It Just Keeps Getting Better

Just a quick eyeballing of the top headlines from the front pages of today's newspapers reveals such heart warming items as:
An Indian stuntman died of a massive heart attack while attempting to zip-line over a river using his ponytail.
The singer Pink confesses she is a reformed slut.
The actress Catherine Zeta-Jones has been admitted to a clinic suffering from bi-polar disease..is that like, er, to be or not to be?
The Immigration bill pending in the Senate would allow about 20,000,000 new potential residents and a loophole would allow them to immediately qualify for welfare and other taxpayer provided benefits. (A related article claims that 1 out of every 3 Mexican citizens would plan to move to the good old US of A. as soon as the bill becomes law.)
The alleged Boston terorists' family has received more than $100,000.00 in welfare from the state of Massachusetts.
And, speaking of Massachusetts, the legislature in that enlightened state just passed the 'An Act Relative to Gender Identity'. This act requires high school aged boys who INWARDLY FEEL FEMALE be allowed to play sports with girls AS WELL AS change clothes and take showers with the girls. I kid you not.
But all is not lost. An NBA player has come out of the closet to proudly announce he is homosexual. He has been roundly applauded by all known news media and sports teams and boy scout troops and, well, everybody. (Except his former fiancé, who is dumbfounded as she claims she "Never had a clue he was a fag, er, gay. Not that there's anything wrong with it.")

At this point, I turned from the serious news to easier to digest opinion pieces and came upon one that provided immediate relief for the acid reflux that was then threatening to overwhelm me. Sort of says it all.
Please see:
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/04/30/not-wanting-to-write-about-not

The Moors Are Coming, the Moors Are Coming, the Moors Are Coming

In light of the recent Boston Marathon terrorist bombing, it behooves us to consider the present state of affairs.
Simply put, the Moors are coming...to a town and village near each and every one of us.
The Moors - Muslims - Jihadists - Islamic fundamentalists - Al Queda - WHATEVER - the come and go and come again enemy of the Christian West since the 8th century is on the rise again.
We ignore the danger at our own peril.
Today, an article caught my eye. It demonstrates the gross political correctness that infects our society.
See:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/28/is-army-career-over-for-radical-islam-academic/

This is just one example. The useful idiots in the mainstream media and their kissing cousins in politics, academia and the entertainment industry are all traitors to the land of the free. They see US as the enemy and the heartwarming Muslims and other third world cultures as the saviors of civilization.

In a sense they are correct. The West has killed off God and so we are left defenseless before the Moors' onslaught. Even such a one time arch opponent of the blood thirsty Moor, the Catholic Church, has apparently succumbed to political correctness.
See:
http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/2218/of_bishops_and_bombers.aspx#.UX50n5UTvw5


What the hell. My head continues to explode. How many cranial detonations can one person survive?

Between religious lethargy and political correctness, we have invited death and destruction into our homes. We are all responsible and we will all pay the price - sooner or later.
We never learn. We believe we are strong because of our diversity, but once upon a time the diversity of our peoples was forged into a unitary, indestructible  sword of righteous indignation. The Judeo-Christian God held sway.
Now He is gone. We are left with a nation of selfish, indifferent, senseless, nasty louts.
Now, the unifying element is gone and we are left with sheer diversity, a babbling lot of competing group rights and shameless jealousies.

See following for a nice take on diversity:
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/04/26/buchanan-the-dark-side-of-diversity/

Sooner or later...some terrorist will detonate an EMP device and the last hope of the West will be an afterthought to any future history.
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/e-bombs-the-looming-threat-from-doomsday-terror-weapons-of-the-21st-century/

Dr. Strangelove anybody?

The Hypocrisy of Killing

"If Satan ever laughs, it must be at hypocrites; they are the greatest dupes he has; they serve him better than any others, and receive no wages." Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon

When it comes to killing, among other pastimes, mankind recognizes no bottom to the depth of depravity he is capable of. Since Cain and Able, man has been going full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes in his effort to rid the world of those who threaten him or  challenge him or  disagree with him or just plain don't smell like him.
Once the Age of Enlightenment began its' assault on God - and late 19th and early 20th century deep dish thinkers finished the job - what would one expect?
As Dostoyevsky said, if God does not exist, everything is permitted.
It doesn't much matter whether God never existed or He did and we killed Him.
The fact is, as far as most of mankind is concerned, God is dead.

