Wonderful Matters

Do you remember in your college humanities class learning about the Baroque period, that time around the 1600s when everything belonging to the rich and powerful became garishly ornate? All the art, design, architecture, and music just got so much more decoratively entrancing. If you remember the details about why that all happened at that time, it was really all just part of the Counter Reformation, a way for the Roman Catholic Church to augment its performance art duties in the most attractive way it could. For if you remember the Reformation  Reformation, Rome noticed a lot of people reading the Bible and seeing God's Kingdom was nothing like what Rome told them it was. So, to rein them back in, Rome had to do something to make things more appealing, more dazzling, more compelling to keep them in the club and paying good money to keep the religious racket thriving.  All the spectacle of all that Rome has promoted through the centuries is no different than what happens in th...

I felt like posting about another article from Brownstone , this one based on the ideas shared in the classic American novel The Grapes of Wrath. I have not read the book and all I know about the film is it stars Henry Fonda as an exasperated Tom Joad, a farmer afflicted with the unyielding vicissitudes of farm life, including that of powerful financial exploiters. He mentions one part that is quite instructive about the reality of The Monolith, that millennia-old entity that does the proper work of prosecuting the standard evildoing of a World System devoted populace. The bank is poised to take his farm, and he fervently exhibits a righteously justified resistance, speaking to the bulldozer driver about to raze his place. The author of the piece does make mention about having enough courage to just get out there and labor really hard to make change happen with the very best rhetorical convincing with the help of a lot of others who feel really really bad about how exploitive The Monol...

In my web surfing this morning I came across a post from someone linking to this movie scene . It is from Margin Call,  a film that came out a scant three years after the latest major financial crisis in 2008. I'd blogged on it already a few times before. They'd linked to it with a remark something along the lines of Here we go again... The scene is easily one of the most horrifying scenes anyone could behold. No, there are no wild knife-slashings and gushing blood-spewings, there are no roundhouse kicks to heads with teeth flying about, there are no machine gun rounds being unloaded onto evil gorks or dorks or orcs -- oh yeah that's what the ugly evil dudes are called in Lord of the Rings -- as the victims' bodies gyrate to the impact of the bullets smacking against them. No, what makes the scene so harrowing is that all the perpetrators are wearing spiffy $1,000 suits sitting pleasantly though quite uncomfortably in a big-city office-building high-floor plush meeting...

Recently an interview response by the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for the president of the United States went viral. It was only a couple minutes long, this take by Jared Bernstein, and it was essentially this: Question: "Why does the United States government have to borrow its own currency?" Answer: "Um, well, err, umm, I mean, hmm, urrp, umm, blippity-blappity-oopy. [Long pauses throughout]." He was mercilessly ridiculed by the legion of trollees remarking quite viciously throughout the cybersphere, and as I sometimes do I will look at the comments and see if anyone gets it. Most times they don't, by miles. Most people like to post thinking they are blapping about how genius they are but they are only demonstrating how ill-informed or just plain stupid they are themselves. Well, I shouldn't call people fools. No matter how many billions there are of them, I really shouldn't. But they are indeed exploited by the System Ops to be such. A...

I caught this very interesting piece over at ZeroHedge , one that highlights remarks by SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. He points out that of all the bountiful benefits that this thing most people call "A.I." does, there is indeed one major item that may very well not be so desired after all. Makes perfect sense . Might want to take that Bible off your shelf for further reference. Seriously. Gensler points out that with the "A.I," or what-should-be-called SPIT for SuperDuperReallySuperDuper-Fast Processing Information Technology being used to reeeeeeeally  do a spit-shine job of peeking around at everyone's financial affairs -- -- And finding out how absolutely & thoroughly, wickedly & deceitfully arranged they really are ... ...That when the SPIT shit hits the fan and all of it gets uncovered, well, you know. It's easy. That would be very very very bad for everyone. It'll be that contagion that everyone fears, that thing that will just do the worst a...

When I was a kid and I was out and about with my family, we might see someone doing something painfully unusual, often it was willfully displaying large parts of their unclothed body in public (sometimes it was their entire body!) My mother would almost always instruct us that this individual was an exhibitionist , and she explained. These kind of people have a pathological need to do something like that to gain attention, to elicit some kind of response from others -- they are terribly insecure and wounded individuals who must act out in attempt to cover for that. Today you hear about such individuals as being narcissistic , but I think that is not quite as good a descriptive term as exhibitionist. By virtue of the definition derived from the original mythology, a narcissist should be happy spending the day looking at his or her image in the mirror. The exhibitionist, on the other hand, goes out and commands people feed his pathology. I saw a meme quote the other day and it somewhat a...

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 is 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...