First Quarter of 2024 - Catching Up

 Due to my Ph.D. work, I have not been writing as much as I used to.  At this point, I am in the dissertation stage of my doctorate, and if all goes well, I will anticipate completing it by the end of this year. I will reflect more on that momentarily but wanted to catch up on a few other things first. 

To summarize, 2023 ended much better than it started, and although we had a few hiccups in January, for the most part the year has gone smoothly - not perfect, but at least not catastrophic.  I did finally contract COVID at the end of February, but I survived - it was really no worse than a flu, and I am no worse for the wear from it.  Barbara had caught the virus from a medical office she worked at here in town because the doctors there were frankly careless and made people work when they were sick, thus creating a huge risk of infection.  Therefore, Barbara caught it, and then spread it to me, and I found out I had it after a routine visit to an urgent care clinic for a tooth infection - I tested positive for COVID and was given the proper treatment.  I had noticed a day or two before going there that I was more fatigued, and I had also been getting a little bit of sinus pressure.  Knowing Barbara was sick, I figured I may be at high risk myself, and I was.  Again though, I survived without vaccination, without any Fauci nonsense, and I am better today.  And life goes on. 

2024 has also been the year of many deaths - both my last surviving grandfather and his wife (not my grandmother as he married this one long after he and my grandmother divorced) passed on in January and February respectively.  Grandad was 98, and although there were some family issues and we were not as close over the years, it does create a realization now that I am officially the last surviving descendant of my immediate family.  Having celebrated my 54th birthday recently, I am also faced with the realization that I am not as young as I used to be.  I found that out a couple of days ago when I reorganized the shed outside and my back is still feeling that now.  It is a lot to digest.  And, with a lot of change happening in the past 4 years, I have many questions.  I guess the final verdict is that I have to trust God - he brought me this far after all, so why wouldn't I?  I does get a little frustrating waiting on answers though, but when I look back one day at this I will probably understand the reasons behind things.  And, that leads me to another very good insight I was given during my COVID experience by our parish priest.

Fr. Timothy Grassi is a short little guy with a big heart, and before he was assigned to our current parish, he was actually the priest in my hometown of Parsons, which gives us a lot to talk about.  When I found out I had COVID, I emailed him asking him to pray for us.  In his response, he said something so profound that I plan on remembering it for a long time.  He told me basically that God allowed the illness as a way of saying it's time to rest - I would have never thought of that, but it does make perfect sense.  Even in sickness - a fruit of the Fall in Genesis 3 - God has purpose in other words.  He uses our own biology to speak to us, which just reaffirms the fact that he created the universe and everything in it.  Symptoms our body gives us act as indicators that we need to make a change sometimes, and God designed our bodies in such a way that the symptoms end up being a divine revelation as well as a natural process.  I may incorporate this into my earlier Genesis study, as I could spend more time on this.  I guess the lesson is that if we really want to hear from God, we should maybe listen more closely - even our own bodies talk to us.  Really good insight, courtesy of our wonderful parish priest. 

I mentioned that I have been doing a lot of reorganization in the house, and so far we have made amazing progress.  I reorganized the kitchen cabinets for one thing - I have a new spice cabinet I bought last month, and thus it opened up space over the stove to store paper cups and plates.  I also managed to clean out underneath the sink, and got that organized - that was a project I had been wanting to tackle for some time, and thankfully it turned out wonderfully.  The big project however was the shed outside, which for some reason was a mess due to weaker small bins collapsing in there.  I spent the better part of three hours this past Wednesday repacking stuff in larger bins, and it sort of reminded me that I am not as young as I once was - trying to lift those heavy bins into place wreaked havoc on my lower back, and I feel it today.  I have had back issues off and on for at least 10 years now - on one occasion when we still lived in Lakeland, I was out of commission for a week when my back went totally out on me.  As Fr. Grassi taught me, it is a way for our bodies to tell us something that could be God's message to us - take care of ourselves and don't stress out over things.  Stress of course in this case is physical stress - when your body reaches a certain age, you have to be more nuanced in the way you handle things.  That is a lesson I am still learning, but it makes it harder when many of these jobs are things only you can do, and thus the risk for physical issues becomes more pronounced.  However, I prove resilient, and we get things accomplished despite circumstances.  Thanks be to God for that too. 

