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Saturday, December 5, 2015

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City center on 12-5-15--Leipzig 6











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20 comments:

Unknown said...

Linh;

Does not seem to be much signs of Merry X-mas($)like one sees on Scranton streets.

Last week while driving school bus home & listening to news on the Catholic (EWTN) radio station, I learned the Pope lambasted German Bishops for not doing more to get people back into church.

I do not know the full story, (who ever does?), but I read that an Argentinian priest, named Francisco Jalics, is presently in "retreat" at a German monastery after he criticized the actions of his Superior, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, during "The Dirty War" (1976-1983) which was supported by the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations. As I understand, Father Jalics cared about Buenos Aires slum dwelling poor and would not go along with the "kick ass & profit" style of S. American evangelism in vogue during that deadly time of mass terror.

Over 10-years ago, I read Penny Lernoux's unforgettable book, "People of God," and I can understand why pews are empty and churches are closing everywhere, including Germany. "The opium of the people" is strong stuff, Linh, and after driving the B.R.C. people to church tomorrow @ 10:00 A.M., I will make a Jalics retreat to mass at St. Ann's Basilica. Thank you for listening.

Linh Dinh said...

Yo Chuck,

You can see the Christmas stalls in the photos. There are actually around 250 of them, so they cover a huge part of the city center. The Finns even have their own section, as do the Tyroleans (from Austria). A popular snack is the Hungarian langos, a flatbread topped with ham and cheese. It is not quite a pizza, however, as it is not baked. Only the bread is hot. People walk around with porcelan cups of gluhwein. (You pay a deposit for the cup.) Christmas here, then, is very festive. From morning until night, the Christmas Market is like a huge festival, and it has been going on for nearly two weeks now.

I've not seen any nativity scene, however. Protestants frown on religious statues, so perhaps this is the reason. Do you know, Ian?


Linh

Linh Dinh said...

Yo Chuck,

Fewer and fewer Germans want to be Catholic priests, so many parishes have a foreign priest. A nearly all-white Bavarian village may have a black priest.


Linh

Unknown said...

Linh: I do not know Ian except for exchanging brief emails. His knowledgeable blog comments are very meaningful for me.

When a child, my family always displayed an Advent wreath upon front door. Tradition explains how the wreath's circular shape symbolizes without beginning or end and God's unending love for creatures. Older people actually lit 4-candles in the wreath, each one symbolized 1,000 years!

Thanks for supplying the information (above)at St. Ann's Basilica, we presently have two Passionate order priest from India in service.

Ian Keenan said...

Hey the Calvinists were apparently against graven images enough to keep those old folk traditions from continuing like those nativity scenes from Naples at the NYC Met. I'm not really clear on this. Rembrandt in Amsterdam and Gerard van Honthorst in Utrecht both produced Adoration of the Shepherd scenes for patrons or wished-for patrons after Luther and Calvin.

It interests me that the the three Magi were first identified as Iranian, Iraqi, and Indian right after the birth of Islam, after which it became a staple in art through the Middle Ages, intensifying in the Renaissance a decade after the Venetian kingdom lost Thessoliniki to the Ottomans, which would lead to a forty year war twenty years later.

Unknown said...

Ian:

Thank you for making more interesting comment.

Regarding the the I.D. of Iranian and Iraqi Magi, correct me if I err, but I believe the national origin of 2 out the 3 might be Persian. Seems that the states of Iran and Iraq were still on the Imperialist drawing board when the Magi followed the mysterious star. Let me know on this?

At any rate, as a child, Byzantine Catholic priest, Father Stephen Zajac, taught catechism, and he referred to the Magi journey & nativity visit as a symbol of Might (wisdom) and HUMILITY. Today I can not imagine any of our world's Wise Men making a visit to any place except for financial gain & intensifying power. Thank you!

Ian Keenan said...

Yes Chuck I intentionally updated the ethnicities from Persian and Babylonian, for some reason

Unknown said...

Ian: Above, I understand completely.

A question? Are you familiar with the work of Paul L. Williams who wrote the book "Operation Gladio; The unholy Alliance between The Vatican, The CIA, and the Mafia"?

The author was an adjunct professor at the (Jesuit) U. of Scranton, my alma mater 1986, and in fact, I understand he actually had a book signing at the U.

As you might know, Paul L. Williams is affiliated with the radio talk show "Coast to Coast," and last week, I started to read "Operation Gladio." The book is quite an indictment, indeed an "eye opener" for me, but as I am on page 167, I have not read anything about Zionist and Mossad treachery. Williams only briefly discusses Rothschild Bank & Rockefeller misdeeds, and does not add a nefarious Zionist arm to the unholy alliance, title to the book.

If you prefer to not reply here, I understand. Thank you1

Ian Keenan said...

