And it's November.

 I look forward to making some kind of effigy of 2022 and setting it on fire on December 31. 

Things have steadified, to coin a term. My son's truck was stolen last month and then recovered, largely intact.

So, crime is at the top of my ballot next Tuesday, and my redistricted neighborhood is surprisingly competitive for once. Though, truth to tell, I rather liked Andy Levin, who was an old-school labor Democrat, albeit one who had to mouth the identitarian pieties which have consumed his party.

Anyhoo, that's obscenely-wealthy Oakland County's loss now. As for the GOP, it has not missed the chance to miss the chance to select good candidates for the local ballot--one or maybe two exceptions aside.

I'll try to avoid making honking noises at the ballot station.

We are trying to stay ahead of inflation, which is 1B on my ballot. That's becoming tougher, though we soldier through. I hope and pray the Russo-Ukrainian War does not go global, though I have little confidence in the nuclear-armed leadership on either side of the fight. Putin is atrocious, but history teaches that the Russians can and will find someone worse in the aftermath of a military catastrophe.

Spiritually, I find myself (unofficially) in the Melkite camp. The late Bishop Elias Zoghby asserted that the papacy of the first millennium--and not an iota more--was something both Catholics and Orthodox could buy into. More Catholics than Orthodox did, but such are the times.

The Vatican I papacy, as codified in the 1917 and 1983 Codes of Canon Law, is the platonic ideal of overreach. "Hypertrophy," to borrow the exercise term. Or "single point of failure," to use an engineering phrase. In any event, magisterial statements like this are, flatly, bonkers:

It follows from this that the Sovereign Pontiff alone enjoys the right to recognize and establish any practice touching the worship of God, to introduce and approve new rites, as also to modify those he judges to require modification.

How about no? As in "No, the Faith is not the wet clay of the reigning pontiff?"

But canon law and the popes themselves say otherwise, so here we are.

And it won't be fixed by a better guy as pope--not that such would be difficult, of course. 

By now it should be clear that the problem is larger than a manifestly-unfit CEO. Rather, it resides in an autocratic system that requires saintly self-abnegation to work--making it not a good system. In human terms, what your powers allow you to do will, in the absence of countervailing forces, inevitably trump what custom says you should do. Yes, it is making me take a hard look at Orthodoxy--or at least the less-caesaropapist versions.

Anyway, I hope you and yours have safe and blessed holiday seasons. Prayers, please, for dear friends who have a loved one who has been arrested for murder. I remember the young man as a boy, and this is beyond a nightmare.