Wonderful Matters

I wanted to briefly add a few notes about my last blog post , the one about the latest Mary Poppins excursion  Mary Poppins Returns . If you look and want to see clearly you'll easily note that the film presents a powerful version of the reigning religion belonging to those captivated by that Harry Potter desire to heroically affect things by their will outside the bounds of any of the more mainstream religious considerations -- ugh, too constricting. I want to be able to make my own way and do it by the most ethereally imaginative means. I don't believe many know the origins of this religion, and I think most would be surprised it is most prominently diffused into the World through the ecclesiastical institution right around the corner from their homes. As much as they may rail against the Roman Catholic organization for its rigid behavioral expectations, it is the one that promulgates their own gnostic, spiritist, and radically selfist perspective . Back in April of t...

The Mary Poppins tale is an extraordinarily enticing one. Last night during our Christmas season vacation downtime I went with my family to see the latest film, the first real Disney sequel to the original. 54 years later, they put together one they thought would be a worthy offering. It wasn't. It was long, dry, and tedious. The music was utterly forgettable, quite unlike the genius score of the 1964 classic. The acting was uninspired, with the exception perhaps of Emily Mortimer -- and no, Emily Blunt as Mary was so affected it took away from the genuine charm of the character. Julie Andrews' rendering drew no attention to herself even though she never denied who she authentically was. Blunt's character, meanwhile, was always looking at herself in the mirror and while there may have been some point to that, it only made her appear uncomfortably vain. This was merely a re-imaging of the original, and I was afraid of that. I was hoping for something fresh and invigo...

I keep thinking about things I could post in relation to my latest home page piece . Every day something comes to mind about the way of the World that would be a fine contrast to the Kingdom that beckons all who genuinely want Light. This one is just about as good as any, a piece from the webzine punditry aggregator Townhall,  "The Religion of Leftism" by Allie Stuckey.   This young lady is a bit better known for making brief satirical videos ridiculing the inanity of the most prominent leftists. She does a fine job of elucidating those insidiously destructive things so many people crusade for, things that are quite characteristic of "leftists." But as I read through this piece another time, I thought something. What would happen if I replaced the word "leftism" and any form of that reference with the word "Jesuitism." And I read through it again. It fits perfectly. All these things are the ways Jesuits behave when addressing anyon...

As we get closer to a supposedly extremely important election this upcoming Tuesday, there is one thing that resounds through all the hype. Fear . Everyone is fearful of everyone and everything. In some way or another, the expressions of rage and disgust broadcast from all sides really amount to a whole lot of fear. You can cut it with a knife it is so thick. And yet in the national psyche there is a palpable desire to seethe and holler and scratch and claw about the favored cause -- it is so righteous! And it feels sooo good. The most typical is "Trump is a Nazi!" accompanied by the contrasting "Trump is making the country great!" Oh that these seasoned Catholicists would see the oppressive fear the authorized World Ops are interminably generating and turn authentically to The One Who Frees From All That. I don't have much time to blog, I just have so much to do with family and work, I think I've reminded my readers of this a number of times. Oh t...

After an extraordinarily tumultuous confirmation spectacle last week, conservatives cheered the final Senate approval of their darling Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. Now we've got our conservative majority. Now we can get things we want done from the court. Not exactly. May I offer a hypothetical? You tell me what will happen as a result of this. A man comes to the court claiming to have standing -- it is quite just. His pregnant wife/girlfriend just had an abortion, and is making the case that she and her abortion doctor murdered the child on the grounds that, indeed, that object in the womb was a human being . To make it a bit harder for those on the left to object, let's say the man is African-American. Let's also say the aborted baby was a girl. An objection then risks compromising the left's obsession with exploiting minorities for the best virtue signaling. Here's the thing about that hypothetical. Do you really think it is that uncommon? ...

Don't think the New York Times <-- mouthpiece of the rabidly leftist academic establishment <--mouthpiece of the Society of Jesus led by its Superior General, isn't the most powerful entity on the planet? Today an op-ed came out in the Times that really wasn't much of anything, filled with the typical talking points about what a butthole they think Donald Trump is. There really was nothing new there. The difference was that it was penned anonymously by someone claiming to be inside the White House  (::Ooooo!::) working as some kind of high level executive official  (::OOOOO!::) with ready access to the president and all the inner operations of the federal government (WOWEE-WOW-WOW!!!::) and even a closet MEMBER OF THE RESISTANCE  (:: I CAN'T KEEP MY BODILY FLUIDS INSIDE MY BODY ANYMORE!!!::) Sure enough it is all - over - the place . I was at the gym on the stair-stepper thing and the nightly ABC news was on, and sure enough, the lead story practically feature...

