Am I a Journalist?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

So who’s a journalist and who ain’t? That’s what the Senate Judiciary Committee is getting ready to decide. They’re fixing to define as a journalist an employee or agent or contractor for some agency which disseminates news or information… HAHAHAHAHAH

Sorry about that: just couldn’t help it. But based on recent performance, don’t you think a better definition, a more accurate one, might be “an employee or agent or contractor for some agency which suppresses news or information adverse to any president or other national figure belonging to the Democrat Party, and disseminates propaganda favorable to such persons”?  Might we not define a news organization as “the public relations apparatus of the Democrat Party”? And of course it sucks up to all persons or agencies promoting any kind of wacko left-wing agenda.

It always amazes me, how many people, who get their news strictly from the Big Media, never heard of Climategate and have no idea that Global Warming has indeed been unmasked as a fraud; never heard how John Kerry got three Purple Hearts in three months without even spending three minutes in a military hospital; never heard anything detrimental to our First Voter Fraud President… and so on. “News” organizations and the “journalists” who work for them suppress news. Any reporter who tries to find out and report the truth about, for instance, what happened in Benghazi, soon finds himself as badly off as Karl Kolchak in “The Night Stalker” trying to get the word out about monsters from Hindu mythology eating up Jewish senior citizens in Chicago.

I consider myself a journalist, at least by training and experience. I don’t need Chuck Schumer to tell me so. In fact, if he told me I was a journalist, I would begin to think perhaps I wasn’t.

 

Buy This Pope a Bible

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

What’s with the new pope? Today (in The Drudge Report) he’s saying you don’t have to believe in God to go to heaven. All you gotta do to gain salvation, says Pope Francis, is obey your conscience. So I guess sincere Nazis, who honestly believed they were doing the right thing by running death camps, are now sitting at the Lord’s table with the saints.

Salvation by the individual conscience–where did he get that idea? Depending on who you are and what you are inclined to do, your conscience will let you get away with worshiping false gods or no god at all, idolatry, blasphemy, abusing the sabbath, abusing your parents, committing murder, adultery, or theft, bearing false witness against your neighbor, or coveting your neighbor’s goods. I mean, look at what people do! Their consciences can’t be giving them that much grief over it, can they?

Not one of the Ten Commandments is safe from the human conscience.

Your conscience is part of you. When you get saved by faith in Jesus Christ, your conscience gets saved, too. Only then can it become a reliable guide.

This is Christianity 101.

God only knows what Pope Francis is trying to do by teaching otherwise.

 

 

Has America Changed Since 9/11?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Has America changed since September 11, 2001? Yes. For the better? You decide. Here are some of the more prominent changes.

*We have grown more like Sodom and Gomorrah, not less. Any opposition to the march of sodomy is increasingly criminalized.

*Our Defense Dept. ponders “what is the proper punishment” for Christians in the military who believe homosexuality is a sin–a belief, by the way, held by virtually the entire human race for thousands of years.

*We have a “president” and attorney general who have personally done more to poison race relations in the USA than the Ku Klux Klan ever hoped was possible.

*If we want to fly anywhere, we have to stand in line to be groped by government goons–while the guy in the turban and the bin Laden T-shirt gets a free pass. (If we bothered him it would be “profiling,” a form of secular sacrilege.)

*The NSA routinely scans our phone calls and our email. It’s for our own good, says the government. ROFL.

*Voter fraud has evolved into a science, able to swing a national election.

*Conspiracy theories, once the exclusive realm of crackpots, have become well-nigh universal.

I don’t know about you, but it sure doesn’t look like “for the better” to me.

Fantasy and ‘Realism’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I think I must be more than halfway done writing my new book, The Glass Bridge. All sorts of things are happening in this story. I wonder how it’ll end.

Meanwhile, one of the issues that comes up all the time in both my writing and my reading is… to what extent is anything I read about or write about ‘real’?

Ray Harryhausen used to say nobody wants to go to the movies to see a sinkful of dirty dishes. Ah–but there are a lot of movies (and even more novels) that show you nothing but stacks of dirty dishes, and even mold growing on them. This fixation on decay and ugliness is always called “realism.”

