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With the death of Pope Francis, here are some crucial items below to read and seriously reflect upon while awaiting the papal conclave in Rome to be conducted at the Sistine Chapel where the new pontiff will be chosen.

The papal conclave, where cardinals elect a new pope, is expected to begin in Rome in early May 2025, likely within 15-20 days after Pope Francis’ death.

In these extraordinary, apocalyptic times, my own candidate for the position of the new pontiff is Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano.

Archbishop Vigano was born on January 16, 1941 in Varese, Italy. He was ordained a priest on March 24, 1968 and incardinated in the Diocese of Pavia (Italy). He has a doctorate in both canon and civil law (utroque iure). His Excellency started his service in the Diplomatic Corps of the Holy See as Attaché in 1973 in Iraq and Kuwait. In 1976 he was transferred to the Apostolic Nunciature in Great Britain, and from 1978 until 1989 worked at the Secretariat of State of Vatican City. On April 4, 1989 he was nominated Special Envoy with the functions of Permanent Observer to the European Council in Strasbourg. He was consecrated an archbishop on April 26, 1992 and made Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana. He was nominated Apostolic Pro-Nuncio in Nigeria, on April 3, 1992. On April 4, 1998 he was nominated Delegate for the Pontifical Representations. Archbishop Viganò served as Secretary General of the Governorate of the Vatican City State from July 16, 2009 until September 3, 2011. On October 19, 2011 Pope Benedict XVI appointed him Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, a post he held until his retirement in April of 2016.

Hilaire Belloc: “Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.”

Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson (.pdf version)

Robert Hugh Benson (1871-1914) was the youngest son of Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, and younger brother of Edward Frederic Benson. In 1895, he was ordained a priest in the Church of England by his father who was then Archbishop of Canterbury. After many years of questioning and soul-searching he was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1903. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1904 and named a Monsignor in 1911. This book, written in 1907, is Benson’s dystopic vision of a near future world in which religion has, by and large, been rejected or simply fallen by the wayside. The Catholic Church has retreated to Italy and Ireland, while the majority of the rest of the world is either Humanistic or Pantheistic. There is a ‘one world’ government, and euthanasia is widely available. The plot follows the tale of a priest, Percy Franklin, who becomes Pope Silvester III, and a mysterious man named Julian Felsenburgh, who is identical in looks to the priest and who becomes “Lord of the World.” “The one condition of progress…on the planet that happened to be men’s dwelling place, was peace, not the sword which Christ brought or that which Mahomet wielded; but peace that arose from, not passed, understanding; the peace that sprang from a knowledge that man was all and was able to develop himself only by sympathy with his fellows…”

Benson was sent to Cambridge to write and serve as a priest chaplain to the Catholic community. Later, he was allowed to live on his own to devote himself to writing. A prolific author, he traveled extensively, writing and lecturing. Benson wrote many apologetic works, including The Religion of the Plain Man, Paradoxes of Catholicism, and Confessions of a Convert. He was also a bestselling novelist, writing The Holy Blissful Martyr Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Come Rack! Come Rope!, and The Necromancers. The dystopian novel Lord of the World is his best-known work.

Apocalypse Now, By Harry W. Crocker III

Story of Satanic Fashion Show Staged Inside a Church Almost Directly Out of 1907 Apocalyptic Distopian Novel, Lord of the World

The post +With the Death of Pope Francis, While Awaiting the Forthcoming Conclave in Rome Set to Choose the New Pontiff, Here Are Some Items to Seriously Read and Reflect Upon in These Extraordinary, Apocalyptic Times appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Menace of ‘Public’ Education

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 21/04/2025 - 05:01

Parents are rightly concerned about what is happening in our “public” schools. Crazed “educators” are encouraging impressionable children to “transition” to another sex, as if such a thing was possible. Students are taught that sexual promiscuity is a good thing. They are brainwashed to accept socialist attacks on our free enterprise system.

What can we do about this disaster? The Trump Administration and anti-woke Governors like Ron deSantis have tried to solve the problem by issuing directives to the schools to eliminate the noxious programs and give parents more say-so about what their children are taught. But teachers who have been indoctrinating our children are well-entrenched, and it will be extremely difficult to curb their baleful influence.

No matter how much good these efforts accomplish, they fail to deal with the real problem, and that is the existence of “public” education itself. Schools run by the state are inherently institutions that propagandize what the state wants schoolchildren to learn. As the great Murray Rothbard explains: “The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child? An essential feature of human life is that, for many years, the child is relatively helpless, that his powers of providing for himself mature late. Until these powers are fully developed he cannot act completely for himself as a responsible individual. He must be under tutelage. This tutelage is a complex and difficult task. From an infancy of complete dependence and subjection to adults, the child must grow up gradually to the status of an independent adult. The question is under whose guidance, and virtual ‘ownership’ the child should be: his parents’ or the State’s? There is no third, or middle, ground in this issue. Some party must control, and no one suggests that some individual third party have authority to seize the child and rear it.”

For Rothbard the choice between these options is a “no-brainer.” “It is obvious that the natural state of affairs is for the parents to have charge of the child. The parents are the literal producers of the child, and the child is in the most intimate relationship to them that any people can be to one another. The parents have ties of family affection to the child. The parents are interested in the child as an individual and are the most likely to be interested and familiar with his requirements and personality. Finally, if one believes at all in a free society, where each one owns himself and his own products, it is obvious that his own child, one of his most precious products, also comes under his charge.” Rothbard’s point is a clear application of the basic principles of libertarianism.

If the state takes over schooling, this is a clear violation of the parents’ rights. “The only logical alternative to parental ‘ownership’ of the child is for the State to seize the infant from the parents and to rear it completely itself. To any believer in freedom this must seem a monstrous step indeed. The rights of the parents are completely violated, their own loving product seized from them to be subjected to the will of strangers.”

But there is, if anything, an even more fundamental issue at stake. Children need freedom in order to develop their powers to live their lives, but the State is inherently a violent institution that suppresses individuality. “The rights of the child are violated, for he grows up in subjection to the unloving hands of the State, with little regard for his individual personality. For each person to be ‘educated,’ to develop his faculties to the fullest, he needs freedom for this development. But the State! The State’s very being rests on violence, on compulsion. As a matter of fact, the very feature that distinguishes the State from other individuals and groups is that the State has the only (legal) power to use violence. In contrast to all other individuals and organizations, the State issues decrees which must be obeyed at the risk of suffering prison or the electric chair. The child would have to grow up under the wings of an institution resting on violence and restriction. What sort of peaceful development could take place under such auspices?”

What will the State teach? You might think that this would depend on the kind of state it is, and to some extent this is true. Schools under Trump will differ from those under brain-dead Joe Biden. But there is nevertheless an underlying pressure that leads the State to impose uniformity and to teach obedience to the government. “Furthermore, it is inevitable that the State would impose uniformity on the teaching of charges. Not only is uniformity more congenial to the bureaucratic temper and easier to enforce; this would be almost inevitable where collectivism has supplanted individualism. With collective State ownership of the children replacing individual ownership and rights, it is clear that the collective principle would be enforced in teaching as well. Above all, what would be taught is the doctrine of obedience to the State itself. For tyranny is not really congenial to the spirit of man, who requires freedom for his full development Therefore, techniques of inculcating reverence for despotism and other types of ‘thought control’ are bound to emerge. Instead of spontaneity, diversity, and independent men, there would emerge a race of passive, sheep-like followers of the State. Since they would be only incompletely developed, they would be only half-alive. This is the logical goal of the Statists in education. The issue which has been joined in the past and in the present is: shall there be a free society with parental control, or a despotism with State control? We shall see the logical development of the idea of State encroachment and control.”

You might object that Rothbard is being dogmatic. Is he trying to deduce what must happen, rather than be sensitive to the actual course of events? Of course not! Rothbard was a great historian, and his theoretical account aligns with what actually happened: “America began, for the most part, with a system of either completely private or with philanthropic schools. Then, in the nineteenth century, the concept of public education changed subtly, until everybody was urged to go to the public school, and private schools were accused of being divisive. Finally, the State imposed compulsory education on the people, either forcing children to go to public schools or else setting up arbitrary standards for private schools. Parental instruction was frowned on. Thus, the State has been warring with parents for control over their children.”

Rothbard wrote before the horrors of today’s wokery , but with his unrivalled genius, he anticipated them: “Not only has there been a trend toward increased State control, but the effects of this have been worsened by the very system of equality before the law that applies in political life. There has been the growth of a passion for equality in general. The result has been a tendency to regard every child as equal to every other child, as deserving equal treatment, and to impose complete uniformity in the classroom. Formerly, this had tended to be set at the average level of the class; but this being frustrating to the dullest (who, however, must be kept at the same level as the others, in the name of equality and democracy), the teaching tends more and more to be set at the lowest levels. Since the State began to control education, its evident tendency has been more and more to act in such a manner as to promote repression and hindrance of education, rather than the true development of the individual. Its tendency has been for compulsion, for enforced equality at the lowest level, for the watering down of the subject and even the abandonment of all formal teaching, for the inculcation of obedience to the State and to the group, rather than the development of self-independence, and for the deprecation of intellectual subjects. And finally, it is the drive of the State and its minions for power that explains the ‘modern education’ creed of ‘education of the whole child’ and making the school a ‘slice of life,’ where the individual plays, adjusts to the group, etc. The effect of this, as well as all the other measures, is to repress any tendency for the development of reasoning powers and individual independence; to try to usurp in various ways the ‘educational’ function (apart from formal instruction) of the home and friends, and to try to mold the ‘whole child’ in the desired paths. Thus, ‘modern education’ has abandoned the school functions of formal instruction in favor of molding the total personality both to enforce equality of learning at the level of the least educable, and to usurp the general educational role of home and other influences as much as possible.”

