Tag: cultural musings

Fantasy to Save Your Sanity

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I just can’t stand it anymore. I mean, even the Pajama-Gram ads for Christmas are sleazy. The country’s falling apart, they’re wildly celebrating the surgical mutilation of boys into pseudo-girls and girls into pseudo-boys–did you know we “need” more of these freaks in our armed forces, according to the US Air Force?–and our nation’s leaders, perpetually at war against the American people, do everything in their power to nullify the last election.

But you know what’s great about fantasy? None of this garbage has to make it into your story.

For those of you who might want to try your hand at writing fantasy, remember this: the allure of a fantasy world is that the “real” world–the Al Sharpton-atheist-transgender-renegade church-Washington D.C.-public education world–can’t get in! Well, not unless you let it in–and why would you want to do that?

You might ask, “Well, if you leave all that stuff out of the fantasy world, what’s left to put in?” But you wouldn’t ask that if you understood that all that rubbish mentioned above is only pasted onto reality. None of it is an integral part of reality. Can’t you imagine a real world that gets by just fine without militant homosexuals, Occupy Wall Street, or the state of Massachusetts?

A reader once asked me how I deal with feminism in my stories. The beauty of it is… I don’t! When I enter my fantasy, I close the door on feminism; it can’t come in after me. In fact, I close it on a lot of contemporary “isms.”

Divorce your fantasy world from aspects of the real world that weren’t there yesterday and aren’t going to be there tomorrow.

Because those things aren’t real. They make us sick, they undermine our country, and they stink to High Heaven; but they aren’t real.

Buy It Now–Eternal Life!

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

The Lord Our God promises us eternal life, if we believe in and trust His Son, Jesus Christ.

But soon, if things go well for a company called Eterni.me, they’ll be able to sell you eternal life. Instead of faith or hope or good works, all you’ll need is money. Then you can, in the words of the company’s slogan, “Simply become immortal” ( http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/technology/article/1657109/want-live-forever-tech-firm-wants-create-your-digital-alter-ego ).

Your 3-D “digital alter ego,” which presumably your family will want to keep around after you’re dead–what will it mean when this gets moved from the living room to the broom closet, or winds up in a yard sale?–will be compiled from your lifetime’s worth of digital data–that is, every little piece of junk you’ve ever put on the Internet–along with artificial intelligence, which for some individuals will be the only kind of intelligence they’ve ever had. The end product will be a convincing illusion of your presence: the “alter ego” will  be programed so that it can interact with real people as if you were still you.

They’re not yet ready to reveal the price tag. Still some bugs to be worked out.

Meanwhile, ask yourself this…

How many of our politicians and celebrities have already died and been replaced by digital illusions?

And how many of them were digital illusions to begin with?

 

President Ahab

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Here’s my prediction.

In spite of the unprecedented, blatantly unconstitutional action last night by the “president,” and in spite of a huge mandate given to them in this year’s national elections to stop this president, the Republicans will chicken out. They will take no meaningful action. All the “president” has to do is threaten to shut down the government, and the Republicans surrender: they know the nooze media will see to it that they are blamed for the shutdown. And beyond that, Republicans are terrified of being called racists.

This is why Barack Hussein Ebola smirks at them and says, “Just try and stop me!”

The Republicans’ cowardice will encourage Ebola to go farther down the path of lawlessness and caesarism.

Indeed, he is already a man who is chasing his own destruction. This afternoon would be a good time for him to catch up to it.

Remember Captain Ahab, the doomed protagonist of Moby Dick? What–you never heard that story? No, it wasn’t about any of the Kardashians. It was about the fanatical captain of a whaling vessel in the early 19th century, whose only purpose in life was to catch up to the White Whale–the whale that once bit off his leg–and kill it. He swore a terrible oath to do so, and made his whole crew join him in it. He sought all over the world for this whale.

And guess what happened when he finally found it.

This is Obama: President Ahab. He will seek his own ruin until at last he finds it.

It’s only now a matter of how many Americans he will drag down with him.

P.S. Just out of curiosity, a few minutes ago I typed in a search for “Obama as Ahab,” to see if anybody else had come to the same conclusion I have. Behold! It’s all over the Internet. It seems a lot of commentators have seen this parallel, going all the way back to 2011.

I didn’t “steal” the idea. It’s something that’s so glaringly obvious, it has occurred to many people over several years.

What They’re Not Telling You About the Comet Landing

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

So the European Space Agency, just a few days ago, successfully landed a probe on a comet called 67P-something-or-other, a 2.5-mile-wide target some 311 million miles from Earth. Quite a shot.

By now the probe’s  batteries have failed–so they say!–and we’ll have to wait six months for pictures of the comet’s surface. So they say!

