"I’ve always thought conspiracy theorists were hopeless optimists."

 Amici, 

Today is the day regarding the Georgia "run-off" election, whether the two feckless Republican candidates eek out a win over the two Democrats, one of which, Raphael Warnock, is a deranged, psychotic ozone-head, a grotesquely racist Black preacher named (whom I believe preaches from Martin Luther King's old church). New Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said this about Warnock:

“This is the last line, we aren’t going to hand over our Senate seats to a pastor who preaches abortion from the pulpit. He’s preaching murder of God’s creation in the womb, holding a Bible in his hand. If anything go out there and vote for the unborn tomorrow. We’ve had enough.”

A lot, maybe the fate of the nation, depends on an election run by the same fraudulent, scandel-clouded voting system that subtracted votes from President Trump and gave many of them to Joe Biden (see here and also here).  

• (BTW, many "conspiracy theorists" are saying Mitch McConnell isn't concerned about the Georgia run-off because he's got the Dominion machines running that vote tabulated to elect the two Republicans. Haha, well. At this point, I'll believe anything of these characters. We'll see.)

In any event, we need some good reading to distract us from the above fiasco. I recommend a most excellent article at The Stream by the irrepressible John Zmira.       

One of those "must reads". Zmirak's one line I like so much is the title of this email. :)

A couple of Zmirak excerpts (highlights mine):

I’ve created a scholarly metric for measuring the depth of our entrapment, the Gunshow Apocalyptic Novel Insanity (GANI) Coefficient.

We can use it trace how the frenzied emotions and implausible events of 2017, 2018, 2019, and finally 2020 have increased not arithmetically but geometrically. That is, they didn’t double, but they were squared. If 2018 was only twice as crazy as 2017, 2019 was four times more insane than 2018, and (double this one) 2020 16 times more deranged than 2019. By that math 2021 will be 64 times worse than 2020.

I know that seems to hard to imagine, but math doesn’t lie. Read my predictions for 2020, issued at this time last year. I was wrong on all the specifics, but not about the rate of escalating madness. It was indeed 2019, squared.

So hold onto your britches, ladies and gents. We’re in for a bumpy ride.

An Préachán again:

And here below is Zmirak's take on the Catholic Church (Zmirak is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism [The Politically Incorrect Guides], and other related and delightful on-target tomes about the Vat2 Church. :)

Losing Our Earthly Attachments

I will say, to use the language of mystics, that 2020 has stripped me of many earthly attachments. I no longer expect my own Catholic church to exist again in recognizable form by the time I die. Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI did not cure its doctrinal and moral rot. In their key decisions — the bishops they picked — they listened to the same corrupt old guard. That is, the bishops who bungled things through the 1960s and 70s. So those popes picked mostly time-serving, and surprisingly lavender, bishops. These bishops treated the sex abuse crisis as a chance to hone their cover-up skills. They mostly let their seminaries keep on admitting soft-minded homosexuals, and turning away young men whose faith seemed “rigid” (i.e., supernatural).

Pope Francis has stacked the College of Cardinals with faded Xeroxes of himself, so we have no human reason to expect things to get better. At least not in my lifetime — not one year of which has seen the church properly governed. The only real hope I can think of for the institutional church is that it goes bankrupt. Perhaps by one means or another, governments like Germany’s and ours, which pour tens of billions into the bloated, politicized institutions these bad bishops manage, will cut off the flow.

Once the gravy train stalls, things will change. Becoming a priest will cease to be a cushy option for young gay men without the IQ to scheme for the Democrats or the talent to dance on Broadway. Being a bishop will no longer be the route for dim-bulb Disney princesses to end up in a palace. Because we won’t have any. (I pray that our gorgeous historic churches will still be saved from demolition, and put to respectful use.) The few men who sign up for the thankless, low-paying task of saying Mass in rented basements, and hearing confessions at Cracker Barrel? They’ll be like the men who built the church in the first place — the monks who cut down sacred oaks in Germany, opened hermitages in the Orkneys, and tried to restrain the Conquistadors in the jungles of Central America. “Rigid.”

Definitely on target, John. 

I highly recommend John Zmirak's writings in general, and this one in particular.

An Préachán