Happy New Year

 

May God bless you all in this new year, which will surely be better than its wretched precedent. We're just about ready to launch SERIOUS fireworks. You know what it's like.

Your Old Pal,

LSP

Urban Hellholes

 

it was bad then

Everyone here knows it but many choose to ignore it; Europeans can scarcely comprehend much less believe it, but our major cities are urban wasteland hellholes. Seriously, I'd email pals in the UK from Detroit in '98 and I don't think they believed me. 

No, fools. The urban, asset-stripped carnage of the Motor City seemed like hyperbole, mind blogging perhaps to them, wild exaggeration. But no, I was pulling punches. Here's Detroit:

And here's Philly:

Beautiful, isn't it. Here's Chicago:

But what about Baltimore?

And let's not forget the nation's Capitol, DC:

But perhaps you're wondering what happened to Gary Indiana:

And on, and on, and on.  Everywhere you look our cities are decaying into urban, hellhole wastelands. It's America's dirty little secret if you like, but not to worry, we have trans bathrooms, rainbow hurray! 

That aside, do you think the outward and visible reflects the inward and spiritual?

Just asking.

Strawberry Fields Forever,

LSP

Yet More War

 

Religious leaders around the world, like Justsin Welby, Pope Francis and Foley improbably named Beach have condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Quite right too, we hate war, but consider. Imagine you were Head of State, a veritable Vladimir Putin.

Imagine, and then consider your borders. Would you put up with, if you had a choice, a hostile power financing and controlling bioweapons labs in a neighboring state and threatening to join a military alliance against you? 

It sounds weird and preposterous, but that's exactly what we've been doing. Gay Pride Ukraine and big woke Trannie Corp's gonna take down monster Putin and turn Russia into a rainbow utopia.

A utopia in which you will WEF own nothing and be happy because your bathrooms are multisexual. That would be the West and the Zelensky Ukraine we're all cheering for. The Moscow Patriarchate says no, and so do Russia's MLRS which are pounding Karkov tonight with furious abandon.

Maybe the dividing line is simple if not easy. Who do we support, the apostate Rainbow West or its opposite?

Your Call,

LSP

Pump Up The Volume

 

Here we go now,

LSP

Lights On

 

I went for a walk to the old Shamrock tonight, and nothing much had changed except for the lights. They were on, in all their Christmas glory. Hold on, this is Advent, but they hadn't got the memo.

Still, the Holy Family, and I like that. Mary, Joseph and the infant Christ. There it is, salvation, come into the world. Beautiful.

The church, on the other hand, looked a bit shaky. We must hope that'd not be some kind of metaphor. And if it is? Draw the moral as you take it.

God bless,

LSP

Sunday Message

 

This one's via Dostoevsky to Maikov in 1870:

Exactly the same thing happened in our country: the devils went out of the Russian man and entered into a herd of swine, into the Nechaevs (nihilists)… These are drowned or will be drowned, and the healed man, from whom the devils have departed, sits at the feet of Jesus… And bear this in mind, my dear friend, that a man who loses his people and his national roots also loses faith in his fathers and his God. Well, if you really want to know – this is in essence the theme of my novel [Demons].

Note the seer-like precision of will be drowned. Take heart from that, but know, great will be the fall of it.

Cheers,

LSP

The Feast of St. Francis

It being the Feast of St. St. Francis, I drove across the dam to say Mass and the sky was huge, such is Texas.

Some say that Francis was a kind of hippy, although his hair was notoriously short, he didn't thieve and was a catholic Christian. Are the two synonymous? I'd say they are, at the end of the day and while we're at it, Europe is the Faith; thanks Belloc, for that. 

ChesterBelloc

Of course the old Europe is fast denying the Faith and becoming something else in its great secularist experiment which has, oddly enough, a peculiar fondness for Islam. 

Foretold, when you think about it, by Chesterton in the Flying Inn,  wherein a cheerful band of heroes roam about England with a large cheese, lots of ale and a "pop up" Inn. 

Say No To The NWO

In doing so they defeat an evil ruling elite which has embraced Mohammedanism and banned alcohol, much less pubs. Prescient stuff, GKC, and with the fierce ChesterBelloc in mind, will America take up the mantle Western Civ? 

