Wonderful Matters

I had some down time tonight, so I thought I'd blog a bit. I really wanted to spill some of my thoughts onto the computer screen here about what I saw in my Los Angeles Times this morning. I just can't help it. The Times is the paper we get, and it is an extraordinarily quality journalistic effort. It is. But it is also a gigantic mouthpiece for the World System. It is one of the reasons I enjoy reading it. I get my news, and I also get a huge serving of the ways the System is keeping people tied to Cain's legacy. Don't get me wrong, this is what The Institution is supposed to do. All very fine stuff indeed. I just can't keep from pointing out how much its perfectly legitimate work comes straight from hell, and perhaps some will see and want to get out of it. Quite frequently I see the profound irony of System operations all over the front page of this very influential daily. Oh don't worry that it's all going away soon. All this news and the humanist tw...

I do have a Facebook page but visit it quite infrequently. Today I did, and a wall post from a terrific friend included one of those quite idiotic but purportedly inspirational notions, this one going something like this, from some motivational speaker at a "You're Really Special"-type seminar that probably cost attendees $800 for the weekend. "See this $20 bill? How many of you want it? [Hands up everywhere.] Okay, what if I crinkled it up, like this? How many now? [Same number of hands up.] Okay, what if I stepped on it and squished it into the ground, like this? How many now? [Same number.] See! No matter what awful thing happens to the $20 bill, it still retains its value. So, listen, YOU ARE VALUED! No matter how much stuff you have to take in life, tough it out because you have value even through all of it!" The few comments there were along the lines of "Bravo! Great words!" and "I must remember that all the time! Thanks!" What w...

Just have to plop up here a quick post on an article right there in the big mainstream McPaper, USA Today . A university professor has a column in which he asks, "Are we living in the Hunger Games?" I wrote at length about the film The Hunger Games as a profound metaphor for very real contemporary human sacrifice. Yes, human sacrifice happens all the time by everyone not living by the self-sacrificial principles of Jesus Christ. It isn't always in the physical violence people do to one another but in the spiritual and emotional violence they do. The reason so many refuse to accept this truth is that it is so hard to discern in the lives of everyone who does it, which it seems is just about everyone. Here the author elucidates how evident this is. He will certainly get points from those shouting about how inequitable all things economic are in this country. He will get more points from those who want to screech about how much power too few people have to exploit other...

This past week events occurred in my life that paralleled one another quite profoundly. The first was that a president was reelected who is so wickedly reprobate that I grieved over the continued course of this nation. Many said, "Oh quit yer whinin' -- that's been said so many times before and look, we're still okay." No we're not. We're still living in a moral sewer. The second was I spent my week exhaustively working to permanently dismiss from my classroom a student who is pathologically manipulative, narcissistic, and sociopathic. The emotional and spiritual violence spewed from this young man utterly destroyed the instructional integrity of my classroom. Both were awfully draining events to endure, but what made them so striking was not just the similarities in the breadth of evil reflected in them, but that so many people either refused to see and act appropriately on them, or much worse: allowed them or even enabled them to continue. Regard...

My niece has been over this weekend, and she's exactly the same age as my daughter. It was a great opportunity to see Wreck-It Ralph , and it was a terrific movie. It was actually kind of slow to start, and I started to see some of the same formulaic plot devices that you see in all the Pixar movies. But the key message is one I want to share with you here because it relates exactly with the subject of my latest home page piece . I want to start by sharing with you something you may already know. I am a rabid San Francisco Giants fan. So it may go without saying that when they won their second World Series title in three years last Sunday night, I was ecstatic. But I realized something a while ago that is quite profound about this ecstasy, and it is one of the most perverse facts of life that there is. For you see, the splendidly wonderful wonderfulness of that whole thing wouldn't mean a thing if there weren't The Los Angeles Dodgers . And not just the Dodgers, b...

The Nobel prize in economics was awarded this week to two economists, Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd Shapley, who specialized in matching. Their work was about finding ways to get a student matched with the best college and a single adult matched with the best spouse.When you look at the breadth of their work you can see that in many respects it is what the core of economics is all about . Economics is chiefly about decision-making . And how much of that decision-making is trying to get what it is out there matched up with who you are, what you're about, what you like and love and sing about. I'll never forget that gal who on an assignment I gave my students in which they were to write down anything and everything they wanted -- I was teaching about scarcity -- wrote "I want to know what I want." How exquisitely and profoundly and splendidly sublime is that. That we'd get matched up with what we want, but then, the challenge ... How does that happen best? Rea...