On one point, though, Rothbard underestimated the menace. He said that “since no one will accept outright State ‘communization’ of children, it is obvious that State control has to be achieved more silently and subtly.” State control under the Left has not been silent or subtle, and this has provoked the recent backlash.

We can all enthusiastically agree with Rothbard’s message: “For anyone who is interested in the dignity of human life, in the progress and development of the individual in a free society, the choice between parental and State control over the children is clear.” Let’s do everything we can to end “public” education!

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Five Years Ago This Easter, What Were You Doing?

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 21/04/2025 - 05:01

In the spring of 2020, many churches in the United States closed down. They were told to. I am willing to forgive that behavior. In fact, I think I’m commanded to forgive that behavior.

I get it. People were scared. Maybe a week you stay closed until you come to your senses. Maybe two weeks, because they assured us it took only two weeks to slow the spread.

It took a special kind of wrong to close down the church and to keep it closed. When Easter 2020 came, I was sure every church would open again.

I was wrong.

Though I forgive those who closed, I have a very special place in my heart for those who never closed down. Pastor Tony Spell of Baton Rouge, Louisiana is one such person. Not long ago, I sent the following to Pastor Spell. Please allow me to share it with you.

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Dear Pastor Spell,

In the spring of 2020, I was hungry for God. I knew that something was wrong when they closed down all the churches in San Francisco where I lived and where I still live today.

I was coming out of a past of atheism and knew that I needed to be in church. I was going to the wrong churches, but I knew that I was better in church on Sunday mornings than sitting at home. Many of the churches even virtue signaled with big signs outside their churches and virtue signaled in the media about how upright they were for closing down. There was a shocking level of pride in what they were doing.

Some of the San Francisco churches that closed down during the Ides of March 2020 remain closed to this day. I have yet to find a pastor in San Francisco who did not close down.

What I did in response to that — I have no question that it was at the leading of the Holy Spirit — is that I bought a hymnal online and started having my own private services on the steps of the church closest to my home. It was just me and God. It was quietly done. Someone standing ten feet from me would not have known I was having a worship service.

I knew no church that stayed open. I knew no Christian who wanted the churches to stay open. And on Resurrection Sunday, I was most sad. As far as I was concerned, if there was any day the churches needed to be open it was that one.

The churches proudly remained closed.

I called the several local pastors I knew asking them if I could just be in a corner of the sanctuary as they held their Resurrection Sunday services that would be broadcast on Zoom that day. None of them agreed. I don’t know why I was so ardent about being in the sanctuary and not at home, but I was. Something felt so wrong about it.

There were brave pastors in California who didn’t close down, but I didn’t know about them. The media gave you, Pastor Spell, such a difficult time in the lead up to Resurrection Sunday 2020.

I have no question that the stories were meant to intimidate you and to try to move the authorities into intimidating you. The stories were meant to tattle on you. But little did they know that through those attacks on you, God was encouraging me in the things of Him. He was showing me what it looked like when a Christian stood up. Every story I read about your church staying open encouraged me. I read dozens of them. There were likely hundreds of attack stories against you in the days leading up to Easter 2020.

And then Monday morning came. And I could not find a single follow-up story about you and your congregation. There was total silence, as if all those journalists had never written about you. In unison, they seemed to feel no obligation to write a follow-up about you, not even a negatively slanted followed up. Only silence. That was all I could find.

This proved to me how disingenuous the media was in covering the topic of your church preparing to stay open Resurrection Sunday 2020. Their coverage was not about notifying the public about what was taking place in the world. It really was about intimidating you, tattling on you, and trying to get local authorities to bully you into submission.

But you did not submit to that. Thank you for that.

Monday morning the media was silent. I woke up early that morning in San Francisco, eager to know if you had stayed open or been intimidated. The media was silent.

Finally, I couldn’t wait any longer and I called your church to inquire, perhaps that Monday or possibly the day after. I called your church, expecting to leave a voicemail that might get returned, but a gentleman with such a polite and kind way about him answered the phone.

I briefly introduced myself as a supportive person watching the story in the media. I asked if your church had gathered for services the day before.

The man, as polite as can be, said something simple and clear like, “We are Christians. We gather every Sunday.”

I understood. The answer was, yes. I thanked the man and went on with my day, greatly inspired.

You refused to close on Resurrection Sunday. You were the glaring example in the media. Thank you Pastor Spell. Thank you. Thank you to you and to your church.

You were a ray of hope for me in dark, dark San Francisco. In the darkest days of 2020, you were a ray of hope for me all the way across the country in San Francisco and you could not have known that.

All you likely knew is that you were being obedient to the Lord. I want to thank you for your obedience.

Eight months later in November 2020, I found my way into the first California church I knew of that did not close down. There were others that did not close down; I just didn’t know about them. I just didn’t know. It was a gift of grace from God in my life that this former atheist, this former renegade against the Lord was brought into a church that never closed down, in November of 2020, was being brought into a church where the Bible was being preached.

Walking into that church that Sunday and on the Sundays that followed changed my life.

That place three-and-a-half hours away from my home became my church and has remained my church these past four years. I gave my life to the Lord there. I was baptized there. I have grown so much in my walk with Christ. I’ve even found myself called out into the mission field from that church, called to a rather unorthodox mission field but a mission field nonetheless. How good the Lord has been to me.

Each Sunday if I am in California I drive the three-and-a-half hours to my church. It means a great deal that this church I attend never closed down. It means a great deal to me that you never closed down, Pastor Spell, that Life Tabernacle never closed down.

You were such a bright light for me in dark San Francisco, and I am so grateful for you and for the choices you made that spring. Thank you.

This Sunday, I believe I will finally be able to make my way to your church. I know I will not be likely to meet you in such a big congregation and I would not even want to take your attention from your parishioners if I could meet you. I am just so very grateful to be able to step foot in your church these five years later. I send this as a note just to say thank you to you Pastor Spell, to your wife, to your staff, to your deacons, and to your congregation for staying open. There has likely been much pain, and much hardship that has come from your decision. I just really want to say thank you.

I did not know how to read the Bible as I do now. I did not know how to pray as I do now. I did not know how to wait on the Lord or to seek His will l as I do now. There are many other ways I know now to encourage myself in the Lord, but in the spring of 2020, I did not know all of those things. I felt very alone. And your actions were the ray of hope I needed. The Lord used you — praise the Lord — to encourage me in Him. And I just want to say thank you to you and your congregation for your obedience.

Allan Stevo

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What I Found

When I stepped foot in that church, I found a place that was thriving. I found a place that sought to build community and to end reliance on the poison of government handouts. I saw 50 school buses that go far and wide, dedicated to not leave a person behind. I just got a glimpse, and I knew I was seeing what the Church was meant to be.

The stories of his irresponsibility in staying open were delivered to me by reporters from New York and Los Angeles. Nasty remarks about him were inserted into the reporting of American newspapers big and small. His own words were delivered to me by tabloids like The Daily Mail and The Sun in England, known sensationalist tabloids that were somehow doing better and fairer reporting than the newspapers of record.

I saw a congregation focussed on God, the Bible, and the gift of Jesus on the Cross. Once I saw it, I understood why the example shined so brightly all the way to San Francisco, so brightly that the hateful reporting, the threats, the intimidation from government and media could not darken that light. They were just there living the life they believed they were called to live and were doing so no matter what the outside world had to say about it.

What Can Each One Of Us Learn From Their Example?

I had never met the man, or watched a sermon. I never knew a thing about him other than the hateful coverage I read in the newspapers. But from Baton Rouge, Tony Spell was a shining light in the darkest days of the lockdowns. He could not have known the impact he was having on me. And I suspect I am not the only one who was encouraged in the Lord by Spell’s example. While all the men of God I knew went to run and hide, there was Tony Spell.

And in his example there is a principle to teach, whether you be Christian or not. The principle is this: Do your best in every moment and don’t worry about what anyone else is saying about you.

We can do no other. Life is unpredictable. You never know who you are touching and to what degree. You do not need to. Just do the best and hold yourself to a high standard.

How do you know that standard? If you ask me, it is in lots of prayer, lots of time in the Bible, a heart focused on hearing from God, and doing the work He calls you to do. I believe that is what Spell did as the weight of society came down upon him and demanded he bow the knee.

He did not bow.

So you do your best, you operate uprightly, you speak the truth diligently, you don’t give quarter to lies.

Will you be imperfect at that? Yes. We are only human. But doing that still remains the goal.

You do your best no matter what anyone else says.

Thank you to Tony Spell. Thank you to all the lions who stood firm in 2020.

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Does the Fed Shave With Occam’s Razor?

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 21/04/2025 - 05:01

Imagine being famous for saying something you never said seven centuries after your death. What has come to be known as Occam’s razor — “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity” — has been attributed to English philosopher and theologian William of Occam (1287-1347), though he never used those exact words in his writing. According to conceptually.org,

Occam’s razor (also known as the ‘law of parsimony’) is a philosophical tool for ‘shaving off’ unlikely explanations. Essentially, when faced with competing explanations for the same phenomenon, the simplest is likely the correct one.

