Down With Redheads?

I’ve been reading a 2012 novel by Ruth Rendell, The St. Zita Society, in which one of the characters is publicly abused for having red hair. All these yobbos on the street shout at her and call her names.

Huh? What gives?

Briefly dipping into the Internet, I discover, much to my surprise, that there is in Britain a loud and nasty prejudice against red-haired people. I never knew that. UK readers, clue me in–what’s that all about?

I suspect it might be because Political Correctness has banned bigotry against most other groups; and the id, seeking an outlet for its venom, has only a few permitted targets remaining to it. Here in the US, you get to feel virtuous for insulting people who smoke. You’re not allowed to cuss out anybody else, but smokers are considered fair game. And I guess in the UK it’s redheads.

I wonder whose turn it will be next.

Humanist Religion (3): Liberal Control Freaks

If I have learned anything at all from intensively studying current events and history, it’s this: everything said or done or advocated by liberals (aka “progressives”) has as its one and only aim the control of other people. This is what makes them tick. In fact, it is the only thing that makes them tick.

Caveat: Not all secular humanists are liberals. Some are strict libertarians who really don’t care what anybody else does, just that they be left alone to do it. There are atheists who are politically conservative, even socially conservative–a position fraught with logical pitfalls, but they are welcome to it.

Most of the Humanist Manifesto II crowd, though, are dyed-in-the-wool liberals… and they want to control your behavior and everybody else’s. Some are sincerely deluded that they know what’s best for others and why do the rest of us not have the good sense to obey them? (“Sincerely deluded” is actually a tautology: I don’t think you can be insincerely deluded.) That would be your old-fashioned Hubert Humphrey liberal–a nice man, an honest man, with a lot of ideas as wacky as they come.

But mostly, when you examine the policies that liberals insist we follow, you discover that if we did follow them, liberals would gain fantastic wealth and more and more power over others. This is blatantly easy to see in the case of Global Warming. It’s what has driven public education theory for over 100 years. It is what makes the political world go round.

There are few liberals who are as flagrantly obvious as, say, Hillary Clinton, about their hunger for power as an end in itself, not to mention her insatiable piling-up of personal wealth. Most of them do a far better job of hanging the fig leaves. But they are only fig leaves.

Because they have such a monomaniacal need to control others, liberals always try to wipe out even the most trifling and ineffective opposition. Case in point: New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, in all other respects a Party apparatchik in good standing, has been socked with a great big indictment for corruption on charges that the Party just laughed off a year ago. But Menendez opposed Dear Leader’s policy of going soft on Castro’s Cuba; so, for this single trespass, they mean to destroy him. The fact that Menendez’s constituency includes many anti-Castro Cuban voters, whom he must represent or else find another line of work, does not register with the Kremlin on the Potomac. They could have very easily ignored it: “Oh, that’s just Bob Menendez, he has to do that…” But no–off with his head.

If you forget everything else, remember that liberals–who probably account for some 90% of the secular humanists–have an unquenchable desire to control your behavior. Under the banner of “Choice,” they take away your choices. Under the  banner of “Diversity,” they enforce uniformity of thought.

This is what motivates America’s ruling caste at every level, from the lowliest classroom teacher to the pharaoh in the White House. Understand this lust for control, and you will understand everything they say and do.

New Dinosaur, Same Old Poppycock

I love dinosaurs; always have. So when I saw a report that a “bizarre” new dinosaur had been discovered in Chile ( http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/27/bizarre-jurassic-dinosaur-chilesaurus-diegosuarezi-discovered-in-remarkable-new-find ), I hastened to read all about it.

“New” dinosaurs are being discovered all the time. It’s exciting. This one, Chilesaurus, is neat because it has the skeletal structure of a meat-eating dinosaur (theropod) but the skull and teeth of a plant-eater (sauropod–and sauropods and theropods both belong to a larger group of dinosaurs, the lizard-hipped… but I digress).

OK, Chilesaurus is new. What’s old is the way “science journalists” and the alleged scientists they interview talk about it.

