Tag Archives: Covid

Current Events

A COVID Christmas

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Please allow me to take this moment to say that I sincerely hope  all my blessed followers had a wonderfully merry Christmas regardless what your local dictators may have said. Mine said have a joyous Christmas with your families and friends, but then I consider myself fortunate by choice to have a sensible, for the people, Governor. My bride and I go to church every Sunday and then to a late breakfast at one of our favorite restaurants.  Life is good in Florida.

I will wish you a very happy new year if you can. I will not have a happy one as best as I can see into the near future. Our MSM wants you to believe 2020 was the worst ever. Well, don’t chalk it up to record books just yet for 2021 may prove to be a close competitor.

Here another thought provoking article from one of my favorite authors.

 

By: G. Maresca

 

American religiosity has been in decline for more than a generation and with the added fear of COVID-19, many Christian leaders have deserted their flocks.

Welcome to Christmas 2020, where the biggest crisis is not a virus but a lack of faith.

Church leaders have conceded to government diktats in this era of COVID-19 in a doleful attempt to brand themselves as benevolent.

The Constitutional right to freely worship, virus or not, was underscored with the recent Supreme Court ruling prohibiting arbitrary limits on church attendance.  Despite the court’s 5-4 decision, religious liberty has never been in more need of defense, especially when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo dismissed the ruling as “irrelevant” and “political.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom had imposed a 10 p.m. curfew, which would have made attending Christmas midnight Mass, a criminal offense.  Perhaps Newsom would find Mass more acceptable if it were celebrated in the French Laundry restaurant – site of his crowded birthday party?  This is another example of directives made by the faithless affecting the faithful in the ongoing leftist agenda to secularize America.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen would be appalled how the church hierarchy has acquiesced to the state.  The state prohibits Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, yet liquor stores remain open.  Churches should have had the same rights as beer distributors, pot smokers and abortion clinics – all deemed essential.

Mandatory masking, overflowing hand sanitizer, and social distancing are in vogue in houses of worship, but what is missing are the children.  Churches will not survive without them.  Few in the pews are under age 50.  Sign-up sheets, roped off pews, and parking lot services did little to bring anyone back, let alone evangelize.

Limiting, or worse, cutting off sacramental grace from Christ’s mercy has only deepened the divide.  The science supporting lockdowns has failed to stop the spread, and may prove deadlier than the virus it was meant to heed.

If anything, COVID-19 underscores daily that no human endeavor can prevent our eventual death from any cause.

Any government that has the authority to restrict your livelihood, family gatherings, and houses of worship is worse than any virus.  The alternative is subservience, empty pews, and lost souls.

The COVID-19 generation may never come back.  The unrelenting attack on Christianity will never cease until the faithful stop kowtowing to tyrants.  Science isn’t going to save you and it is no coincidence Democrats are leading the charge.  What do you expect from a political party that has forced religious sisters to provide for contraception?   The left knows all too well that faith can be exorcised by breaking one’s spirit and will.

Too many politicos claiming to be Christian believe Jesus Christ came to put a chicken in every pot rather than to feed souls and offer salvation.  As long as a portion of a bishop’s budget is generated from government service contracts, towing the party line will be its low-hanging fruit.

Where are the bishops’ supernatural faith?

Where are today’s St. Thomas Mores, and St. Joan of Arc’s, or Fulton Sheens?

Prophetic voices must emanate among the bishops to speak truth to this abuse of government power.  As suicides and other mental health issues increase, we need more prayer, not less.  The secularist, dictatorial governors and mayors and designated so-called experts seeking to oppress worship reveal their contradictory priorities, daily.

Christmas is not the time to take counsel of your fears, but recall the hope that only a sincere faith provides.  Has there been a year in living memory when the Christmas promise is in such demand?  The reason for the season is here, and never leaves.  Jesus was born during one of the darkest periods in human history as the Roman Empire begot moral depravity on an unparalleled scale.  Our Lord did so by entering the world in the humblest of ways to show He will go anywhere when invited.