I can hear you now,
Oh that is nonsense Firpo. Why just the other day I read a poll showing 87% of Americans believe in God and just think of all the good Muslims and Buddhists and Jews and all the other warm and fuzzy people around the world who believe in some god or other.

The fact is most people give lip service -and little else - to God. They shroud themselves in the fog of hypocrisy. This is why killing comes so easily to man.

We needn't travel back to the dim days of Assyria or Babylonia or the noble days of grandeur laden Greece and Rome or the dark ages of lice covered Mongols, bloody Aztecs, and marauding European warlords for evidence of this.
Hell no. In less than 100 years, mankind has managed to kill off nearly as many people as had lived in the previous 1900 years of Anno Domini. Millions dead in the first world war as the good guys crushed the evil Kaiser, with the help of mustard gas, an earlier type of weapon of mass destruction. Then the good guys helped support Lenin and his acolytes establish the marvelous communist empire of barbed wire freedom, absent several more millions who didn't get the memo.
Before you knew it, the good guys were ridding the world of the murderous despot Hitler, a mass murderer par excellence who was outdone in barbarity only by the good guys' erstwhile ally Stalin who had taken over for the former good bad (or bad good) guy Lenin (who was poisoned by Stalin). We reduced the Hitlerian reich to rubble, including the cultural center Dresden along with  a quarter million civilians --what the hell...all's fare in love and war.
Not to be outdone by the European slaughter, the good guys wound things up by disintegrating the civilian centers of Nagasaki and Hiroshima Japan with the ultimate weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, better to sacrifice another half million women and children than just bomb the evil Emperor.
After all, he was a potential ally in the post war world. As was another good bad guy ally, Mao the Chinese liberator who liberated countless millions (estimates range from a low of 60 million to well over a million) from their property, including their hearts, minds and bodies.

I can still hear you...Oh that was war Firpo and things happen...the price of freedom...that wasn't us...we know better...we're different...all's well with the world...

(In case you can't read what the good guy Churchill says above:
"History is written by the victors."---"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."---"Men stumble across the truth from time to time, but must pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened."---ahh, the redoubtable prototypical hypocrite for all ages.)

Yes, things happen, like the good guys refusing to acknowledge the concentration camps until underground pictures were smuggled out of Europe...and the good guys forcibly returning millions of Russians and Germans to Stalin's clutches rather than upset their good bad guy ally by granting freedom to those escapees from the bloody barbed wire communist democracy and...what the hell.
That's all ancient history too.
All's well with the world and we are different, and...
Do we know better?
(An aside---Where is the god of the 87%? I can't imagine He is the God. Maybe it's the 13% who have a clue.)

Let's just consider the land of the free and America's  87%ers.
Since Firpo was watching Hopalong Cassidy round up the bad guys (he never shot to kill), we have stood by and watched nearly 50 million babies be murdered and not blinked...no, not murder, just a woman's reproductive right; we have fought wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Yugoslavia, the mind boggles- that's not a country, I just find my mind boggling.
We continue to search for places to spread our good guy culture and version of democracy and always against a people who don't want anything to do with our version of reality thank you very much.
Is Iran next? How about Syria?
We are the good guys and they are the bad guys and just because an obscene number of men, women and children happen to perish in our magnanimous effort to free them, well, that's a shame, that's - how you say - collateral damage.
None dare call it hypocrisy.

(For a nice article on more recent hypocrisy, see:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/04/21/if-you-want-to-go-to-heaven-you-had-better-get-busy-overthrowing-syria-paul-craig-roberts/ )

In closing, a WARNING...Graphic Image follows...by way of choice...in the end there is only one choice...God or god...Life or death...In the next life there will be no happy hypocrites.

This:

(What Einstein said above: "There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.")