To impress college professors and literary critics, Stephen King filled The Shining with infinite detail about the protagonist’s whole life, starting with early childhood–all of it ugly, painful, perverse, etc. Betcha it added 100 pages to the book. He provided this excess of unedifying information because it is what intellectuals and literary wallahs consider to be “realistic” detail. If the author writes about someone who has led a wholesome and happy life, that would be pooh-poohed as unrealistic.

What this teaches us is an important lesson about what Godless humanists think about reality: only the bad stuff is real. This comes across in their literature all the time. It is a world-view that also works its way into their personal lives.

They can keep it.

 

Our Air Force’s New H-Bomb

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

A 19-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force has been suspended from duty, received a Miranda warning, and will be court-martialed–for saying he believes that homosexuality is a sin. He said so because his openly-lesbian commanding officer ordered him to state his views. Oops, wrong view.

But hey, I’m cool with that. I see the light. America’s ruling class is head-over-heels in love with sodomy.

All I ask now is that they practice what they preach. Show me you’re sincere, O mighty ones.

Obama and Kerry in a “gay” mockmarriage–with live TV of the “wedding” night activities, because we can’t just take their word for it…

Chris Christie, who says he’s a practicing Catholic (he needs to practice harder) and “it’s not a sin” as far as he’s concerned, starring in a gay porn film…

Stop.

You know something? I can’t write the rest of this. I’m grossing myself out. Besides, the total destruction of morality and decency in the whole Western world just isn’t funny anymore. And how do you satirize the reality of an Air Force sergeant, with 19 years’ honorable service to his name, getting a Miranda warning–as if he’d raped or murdered someone, or robbed a liquor store–for believing what the Bible says is true?

This is the air force which our glorious leaders are so hot to send to war in Syria–and any prayers offered up for victory will be abomination.

I have a very bad feeling about this. Don’t you?

 

How to Relate to a Liberal

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Let’s face it–we all have at least one family member who’s a liberal. It feels kind of like being related to a horse thief or a pickpocket. Yes, it makes us cringe. It’s embarrassing to be seen in public with someone who believes in Global Warming and thinks China has a really super government.

We get tired of fighting with this person all the time. How can you reason with anyone who thinks Al Gore is a sage? You’re better off arguing with a tree stump. You can’t give in to any of his absurd opinions, and you can’t quite bring yourself to disown him. You could try asking him or her, very nicely, to walk ten paces behind you if the two of you have to go anywhere, and pretend you don’t know each other. But that probably won’t fly.

I find the best way to get along, although it can be a challenge, is to find neutral topics to discuss together. Maybe you share a common interest in movies, salamanders, beer, or whatnot. Of course, you never know when an innocent conversation might suddenly take a turn for the worse. You’re chatting happily away about Journey to the Center of the Earth and suddenly he brings up Avatar. The only hope of salvaging peace is quickly and slyly to shift to a another subject–“Say, do you remember that old lady who lived across the street from us when we were kids: the one who used to confiscate any whiffle-balls that wound up in her yard? I heard she poisoned her husband…” (Here we resort to fiction, just to get away from Avatar. We can repent later.)

Maybe some of you out there have found more efficient or humane methods of coping with this situation. Please share them. When it comes to living with a liberal, we all need good advice.

Jules Verne vs. Stephen King

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I recently re-read my favorite Jules Verne book, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Next I chose to revisit Stephen King‘s The Shining, which Patty and I have long agreed is King’s best book. It must be at least 25 years since I last read The Shining.

Oh, does it suffer by comparison! People nowadays don’t give Jules Verne much credit as a novelist. He’s mostly remembered as a pioneer of science fiction who was among the first to see the potential of the submarine. Okay–but 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still one corker of a novel. It’s also one of those books which, once I’m into it, I don’t want to see come to an end.

Just a few chapters into The Shining, I find myself wondering just how fast I can read this book so I can start on something better.

For those of you interested in the craft of writing, do you know what is the difference between these two books?

