Category: Pop Culture

Intellectuals Say the Darnedest Things

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Ignorant louts do spout a lot of foolishness; but for pure, 24-carat inanity, give me a Ph. D. every time.

In the December 2013 of Hillsdale College‘s newsletter, Imprimis, Larry Arnn quotes this blather from the Teachers Guide for Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition, 1991, published by the outfit that administers the SAT tests, written by “an English professor from Agnes Scott College in Georgia.”  If you’re wondering why Arnn does not identify this clown by name, read on.

The quotation is rather long, so I’ll just give you the italicized portions.

“Instruction has become less a matter of transmittal of an objective and culturally sanctioned body of knowledge, and more a matter of helping individuals learn to construct their own realities.”

Whoa! Aren’t the loony bins full of individuals who construct their own realities? But Kluge Hans continues:

“Contemporary educators no doubt hope students will shape values and ethical systems… acquiring principles that will help them live in a mad, mad world.”

Does this SAT-wallah understand what he’s just said?

First he’s going to teach students they can construct their own reality–as in, “I am the rightful heir to the Throne of England,” or “See that beautiful woman over there? She is madly in love with me, even though she denies it and tries to act like she hates me.”

And then, having taught his students to be mad, he sorrows that that world is mad!

If you have children in high school or college, chances are they’re being “educated” by dunderheads like this one. And at great cost.

And just to clue you in, Prof. Whoever You Are–there ain’t but one reality. It was here before you were born and it’ll be here after you die. So deal with it.

(PS: Kluge Hans [“Clever Hans”] was a horse who was said to be able to do arithmetic, around a hundred years ago. It turned out to be a hoax.)

How Tyranny Grows by Little-Bitty Steps

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Hey, has anybody noticed a subtle shift, in recent years, in the way laws are written, and in the kinds of things they aim to accomplish?

It has long been that most law told us what we couldn’t do, and as long as we refrained from such actions, we were left alone.

But the new trend in law, throughout the Western world, is to tell us what we must do. And we are not left alone.

You must purchase health insurance, whether you want it or not, or else pay a fine.

You must pay for someone else’s contraceptives, and even pay for abortions, no matter what violence it does to your conscience.

You must actively join in promoting homosexuality–by catering a sodomite parody of marriage, or allowing your child to be taught that sodomy is a virtue, or hiring a freaky “transgender” waitress for your restaurant, etc.–even if you are convinced that it’s an abomination and a sin.

It’s getting so the only ones who are safe from the law are criminals.

Do You Worship Science?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

You can learn a lot by chatting on the Internet. Here is one thing I’ve learned.

Most people, including most Christians, consider “Science” (whatever they might mean by the term) to be the highest authority for truth–higher than God’s word.

Alone among human enterprises, Science is held to be virtually immune to corruption, wishful thinking, prejudice, or folly.

People are genuinely shocked if you suggest that science is not immune to those frailties of human nature. They are shocked if you suggest that a scientist is no more likely to be truthful, moral, or trustworthy than a politician, a used car salesman, or a televangelist.

People will trust Science and scientists blindly. They will defend Science with a zeal and an emotional heat which, if exercised in the defense of a religious belief, would make them quite uneasy if they saw it.

For most people, Science is synonymous with truth. But do they even know what Science is?

I was taught to believe that Science is the application of the Scientific Method–observe, make a hypothesis, experiment, analyze, etc. The Scientific Method is only a procedure, not a definitive statement on the nature of reality; and it has served us well.

But at least for members of today’s scientific community, Science is a thorough-going, overarching world-view which is purely materialistic: that is, for these scientists, nothing exists that cannot be measured by our senses or our instruments.

That rules out God, and practically everything else that really matters.

I don’t believe most people realize that Science makes that claim. They just put their trust in it.

Do you?

Fame Isn’t So Famous Anymore

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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?)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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.

 

A Kid Flick That Gets Under Your Skin

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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.

 

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

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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.

Three Cheers for Godzilla

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Sometimes I have to step back from watching civilization destroy itself. Of course the American Humanist Assn. is suing a school district because a teacher prayed. Of course 100 million people are going to lose their health insurance, thanks to their own government which many of them, in their stupidity, voted for. Of course a Methodist bishop promises to go on performing sodomite parodies of marriage in his church.

I can’t write about that stuff today.

But I will write about a Thanksgiving tradition at our place.

Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, my wife and I watch Godzilla vs. Megalon. I told my friends in a Pogo chat room and one of them asked, “Is that football or basketball?”

Neither–it’s Godzilla, King of the Monsters. It’s Japanese monstervision at its finest. See the destruction of cities made from the Toho Film Company’s most exquisite miniatures. See the “USMC” tattoo on the shoulder of the guy who’s supposed to be the high priest of something-or-other on the Lost Continent of Seatopia. See the robot, Jet-Jaguar (“The name suits him!” says his creator), suddenly increase his size several hundredfold–never mind stretching the metal awfully thin–and hear the scientist wisely muse, “He must have programed himself to do that.”

It’s still more coherent than the daily news.

Join Jet-Jaguar as he flies across the Pacific Ocean–and there is no explanation as to how this robot is able to fly those enormous distances, especially with no provision made for fuel–to the sanctuary of Monster Island, where Godzilla lives with all the other monsters. Join Godzilla as he swims back to Japan to save it from Megalon, a giant beetle unleashed by the Seatopians to punish Japan for nuclear tests done by the United States and Russia.

It’s still more coherent than anything that goes on in Congress.

Get this movie and give your brain a day off!