OK. We’re coming up on Good Friday. The Crucifixion of Our Lord sickens me. This was nothing out of the ordinary in the Roman World. This was a world where unwanted babies were allowed to die. Some things never change.

J wanted me to spend “time” with her while she watched Emergency!, a 70’s show of fictionalized stories about ER doctors, nurses and paramedics. All in all, it wasn’t a bad series, except the music set the dramatic tone with lots of brass. Completely unsettling. After half an hour of this, I wanted to die.

Two mentions of death in the first two paragraphs should tell you that my head is not in a good space. It got hot in Richmond, not unusual, where Spring morphs into Summer after about three weeks. We’ll sweat it out till about Hallowe’en. 

I might watch a World War Two documentary where the Bad Guys get what they deserve. Or cartoons. Maybe cartoons would be better. The manic antics of Daffy Duck are absolutely therapeutic.

I could not stand another minute in bed with J. There, I said it.

I went to a doctor, a PA, actually who told me the best way to manage my joint pain is to exercise. I need to break the cycle of inactivity.

OK Makes sense. Somewhere, mixed with the physical pain, is the heartache, the tears of tragedy. I can’t call the Russo-Ukrainian War anything else. This is Eastern Europe at its worst. We Americans think more violence fixes violence. But this violence is Redemptive Violence. We’ve figured out a way to prolong a crucifixion.

And that’s just one slow agony among many, some personal, some collective. I guess I’m in the right mindset for Passiontide.

I need this Resurrection, this Easter.

Who in the Taliban government in Afghanistan has the Climate Policy portfolio?

The people across the street fly a Dallas Cowboys “Lone Star” flag eleven months of the year. In June they fly a Pride flag. In a neighbourhood of Steelers and Washington fans, the Cowboys flag elicits more controversy.

In the event of Nuclear War should one go to the supermarket to stock up on bread and milk, as one does before a blizzard or hurricane?

In the etiquette of the Officer/Gentleman Class of the Nineteenth Century, an insult to a man’s wife would follow with that husband slapping the offender. A challenge to a duel was implicit.

The affront would then be resolved on the Field of Honour, where the parties would fight, with sword or pistol, often to the death.

We frown on this behaviour today. Understandably.

Still how do we take responsibility for the gravity of our words? Libel and Slander suits are often litigated between a plaintiff’s attorney and the insurance company’s attorney. An out-of-court settlement, with a non disclosure agreement (NDA) is the rule, rather than the exception.

The absurdity continues.

Back in my mind, I remember stories of corruption within dynastic states, wherein various court factions would conspire to place a weak, ineffectual, or corrupt figure on the throne whose one positive “attribute” was their malleability. This autocrat would be controlled by the parties who put him/her in power.

We are finally discovering the mechanics of a rigged election: a flood of absentee voting prompted by a pandemic, ballot harvesting, ballot counts closed to poll watchers, etc. The end result transformed an accepted electoral process into the means to effect a coup d’etat.

Sounds creepy, for sure. We now have a demented, arguably corrupt, old man, Joseph R. Biden, Jr. ruling the most powerful nation on the planet by Executive Order, aka, decree.

To make matters worse, the Biden Administration is staffed by incompetent individuals who move between either government service, government contractors, academia, lobbying firms, or the enigmatically designated “think tanks”. For example National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, has never worked in the “real world”, i.e. the one we live in where we exchange labour for money to live on. He bounces from government job, to political campaign gig, to work at a think tank, the Brookings Institution , back to government executive job. Not once did it occur to anyone considering Sullivan for a job in the security sector, that service in the military, as an infantryman for example, might be vitally important. Sullivan is therefore eminently unqualified to send a soldier into battle, completely oblivious to either dangers or consequences .

To make things even creepier, big investment funds are buying houses, deemed affordable to first time home buyers, for use as rental properties. This dovetails nicely with the public relations canard that millennials don’t want to own their own home and are happy renting . “You will be happy renting, because you have no choice.”

Oh, wait, have you heard Bill Gates is going around buying farm land, lots and lots of farm land? He’s not starting vineyards, herb farms, or thoroughbred racing stables either. If this were Russia or Ukraine, Gates and his cohorts would be called oligarchs. The CIA would be thinking of ways to kill them.

We’ve now morphed the idea of freedom into the right to pursue delusional ideas to disastrous conclusions. This is transgenderism at its core. Call me a transphobe, but that’s the plain and simple truth. Sorry. The last century saw the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism give us the Shoah, the near extermination of European Jewry. What will this pseudoscience give us?