OR this:

The Great Goal Posts in the Sky

That's  Pat Summerall, NY Giant kicker from the golden '50s and early '60s. He died yesterday at the age of 82 and the above photo headlined the story.
It's the 1959 game winning, division clinching field goal against the Cleveland Brown (ancestors of the present day Baltimore Ravens).
It was kicked during a snow storm and to this day no God fearing Christian who watched the game is willing to swear on a bible that the kick went through the uprights. Even Pat Summerall claimed he lost sight of the ball in the swirling flakes.
Back then, the NFL blacked out all home games, even if they were sold out. I listened to the game on the radio and almost passed out from holding my breath as I waited for the Giant's announcer Marty Glickman to make the call.
What fun it was then to listen to a game on the radio, any sport. Television and all the modern marvels of digital technology have taken some of the panache, the cache if you will, out of the thrilling experience of following the exploits of your team over the radio waves where your imagination was required to picture the contest.
The announcer describing the blinding snow and the frostbitten fingertips of players and fans alike...the emerald green grass of Yankee Stadium hidden beneath a sheet of mud stained snow, the wind howling like so many banshees from sideline to sideline.

A better time then, and not just because those were days of golden youth, my youth.
It was in every way a better time. (May hap, I'll talk about how some other time.)
This time, I remember the Giants...Sam Huff and Frank Gifford and Charlie Connerly and Rosey Brown and Rosey Grier and Jack Stroud and Mel Triplet and Kyle Rote and Y.A.Tittle and and Del Shofner and all the others, including Pat Summerall, whose exploits became so many warm memories in the hidden folds of my mind.
Thanks for the kick(s) Pat. Hope you're enjoying those golden uprights in heaven.

Grass & the Eternal Now

Yesterday, I sat beneath a deep blue sky and sparkling sunshine and watched the grass grow.
The beauty of it all filled me with the sensation of being on the cusp of understanding at last the mystery of life. It was as if I had been offered a taste of heaven and then, as I opened my mouth to take a bite, the sensation - along with any possible understanding - evaporated quicker than a tick's sneeze.

This often happens whenever I am enjoying a sublime moment, be it in nature or with loved ones or under the spell of some artistic work of genius.
 So close and yet so far.
I like to think, to believe, such moments are glimpses into eternity offered to us by God so that we may know what awaits us on the other side of the one way door.
He gives us a foretaste of heaven...as 1 Corinthians 2:9 says, "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him."

All of His great creation that teases us with an ineffable joy is but a tantalizing appetizer for the feast to come.
The verdant grass that swayed like a slow motion hula dancer in the gentle breeze trapped me like a fly in amber, caught in a moment of eternity that ended before it began.
It came to me that heaven is that moment, that moment of joyful bliss, which ends before it begins, or- as I prefer - heaven has no beginning or end, it is the moment for ever.

The Eternal Now.


This Eternal Now is the ultimate 'living in the moment', when all that ever was or will be in time, that is to say, in our earthly existence, which brings us momentary joy will now be ever present in eternity, in the Eternal Now...all the golden sunsets and snowy nights and all the crashing waves and croaking frogs and cooing doves and humming hummingbirds...all the sublime paintings and overwhelming symphonies and heart rending poetry...a quiet moment with a great book...or warm companion, the laughter of children and the welcoming nuzzling of a dog's wet nose against your cheek, on and on from hearty meals to thirst slaking drink, and - most wonderful of all, the smiles and hugs and kisses of loved ones...all the glimpses into eternity God provides us in time and finally part of the Eternal Now. 

Kierkegaard remarked, "God does not exist; He is eternal."
United with God in heaven, finally we too shall be part of eternity, in the Eternal Now, the ever present present.
Enjoy a taste of the ineffable:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMJPZ-mu-Ts

Rudentes --- The Great Mass of Unwashed, Uneducated and Unmannered

I am not sure where I came across the Latinate word rudentes, but it's a colloquialism for the above mentioned group of humanity.

The way things are going in the good old US of A, I couldn't help thinking about the rudentes among us. What with over half the population depending on the government for some type of aid, and a majority of voters beholding to big government politicians, (to go along with all the countless bleeding heart useful idiots who should know better), not to mention the exuberant gangs of inner city youth flash mobs and community organizers and brainless union thugs and intellectually smug academicians and...the list is almost as endless as the heartburning nausea that envelopes me every time I am subjected to Nancy Pelosi's witchy visage.

