Wonderful Matters

The Spiritually Insane Society

2012-02-09T19:14:00.000-08:00

The response to two prominent stories in the press these days highlights the rank spiritual insanity that continues to devastate society.

The first is a ruling by a federal court that the state of California cannot oppose same-sex marriages. The second was the summary dismissal of every single teacher at an elementary school that employed an instructor recently charged with sexual assault.

I feel tremendous sorrow for those who applaud both decisions. How many do? I'd say it is quite a few, their moral sentiments profoundly hammered by World operatives convincing them that such actions are justified.

Applauding the first means condoning, accepting, encouraging, and in this case legally sanctioning the physical and emotional abuse of one individual over another. This is truly the essence of a homosexual action -- indeed the use of genitalia for exploitive purposes. I don't believe for two seconds that any true consent is involved. It is merely exploitation of another to gratify desires that have been degenerately sexualized.

Applauding the second means joining a paranoid response to an act of sexual exploitation that is no worse that the first. Officials certainly want to address the issue, but how about making sure the guilty are prosecuted without punishing those who have dutifully done their jobs for years and dropping a gargantuan cloud of suspicion over everyone?

Society is so wretchedly confused about sexuality that no wonder these things are foaming up in the public purview. It is like a clog in the sewage system, massive amounts of fecal matter and filth streaming up into the streets.

The amazing thing that even more refuse to see is that all of this is perfectly rational.

Homosexualists do it because they've been so indoctrinated in the principles of the sexual revolution and engrained with the idea that anyone can do whatever it is they want to do which all of the wiser modern-age sages say is okay to do like allow same-sex couples to share sexual intimacy with one another just like any other couple.

School district officials do it because they can't fathom the thought of anyone presuming that they were involved in enabling that kind of behavior so it's "Zero tolerance!" time yet again. No wonder methinks they protest too much Horatio, no World System adherent really knows what the proper sexual behavior is these days.

While it is perfectly rational, it is not righteous in any way.

Is there even 1% of the population who not only don't applaud either action, but actually understand why?

That everything anyone does is perfectly rational, it is just that it may very well not be righteous?

Does anyone dare to proclaim what true righteousness is anymore? Or are all 99% of the population who refuse to understand simply afraid to get it because the weight of moral judgment is simply too overwhelming?

Can we even have the conversation without everyone just spouting "What the hell does that have to do with anything?"

That may just involve looking closely at what the Kingdom looks like as opposed to the World.

And that may involve asking the One Who Knows to help us do that.
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Cowboys and Aliens - A Metaphor, Addendum

2012-01-19T16:33:00.000-08:00

After writing this post a few days ago, I thought about a couple of things I wanted to add. One is a critical part of the movie I neglected to point out was profoundly allegorical, and the other a striking example of the way World inhabitants catatonically stare at that light. (Spoiler alert again, just so you know.)

A week or so ago there appeared this piece in the Los Angeles Times by Meghan Daum titled "The Mythic Power of Zealots." She lights into Rick Santorum for having such "boneheaded" (her word) beliefs as protecting the lives of unborn children and the sanctity of marriage, and concludes (in so many words), "Zealots really don't have that much power after all -- well, we hope they don't but we'd better expose them like I am here before they do; it's a good thing us mainstream folk are vigilent enough to prevent it."

Ms. Daum gazes intently into that light because she believes she is the one who is above it all by being mainstream. Rick Santorum, he's the one who's the zealot and we'd better watch him carefully.

I could get into the issue of abortion and same-sex marriage, even the issue of how the Catholic Church exploits it all to begin with (Santorum is a declared Roman Catholic), but the point is how Daum's argument is self-defeating. My real question to Ms. Daum is:

"Are you zealous about your mainstream position?"

For you see, if she says she isn't, if she backs off and confesses that she isn't a zealot about anything, really, that she's open-minded and tolerant and all the rest of it, then she's admitting there is no reason we should listen to her at all. If she doesn't believe what she's saying about the danger of zealots, then why pay attention to her? She really has nothing to say.

On the other hand, if she does concede that she is a zealot after all, that she is a zealot against zealots, then why is she any better? It's like those who holler, "No haters!" Excuse me, but are you saying that you hate haters?

She may take a more sophisticated approach and say that she's only against zealots who believe x, y, or z. Then why doesn't she say that, and then we can argue the merits of each issue. Instead she wimps out and slinks into one of those typical refuges of a fool: "I'm just part of the mainstream."

She can't win. No matter what, she is the one saying boneheaded things. Either she doesn't see it and therefore just a toadying handmaiden, or she does see it and she then reveals herself not merely one of the harmless Cowboys and Aliens people gazing into the light...

She is an alien herself.