In a remarkable sign, Jupiter and Saturn crossed paths this past week appearing as one body in the night sky.  They were closer than they have been in nearly eight centuries and was labeled the “Christmas Star.”

Many need to heed the message the angels announced that first Christmas: Fear not!

The child whose birth we celebrate is Emmanuel, “God with Us.”

If God is with us, who can be against us?

 

Originally posted 2020-12-26 10:26:05.

Recent Posts

Independence Day – Really?

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Another thought-provoking message from Greg. We have so much to think about this 4th of July, but in today’s society I fear that many folks will think of nothing but hamburgers, hot dogs, pop, beer, and a day off from work, that is for those who are working and not  taking government handouts. Meanwhile the “silent majority” sleeps.

 

Freedom’s landscape

By: G. Maresca

As America plans to celebrate the nation’s birth by taking inventory of the hotdogs, hamburgers, soda and beer, the most treasured and esteemed American stock lies forsaken along freedom’s continuum.

In his seminal work, “Crisis and Leviathan,” economic historian Robert Higgs argued how in the 20th century the federal government grew as a result of three crises: World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. In the 21st century, you can add 9/11 and COVID-19 to the list. During those crises, the federal government went about raising taxes, instituted more spending programs, and added to their arsenal more regulatory power.

With the heady combination of 9/11 and COVID, the government continues to fester as America devolves into Gotham City. I was reminded of this during a recent trip to the airport. I was not flying, just dropping off, and still had to remove my shoes, empty my pockets, and go through a full body scan in order to escort my daughter to her departing gate.

What Benjamin Franklin, our first self-made American, said over two centuries ago certainly resonated: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

As we traversed the terminal there was a sketching of the top ten skyscrapers in the world. The U.S. has only one on the list at number six – the Freedom Tower in Lower Manhattan – that was supposed to fill the void left when the World Trade Center met its untimely fate on 9/11. A generation ago, America had all ten.

Besides the overwrought airport security courtesy of The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), I couldn’t help but wonder what other things have been compromised all in the name of security in a time of heightened emotions “where something must be done.”

Never underestimate governmental mission creep.

Enter the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, TSA and an emboldened National Security Agency and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts that illegally spies on more than three million Americans, and this is according to that leftist fortress, The New York Times. Not to be dismissed was America taking on the costly role of being the unwanted landlords of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Government’s resulting muscle has grown too penetrating and too concentrated. Many throughout the federal bureaucracy are overly determined to inject this power into all aspects of American life. Proposals for more legislation, regulations, and interventions is akin to treating a poisoned patient with more poison.

Solving problems caused by too much government with more government is no answer.

Evidence of this can be found in the latest Gallup poll where only 19% said they trusted the government “most of the time.” Juxtapose that to the same 1958 poll where nearly 75% said they trusted the government to do the right thing “most of the time.”

Government has devolved into a centralized religion telling houses of worship to close, while giving abortion clinics the green light to remain open during a pandemic. Government bureaucrats sell voting and vaccines as salvation while indoctrinating America’s children through public education.

The government has banned God in the classroom, the locker room, the public square, public buildings, and ignores His teachings when writing its laws. Observing constitutional limits that does not provide for a “right” to abort an unborn child is depicted as violating “women’s rights” when the left cannot or will not define what a “woman” is.

The country is on a suicidal path culturally and taking our freedom along for the ride. The Founding Father that would not be surprised: Franklin.

On September 17, 1787, as the delegates departed the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, Franklin was asked what kind of government the convention had created. Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Franklin also remarked how “freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.”

Freedoms ceded to government are rarely regained.

On the cusp of celebrating America’s independence, the nation is fighting a cold war with itself that has most Americans wishing for a sense of normalcy, but at what price?

Current Events

How Do You Spell Olympics?