How long will it take for someone to declare that there are pictures that they haven’t shown us, and never will? Pictures of windmills and little Dutch girls in wooden shoes, live centaurs galloping here and there, and a colossal, enigmatic face carved out of a hill–evidence of a great alien civilization that still has a base on the far side of the moon, and shape-shifting spies living among us. And so on.

Yes, the conspiracy crowd will have its usual field day. The ESA may release photos of a lifeless surface scarred and pitted by erosion and by micro-meteorites; and then someone else will say, “This is what happens to a world that allows Income Inequality to get out of hand.” And there will be those who say that this never happened at all, there was no probe landed on 67P, it’s all a hoax just like the American moon landing, etc.

Academics say there’s no such thing as truth, politicians live by that saying, and it has gotten into our everyday business.

A Problem for Atheists

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Okay: let’s say the fat-heads are right, and there is no God.

Who does that leave responsible for all the crimes and cruelty in the world, and with no Savior to set things right? At whose desk does the buck stop now?

There being no God, then there is no one but man–and his monster, the state–who can be blamed for 40 to 60 million Chinese done to death by their own government during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, just to name one of many hard-to-imagine crimes of recent history. Two world wars, a global epidemic of terrorism, man-made famines… the list goes on and on.

And the solution to this, according to our humanist friends, is to give the perpetrator, man, even more power! Gee, if Mao had had twice as much power, he could’ve murdered twice as many people.

What kind of sense does that make? Our country’s founders, who were Christians, believed in human evil and in the need to restrain it: hence our system of checks and balances, our Bill of Rights, and the built-in inertia that ties the hands of those government officials who want to strangle us for our own good.  That the system seems to be breaking down after 200 years is only due to the ceaseless efforts of “progressives” to destroy it.

St. Paul taught us that if Christ is not raised from the dead, then we won’t be raised, either: our faith is in vain, we are still in our sins, and we will die in sin.  The good news, of course, is that He is raised.

Except to those who look to government, to the work of their own hands, for their salvation.

And they ain’t gonna find it. Not there. Not there.

 

Self-Publishing and Cruelty to Authors

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

My employer, the Chalcedon Foundation, has a policy not to review self-published books. I adhere to that policy. We don’t want to encourage a shady business.

The other day someone sent me a self-published book for review. I often get these in the mail. I don’t know how much the so-called publisher charged the author, but whatever it was, it was probably too much.

Even at some of the reputable, professional publishing houses, where they pay the author rather than hoodwinking the author into paying them, editing has become almost a lost art. But here the self-publisher took the author’s money, and in this case provided no editing at all. And so the reader is treated to misspellings, quotation marks strewn around the page like confetti, misuse of words, and weird sentences that fall apart before they get anywhere, reminiscent of some of the stairways at the Winchester Mansion that simply end at blank walls.

Speaking for myself, I would be embarrassed if one of my books were published without careful editing. We all need editing!

But to take the author’s money and then publish the book as is, with all the errors for all the world to see–that’s not only dishonest, but cruel. I say no writer can afford to have a book published in a state of nature, any more than he would want to board a bus in the nude. Here they stripped the author and shoved him out onto the sidewalk at high noon.

The immortal Rocky Bridges once said there are three things that everyone in the world thinks he can do: run a hotel, manage a baseball team, and write a book. The expansion of the self-publishing industry feeds the third part of that delusion.

I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said to me, “Yeah, I’d write a book, too, if I had the time.” Sculptors and composers and ballet dancers never have to hear that, but every writer does. Durned if I know why.

I grant that every now and then, a worthwhile book is self-published. But I have been sent many of them that are not worthwhile by any stretch of the most feverish imagination.

If your book is worth being published, you ought to be paid for it. Keep your life savings under the mattress, where the self-publishing company can’t get at it.

One of My Nightmares

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I have this dream from time to time, and I had it last night.

In all versions of it, I’m still in high school even though I’m now 65 years old. My classmates are no spring chickens, either. You see, we haven’t finished yet! They keep on adding to the time you must spend in school. Last night, as in most versions of the dream, we were halfway through June without the school year ending. Every day you think is going to be the last, or next to last–nope! It just goes on and on.

I’m coming to believe this is a prophetic dream.

What would our evil, crazy rulers and their expert advisers like better than to keep us all in school for as long as we live? Much easier to control us! They can even control what we eat and when we eat it. And all the while, in classroom after classroom, they can talk at us without our being allowed to get up and leave, or talk back. And they can control what information we get and what information we don’t get.

What seems a nightmare to a normal person is a progressive’s (translation: communist fat-head) golden dream.