The creature’s odd mix of parts, says the article by The Guardian’s science editor, show “an extreme example of mosaic convergent evolution, where different parts of an animal adapt to the environment along the same path taken by other creatures.” You’d almost think he’d actually observed it. Lemme see, now–my nose is gonna follow this path of evolution, kinda like a tapir’s nose, and my neck wants to follow this other path, like a giraffe… man, am I a mess…

But a real scientist easily outdoes this bit of verbage:

“It shows that dinosaurs were experimenting with a wide range of body types…”

This is a singularly asinine group of words. The dinosaurs were experimenting? OK, first we’ll try this body type, and run it through a couple of tests, and then we’ll try that one…

None of this stuff, including the dinosaurs themselves, has ever been observed by a living human being. There are no records to consult. We have wonderful fossil remains which move us to speculate–wisely, we hope–as to what the animals were like when they were living. But we’re laden down with this old Theory of Evolution that has to be defended at all costs, lest the wise men of the world have to answer for the crimes committed in its name, and they keep shoe-horning the dinosaurs into it.

Maybe if scientists stopped talking through their hats, I might try listening to them again.

Another Vanished Civilization

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Our own civilization is in deep, deep trouble. While our ruling class does everything it can think of to poison the culture, President *Batteries Not Included and his secretary of state, John “Scarecrow” Kerry, urged on by the notion of “a deal at any price,” are putting all the world at risk by arranging for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons and touch off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East–the most unstable powder-keg on earth. They’re all like toddlers playing with loaded guns.

Against this background, scientists, only since the late 1990s, are discovering a mind-bogglingly ancient civilization in coastal Peru, the Norte Chico (or  Caral-Supe) civilization. Fully formed and in business by around 3200 B.C., and fading out around 1800 B.C., the Norte Chico people built cities characterized by monumental architecture.

They seem to have had plenty of music (various instruments have been found in the ruins), but no visual arts–although painting may simply not have been preserved over such a long period of time. They invented quipu, a system of record-keeping with knotted cords, which was still in use by the Incas thousands of years later.

We don’t know the name of a single person who lived in any of those cities. We don’t know what gods they worshiped, what jokes they told, what language they spoke, or anything much else.

What we do know is something hauntingly strange.

At roughly the same time in history, in parts of the world widely separated geographically, true civilizations (with cities and record-keeping) seem to have arisen independently–in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, Northern China… and Peru. Norte Chico is so far away from any of the others, it doesn’t seem at all possible that any other civilization might have influenced its development. And unlike the others, Norte Chico was not centered around a major river system.

Five civilizations arise in five different places, at about the same time–how could that have happened?

In the Book of Genesis, civilization suffers two destructions–by the Flood, and by God’s action at the Tower of Babel. I think this suggests the possibility that survivors of those calamities would have tried to rebuild, wherever they happened to be. Reputable Bible scholars who don’t believe the Bible will scoff at this; but they can’t laugh the cradles of civilization out of existence.

Why did they come at around the same time, in different places far apart?

And what will scholars be saying about our modern Western civilization, centuries from now, when they pick over our ruins and try to decide which of our famous names were real and which belonged to legend?

Or will we, like the Norte Chico and the Indus Valley people, leave behind no famous names at all?

Glenn Ford, Homicidal Maniac: ‘The Man from Colorado’

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Don’t ask me what the movie poster actually says. All I can tell you is, it goes with a very cool and off-beat movie: The Man from Colorado (1948), starring Glenn Ford and William Holden.

We’re used to seeing Ford play a sympathetic, kind of Everyman character. But in this outing he’s a Civil War cavalry officer who’s been at it long enough to develop some very bad habits not at all suited to peacetime. He wishes he could stop, but he can’t: can’t stop killing people. He confides in his diary a fear that he might be “going crazy.” Gee, you think?

Unaware of their hero’s darker side, and with the war suddenly over, the grateful community has the governor of Colorado appoint Ford a federal judge. The former colonel takes full advantage of his new-found power to have persons hanged.

His one-time second-in-command, William Holden, has his suspicions; meanwhile, he allows the judge to make him a federal marshal. Wise advice from a family friend, good old Edgar Buchanan (Petticoat Junction), that as marshal, Holden can keep an eye on the judge and help him get past his inner demons, turns out not to be so wise after all.

