This is Psalm 51 set to music–the Psalm David wrote when he realized how grievously he’d sinned in taking Bathsheba for his wife after arranging for her husband, Uriah, to be killed in battle. We all need to prayer this prayer: “Create in me a clean heart and a right spirit.”
Requested by Erlene, sung by girls from Fountainview Academy, and filmed on Moonstone Beach, California–Create in Me a Clean Heart.
Sorry, Doc, but you are cut from the team. Vamoose! And don’t let the door hit you in the kiester as you leave.
I thought it might be nice to give some space on this blog to someone who believes what he hears from the nooze media and Hollywood; but heck, we’ve already got Joe Collidge for that. And there are still millions of nooze-eaters out there who think Hillary shoulda been president only darn old Donald Trump did Collusion With The Russians.
They’ve already got a voice, and more of a voice than is good for America. Dr. Credulous, you’ll just have to go back to teaching Intersectional Gender Fluid Superhero Self-Stimulation at Harvard.
‘Cause we don’t need you here.
I’m ashamed that I was once a “journalist,” a newspaper reporter and editor, back in the day. To be sure, in the 1970s it was still an honorable profession in which we who practiced it took pride. Things that are routinely done today, and called “journalism,” would have once moved real reporters to contempt. We would have laughed off the press table anybody who behaved like that. But nobody did.
Well, that’s all changed.
Poynter, an “institute” funded by the Dark Lord, George Soros, supposedly for “training writers and reporters,” has listed 29 top conservative news providers as “unreliable” and “un-news” (https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/techwatch/corinne-weaver/2019/05/02/journalism-institute-poynter-tries-blacklist-29). The list was compiled by some commie who works for the Far Left hate group, Southern Poverty Law Center. One might almost think the whole thing was a joke.
But of course the newest thing in journalism, the newest technique, is to write up the story before you do the interviews, before you see the video, before you have any of the information–because as long as the story fits the “narrative”–modern-day nooze-talk for big fat lie–you’ve done your job.
This is what happened in two notoriously shameful examples of narrative journalism–the Covington High School kids and the Jussie Smollett case. In both, the alleged journalists in the nooze media–along with Democrat politicians and assorted Hollywood losers–dove in headfirst: only to discover, quite soon afterward, that the story didn’t happen like the way they were reporting it. They didn’t care.
Once upon a time, even reporters who were total wastes of space in their personal lives still tried to live up to standards–standards like accuracy, thoroughness, truth-telling, fair play, that simply don’t exist anymore.
The result is a mainstream nooze media that’s unworthy of our trust: we know they’re lying to us. I call it the Walter Duranty school of journalism, after the New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer for being Josef Stalin’s cheerleader and public relations agent.
Remember Dan Rather and his “fake but accurate” story of George W. Bush and the National Guard? Even as late as 2004, a big nooze gasbag like Rather could (and did!) actually lose his job for bamboozling the public and getting caught. That was only 15 years ago!
The speed with which our mainstream “journalism” has deteriorated is a frightening thing to contemplate.
“Yes, master! America is bad…”
It’s not a conspiracy theory when you’ve seen it with your own eyes, and heard it with your own ears.
The Far Left crazies who own the public “education” establishment hate America, our America, and want to “change” it beyond recognition. And we’re not only letting them do it–we’re paying for it!
I’m still wondering what would happen if they gave a rap concert at a Bernie Sanders rally.
Then I remembered hardly anybody ever comes to Democrat rallies.
But they would definitely draw a crowd if they offered gangsta rap along with the open borders, global warming, and reparations.
We do have some hymn requests today, but first, this–Come, Thou Almighty King, sung by the congregation and choir at Grace Community Church, Sun Valley, California. This hymn was with me all last night–and that means “share it.”
If you’re new here, we like to start each blogging day with a hymn, and we love to take hymn requests. So if you’ve got one, just leave a comment anywhere and we’ll do the rest.
They’ll play with dogs or cats or even people: chickens like a good time.
One thing they don’t appear to like at all is their reflection in a mirror. This is proof that chickens are not narcissistic. Which I’m sure is a relief to us all.
I found myself, as I was reading, thinking, “I like this!” I still thought so by the time I’d finished it.
We know author Allison Reid as “Weavingword,” a friend of this blog, and Shards of Faith is a “companion book” to the three books of her Wind Rider Chronicles. Somewhere between a novella and a novel, with a length of some 45,000 words, Shards of Faith takes us back in time to events preceding the main story line. It’s sort of a side trip, focused on Broguean the Bard, who last appeared as a minor character in Book 3, Visions of Light and Shadow.
