Marble Staircases
Virgins and some who seek halos over their heads
December 14, 2024
Front center with a white pocket square in his jacket, Henri Albert Gabriel Félix Marie Guillaume, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg at one of his palaces. Front row at far right is US Representative Nancy Pelosi. Henri is a first cousin of King Philippe of Belgium and descends from Spanish kings. He has veto power over his nation’s government and a personal net worth over US$4B+. His family vacations at a big property on the French Mediterranean coast on land given by France with 100% sovereign control by Luxembourg for its 100% legal control and easy walking distance to the very private seaside castle fort used by the French leader like the US Presidents’ very private Camp David. What did Lux give France for that total control of prime seaside land post-WW2? Perhaps something to do with Henri’s country being a tax haven and banker for Europe? After Lux let the Germans take it over in WW2 while trying to remain neutral?
Woke up to news the US Congressional House former Speaker Nancy Pelosi fell on a marble staircase at a ducal palace in Luxembourg and cracked a hip bone. Without her fall likely few in the USA would have known some of our elected representatives were happily socializing with a royal potentate whose family tried to play both sides in WW2.
Surfed online for photos and saw her posing with a scrum of elected and appointed US federal employees smiling with the Grand Duke of Luxembourg all standing on or next to the unlucky stairs. She is wearing black pointy-toed 3-4” stiletto slip-on shoes and a grimace on her face. She has a death grip handhold with another member of her US government-funded long weekend junket, ostensibly to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge which roared through Belgium and Luxembourg.
Neither she nor any Washington, D.C. leaders visited Guam or Saipan for their 80th anniversaries this past summer to commemorate their liberations after battles as bloody as the Battle of the Bulge. Christmas Season in Western Europe with evening Christmas markets full of crafts and mulled wine booths in every big town plus meet & greets with food & drinks at old and gilded royal palaces… or a summer visit to remote and brutally hot and humid islands near the Equator? Shall we do a battle death count for those three battlegrounds where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan made most of their very last-ditch big stands?
I’ve not yet gotten over Mrs. Pelosi like a scepter-waving “Off with their heads!” Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland ordering her colleagues while Speaker to pass the Obamacare bill BEFORE there was any time to read the final voluminous bill as she informed them they could read it AFTER passing it. While she and they had then and keep today their gold-plated Congresscritters’ federal employee health plans with access for life for “free” care from the doctors of their choice at any US military or civilian medical facilities. She also exempted as Speaker any mandate for herself, her colleagues, and their staffs to take Mr. “The Big Guy” Biden’s “mandatory” covid injections to keep their federal paychecks. When asked in 2021 if she took a jab of one of those patented bioweapons she haughtily said, “THAT is PRIVATE information!”
She also insists any stock trading of pharmaceutical stocks by herself or her family members is free of any illegal insider trading information. Nice to be one whose staff writes don’t-look-close-at-it housekeeping legislation or shall I call that all get-rich quick schemes?
How did that lady buy during the plandemic lockdowns a beach front home on Florida’s Jupiter Island while also carrying the costs of a California Wine Country estate, plusWashington, D.C. and San Francisco homes on her salary beats me. And why buy beachfront land given she’s been so concerned for so long about “Climate Change” and “Global Warming” in so much legislation she’s voted for to funnel federal finds here and there?
[Coda: By 12/15/24, Ms. Pelosi got a very fast hip replacement surgery at a US Army hospital in Germany.]
I was not amused when during the Covid lockdowns she was caught flouting like an untouchable Celestial Empress her State’s Covid lockdown rules by getting her hair done at a San Francisco salon in her official home Congressional District. She ranted afterwards on video she was “Set up!!” by her political opponents when film of her inside the salon emerged which should have been per City rules 100% closed to all customers. All for a hair coloring touchup, cut, blow dry, and styling. Why didn’t she openly say the lockdowns were totally nuts given she brazenly ignored the local rules? Or, just get professional hair care help at home as many I know did when California hair salons were ordered closed as “non-essential” businesses. Or, buy herself some quality scissors and hair dye at her local pharmacy? Perhaps grow her hair long, then wear a pony tail or pin it up?
Every California salon haircutter I knew personally did great business during the lockdowns cutting hair in the home backyards of their longtime clients with all their trusted neighbors’ piling in with freshly washed and still wet hair for hair cuts and blow dries. Cash only!! Ditto for pedicurists and manicurists. No paper trails for nosey bureaucrats. It is, isn’t it?, one’s duty to rebel if faced with a violation of one’s God-given (i.e. not given by an anointed king or elected queen) inalienable unqualified right to the freedom of assembly, which includes “assemblies” for hair cuts, manicures and religious gatherings plus sports games. “Fancy Nancy” could have said closing all hair salons was in actual no-kidding health facts merely a stupid fear-mongering psy-op to boost vaccine sales and profits to gullible sheeple… but she didn’t.
