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Here is the entire Book 1 of Disputations by St. Bellarmine.
Book 1: On the Sacred and Apocryphal Books
All 20 Chapters
All of this
Every GOP strategist, consultant, and candidate should be forced to participate in a role-playing exercise this morning.
Your name is Bob. You’re a 49-year-old blue-collar worker in Ohio. You’ve always struggled to make ends meet. The good jobs were all shipped to China and the few remaining pay a pittance wage, undercut by endless illegal labor.
You’re a 3x Trump voter because you believed he would finally make America great again.
You put your son through Ohio State. He graduated cum laude in computer science. You couldn’t have been prouder. After months searching, he landed an entry-level job at Microsoft. Beneath his qualifications, but a good start for a smart kid.
Then he got laid off. That same month, Microsoft applied for 150,000 more H-1B visas because it can’t find qualified Americans.
Your son has spent six months back in his childhood bedroom, sending hundreds of applications without landing an interview.
On TV, Trump boasts about the greatest economy in history and how many women and minorities are finding jobs.
You decide a father-son steak night might cheer him up.
Gas is $4.50 a gallon. Filling your truck costs over $100. At Kroger, ribeyes are $30/lb. You settle for hamburger, even though 70/30 ground beef still costs $10+.
At checkout, a fat black woman is screaming at the cashier because her EBT will only cover most of the filet mignon and lobster in her cart.
You think to yourself how the Iran war has made everything expensive, but at least we’re stopping their nuclear bomb. You weren’t even sure where Iran was before you googled it after we first bombed them in March.
After dinner, you take your son to the county fair. Half the people aren’t speaking English. Virtually none of the crowd looks like you. You’re forced to leave early after a “teen takeover” turns violent. A foreign born judge pledges none of them will go to jail.
Back home, you turn on the TV. Vivek Ramaswamy is lecturing the crowd about American mediocrity and why Ohio needs more foreign talent.
Your son grows upset. You change the channel.
Now a Republican surrogate, the daughter of a governor or wife of an elderly billionaire, explains that young White men are the REAL welfare queens. They’d rather play videogames in their parents’ basements than work.
Your son says nothing. He just goes back to his childhood bedroom. You turn off the TV.
Then your neighbor starts blasting reggaeton and cracking open Modelos. He brought his cousin’s family from Mexico to help with all the minority-business contracts his construction firm keeps winning. Tonight they’re celebrating his nephew’s birth, the family’s first birthright American citizen.
You sit alone in your living room.
You worked hard, paid taxes, obeyed the law, and raised your son to do everything right. You voted Republican again and again because you believed somebody in Washington would finally fight for you.
Instead, your wages are stagnant. Groceries are unaffordable. Your community is unrecognizable. Your country is fighting another foreign war.
And upstairs, the son you sacrificed everything for is lying awake in the bedroom he slept in at twelve, wondering what the heck he’s even supposed to do with his life now.
Every time you turn on the TV, the Republicans you elected are either congratulating themselves or explaining why you and your son are the problem.
For ten years, they told you America’s future depended on your vote. Now you aren’t even sure America has a future worth defending.
The Republican Party needs to answer one simple question this morning:
You’ve spent a decade demanding Bob’s loyalty. You’ve given him stagnant wages, unaffordable groceries, another foreign war, and a son who did everything right but can’t find work.
And when they complain, you call them lazy, entitled, and racist.
What possible reason have you given Bob and his son to vote Republican? Do you honestly think you deserve their vote?
26
Sailing Pluto 🇻🇦🌽 retweeted
Every GOP strategist, consultant, and candidate should be forced to participate in a role-playing exercise this morning.
Your name is Bob. You’re a 49-year-old blue-collar worker in Ohio. You’ve always struggled to make ends meet. The good jobs were all shipped to China and the few remaining pay a pittance wage, undercut by endless illegal labor.
You’re a 3x Trump voter because you believed he would finally make America great again.
You put your son through Ohio State. He graduated cum laude in computer science. You couldn’t have been prouder. After months searching, he landed an entry-level job at Microsoft. Beneath his qualifications, but a good start for a smart kid.
Then he got laid off. That same month, Microsoft applied for 150,000 more H-1B visas because it can’t find qualified Americans.
Your son has spent six months back in his childhood bedroom, sending hundreds of applications without landing an interview.
On TV, Trump boasts about the greatest economy in history and how many women and minorities are finding jobs.
You decide a father-son steak night might cheer him up.
Gas is $4.50 a gallon. Filling your truck costs over $100. At Kroger, ribeyes are $30/lb. You settle for hamburger, even though 70/30 ground beef still costs $10+.
At checkout, a fat black woman is screaming at the cashier because her EBT will only cover most of the filet mignon and lobster in her cart.
You think to yourself how the Iran war has made everything expensive, but at least we’re stopping their nuclear bomb. You weren’t even sure where Iran was before you googled it after we first bombed them in March.
After dinner, you take your son to the county fair. Half the people aren’t speaking English. Virtually none of the crowd looks like you. You’re forced to leave early after a “teen takeover” turns violent. A foreign born judge pledges none of them will go to jail.
Back home, you turn on the TV. Vivek Ramaswamy is lecturing the crowd about American mediocrity and why Ohio needs more foreign talent.
Your son grows upset. You change the channel.
