Trump is the greatest . . . murderer

 

 

Like some rich or mighty murderer,

Too great for prison, which he breaks with gold,

Who fresher for new mischiefs does appear,

And dares the world to tax him with the old.

 

-- John Dryden 

The Devil, flanked by Famine and Death

 A Devilish Photo of Trump Sparks an Online Firestorm

Should he not know better by now?

 

I mean, the gaudy gold ornamentation above the "horns" in the current photo from the Cabinet Room is new. It is missing in the 2020 photo, so he's aware of this setting and what happened to him last time, isn't he lol?

 

The Devil has only himself to blame.

 

October 9, 2025

July 9, 2020

Trump's Commerce Secretary Howie Lutnick says you are among the best only if you are rich

 

 

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned, you have killed the righteous man; he does not resist you.

 -- James 5:1ff.

How to print money on the gold standard

 How happy should we be if we had the privilege of employing the sheers, for want of a mint, upon foreign gold, by clipping it into half-crowns!

-- Jonathan Swift

We're so vain

 NASA wants to send nudes to space to attract aliens... 

This isn't the first time NASA has transmitted depictions of naked humans to the great beyond in hopes of luring the attention of aliens. Previously, plaques and golden records sent on the Pioneer and Voyager missions, each headed by famed astrophysicist Carl Sagan in the early 1970s, included illustrations of a naked man and woman, though much less detailed. 

"The launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet," Sagan concluded.

 

 

We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to selfawareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. 

-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980) 

 

Welcome to unsufferable winter

Instead of golden fruits,

By genial show'rs and solar heat supplied,

Unsufferable winter had defac'd

Earth's blooming charms, and made a barren waste.

-- Richard Blackmore

Even sound money tells lies: "The golden age is back" (for about five minutes)

Western Caesar, AD 286-293

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whatever victories the several pretenders to the empire obtained over one another, they are recorded on coins without the least reflection.

-- Joseph Addison

Promising Renewed Greatness: Slogans from Two Insurgents :

The coins [he issued] include many literary allusions but none more so than in the cryptic … legend that appears on many of the silver coins:  RSR.  This was short for Redeunt Saturnia Regna, ‘The Golden Age is back’, from Virgil’s Fourth Ecologue. 

Loyalty, like grace, shows the nobility of the giver of it more than the nobility of the receiver

Though loyalty, well held, to fools does make

Our faith mere folly; yet he that can endure

To follow with allegiance a fall'n lord,

Does conquer him that did his master conquer.

-- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act III, Scene XIII

For loyalty is still the same,

Whether it win or lose the game;

True as the dial to the sun,

Although it be not shone upon.

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

I have coveted no man's silver, or gold, or apparel. Yea, ye yourselves know, that these hands have ministered unto my necessities, and to them that were with me. I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.

-- Acts 20:33ff.

'Twere profanation to tell our love

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
   “The breath goes now," and some say, “No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.



Dull sublunary lovers’ love
   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.

-- John Donne

Ralph C. Wood of Baylor tries to enlist St. Paul in his nincompoopery

Here:

It is safe to say that, prior to Descartes, human reason seated itself either in the natural order or else in divine revelation. In the medieval tradition, reason brought these two thought-originating sources into harmony. Thus were mind, soul, and body regarded as having an inseparable relation: they were wondrously intertwined. So also, in this bi-millennial way of construing the world, was the created order seen as having multiple causes—first and final, no less than efficient and material causes. This meant that creation was not a thing that stood over against us, but as the realm in which we participate—living and moving and having our being there, as both ancient Stoics and St. Paul insisted. The physical creation was understood as God’s great book of metaphors and analogies for grasping his will for the world.

So, in the creation we live and move and have our being, huh? Firm grasp of the obvious there Ralph, except that's not at all what Paul said.

The language only vaguely familiar to Wood comes from Paul's Areopagus Speech in The Book of Acts, but Wood has it turned completely around. Paul insists that we live and move and have our being "in him", in the transcendent Creator God, not in creation, whether God's or our own:

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; . . . For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. -- Acts 17:24, 28f.

Far from being a great book "for grasping God's will", the world is a woefully deficient book in desperate need of an editor (as is Wood):

For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things! -- Romans 10:12ff.

Whatever may be said of Descartes as a dividing line between the modern and the pre-modern, he has nothing on Paul, or Jesus, neither of whom imagined the long future which unfolded and we call Christendom. They were apocalyptic thinkers for whom the end of the world and final judgment were nigh. The separation between us and them is far deeper than anything wrought by Descartes, real or imagined. 