Occam’s principle has been reformulated many times before and after Occam himself presented it, beginning with Aristotle (“Nature operates in the shortest way possible”), but the value of parsimonious explanations in some form has been preserved up to the present as an invaluable tool of explanation. Einstein is credited with expressing it as “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Da Vinci recommended mimicking Nature in whose works “nothing is wanting, and nothing is superfluous.” And since WW II, in keeping with the principle itself, KISS (“Keep it simple, stupid”) has become the modern world’s acronym for it.

The theory describes a desirable goal in any undertaking — everything necessary, nothing superfluous. With this in mind, how should we evaluate the Federal Reserve System? Is it a streamlined agency purporting to provide the American economy with all its monetary needs? Did it replace a flawed system that was causing havoc? Was it an improvement over anything the economy has ever had? Since an economy includes people who work and trade, was there a public outcry for monetary reform?

To answer these questions we need to look at the Fed’s goals, and for those we find on its slick website a straightforward statement: The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, provides the nation with a safe, flexible, and stable monetary and financial system. If we dig a little we find under “The Fed Explained” the 11th edition of its purposes and functions, though it’s no longer called that. Also, for those who are upset over the Fed’s private character, note that the top level domain is .gov, not .org, .com, or .net.

Going further, under the section labeled “Who We Are” we learn that

The Federal Reserve System performs five key functions that serve all Americans and promote the health and stability of the U.S. economy and financial system.

The first two functions are (1) conducting the nation’s monetary policy, and (2) promoting financial system stability. By scrolling a little we learn that a committee of 12 voting members from around the System “serve on the Federal Open Market Committee and help set crucial U.S. monetary policy.” Presumably they keep foremost in mind the ideals of a safe, flexible, and stable monetary and financial system.

Although “safe” can be interpreted various ways, it might refer to the FDIC’s role in the economy in the event of a bank failure. Its website tells us “Your deposits are automatically insured to at least $250,000 at each FDIC-insured bank.” The government created the FDIC in 1934, 20 years after the Fed became active. How safe were depositors’ money before 1934?

The Fed was the brainchild of the big Wall Street banks, particularly J. P. Morgan & Co., who wanted a lender of last resort and a more elastic currency. Neither of these goals could be achieved without the power of the federal government, which is why the Fed is not a purely market arrangement but a coercive cartel established by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. To ensure the Fed controlled the elasticity of the money supply, which mostly meant inflating it, the legislation granted the Fed a monopoly of the note issue. Though Fed notes were initially designated as lawful money, they were not awarded legal tender status until 1933, following FDR’s criminalization of gold ownership.

Gold had always been money, with paper currency understood as receipts for money, not money in itself. From the depositors’ perspective any gold left at the bank was his and could be acquired in full any time the bank was open. Yet according to the government, adherence to gold redemption was the primary reason for the economic chaos in 1933 because people were “hoarding” it — they were pulling it out of banks and securing it somewhere else.

In the world of central banking the gold standard was, as Keynes had called it in 1924, a barbarous relic. In his A Tract on Monetary Reform, he writes:

If we restore the gold standard, are we to return also to the pre-war conceptions of bank-rate, allowing the tides of gold to play what tricks they like with the internal price-level, and abandoning the attempt to moderate the disastrous influence of the credit-cycle on the stability of prices and employment?

It wasn’t the “tides of gold” that caused the problems, it was bank deception called fractional reserve banking. You think your money’s still in the bank? Not if enough of you try to redeem it at once. When that happens we have the unique experience of bank runs and bankers go nuts.

Ironically, it was Keynes who had shown only a few years earlier a highly perceptive understanding of banking fraud in the Economic Consequences of the Peace, Chapter Six:

By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

The racket he describes is infinitely easier with fiat money in the hands of a central bank like the Fed. Keynes, incidentally, was highly leveraged in the stock market when he changed his mind about “the process of inflation.”

Conclusion

Should we conclude then that the Fed is far from the parsimonious answer to credit cycles and bank panics? Does it violate Occam’s razor? We didn’t need an FDIC before the Fed, why does it require one now? Why does the Fed have the privilege of legal counterfeiting while the rest of us don’t? Why is gold anathema to central banks in practice while they hoard it on the sly?

Finally, does the Fed reign over a monetary system that is safe, flexible, and stable? Not if you believe its stated objectives. If the Fed isn’t the answer, then what is?

With government granting privileges to banks and for other reasons, we have never had honest money or honest banking. We need both and can get both if we spread the word and get government out of the way. As I’ve quoted often because it’s both true and incisive,

“If a domestic money consists of a commodity, a pure gold standard or cowrie bead standard, the principles of monetary policy are very simple. There aren’t any. The commodity money takes care of itself.” — Milton Friedman, “Monetary Policy: Theory and Practice“

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What Was Old Is New Again; In a Nutshell

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 21/04/2025 - 05:01

Tried and true cures for what ails were replaced by some clever “scientific” sleight of hand over a century ago. Now it’s back, baby, for those who can cut through the mountains of pharma-ganda and heal themselves with forbidden know-how. Humans who once lived in harmony with nature were tricked into worrying over life threatening disease to promote a load of magic-beans and phony pills by greedy shamans,…for largely preventable conditions and natural ancient remedies. Their minds were “salted” with a few modern successes in trauma and acute medicine while the drug trade mined their gold.

Symptoms Are Not DISEASES!

***Realize that disease is a result of 1. defective nutrition, 2. toxins/metals/drugs/infections, 3.sedentary lifestyle habits,… and most importantly 4. mental/emotional states. (period)

***All life runs on electron energy!

***Metabolic ATP output + absorbed/ingested antioxidant electrons – oxidative/inflammatory electron deficit = systemic voltage .

***Inflammation = Oxidative Stress (low voltage) = Disease

Various symptoms arise on the basis of root causes resulting from imbalances in this simple equation.

All it takes is knowing which oxidative factors like empty foods, vegetable oils, metals, pesticides, plastics, lack of sunshine exercise and unhappiness gobble life energy/chi/voltage.

Media networks are all about invoking death/disease consciousness to maintain egoic anxiety in order to maintain psychological power over the masses, reinforce official narratives, sell drugs, vaccines and extraneous shit. See this.

Pharma-ganda strikes gold every time they label symptoms as diseases and come up with a profitable drug to treat a downstream effect of an imbalance in the above equation.

Tobacco, Cannabis and Mushrooms. For at least the last 12,000 years of the most “recent” epoch of human life, these substances have been used both ceremonially and medicinally. Each has scientifically shown therapeutic value, yet each has been demonized or made “illegal” by government regulation in response to Medical authority.

Tobacco/nicotine is more frowned upon today than leprosy, being blamed for every disease in the book. Nicotine itself is of great health value and antidote to fatigue, but commercial cigarettes are contaminated with pesticides and additives while the tobacco plant itself grabs heavy metals. Since nicotine blocks ACE-2 receptors, covid spike proteins are toast; why smokers fared better from the virus and nicotine is recommended for long covid. Dementia and other neurological-dysfunctions also receive benefits.

Christ on a cracker; people freak at a whiff of second hand smoke yet breathe deep the gathering gloom of polluted air responsible for millions of deaths a year. Smokers are shamed as disease takes the rap for a multitude of chemicals released by protected industries!

Cannabis/marijuana is another neuro-healer in its many forms from gummies and smoking to potent RSO resin taken orally or transdermally which destroys cancers and a long list of other terminal diseases. Search “Rick Simpson’s Oil.”

Psylocibin mushrooms and mescaline derived from peyote cactus, like LSD show clinical success in cases of depression and PTSD owing to the dissociative properties of a “trip” and users rising above egoic fears. See this. Microdosing has become popular among bummed-out housewives and vets suffering PTSD.

Vitamin C, MSM/DMSO and methylene blue have been around for many decades, yet their usages have been censored and eclipsed in the public mind in favor of highly profitable drugs. These help restore cell function by cancelling free-radicals, increasing oxygen penetration, circulation, immune strength and DNA expression via increasing the metabolic output of essential ATP electrons; the energy required for all natural body functions. Vitamin C alone is protective of mitochondria and when combined with collagen maintains connective tissues which conduct e- charge/chi throughout the body. Pharmaceuticals may provide temporary symptomatic relief, but fail to address root causes hidden in deficient cell voltage. Drugs simply disable “dashboard lights” through downstream chemical interventions.

H2O2 hydrogen peroxide, MSM sodium chlorite, Vitamin C megadose or IV, UV blood irradiation and O3 ozone are being used in some nifty ways. These are powerful oxidizers that destroy pathogens, cancers and cell debris. Each has a unique method of DIY application, but IV infusions are limited to any number of holistic clinics.

N-Acetyl Cysteine (NAC) stimulates glutathione production, a major internal sulfur based antioxidant which protects cell structures from free radical damage and supercharges macrophage performance to rid the system of “garbage” collected by neutrophils. Macrophages must have electron voltage to produce H2O2 to destroy the pathogens collected by neutrophils,…and when macrophage “incinerators are underpowered, neutrophils back-up, signal killer T-cells to stand down blocking immune function leading to pneumonias and sepsis. Interestingly, large infusions of Vitamin C electrons are highly effective against deadly sepsis through the “Marik Protocol.” Nebulized NAC or oral capsules also thin mucus, prevent dry cough and do wonders for sinus/lung health.

O2 Oxygen! Ya can’t live without it! Oxygen therapies are not new, but their widespread use for many conditions does not fit the profit driven healthcare system or currently have FDA approval. What better way to quickly boost metabolism and cell voltage! See this.