FWIW: I didn’t get my hair cut between March 2020 and November 2021 during my County’s lockdowns just to see for fun how long I could grow it especially after I found out by Summer 2020 the guy who most often cut my hair had more business than he could possibly accommodate. Also, I had already let my hair go white by my 40s. “Face reality and laugh a lot” is one of my mottos.
Or, as George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, the pigs’ rules included “Some animals are more equal than others” to rationalize to the farm’s very gullible sheep, chickens and working horses to believe it is OK to allow those ruling pigs to live inside the farmer’s house and wear his clothes then sell or gamble away those less-equal hard working bodies - while still alive! - for the cash value of their meat and rendered fat & bones.
If I was not raised as a Christian with the old Bible’s admonishment that “vengeance is mine” sayeth the Lord God, I’d have cursed to Hell that Pelosi woman long ago. Meanwhile isn’t “karma a bitch” when one wears stupid slip-on stiletto shoes on a marble staircase on a U.S. taxpayer-funded luxury long weekend junket in of all places Luxembourg? Wondering if she had one too many glasses of wine with the Grand Duke before her fall. “Tant pis” (what a shame) as the French say.
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Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Bene-Lux. 500 years ago that land was mostly known as Flanders, then ruled by an assortment of intermarried small royal duchies and principalities plus the growing Spanish-Austro-Hungarian Empire which then ruled much of Flanders from mostly old cities in present day Belgium. A land with very rich agriculture and fantastic sea ports. Raging battles by warlords, royal sovereigns, and church princes for 1,000+ years for control over its peasants and merchants’ taxable products and services as well as income from its minor aristocracies.
Back and forth armies come and go across that land with no big mountain ranges to delay a marching invading army. Long known also as the “Low Countries” thanks to its terrain. An historical fulcrum of Western European Civilization where the Latin language of French meets and blends with Germanic languages. Generations of very well-funded and well-educated backroom power players have ruled there with ever shifting royal marriage-alliances using royal children, most frequently married by proxy often before age ten.
A place where the French Joan of Arc was held prisoner by John of Luxembourg, then a mid-range royal ruler who well played both sides of the raging 100 Years War between England and France. Just like how Nasser of Egypt played the USA and NATO against the USSR for cold cash and military hardware in a protection racket and other mutually-beneficial exchanges. That mid-range Low Country ruler John of L. for a good “deal” turned over Joan to France’s then enemy England which in 1431 burned her at the stake for witchcraft.
A land of endless bloody wars and nasty trade battles which intensified during the rising challenge by the early 1500s from the brand new Protestant religions fighting against any rule by Catholic royal families such as those who elected the Holy Roman Emperors such as Spain’s Carlos V, the Holy Roman Emperor, who ruled from Mexico to Vienna via his homes in Ghent and Antwerp in Belgium. Where in December 1941 Hitler threw 200,000 troops into a Bene-Lux forest to start the multi-week long Battle of the Bulge where my own (Catholic) uncle fought as a US Army conscientious objector medic with General Patton who led the relief force. So, Pelosi and her pals this long weekend are marking the start of the Battle of the Bulge in today’s happy & sparkling Bene-Lux Christmas party season not the Battle’s end in mid-January 1945. Most of them “camoflaged” in black clothes instead of festive colors as we’re-serious-folks PR spin.
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The Christmas Season for Western Europeans starts four Sundays before
Christmas Day with Advent. A time for many to fast by avoiding red meats and dairy products during the Northern Hemisphere’s shortest days of the year. Think about the coming, the “advent,” of Jesus Christ. Reflect on the Virgin Mary in her fat, awkward, and last month of pregnancy waiting to pop that baby as she and her husband travel to Bethlehem to be taxed by the Roman Empire right after it did a census to figure out exactly how much head-tax its minion bureaucrats had to collect to keep their jobs.
Digging back into my early youth I try to recall when I first learned the meaning of the word “virgin” and what is a holy oil “anointed” state-religion royal or priestly ruler. I suppose I understood those words sometime between fourth to sixth grade. 4th grade is when California public school students get a brief State history course including stories about the Spanish Empire’s Roman Catholic Franciscan priests who with the Spanish Army colonized and evangelized in California beginning in 1769. The Spanish king wanted to stop or deter there the territorial ambitions of the Protestant British Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Russian Empire, both empires with an anointed royal head of state in nations with only one official “state” religion. In 5th grade, we girls got a very brief pre-menstrual State-approved lesson in school while the boys were sent out to the playground. Then, the State-approved sex-ed in 6th grade to understand mechanically what “virgins” are and only the barest minimums about how babies are created, mostly just enough vocabulary and anatomy pictures to understnad when and why women get menstrual periods.
