Wednesday Potpourri

On the world stage the most significant is probably that the Neocons, having fixed on the mantra “as long as it takes”, are maintaining their pushback campaign against the professional military and its establishment allies. The notion of “as long as it takes” is in direct opposition to the repeated leaks that US support for Ukraine will basically end in the summer. The latest evidence of this “as long as it takes” campaign was the trip to Kiev by Boris Johnson, er, Janet Yellen. Yellen is nominally Secretary of the Treasury and is facing a possible US debt default in a few months, but she found time to make the pilgrimage to Kiev, to chant “as long as it takes”, and to add: As much money as it takes, nevermind where that money comes from. Of course, some geopolitical analysts, such as Tom Luongo, suggest that Yellen’s actual role in the Zhou regime is more significant than merely Sec/Treasury—that she is, functionally, in many respects the actual president. In any event, she concluded her visit with a real flourish:

The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee

To Save Time, Treasury Secretary Yellen Gives Zelensky Key To U.S. Treasury

babylonbee.comTo Save Time, Treasury Secretary Yellen Gives Zelensky Key To U.S. TreasuryU.S. — To avoid any future delays in sending billions of taxpayer dollars and deadly weapons to Ukraine, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has decided to make things easier and give President Zelensky the key to the U.S. Treasury.

British Neocon and obsessive Trump hater Martin Wolf has also weighed in, pontificating about “Western values” and that’s what launching a war on Russia is all about and as long as it takes and … You get the idea. It’s just a guy with a bit more pundit prestige than Turtle McConnell saying the same thing: The number one priority in the world is defeating Putin.

Meanwhile, back home where normal people have different ideas on priorities than those of their Neocon masters—Ukraine doesn’t even make it into the top ten for normal people—here in Chicago we moved closer to picking the next Dem mayor. The Dem primary goes to a runoff to pick the mayor—that’s how elections work in Chicago, and have for many, many years.

With that in mind, Wirepoints offered some perspective. They linked to one of the power brokers in Chicago and Illinois, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) site, which backed the current #2 Brandon Johnson. Here the CTU explain what they’ve been up to lately and what their priorities are:

In recent weeks, CTU members fanned out across the city — on foot and electronically — to make the case to thousands of voters about the importance of investing in schools, housing the unhoused, health care, effective public transportation, LGBTQ+ rights, and environmental protections. Brandon’s campaign is the most diverse, multi-generational, and inspirational we have seen in a long while. This outreach moved people closer to an inclusive and equitable vision of the schools and the city our students deserve.

OK, technically the teachers do refer to education. No, wait. Actually, they don’t. They refer to “schools” and “investing” in the schools, which I think means: more strikes for more money. Also more indoctrination for the “students”. All of that is different than education.

Interestingly, and this speaks to how moribund democracy in America is, the two top issues for the voters were: school choice and crime. Huh. Go figure, right? If those are the voters’ top priorities, how is it that they keep electing the party that gives them failed schools and ever increasing crime? That’s a major disconnect, and maybe that means that the problems with education in Chicago really do start with the problems at home.

Hold that thought. Mark Glennon at Wirepoints then raises a closely related issues:

Why are so many people leaving Illinois?

That question is actually one that was raised by a writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, but Glennon offers this fascinating observation:

In fact, there’s not a shred of information in the article specific to Illinois about why people are leaving, as the headline promised to deliver. It gave only some bland generalities about migration from a sociologist and a demographer.

Perhaps the most fascinating issue in why people are leaving Illinois is politics, though it, too, was omitted in the Sun-Times column. A recent poll found a stunning 7% of voters nationally saying they intend to move in the next three years to a place more closely aligned with their political beliefs, and the number may be larger for Illinois. That means a massive, interstate re-sorting is going on with huge implications, as we wrote here.

One of those implications is this, according Glennon, who draws on a Trafalgar poll:

America may be politically segregating at a much faster pace than is apparent from net population changes.

That will make a difference. These 7% are people in the poll who specifically cited “political beliefs”. My bet is that for every one such person there may be as many as several more whose move is predicated on “quality of life” considerations that align with conservative values. And those values are also reflected in the failure of Ukraine as “number one priority” to resonate with normal Americans. Further, I suspect that many of these people who have been targeted for cancelling by the Great Reset—the middle class, which still harbors those with normal human values, no matter how muddled. Soros’ political donations and the ESG movement are targeting those values for elimination (Soros actually referenced Russian Orthodoxy as inimical to his Open Society, as early as the 1990s, and therefore called for a Western assault on the then prostrate Russia. The sexual degradation of America’s children in government schools and in the media, the open borders, the Soros DA’s privileging the criminal class—these are not incidental parts of the Great Reset. They are essential tactics in destroying and subjugating the middle classes by destroying their values.

OK, so, with that we pivot to one American Catholic bishop calling an American Catholic Cardinal/Bishop … a heretic. Here I quote from Lifesite, which links to the original statement:

(LifeSiteNews) — Bishop Thomas Paprocki [Springfield, IL] stepped up his criticism of Cardinal Robert McElroy, accusing the San Diego cardinal and other dissident prelates of “heresy” and suggesting that they have excommunicated themselves from the Catholic Church.

Writing in First Things on Tuesday, Bishop Paprocki said that McElroy’s call to give Holy Communion to grave sinners, including homosexuals and adulterers, meets the definition of heresy, the penalty for which is “automatic excommunication.”

Other bishops have also criticized McElroy in strong terms, but this is the strongest yet.

Now, some readers may be wondering, Mark, what’s with the lack of continuity? We started with Neocons and the Great Reset and the Dividing of America, but … ecclesial politics? Actually, there is a connection.