She is an alien in human clothing doing her duty to wrap them up in her splendidly rhetorical folly, and if she doesn't even know she's doing it, a huge powerful publication like the Times does. And if the Times doesn't,

Then powerful operatives making it all happen do.

So yeah, I don't think Meghan Daum really knows what's going on, how she's been played. It just sounds really good. Only those with the mind of Christ can see through it, see the rank humanist manipulation, and understand that it is reasonably designed to keep spiritually destitute people in line.

What people need is not these pundits, media, or General's officers to keep things looking and feeling good -- wow, that light in the movie did look really enchanting -- whoaaa...

What they need is Christ.

And that was the key part of the film that I totally forgot to mention.

The character played by Olivia Wilde was indeed a Christ figure. She dies in the film, interestingly being whacked so hard by an alien and its sharp claws that she loses too much blood. Later she comes back to life (she is some rival alien being and as such can do that kind of thing I guess) and in the film's climax she willingly gives her life to destroy the alien spacecraft and save the universe.

Again, World inhabitants are entranced by all the World nonsense, like "I'm not a zealot, really, I'm zealously not!" World operatives industriously work to keep them there, again for good reason -- World inhabitants ask them to do so because they need it so.

Unless they'd actually come to Christ -- who is life.

Real, authentic, rapturous, dying-to-self-and-living-to-love, resurrected life.
_

My latest home page piece addresses another bit of that foolishness coming from the mouth of someone intellectually basking in the light emitted from the General's ceiling lamp.

Cowboys and Aliens - A Metaphor

2012-01-16T16:42:00.000-08:00

Recently I put into effect a Google feature that alerts me to items that interest me. I've put in a number of Catholicist Nation items like "Legacy of Cain," "ungrafted church," and "value extraction." Needless to say, these things never come up because no one knows anything about them. Oh they are very truthful and veritable aspects of life, of the critical contrast between the World and the Kingdom. But they aren't in the discourse because so much of the what's out there is of the World System, and bazillions of people who follow Cain right out of the presence of God and into the law enforcement clamps of Caesar don't have the faintest idea.

There is a Google Alert item that does come up every once in a while, however. It is "human sacrifice." It's just that when it comes up, it comes up as that thing people do when they carry out some ritualistic murder of an individual, much like the Aztecs did when they hacked out the pulsating heart of a prisoner of war at the top of the ziggurat temple or wherever they did that kind of thing.

It never comes up as the human sacrifice that happens all the time, all over the place in today's world.

That kind of human sacrifice is when an individual takes someone else's value and hacks it off to appropriate it and make oneself feel better, more whole, more complete. There are dozens of very typical ways this is done, and many are listed here on this webpage.

I don't think there are many people out there who would agree that these things are really human sacrifice. But if one carefully looks at the evidence with thoughtful and biblically sound wisdom and insight, I don't think there can be any other conclusion. The reason too many of even the most wholesome church people refuse to see it is because of their declared devotion to the World System.

I bring this up because I watched the film Cowboys and Aliens last night on video. (Note: there will be spoilers in this post.) I remember when it came out a few months ago and it looked so wonderful, but it got ravaged by the critics. I don't know what they were so pissy about, it was terrific western fare, and I generally don't like westerns. I'm sure they were expecting some pithy, meaningful, revelatory something from it, but hey, it was just cowboys and Indians with the cowboys joining up with the Indians to have gunfights against aliens. Cool.

But a couple things just struck me, and made me think about how much the film was a metaphor for actual real-life modern-day human sacrifice.

For one, the aliens were these ugly (how could they not be), pasty, grey-colored creatures who had a gangly and hunched-over look to them -- They reminded me of the image of Saturn in Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son. I went ahead and included it here.

Now I wouldn't have thought this except that when the aliens went after people, they didn't just stab them with their extra long claws, which they could've done very easily to any of those against whom they were battling. No, for a few of them, the alien actually started eating his victim. The alien even had an extra physical feature: small arms that emerged from their gut, each with three "fingers" with which to further grope or grasp at something. The metaphor: People grope and grasp at others for the purpose of eating them. Maybe not in the cannabilistic sense we think about, but in the sense that anytime someone is trying to schlurp up more for their retirement than they would otherwise get from simple, honest human value transfer, they are still doing human sacrifice.

When the aliens abducted people, they held them in a room, but they didn't have to tie them down or chain them up. The people were just standing there, completely immobile because of the brilliant hypnotic light that transfixed them. They were all in a semiconscious state just gazing at that light. The metaphor: How phenomenally powerful is the light of the World System, keeping people in a state of complete disunderstanding about the true nature of things. How many Jesuses are out there distracting people from coming to the real One who offers them forgiveness, salvation, righteousness, truth, grace, eternal life. They look like they are up and about and with-it people, but they are slaves to Cain -- perfectly reasonable because the agency of Cain was set in motion to keep sinful people from tearing one another apart in days. They still do human sacrifice, however.