Proteolytic enzymes. Pineapple and papaya (bromelain/papain) are traditional food sources, add soy based nattokinase and a powerful earthworm extract lumbrokinase and we have four tools to dissolve fibrin films, plaques and scar tissues. Infections hide from immune cells protected by these fibrin films formed as a result of inflammatory responses to insult and a tumor’s oxygen-repulsive acid mantle created by cancer’s poor electron output.

After a few months of using lumbrokinase, the skin on my arms and legs erupted expelling a lifetime of cuts, scrapes, plant poisons and stings. This caused months of intense itching as these scars came to the surface. A hairdryer to the rescue! This earthworm “juice” has been used in Asia to reduce women’s fibroids and I can only assume other plaques and fibrins were erased?

Foods; Before paleo was a thing, I was a hunter gatherer fisherman farmer. Seafoods from clean waters, wild animals and plant foods grown on mineral rich live soils, raw milks,… and the sunshine and physical exertion of that lifestyle dominated my early years. Compare that to modern fast foods and factory monkey-chow thanks to chemical agriculture and the “wonders” of food technology. Through the hypnotic training of simian TV, the “monkey-see monkey-do” principle kicked in big time. Paid peer pressure easily had ’em all eating corn flakes and twinkies!

Real foods have become scarce commodities due to chemical agriculture/monocropping/soil destruction and industrial processing. Wild and organic items must be sought-out, are pricey and largely unavailable on urban food deserts. Common processed foods in America are stripped of electron energy and so deficient in vitamins and minerals, contain additives, metals and pesticides, and are the reason savvy individuals learn to supplement what is missing in their diets. Vitamins C&D, B vitamins, and magnesium are widespread deficiencies. Heavy metals, Roundup/glyphosate, atrazine, fluorine compounds, etc., etc. are cumulative toxins, generate free-radicals, steal electron energy and must be detoxed before health can resume. See this.

Since we are bombarded by media marketing and industrial propaganda most folks have little cognitive association with science and reality!

I can only provide “Interstate Exits” and a general roadmap to truth and your personal awareness. You must take each “Exit” to explore these subjects, personal applications, skip “common beliefs” and Medical system lies to arrive alive. Then one can take appropriate actions and learn effective usages of simple cheap safe substances. One can take therapeutic items orally, sublingually, topically/transdermally, via nebulizer or IV in alternative holistic clinics. Be sensitive to bodily signals, only you know how you feel so play it by ear until success happens; you struck the root and symptoms fall away.

When blindsided by a serious illness, most folks, through a false sense of urgency, go with standard system treatments without being exposed to safer less expensive alternatives. RFK Jr. is all over informed consent throughout the medical establishment. One is more likely to be truthfully informed by a used car salesman than the average hospital or MD.

Just look at ACAM.org physician finder or search holistic practitioners and view the many protocols offered at alternative clinics. You will see a spectrum of IV infusions (Vitamin C/NAC/glutathione/RALA), hyperbaric oxygen sessions, UV blood irradiation, acupuncture, Chiropractic and various other modalities.

You may want to print-out this post and begin to research these preventatives and remedies. If illness strikes, you can resource the many “escape routes”.

Peruse these respected sources;

Orthomolecular.org

Riordan Clinic

Dr. Thomas Levy

A Midwestern Doctor

Dr. Mercola

Weston A. Price Foundation

Earthclinic.org

How-to entries and youtubes on each of these therapeutics

The post What Was Old Is New Again; In a Nutshell appeared first on LewRockwell.

Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 21/04/2025 - 05:01

Electronics, Volume 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965

The future of integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself. The advantages of integration will bring about a proliferation of electronics, pushing this science into many new areas.

Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers — or at least terminals connected to a central computer — automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment. The electronic wristwatch needs only a display to be feasible today.

But the biggest potential lies in the production of large systems. In telephone communications, integrated circuits in digital filters will separate channels on multiplex equipment. Integrated circuits will also switch telephone circuits and perform data processing.

Computers will be more powerful, and will be organized in completely different ways. For example, memories built of integrated electronics may be distributed throughout the machine instead of being concentrated in a central unit. In addition, the improved reliability made possible by integrated circuits will allow the construction of larger processing units. Machines similar to those in existence today will be built at lower costs and with faster turn-around.

Present and future

By integrated electronics, I mean all the various technologies which are referred to as microelectronics today as well as any additional ones that result in electronics functions supplied to the user as irreducible units. These technologies were first investigated in the late 1950’s. The object was to miniaturize electronics equipment to include increasingly complex electronic functions in limited space with minimum weight. Several approaches evolved, including microassembly techniques for individual components, thinfilm structures and semiconductor integrated circuits.

Each approach evolved rapidly and converged so that each borrowed techniques from another. Many researchers believe the way of the future to be a combination of the various approaches.

The advocates of semiconductor integrated circuitry are already using the improved characteristics of thin-film resistors by applying such films directly to an active semiconductor substrate. Those advocating a technology based upon films are developing sophisticated techniques for the attachment of active semiconductor devices to the passive film arrays.

Both approaches have worked well and are being used in equipment today.

The establishment

Integrated electronics is established today. Its techniques are almost mandatory for new military systems, since the reliability, size and weight required by some of them is achievable only with integration. Such programs as Apollo, for manned moon flight, have demonstrated the reliability of integrated electronics by showing that complete circuit functions are as free from failure as the best individual transistors.

Most companies in the commercial computer field have machines in design or in early production employing integrated electronics. These machines cost less and perform better than those which use “conventional” electronics.

Instruments of various sorts, especially the rapidly increasing numbers employing digital techniques, are starting to use integration because it cuts costs of both manufacture and design.

The use of linear integrated circuitry is still restricted primarily to the military. Such integrated functions are expensive and not available in the variety required to satisfy a major fraction of linear electronics. But the first applications are beginning to appear in commercial electronics, particularly in equipment which needs low-frequency amplifiers of small size.

Reliability counts

In almost every case, integrated electronics has demonstrated high reliability. Even at the present level of production — low compared to that of discrete components — it offers reduced systems cost, and in many systems improved performance has been realized.

Integrated electronics will make electronic techniques more generally available throughout all of society, performing many functions that presently are done inadequately by other techniques or not done at all. The principal advantages will be lower costs and greatly simplified design — payoffs from a ready supply of low-cost functional packages.

For most applications, semiconductor integrated circuits will predominate. Semiconductor devices are the only reasonable candidates presently in existence for the active elements of integrated circuits. Passive semiconductor elements look attractive too, because of their potential for low cost and high reliability, but they can be used only if precision is not a prime requisite.

Silicon is likely to remain the basic material, although others will be of use in specific applications. For example, gallium arsenide will be important in integrated microwave functions. But silicon will predominate at lower frequencies because of the technology which has already evolved around it and its oxide, and because it is an abundant and relatively inexpensive starting material.

Costs and curves

Reduced cost is one of the big attractions of integrated electronics, and the cost advantage continues to increase as the technology evolves toward the production of larger and larger circuit functions on a single semiconductor substrate. For simple circuits, the cost per component is nearly inversely proportional to the number of components, the result of the equivalent piece of semiconductor in the equivalent package containing more components. But as components are added, decreased yields more than compensate for the increased complexity, tending to raise the cost per component. Thus there is a minimum cost at any given time in the evolution of the technology. At present, it is reached when 50 components are used per circuit. But the minimum is rising rapidly while the entire cost curve is falling (see graph below). If we look ahead five years, a plot of costs suggests that the minimum cost per component might be expected in circuits with about 1,000 components per circuit (providing such circuit functions can be produced in moderate quantities.) In 1970, the manufacturing cost per component can be expected to be only a tenth of the present cost.

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000.

I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.

Two-mil squares

With the dimensional tolerances already being employed in integrated circuits, isolated high-performance transistors can be built on centers two thousandths of an inch apart. Such a two-mil square can also contain several kilohms of resistance or a few diodes. This allows at least 500 components per linear inch or a quarter million per square inch. Thus, 65,000 components need occupy only about one-fourth a square inch.

On the silicon wafer currently used, usually an inch or more in diameter, there is ample room for such a structure if the components can be closely packed with no space wasted for interconnection patterns. This is realistic, since efforts to achieve a level of complexity above the presently available integrated circuits are already underway using multilayer metalization patterns separated by dielectric films. Such a density of components can be achieved by present optical techniques and does not require the more exotic techniques, such as electron beam operations, which are being studied to make even smaller structures.

Increasing the yield

There is no fundamental obstacle to achieving device yields of 100%. At present, packaging costs so far exceed the cost of the semiconductor structure itself that there is no incentive to improve yields, but they can be raised as high as is economically justified. No barrier exists comparable to the thermodynamic equilibrium considerations that often limit yields in chemical reactions; it is not even necessary to do any fundamental research or to replace present processes. Only the engineering effort is needed.

In the early days of integrated circuitry, when yields were extremely low, there was such incentive. Today ordinary integrated circuits are made with yields comparable with those obtained for individual semiconductor devices. The same pattern will make larger arrays economical, if other considerations make such arrays desirable.

Heat problem

Will it be possible to remove the heat generated by tens of thousands of components in a single silicon chip?

If we could shrink the volume of a standard high-speed digital computer to that required for the components themselves, we would expect it to glow brightly with present power dissipation. But it won’t happen with integrated circuits. Since integrated electronic structures are two-dimensional, they have a surface available for cooling close to each center of heat generation. In addition, power is needed primarily to drive the various lines and capacitances associated with the system. As long as a function is confined to a small area on a wafer, the amount of capacitance which must be driven is distinctly limited. In fact, shrinking dimensions on an integrated structure makes it possible to operate the structure at higher speed for the same power per unit area.