You won’t believe what this judge gets up to. He was every bit as mischievous in 1865 as federal judges are today, and did almost as much harm. With the limited tools at his command–the noose, arson, a gang of goons, and a total commitment to do whatever it takes to get his way–Ford manages to stage his own little apocalypse.

Ford and Holden act the daylights out of their respective roles, especially Ford, going against type. The Man from Colorado is older than I am, but you’ll wait a long time for any current movie to be anywhere near as good.

And, yes, it’s in English. Don’t let the imported poster bother you: I just thought it had the most appropriate art work.

Rabbits With Swords–a Fantasy You Can Believe In

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After all the awful fantasies I’ve read, I’ve finally found a good one: The Green Ember by S.D. Smith, a tale of rabbits with swords. It’s available on amazon.com.

OK, it’s a fairy tale. All the characters are talking animals. The rabbits have been crushed by their enemies and are trying to rebuild their world. They are kept alive by hope and faith. Their society is built around strong and loving families. For love and loyalty, they will make sacrifices.

I recommend this book without reservation. I’ll be writing a full-length review of it for The Chalcedon Foundation; and of course you can go to amazon and read the large number of five-star Customer Reviews. Meanwhile, though, I have heard from some who most emphatically do not like The Green Ember.

“Not a single f-bomb in the whole [bleep] thing!” complains the Citizen of the World Library Assn. “How are kids supposed to learn how to talk, reading [bleep] [bleep] like this?”

“Would you believe it,” cries the reviewer for Musical Feminists Inc., “one of the characters in this far-Right propaganda hate-piece actually refers to ‘having babies’! I thought I was going to be sick!”

Grumbles Fred Vermin of The Science Is Settled, So All of You Shut Up, “Not one word in it about man-made Global Warming, I mean Climate Change! I suspect this Smith guy of being a secret Climate Change Denier. He should be jailed and tortured, just in case.”

Wanda Byaduck of The Whoopee Crowd beefed, “I don’t know how you write a book for children without detailed sex scenes. I think this author is a homophobe! And probably a transphobe, too, and any other kind of phobe we can dream up between now and suppertime.”

Added Dotti Frump of the Hillary Clinton for President Campaign, “The whole thing is coded language expressing hatred for women and a pathological fear of Mrs. Clinton. It should be taken off the market!”

So, folks, enjoy this book while you can. It’s written for kids, but adults can enjoy a noble tale like this, as soon as they’ve outgrown their education.

Do You Love Daytime TV?

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Do you see that picture of dead flies? They were killed by exposure to daytime television.

I came close to joining them today, stranded as I was in a doctor’s waiting room. But I got out just as my toenails and fingernails started to get brittle and fall off.

At least I was too early for any of the soap operas. Those, I think, are produced on other planets. Someday they’re going to give themselves away. For example, Brittony makes goo-goo eyes at Podsol, but suddenly changes the subject.

“Probably you have been wondering,” she says, “why I behave like a completely talent-less person who has never done any acting before, and also very near-sighted, trying to read cue cards with my lines on them–lines that sound as if they were written by not-very-bright teenagers who do a lot of drugs…” And then she turns into The Blob and engulfs poor Podsol before he can get away.

No soaps for me today. I had to make do with annoying shows devoted to the ecstatic worship of celebrities I never heard of. (Fame ain’t so famous anymore.) Then Rachel Ray. Then, horror of horrors, The View. Poe or Lovecraft never thought up anything half as awful as The View. It hadn’t been on for 30 seconds before the flies started falling off the windowpanes.

Again I ask, and yet again: if this is the stuff we pump into our minds every day, by way of popular culture, what long-term effects will it have on us? It has already given us Obama. Where will it end? Can a people nurtured on pure mindlessness even survive?

Take a last look at those flies, killed by The View.

You might be next.

‘Don’t Bother to Knock’ This Movie

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Marilyn Monroe is mostly remembered as a movie sex symbol, at least by my generation. If you were raised on video games, you may have never heard of her. In fact, she was such a major sex icon of the 1950s and 60s, hardly anyone noticed she was also a pretty fine actress.