Chuck I'm obsessed with the painter Giorgione (like Augustus the Strong, who brought Sleeping Venus to Dresden) and we have his manger scene in DC and then I pilgrimaged to Atlanta to see his Three Philosophers (Magi?) at the High's tacky Hapsburg show. I felt like a heroin addict shooting up after a fortnight when I finally saw it in person, and they had Correggio's Jupiter and Io, where you have to see it in person to actually see Jupiter fully, plus Rubens' little manger, Tintoretto's bigger Susana and her elders, one of Titian's Danae, Caravaggio's Jesus Crowned with Thorns &c. All one room basically, amid carriages, horse mounts, carriages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Philosophers

The Pignatti text goes for the scientific explanation but recounts the scholarly back story: "At first (the figures were) identified as Astrologers or Astronomers (Venturi 1913) or the Magi, as the characters representing an allegory of the three ages of man or of the contemplative life (Wilde 1932), Ferriguto's study (1933) was the first of a series of philosophical interpretations ((into Arabac followers of Averroes,Humanists, hermetic followers of Saturn, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Regiomontano, Ptolomy's annotator Al-Battani, Copernicus from scores of scholars)). .. In the meantime, Klauner (1955, working from Wilde's studies, produced an elaborate explanation of the subject as the Three Magi, dressed as scholars, paying a respectful visit to the scene of the Nativity, which would have been located in the cavern to the left, partially cut off. Wind (1969) thought of the three characters of the human soul: celestial, spiritual and earthy."

People's view of the Magi (including TS Eliot's) is in part a reflection of self, one of the things this painting brings out. Perhaps this was played up to highlight Christ's appeal to ascendant science and occult mysticism of the enlightened Eastern faithful for these churches.

I also just found a reasonably priced dvd of Olmi's Keep Walking about the Magi but haven't checked it out yet (presumably long and slow) but I really want to see it when I get the chance perhaps before the Yule. I've seen his early two shorter films which are uniquely down to earth.

Ian Keenan said...

Chuck I just saw your other comment.. haven't read that author. Everything that comes out on these topics has contested accuracy of course (I've read all sort of things), the arguments getting more heated the closer you get to the Mossad. Victor Ostrovsky's By Way of Deception is one of the core classics on that topic. I haven't really read much about the Vatican.

Ian Keenan said...

Chuck checking out that book description, the CIA courted the church in Operation Condor and elsewhere in the Americas. Pope Francis is making the church more popular, while saying things inconvenient to certain kinds of conservatives but vouching in the end for worldwide trust in US influence. Previous to him the hatchet man on liberation theology was Pope and the church was losing people in droves. Ratzinger even said in his essays (after a lot of blah blah theology I don't get) that liberation theology's relation to Christ's teachings was authentic but it angers their donor base. I think of Francis as a compromise choice between these considerations. The CIA's most consistent priority is nipping labor movements in the bud - this continues in earnest in North Africa as well as of course South America, where a lot of US taxpayer funds went into the right's legislative victory in Venezuela this week.

Unknown said...

Ian:

First of all, your words on the works of painter Giorgione show how much I am missing in the world of art. At any rate, I will tell you a story about a particular painting and how it blends well into the dark CIA mindset, suppression of labor.

In the mid-1990s, while working as an EH&S coordinator, I had a manager who thought highly of himself, and behind his desk hung a print of Wyeth's painting of the deathly ill Jim Bowie and his dramatic rise from bed to kill Mexican "terrorists" at the Alamo. The manager got kicks out of such "last stand to the death," and a few months later, he hired about 20 Mexican immigrants needed to work a hazardous material project in a closed down New Jersey factory.

One day while the new hires were in attendance at a 40-Hour OSHA training session, he proudly pointed to the Wyeth painting and said to me, "I'd like to teach those fuckers how to use a Bowie knife if they ever have to cut their way out from Tyvek (protective clothing)!" Flabbergasted, I just gave him a donkey nod in return.

As a Teamster dockworker at Roadway Express, Tannersville, PA, a ten year stint, I got a good education on how companies and union leaders collude to fatten their pockets and suppress any form of unionism which happened to develop. As you say above, and what I did not know at the time, the New World Order Unions got a lot of support from the CIA and, of course, the 1% and corporations feasted. If I could paint, Ian, I'd like to do a portrait of a beaten down Mexican landscaper and his chasing bosses with electric hedge clippers around the Newark block.

No joke, Ian. For what remains of US labor unions, workers need an (invincible) Pope Jesus to chase money changers out of key Business Agent positions. Thank you.

Unknown said...

Ian: I agree with you above..., forgot to mention how evident it is that Pope Francis has validated the US paradigm, influence & control of the world. Interesting how the Pope is rather silent after the Paris and San Bernardino attacks? William Blum reasonably asks, "why doesn't ISIS strike Israel?"