The aliens did their gratuituous probing of their captured humans on "tables," which could easily be considered an altar, and what they did to their victims could easily be a metaphor for what powerful people in society do to try to get their value extraction cut. Sure it's all good alien abduction fare, pretty typical for these kinds of movies. Nothing really unusual there.

Except, why exactly do we get all squirmy and feel repelled by the idea of aliens snatching us up to have their way with us on their exploratory tables?

And why don't we feel the same way when people do that with us and our value assessments in real life right now?

I wrote a bit more about this in an old home page piece. It is here. My most recent home page piece is on the ultimate destination for those who spend their entire lives successful in other-sacrifice.
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Is That a Hand in Your Pocket or Are You Happy That You Can't Be Sure?

2012-01-08T16:38:00.000-08:00

Last night driving home from an event we attended far from home, I was listening to a radio station that was playing some good alternative music -- some brand new and some I hadn't heard for a while. One of the latter was Alanis Morissette's "Hand In My Pocket." I'd heard it a million times back in the early 90's, and was enjoying its smooth, breezy feel when I heard this line:

"What it all boils down to is that no one's really got it figured out just yet."

Earlier in the song she confesses she herself hasn't got it figured out just yet, and again the entire tone of the song is to just live life as it is whatever it is. Okay.

But this line just made me think about the rank abuse of logic that so many pass off as just-ever-so-with-it.

Simply, how does Miss Morissette know for sure that no one has got it figured out? Has she met every single person in the universe to conclude there is indeed not a single sentient being who does have it all figured out?

I understand she speaks from a very common perspective of observing so many people who just don't get it, a lot of whom claim to. I myself can't say I've got it all figured out, but I can say for sure that I do know of the next best thing. That is --

I know of Someone who does.

Yes, I know Someone who does have it all figured out. The One who created it all to begin with, and also who loves His creation so much that He gave the ultimate measure of devotion to make sure its centerpiece, you, could eventually have it all figured out -- joyfully, wonderfully, rapturously figured out.

Many would leap right into the cesspool of illogical thinking and spew the typical and quite widely accepted position "You can't know any of that for sure." My question is then this:

Are you sure about that?

"I can't speak a word of English." "This statement is false." "I know for sure I don't know anything."

The simple violation of the laws of logic are so obvious, it is amazing so many are captivated by radical skepticism. But I think they are because extraordinarily powerful people convince them to live by so many radical selfist precepts that they must swallow the idiocy along with it.

One recent example is one that has been around for ages, but since I love doing apologetics I just couldn't help myself -- I was chomping at the bit to tackle this one. It is:

"No one knows about hell. So shut-up about it."

Oh? No one knows about hell? And if what the things some people do claim to know about hell (even if you don't believe it) are indeed true, then shouldn't it be talked about as much as it can be in order to keep you from it?

All of this is what my latest home page piece is about, and I invite you to enjoy it. I'd also love to know what you think. Share your comments if you have a moment.

The "Margin Call" Phenomena

2011-12-22T09:54:00.000-08:00

We watched the film Margin Call last night, much because as you know if you read my blog and webzine, I am very interested in studying the massive proliferation of modern-day human sacrifice. It is fascinating how much the World System facilitates it through rigorous law enforcement (U.S. federal government and its satellites), rigid civil religious expectations (Roman Catholic ecclesia and its 501c3 subdivisions), and rabid value assessment programs (banks and finance service firms coordinated through a central bank).

Margin Call was a riveting expose of the latter. [Editors note: there will be spoilers in the following post.]

It presented a dramatization of a condition I've been sharing for years, one that is surely dismissed as folly but was pouring off the screen in the film.

The story revolves around the discovery that a financial services firm, much like a Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, is holding a wad of "investment vehicles" that are essentially worthless. All along they've been touting these to clients as worthy to have, but now the firm's management is faced with the reality that they will soon be found out by all, eventuating the firm's demise.

Through much of the film the characters are faced with a choice. Work through selling these "toxic assets" by lying through their teeth for immense financial reward, or be principled and refuse to submit to the rank deception, yet then be thrown on the street.

Most chose to "stay with the firm" as one top manager put it when given a face-to-face ultimatum from the CEO. "I am with the firm" he sneered through grinding teeth.

In the end of it all, it came down to that condition in life that so few comprehend, but there it was in bright, brilliant colors on the screen.

People are worthless.