In Visions Broguean is middle-aged, an entertainer who makes the rounds of taverns, not someone whom most people would take seriously–except it becomes evident that he is hiding behind a carefully constructed facade, and has a secret. In Shards we find out what that secret is.
Broguean has revoked his monk’s vows and left the monastery–run by a corrupt and evil abbot, and a prior who goes on to become the chief villain in the trilogy so far–to become a bard and a heavy drinker. He has abandoned a heritage which seems too high for him: he believes himself to be unworthy of it.
But the leaders of the faithful clergy have not forgotten whom he really is, and wind up recruiting him as a secret agent in their battle against evil men aligned with dark supernatural forces; and the job turns out to be vastly more dangerous than any of them bargained for. In the course of his adventures, Broguean has to come to terms with the conflict between what he is and what he ought to be–and that’s what makes this book special.
Once upon a time an author would have included all this in the main body of the story, via flashbacks, dialogue, etc. That can get messy. The companion book is a way to impart this information without interrupting the flow of the main story. The only problem with it is that if you read it as a stand-alone book, you won’t be reading it in context.
Ms. Reid has come a long way in her mastery of characterization; meanwhile, as usual, her quasi-medieval setting is authentic and convincing. There’s still an awful lot we don’t know about the main story–like, for instance, why the bad guys are calling monsters into the world, what they hope to gain from its destruction–but we hope that will be remedied in the next installment or two.
I like stories in which ordinary, believable people–not superheroes!–are called upon to do extraordinary things: because they have to, there’s no getting out of it, and they make do with the resources that God provides for them, sustained by their faith in His Word. Need I mention that every heroic act in all of human history so far has been performed by a real person, not a superhero?
Even when you’ve got a hero on the scene, even when you’ve got King Arthur, he can’t accomplish much without the help of unnamed, unsung men and women who share his vision, fight for it, work for it, and sacrifice for it. There’s way too much fantasy whose authors don’t get this: but Allison Reid does.
Why does this guy call himself “Beto”? I think it’s Sanskrit for “Jackass.”
Anyway, “Beto” O’Rourke, seeking the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination, has upped the end o’ the world from twelve years to only ten–“the ten years that we have left to us,” he prattled (https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/04/29/orourke-scientists-say-we-have-ten-years-left-to-make-bold-change-on-climate/).
But we can even now save ourselves, he gibbered, with a “bold change” in our energy policies and a mere $5 trillion spent on getting rid of all “emissions”–I wish someone would get rid of his emissions–by 2050.
Hey, Beto! Did you flunk arithmetic in school? It’s 2019, right? Well, how much is 2019 plus 10–“the ten years that we have left to us”? [Waits 30 minutes for answer.] No, no–let me tell you: 2019 + 10 is 2029. That comes before 2050. So if you completely change our economy by 2050, according to your calculations, the world already ended 21 years before!
Revolutionary new idea: forbid politicians from being active in politics. We don’t want their kind running our country anymore. There has to be something you can spray at them to make them go away.
This is the latest thing sweeping the business world: banning the handshake (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8930608/handshakes-banned-workplace-rules-sexual-harassment-claims/).
It’s not totally irrational. The idea is to “ban all forms of physical contact to avoid confusion about what kind of touch is appropriate”–because that’s how you wind up with some #MeToo nut filing a sexual harassment lawsuit. Those can be expensive. So you just ban all contact whatsoever, and you’re covered.
Until they come at you for verbal harassment, microaggression, unwanted eye contact, or thinking bad thoughts.
Meanwhile, a survey says that three out of four people in business want the handshake ban. We are at liberty to disbelieve that.
You know what’s so weird about this whole thing? It’s like pole dancing in a burqa. They want to be puritans and libertines at the same time. All these new rules restricting virtually any form of male-female interaction are drawn up against a backdrop of the most widespread sexual anarchy ever seen in history. I mean, if you can get through the day without seeing any pornographic images at all, that’s a pretty neat trick. And they start on you in first grade–with all the gender stuff, “you can be a boy one day and a girl the next, depending on how you feel,” invitations to your teacher’s same-sex “marriage,” there’s no bottom to this pit.
Our culture is racing off in two opposite directions at the same time.
May the Lord defend us.