It is hard to find good healthy churches that can provide rich spiritual sustenance. I'm convinced that it is because most Christian churches are intractably tied to the World System through its law and bylaws, one of which is the 501c3 paperwork the leaders of those churches sign to get all the goodies Caesar offers them. Tonight I went to the Saturday evening event of a "Truth Conference" that trumpeted itself as an apologetics-oriented affair, and I'm always jumping on good apologetics kinds of things. The speaker tonight was Ed Hinson, and I'd never heard of him, but thought I'd step in and see what was what. His ambitious plan was to go through the entire book of Revelation for the several hundred seated in the megachurch-like auditorium. Whew, I thought, that's a really tall order. But alas, I was not in a church where the people were necessarily expecting an expansive scholarly take on a very challenging part of the Bible. Sure enough, much of ...

Last Sunday the Doonesbury comic was a vicious swipe at those who believe in God and what He says in the Bible. Some of cartoonist Garry Trudeau's stuff is fine, but far too often he lights into those who don't share his view of things, and when he does he just looks mostly foolish. His strip Sunday was a classic instance of this. I couldn't help but put together an alternate version, one that reflects the truth about the scientific evidence, and that version is here . I went ahead and put mine up on "the wall" at Facebook and thought, hmm, wonder if anyone's going to add some remarks? Would they be favorable, from those who tend to believe in God as He shares Himself in the Bible? Or would they be unfavorable, from those who don't quite believe in all that in that way? So far I've gotten two "Likes," which is really cool, but not a single comment. This is kind of why I really don't spend too much time on Facebook. I mean there are...

I saw an ad for a film called  Father of Lights . Don't know much about it, but was intrigued because the term is a name for God in the New Testament. So I went to the website about the film, and found a piece written by someone responsible for it who says this is the third film in a series that is supposed to tell us who God is really . Apparently the film shows all kinds of awesome things happening to people, and this proves that God is loving and kind and giving and gracious and because of all that... He definitely then isn't Angry. It wasn't just that the writer said this, but he said in that pukifyingly humanist way, you know, "We must get rid of that Neanderthal idea that God is wrathful, which is just so ridiculous and no enlightened person really believes that anymore." I read this and, yes, got a little angry. I get a bit ticked about these kinds of statements because they themselves are so idiotic. For one, the guy writes with such anger himsel...

I wish I had the time and energy to blog much much much more often. As I'd noted before, it is very difficult to get something of meaning down here as frequently as I'd like, and it is really only because I spend so much time ministering to my family, my students, and my neighbors. It partially titled this post "The LIBOR Extraction" because last month I so longed to address the revelation that the LIBOR rate, which is merely a widely referenced interest rate, was manipulated by Higher-Ups in some manner for the expressed purpose of forming questionable impressions about value. Many people benefitted, many others took a hit. I wanted to regale my readers with the whys and wherefores about it, but it really came down to this: It was yet another typical way powerful people living by, for, and within the agency of Cain carry out their proper human sacrifice practices against those who properly let them. Yes, people die slow and painful deaths through it all, but the ...

Yesterday we went to the beach, and afterwards enjoyed dinner at a pizza place. The splendidly perfect summer outing. My wife lamented not being able to see the closing ceremonies of the Olympic games, but since most restaurants have no fewer than 57 television sets placed throughout the dining area, we could at least view some of the festivities. What I saw was a celebration of one of those immortal gods of the World, John Lennon, singing his classic "Imagine" while a stylized, "puppetized" visage of his face sat in the center of the Union Jack stripes in the middle of the arena. There it was in glorious splendor, the anthem of mindless World obedience and the visual spectacle all over a gigantic Annu signature, the authoritative designation of control over a reprobate population. And on this stage the pronouncement was quite clear. The Olympics used  The Legend Lennon to be sure everyone knew it was global in nature. Today driving out on the freeway I saw a...

Robert Samuelson is one of the more respected commenters on financial things. While he does work for the World as a prominent speaker in the echo chamber, he does refuse to pull punches about the reality of things. I think because he's paid by Caesar a lot of this is designed to get people to keep looking to Caesar to try to solve things. In his latest piece , he says the economic models the world is working with today are, in his words, "collapsing, time-consuming, torturous, and possibly inconclusive" resulting in "frustration and fear." As always he pounds down the vital stats, and they are always frightening. One of the most controversial policy decisions made by the federal government was given the thumbs up by the Supreme Court this week, and that was universal health care. The idea -- now implemented as public policy -- is that taxpayers must be obligated to pay for everyone's health care needs. It is a classic example of the broken model at wor...

Right now I'm in the midst of industriously managing family affairs, teaching summer school, and trying to squeeze in assembling a decent home page piece for the next month's edition of my webzine. Most times all of this very much precludes me from blogging, but I have to get this down here, briefly (if I can!) I teach students U.S. Government at a high school. Part of their lessons involves immersing themselves in current events. This past two weeks we'd been mulling over two of the most publicized cases about which the Supreme Court has issued or will be issuing a ruling. It already announced its decision regarding the notoriously strict Arizona illegal immigration law. It had struck down some of it, kept some of it. So we talked about this and talked about that, in watching and listening to all that's said I'd been trying to make heads or tails of this part of it and that, I'd been seeing and hearing some people say this and some people say that... Unti...

