Top signs that men and women are become a commodity and we are returning to feudalism:

• “Human resources.”
• The Dow Chemical Company’s “Human Element” commercial / H+ or transhumanism.
• Monsanto Company’s attempts at being allowed to patent human genes (!)
• Phoenix, Arizona, and prostitution.
• Multiculturalism, which amounts to genetic Marxism.
• Birth certificates bearing NYSE stock numbers, the excessive numbers assigned to men and women and the implantable microchip.
• The branding of people via fashion, subliminally steering us toward fascism, i.e. toward being property; also neckties, nametags, obsessive grooming.
• Peggy Kane’s perspectives.
• Many broad signs that we are being scientifically bred into different varieties á la Disney characters where you have the extreme alpha male, the hopeless nerd etc., with to make us more useful means of production (or destruction!) in the hands of heartless tyrants. The funny thing is, the controllers don’t mind you being “different” as long as you can be categorized a in utilitarian way (and keep chugging that sodium fluoride).

Mere technical claptrap or the straight story at last? You tell me.

1. Why was the late, great Roman Pope John Paul II beatified (i.e. declared “Blessed John Paul” by the reigning pope, namely by Roman Pope Benedict XVI) on “May Day”?
2. Why thirteen (13) days between Benedict XVI’s abdication and Francis’s elevation?
   (as there had been, for example, between the U.S.S.R.’s dissolution and the C.I.S.’s establishment)?
3. And where do the Vatican’s own “Saint” Malachy’s prophecies figure?
4. How about Thelema and Aleister Crowley?

In a nitty-gritty look at Twentieth-Century sacerdotal¹-papal²-regal rule, User MHFM1 (video below) points out that heaven double-struck³ Saint Peter’s Basilica’s cupula⁴ the same day on which Pope Benedict XVI had abdicated, which was also the same date (11 February 2012) as the 1929 Lateran Treaty (between the Roman Catholic Magisterium and the Italian Government) established papal² kingship, Benedict being the last Tridentinely ordained priest to hold papal office. Since Benedict was the seventh (and by the “Old Order”⁵ the last!) priest-king of the Vatican City-State, all of this seems suggestive of the “seven kings” of the Apocalypse/Revelation. (Or not. For context, recall that in the itemization of the Church’s Canon of Scripture [that is, the Table of Contents of Holy Writ or “The {Holy} Bible”] at the First Ecumenical Council, which was held at Nicæa in present-day Turkey, it was the Old Rome that insisted on including the book known as the Apocalypse (or Revelation) of Saint John, to which Constantinople capitulated in exchange for the Acts of the Apostles.)

(I hope I’ve encapsulated any substance contained in the needlessly hour-long video below [which in its supposedly monastic polemicism tries to make Roman Pope John Paul II and not Benedict XVI the antichrist in spite of the diagram pictured above] so you don’t have to take the Dimondesque propaganda as a temple tax for getting the “fun facts.”)

________
¹ Sacerdotal means priestly.
² Papal means popish, i.e. of or relating to popes.
³ I gotta say, with this twofold lightning thing, Benedict XVI may never shed that Emperor Palpatine image!
⁴ A cupula is a dome.
⁵ In 1968 Old Rome, or specifically the Vatican, closed out its second-ever pan-occidental “ecumenical” (meaning church-wide, not to be confused with ecumenist or ecumenism) council (“Vatican II,” “Vatican I” having been held ca. 1869), one leg of whose threefold order of business had been to reform the erstwhile Tridentine (i.e. of the Council of Trent) Liturgy (basically known to Roman Catholics as “The Latin Mass,” famous for its incense and its still somewhat historic Christian nature), the Tridentine ritual model itself being a Reformation-Era (some would say “Deformation-Era”) “reform” of the Divine Liturgy of Our Father Among the Saints Gregory the Great (Pope of Rome). This liturgical coreography (or missal from missa [as in Ite, missa est meaning Go, she {or it} is sent] whence Mass⁶) that the 60s Second Vatican Council scripted was christened Novus Ordo or New Order, giving rise to many and sundry theories linking it to global governance ideologies (and conspiracies), institutionalized in the F.D.R.-to-present US$1 bill’s pyramidal “Novus Ordo Seclorum” (we presume a Mason’s misspelling of sæculorum) slogan, always interpreted as New World Order [seclorum/sæculorum is a genetive {i.e. possessive} plural capable of meaning either of the worlds or more commonly of the ages, hence New Age Order seems a truer rendering of the globalist intelligentsia’s meaning]) as well as to George H.W. Bush’s subsequent “Thousand Points of Light” speech in which he describes what is presumably the C.I.A.’s vision for a “new world order.”
⁶ From the Etymology Dictionary etymonline.com: “‘Eucharistic service,’ Old English mæsse, from Vulgar Latin messa ‘eucharistic service,’ literally ‘dismissal,’ from Late Latin missa ‘dismissal,’ fem. past participle of mittere ‘to let go, send’ (see mission); probably so called from the concluding words of the service, Ite, missa est, ‘Go, (the prayer) has been sent,’ or ‘Go, it is the dismissal.'”

