops. I don’t forget.”


“Vlad, you totally interfered in our 2016 election over here and still keep screwing around. I will remember.”

“Vlad, I’m holding you responsible for the broken American oil pipe line that serves the Eastern United States and is disrupting our gas supply.”

“Vlad, with all due respect, sir, you’ve got 72 hours to fix everything… or else.”
“Or else what?”

“Your entire national GDP is equivalent to one of our state’s–Texas. That’s it. Good luck, pal.” Screw the Alamo.

*”We will expropriate all the cash and real estate assets of your thuggish oligarch buddies around the world. That will expose some of our super-secret banking-intelligence capabilities, but I will pay that price. Your personal assets, we will leave alone and make sure the Russian people fully understand your wealth at their looted expense. I will leak the word to your “friends” that we made a deal to let you keep your assets.”

*”The Ukrainians have already received initial secret shipments of advanced anti-tank weaponry, the kind that wiped out Saddam Hussein, only more advanced this time. Your tanks won’t even see it coming. The U.S. Air Force has new armed drones coming out the ass and is eager to try them out.”

*U.S. Naval Fleets? Well, more headed your way after I talk to the Chinese, and the British, et.al.

*”The Ukrainians will receive up to-the-minute state of the art satellite coverage of Eastern Ukraine.”
*”Your satellites will suddenly go dark, again unfortunately revealing more of our secret capabilities.”

*”Arrangements will be made for the S. American Drug Cartels to flood your streets. You will lose a generation of Russians. We have been through this. Horrible. I’d rather go after them than you, but I don’t have a choice. I’m here to protect America, not negotiate a downtown Moscow hotel deal.”

*”Worst of all, for you, I will initiate secret talks with the Chinese President, seeking a new understanding. After all, there’s a huge ocean between the U.S. and China and we love Chinese food and the Chinese women are fine looking. China, with one and a half billion people, is looking at all of that empty Russian land on their doorstep and thinking they could probably do something more useful with it than just let it sit there.”

“If you’ve got something to say, say it fast and to V.P. Kamala. I’ve delegated her responsibility for negotiating with economies that aren’t in the top five. Capiche?”

Yours truly, Sleepy Joe Who is Real Woke

ALMOST FEELING SORRY FOR A TRUMP THUG

by Ben Leiter

I just finished Michael Cohen’s very recent book, DISLOYAL: A MEMOIR.

I recommend reading it for information and Cohen’s personal insights that have not come out in the news. It totally and completely details the corrupt, incompetent traitor we have in the White House, and the potential threats we face as Americans.

What is fascinating about the book is that Cohen intimately describes how totally wrong he was in his thuggish, intimidating tactics and manner of doing business for his boss, Donald Trump. The worst part–and maybe the most ingratiating to the reader–is that he confesses he knew exactly the bad things he was doing and why–to win and keep Trump’s approval. I read the entire book with a suppressed feeling of “you got everything you deserved, you bullying piece of scum.”

But, then Cohen then went on to experience his own legal woes from the Southern District of New York. And, he had been abandoned by Trump, and there were various intimidating tactics used to shut him up which didn’t work when the Supreme Court got involved and told the Barr toadies to back off. They said Cohen still had First Amendment Rights. Thank God. It was the description of his family, that he cared about, that pierced my armor of hatred against this gangster group that has threatened our Republic.

Interesting reading because of quality writing and story telling by Cohen and his ghost writer who almost have you rooting for him at the end of the book, which he does not deserve.

God save The United States of America,