Now a Republican surrogate, the daughter of a governor or wife of an elderly billionaire, explains that young White men are the REAL welfare queens. They’d rather play videogames in their parents’ basements than work.
Your son says nothing. He just goes back to his childhood bedroom. You turn off the TV.
Then your neighbor starts blasting reggaeton and cracking open Modelos. He brought his cousin’s family from Mexico to help with all the minority-business contracts his construction firm keeps winning. Tonight they’re celebrating his nephew’s birth, the family’s first birthright American citizen.
You sit alone in your living room.
You worked hard, paid taxes, obeyed the law, and raised your son to do everything right. You voted Republican again and again because you believed somebody in Washington would finally fight for you.
Instead, your wages are stagnant. Groceries are unaffordable. Your community is unrecognizable. Your country is fighting another foreign war.
And upstairs, the son you sacrificed everything for is lying awake in the bedroom he slept in at twelve, wondering what the heck he’s even supposed to do with his life now.
Every time you turn on the TV, the Republicans you elected are either congratulating themselves or explaining why you and your son are the problem.
For ten years, they told you America’s future depended on your vote. Now you aren’t even sure America has a future worth defending.
The Republican Party needs to answer one simple question this morning:
You’ve spent a decade demanding Bob’s loyalty. You’ve given him stagnant wages, unaffordable groceries, another foreign war, and a son who did everything right but can’t find work.
And when they complain, you call them lazy, entitled, and racist.
What possible reason have you given Bob and his son to vote Republican? Do you honestly think you deserve their vote?
Watching UM & PSU have year 1 head coaches. I do not want to do a year 1 t again. It looks so familiar
44
Start assessing a 15 yard penalty when the crowd is chanting “f—“ anything and it can be heard on the field, enough of the profanity @B1Gfootball @bigten
29
The more I watch a Tony White defense, the less I blame Rhule for the 4th quarter woes during his first 2 years.
2
139
Sailing Pluto 🇻🇦🌽 retweeted
In Nebraska I was told a number. I did not believe it. I have since checked it, and I still do not believe it.
The football stadium in Lincoln has sold every seat, for every home game, since November 3, 1962.
Every game. Not the good years. Every game. Through seasons the state would rather not discuss. Through blizzards. Through years when leaving early would have been reasonable, and nobody left.
I asked a man named Gary how two million people keep a promise for that long.
He said, "You buy the ticket."
I asked what if the team is bad.
"You buy the ticket."
I asked what if it is snowing.
He looked at me with real patience. "You buy the ticket."
Here is the part that undid me. The first game of the streak, in 1962, they lost. Thirty-six thousand people came out the week after the Cuban Missile Crisis ended, watched their team lose to Missouri, and came back for the next one anyway. And the next. It has not stopped.
The streak began with a loss. Nobody in Nebraska finds this ironic. They find it obvious.
This summer there was worry. Ticket sales were slow. People wrote articles asking whether it would finally end. I read them in a diner over a slice of pie I did not finish, and I confess I was afraid for a state I do not live in.
Then this week they announced the opener is sold out. Four hundred and eleven in a row.
In my land, a lord who kept his word for sixty years was written into the temple records.
Nebraska has kept its word since the Cuban Missile Crisis. There is no temple. There are eighty-five thousand people who bought the ticket.
Gary is going Saturday. It is not snowing. He would go if it were.
A promise is easy in a winning season.
Nebraska has kept one through every other kind.
Sailing Pluto 🇻🇦🌽 retweeted
We've lost our damn minds.
The Lindsay Clancy mass psychosis proves that a lot of people need to have their Wifi taken away. But this psychosis started many years before TikTok...
Sailing Pluto 🇻🇦🌽 retweeted
Apparently, the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts has determined not to count letter grades toward its freshmen’s GPAs during their first semester, starting in 2027. The reason given is that this move will address the growing mental health crisis among young people. Nothing could be further from the truth. It will, in fact, exacerbate the crisis.
Across cultures, one can discern a common pattern in the initiation rituals of primal peoples. The elders of the tribe rip a young person from the comfort of his home during the night. He is then scarified or otherwise physically marked in some way—a tooth is knocked out or his face is cut—in order to impress upon him that life is difficult.
Then he is introduced to the lore and history of his people, and finally he is taken to the edge of the wilderness, given a few simple provisions, and told to make his way for an extended period of time.
The entire purpose of the exercise is to break him free from the dominance of his self-regarding feelings and to orient him to the achievement of objective goods.
Plato famously compared the soul to a horse-drawn chariot. The animals represent the passions, which provide energy for the vehicle, and the driver represents intelligence and refined moral consciousness. As long as the charioteer is in place, the chariot makes its way purposefully. But if the charioteer is kicked out, the horses will run amok.
Our “suicidally empathetic” culture, which consistently privileges feeling over objective value, has produced armies of dangerously uninitiated young people. In terms of Plato’s metaphor, it has given rise to lots and lots of chariots with no sense of direction, crashing into one another.
Electing not to count first-semester grades toward students’ GPAs in order to spare the delicate emotions of eighteen-year-olds is, spiritually speaking, about as dumb a move as a university could make.
Sailing Pluto 🇻🇦🌽 retweeted
"You're a rockstar, man."
"You've been a huge help for me as I've come into the Church."
"Behold Your Mother is the best Marian theology book I've read."
Happy retirement, Tim ❤️