Day of reckoning

Clearly, we will be able to build such componentcrammed equipment. Next, we ask under what circumstances we should do it. The total cost of making a particular system function must be minimized. To do so, we could amortize the engineering over several identical items, or evolve flexible techniques for the engineering of large functions so that no disproportionate expense need be borne by a particular array. Perhaps newly devised design automation procedures could translate from logic diagram to technological realization without any special engineering.

It may prove to be more economical to build large systems out of smaller functions, which are separately packaged and interconnected. The availability of large functions, combined with functional design and construction, should allow the manufacturer of large systems to design and construct a considerable variety of equipment both rapidly and economically.

Linear circuitry

Integration will not change linear systems as radically as digital systems. Still, a considerable degree of integration will be achieved with linear circuits. The lack of large-value capacitors and inductors is the greatest fundamental limitations to integrated electronics in the linear area.

By their very nature, such elements require the storage of energy in a volume. For high Q it is necessary that the volume be large. The incompatibility of large volume and integrated electronics is obvious from the terms themselves. Certain resonance phenomena, such as those in piezoelectric crystals, can be expected to have some applications for tuning functions, but inductors and capacitors will be with us for some time.

The integrated r-f amplifier of the future might well consist of integrated stages of gain, giving high performance at minimum cost, interspersed with relatively large tuning elements.

Other linear functions will be changed considerably. The matching and tracking of similar components in integrated structures will allow the design of differential amplifiers of greatly improved performance. The use of thermal feedback effects to stabilize integrated structures to a small fraction of a degree will allow the construction of oscillators with crystal stability.

Even in the microwave area, structures included in the definition of integrated electronics will become increasingly important. The ability to make and assemble components small compared with the wavelengths involved will allow the use of lumped parameter design, at least at the lower frequencies. It is difficult to predict at the present time just how extensive the invasion of the microwave area by integrated electronics will be. The successful realization of such items as phased-array antennas, for example, using a multiplicity of integrated microwave power sources, could completely revolutionize radar.

Reprinted from Olivier.Hammam.com.

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Nazi Stormtroopers Versus the Soldiers of Christ

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 21/04/2025 - 05:01

Caesar, like the poor, is always with us. So is Judas. And so are the disciples of Christ. The Tyrant, the Traitor, and the Martyr. These three types of men form the very threads from which the tapestry of history is woven.

Caesar and his followers come in many philosophical shapes and many ideological guises, but they are always animated by the same spirit of secularism, the same spirit of worldliness. They idolize the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist, and they are always at war with the Holy Spirit, the Heiliger Geist. In the 19th century, the followers of Caesar were formed by the fashionable philosophies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. In the 20th century, these philosophies morphed into the ideological monsters of Marxism and Nazism, the former inciting communist revolutions in many parts of the world and the latter possessing the German soul with diabolical pride. The Nazis, following the example of the Italian Fascists, adopted the Roman salute, the open-hand raised aloft as a sign of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, the New Caesar, and to the Thousand Year Reich, the New Empire, that Hitler had promised and proclaimed.

In response to the rise of the new secularist monsters, Pope Pius XI condemned both the Nazis and the communists. In two encyclicals, issued a week apart in 1937, he condemned the Nazi government in Germany for its persecution of Catholics, its racism and anti-Semitism, and for its tribal neo-paganism. In the encyclical against communism, he attacked the evils of Marxism in general and Soviet communism in Russia in particular. “Society is for man and not vice versa,” he insisted, condemning communism for reversing this right order.

Pope Pius XII, who succeeded Pius XI, ascended to the papal throne as the world descended into war. His first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, issued shortly after the war had begun, condemned the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland, which had caused Britain to enter the war in Poland’s defense, as well as condemning anti-Semitism and totalitarianism. The courage of the pope, considering that he was himself living in the midst of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, is exemplary.

Such courage was present to an even greater degree in the midst of Hitler’s Germany. We think immediately of those Catholic martyrs who were executed by the Nazis and subsequently canonized by the Church, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and St. Maximilian Kolbe. Their praises are rightly sung and prayers are rightly said for their powerful intercession. Far fewer will think of a lesser-known martyr, Blessed Otto Neururer, who was beatified by St. John Paul II in 1996.

Otto Neururer was born in the Austrian Tyrol on the Feast of the Annunciation (March 25) in 1881. He was the twelfth and youngest child of devoutly Catholic parents. At the age of 21, following the call to the priesthood, he entered the seminary and was subsequently ordained in 1907. A little over thirty years later, in March 1938, the Nazis annexed Austria, subsuming it within the Third Reich.

In the same year, Fr. Neururer advised a young woman not to marry a divorced man whom he knew to be a serial adulterer and congenital liar. After the woman informed the man of her conversation with Fr. Neururer, the man denounced the priest to the local Nazi authorities. A week before Christmas in 1938, Fr. Neururer was arrested and charged with “slander to the detriment of German marriage.”

Three months later, he was sent to Dachau, the first of the concentration camps established by the Nazis, where he was imprisoned with other priests in what was known to camp authorities as the “priests’ barracks.” After six months in one concentration camp, he was transferred to another, Buchenwald, at which the infamous “Hangman of Buchenwald,” Martin Sommer, routinely tortured prisoners.

The “crime” for which Fr. Neururer would ultimately be sentenced to death was the baptizing of a fellow prisoner. He was ordered to be taken to the punishment block where he was effectively tortured to death. He was stripped naked and then hanged upside down. It would take him 34 hours to die. A fellow prisoner, Alfred Berchtold, who witnessed Neururer’s final torture, reported that he never complained, mumbling prayers until he lost consciousness.

Blessed Otto Neururer died and earned his martyr’s reward on May 30, 1940. He was 59 years old. He would be the first priest to be martyred by the Nazis but by no means the last. Over the next five years, more than 2,600 Catholic priests would be killed on the orders of those who owed their allegiance to the new Caesar. Unlike St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, St. Maximilian Kolbe, and Blessed Otto Neururer, they have not been officially recognized by the Church.

These true soldiers of Christ are unsung heroes, to be sure. If they are in Heaven, we can be assured of their prayers. If they are not in Heaven, they can be assured of the prayers of Blessed Otto Neururer, the protomartyr of the Nazi Persecution. May he pray for them. May we pray for them. And may he pray for us.

This originally appeared on Crisis Magazine.

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What Would Jesus Do?

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 21/04/2025 - 05:01

When did Jesus say it was acceptable to starve the poor, slaughter women and children while turning a blind eye to the suffering of the weak? The answer, of course, is never. Yet for years, a vocal strain of American Christian Zionist leaders have supported policies that do precisely that—enabling the starvation and slaughter of Palestinians while underwriting broader wars that have decimated ancient Christian communities across the Middle East. How did we arrive at a place where those who claim to follow the Prince of Peace justify such unchristian horrors?

The Biblical call for compassion is clear: Leviticus 23:22 commands, “When you harvest the crops of your land, do not harvest the grain along the edges of your fields, and do not pick up what the harvesters drop. Leave it for the poor and the foreigners living among you.” This is a divine directive to care for the vulnerable, not an optional gesture. James, the brother of Jesus, is yet more emphatic: “Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you” (James 1:27). What kind of religious leaders cheer the bombing of Gaza’s widows and orphans, left destitute by policies supported by American and Israeli leaders? Decades of war propaganda have numbed many Americans to the atrocities committed in their name. Yet a growing awareness is stirring both here and abroad.

American Christian Zionist leaders often frame their support for Israel as a divine mandate, dismissing Palestinian suffering as collateral damage in a prophetic plan. Pastor Robert Jeffress declares, “The Bible says this land belongs to the Jewish people — period… God has pronounced judgment after judgment in the Old Testament to those who would ‘divide the land,’ and hand it over to non-Jews.” Likewise, Pastor John Hagee insists, “You’re either for the Jewish people or you’re not.” But where in the Gospels do we find Jesus exalting land rights or ethnic loyalty over human lives? Why did Jesus tell his fellow Jews to be like the Good Samaritan if not to call all people out of their tribalism? The only time He spoke of snakes was to call the Pharisees a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 23:33), condemning their ethnonationalism that blinded them to His message of nonviolence and forgiveness of enemies. He urged, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13), a rebuke to those who prized vengeance and power over compassion. Did He not say, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and instruct us to “turn the other cheek”? How do religious leaders who celebrate military might over mercy square with the Messiah who dined with sinners and healed the outcast?

The fruits of this ideology are death and destruction. For decades, some American Christian Zionist leaders have backed Israel’s destructive actions, often at the expense of the very people Jesus called us to protect. They support the decades-long blockade of Gaza, where malnutrition haunts the population, and the wider wars in Iraq and Syria, which have all but erased Christian communities dating back millennia. In Syria, America’s decade-long support for “moderate insurgents”—coupled with the theft of Syrian oil, much of it shipped to Israel—helped topple the government. Now, Al Qaeda affiliates hold sway in parts of that land. Who benefited? Not the Syrian Christians and other religious minorities who are being killed, displaced, and fleeing for their lives.

And then there’s the inconvenient truth about Hamas. For years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu facilitated funding to Hamas through channels like Qatar, a policy aimed at keeping Palestinians divided and weakening the Palestinian Authority. The State of Israel, with American Christian Zionist leaders’ applause and U.S. support, has trained, equipped, and empowered Hamas to serve its own strategic ends. Decades of this cynical game have propped up a terrorist group that Israel and its allies now use as a pretext to justify slaughtering Gazan children by the thousands. How can Christians reconcile killing innocents for the actions of a monster they helped enable? Worse still, many believe Netanyahu’s government may have had foreknowledge of Hamas’s October 7 attack plan yet allowed it to proceed, amplifying the tragedy to justify further escalation of the abuse of Gazans.

