Wonderful Matters

Recently there was a piece written about the exploitation of people's financial sentiments in Quillette  called "From Panic to Prudence." It got a bit into the history of it all, and pointed out that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was a contributing factor to the Panic of 1907 since the desire to rebuild the city led to an overwhelming demand for capital. The strain was simply too great and the economy couldn't handle it. Of course there were several more complexities involved, yes, but as I thought about it I thought about the idea of risk . Building things on a fault line carries with it risk. The thing risk  has been mentioned a lot in what people have said or written about the most recent financial disaster. What to do, what to do with that thing risk. And I thought, huh, we could go far to identify all the things that comprise that thing.  I know of something that is the absolute worst kind of risk -- much worse than an earthquake. Man's sin. Like Jesus, ...

The Oscar awards were on the other night and while a long time ago when I was a starry-eyed kid enjoying the movies and actually getting into those awards, now I don't pay any attention to any of it at all. I actually looked and I could only find four decent movies that won the best picture award over the past 20 years or so. The rest were either garbage or, if I didn't see them, they were about a theme that was garbage. For instance a film I did not see,  12 Years a Slave,  may have been a wonderful story about a courageous  man seeking his freedom in a world of injustice -- I get all that, that's fine. But the only reason that film got as much acclaim as it did was it was merely another way for the entertainment virtue-signaling hegemony to lambast white people for being so evil, and to augment the continuing modern-day witch hunt of anyone who doesn't buy into the Frankfurt School Critical Theory dogma that is destroying everything. Most of the films have that increa...

There's this amazing proverb, 16th one in the 14th chapter of them, right there mixed in the middle of all of them in the Book of Proverbs so it is easy to skid past, but it is perfect for the financial shitstorm we find ourselves in right now. Oh, don't get me wrong, it is the same shitstorm everyone has pretty much been in for all time, well, except for the rich and powerful, but well, it is the same one. Anyway, the proverb: "The wise fear the Lord and shun evil, but a fool is hotheaded and yet feels secure." Yep. There it is. The entirety of financial scamming at the highest levels of political, financial, commercial, and ecclesiastical levels ever.  What it truly in the heart of every single human since time began . The key to what we are beholding more gruesomely visible right now is that the financial sector in every form would love for you to feel secure about how they're handling your value assignments. Are you valuable and is that represented by some kin...

Did you know there was another The Shining  motion picture in the works, abandoned after  Doctor Sleep just didn't cut it at the box office? It was a prequel of sorts about Dick Hallorann, the Overlook Hotel's chef and quasi-caretaker who, of course, has "the shining." This again is the ability to sense the supernatural, particularly the evil that can be out and about working to snatch our souls. I'd previously remarked that anyone can have this ability, in the Christian sense it is discernment , simply identifying what is righteous out there as opposed to, yes, I am not ashamed to say it, as opposed to the stupid.  As I wrote in my home page piece this season , I wrestle with calling anyone a fool because in the fifth chapter of Matthew Jesus warns against it. I do believe, however, that he was distinctly warning against calling someone a fool when you yourself are just as much of a fool, and often by doing so you are simply stirring dissension and not working t...

Yesterday  in introducing my current home page piece at my webzine , I wrote a bit about the film The Shining, which was on cable television as it is just about once every two or three months. I took a peek at it for a bit to remark about a simple truth, indeed one of those Truth Rules that are so easily dismissed but can be much more readily identified if people were to use their God-given intuition more. That Truth Rule: Stupidity is evil . One reason it is sloughed off so much is that many tend to give the Stupid a pass on their foolishness. Hey,  they spout, they're stupid, they don't know any better. This extraordinarily common attitude is not only just as evil, but it seems to be more and more prominent out there in what should be some kind of dignified civil society. While it is true that it does take some work to have a bit of wisdom, as well as the much more difficult task of identifying one's own stupidity so it may be addressed, the key is seeking deliverance fro...

Using "The Shining" is not hard, really, when simply identifying stupid people. The trick is you've got to ask The Deliverer to deliver you from your own propensity to be stupid. That  can be hard. I mention The Shining  because while I don't think it is the greatest horror movie ever, I do appreciate it. I wrote a bit about it in a blog a while back. There is a sequel too, Doctor Sleep , which is pretty good but too overbearing and self-aware, I think. It is weird, Stanley Kubrick can get away with those long drawn-out scenes full of meaning and intensity, just by the way he handles them. Other directors simply can't, which is why Doctor Sleep has great potential but just isn't even close in quality. Anyway, what makes both films compelling is they do make palpably real the malevolence that exists in the supernatural world. In film you can do it, though again I think Kubrick does it best with the people Jack and Danny encounter in The Shining . In Doctor Sle...