Year: 2013

Don’t Give In

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

The depressing news this morning is that a judge in Colorado has ruled that the Christian owners of a small bakery must obey homosexuals who demand that the bakery create a cake to celebrate a same-sex parody of marriage.

Is there anything a judge can’t tell us to do, anymore?

So here Christians must actively promote something which they believe is an abomination, thoroughly repugnant to their moral sense… because a judge says so.

I want to see what happens when a judge orders a Muslim restaurant to serve pork chops.

But for now, either you do something you are sure is a sin, because a judge says so, or you refuse to do it and you let them put you out of business, destroy your livelihood.

What can I say? Stand fast. The Bible warns us that we will suffer for Christ’s sake. I don’t want to suffer. I don’t know anyone who does. But somewhere along the line, we will all have to either stand or fall.

I say, let’s stand here.

Fame Isn’t So Famous Anymore

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Once upon a time, and not so long ago, people who never went to a horse race still knew the names of famous horses–Man O’ War, Whirlaway, Sea Biscuit, Silky Sullivan, Secretariat, and on and on. But if my life depended on it, I couldn’t name a single horse racing today.

People don’t fare much better. If you never picked up a golf club, never watched the game on TV, still you knew the names of famous golfers–Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus.

Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano weren’t boxing anymore when I was a kid, but everybody knew their names. You might not know the first thing about baseball, but unless you were living under the polar ice pack, you knew the name of Mickey Mantle. Capablanca died years before my birth; but before I knew how to pronounce his name, let alone knew how to play chess, I knew he was a famous chess champion.

So who are the great golfers of today? The great boxers? Who fills Mickey Mantle’s niche? Who care’s who’s the world chess champ?

This is very odd. We live in a culture that’s crazy for celebrities, that generates celebrities: where the most common answer given to pollsters asking high school kids, “What do you want to be as an adult?”, is “Famous!” (Famous for doing what, don’t ask.) This is the age of the Kardashians, who are famous without having done anything at all.

Our celebrities–remember “Snooky”?–streak across the sky like meteors and burn out just before they crash. We can’t remember what they were doing up there in the first place.

Remember when Simon and Garfunkel sang, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”

No one is going to sing, “Where have you gone, Honey Boo-Boo?”

What Do You Think? (Or Do You Just Not Think At All?)

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I saw a documentary in which the following exchange took place.

Q: “Do you believe in Global Warming?”

A: “Yes, I do!”

Q: “Why?”

A: [Pause. Blush. Look all around, as if there might be a teleprompter handy. Shrug. More pause. And then…] tee-hee-hee!

Or we might ask, “Do you believe in Evolution?” And the usual answer will be something like, “Oh, yes! Why, Evolution’s scientific!” We might then ask, “How do you know it to be true?” Pick one:

“I saw it on TV.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

“I read about it somewhere.”

Or, best of all, “Whaddya mean, how do I know it’s true? It’s science! That’s how I know! Science is always true! Always! Yhaaaaah!” [Falls backward, flops uncontrollably; pink foam issues from ears]

They won’t believe something is true because the Bible says so. But something must be true because “Science” says so.

Churches please take note.

 

Pitting Americans Against Each Other

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So the other day our Community Organizer-in-Chief gave a speech in which he said we Americans have got to get out of the habit of thinking the government can’t abolish “income inequality.”

In all my life, I’ve never seen a president trying so hard to turn some groups of citizens against others. We have “income inequality,” he said, because “the rich”–that is, anyone who has a dime more than you do–are screwing us. If only we give him still more power beyond that which he has already scooped into his hot little hands, he’ll make everybody equal.

Well, why doesn’t he start by giving you and me some of the colossal fortune he enjoys? As we speak, he is preparing for his annual vacation to Hawaii–as distinct from the many other vacations he takes throughout the year–starting with a luxurious flight aboard Air Force One that will cost the rest of us some millions of dollars. Does he mean to imply that, if it weren’t for those selfish rich people, we could all enjoy annual vacations in Hawaii?