Maybe the barbarism of Spain in the New World had something to do with its 800-year experience of Islam before Columbus

From "Islamic Spain in Middle Ages no paradise for Christians, Jews, women" by Paul Monk here:

The real thrust of Fernandez-Morera’s critique of the myth of Andalusia is that Islam in Spain, far from setting a high bar of tolerance, was characterised by plunder, domination, the harsh application of sharia law, the persecution of Christians or Jews who openly avowed their non-Muslim beliefs, and the violent suppression of ‘‘heresies’’ and apostasy within the Muslim community. ... There is no Andalusian golden age of Islam to emulate.

Baba Ramdev, the face of yoga, ayurvedic products and patriotic nationalism in India, is poor in name only

From the story here:

It might seem like an impossible arrangement—observing an oath of poverty while also being one of India’s top entrepreneurs. ...

Ramdev’s home is on the outskirts of the city—in a walled garden he shares with bees, butterflies, and armed security guards. I entered the estate through two huge gates with golden lion-head door knockers, and drove down a brick path toward a complex of tidy white buildings. Ramdev received me in a comfortable parlor, with an ample porch and several couches and armchairs. “Nowhere in our religious books and scriptures is it written that a sanyasi should be a mendicant,” he said, referring to the kind of beggars I’d seen along the Ganges. ...

Stuart Ray Sarbacker, a professor of comparative religion at Oregon State University who’s studied Ramdev’s career, calls him “the most prominent face of yoga in the entire nation.”

The fox tells the ape that the life without toil is freest "uncontrolled of any"

For without gold now nothing will be got,

Therefore (if please you) this shall be our plot:

We will not be of any occupation;

Let such vile vassals, born to base vocation,

Drudge in the world, and for their living droil,

Which have no wit to live withouten toil;

But we will walk about the world with pleasure

Like two free men, and make our ease our treasure.

Free men some beggars call, but they be free,

And they which call them so more beggars be;

For they do swink and sweat to feed th' other,

Who live like Lords of that which they do gather,

And yet do never thank them for the same,

But as their due by Nature do it claim.

Such will we fashion both our selves to be,

Lords of the world; and so will wander free

Where so us listeth, uncontroll'd of any:

Hard is our hap, if we (amongst so many)

Light not on some that may our state amend:

Seldom but some good cometh ere the end.

-- Edmund Spenser (1553-1599), Prosopopoia: Or Mother Hubberds Tale

Yes, it's in there: "Money is the answer for everything"

Ecclesiastes 10:19

Peter Leithart provides a helpful exegesis of Shakespeare's 3rd Sonnet, apposite our exceptionally narcissistic age

Here, in which he meditates upon the immortality afforded us by human reproduction, the urgency of it when young, and our obligation not to defraud the world of it, nor especially a mother like our own, and in the end, ourselves:

"Battle mutability, battle age. Reproduce."

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest

Now is the time that face should form another;

Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

Of his self-love, to stop posterity? 

Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

   But if thou live, remembered not to be,

   Die single and thine image dies with thee.

Miracles have declined in proportion to the increase of our wealth

 

 

 An old chestnut related by the dear departed F.F. Bruce in his 1988 commentary on Acts 3.6:

According to Cornelius a Lapide, Thomas Aquinas once called on Pope Innocent II when the latter was counting out a large sum of money.

“You see, Thomas,” said the Pope, “the church can no longer say, ‘Silver and gold have I none.’”

“True, holy father,” was the reply; “neither can she now say, ‘Rise and walk.’”

Stupid statement of the day: "People who live in poverty cannot change the world with the Gospel of Christ"

Raphael's Healing of the Lame Man

For rank ignorance of the early history of the church you can hardly do better than that, and I won't mention who said it but her initials are RS.

Christians basically took over Roman culture from the bottom up through their sustained ministry to the poorest members of society, transforming it so that it eventually became what was called the Holy Roman Empire.

Evidently it is little studied anymore.

A shining early example of changing the world one person at a time without money but with the Gospel of Christ comes from the Acts of the Apostles:

Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.

-- Acts 3:6

You cannot serve God and mammon

 

 

 The law of thy mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces. ... Therefore I love thy commandments above gold, above fine gold.

-- Psalm 119:72, 127

Oral cardiac defilement syndrome

 

But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man.

-- Matthew 15:18ff.

Walpurgisnacht: Witches and devils and spectres oh my!

 

 

 Now to the Brocken the witches ride;

The stubble is gold and the corn is green;

There is the carnival crew to be seen,

And Squire Urianus will come to preside.

So over the valleys our company floats,

With witches a-farting on stinking old goats.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust