Category: Pop Culture

They’re Doing It to Us Again…REPRINT

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From March 10, 2018

There are many scientific studies, including one from the government’s own Center for Disease Control, declaring that Americans don’t get enough sleep (https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-dont-get-enough-sleep-cdc-study-finds-1455818427). In fact, says the CDC, fully one-third of us is sleep-deficient: less than seven hours of sleep a night poses a risk to one’s health.

So what is that same government preparing to do to us this weekend?

Why, take away an hour of our sleep, of course!

Yes, it’s Daylight Savings Time again, which means we have to turn our clocks ahead an hour tonight and then, for the next week or so, be short on sleep or else be late for everything.

Is this really stupid, or what?

Bad enough we have neighbors aiming floodlights at our bedroom windows, sedentary jobs that wear us out without benefit of exercise, and a disintegrating culture to stress us out. On top of all that, they’ve got to take away an hour of our sleeping time.

Why don’t they spare us this? Is this just another one of those things that government does because it’s done it for so long, everyone’s forgotten the reason for it–if there ever was one–and nobody thinks anymore, they just freakin’ do it?

Yeah, probably.

Hey, We Try REPRINT

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From August 8, 2019

Image result for images of dog in a tree

On this blog alone there are enough “education follies” posts to fill a good-sized book–actual news reports of real follies and outrages perpetrated by what we laughingly call “public education.”

In spite of the mass of information to the contrary, tens of millions of our fellow Americans continue to send their children to public schools to be educated by strangers trained by very Far Left teachers’ unions–and then on to college to finish the job. Why do they do this?

After some fruitless conversation in a chat room yesterday, it was made clear to me again, for the umpteenth hundredth time, that people simply refuse to believe the truth about public education. The truth is plain for all to see: it would take some effort to miss it. Nevertheless, most of America does not see. Decide for yourself whether it’s because they really can’t see or have just chosen, obstinately, not to see.

Yesterday the thing they refused to believe (the people I was chatting with) was that the single biggest lesson taught in public schools is that your age-group peers–other kids–are the most important people in your life. So you must please them, you must conform to their expectations, you must try, no matter what the cost, to be popular. They are much more important than your family. Your family is so un-cool! Boring! But conformity with your “friends” is everything.

That was the case even when I went to school, way back when.

It is still the case now.

Uh, people–could you, like, just take a minute to look at our freakin’ culture? Do you like what you see? Really?

Sing louder.

Keep trying.

God help us.

Before It Evolved into Twaddle…REPRINT

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From March 27, 2019

My wife and I like watching videos of prehistoric animals. Usually we can just tune out the Evolution just-so story that accompanies the video, if the visuals are cool enough.

So we settled down on Youtube to watch Morphed: Before They Were Bears.

Apart from the initial absurdity of declaring that life arose from non-living materials, purely by chance, it rained on de rocks and de rocks come alive, doo-dah, doo-dah, we were treated to unbearable nonsense about… bears. It seems that whenever prehistoric bears encountered some kind of environmental challenge, they wisely considered what they would need and then proceeded to evolve it.

Oh, boy! Whoever said there’s no quality control on Youtube wasn’t kidding!

So, ya see, the giant panda needed an opposable thumb so he could hold on to the bamboo while he was eating it, but the digits he already had were spoken for, so he just, like, went ahead and evolved one of his wrist bones into a kind of thumb… and what he was eating while waiting for his magical thumb to evolve, who knows? If it takes millions of years for revolutionary new body parts to evolve, how does the species last long enough to benefit by it? Or if it happens real fast, then how come no naturalist or farmer or zoo-keeper or pet owner has ever observed it?

This doesn’t even rise to the level of crapola. We couldn’t make it halfway through this video before we had to turn it off.

Darwinism wouldn’t last another ten days if there weren’t such a deep political investment in it by the Left.

A Whole New Idiocy: Subway Surfing REPRINT

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From June 13, 2022

I only heard this morning about a new fad heating up in our glamorous urban centers.

Subway surfing!

It’s easy and fun to do. Just pick a train and hop onto the roof, preferably before it gets up to full speed. See the little guys in the video walking along the top of the train. I don’t know how fast New York subways go, or for how long the, um, “surfers” stay on. (I just looked it up: top speed, 55 mph.)

This has been going on for several years in cities all over the world. In 2018 in New York, the MTA reported 68 deaths, half of which they ruled to be suicides.

Yeahbut, yeahbut! You can get on YouTube!

Oh, well then! What’re we waiting for…?

Bashin’ Fashion REPRINT

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From July 27, 2017

I suppose I could be writing about world events, politics, or other Important News, instead of bothering with fashion. But some of these seemingly trivial things turn out, in the long run, to be more important than the big stuff.

Kill the culture, and it’ll kill you back.

One of the latest poison darts blown into our culture comes from Gucci, the fashion giant, with their Fall/Winter 2017 “fashion campaign,” aka “Gucci and Beyond” (https://www.cnet.com/news/gucci-star-trek-inspired-fashion-is-sexy-retro-sci-fi-heaven/). It seems to have been inspired by corny old science fiction movies and TV shows from the Star Trek era.

One of its centerpieces is models posing as women with blue skin and red lip gloss. Is this supposed to be beautiful? It’s only ugly. But then the whole point of humanist culture is to flee from everything that smacks of being human–hence their fanatical support for all things transgender.

True, high fashion has always had a streak of freakiness. Danny Kaye made fun of it, singing “I’m Anatole of Paris…and I hate women!” Mad Magazine had The Attack of the Fashion Model Zombies. There’s a lot about our whole pop culture that’s deep-down freaky–and we are not the better for it.

Global Warming Froze Our Parking Lot REPRINT

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From February 15, 2014

As Global Warming continues to pile snow and ice on our neighborhood, we have observed some peculiar behavior.

We pay to park in our neighbors’ lot next door. Because our building doesn’t have a driveway or a parking lot, the only alternative is to park on the street and have our cars buried by the passing snow plows. I gave that up when some drunk totaled my car, speeding down the street in the middle of an ice storm.

Well, everybody’s been getting stuck in this parking lot lately. The owner of half of the lot refuses to have it plowed because he put down gravel in the summer and he doesn’t want the gravel to be plowed up. So it’s a mess.

Next door to the parking lot is a school. Because children must never be allowed more than a minute or two without adult supervision, when school lets out, a mob of cars descends on it–unemployed moms and dads, taking time out from writing poetry and composing geometrical theorems, have to pick up their kids, who must not be allowed to walk home.

In all weather, one of their favorite tricks is to block the entrance to the parking lot next door. But in this weather, they force their cars up the private driveway to wait for their kids on someone else’s private property. Sometimes they get stuck in all the Global Warming. The lout who got stuck yesterday grabbed a tenant’s snow shovel, dug his car free, and left the shovel lying in the middle of the lot as he drove off with his kid.

Oh, look–it’s snowing again! If only we paid higher taxes and gave up all our freedoms, our glorious leaders and scientific sages would put a stop to this weather.

And I am the Sultan of Swat.

It’s Personal! REPRINT

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From July 24, 2017

How many times have we encountered this? “My grandson that I really, really love was so unhappy because he couldn’t marry his boyfriend; but now he can, and he’s just so happy! And I’m happy that he’s happy, so I’m all in favor of gay marriage and that’s why I have the Rainbow Flag on my lawn…”?

Moral standards that are handed down by God, and have stood unchanged for thousands of years, must quickly give way–because someone is “unhappy” with them. Naturally, we want our loved ones to be “happy.”

Even if we don’t quite know what the word means, anymore.

The Bible believes in happiness. “Happy is that people, that is in such a case; yea, happy is that people, whose God is the Lord” (Psalm 144:15). “[H]e that hath mercy on the poor, happy is he” (Proverbs 14:21). But the word is never used to describe sexual anarchy.

Still, for the sake of whatever “happiness” is, people with blinding speed discard the moral code in which they were raised. There was once a baby shower here, in front of this apartment building, complete with DJ and free beer, to celebrate an impending out-of-wedlock birth. The mother-to-be, who had not yet divorced her husband, was having the baby by her shiftless, no-good boyfriend. And the yard was full of “happy” people “celebrating” the event which, at one time in their lives, they would have viewed as a moral calamity. Mr. Boyfriend, by the way, stuck around long enough to beget another child by this woman, then fled the scene. Leaving the baby strapped into a car seat, Mommy worked full-time while Mr. Boyfriend played video games and gambled.

But they were “happy” for a while.

Are God’s laws bad because, if we obey them, they keep us out of messes like this? Or are they just bad because God doesn’t like us to be “happy”?

But, hey, well, if we’re gonna trust other sinners, if we’re gonna trust What’s Happenin’ Now, instead of trusting God… God doesn’t know what’s best for us, but Bill Nye the Science Guy does. Anything to be “happy”–right?

‘Are We Encouraging Insanity?’ REPRINT

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From April 19, 2019

 

R.J. Rushdoony was asking this question in the 1980s and 90s, before we had anything like “transgender” to contend with–to say nothing of “world is gonna end!” climate change, or a “Green New Deal.”

https://chalcedon.edu/resources/videos/are-we-encouraging-insanity-our-threatened-freedom

This essay can be found in a collection, Our Threatened Freedom, published in 2015 and featuring some nooze gems that will tax your power to believe it. Like the four or five full-time agents assigned to bust a little boy who was selling fishing worms without a license. I helped edit the book, and wrote the cover blurb, so I take an interest in it.

Meanwhile, I think the answer to Rushdoony’s question is, “You bet we are–and you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

Self-Education via Pop Music: Foolishness 101 REPRINT

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From June 13, 2017

One of the ways we continually educate ourselves is by consuming pop culture. And just so you don’t think this present time has a lock on truly ridiculous ideas expressed in music, dig this award-winning turkey from 1962, sung by Jack Jones: Lollipops and Roses.

Do you believe these lyrics? “Make it her birthday each day of the week…” On Dec. 31 she’ll be 365 years old. But even more preposterous, “One day she’ll smile, next day she’ll cry,/ Minute to minute, you’ll never know why…” Sounds like she’s more than ready for the rubber room. Can you imagine living with somebody like that?

So much of our music, our movies and TV, our books, teach us an awful lot of pazoo about how we ought to relate to one another. Do you really think nobody actually picks up on this teaching? No one’s influenced by it? Well, bunkie, there’s a whole advertising industry that’s betting that you’re wrong. And a whole public education industry, too, for that matter.

The only reason nobody gets a degree in Being a Dope is that nobody needs one.