Placing the idea of transgenderism on the fringe where it, rightly, belongs, the narcissism of our culture, has rendered our nation into a nearly ungovernable mess. A person can now talk about their “truth”. Maybe that person is mistaking truth, for the conditions encountered or perceived in their day to day life. By expanding or bastardising a definition, dialogue is rendered impossible. For example, we can attribute every dysfunctional situation to “racism”, whether racism is the cause or not. And in seeking to fix racism, we are not addressing the underlying issue. The limitations of design in a road system designed by Robert Moses, may simply be a manifestation of its obsolescence, not a nefarious plot. Fix the problem. Skip the sermon.

Very powerful people seek to change public opinion, preferences and tastes to suit the demands of their investment strategies and portfolios. If one is heavily invested in electric cars, an antipathy to fossil fuels is completely understandable. If China is the main source of lithium for electric car batteries, foreign and trade policies favouring China are absolutely necessary.

The Clinton Administration brought us the rise of the “spin doctor”, persons given the job of manipulating public perceptions. Put coarsely, their job is to convince you that it’s raining when the reality is that someone is spitting in your face. We’ve had thirty years of this. It doesn’t work.

At 2:22 AM, I woke up. I could say my heart was heavy but that’s more of a figure of speech than an actual physical sensation. What is more real is the sense of sadness and the burning in my eyes. I want to cry but can’t. Perhaps won’t is the more accurate word.

J opened an Alumni mailing  from her college and learned of her ex- husband’s death. She had not heard anything from or about him for over thirty years until this notice. She  shared a life with him and then she didn’t. I remember my own experience with ex-wife #2.I learned she was dying six weeks before she passed away. We did have a son together, so that link endures. J and B had no childrrn.

But that whole situation brings up the brokenness of the world. I brought that to Our Lady this morning as I prayed  The Rosary.  All I can do is carry my pain to Blessed Mary and share my hurt. I can pray for healing.  I go to You Tube and pray the Rosary with the priests at Lourdes. Don’t ask me why.

When I finished The Rosary, I turned to watch a freight train pass through Ashland on another YT channel. I find the trains oddly comforting, the noise and the rhythm of the cars moving on the tracks. A coal train just passed through. So much for the the facade of green energy policy. That coal will be burned somewhere in the world, John  Kerry be damned

I’m tired now and lonely. I will go back upstairs. And I will sleep beside my wife on this last morning of March, the calends as the Romans called it.

OK. They’re not fun. They’re down right terrifying, as in we better pray and hope that somebody in the Department Of Agriculture knows where we are going to get the ammonium nitrate we need that we now buy from, wait for it..,, The Russians.

I don’t think the climate change geniuses know or care where we get it and what it’s used for. Or that natural gas is the source material used to make fertiliser synthetically.. So if we’re not producing enough natural gas, agricultural productivity goes down the drain. Those who are curious can look up the Häber-Bosch Process. Those who do know probably took organic chemistry.

We need fertiliser, as well as rain and Mr. Sun to grow large, no, gargantuan quantities of wheat, maize, soybeans, sorghum, etc. that keep our granaries full. And our livestock fed.

Don’t bet any of these grandstanding scoundrels in DC have the foggiest idea. They think in terms of Artificial Intelligence rather than artificial fertiliser, because the people who give them money 💰 make their money off Artificial Intelligence . See how it works? The pols can ask the tech giants to censor, de-platforming or changing the algorithms, and prevent dissenting opinions, or even the facts themselves, from coming to our attention. Ask Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) about controlling the facts on the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Sen Warner is a typical Swamp Rat. To call him that is a disservice to all the honest swamp rats in nature. He sits on the right committees, Intelligence, Foreign Relations and swallows whole whatever swill the Council on Foreign Relations wants him to believe or think. His constituents in Virginia, either government employees or employees of government contractors, provide enough votes to tilt the electoral scales his way. War in Ukraine, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Burkina Faso, etc. is good business.

The takeaway is that the politicians don’t care about American self-sufficiency because the arms contractors and the hedge fund managers don’t care. And the farmers, miners, construction workers, and machinery workers won’t be running into them when the politicians and lobbyists go on holiday in Aspen or Nantucket.

Next time people march on the Capitol, they should carry torches, scythes, and pitchforks as any good 1930’s monster movie would demand.

We may be technologically advanced, but at our cores, we are as simple as children, as fascinated by technology as an infant is by their crib mobile.

We eventually come to replace intimacy with this electronic facilitator.

I had a long dream, almost a hallucination, which was a long and compelling and seductive take in reality, as if my phone were an entry way to a madhouse, as if Rod Serling was beckoning me to The Twilight Zone.