Wonderful Matters

My most recent home page piece has been uploaded, and while I really try to work at introducing it here at my blog with at least some kind of flourish, tonight I think I'm just going to have to pass. I am so exhausted from my job and running the standard family errands that I'm tucking in very early tonight. This is not to say that I don't want to jump at sharing the dozen or so different things I keep seeing out there in this delightfully smothering World, items that I'd love to highlight and remark about simply to show quite categorically that, as the entirety of my latest declares, Everyone does quite wholeheartedly follow the words and ideas and evocations of someone else somewhere. My simplest of simple questions to you is, Do you know who that individual is for you?

Michael Lewis has a wonderful new piece out in March's Vanity Fair about Ireland. He had one a few months ago on Greece, and if you know what's been going on in the financial innards of both you'd have an idea about what his exposition is about. I'm interested a bit more in the Ireland take because I am mostly Irish myself, many of my ancestors coming over here from Londonderry to build lives in the midwest. It was a brutal existence, and I think often of them and how hard they worked when I whine about this or that piddly inconvenience. I haven't read the entire piece, but I just wanted to share that as I have absorbed Lewis' words, I've had an image in my mind that is quite disturbing. It is a classic work of art that is as repulsive as it is sublimely telling. It is Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Children," and I'm not even going to reproduce it here. You can find it easily in Google's Image finder. But I have to say that I ca...

Sometimes I come across a piece of writing in the punditsphere that gets at the heart of the way the World works. All too often I think about how much I speak of meaningful things in my webzine, my blog, my ministry work; and I wonder where the articulation of support is out there. This work by Jerry Bowyer , apparently a blogger of some sort for a major business news magazine, is one such piece. It is titled simply, "The American Nomenclatura," a clear reference to those whose job it is to collect the extraordinary amounts of tribute from those who ask them to constrain their evildoing. Really, "job" is too weak a term -- it is more like ordination . Of course, please forgive me if I convey the idea that this is anywhere close to groundbreaking. That there are tribute-imposers and tribute-bearers is not that revelatory, though I do tend to try to shout that fact from the rooftops with my work. When I start to hear that the solution is something other than more ...

Recently I've been deeply pondering the idea of sowing , and in doing so I'm finding very little about it anywhere in the public discourse. No surprise. So many World inhabitants are entranced by what's blapped in the echo chamber that it doesn't get much airplay. Indeed, those so devoted to Cain and the humanistic principles of value extraction can't know a thing about it. Today I came across this piece from Bloomberg Businessweek , nothing that hasn't already been written about a zillion times through the ages. Essentially it is more of the World's pap about how puny our existence should be, generously peppered with pithy remarks from the World's authoritative priests: economists and psychologists. An added feature was a spiffy slideshow highlighting the 25 things the author and editors believe we have too much of. For your edification, they are :: big breath :: food law information books art medication longevity money education sex industry free...

As the new year opens many have their attention on the hundreds of birds dropping from the air (that or a charming homeless man suddenly scoring it big on the merits of his golden voice). The puzzlement about the bird weirdness is almost always coupled with the theories about why it has happened. Was it fireworks? Was it a freak of nature? Was it an invisible UFO? Or was it some insidious manifestation of the rank conspiracy the new world order has going to bring us into submission to tyrannically bad things? Very few pay any attention to the more subtle, more telling, and more relevent revelations regarding the necessary conspiracy, the one started millennia ago to keep murderous man's murderous activities a tiny bit more in check. They say this year many local governments will be declaring bankruptcy, that even some state governments will be defaulting on their overwhelming debt. I hear these things and think about the information found in any comprehensiv...

Now is the time when Christmas things occupy everyone's attention in some measure. No matter how extremely anti-Christian-things one is, he or she cannot avoid noting the difference in the way things are in December. Even as much as a lot of that Christmasy stuff is driven by those wholly given over to Roman Catholic commitment, it still does direct the observer to one single truth: That God entered our realm of existence as a man with one single purpose. He was to die in order to shed His blood as the one single sacrifice that would cleanse us of our sin and rescue us from the grip of death. How much of a contrast that was to the signing ceremony the president of the United States held yesterday, when he enacted into law the rescinding of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy of keeping an individual's proclaimed and presumed homosexuality from affecting military activity. Apparently the administration and defense department will work out how it will work ...

So, exactly what are you going to do with the information that was recently published on WikiLeaks? You know what I'm talking about. The information that reveals the United States uses strongarm tactics in its diplomatic efforts. That it uses what is effectively subversive espionage to engage other nations. That it is wholly devious and underhanded in its strategy to gain the upper hand in all negotiations relating to the interest of maintaining stalwart national security. Are you a Chicken Little who's screeching that the sky is falling? Are you a timid traveler on the Yellow Brick Road bleating "Lions and tigers and bears oh my!"? Are you dutifully rivited to the World's megaphone holders who are either soaked in denial, steeped in rationalization, or immersed in arrogance spouting some plap about being above it all? Some may say those who cheer on the WikiLeakers represent a second kind of person, one who proudly bellows "I knew it all along, those...