Wonderful Matters

The latest home page piece at The Catholicist Nation delves into aspects of violence that, it seems, so few care to see. It's here.

This week NBC got into a bit of hot water for showing the pics and airing the words of the Virginia Tech mass murderer. Shortly before shooting 32 individuals, he sent an informational package to the NBC offices in New York to explain himself. Predictably it was filled with profane rants and menacing images, and after chief correspondent Brian Williams expressed turmoil over the decision, NBC went ahead and showcased it all. It is easy to understand the displeasure with this, ahem, "decision." The guy is now a celebrity, even if posthumously and with the abjectly repulsive notoriety. Add to this the number of other disaffected individuals who now have incentive to commit heinous acts because of the wide gratuitous publicity-- indeed this was the premise of the film Natural Born Killers . Reviled by many as being excessively violent, its message was that the media are such that a top rated feature can be hewn from "reality show" hyperviolence. Actually, I shouldn...

Day before yesterday at the airport waiting for my flight, I caught sight of a TV showing the nationally televised major league ballgame between the Dodgers and Padres. I noticed that every Dodger was wearing the number 42. I love baseball but after discovering the depth of its competitive duplicity, I don't pay any attention to what's going on there. Even as clueless as I was about this, however, I did figure the 42 thing had to be about Jackie Robinson, who wore that number. Now, as a rule, I despise the Dodgers, being a faithful San Francisco Giants follower, so my take here may be a bit biased indeed. You may certainly think that. But this wearing the number 42 thing. Utterly ridiculous. It is not only that it is silly, but it is a prominent reflection of this obsession so many have with their racist guilt. I've wondered how to articulate all of this, and I think I've found one way to do so. It came from Shelby Steele, a black writer who has joined many thoughtful w...

Benjamin Bush is a prolific blogger who recently made a foray to the "Jesus Creed" blog , a popular emergent church type forum that supposedly welcomes all views with all openness. What he found is that they aren't exactly so open as to hear views that would--heaven forbid-- perhaps close one's mind on something that is--oh my-- true . I enthusiastically encourage you to check out his eloquent narrative of this adventure. His blog is here, The Politics of Heaven . In today's Los Angeles Times there was a piece by columnist Joel Stein about how pointless Don Imus really is-- this in light of the recent hypocritical popular culture witch hunt of the guy. Not that I'm an apologist for him, for I feel pretty much the way Stein does. What is noteworthy is that the postmodern philosophy from which the emergent church movement takes its charge is all about rejection of truth as a weapon used by those who want to increase their power over others. With this in mind it ...

A new book is out by wunderkind 9/11 debunker David Ray Griffin called, appropriately enough, Debunking 9/11 Debunking . So, to review, back on September 11th, 2001, there were these planes that went into buildings and caused us all to be horrified. Naturally we all asked, “What happened?” Then the media gave us the story of Muslim extremist terrorists who flew the planes and all the rest of it. And then evidence arose that it was an inside job— that, for instance, the towers were brought down by controlled demolition. And so the media went to work debunking that evidence. (Viz: “The structures of the towers were such that a single plane could indeed have destroyed the building, and here’s all the technical mumbo-jumbo that would make that possible.) And then the truth seekers went to work debunking that debunking. (Viz: “You say this-and-that technical mumbo-jumbo, but here’s other technical mumbo-jumbo that clearly disputes that.”) The Culture War continues. Oh, the powers-that-be ...

This was the title of an editorial in Saturday's Los Angeles Times, way in the back, way down at the bottom left corner of the page. It was about new DNA findings that tell us, essentially, that the theory of evolution is still quite the theory. It addressed recent findings that show that the mammal line started shortly after the dinosaurs were made extinct by the cataclysmic event 65 million years ago turned out to be a dead end. Furthermore, it wasn't until 15 million later that the mammal line that supposedly led to us started. This followed a cover story in Newsweek two weeks ago that revealed DNA discoveries have shown that most of the caveman types we'd all been taught were our evolutionary ancestors were also dead ends. This means Darwinists are now confessing that the evidence cannot be denied any longer, and are actually scrambling to hedge their sentiments as soon as they can by devising new theories to explain things. In other words, they've got to come out q...