Ian Keenan said...

Chuck, Mexican landscapers with electric hedge clippers chasing EH&S coordinators around Newark would make a better video game imo

"Friar Clete Kiley, who founded the Priest-Labor Initiative in 2012, spoke at the AFL-CIO’s conference in June; Cardinal Donald Wuerl, one of Pope Francis’s closest confidants in the U.S., also attended the AFL-CIO conference..

"Union leaders joined together to welcome the Pope at the White House yesterday. According to Politico, the guests included AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka"

http://onlabor.org/tag/pope-francis/

AFL-CIO: in 1953-1954 helped out with the Guatemalan coup against Jacobo Arbenz Guzman on behalf of United Fruit Company, leading to fifty years of death squads there;

1964: supported the Brazil coup that imposed the military government that tortured the current President;

1973: supported Pinochet;

2002: funneled substantial funds from union dues for the coup against Chavez

Unknown said...

Ian: During the late-1970s, single and an activist member of the dissident "Teamsters for a Democratic Union," I came under heavy fire from both Roadway Express high management and the Local 229 Business Agent. They wanted my "scalp" and come October 1984, I surrendered & walked away from the dockworker job.

I believe the fundamental trap for modern union leadership is their willingness to play the Game on our Controller$' home turf and leading the membership under global corporate rules of engagement. Understandably, none desire to become labor martyrs.

The Roman Catholic Church has never come to terms (and battle?) "unbridled capitalism." Consequently it's quite natural for a Pope to meet at the White House with the POTUS and President Trumka.

Thanks so much for the attention and solid data above, I really hate when an urge to pontificate takes control of me, but my lack of Thought Control erupts and it is what it is. Peace be with you.

Ian Keenan said...

Chuck I neglected to mention the AFL-CIO was in on the 2004 coup against Aristide in Haiti, leading to several years of lawless bloodshed and the return of the Duvalierist army. I have researched the union sporadically. There's good news, like Jimmy Morales winning the presidency in Guatemala, which my friends here from there are stoked about. I wish him well, and at the very least, as another friend said about Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of his native Liberia, "she's not that good at the economy, but I can go to sleep without worrying about being shot."

Unknown said...

Ian: My, my, thank you for what's said about AFL-CIO role in the Aristide and also what your friend had to say about Ellen J. Sirlief and sleeping!

Thanks to your comment intervention, my four & counting decades sentenced to work without the "help" of AFL-CIO makes me feel better. A real American union leadership would worry about Haitians getting shot because under the deadly terms of globalization, they would know their membership & perhaps their own hides likely would be targeted next,

I believe U.S. Unions were wisely subcontracted by powerful globalists to serve the dual purpose of increasing profit and the creation of a Rich Man (1%) and Lazarus world. Full disclosure, a Byzantine Catholic priest told me about the implementation of the latter scenario back in the late 1970s, while I humped freight as a Teamster dockworker at Roadway Express, Tannersville, PA.

Thanks again Ian for another learning opportunity!

Linh Dinh said...

Yo Chuck and Ian,

Just an hour ago, I saw a huge nativity scene in the middle of the Christmas Market, right beneath the Christmas tree. It even has three live sheep. It's ridiculous that I managed not to see it until today.

It is a huge Christmas market.

Linh

Ian Keenan said...

Chuck also Dana Frank, a scholar of US labor and Honduras and who documented the last coup and the mess that's come of the latest crooked elections there, is writing a book on the AFL-CIO in Honduras, a topic she wrote about previously as part of her book Bananeras about the whole region, where she goes over how the union took over collective bargaining for the United Fruit workers but made sure the workers movement provided no political threat to the status quo.

Trumka and the AFL-CIO leaders have spoken out against the most recent Honduran coup and the election abuses in the previous cycle. There's all sorts of speculations you can make, but what is known is that President Zelaya, a wealthy moderate, was beginning to work with local labor and activist movements, and was forced out of the country in a more military and propagandist approach to matters that had less of a role for the AFL-CIO, which is where the Pope could be useful to the union.

Unknown said...

Ian: Thanks once again, Dana Frank seems to be a true scholar, one with a conscience. People w/o the latter quality scare me.

I believe Popes will support union activities unless they challenge globalist plans to oppress workers. Pope John Paul II gave "useful" support to Solidarity but I'd really like to know how Polish workers are doing under the current "Democratic" and uber capitalist NATO regime.

Maybe Linh Dinh will journey to Poland and get some steel toe "boots-on-the-ground" insight and convey findings to us? (For what it's worth, Ian, I think a socialist Lech Walesa, in modern day Poland, would not fly with the mighty D.C. and EU powers, those who are in control of business and what's in store for workers)
Thank you!