God made a covenant with Abraham, promising his descendants a legacy (Genesis 12:2–3). But the Apostle Paul clarifies this promise in Galatians 3:16: the covenant finds its fulfillment in Jesus. Many well-meaning Christians, however, were misled into believing otherwise by the questionable biblical interpretations of Cyrus Scofield. In certain circles, his 1917 edition of the Scofield Reference Bible was very influential.

What would Jesus do if asked to condone the terrorist actions involved in Israel’s founding? The 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel by the Irgun, killing 91 people under the guise of a “liberation” struggle, or the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, where Zionist militias slaughtered over 100 Palestinian villagers to terrorize others into flight—would He bless such bloodshed? And what of the Nakba, the catastrophic expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes that same year, leaving them refugees in their own land? Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion himself acknowledged in 1918, “We have no reason to assume that the inhabitants of the country who remained after the destruction of the Second Temple were uprooted. On the contrary, the Jewish farmer, like his neighbors, clung to the soil and continued to live in the land, eventually adopting Christianity and later Islam.” If even Israel’s founding father recognized the deep roots of Palestine’s people, how can Christians justify their dispossession? Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem and called for mercy, would surely mourn the dispossessed, not celebrate their displacement.

Read the Whole Article

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European Union Bans Commemorating the Defeat of Nazi Germany

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 21/04/2025 - 05:01

Now, a new low in degeneration has been reached. The EU is banning homage to those who defeated Nazism.

The European Union is warning European leaders not to attend the 80th anniversary of Victory Day in Moscow on May 9.

Ostensibly, the rationale for such a ban is that Russia is allegedly waging a war against Ukraine and threatening the rest of Europe, according to the EU. That’s one way of seeing it.

Another way of seeing the matter is that the conflict in Ukraine is a proxy war sponsored by the EU and NATO to defeat Russia, eight decades after Nazi Germany failed to do it. The Euro elites who have come to dominate policymaking share the same fascist mentality. No wonder, then, that they are against attending the 80th anniversary event in Moscow next month. They need to sully that event by way of covering up their despicable politics.

The event marking the defeat of Nazi Germany and fascism in Europe is a massively important historical date for the entire world. Eighty years ago, on May 9, 1945, the Soviet Red Army crushed the Nazi regime in Berlin thereby ending the most horrific war in human history.

Up to 27 million Soviet citizens – perhaps more – gave their lives in the epic struggle to defeat Nazi Germany and its fascist European allies, including Vichy France, Italy, Hungary, Finland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Russia holds the honor of liberating Europe from the evil of fascism. By comparison, the other anti-fascist allies of the United States and Britain lost less than 5 per cent of the casualties that the Soviet citizens endured.

It is fitting that many international leaders are attending the Victory Day parade in Moscow this year. They include China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi.

Many others, however, will not be in Moscow, which is lamentable. The American President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer should be present to pay respects to the soldiers and civilians who sacrificed their lives. Deplorably, the toxic politics that have poisoned relations between Western states and Russia have rendered such participation impossible.

What is all the more appalling, however, is the explicit ban on European leaders attending the celebrations in Moscow.

This week, Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, issued a warning that any politicians who went to Moscow would face severe consequences. Kallas, who was formerly the prime minister of the tiny Baltic state of Estonia, was appointed last year as the EU’s most senior official on foreign policy.

One of those defying orders is Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico. He rebuked Kallas for daring to tell him, as the leader of a sovereign nation, where and where not to go. He added: “I will go to Moscow to pay respects to thousands of Red Army soldiers who died liberating Slovakia.”

Fico was elected on a platform calling for friendly relations with Russia and an end to the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. He has consistently opposed sending more military aid to the Kiev regime. Last year, Fico survived an assassination attempt in which he was shot by a gunman motivated by pro-Ukraine politics.

Of particular note, the European Union’s sanctions on politicians attending the Victory Day commemoration in Moscow are targeting candidate states joining the 27-member bloc. Kallas threatened that their candidacy could be cancelled. They include the Balkan nations of Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia, as well as Moldova and Georgia.

Nevertheless, Serbian President Aleksander Vučić stated that he would be going to Moscow despite intense pressure from Brussels. “We are proud of our struggle against fascism, and that was the key reason why I accepted the invitation,” said Vučić. He spoke, however, of the sinister leverage on his government.

“It seems to me that the sky is about to fall on my head due to the pressure surrounding the trip to Moscow,” said the Serbian president, who added that his country was being destabilized by outside agitators.

The unseemly controversy over the Victory Day parade in Moscow serves to highlight the growing malevolent tendencies of the EU.

Increasingly, the bloc’s centralization of political power is becoming more authoritarian and hostile towards Russia. Any dissent among the EU members questioning the bloc’s support for the proxy war in Ukraine is ruthlessly suppressed with threats of political and economic sanctions.

The EU leadership, under Russophobic autocrats like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, is implicated in suppressing elections in Romania, Moldova and Georgia to prevent parties that are calling for an end to the war in Ukraine and better relations with Russia.

The recent dubious prosecution in France of nationalist politician Marine Le Pen, who has been critical of NATO’s proxy war, is another baleful example of the EU moving to crush dissent.

It is startling how much the EU has come to operate like a fascist bloc. Policy decisions about funding a NeoNazi regime in Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia are being made by Russophobic elites with no democratic accountability.

Ironically, the European Union, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, has transformed into a militaristic axis in which the civilian economy is being subordinated to an inordinate drive for war, allegedly to confront Russian aggression.

For several years, the EU has been drifting towards this nefarious manifestation. The bloc is run by people like Von der Leyen whose German politician father had Nazi affiliations. Baltic States that are erecting monuments to Nazi collaborators are now over-represented in the policymaking offices of the EU.

It is appropriate – albeit abhorrent – that the bloc is today allied with a NeoNazi regime in Kiev that honors Ukrainian fascists like Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych and many others who collaborated with the Third Reich in their extermination of millions eight decades ago.

A shameful milestone was the passing of a resolution by the European Parliament in 2019 equating the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany in allegedly starting World War Two. Russia condemned that political revisionism.

Now, a new low in degeneration has been reached. The EU is banning homage to those who defeated Nazism.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

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Survival Or Looting? What Trump’s Revolution Is Really About

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 21/04/2025 - 05:01

Many people, including me, are still not sure what Trump’s revolution – in trade, international relations and in his fight against the U.S government at large – is all about.

Trump, it seems, sees that the current path the U.S. is on, with ever increasing deficits and debt, is unsustainable. He and his people argue that the dollar as a reserve currency is doing more harm than good for the country. They point to the decrease in manufacturing as the main symptom of a larger disease.

They believe it is necessary to destroy the old system before a new, more glorious one, can arrive. They know that the process will be painful for many but hope for a better outcome on a new trajectory. (There is also a motive of personal profit.)

Alastair Crooke is alluding to all that when he writes (also here):

The Trump ‘shock’ – his ‘de-centring’ of America from serving as pivot to the post-war ‘order’ via the dollar – has triggered a deep cleavage between those who gained huge benefit from the status quo, on the one hand; and on the other, the MAGA faction who have come to regard the status quo as inimical – even an existential threat – to U.S. interests.
…
Vice-President Vance now likens the Reserve Currency to a “parasite” that has eaten away the substance of its ‘host’ – the U.S. economy – by forcing an overvalued dollar.

Just to be clear, President Trump believed there was no choice: Either he could upend the existing paradigm, at the cost of considerable pain for many of those dependent on the financialised system, or he could allow events to wend their way towards an inevitable U.S. economic collapse. Even those who understood the dilemma the U.S. faces, nonetheless have been somewhat shocked by the self-serving brazenness of him simply ‘tariffing the world’.

Trump’s actions, (as many claim), were neither ‘spur of the moment’, nor whimsical. The ‘tariff solution’ had been pre-prepared by his team over recent years, and formed an integral part to a more complex framework – one that complemented the debt-reduction and revenue effects of tariffs, by a programme to coerce the repatriation of vanished manufacturing industry back to America.

Trump’s is a gamble that may, or may not, succeed: …

A similar argument can be found here:

Even though Trump explained the logic of the tariffs as an attempt to correct the trade imbalance between the US and the rest of the world, White House officials [(archived)] outlined the expected goals behind the tariffs in more detail. They described these goals as concentrating economic forces nationally to “push for structural changes to the global economy to rectify challenges that are difficult to overcome, including high tariffs globally, currency and tax policies, intellectual property theft, and even health and labour standards”. Ultimately, Trump aims to reshape the global economic order by prioritising America’s national interest through this wide range of tariffs.
…
Trump fully understands the consequences of his policies. America’s “aggressive unilateralism”, which started in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan, has now peaked. Trump isn’t an outlier; he embodies the genuine interests of a waning superpower, whose policies mirror the conflicting and shifting global reality he navigates. Trump’s 2nd administration is poised to instigate a major crisis and widespread devastation worldwide to prevent its inevitable downfall. Their rise to power and the ensuing actions merely reflect the profound structural and historical changes occurring in the international political economy and the global power architecture.

