Wonderful Matters

Last night I attended a Passover seder demonstration, and while I'd been to one before, I was still blown away at how everything God does points to Jesus Christ. Anyone who even slightly contemplates the meaning of Passover can't miss it: God loves us so much that He sent His Son to be the very sacrificial lamb for our sins, simply so He could have deep, abiding fellowship with us forever. It is just as the Elijah whom Jews seek every year once said, as he gazed into the eyes of the One Savior, "Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." It is only through Christ that one may have freedom. He's the One. That's it.  He's it. Any other kind of freedom is not a freedom at all, but merely a way to keep people slightly happy while still enslaved to their sin and the head-cracking hegemony that only goes so far to rein it in. He is the "liberation from bondage" as the seder presenter said is the theme of the Passover commemorat...

If you pay even the slightest attention to current events, you may have caught sight of an unprecedented incident. It was announced on a Friday afternoon, a time notorious for rapt inattention when most are speeding out of the office to hook up the trailer and head to the river. Even if you did catch it you'll see that any significant meaning will be seriously muted by the divinely ordained power of the order. It always is for such occurrences. The ho-hum story was the Jesuits' record payout of some $100+ million in a settlement over sexual abuse claims made in the Pacific Northwest. You'd think something like this would thoroughly discredit the Roman Catholic Church, but sadly, most will rationalize it away with casuistry having to do with their respectability in at least paying those seduced into their convenient prostitution. There's always a good reason, and the Jesuits are best at coming up with good reasons. They run the World System and are experts at all fo...

This is kind of an addendum to my last blog post, "Everything is Window Rebuilding."  I took issue with Caroline Baum's remark that earthquake's are bad for an economy, not because they aren't, but because everything that anyone does is about repairing something. The Jewish mystics even had a term for it, tikkun , and it is a certain truth that the world around us is broken, battered, beaten, and in dire need of an expert handy man. The problem with the concept of  tikkun is simply that there are two types of handy men in the Yellow Pages. One is sitting in a modest throne room in some presently little known location processing all the information the World System gathers to better manage the sin of the inhabitants he is charged with constraining. This often requires extraordinary deceit and calculated murder, and it always involves grand acts of provocation for the most proficient implementation. And it can never be anything other than human sacrifice. ...

I've been so consumed with and subsequently exhausted from work and home and family running-around-with that I just haven't been able to post much here recently. But sometimes I see something that just cries for me to say something about. Since I'm still pretty tired I can slip it in here quickly. Today I caught Caroline Baum's blog-like piece about the "benefits" of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami disaster. She initially makes a great point about how things like earthquakes are actually bad for economies in spite of Keynesian minded pontificators blapping about how helpful they are -- you know, providing jobs to get the rebuilding going and all that. She quotes Bastiat, and it seems anyone who channels Bastiat is worshipped as a prophet with the most sublime wisdom of some sort. The oft-quoted truthism she references is the one about broken windows. If you remember, it is his refutation of those who say broken windows are good because they provide window...

My most recent home page piece has been uploaded, and while I really try to work at introducing it here at my blog with at least some kind of flourish, tonight I think I'm just going to have to pass. I am so exhausted from my job and running the standard family errands that I'm tucking in very early tonight. This is not to say that I don't want to jump at sharing the dozen or so different things I keep seeing out there in this delightfully smothering World, items that I'd love to highlight and remark about simply to show quite categorically that, as the entirety of my latest declares, Everyone does quite wholeheartedly follow the words and ideas and evocations of someone else somewhere. My simplest of simple questions to you is, Do you know who that individual is for you?

Michael Lewis has a wonderful new piece out in March's Vanity Fair about Ireland. He had one a few months ago on Greece, and if you know what's been going on in the financial innards of both you'd have an idea about what his exposition is about. I'm interested a bit more in the Ireland take because I am mostly Irish myself, many of my ancestors coming over here from Londonderry to build lives in the midwest. It was a brutal existence, and I think often of them and how hard they worked when I whine about this or that piddly inconvenience. I haven't read the entire piece, but I just wanted to share that as I have absorbed Lewis' words, I've had an image in my mind that is quite disturbing. It is a classic work of art that is as repulsive as it is sublimely telling. It is Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Children," and I'm not even going to reproduce it here. You can find it easily in Google's Image finder. But I have to say that I ca...

Sometimes I come across a piece of writing in the punditsphere that gets at the heart of the way the World works. All too often I think about how much I speak of meaningful things in my webzine, my blog, my ministry work; and I wonder where the articulation of support is out there. This work by Jerry Bowyer , apparently a blogger of some sort for a major business news magazine, is one such piece. It is titled simply, "The American Nomenclatura," a clear reference to those whose job it is to collect the extraordinary amounts of tribute from those who ask them to constrain their evildoing. Really, "job" is too weak a term -- it is more like ordination . Of course, please forgive me if I convey the idea that this is anywhere close to groundbreaking. That there are tribute-imposers and tribute-bearers is not that revelatory, though I do tend to try to shout that fact from the rooftops with my work. When I start to hear that the solution is something other than more ...