Will micro-management by the government provide us all with second homes on pleasant beaches? Will we all get to kick back at Martha’s Vineyard every summer? Will all of us–even the laziest, most incompetent, and most dishonest of us–wind up living large on someone else’s money?

If, by some miracle of divine providence, America lasts another thousand years, we will never live down the disgrace that this man was our president.

 

A Kid Flick That Gets Under Your Skin

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I’m tired of writing about wicked idiots who want to control our lives, so today I’ll take a break to write about something worthwhile.

A Bear Named Winnie (2004) is a simple, straightforward children’s movie starring Michael Fassbender and David Suchet. My wife and I watched it the other day, and we have both dreamed of it since. This uncomplicated little tale is haunting us!

It’s the true story of an orphaned bear cub adopted by Canadian soldiers on their way to fight in France in World War I, and how the bear becomes the inspiration for A. Milne’s classic, Winnie the Pooh. (Helpful hint: if you’ve never read Winnie the Pooh, drop whatever you’re doing and go get a copy!)

We tend to find World War I stories unbearably poignant–such a waste of life as was never before seen in the civilized world. But this movie doesn’t dwell on what we already know to be horrible. I was thankful to be spared the gory details, and almost flabbergasted to see a happy ending.

Suchet kind of steals the show as a drunken, incompetent, upper-class twit of a general; but really, the story’s much more important than the acting.

And I think it’s the musical score that really got under my skin. The film’s main musical theme is a lovely old hymn, This is My Father’s World (one of my favorites: never fails to bring a tear to my eye). There is also a WWI soldiers’ song sung to the tune of What a Friend We Have in Jesus, another favorite hymn. If these two hymns don’t move you, you’d better have yourself checked out: you might be dead.

So, days after seeing the film, the music is still playing in my mind, and Patty and I have both had dreams in which we were petting bear cubs–and if you’re tired of reading and hearing about bloodsucking moronic vampires murdering our country, A Bear Named Winnie will soothe your jangled soul.

 

Bob Dylan Sued for ‘Race Hatred’

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From the Thin-Skinned Overbearing Idiocy Dept., by way of The Guardian, Dec. 3, 2013: Music legend Bob Dylan is being sued by a Croatian group for saying “Serbs can sense Croatian blood.”

Dylan made the remark in an interview last year in Rolling Stone, in which he was trying, in his clumsy way, to say that racism has been a bad thing for America.

So… he gives an interview to an American magazine… and Croatians are suing him… for violating the French law against “racial hatred.”

This much foolishness speaks for itself.

But really–do we have so few laws in our own country, that we have to be made vulnerable to prosecution under the laws of every other country, too? I mean, how many Chinese laws have you broken today, without even knowing it? Maybe you should be sued under Saudi Arabia’s law against not being a Muslim. And you can’t hardly say anything without violating some Canadian hate speech law.

One-world-government anus-heads will only be happy when everyone’s mouth is sewed shut. Except their own, of course.

And I’m sure I’ve broken someone’s law by writing that.

Scientist Says Chimps Mated With Pigs to Produce Humans (Not a Satire)

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Sometime in the distant past, according to a hot-shot scientist who is billed as “a leading geneticist,” chimpanzees had sex with pigs–uh, why?–and produced hybrid offspring that were the origin of the human race. See the report in The Daily Mail, Dec. 2, 2013, ‘Humans evolved after a female chimpanzee mated with a pig’: Extraordinary claim made by American geneticist.

Dr. Eugene McCarthy–no relation to the hippy-dippy 60s politician of the same name–is a former professor in the Dept. of Genetics at the University of Georgia and currently the director of Macroevolution.net. He has also suggested that the duck-billed platypus arose as a bird+mammal hybrid.

I have become radically skeptical of Science.

But, hey, let’s do some science! Let’s get a female chimpanzee to mate with a pig and see what happens. What? The chimp doesn’t find the pig attractive? Well, send her to public school for a while. If all else fails, we can try artificial insemination. Go ahead, do it.

