Wonderful Matters

Tonight on the cable television I enjoyed a wonderful Looney Tunes cartoon featuring Sylvester the Cat trying to teach his reluctant son to chase, catch, and ::gulp::  eat a bird who was the boy's friend. It was really fun to watch, good belly-laughs throughout. Whatever happened to those marvelous Warner Bros cartoons... ::sigh:: I thought I'd then tune into CBS' FBI  television show. I don't think I'd watched anything by a traditionally major network (ABC, NBC, CBS) for years, seriously. I thought I'd tune in just to see what these things are like nowadays. I watched about 20 minutes of it and it was what I thought. Standard crime story about an attempt to stop terrorists but now involving a whole crew of young, hip, racially and sexually diverse FBI officers dutifully on the job. Here's the difference from the old Mannix  episodes I used to watch when I was a kid. These guys could find out everything they needed to know about anyone with computer systems....

Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots is being said about this Orlando night club shooting. I've already assembled a good sized chunk of words writing about it, back in 2012. Yeah, back then . Same stuff still applies. And the same deafness, and blindness, and dumbness reigns all about. Yesterday I wept some more, but not for the 50 murdered victims. Oh, I do grieve for them, but I weep for those alive right now sucked into the World's conception of everything that's happening. I weep for them because their fate will soon enough be the fate of the perpetrator and the victims. Confused already? Maybe. Maybe if your mind is calcified with intractably regimented Catholicist principles it is. In fact, it will continue to be so throughout the rest of this post. Unless, of course, you want to take the red pill and enter the real world. That's up to you. It is simple. Every single one of those people in that night club were sinners. It wasn't because they were...

I thought I'd peek around the web to see where I could find the exact string of words "Islam is a product of Rome". I found them in only two places, one of which was from a gal's inactive blog in the comments section of a 2008 post titled "Wussy Christianity," something like that. Of course the post itself was about how ineffectual modern Christianity is at truly having an impact and yeah, stuff like that. True enough, and related to something I'd thought about regarding my last webzine home page piece . I'd thought about the point I'd made about loving one's enemy, and thought, "Hmm, wonder what men  think about that?" I thought that because I know a lot of men consider being manly as punching people they don't like. On the other hand there are quite a few men who go the far opposite way, because we do live in such a feminized culture. Not that they're homosexual or anything, just that they consider most anything "ma...

My family and I recently spent a week in Walt Disney World, and there is enough Catholicist Nation fodder there for a writing episode at another time. I will admit much of it is quite fun, and after we returned from a six-day binge we had to detox. I popped in a wonderful film, The Incredibles , something my children have seen a half-a-dozen times but I’d only seen once, back when it was in the theaters. As I watched it I was intrigued by its similarity to Watchmen , which I’d webzined on last month. I have to believe Brad Bird, the guy who put The Incredibles together, had to have been very familiar with Watchmen , because the Pixar film is a virtual children’s version of the classic graphic novel. At one point in The Incredibles the superheroes are outlawed because they are saving people who don’t want to be saved. What do you think about this idea? I ask my Government students this discussion question: “We all have a right not to be beat up for no reason. But what do you think if ...

A recent John Podhoretz column was brought to my attention as I listened to a bit of talk radio this morning, and the piece exposed the wimpiness of the preeminent powers to fight bad things, like terrorism. These powers have tons of military strength and weaponry, they just don't use it because they're too timidly fearful of world opinion. Lots of media coverage of children lying dead around rubble can be a wee counterproductive. Today's Rome (embodied in the U.S./U.K./and, in some sense, Israel alliance) certainly doesn't act like the Rome of old. When Rome of old conquered a territory, it summarily executed every single remotely powerful individual (after a bit of parading some of them about town), dragging the main leader to the feet of the emperor who very graciously said, "You may serve me, or be dead also." That kind of fixed everything. Please know that I don't say yea or nay to this activity in any way, for my Lord has asked me to live by the prec...

A ton of news coverage has saturated the public square regarding the conflict in the Middle East between Lebanon and Israel. Yesterday there was a press conference featuring President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and I found something Blair said worth noting. He said, essentially, that the fight against terrorism would be like this, and that there is no other way to fight it, so we must keep doing what we're doing. The item that struck me was "There is no other way." Well, yes, there is another way . The other way is Jesus Christ, seeing how much He loves you and in that moving you to love another with that love. If everyone did that (oh this is just too easy) then there would be no violence . But Blair, being a sworn servant of Cain, hasn't a clue about that other way . He only knows of the seven-fold vengeance he must help exact against rebels such as the terrorists in Lebanon, and he continues to enable the destructive activities of the plainly ruthl...

Right after it was revealed that the National Security Agency is paying phone companies for copies of all of their customers' phone records, using them to look for "patterns" to help them fight terrorism, the Washington Post took a poll and found that 56% said "it was appropriate for the news media to have disclosed the existence of this secret government program." I took this stat from Tim Rutten's media column in Saturday's LA Times. Rutten makes the case that, really, it is up to the people to decide, but gives a great deal of credit to the press as a sort of clearinghouse for what people are to know about government. Thing is, as much as Rutten tries to objectively detail today's conditions of information dissemination, he doesn't admit that he and the media is a critical part of what the government does. He may even think he is an unbias reporter, sworn to serve the public as a check against tyrannical government, but he is actually a pawn i...