Check out Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), in which Monroe played a young woman with serious psychological issues. Jim Backus and his wife are staying at a hotel so they can attend a formal dinner, and they need a sitter for their little girl. The bellhop, the immortal Elisha Cook Jr., recommends his niece. He wants to help her by finding something constructive for her to do. He greatly underestimates the intensity of her mental illness. She gets the gig, the parents go out, and the little girl is left alone with this terribly unstable woman.

It’s bound to end in murder or suicide–unless the heart of a hard and cynical young man (Richard Widmark) can be moved to understanding and pity.

This is a movie version of the 1950 thriller, Mischief, by Charlotte Armstrong–an original and effective writer of suspense novels. She died in 1969 and her books have been unjustly forgotten except by connoisseurs of the off-beat novel. She deserves to be rediscovered.

If all you want from a movie is super-heroes taken from comic books, lots of screaming and bodies flying around, and a really loud sound-track–well, there’s really no hope for you, is there?

Don’t Bother to Knock is edgy, presenting a creepy situation that is just about to get disastrously out of hand. But it’s also a story of the power of goodness, against all odds.

And that’s a story worth seeing.

 

A Most Unusual Movie

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Let me say up front that I’m no fan of ballet. For entertainment and edification, it ranks somewhere below getting a parking ticket and above Obama’s speeches.

But I do like a psychological thriller packed with snappy dialogue and vivid characters played by brilliant actors at the top of their form, and this off-beat little gem from 1946 has all of that.

What happens when a struggling ballet studio and a failed ballet impresario try to strike it rich by engineering the comeback of a genius dancer who may have, and probably did, murder his wife? And who has been holed up with galloping hallucinations ever since? The police can’t prove he did it, the gifted young ballerina is in love with him–so why not? This time everything will turn out hunky-dory.

Uh-huh–but what if Mr. Superstar is not really better, after all?

This movie by Republic Pictures bombed in the box office when it was released in 1946, and you can now see it for free on youtube. I guess it was just too far ahead of its time: probably too dark for 1946.

But it has great things going for it: sharp screenplay by Ben Hecht, Dame Judith Anderson as a washed-up star running a studio packed with mediocre talent, Lionel Stander as a jealous journalist with a bent for bitter poetry. Then there’s Ivan Kirov as the psychotic ballet star. Outside of The Specter of the Rose, his acting career didn’t amount to much; but in this outing he brought a powerful and at times menacing presence to the screen.

Yes, I admit it–I like good old stuff. This movie is even older than I am. I’m not sure modern movie-makers could tell a story this grim without recourse to a lot of nudity, f-bombs, gore, and the usual screaming bodies flying all around, etc.

Watching this film will probably not make a better Christian of you, except in the sense that all things may be considered in the light of faith, and possibly teach a useful lesson. But it will hold your interest–even though there’s a fair amount of dancing in it.

The Last of the Dodos–Daylight Savings Time

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We don’t have dodo birds anymore because they were too stupid to survive . But we do have Daylight Savings Time, which is why I’m running late today and can never catch up. Of course the dodos were innocent, defenseless creatures who couldn’t help going extinct when humans came along and fundamentally transformed their environment. Daylight Savings Time, by contrast, is the purposeful creation of stupid and arrogant people.

Too bad we can’t trade in DST for the dodo.

God gave us perfectly serviceable days and nights, and the flop-eared knaves in government had to tinker with them. Actually, the days and nights are beyond their reach; so what they’re really tinkering with is… us! “Hey! Let’s take away an hour of their sleep and see what happens!”

Too bad we can’t trade in DST’s enablers and promoters for the dodos. I would defy any ten thousand dodos to do a tenth of the harm done by any single U.S. Senator.

Woodrow Wilson was a big fan of DST; in fact, he vetoed legislation to do away with it. Woodrow Wilson also said the purpose of education was to make a son as unlike his father as possible. What an ass.

They can’t speed up or slow down the movements of the sun and the earth, as decreed by God.

All they can do is foul up our schedules–and to what purpose, who knows?