There are also such headlines

Trump’s in-the-know plan to demolish the US economy – Asia Times
Trump insider claims demolition plan will necessarily ‘decimate millions of investors’ while reset will bring ‘greatest wealth creation’ ever seen

I do not know if those are Trump’s real intentions or if all such talk is just obfuscation to hide the immense insider dealing and looting that is coming along with it. The later might very well be its sole purpose.

As Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism sees it:

[W]e are in the midst of a revolution, one run by reactionaries trying to cement the advantaged position of the rich and further immiserate the rest of the population. I warned from the outset that the only way to make sense of the Trump policy blitz was that he and his allies intended to created a Russia-in-the-1990s level crisis so as to facilitate elite asset grabs.

She is on board with Michael Hudson in this. Hudson …

.. explains why the seemingly novel part, the heavy use of tariffs, represents continuity of neoliberal and libertarian policies, of reducing the role of government in commercial and private life. He contends they therefor have perilous little to do with “rebuilding” America and are intended to allow the super-rich to extract even more from ordinary citizens.

Trump is not alone in doing this. There is a swarm of multi-billionaires around him who are pushing for it:

A sector of the U.S. capitalist class is now openly in control of the ideological-state apparatus in a neofascist administration in which the former neoliberal establishment is a junior partner. The object of this shift is a regressive restructuring of the United States in a permanent war posture, resulting from the decline of U.S. hegemony and the instability of U.S. capitalism, plus the need of a more concentrated capitalist class to secure more centralized control of the state.

Trump is slashing the budgets of many vital institutions and, via Elon Musk’s DOGE, eliminating their means to function and to measure outcome. He is enriching himself by building a cryptocurrency empire while destroying its regulators.

While this is mostly a fight at home there is an strong international component to it. As Brian Berletic provides:

The US is preparing to subject its own population as well as those of its supposed “allies” to immense long-term economic, social, and political pain. The cost-of-living crisis in the US will only grow worse. The US hopes that it can endure economic pain and disruption at home and abroad better than the emerging multipolar world can. Multipolarism’s survival will depend on proving otherwise.

And therein lies the trouble for Trump. The looney tunes trade policy will be felt in China and elsewhere. But the pain level in the U.S. will be much higher. Other government will provide for their populations while the Trump administration has no intent do similar at home.

His tariffs against China will have similar consequences as the European sanctions on Russia. The targeted country will have no problem to handle the onslaught while the initiators will deeply hurt their own polities.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Survival Or Looting? What Trump’s Revolution Is Really About appeared first on LewRockwell.

‘I Want a Death That the World Will Hear’

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 21/04/2025 - 05:01

Israel assassinated a photojournalist in Gaza in an airstrike targeting her family’s home on Wednesday, the day after it was announced that a documentary she appears in would premier in Cannes next month.

Her name was Fatima Hassouna. Nine members of her family were also reportedly killed in the bombing. She was going to get married in a few days.

The documentary is titled Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, and it’s about Israel’s crimes in Gaza.

In an Instagram post from August of last year, Hassouna wrote the following:

“If I die, I want a loud death. I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group; I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place.”

Palestinian photographer Fatima Hassouna was killed, along with nine members of her family, in an Israeli airstrike that targeted their home in Gaza on Wednesday.

Hassouna, who had gained international recognition for her photojournalism documenting the impact of Israel’s… pic.twitter.com/y0FEJ60emH

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) April 17, 2025

Hassouna said she viewed her camera as a weapon to change the world and defend her family, making the following statements in a video shared by Middle East Eye:

“As Fatima, I believe that the image and the camera are weapons. So I consider my camera to be my rifle. So many times, in so many situations, I tell my friends, Come and see, it’s not bullets that we load into a rifle. Okay, I’m going to put a memory card into the camera. This is the camera’s bullet, the memory card. It changes the world and defends me. It shows the world what is happening to me and what’s happening to others. So I used to consider this my weapon, that I defend myself with it. And so that my family won’t be forgotten. And so I can document people’s stories, so that my family’s stories too don’t just vanish into thin air.”

Israel saw Hassouna’s camera as a weapon too, apparently.

As Ryan Grim observed on Twitter:

“For this to have been a deliberate act — which it plainly was — consider what that means. A person within the IDF saw the news that Fatma’s film was accepted into Cannes. He/she/they then proposed assassinating her. Other people reviewed the suggestion and approved it. Then other people carried it out.”

Israel has been murdering a record-shattering number of journalists in Gaza while simultaneously blocking any foreign press from accessing the enclave because Israel views journalists as its enemy. And Israel views journalists as its enemy because Israel is the enemy of truth.

Israel and its western backers understand that truth and support for Israel are mutually exclusive. Those who support Israel are not interested in the truth, and those who are interested in the truth don’t support Israel.

That’s why the light of journalism is being aggressively snuffed out in Gaza while Israel massively increases its propaganda budget to sway public opinion.

It’s why journalists like Fatima Hassouna are being assassinated while the western propaganda services known as the mainstream press commit journalistic malpractice to hide the truth of Israel’s crimes.

It’s why western journalists are banned from Gaza while western institutions are silencing, deporting, firing and marginalizing those who speak out about Israel’s criminality.

Israel and truth cannot coexist. Israel’s enemies know this, and Israel knows this. That’s why Israel’s primary weapons are bombs, bullets, propaganda, censorship, and obstruction, while the main weapon of Israel’s enemies is the camera.

Fatima Hassouna’s death has indeed been heard. All these loud noises are snapping more and more eyes open from their slumber.

_________________

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Priests Must Hold Fast To Tradition as the Church Goes Through This Agony

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 21/04/2025 - 05:01

The following was written and published in French by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò on Holy Thursday. The following is an unofficial English translation.

NEC SENESCAT TEMPORE

Homily of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday

On Thursday of Holy Week, the Church honors with the utmost solemnity some of the most important mysteries of our religion. In ancient times, this blessed day began with the reconciliation of public sinners who had atoned for their sins during Lent. Vivo ego, dicit Dominus: nolo mortem peccatoris, sed ut magis convertatur, et vivat.

But for the sinner not to die, but rather to be converted and live, it is indispensable that the Sacrifice of the New and Eternal Covenant, the Holy Mass, be perpetuated in an unbloody manner; and for this eternal Sacrifice to be celebrated, it requires the Priesthood, and thus the Episcopate to transmit it in the line of Apostolic Succession; and with the Priesthood, the Oils and Chrism of the anointing of Priests and Kings, Prophets and Martyrs. In short, it is necessary that the Messiah – the Χριστός, the Lord’s Anointed – gloriously risen and ascended to Heaven after suffering and dying on the Cross, perpetuate His presence in Holy Church, His Mystical Body, until the day of His return at the end of time.

On this blessed day, we remember the Last Supper, the institution of the priesthood, the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament.

The evening liturgy takes us back to the Upper Room, where the Apostles received His spiritual testament from the Lord, before the agony of Gethsemane and the arrest by the Sanhedrin. And while the days before and after Maundy Thursday offer us the Gospels of the Passion and the outward signs of mourning, today the Church dresses in white, intones the Gloria and concentrates on contemplating these last hours that the Redeemer spends with His disciples.

Never as in this crucial phase in the history of the Church and of humanity can we feel and share the apprehension of the Apostles, their disorientation at seeing their feet washed by the Master, their awareness of an imminent destiny, the sleep that seized them during the Agony in the Garden of Olives, the fear that led them to flee, Peter’s triple denial in the Praetorium, the despair that led Judas to take his own life, the silent presence of John and the holy women on the ascent to Calvary and at the foot of the Cross.

In the space of a few hours, the ritual banquet of the Jewish Passover, anticipating the only Mass celebrated before the Sacrifice on Golgotha, gives way to the apparent triumph of the executioners, the arrest of the Lord, a trial conducted with fraud and false witnesses, His condemnation to death on the infamous scaffold reserved for slaves, the outrages of the crowd stirred up by the scribes and priests.

We find all this in the modest signs of the Liturgy, which ends in sadness, with the rite of the stripping of the altars accompanied by the monotonous singing of Psalm 21, and the replacement of the sound of the bells by the austere noise of the rattle.

On the day when the Levites renew their priestly promises and the bond of unity with the Bishop, we must ask ourselves to what model we wish to conform our Priesthood.

There are indeed many ways of understanding and living the priestly ministry, but only one conforms to the will of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It is not you who have chosen me, but I who have chosen you (Jn 15:16), said the Divine Master.

And if He has chosen us, if He has chosen you, it is so that you may be as He wants you to be, and so that you may go and bear fruit and that your fruit may remain (ibid.). That you may go, not that you may remain. That you may grow in holiness, not wallow in mediocrity, or worse, sink into sin. That you may bear fruit. You are not trade unionists, propagandists, leaders of a humanitarian organization or members of a philanthropic circle.

You are not called to reassure souls, nor to please them, but to awaken them from their torpor, to warn them, to prod them opportune, importunate. You are no longer of the world, but in the world: the black robe you wear is a sign of separation and renunciation, an example for the good and a warning for sinners. You are not presidents of an assembly, but ministers of Christ, dispensers of the Mysteries of God (1Co 4, 1). You are not actors on a stage, nor lecturers on a podium: you are priests, in whose gestures and words those who listen to you must see and hear Our Lord, the High Priest, stretching out his arms on the Cross to offer himself to the Father. The Church, the Priesthood, the Mass, the Sacraments, the Liturgy and the Gospel are not your property, nor a draft that God leaves you free to alter, distort or “reread” as you please.