Among other world leaders that the Davos crowd, the globalists, were determined to get rid of, there was Joseph Ratzinger, aka Benedict XVI (B16). If you want my views on Ratzinger, just use the search function. That’s not where I’m going. Whatever his faults, B16 had held fast to traditional teaching on sexual ethics. Recall, I just said that the debasing of sexual morality and, thereby, the destruction of the nuclear family as the fundamental institution of society was a key goal for Soros’ Open Society and for the Cultural Marxist movement generally. Not peripheral, not coincidental—a key goal. Add to that, B16 had empowered a movement within the Catholic world that was spreading by leaps and bounds—quite possibly more rapidly than he had expected. That movement was the movement of Catholics who were faithful to the Traditional Roman Liturgy, aka the Latin Mass. The fact that the FBI, as we recently learned, is investigating such Catholics should tell you how seriously the globalists took this. Readers with a knowledge of Europe will be aware that this movement carries historical and political overtones—all of them hostile to the goals of Davos, the Open Society, the Great Reset.

So, what happened? B16’s Vatican got the Russian Reset treatment, before Russia. Here’s Marco Tosatti (SWIFT WAS THE “BEAST” OF THE APOCALYPSE?):

Few days before Pope Benedict XVI unexpectedly and inexplicably resigned in February 2013, the Vatican Bank (IOR) had been suddenly excluded by SWIFT (the international system of bank identification codes). By this action, it was impossible for the Vatican to carry out any international financial transactions, and the Church was essentially treated as if it were a terrorist state like Iran.

 This economic destruction of the Vatican had been long and well prepared ...

 ...

Veiled threats that were made against Moscow to exclude it from the SWIFT network in retaliation for its so-called “annexation” of the Crimea in 2014 – causing immeasurable damage to Russia’s economy – have accelerated the development of an alternative clearing house system called BRICS that is controlled by China and Russia and operates in yen and rubles rather than US dollars, in order to evade the blackmail power that SWIFT wields against sovereign nations.

The Belgian website Media-Presse (SWIFT is based in Belgium), reported on April 5 about the SWIFT alternative being launched by Beijing and Moscow and referred to the Vatican as an example: “When a bank or territory is excluded from the [SWIFT] system, as the Vatican was in the days preceding the resignation of Benedict XVI in February 2013, all financial transactions are blocked.”

And then, as soon as the resignation of Benedict XVI was announced, the SWIFT system was unblocked for the Vatican, without waiting for the election of his successor.

And so we see that Benedict XVI was blackmailed by means of SWIFT, although we do not know from where it originated. The deeper reasons underlying this story have never been clarified, but it is clear that SWIFT intervened directly in the affairs of the Church.

This explains Ratzinger’s unprecedented resignation, which many people have mistaken for an act of cowardice. The Church was treated like a “terrorist” state ... The Vatican was no longer able to pay its nunciatures or send any financial support to its missions, and in fact the automated teller machines in Vatican City were all shut down during the weeks preceding Benedict XVI’s resignation. The Church of Benedict could no longer “either sell or buy” (Rev 13:17); its economic life was in its final hours.

It was a resignation made under duress.

The result was that a known heretic was installed as “pope”, one who had decades long ties to Klaus Schwab. In light of this, does anything that Bergoglio has done as “pope” come as a surprise?

Rod Dreher has a pretty thorough discussion of this event and its significance. I encourage readers to follow the link and read it all: Adventures In Heresy. However, for our purposes this passage gets to the heart of things:

Paprocki goes on to explain why what Cardinal McElroy wrote constitutes formal heresy. (You can read more about what McElroy said in this blog post of mine, titled “Cardinal Screwtape”.) I don’t know how it can be denied, frankly. (And by the way, if Cardinal McElroy is guilty of heresy, so is Luxembourg Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, who has described authoritative, magisterial Catholic teaching on homosexuality as “false.”) Hollerich is not a nobody. Not only is he a prince of the Church, he is also the Jesuit (naturally) tapped by Pope Francis to lead the Synod on Synodality.

The must-read independent Catholic news site The Pillar explains why Paprocki’s accusation is so important. It’s not just the accusation itself, as shocking as it is, but also what brought the accusation: McElroy’s endorsing publicly heretical things that a lot of American bishops already believe. From The Pillar:

But consider if the issue he raises go unaddressed, and a conclave happens – in our social media era – in which a number of cardinals accused of heresy were participants. If you think the periodic and isolated challenges to the validity of Benedict’s resignation were just a one-time blip on the radar, you’re probably wrong. Broader challenges to the credibility of a conclave could become a very live issue for the life of the Church, and for the pastoral ministry of American bishops.

All that might seem dramatic. Perhaps even melodramatic. After all, it was just an essay.

But an American bishop accused his brother bishop of heresy this morning, so the fierce debates of recent years will probably seem like prologue to what’s coming next.

Could this have been the opening shot in a coming ecclesiastical civil war in the most fundamental institution in Western Civilization? It could be.

Again, it’s all tied together. World War Three? It could be the first civilizational war of the modern era, global in scale just as the Church claims to be Catholic.

So much going on.

Speaking of which:

Tom Luongo (The Bots Have Returned!) @TFL1728

MOAR Neocon 'flooding the zone' with why we need a war with China, STAT!

zerohedge.comFBI Director: COVID-19 “Most Likely” Escaped From Wuhan Lab...bureau reached conclusion “quite some time” ago...

For right now I believe the China hysteria is a deflection being executed by the Deep State. A dangerous one.