I was raised as a baptized Catholic as an infant to please one side of my family but taken to a Protestant Sunday school to please the other side. Catholic masses for my nuclear family all together only on Christmas and Easter. Allowed to choose my own religion when I reached the typical first grade age of 6 when most USA Catholics begin liturgy training for their children to be eligible to take First Communion. Thinking back at that age, I simply did not like all the kneeling the Catholics did compared to the Protestants. I’d also noticed only the Catholic priest took a big drink of wine and his parishioners only had a small sip whereas in the Protestant church everyone - with no “confessions” to a priest needed nor any special words spoken - was offered a small glass of Welch’s grape juice a few times a year which stuck me, as an American first grader, as more fair. More egalitarian. More welcoming.
A child’s simple mind. We Americans don’t accept any royal titles for ourselves. No bows or genuflecting to kings nor dipping our flag in any Olympics parade or to anyone living. Kneel? A hard pass decision from me by first grade. Maybe having seen by then the movie The King and I with Thai princes, princesses and queens crawling across the floor like slugs towards their king put me off any idea of kneeling in a church or anywhere else. One has to draw a line somewhere as I understand some opinions will vary.
USA law does not recognize mental maturity to know right from wrong until age 7. So age 6 means what mentally? In the USA someone by age 6 has usually started to learn to read. Can murder anyone with impunity because they are legally deemed not to know better. Same reason teens can’t sign a real estate contract until age 18 or sign up with the military without a parent or legal guardian’s signature because their brains, on average, have not matured enough to be deemed legally a full adult and thus, in general, finally 100% responsible for all their own actions.
I’d thought long and hard at age 6 whether or not to join any religion while in 1st grade. I picked being just a “generic” Christian. To be “ecumenical,” a word carefully explained to me by both parents. To be as happy to attend a bar mitzvah as a Hindu wedding. My “church” is more just being with people of true goodwill to all mankind and best of all being alone in a wilderness of nature rather than inside any church building with anyone there merely going-through-the-motions of a formal liturgy drilled in by age 7 while, for some, shooting dagger eyes at anyone deemed a heathen or apostate. I’ll never forget the dagger eyes in different churches towards my parents and me from some in my extended family at weddings and baptisms where we were invited and expected to bring a gift.
About ten years ago I sat in the Thomas Aquinas Catholic church in Palo Alto (as seen in the Harold & Maude movie) for a mass with Gregorian chant music I wanted to hear. As everyone but me stood to receive communion I stayed seated as always, usually alone in the the back or a side aisle. Found a thick missal book in my pew’s row which requested on a flyleaf anyone not in official communion with the Vatican to stay seated. If Christian please pray silently for Christian unity. If not Christian pray silently for world peace. That’s all fine with me!
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12/11/24: 11pm musicians packing up at St. Joseph in Mountain View, California. Right before they performed, there was a reenactment of the Virgin of Guadalupe appearances to St. Juan Diego.
This Advent season, I decided on a sudden whim to attend two late night religious events at the church where I was baptized in the heart of Silicon Valley. At 11pm on December 11, 2024 a folkloric singing group serenaded the Vatican’s declared patron since the 1750s, the Virgin of Guadalupe, of all of Nueva España which included present day California and Mexico plus Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and most of Colorado and Utah. Then at midnight a mariachi band began performing for La Guadalupana’s feast day on December 12 honoring she who first appeared in Mexico in 1531. I sang and clapped along to the music which I already knew fairly well having lived and traveled a lot in Mexico. Everything was in Spanish.
Mariachis in the first minutes after midnight on 12/12/24. One tradition is to sing and pray right in front of an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Here, a lady mariachi singer with a ponytail is singing La Paloma Blanca.
Yesterday after another last minute whim, I drove over to Stanford University to help lead with fellow Stanford chorus singers the annual sing-and-play-along of Handel’s Messiah. Been doing that occasionally for almost 30 years. It’s always a packed event for music lovers. The pick-up orchestra is always excellent and welcoming to all with scores available for any kind of instrument. One year there were at least 10 kazoo players who fit right in. Another year had 2 Sousaphone/tuba players from the wacky Stanford football band. I missed the year a very large group of trombone players showed up as well as the year with a Celtic harp. This year had an infant in the singing audience frequently testing his or her lungs with very happy squeals during musical pauses. We always start by practicing the train-wreck “For Unto Us a Child is Born” with its tricky fugues and trills to get every one of the 900+ singers and musicians focused on the conductor’s beat. We end by singing and playing the “Hallelujah” tune twice.