We saw Prometheus the other night, and while it was enjoyable -- we saw it in IMAX 3D! Wow! -- I liked it less and less afterwards. I've always been a fan of the Alien series, particularly the first two, because even in all the alien creepiness there is a tremendously compelling aspect to the vibrant storytelling. I also just like good horror and sci-fi films. The two things that frustrated me most were, one, it was really just a remake of the first Alien . Really, it was as if Ridley Scott said to himself, "What would Alien be like if I made it today ?" He put in a few variations, used CGI a bit more (of course), but it really was exactly the same story. Same theme. Same motif. I even heard exactly the same music at times -- no, not similar music, but the exact same parts of the original Alien musical score. There was the gargantuan ship ( Prometheus=Nostromo ) and the scheming android (David=Ash) and the curmudgeonly crewmembers bickering over work and pay... I co...

Kenny says he can make flying boots. They'll be great. You just strap them on, and up you go, zipping off to wherever you need to be. No traffic, no delays, no hassles. Just perfectly safe, perfectly efficient, solar-powered flying boots. A bunch of his brothers and sisters and cousins like his idea, and they join a bunch of their friends -- even ones who live far, far away -- to give him a bazillion dollars to make the boots. The contracts are all drawn up, they wink and smile at one another about all the ways they're really working within the true intent of the law, and they all go clubbing together to toast how wonderful this will all be. Dad is suspicious, however, but Dad likes Kenny too much to say anything. In fact he works hard to turn those suspicions into his advantage. Should Kenny and everyone fail to do so well in this effort, he gets them to believe that he'll rescue them. That way no one will abandon Dad and his splendid intentions. The neighbors really...

This is the question I've heard a dozen times already. After being on the hook for a $2 billion trading loss, Dimon is taking the heat and many are getting nervous about his place in the highest reaches of the Ivory Tower. What so many -- and by "so many" I mean just about everyone who likes having a bit of a return on their money, so that number is literally in the hundreds of millions World inhabitants around the globe -- what so many don't get is that They've put him there, and have asked him to do precisely what he did . Societe Generale bank president Daniel Bouton was in a very similar situation a number of years ago, when one of his traders did an "Oops" with a huge gob of other people's money -- whether phantom or real -- and he did all the mea culpa ad nausea silliness too. I wrote about it in this home page piece in my webzine , but I have a feeling not many read it. Everyone is still doing it, sad. Everyone is still thinking they...

This past week two people were notably convicted of crimes that it merited a bit of news coverage. Charles Taylor, the erstwhile dictator of Liberia, was put away in an international court for his autocratic brutality. Legal scholars and political scientists alike have expressed some consternation about this, merely because it may only encourage dictators to do more to consolidate power in order to keep them from the clutches of international law. Another gentleman whose name is much less important received a "third-strike" sentence for the crime of conning people out of their homes. He promised help with foreclosure and deceptively took the houses and cashed in the equity. I don't know the details, but it was pointed out that no fraud conviction has ever resulted in the mandatory 25 year term the three strikes law requires. Many expressed distress about this. One could easily scratch their heads about all this, but when seen from The Catholicist Nation perspective...

I can't keep it in. I have to put up a good rant in a post about The Hunger Games . A long time ago my best friend came up with an honor for movies that really stink up the place. It's called the Slap Shot award after watching the Paul Newman film about ice hockey that had him squirming in his seat it was so bad. This happened to me tonight watching The Hunger Games . I was squirming the entire evening. I didn't leave because I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so I stayed for the agonizing duration. I'd actually heard that there were some profound insights in it and interesting things to think about. I discovered that there were none. It wasn't enlightening or edifying in any way. Oh what about Katniss caring so much about her sister that she's goes in for her, that's kind of a Christ-figure kind-of thing to do? Yeah, but so what -- any film can have that, and lots do. Eh. I will say that there was the idea about the way the World Syste...

I was browsing in a bookstore today, and happened upon last week's edition of Newsweek. The cover featured a picture of a modern-day urban working class Jesus hittin' the streets. The title blazing across the middle of the page: "Forget the Church, Follow Jesus, by Andrew Sullivan." I haven't read the piece, but knowing a bit about Newsweek, and knowing a bit about Andrew Sullivan, I can pretty much tell you what's in it. Let me guess. It'll talk about how the Christian church, or any organized religious institution (don't want to be ecclesiastically insensitive now), is just not meeting the needs of people. It'll say that we just need to get back to the Jesus who told us about love and peace and equality and democracy and really touched us with transcendent meaning. Most likely he included some conciliatory stuff to assuage the worries from that group of Jesus appreciators, and some other niceties to appease this other group of Jesus affeciona...