DO birds spread the coronavirus? This is a crucial question and if there isn't a team of Harvard scientists working on it, I would be shocked and dismayed. I was thinking about this question yesterday after reading the touching comments of a reader who braved the New Normal to go birdwatching. Personally, I would say that chickadees, blue jays, wrens, cardinals and many others, as adorable as they can be, are definitely super-spreaders since they go about breathing the open air and some of that air, at least until Comrade Biden implements the national mask mandate enforceable with jail terms, must contain germs. Birds are not locked down. Not yet. Until they are confined to their nests, those of us foolishly willing to risk death from a virus with a greater than 99 percent survival rate should take advantage of this opportunity. Enjoy birds. They are everywhere. They are free for the watching. They can fill the days of Home Aloners -- those who no longer go to the office and are slowly losing their minds in between Zoom calls -- with the small, innocent pleasures. A dictatorial consensus exists among world leaders that small pleasures must be destroyed, the sooner the better. But they are going to have a hard time rounding up all the birds, not that I would for a minute put that past them either. Did I ever tell you about the time my younger…

[Thank you to a special correspondent.]

"A LABOUR government has just been returned to power in Queensland. I think they ran on a 'Trust us to keep you safe from CoVID' platform. I don't have a television or buy newspapers - but from the how-to-vote card it looked to me like this was the pitch. It was just so funny you had to see all the sheeple standing masked and socially distanced in line to vote for organized crime. And no sooner was the government back in the kitchen, they put mutton straight onto the menu with euthanasia legislation. "They have to start somewhere with the depopulation Agenda and there are just too many oldies clogging up the pension system. We are the obvious go-to for the needed CoVID numbers. They can't just keep pulling these cases out of their wazoo. As they have tanked the economy, predictably, they will start with us. "Fitting all this into the Big Doctor/Big Abortion business model of CoVID Biosecurity will take some doing. "These totally subverted Marxist governments are not Western governments. They are not even post-Christian Western states. They are Communist operations and have been for years." --- From "Savvy Australian Granny Paints Grim Picture"  

  "COME, Holy Ghost: Come, God who art love! Fill my poor heart, void, alas, of all good. Enkindle me, that I may love thee; enlighten me, that I may know thee; draw me, that I may find all my joy and my delight in thee; make me capable of enjoying thee." -- St. Gertrude  

FROM “Notes of a Pizza Deliveryman:”

I will eat a slice of the stuff every now and then, but when I hear a child or adult say pizza is their favorite food, I cringe. They must have never had my grandmother’s lasagna, my grandfather’s beef roast, my mother’s London Broil, my neighbor’s elk steak, or my pastor’s grilled trout. Have they ever been to real restaurant? I don’t eat out very often, but when I do I prefer to visit an establishment that serves real food, and has a quiet and elegant atmosphere. In Denver I like the Briarwood, Simms Steakhouse (formerly Simms Landing), the Chart House (Genesee), and the Greenbriar Inn up in Boulder, to name a few.

Yes, they cost a bit, but even when my family was of very limited means I recall being taken to these places for special occasions. I would have to wear nice clothes, and could not act like a barbarian. These are some of the most magical memories of my childhood, the wonder of being taken to a special restaurant, getting to taste a special dish from the land of my ancestors or a local delicacy. The tablecloths, the multiple forks and utensils set at my place at the table, the dignified and well-dressed waiters, everything made the atmosphere special. (more…)

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"SURRENDER to me does not mean to fret, to be upset, or to lose hope, nor does it mean offering to me a worried prayer asking me to follow you and change your worry into prayer. It is against this surrender, deeply against it, to worry, to be nervous and to desire to think about the consequences of anything. It is like the confusion that children feel when they ask their mother to see to their needs, and then try to take care of those needs for themselves so that their childlike efforts get in their mother’s way. Surrender means to placidly close the eyes of the soul, to turn away from thoughts of tribulation and to put yourself in my care, so that only I act. Saying, You take care of it. O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything! (10 times) From The Surrender Novena of Fr. Dolindo Ruotolo  

    WHO is talking about this? Biden or Trump? The answer of course is, neither!  

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ALAN writes:

FROM Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville:

I think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I am trying myself to choose an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, but in vain; the old words “despotism” and “tyranny” are inappropriate: the thing itself is new; and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not—he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. (more…)