Borrowed from the New Oxford Review:

“To call a modern nation-state a family, in the interest of connecting us to one another, should be faulted because it transforms citizens into Big Children.”

by Jean Bethke Elshtain, December, 1996

Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy.  By Michael Sandel. Harvard University Press. 417 pages. $24.95.

Michael Sandel has written a challenging book, which argues that the prevailing political agenda leaves too many people in limbo. He is on target in tying their anxiety to “the loss of self-government and the erosion of community.” But where did self-government historically come from in the United States? What were the sites of civic formation? For most — and Tocqueville hits this one squarely on the head — it was congregations, “intense sectarian commitments,” and they helped fuel the penchant for political liberty. Sandel pays too little attention to the religious sources of American democracy.

Sandel’s account of the forces that changed the scope, shape, and scale of American life forever is compelling but incomplete. He stresses the political-economic dimensions of this process, emphasizing the shift from a producer-based economy to a consumer-based one. If Sandel is right that a consumer culture doesn’t cultivate the “qualities of character necessary to self-government,” then we are in rather big trouble. And there is trouble aplenty in Democracy’s Discontent. One basic and seemingly insurmountable dilemma is that the source of many political-economic troubles lies beyond the purview of national governments. If one follows this line of thinking, it leads to the conclusion that we must have some kind of world government. Such a “solution” is not only implausible, it is unacceptable for a variety of political and moral reasons. How could civic formation possibly proceed if it is cast on such an immense scale that individual human beings, from their concrete places and sites, cannot really attach themselves to it? If Sandel’s procedural republic “cannot secure the liberty it promises because it cannot inspire the moral and civic engagement self-government requires,” the trouble is compounded many times over as one moves to structures beyond nation-states. If a kind of mega-republic is the only “solution” to at least some of our woes, we are in the soup. For the structures that cultivate civic virtues — including possibilities for solidarity (or solidarities) — are the many associations of civil society. Restoring robustness to these formative institutions, or some version of them, is the way to chasten the consumer identity and the chimera of the sovereign self. If this does not happen, we will see ever greater concentrations of power even more comprehensively change citizens into consumers.

Given the sheer complexity and scope of the problem, Sandel’s short list of exemplary civic efforts seems too little, too late. Community development corporations, fights against mega-malls, and community organizing are discussed briefly. Certainly one applauds such efforts, but these pages in Sandel’s book are a let-down, in part because it’s difficult to extend the civic purview of the efforts Sandel notes beyond certain reasonable limits. In calling them “mediating institutions,” as Sandel does, as do we all, a question occurs: What exactly are they mediating? Mediation means connecting together somehow. It is far easier to see the points of mediation between congregations and town meetings — both local — or between town meetings and, say, state government than it is to see how local associations can forge connections to government beyond the local or perhaps state level.

Sandel notes Mario Cuomo’s metaphor of the nation as a family at the Democratic national convention in 1984. Let’s grant the decent intent behind the turn to familial metaphors. But to call a modern nation-state a family, in the interest of connecting us to one another, should be faulted because it too easily transforms citizens into Big Children. Government, in this scenario, becomes a benevolent, sometimes chiding caretaker and protector. The consumer identity Sandel laments has gone hand-in-hand with a therapeutic mentality that sees us all as needy and dysfunctional, whether we know it or not. Look at how cuddly and caring both parties tried to appear at their recent conventions. We long ago crossed the line demarcating the appropriate display of compassion and human complexity in public settings and have descended instead into bathos.

What we are seeing in this childmindedness, this domestication of political imagery, is the reversal of the old standard in loco parentis. That rule was straightforward. For those not yet fully adult, other adults (or, as the law would have it, the state) played the temporary role of guardians, arbiters, and perhaps disciplinarians. The situation now is almost completely reversed — parents are to follow the therapy-state’s tutelage, or they are bad parents. In the areas of mental health, sexuality, and values, we are all at sea, it seems, until others have clarified matters for us. Because children, by definition, are not citizens, the deepening depiction of us as kids in a big family depletes citizenship, undermines legitimate democratic authority — which relies on the idea that people grow up and can be held accountable — and ultimately demeans us all.

What this adds up to is that Sandel should have paid more attention to the cultural forces at work undermining our identity as citizens.

Jean Bethke Elshtain teaches in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago and is the author of Democracy on Trial.