Now, let's talk about this doctorate.  I made it to my second dissertation course - 988 - and I also now have the initial drafts of all my chapters completed.  With those taken care of, I have entered an extensive revision phase for my dissertation that could take anywhere from 6 to 9 months, depending on what extent revisions are needed.  The next step after the revisions will be preparing for the defense, publication, and presentation of my bound copy to the university.  Once I successfully defend, then I will be conferred a Ph.D.  In all honesty, I am ready to wrap this up, as I have been in school since I was 5 years old and I am ready to retire as a student - although I had a few intermittent breaks between my undergraduate and Master's programs regarding a formal degree, during that interregnum in my education I was still actively learning. It was during that time I completed my paralegal certificate and some other professional coursework for jobs and such, and thus I have not had a completion of my education since kindergarten.  This Ph.D. for me is my climax to my education, and upon successful completion of that I am done with formal education.  I may still take a course or two here for professional development, but only on an as-needed basis.  In all honesty, much of this should have been finished years ago, but for most of my 30s I spent my time working and achieving a level of stability so I had no time then, hence the 16-year gap (1996-2012) between finishing my BA and starting my MA.  Fortunately, I only had two years between completing my MA and starting my Ph.D., so we have been continuously finishing degrees for about 12 years.  I do have plans with my dissertation once I successfully defend it and get my doctorate conferred.  For one thing, I want to turn it into a marketable book, so upon completion of studies I will format it accordingly and submit it for publication with my own publisher (Lulu Press has been fantastic over the past several years for my publishing needs, including a multi-volume collection of all these blog posts over the 14 years I have been writing).  Then, I can pursue other writing projects, such as my Genesis study as a book as well as a history of American dance bands, which means turning my hobby into a scholastic endeavor.  In all honesty, I plan on being busy for a while. 

Aside from getting the house in order, recovering from illness, losing family, and my schooling, my life has been otherwise uneventful.  There are things that are happening I will discuss at another time when they will be more appropriate to address, but for now those areas are still largely under construction.  With my personal things now discussed, let me address our national issues a little. 

As anyone who knows me will verify, I am fairly conservative in my political views.  I am conservative because I see a divinely authored natural law that dictates certain things are supposed to be certain ways.  For instance, if you are born a man, you cannot become a woman (and vice versa) - for a devoutly Catholic person such as myself, this whole "transgender" issue is heretical in that it asserts that God is somehow imperfect and capable of making mistakes.  These issues also embody an ancient heresy called Gnosticism - denying the tangible for some esoteric nonsense.  This makes the ideology of transgenderism also somewhat occultic, and as my dissertation shows that makes it dangerously close to some ideologies the Nazis had.  For instance, when you have weirdos such as Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (a Volkisch occultist, former priest, and early mentor of Hitler) taking Biblical terms such as sodomy and radically redefining them, it causes some issues.  It is also true with how the precursors of this transgender movement - people such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld - viewed homosexuality as an "evolving third gender."  With pronoun misuse and gender confusion today, you see that ideology permeating society more and more.  I know of at least three individuals who "came out" as homosexual and then all of a sudden were transgender, and it is largely based on whatever demonic spirit drives the agendas pushing this garbage.  One of them is a fellow alumnus of the university where I received my undergraduate degree, and the other two are more high-profile - the actress Ellen (who now calls herself "Elliot") Page and the freakshow who bankrupted a major beer company, Dylan Mulvaney.  Page and Mulvaney are going to some pretty ridiculous extremes with their conflicted identities, and in all honesty it is turning into a huge freakshow.  This, along with the labeling of things certain individuals who don't like them as "racist" due to bad identity politics (now, if you don't like something such as coffee, declare it "racist" and every mainstream media outlet will have their noses so far up your butt it will feel like a reverse bowel movement), has led to a serious rift in our society.  Now, also in the name of "climate change," many of these same idiots are trying to eliminate carbon dioxide (which plants need to survive, incidentally) as well as destroying pieces of priceless art.  And, now you have the outright support of actual terrorists - a lot of spoiled rich young liberal ding-dongs are actually protesting for Hamas, who last October killed close to 1300 Jewish people in Israel.  All of these things together constitute a warped mindset called "wokeism," and it is the real pandemic which is doing far more damage than COVID ever could.  Unless this is brought to heel soon, Western Civilization is in mortal danger of collapse once the loonies take over.  This is where we need divine intervention. And, there are a couple of other thoughts I want to address with this now.