Good question and I'd argue, if the present howling, gnashing of teeth and wailing of the Left is any metric, that we are and have a chance of winning. So get your act together, GOP, defeat the antichrist globalist elite NWO and their Illuminati Hollywood shills and #ConfirmKavanaughNow

A Saint

But back to Francis. He may not have been a thieving hippy but he did, apparently, talk to animals. That sounds pretty freakish dreadlock, right? Not so fast, punters. Francis preached to the animals because he felt he got a better response from them than he did with his human congregations.

He also went on to try and convert the great jihad general Saladin. He failed, but the remarkable Moslem, and he was, gave the mendicant saint the True Cross or fragments of it, which the Islamic war horde had captured at the disaster which was Hattin.

Saladin

Moral of the story? 

Don't be a hippy, strive to be a saint, scorn our globalist elite NWO overlords and ask for Francis' powerful intercession.

And as always,

Deus Vult!

LSP

Cooking With LSP, Friday Fish Fry

Just because you've cleverly caught some fish and filleted them doesn't give you license to stare at the things in slack-jawed, alt right consternation, like someone who's observing the Church of England's General Synod, or Hillary Clinton's truth disorder. No, you've got to eat them, and Friday's a good time to do it.

Watch The Temp Rise

That's because you're not supposed to eat meat on Fridays, as a small token of abstinence in commemoration of the Crucifixion. That said, the ten golden, crispy Bluegill nuggets didn't seem that abstemious, but hey, they weren't steaks. 

Don't Get The Plastic Bowl Hot. It'll Melt

I used the old beer batter method and invested in a candy thermometer to gauge the temperature of the oil in the cast iron pot. Keep it at 185* and get that fish moving! First, dredge the fillets in flour. I used a blue plastic bowl from Walmart which cost $1.00, but you might go for something more fancy and 1%. 

Blue Davos

Maybe a silver bowl or a handy bit of Waterford crystal that's knocking around; whatever, that's up to you, your call. Next, immerse the fish in batter (1 cup flour, 1 egg, salt, 1 bottle light beer) and put it in the pot. Watch the fillet boil and pop in the hot oil, then remove after a few minutes, put aside to drain, and repeat.

Ah Hah!

You can serve the fish with some kind of "side," like a deep fried Mars bar or a fried cherry pie. I chose onion rings, like a member of the ruling globalist elite, and didn't regret the choice.

After admiring your fry up, serve it with some lemon, or whatever else you like, and eat your scoff like a warrior. And I tell you this, it tastes better when you've caught it yourself.

And that's cooking, with...

LSP

Texas Crazy Rain

One of the things the team looks forward to after Sunday Mass is fishing, and not just any old fishing. No, we like to go to a secret location somewhere in Texas and catch enormous, absurdly large, leviathan size Bass on light rods. Just a whole lot of fun.

That plan didn't work out because of the threat of rain and because one of the team decided to go fishing in Venice instead, which is ironic, given that the place is flooded. So I went down another route, and drove to Lake Aquilla.

Not a bad option. As the storm was coming in, thunderclouds looming, boats were pulling into the ramp and the scene was soon deserted. Just me, the still-before-the-storm water, distant lighting flickering across the sky and the pleasure of trying to lure a Bass onto an enticing topwater spook.

Thrash! One of the fierce predators was lurking right near the bank and attacked the lure at the end of my retrieve. A good fight with a decent Widemouth, who lived to fight again another day. There were a few more close calls, with a small school of fish surging up and out of the water around the spook, but no strike. Still, even that was action, and action against the dramatic backdrop of the lake.

It's a new lake, like most in Texas, and before its creeks were dammed, an archeological survey was done on the soon to be flooded area and what became the lake shore. There were any number of Indian campsites and small settlements, some of them dating from the not so distant past. They'd be hard to recognize if you're not an expert; mostly charred stones from campfires and the occasional worked piece of stone. Some of the sites remain, if you have eyes to see.

I imagined those Indians as I fished, under the big, threatening sky. There they had been, hunting and fishing on Aquilla and Hackleberry creeks, in the vastness of the land. Well, the land's still vast and the sky's still the same, and before long it began to crash down with a vengeance.

Time to get back to the Compound, a glass of wine and the latest awful news from the Jihad. But before that, the sky turned ominously green and it started to rain in earnest, Texas-style. No fooling, and a good thing I had a truck because the streets were flooding as I drove into town.

If the rain continues, it will all be underwater. Is there a moral in this story?

If you care to draw it.

Your Buddy,

LSP