In The Shining, Stephen King tells you everything, and I do mean everything, in flashbacks galore. You know almost as much about his major characters’ lives as the Recording Angel does. All right, this sort of helps you to understand them, and to understand what happens to them as the story plods on. But it sure does slow things down. Later in his career Stephen King would carry this practice to a ridiculous extent: for instance, in The Tommyknockers you get the whole life stories of various walk-on characters. It’s like someone having you in a headlock and giving you noogies, and you can’t get away…

in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne is too busy telling an exciting story to bother with flashbacks of his main characters’ early childhoods, etc. And yet as his story gallops on, you come to know Prof. Arronax, Conseil, and Ned Land like brothers. How does the writer do that, without flashbacks? Let me elucidate a deep mystery: What the characters say and do reveals their personalities. Voila! He makes it look so easy, you’re hardly aware you’re reading a book at all.

I despise the Serious Mainstream Literature of the 20th century. It’s all pseudo-intellectual cow-flop and no story.

It’s Jules Verne over Stephen King by a knockout, just a minute into the first round.

Bell Mountain won an award!

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Bell-Mountain-1400

Bell Mountain won Bronze in the 2013 Global Ebook Awards for Fantasy/Other World! You can see a list of the winners at their website.

The Tolerance Fuhrer

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Gone are the swastikas, the stalags, and the goose-steps. But in Germany today, at least one trace of the Third Reich remains–the Hitler-era law against homeschooling.

In defense of the ban, a German named Schmidt wrote a letter to Michael Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Assn. here in the USA, dated Sept. 4. Herr Schmidt was sore about some of Farris’ opinion pieces attacking the German government–particularly its practice of seizing children whose Christian parents wish to give their children a Christian education: strictly verboten, under German law.

I don’t know who Herr Schmidt is. He sounds like some kind of obersturmbannfuhrer wannabe. I quote from his letter to Farris.

“The only thing… these so-called parents want is to prevent their children from a free and open minded view on the world.” [Make allowances: Herr Schmidt is writing in what is, for him, a foreign language.] “They want to force them into their own little world regardless of what the children want or not and only for religious reasons!

“From the very beginning theses so called parents drummed religious opinions into their poor children. They never had a chance to build up their own opinion. This can be called torture and if for sure harms the children in their development to free, tolerant and open-minded members of society. Only to please the parents and only to spread the parents strange ideas, disgusting.”

Get it? The dude is tolerant and open-minded. He concludes:

“For my opinion these parents should be imprisoned”–not strung up with piano wire?–“and they should not be released before all of their children have finished school. Anyone, regardless of the reasons who harms his children, in whatever respect, should be removed from them immediately. If it happens for religious reasons the person should be jailed.”

Is this man a nut, or does he represent the mainstream opinion among the German people? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

 

Show Us the Polls

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Our country’s leaders want a war with Syria, and they mean to have it. But as they drag us, kicking and screaming, into it, there’s a major element missing from the news reporting.

Where are the polls?

Usually by now we’d be up to our eyeballs in “news” stories about polls on this Syrian adventure. After all, it’s the easiest way to cover news–just talk about the polls. Whatever the issue, you’ll hear about polls taken by CNN, USA Today, Gallup, Roper, The New York Times, Washington Post, and all the rest. You could paper your walls with them. So why aren’t we being inundated with poll stories?

Funny things happen when Democrats run foreign policy. The anti-war movement disappears. Pacifists turn into hawks. WMDs that were imaginary when a Republican was in the White House suddenly become real. The GOP’s grovel reflex is activated.

And news stories about polls dry up to the vanishing point.

Oh, there are some polls around. There’s one on my computer’s home page: 80 oppose military intervention in Syria. Some Congressmen have reported 99 percent of their constituents opposed.

That’s the problem. The “news” media is an organ of the Democrat Party, the Democrats want war, and the polls, such as they are, just aren’t giving them the answer that they want to hear. So they don’t talk about polls.

Silly buggers. All they have to do, to get the results they want, is to tweak the poll questions a little more than usual. For instance:

“Are you in favor of helping the Syrian rebels militarily? If you say ‘no,’ the IRS will audit you until the day you die.” Or, “If I were to ask you whether you favored military action against Assad, and if you were inclined to answer in such a way that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ means no, would you not say ‘yes’?” They’ll get so lost trying to figure that one out, you can report any result you please.

It’s not like they’ve never done it before, is it?