A blessed continued Eastertide to all our readers! Christus resurrexit! In spe gaudentes! Alleluia! Χριστός Ανέστη!
I just finished grading my final exams – hence the mild note of euphoria – so a few thoughts for your ponderings, and please do send along your own. After all, truth is best sought in dialogue:
In the spirit of that Greek greeting, and courtesy of a friend of mine, would that we Catholics might hear a sermon like this one preached in an Orthodox church. As the same acquaintance put it, the Easterners will play a central role in the final eschatological battle, as recounted in Soloviev’s ‘The Tale of the Antichrist‘. Of course, we Catholics used to hear such sermons – today’s Saint Anselm certainly had no difficulty speaking truth to power, as the saying goes, exiled twice by powerful kings, but who both called him back – and still do in some places. May the divine parrhesia of Christ and His Apostles inflame our pastors with holy zeal!
As a supplement to the ongoing ‘debate’ – are we still allowed to debate? – on the vaccine, here is one succinct summary why one person has decided not to get the shot. Well worth a perusal.
And on the lunatic lockdowns, which are now being declared ineffective and illegal across a growing swath of the world, except for feckless Ford’s Ontario and a few other totalitarian regimes:
The Portuguese, German and Dutch rulings and now the Austrian court has ruled that PCR tests are not suitable for COVID-19 diagnosis and that lockdowns have no legal or scientific basis.
Florida, Texas and various other locales provide a posteriori evidence that lockdowns simply don’t work, besides all the misery they cause. On just one note of such useless mayhem, Premier Ford has closed the provincial borders – so much for freedom of movement across our own country – and at one crossing there was a 10 kilometre – six miles for Brits and Americans – back up of cars. The police turned a grand total four of them back.
Oh, to be in Texas, tyin’ a yellow ribbon ’round an old oak tree, land of freedom and the Alamo!
38 days since dropping Covid restrictions and mask mandates
Full capacity sports – Businesses open – Vaccine passports have been banned – Covid cases down 34% – Covid deaths down 68%
How do you like them apples? Covid zealots – Trudeau, Fauci, et al., – must just hate Texas. They’re free to avoid it, like Thelma and Louise, even it’s a long way around. On that thought, perhaps we should just go our separate ways, the mask-vaxx from the not-so-inclined, and see how things work out, a posteriori. That would certain prove things, empirically, epidemiologically, scientifically – which is what they want, is it not?
On a note of hope and sanity, every municipal police force in Ontario refused to enforce Ford’s draconian decrees – including random police checks, ‘papers, please! – except, of course, the new-Praetorian guard, the hyper-militarized O.P.P., the highest paid police service in the province (by law, which is why their salaries keep ratcheting up, while we drown in debt). As Nero advised his fellow and subsequent rulers: Pay your soldiers well.
And what of merciless mask mandates, particularly harmful to children, on different levels?
@MikkoPackalen | Economics prof at UW. Let kids live normal lives. Their rights were taken away by panic not science.
And here from John Tierney at City Journal. I especially liked his bit about ‘jug ears’ caused by the perpetual strain of the mask elastics. I wonder about that, but there’s nothing like vanity to motivate people. After all the ear is cartilage, not bone, so is more open to shaping (and grows even after bone ceases to). But I’m most concerned about the long-lasting psychological and spiritual effects of this. – not just the mask, but the isolation, the constant fear of the ‘other’, and just the plain oppressive body-snatchers weirdness of it all.
In Ottawa – yes, the capital of oppressed Ontario – masks are mandated on children two years old and up at outdoor playgrounds. My own nephew, soon turning seven, was all set to play soccer – or, as we said in our Scottish household, ‘football’, or more properly, fitbah – but the municipality (or whoever) mandated masks on all the players. Try playing sports in a mask.
Meanwhile Finland’s leading pediatricians write in the country’s main newspaper that there is NO scientific basis for masks on primary school children even indoors. https://twitter.com/MikkoPackalen/status/1384828826753060866
When is enough, enough?
In light of the priest’s, shall we say, exhortation, keep in mind the following from our own Charter:
Every single one of these is moribund in Canada, unless we take them back – now, and do our best to preserve and conserve them. Isn’t that what ‘conservative’ means, as well as, by the way, ‘liberal’? They are not contradictory, but complementary.
Live free, amici mei – for freedom, Christ has set us f