I just finished my latest home page piece , and I just wanted to post a heads-up about it here in my blog. I'm including an interesting addition to the thing that I just couldn't squeeze in there, but it is worth putting here. Across the street from that graphic novel coffee bar we visited in Oceanside one Sunday morning, right across the street , was this building. Quite sparse with a mere single word identification: FACT. If I go in there, will I find the facts? Will I discover the truth of things and allow that to slice through my own benighted deceitfulness? Just point of fact, so to speak, I looked around online and discovered it is the office of "Full Access and Coordinated Transportation." But that acronym. Funny, there is a sign on the door there, it says "No soliciting." That's gotta be good, facts don't need someone trying to tell them they are something else. But then I found it kind of interesting that there are two "one way...

Economics is sometimes called "dismal" science, and while there may be many explanations why, mine is this one: So many hifalutin economists with the most advanced scholarly credentials make the most boneheaded assertions about the way things are. I myself am a veteran economics teacher with some credentials, but my main qualification for elucidation of things the way they actually are is that I work hard to be a humble student of Scripture. I have a webzine and a blog to share some of what I discover, only to the extent that a reader may find Christ in the wisdom He shares with me as it is. I don't at all hold to any claim of anything, really. If what He sees me saying is off, that's cool, I've been corrected by Him thousands of times. Prayerfully look at His words in Scripture yourself to see . One of the main thrusts of my work is to challenge the silly assertions made by the legion of those making claim to expertise in the latest rendition of the dismal...

I just had to put in a brief blog post about this past Sunday's Pearls Before Swine  strip. You should read the whole thing to get the idea, but these two frames are golden. They nicely elucidate in very graphic detail what exactly happens when World devotees go bananas enlisting fine smiley articulate well-groomed agents of Cain to try to make things the way they want things to be around them. Again, it doesn't matter who it is . Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi. Jerome Powell or your friendly mortgage lender. Pope Francis or the fiery pithy minister at the non-profit church next door. It. Doesn't. Matter. Revere them revile them embrace them crusade for them want them assassinated in the most cruel way It. Doesn't. Matter. Your allegiance is fully with them to do the job of Lordship in your life. Scripture makes it pretty plain. So many don't get it, but here's the truth. You may think you're pretty cool (don't worry, I do too) but yo...

The biggest news of the week was how much the value of Facebook tanked in the swirl of conditions afflicting the powerful social media company. It dropped 20% in one day wiping out hundreds of millions of dollars of value assignments given it by those obsessed with finding connections with people through a computer interface. Thinking through this roller coaster phenomena related to what some call "The Masters of the Universe," I've come to the conclusion that any widely used social media platform is in a no-win situation particularly if it emanates from the World System . And Facebook does. There is no shred of evidence that the people who run Facebook or any of these other platforms have any idea who Christ is, who The Only One Who Delivers From Evil is. No wonder Google had as its motto for years "Don't do evil." They don't know what that really means and they must keep browbeating themselves with some benighted humanist conception of how to ach...

I read recently that John Schnatter has been summarily kicked out of Papa John's Pizza, the company he started. The reason: at a company conference call he uttered the n-word in reference to how, many years ago, Colonel Sanders used the n-word with impunity, after which he spoke a bit about racism and society and that racism is a bad thing in society. Several people took offense, the mainline racialist media ran with it, and it was off to the races. Goodbye, John Schnatter. He is now thoroughly ostracized, even demonized, and will never be seen or heard from again. Then there is Lil Jon. He is a famous rapper with the real name Jonathan Smith. A number of years ago he and the rest of his musical group known as the East Side Boyz put out a song called "Real [N-word] Roll Call." Just about every line in the song has the n-word in it. I'd even seen a reference to a Guinness record number of swear words, 295 of them they counted. I didn't see that this...

"I tell you this so that no one may deceive you with fine-sounding arguments." This morning I read the second chapter of Paul's letter the Colossians, and I can't find a better response to the abject idiocy that is being spouted by so many, showcased by the most benighted television news journalism organizations. Recently the New York Times put out an article essentially saying the principles of free speech don't apply to conservatives, because they are saying bad things. I wrote a home page piece  on this very thing two years ago, but the truth is the ones saying free speech doesn't apply to some are the ones to whom free speech shouldn't apply. In the piece I noted some of the more prominent ones. Here's one that gets a tremendous amount of airplay: "It is best to enlist government people to to fix income inequality by rearranging wealth in the name of charity." People are being browbeat with this terrifically destructive argument ...

In my last post I made some notes related to my latest home page piece . I'd mentioned the sudden attention offered to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now on a meteoric ascendency after winning a New York City Democratic primary with a platform that is unabashedly socialist, sodomist, and racialist. Apparently she got some really good cred joining a caravan of other totally white-clad folks near the border to bravely confront those dastardly ICE agents separating children from parents. Never mind that Mexico and Central American countries are such disasters politically, socially, and economically that the truth is the parents  are separating themselves from their children. Agreed they are under terrible distress from forces designed to keep them in despair, but each individual is responsible for his/her own actions -- abandoning your own children to smugglers as so many of them are doing borders on child abuse. The white knights of socialism feel it is better to rage and holler a...