As if it wasn't bad enough that over half of us have already sworn fealty to Big Brother, a good portion of the rest of us are so lost in our distractions and amusements, in our daily lives of Thoreauian quiet desperation, that we run the risk of inadvertently succumbing to Big Brother as well.
In the name of national security, the government can whisk us away to God knows where - and our families certainly won't - without due process, without legal representation...the airports assault grandmothers and infants (potential terrorists), force disabled individuals to remove prosthetic devices, sexually attack both males and females...street cameras monitor both our cars as well as pedestrians...the IRS can and does read our e-mails...we are required to pay ever expanding and rising fees and taxes, we are forced to buy health insurance and subsidize illegal aliens...we are told what to eat and not eat, how much soda we can buy or how much salt we can use or how much trans fat we can consume.
When the majority vote against a pet progressive cause, e.g. homosexual marriage, leftist judges overturn the people's will...democracy in action?
Big Brother wages endless wars for the profit of the military-industrial-security complex and claim it's all for our security.
(When was the last time terrorists attacked us?)
Meanwhile, we use our soldiers to guard the poppy fields in Afghanistan and shake a finger at North Korea for threatening to use nuclear technology that we helped provide them with. (Both the Clinton and Bush administrations sold material and advice to North Korea to get a 'peaceful' nuclear energy program off the ground. And, let's not get started on how the US of A and its CIA supported a freedom fighter named Osama bin Laden when he was attacking the Russkies).

At home, our goddamn lily-livered D.C. politicians trip over each other in their mad dash to provide amnesty to millions of illegal aliens while taking away the 2nd amendment rights of lawful Americans.

Where will it end?

Benjamin Franklin warned that those who were willing to surrender some of their liberty for security would soon lose all their liberty.
Maybe that's what the majority of the rest of us want.

As Voltaire remarked about the rudentes of his time - and humans in general - "They are oxen which require a yoke, a goad and some hay."

Well, we have been goaded and provided with hay. It remains to be seen if the lashing of the yoke is soon to be completed.  I wouldn't bet against it.
(And, in advance, sheep are even stupider than oxen.)

This Sorrowful Life

Easter recently came and went and the day and the season remind us of many things, most notably suffering, death and salvation.

We know we are going to die and don't believe it.

We believe we are going to be saved and don't know it.

We both know and believe we are suffering...the curse of Adam and Eve...God damn them, and He did...to a life of suffering!

And us along with them. Ah...

This sorrowful life.

..........................................................................................................................................................

A brief meditation on sorrow...


The Buddha claimed all life was sorrow. Birth and death each brought grief. Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth, commanded one of Shakespeare’s characters. We poor humans recognize the omniscience of sorrow all too well, and we don’t like it. What to do?

Man has been trying desperately to avoid sorrow ever since Adam and Eve scurried past the angel with the flaming sword on their bum’s rush out of paradise...Aside from all too few moments of temporal bliss though, mankind’s efforts to detour sorrow down some black hole of earthly diversion have failed. Attempts to stifle the melancholy power of sorrow are ultimately doomed to failure. It’s the nature of the beast. Even in laughter, as Proverbs tells us, there is sorrow.

So, all life is sorrow. Once we accept that fact and decide not to waste time trying to push our sorrows down some black hole of temporary distractions, we can fashion an approach to deal with it. We can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse after all. We can transform sorrow from a debilitating emotion into a new way of dealing with reality.

Cervantes, the survivor of battlefield wounds and Moorish prisons and ever the pragmatist, reasoned that all sorrows are bearable, if there is bread. And there is bread, both of this world and beyond.
For the material minded, the bread - eventually - goes stale.
But...
For Christians, the bread of life is Jesus. Through Jesus, the sorrow that is life becomes the key to the joy which lies at the heart of salvation. -(God gives us sorrow that we may know joy.)-
We need but follow Jesus through His earthly journey to see the road map back to paradise that He has written into the heart of each and every one of us.
................................................................................................................................................................

Another sign of Easter season is the new life awakening all around us as the earth renews itself. I can smell the Spring grass and see the dogwood's pink blossoms and hear the chirping of baby birds. I can feel the soft warm breeze caress my bare neck and taste, yes taste, the hope that this season brings of new life and new possibilities.