Bass singers taking the lead during The Trumpets Shall Sound at Memorial Church, Stanford 12/13/24.
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Also woke up today to an email from the San Francisco Catholic archbishop’s new-ish music & arts Benedict Institute announcing music has been commissioned by him for the 500th anniversary in 2031 of the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Will he invite to the premiere his parishioner Mrs. Pelosi to whom he has refused to give communion given her support for USA taxpayer-funded on-demand abortion even into the 9th month for a 100% healthy fetus/baby? I was born a whole month early, so yes, I take this issue seriously.
I found it hilarious when she rushed off in a USA government jet to the Vatican to get a communion wafer from the Pope - “I’ll show that SF archbishop of my hometown!” - a Pope who is now facing a Vatican bankruptcy so bad (in at least one Vatican bank account) he can’t pay soon the pensions of all retired Vatican employees including nuns and priests because - surprise! - donations from worldwide Catholics to Vatican coffers are plummeting. The latest from the Pope is he thinks he’ll rake in the cash from Vatican pilgrims wanting indulgences to celebrate the 1,700th “Jubilee” year of the Council of Nicaea run by a Roman Emperor in Turkey which didn’t do much in the long term for Christian unity. It set-up the top-down autocratic, state-religion, royal-style Roman Catholic church which soon split off the Eastern Orthodox Christian church, and then the ever growing number of Protestant churches. Meanwhile, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, who is Roman Catholic, has intervened with his elected government to tamp down some of its very liberal abortion ideas. I can only imagine his stares and tight smiles at Nancy before she fell down his stairs and broke her hip. Or the stares from his wife, the Grand Duchess, whose family came from Cuba whose citizens lost their right to freedom of assembly before I was born.
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Maybe the new Guadalupana music commissioned by the SF archbishop will be first heard at San Francisco’s Mission Dolores founded by Roman Catholic Franciscan priests in September 1776 after they’d already said the first ever mass in San Francisco a mere five days *before* USA’s Independence Day on July 4, 1776. The USA federal and state governments along with Mission Dolores are planning for 2026 big 250th celebrations of 1776.
St. Francis of Assisi, the namesake of Babylon by the Bay, a.k.a. the Barbary Coast and San Fransicko [sic] to others, died on October 3, 1226, thus 2026 is also the 800th anniversary of his death. Many interesting “spirits” seem to be merging between 2026 and 2031 with their adherents wanting to celebrate and teach their stories. St. Francis with his desire to reform a horribly corrupt Roman Catholic church and teach anyone even if only birds wanted to listen to him. Guadalupe who taught the Mexican natives in 1531 they were as worthy to the Christian paradise as the invading Spanish conquistadors many of whom considered the natives to be just disposable slaves or dumb beasts of burden. Rather similar to a bunch of “rebels” in the 13 Colonies telling the anointed Protestant British (cough, Hanoverian German) king and his parliament in 1776 to stop any ideas of treating them like 3rd class royal subjects instead of human beings with full human rights granted not by any anointed kings or clergy but by a Creator. That all men are created equal!
Pass me the popcorn for the run-up of the events of 2026-2031 by getting ready to watch real fireworks during USA’s and SF’s Mission Dolores’ 1776’s 250th in 2026. The Spanish King doing a census and then collecting “donated” cash from his California to Florida subjects to send to George Washington to punch British aristocratic noses he didn’t like. Then, to recall Mexican patriots between 1810-1821 marching under La Guadalupana banners led by Catholic Father Dolores Hidalgo while his followers carried copies of the USA’s 13 Colonies’ 1776 Declaration of Independence when Mexicans fought successfully for independence from Spain while Mexico and California were both still part of the Catholic Spanish Empire. Funny that today, many California Catholic parishes stay alive only thanks to new immigrants from Vietnam, China, Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. It’s all a big and complicated US/Mexico/World cultural mix here in California with new groups constantly arriving and reshuffling who leads our lands.
Well! I’m now looking at my local music schedules for any Mexican-style Posadas and Filipino Simbang Gabi excuses-for-a-party and teach-the-kids sing-a-long evening gatherings held during the nine days before Christmas when our days are so short and nights so long. I could go for learning a few new songs and then sharing hot spiced beverages and snacks plus perhaps help with a Posada piñata, too.