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Well, are they over? Who won the most gold? Anyone maimed, kidnapped, or killed? No? Shucks. I have no idea as I did not watch one episode, game, or advertisement, which I hear there were very many of them. I did hear something about not knowing who was going to represent who?  Did NBC make any money? I hope not. I watched Netflix and Amazon Prime, they have great movies as well as series. If you haven’t watched Reacher, Ozarks, or 1883, you need to. Anyway, Greg provides somewhat of a recap of the games — should we really be calling them games anymore? Hmm, good question for my watchers. 

 

The indifferent games

By: G. Maresca

 

The television audience for the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games resembled a Joe Biden rally. This is no surprise as the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games made for the worst ratings since NBC first began broadcasting them in 1988.

Running counter to the Olympic spirit, the games have been politically hijacked. The Olympics lost its way after the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, West Germany with the Israeli massacre. The governing body is corruption personified, while half the competing countries use their doped-up athletes as nothing more than public relations fodder.

The latest version provided an international stage for the unholy tripartite of NBC, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and China’s Communist Party (CCP). NBC is a left-wing political subdivision of the Democrat Party. The IOC followed the playbook of the World Health Organization that refused to hold the CCP accountable in the COVID pandemic by allowing them to host the games and ignore their competition rules.

U.S. citizens Eileen Gu and those 16 Americans who played hockey for China is such a violation. Americans competing for any country other than the U.S. is patriotic sacrilege. Perhaps they all need to live the rest of their lives in the Middle Kingdom.

Then there is the 15-year-old Russian skater Kamila Valieva, who was permitted to compete after she failed a drug test. How much was the IOC bribed to award China the games?

China is about slave labor, authoritarian rule, who gave the world COVID-19, while they lied, covered up, and blocked any investigation of the pandemic. Not to mention their repugnant disregard for human rights and international law, while being the foundation of the Biden family fortune. This malfeasance runs counter to good ratings.

Lousy television, debauched politics, cheating in events you have never heard of where officials judge on politics rather than athletic ability sounds like a new Netflix series?

What’s not to like?

The opposite of love is not necessarily hate but indifference. Such indifference was reflected in a poll conducted by the News-Item when nearly two-thirds said they didn’t watch any of the games.

Once upon a time in America, the Olympics were a must watch event where compelling amateurs battled for patriotic glory like in 1980, when the U.S. hockey team prevailed over the Soviets at the height of the Cold War.

Today, multimillion-dollar pro athletes and corporate sponsorships rule the games that are immersed in politics and propaganda and are no longer a welcomed distraction, but a blatant manifestation of them.

Without American broadcast revenue and commercial investment there are no Olympics. All those American woke companies and their media allies dismissed China’s ongoing ethnic genocide.

Moreover, given the assorted internet platforms, it is easier to watch the games piecemeal and at your convenience. That is, if you really care. One friend who actually watched some summarized the games saying, “NBC: Nothing But Commercials.” He also said there was no truth about the U.S. bobsled team naming their sled “Biden” as nothing has gone downhill faster. He admitted that there is only so much curling, skiing and team skating that resembles a roller derby that one can watch that included more than its share of political messaging.

Seeking political direction from athletes and Hollywood is like panning for gold in a dumpster. They need to stay in their lane and entertain and cease the lecturing.

Tonya Harding encouraging our Olympians to “break a leg” was in poor taste but what did you expect? The most telling quote belonged to another skater in 17-year-old Russian Alexandra Trusova, who won silver saying: “I hate this sport!”

She should be awarded gold for most honest.

Why not give the next winter games to Russia who could host them in Siberia where the skiers could do their thing between the gulags. What about having the Mexican drug cartels host? At least, the cartels’ body count is less than the CCP and they have more money.

It is long past time for the Olympics to find a permanent site for the summer and winter games where random and independent supervised drug testing is the norm.

Until then, you can continue to spell Olympics: C-O-R-R-U-P-T.