Oh! But how can a society generate enough wealth to live on, if everybody’s still in school instead of working?

But under the very best of circumstances, not requiring the population to be confined in school, societies run by progressives really stink at creating wealth, and excel in wasting it.

Nameless Portraits on a Colossal Scale

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Life is full of unanswered questions. Like, why did I once pay money to watch Tentacles? But there are bigger mysteries than that.

In the hot, steamy country around the Gulf of Mexico, in Vera Cruz, in Tabasco, there flourished long ago a civilization we call “Olmec.” That was the name given to them by people who came along much, much later. We have no idea what these people called themselves.

According to archeologists’ best guess, Olmec civilization lasted from 1500 to 400 B.C., approximately. The Olmecs had writing, but they didn’t leave many inscriptions and most of these haven’t been deciphered yet. So we know nothing of their history, their famous people, their beliefs, or their customs. We don’t know the name of even one Olmec. They do seem to have invented the ancient Mesoamerican ball game that was still being played by the Maya and the Aztecs a thousand years after the Olmec civilization disappeared.

But did the Olmec people disappear with it?

The most tantalizing remains of this civilization are 17 colossal stone heads, the biggest of them weighing almost 50 tons, all of them made sometime well before 900 B.C. The Olmecs didn’t use the wheel and had no beasts of burden, so how they transported these enormous stones is a mystery as yet unsolved. That they could do this very difficult work proves that they had skills and resources worthy of a great civilization–even if we don’t know what they were.

The cool thing about these gigantic heads is that they seem to be portraits of real people. No two are alike. Each face has its own expression, its own distinctive features. The Wikipedia article shows all 17 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmec_colossal_heads ).

Who were these men? Rulers? Gods? Ballgame stars? Epic heroes? Nobody knows. Some of them smile at us; some of them frown. It’s as if they know we’ll never know the answer.

There are people living in the Olmec lands today who seem to resemble the stone portraits. So it may be that the Olmec people survived the dissolution of their civilization, even if all knowledge of it became lost.

What will remain, someday, of our own global humanist civilization?

The stone heads of our day are still attached to the leaders’ and the wise men’s shoulders.

When a Church Makes a Bad Neighbor

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The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.  Matthew 8:20

Do you think Our Lord would have been happier if he’d had a great big modern church equipped with every amenity?

The church across the street from me has all sorts of amenities, including ones that are anything but amenities for the church’s neighbors.

Every day it doesn’t rain, they have this horrible machine, sort of like the huge lawn mowers used on golf courses, that goes round and round, vacuuming up fallen leaves. Some fat guy rides on it. If you were new to the neighborhood, you might think we had a jet-port hidden somewhere.

The machine is escorted by two or three men with leaf-blowers, the kind that strap to your back, and another guy with a very loud edger.

When you call the church office to complain about the noise they’re making, absolutely nothing happens.

Now, what does all this have to do with the church’s ordained mission of taking care of God’s people–teaching them God’s word, seeing to their spiritual welfare, and providing charity to those who need it? Where is it written that there must not be a single leaf on any of the sidewalk surrounding the church? That the grass must be edged every day? And how much money does it cost the church to do this every day?

Do you have a church in your town that thinks it’s a boiler-making factory?

But then if the churches really cared about their mission all along, and performed it diligently, we wouldn’t have the kind of America we have today.

How Much Do They Want from Us?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Here’s a question to ask any “progressive” (translation: soft-core communist): “At what point do you decide you have enough power over us and don’t want any more?”

They want to control our health care. They’re designing little buttons we can wear that’ll rat us out to the massa if we eat something he thinks we shouldn’t eat.

They want to review our pastors’ sermons. They want all of us to participate in and “celebrate” same-sex pseudo-weddings, or else. People have been thrown in jail for having a garden in the front yard instead of the back, or not mowing their lawn to the satisfaction of the authorities. If they don’t like the color you’ve painted your house, they’ll make you re-paint it: and you’d better get it right, this time.

The National Science Foundation has a government grant to monitor the Internet and the social media to study “errors”–that is, remarks and questions that the government deems extremist or hateful. Like, “Marriage is between a man and a woman,” but not like “You $#%$%! How dare you say that? You should have your lungs torn out with a trowel!” It’s only hateful if some progressive says it is.

They want to dictate what the kids should have for lunch. They want to create “equality” by confiscating the money that you worked for and giving it to someone who sat at home playing video games. They demand the right to tell you want kind of car you can drive and when and how far you can drive it, what kind of house or apartment you can live in, and how much electricity you should be allowed to use.

At what point will the progressives/liberals/Democrats/citizens of the world be contented? How much of our lives must be under their boots for them to leave the rest alone?

I think you know the answer.