So honor Holy Tradition, not as the cold, extinguished ashes of a past now buried, but as a living flame that should set everything ablaze with supernatural Charity, starting with yourselves. For if you are not the salt of the earth and the leaven of the mass, you will end up being thrown to the ground and trampled underfoot (Mt 5:13) by those you think you are pleasing.

Make the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass the main reason for your life and your days, for on it depends the salvation of the Church, the world and your own. Complete in your body what is lacking in Christ’s sufferings, as the Apostle says (Col 1:24), for the good of His Body, which is the Church. Resistite fortes in fide (1 Pet 5:9), as St. Peter exhorts us. Beware lest your hearts be deceived and you turn aside, serving foreign gods or bowing down to them (Dt 11:16). Heed the advice of the Commonitorium of Saint-Vincent de Lérins: In ipsa item Catholica Ecclesia magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.

This is the most certain rule of Faith, before an apostate Hierarchy that eclipses the true Church of Christ, and before a usurper of the Supreme Pontificate. Learn to obey God rather than men, remembering that the destiny of the priest or bishop is indissolubly linked to that of his Lord:

If the world hates you, know that it hated me first.

If you belonged to the world, the world would love what belongs to it. But because you are not of the world, and I chose you out of the world, the world hates you because of this. Remember what I said to you: The servant is not greater than the master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my word, they will also keep yours. But they will do all these things to you for my name’s sake, because they do not know him who sent me (Jn 15:18-21).

The Church is preparing to face the passio Ecclesiae, the Mystical Body of Christ, which, like its Head, must not only face torment in the individual members of the Martyrs, as has happened throughout history, but also in the whole body, brought before a new Sanhedrin that hates the Church as it hates Christ. And in these blessed hours, we are given the opportunity to celebrate the Priesthood that has been conferred upon us: some in the fullness of the Episcopate, others in participation in the various degrees of the Order you have received. Gathered around the Calvary of the altar, let us repeat the words and gestures that the Lord taught the Apostles, faithful to the mandate received: Hæc quotiescumque feceritis, in mei memoriam facietis (1Co 11, 25). Each of us can say with Saint Augustine: Admiramini, gaudete, Christus facti sumus (Tract. XXI). We have become Christ: the faithful, in Baptism; you, Sacred Ministers, in the ordained ministerial Priesthood; we, Bishops, in the fullness of the Priesthood and in the Apostolic Succession.

We repeat what we have been taught and ordered to do. Let us pass on intact – with God’s help and the assistance of the Holy Spirit – what we have received: Tradidi quod et accepi (1 Cor 1:3). For we have nothing of ourselves to pass on, except all that Christ has given us: Dominus pars hereditatis meæ et calicis mei: tu es qui restitues hereditatem meam mihi (Ps 15:5), the Lord is my inheritance and my cup: it is You who brings me back into possession of the inheritance I had so abruptly lost. And if we are children, we are also heirs: heirs of God, co-heirs with Christ, if we truly share in his sufferings so as to share in his glory (Rom 8:17). Our being heirs of God and co-heirs of Christ thus involves assimilating the royal priesthood of Our Lord: a priesthood that consists in offering the divine Victim in the unbloody Sacrifice of the Mass; but also in offering ourselves, mystically, as victims in union with the Immaculate Lamb; and in being, like Christ, the cornerstone, the mystical altar on which the rite is celebrated. Only in this way, dear brothers, can we be worthy of hearing the Master repeat the consoling words he spoke to the Apostles in the Upper Room:

This is my commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.

There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends, if you do what I command you. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you, that you may go and bear fruit, that your fruit may abide, and that the Father may grant you whatever you ask of him in my name (Jn 15:12-16).

Let us implore the Blessed Virgin, the Regina Crucis, Mother of the High Priest, Mother of the Divine Victim, Tabernacle of the Most High, that we may truly be friends of Christ, doing as He commands. By staying awake and praying during the agony of His Church; by remaining faithful to Him when new Judases hand Him over to the Sanhedrin; by not fleeing in fear, by not denying Him as Peter did. By loving one another as He loved us: Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor; by knowing how to give life as He gave it for us. By sharing in His sufferings, so as to share in His glory. And may it be so.

This originally appeared on Lifesite News.

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The Truth

Lew Rockwell Institute - Lun, 21/04/2025 - 05:01

What is Truth?

It can be hard to know.

Not because it doesn’t exist, but because it’s usually too distant, vast, and complicated to comprehend. Or…like an ocean to a fish or a forest to a tree…it’s too close, and all-encompassing. As Chesterton said, it’s easy to be blind to a thing, so long as it’s big enough.

What we think we see is often a consoling mirage, a portrayal we create to validate our assumptions. It’s tempting (and often reasonable) to base unequivocal conclusions on preconceived notions.

And why not? In some sense, that’s what preconceived notions are for: handy guides to keep us from wandering in the desert. But we tend to rend our garments whenever they’re refuted.

We all have biases that beg to be affirmed. Most are harmless, some are helpful, many are dangerous.

To keep from being singed, we sometimes hide our candle under a bushel, to curtail controversial opinions so that we keep receiving our pieces of silver. When suspected of holding dissident perspectives, it’s easiest to deny three times we ever deviated.

It’s convenient to follow the crowd and go with the flow. To preserve professional status or personal clout, we’d best join the chorus…and choose Barabbas over Christ.

That’s human nature. When given a choice, most of us opt not to carry a cross. I’m no different.

Their Own Reward

I’ve spent most of my life on the prescribed path. College…graduate school… corporate career…leafy suburbs. For most of that time, aside from intimate family and close friends, I kept my opinions private.

For two decades, my writing was mostly personal diaries, family stories, and travel journals. Only in the last few years did more controversial topics enter these essays, tenuously transported on the ignorance of an ass.

Regarding religion and politics…which converge on Good Friday as on no other day…my opinions are occasionally welcomed with waving palms. Often they’re met with rhetorical scourging.

That’s fine, and to be expected. These are acrimonious subjects we’re not supposed to discuss, except to repeat approved pronouncements from our appointed priests.

It’s understandable that “respectable” society avoids these contentious themes. We don’t want relationships ruined over political disputes that are often irrelevant, and typically beyond our control.

Regardless the intensity of our concern for some distant war, domestic policy, or religious dogma, there’s usually little we can do about it.

But deliberation and discussion can be their own reward. Philosophical topics would be less interesting if they weren’t controversial. And they’re engaging because they matter, whether for the wisdom they instill, the damage they do…

or the hope they provide.

Spreading the Word

On the holiest day of the year, we dispense with Good Friday gloom, and exult in Easter optimism. Let’s wash our hands of rancor, to focus inward on family and upward to God.

From the Resurrection to the Ascension, the followers of Christ were reacquainted with the Redeemer, humbling themselves before the Conqueror of death. Having been confined to the Chosen People for two thousand years, it was time for the Word of God to be transmitted to the world.

When Christ was crucified, the Roman Empire was nascent. Like the US after the Second World War, it was energetic, expansive, and unrivaled. Its money was good, its military strong, its competitors subdued. For another century it continued to expand, till decadence and hubris slowly withered it away.

It’s said that with God there are no coincidences. In the time of Christ, Rome approached its apogee. Maybe He came when he did because His path had been paved.

Literally.

Roman roads and the Augustinian peace permitted Word to spread. Never before had the known world been so seamlessly connected. After the Resurrection, Christ’s disciples could multiply adherents by traveling vast distances with (relatively) few internal hindrances or foreign threats.

And they did. From Jerusalem, they scattered far afield.

We know Peter and Paul ultimately went to Rome. Andrew evangelized what’s now the Ukraine, and probably Greece. James went west to Spain. Thomas traveled east, to Parthia and India. Bartholomew may also have gone to India, but almost certainly arrived in Arabia.

A Church established, the message was magnified. After a couple centuries of periodic persecution, it seeped into the crannies and crevices of the declining empire. In the 4th century, Constantine adopted and adapted Christianity to Rome.

Net and Sieve

In large measure, Gibbon ascribed the fall of Rome to the rise of Christianity. Perhaps.

But many factors precipitate an imperial collapse. Sometimes, as Nietzsche said, that which is bound to fall deserves to be pushed. If the Church gave Rome a shove, it also served as a net, and a sieve… retaining seeds of revival as it let degraded soil wash away.

Regeneration was tedious. It began when the Church embedded belief in the sanctity of all human life. This was based on a worldview rooted in reason, that acknowledged an orderly universe created by God, with each person crafted in His image.

Unlike some random creation subject to arbitrary whims, such a rational system was susceptible to observation, experiment, and study. This formed the basis for modern science, of which Church scholars were at the forefront.

Their efforts laid the foundations of Canon Law, from which emerged Western notions of human rights and the rule of law. Five centuries before Adam Smith, Catholic priests developed precepts of free-market economics. To facilitate scientific exploration and philosophic inquiry, the Church invented the university.

Today these achievements are mostly forgotten, attributed elsewhere, or overtly denigrated. The Catholic Church (and Christianity itself) is routinely ridiculed as anachronistic and oppressive. It hasn’t helped that since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has engaged in what seem to be concerted efforts to undermine itself.

Ostensibly “opening its windows” to welcome the world, the Church instead stooped to its level. Sacramental reverence and ecclesiastical credibility have all suffered erosion as earthly concerns superseded the salvation of souls.

But even with the Church in shambles or consigned to catacombs, we’re certain it’ll survive. Christ affirmed the Gates of Hell wouldn’t prevail against it, and that He’d be with us till the end of time, as the Way and the Life.

And the Truth.

Happy Easter.

This originally appeared on Premium Insights.

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