Current Events

Olympics

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Well, the Olympics have begun. So stand by America, get ready to be entertained, albeit I think I know what you’ll see. I won’t HA! You see, I feel the same about this event as I do about the Super Bowl. I’ll watch 1883 on my TV and enjoy it as much as I enjoy “Yellowstone.” I won’t watch it and not so much because of this article, albeit is a serious slap in the face, but because of what I would probably see from the American athletes. The Olympics has become nothing but a political football for all to play with.

I  don’t need to see fists raised, disgracing our flag, and all the other BS that athletes tend to produce while on center stage. All nothing but an embarrassment to our once great nation. Sorry, but that is MHO. I know there will be some of the same stuff we always  see from these immature smartass athletes who get to go to this event at the taxpayers expense, then slap us in the face. No way Jose.

China Thumbs Its Nose at the West With Sick Move During Opening Ceremony of the Olympics

 By Bradley Cortright February 4, 2022 at 2:10pm

Olympic Ring fireworks go off over the National Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest, in Beijing, during the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, on February 4, 2022. (Photo by NOEL CELIS / AFP) (Photo by NOEL CELIS/AFP via Getty Images)
China’s government is showing how it feels about international condemnation of its human rights abuses.

During the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, China made a particularly brazen decision to choose an Uyghur athlete to deliver the ceremonial flame, which NBC News notes “often carries symbolic weight based in part on who is selected for the task.”

“This was a riposte to President Joe Biden for skipping these Olympics,” Andy Browne, editorial director of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum said during NBC’s broadcast, adding that it was “a message to the West: China won’t be lectured to on human rights, or on any other issue.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper weighed on China’s move on Twitter, “Hard to imagine a more cynical move. The Chinese government is literally committing genocide simultaneously against the Uyghurs.”

He went on to share a series of articles detailing horrific allegations of forced labor, sterilization, and torture that Uyghurs have been subjected to in the northwest region of Xinjiang.

Last year, a U.K.-based panel determined that China’s treatment of Uyghurs amounts to genocide. And the U.S. announced a diplomatic boycott of the games but vowed to support its athletes.

China has denied that it mistreats Uyghurs.

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, also called out China in a tweet writing, “The Chinese government selects an athlete with Uyghur heritage to light the Olympic torch, as if that might make us forget that Beijing is detaining one million Uyghur Muslims to force them to abandon their religion, culture, and language.”

As Rushan Abbas, an Uyghur activist, noted in a column in USA Today, “The 1936 Berlin Games were known as the ‘Nazi Olympics.’ More than merely a sporting event, these Games gave Germany a platform for Nazi propaganda.”

“The Nazis already operated concentration camps, just as China operates and denies the existence of Uyghur concentration camps. The Nazis promoted a false image of a free and open society before the Berlin Games, just as China attempts to portray with Uyghurs,” she added.

NBC faced heavy criticism on Friday over its coverage of the games, with some alleging it is “casually pushing Chinese Communist propaganda” and brushing off concerns about human rights abuses.

China’s decision to thumb its nose at charges of genocide by having a smiling Uyghur athlete deliver the Olympic torch truly is a ghoulish move.

Otherwise, how is your day going, mine is going well. Have a great one, and if you have not been watching “1883” you don’t know what you are missing. Semper Fi gang, Jim

 

Current Events

Vax or No Vax?

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With all the questions being asked, but no answers proffered, one has to wonder who is telling the truth, or perhaps it should be is anyone telling the truth. Personally, I do not believe his Highness Fauci, and haven’t from the very beginning.. His crutch is “science.” Wants us to believe him because it’s science and too complicated for us normal folk to understand so we are supposed to trust him.  Well, watch this short video where Rep Jim Jordan (R OH) asks some important  questions and listen to the answers, then you decide.

Is Fauci full of it or what? I took the VAX; have not taken the booster and do not intend to.  My choice.

WAIT

Before you leave I have another short video for youy to watch. Let’s just call it a typical night out with the boys in LA County. Enjoy.

Wasn’t that fun? Just another night in a lawless third word shithole!