Two weekends ago the weather was particularly lovely and, while I was out for a Sunday stroll in my neighborhood, what I had already been sensing over the previous weeks became crystal clear: Many Parisians were not abiding by the draconian rules of quarantine that had been laid down in March,
Jeremy Chiaroscuro is one of the most important men in American politics. Not that he is a politician. Jeremy wants to be a puppet master and not one of the puppets whose only qualification is an insipid face and a case of hairspray. Like his one-time rival Carl Rogue, he was a protégé of the legendary Grant Blackpool, who until his premature death pioneered the science of hardball politicking.
The Kremlin has seized the opportunity to advance the plan of tagging the population – “bio objects,” if the gentle reader recalls my post of July 11 last year, is the official term on the government’s websites – to turn its citizens into what we might call “smartserfs,” eventual inmates of a “smartgulag.”
One of the advantages of any “crisis,” (real or manufactured, grave or embellished) is that we get to observe how it is handled by various people and institutions. As Covid Craziness continues to engulf our society while our fearless leaders attack it one press conference at a time, Christians should examine how the Church is responding.
There’s nothing more self-righteously unctuous than high-level media figures blathering about their virtues. Here’s Andy Lack, chairman of NBC News and MSNBC, “Journalism is under attack from coronavirus and the White House. But we’re winning.”
It used to be the news media at least tried to be serious. Now they’re just stupid. The latest: President Trump supposedly said a cure might be injecting people with Lysol and other cleaners. No, he didn’t.
Although we moderns look at questions of inheritance largely in economic terms, Jews, Greeks, and Romans were also interested in the continuity of the bloodline and in the carrying out of ritual obligations, particularly to the dead testator and his ancestors.
Let us turn to the more lighthearted side of life. While democracy groans and totalitarianism gloats, there is plenty of comedy out there to enjoy.
“Those on the Right have a strong belief in markets – and yet markets seem to be failing us, just when we need them most…. Society would like to have an excess supply of masks or ventilators just in case—in case we have an emergency like the current one. A well-functioning government would have stockpiled them, recognizing the risk of not having them in just such a circumstance as the one now confronting us.”