I just uploaded my latest home page piece about how much we are fooled into believing what the World System Operatives tell us about how we should look at things. After putting it up at my webzine I've actually thought, hmm, am I saying anything new? Am I really adding anything to the conversation? Is anything I'm saying anything different from the general way everyone pretty much understands the gospel message? Then I looked around again at the news. And yep, it's true. Millions and millions and millions not only haven't the faintest idea of what's in store for them when Jesus returns, but they have even less of an idea of how they're being played by powerful forces keeping them on their particular route to Hell. There was this piece about the longest meeting ever between Pope Francis and a head of state, in this case Emmanuel Macron of France. Take a peek at what they're discussing. Essentially it is the game plan for forcing people to adopt the ...

Quite a number of years ago, something like 10 to 15 years ago, I started assembling a "flash" program knowing that I should put something graphically arranged to augment what I'm saying in my webzine . I first put it together on a PowerPoint but that was too awkward for web display, so I made one from a movie-making program. Even after that it got stuck loading and all that. Much of the delay had less to do with the technology but more with my other commitments. I did put it on a DVD because we switched out hard drives at home, thinking I could just upload it that way. I asked a friend to help me with it but he dawdled and eventually lost it. Yikes. Fortunately I had a back-up copy and after several years of just not having the time to upload it, I finally did -- with the help of another friend. I just wanted to blog to upload it here. Hope your heart is touched by the overwhelming mercy and beauty of God. __

I've thought about a lot of things I can write in this blog post to introduce my latest home page piece . I don't know. Here's about the best thing I can say right now. We've got HBO for a while, just today, and I thought I'd peek in and see some things there. Tonight I tuned in to Bill Maher's show for a bit. On there was Matt Welch, Sally Kohn, and Michael Hayden. They were discussing the standard revulsion of Donald Trump, yet the things they were saying in and around it all were just the most foolish, inane, repulsively idiotic things anyone could ever behold coming through a television set. I turned it off after even a few moments because it became unbearable. Oh I understand why they do it. I understand who's telling them the things they're saying. I understand what its purpose is. I'm given to think that God allows this to subsist because the harrowing absurdity simply has to drive people into the arms of their Savior. Still, these peopl...

I was channel surfing a bit today, and came across a C-SPAN recording of Rod Dreher's acceptance of an award by some conservative group for best book of some kind. I thought I'd look in and see what Mr. Dreher would say about what he calls "The Benedict Option." A while back I'd read a bit on it, and I reviewed some remarks about it, and of course I sat for a few minutes watching Dreher tell us precisely what this option is. Sure enough, it isn't much. All he does is overwhelm us with pithy declarations imploring us to behave more Christianly in a culture that reviles Christianism. Sounds a lot like the Catholicist Nation. The Catholicist Nation is the place where people can be very religious -- even very very Christianly religious -- yet still be light years away from what Jesus tells us about Himself and ourselves so we may have genuine spiritual contentment in any circumstance. Dreher merely bleats "Be like the Christians of old and do those whol...

I've long felt that there is only one thing that has true intrinsic value. He is God. He is it -- in and of Himself, irrespective of anything else. The only intrinsically valued thing. Everything else has instrumental value, that is, anything else has value in the perspective of the one doing the valuing. There is one qualified exception to that, however, and it is an important one. It is that one thing that is instrumentally valued by God, and in a sense does have a certain amount of intrinsic value if we see that for what it is. That other thing? The human soul. If we see the human soul the way God does, we can see it too has a measure of intrinsic value. From that we can value lots of things in lots of ways. We can value things the way we  want to, but that leads to all kinds of evil. We can also value things the way God  does, and that requires some measure of understanding of His will and purposes particularly when it comes to the way He loves us while at th...

The Oscars will be broadcast this Sunday night, and it will indeed be yet another great display of the grandest virtue signaling around. Really beautiful insecure people will say really beautiful insecure things -- and it'd be one thing if they were merely beautiful and insecure. It's a wholly other thing for their words and actions to accomplish the work of the militant religious order charged with the divine task of ruthlessly regulating the behavior of a reprobate population. A street artist who has developed quite the reputation for calling out the hypocrisy of the Hollywood leftists has made his mark again, putting up three billboards in a nod to the odds-on favorite to win best picture, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. (I had my own take on the film in my last blog post .) The one here in the photograph says quite a bit. Instead of being arrested, the accomplices will simply walk down the red carpet and beam over the virulent sycophancy, and after acceptin...