What a nice guy I am. I have resisted the temptation to indulge in all the obvious wisecracks. But of course I can’t be responsible for any comments made by readers.

Y’know, we believe a great many things because Scientists have told us that they’re true.

What if a lot of them aren’t?

Thou Shalt Not Say This or That

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One of my readers alerts me that Facebook has deleted a comment by “a fit mom” to the effect that “plus-size lingerie models” are not good role models to exalt in the midst of an obesity epidemic.

Funny, isn’t it? When the Worst Lady or Mayor Bloomberg tell us what we can or can’t eat, they get high fives from all the media for knowing what’s best for us ignorant serfs. But let one of the plebs make a similar comment, and Facebook brands it “hate speech.”

In one of the many videos taken of our country’s “Black Friday” capers, we see an immense fat woman trying on a wig while sprawled on the department store floor in the midst of the impromptu rugby scrum staged by her fellow customers. A lot of them are roly-poly, too. It’s not the kind of visual image that helps you sleep at night.

How did so many people get to be so fat? Is this the self-portrait that today’s America wants to pass on to tomorrow’s?

Like so many kids in the 1950s, the very first pet I had was a goldfish. And the very first thing they told you in the goldfish book was not to over-feed the little fellow: or he’ll just keep eating and eating until one morning he’s floating belly-up and not smelling too good.

A goldfish overeats because he’s only a fish and doesn’t know any better. But I think people are overeating to fill a hole in their spirits that cannot be filled by food or video games or any of the other goodies they’re ready to kill each other to obtain on Black Friday.

Behold–50 years of public schooling, self-esteem, entitlement, moral imbecility, and replacing God with false gods and idols has done its work only too well: a mob of fat people rolling around on the floor, fighting over things they don’t need.

Our Swell Post-Christian World

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I think I’ll watch Miracle on 34th Street this afternoon. It’s a wonderful fairy tale. It’s also a great movie about fairy tales.

In my time the biggest fairy tale ever told is that the world doesn’t need Christianity anymore, it can get along just fine without Jesus.

Uh-uh. Yeah, sure looks it. How many stories have I seen this morning–just this morning–of people rioting, stabbing each other, having apoplexies, etc., during the course of their “Black Friday” shopping? There was no such thing as “Black Friday,” not so long ago. Some ad men invented it, and people went for it. You can’t get them to hear the Gospel, but they’ll kill and be killed for Black Friday.

And then there’s the rest of the news: the new urban craze, “Knockout,” which used to be known as unprovoked assault and battery; our elected officials’ most current lies; this new sexual liberation movement, that new wrinkle in public education to support the new sexual liberation movement…

Yeah. Post-Christian civilization.

Even if Christianity were a fairy tale, which it isn’t, it would still be a thousand times better than what our ruling nincompoops are pleased to call reality. But it isn’t the Bible that’s the fairy tale.

It says something about our wise men and our scholars and our whoopee crowd that they can’t even make up a fairy tale that doesn’t suck.

A New Kind of Fantasy

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Sometimes I think I would enjoy writing a fantasy novel in which the lead character is a coward and an idiot who can’t do anything right. For instance, the Knight turns to him and says, “Soon the battle will begin.” And Mr. Screw-up answers, “What? What did you say? Did you say battle? Man, no way–I’m outta here!” Think Bill Paxton in Aliens or True Lies, and you’ve got exactly the kind of character I mean.

Or, “Sir, did you not know that this is Camelot, and the stronghold of King Arthur?”

“Camel lot? Like you can buy used camels here? Fooey! And what’s this king, Arthur Whatsisname? King of what? Why can’t anyone around here talk sense?”

This could be fun. But it could also get very tiresome: the writer would have to take care not to cross the line. And of course, in addition to the fun of shaking up fantasy cliches, there would have to be a point to the story.

I think some of you can probably guess what that would be.

Here’s hoping you all had a nice Thanksgiving.