A cursory reading of the press will show that over the past 20 or so years, the dictator Erdogan in Turkey has been getting more extreme in his rhetoric.  It is as if he wants a restored Ottoman khalifate with himself as leader, and he is stopping at nothing to make that happen.   While many think Putin is the ultimate bad guy in world leadership (in reality, he isn't), many ignore Erdogan because he fits their agenda.  Erdogan, if he had his way, would wipe every Armenian off the face of the earth - he is a genocidal freak.  Yet, what is so weird about him now is that all of a sudden he is supporting Hamas also, and defending Palestinians while threatening Israel.  I called that years ago, because that is essentially Ezekiel 38-39 playing out.  Erdogan is also hypocritical - he condemns Israel for "genocide" against Palestinians, when in reality his own nation was guilty of the greatest genocide of an indigenous population back a century ago.  No one seems to mention the Armenian Genocide much, do they?  This despite the fact that Erdogan's Azeri "soul bro," Aliev, is carrying out his own genocide against Armenians by attacking the Nagorno-Karabagh corridor (also known as Artsakh in Armenian, and traditionally a part of Armenian territory).   There are a couple of very strong observations I want to make here.  If Erdogan is concerned about Israel, he has two problems.  For one, Jews are actually indigenous to Israel - Turks are not indigenous to Turkey.  Secondly, he accuses Israel of "genocide" (an allegation with no basis in fact) while at the same time supporting actual genocide against Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians in his own country, all of whom are indigenous to the geographical area called "Turkey" now.  I see that same attitude with other Turks even in the US, particularly leftist political pundit and loudmouth Cenk Uygur of "The Young Turks."  Cenk loves throwing the word "genocide" around when it comes to Gaza, but then seethes in anger at the mere mention of the genocidal legacy of his own people.  That being said, I have a couple of further observations.

First, I am not what you consider to be a "Zionist."  I have some Jewish ancestry, I believe that Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people, and I think Israel as a state has every right to exist.  However, I also think that many so-called "Palestinians" come from two origins.  Many of them are the descendants of Arab Beduin tribes from the Arabian desert who came with Mohammed to conquer much of the Middle East and Islamize it in the 7th century.  However, this is not true of that entire population, as many "Palestinian" communities in Israel do share common DNA with their Jewish neighbors - my theory on this is that they may be actual Israelites by ancestry - could be even part of the lost 10 tribes in all honesty - who were Arabized and Islamized over the centuries.  That means that the land of Israel is their home as well, and by all means they also have a birthright there.  Bottom line, if one really studies that intensely, the conclusion is that the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a sibling squabble then, albeit a very intense and dangerous one.  That means that meddling globalists in the West may need to keep their noses out of it.  Secondly, because I am not technically a "Zionist," I also don't agree with all of Israel's policies either - for instance, their support of Aliev's regime in Azerbaijan against Armenians is a bad policy move, no different than the way our current administration supports a corrupt neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine right now.  Jews and Armenians should by all indicators be natural allies, in that they suffered many of the same atrocities over the centuries and have a lot more in common with each other than they do with anyone else.  Yet, because Israel supports Azerbaijan against Armenia, that has damaged relations between these two great nations.  Hopefully, Erdogan's genocidal psychosis and his close ties to Aliev will begin to change Israel's policies in this regard, and maybe the Israeli leadership will wake up to reality on that one.  I am also not overly thrilled with the way some Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel treat Christian communities - I have heard stories of Armenians, Copts, Greeks, and others being spit on as they leave their churches by Orthodox Jewish rabblerousers, and also how Israel at times targets innocent Christian communities who are trapped in the crossfire.  While Hamas and similar groups are corrupt and evil and do use innocent victims as human shields, that is no excuse for Israel to randomly target areas where Christians may live.  That is something Israel does need to sort out.  

For now, that is all I have to share, but hopefully I can be back soon with more insights.  God bless everyone who gets to read this, and see you soon!