Oh sure we put together all kinds of rationalizations about why we're worthful. But then that's just it, isn't it? Precisely the point of the movie. A bunch of people working through the truth that they are worthless, and all they've been doing all along is sustaining a gargantuous lie and getting paid ungodly amounts of their extractees' cash to do so. They go crazy recognizing how worthless they really are in that, and frantically search for the ways to still keep getting paid ungodly amounts of their extractees' cash.

At the end of the film the "I'm with the firm" manager (played by Kevin Spacey) goes to announce his resignation to the CEO, then endures a blithering speech about how little money really means -- putridly ironic in itself. He then stands up and sighs, "I'll stay. But not because of your speech. It's because I need the money."

I could share a lot of telling moments from the film, such as the very plain scene that simply featured a pan across the office building floor with all the computer screens showing those market charts being displayed to no one. Also worth a mention is the very last scene of the film when the Kevin Spacey character is burying his dog late at night. Incessantly shovelling up dirt from a nicely manicured lawn. Images and metaphors for the tremendously dismal value disassessment that reigns in the World System.

But I do want to share a thing that struck me, something that demonstrates the filmmakers' abject failure themselves to even understand the meaning of what they've shown.

I watched a bit of the "Making of..." segment offered in the DVD, and some remarks were provided by Zachary Quinto, an actor who played one of the characters and himself a producer of the film. (You may know Quinto better as the actor who played Mr. Spock in the most recent Star Trek film remake.)

The very first thing Quinto said was, "There is no judging in this film, no one is being judged," something to that effect. He then blapped all the typical Hollywood stuff about choices and character and dilemma and feeling and all that blap.

But, really...

No judging at all?

No one is liable to be judged, let alone the characters themselves within the film?

Are you kidding me?

That's one of the compelling features of the film.

That they all were judging one another, the entire time! The splendid tension resulted in them not being able to express their very justified judgment of one another because it would've compromised their capacity to keep gulping their ocean-sized swig of the gravy train!

It is easy to see why Quinto would say something like this. That the consideration that life is all just "losers weepers" all along, that it is ugly but it is what it is, that no one can really judge anyone else.

Yes, indeed, everyone behaves rationally, which is why no one should be judged, if all there is is rationality.

But the film reveals that there is another thing in the mix that not even the filmmakers know about.

There is also righteousness.

And yes, not everything is righteous.

And yes, only those who know the One Who Judges Things Perfectly can truly know what that righteousness means.

Yes, what those people did in the film was spectacularly unrighteous, but the only true way out is to go to the Kingdom where Christ gives all good things to His followers. Indeed He is the third choice for all those characters in the film, but they haven't a clue because they've all been so thoroughly Catholicized, told that the World System is all there is with its stark "Take it or leave it" options.

The third option is to accept you're worthless, die to yourself, give up all the pretense -- the Spacey character was this close to doing so but he hadn't any clue that Christ would be there to meet him...

All he had was a grave he kept digging.

Oh my, what a body of death.

I really like horror films. I really do. Margin Call was about as good as any.
_

For more, check out this page in my webzine that describes more about the human sacrifice of today. I also wrote this about the "flash crash," getting into more about the meaning of what's going on in those finanical services firms.

The Very Nearly Perfectly Accurate Primer on the Financial Meltdown, the Advanced Version

2011-12-02T09:59:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I directed your attention to Matt Miller's piece in the Washington Post in which he tries to explain what's going on in the world as he would if he were speaking to his young daughter. Today I noted a piece by Jeffrey Snider that is really the same thing but with all the turgid economics included.

This is what you want to read if you want all the gory details of the way human sacrifice works these days. In fact, I like Jeffrey Snider's work because in virtually everything I read from him he is merely explaining the full apparatus for standard value extraction practices engendered by the World System.

As I read it, all I could think about was the Black-Scholes model that everyone raved about once upon a time, that novel formula that could guarantee returns on an investment no matter what happened. Snider's piece demonstrates that the Black-Scholes seduction is still alive and well.

As it should be.

World inhabitants need it all to survive. Doesn't matter if you're the highest living billionaire or the lowest slogging gutter dweller, you are always looking for the next human sacrifice hit. Does it involve lying? Of course. Does it involve great big smiles on the well-dressed liars? Certainly. Does it involve lots of exploiting the numbers and manipulating the law to keep the best of it humming along? How else could it work. Does it involve millions of people bumbling about clueless about any of it, much less the One Way out, yet still handing over gobs of their own cash to these people so the latest Black-Scholes technique will get them their cut? Nothing but.

And we all do that because we feverishly clutch our World System contracts. Should someone bring up the idea that, hey, how about instead we all gather in Christ's love and provide the tremendous wealth of the gifts He gave us on our own without Caesar's direct help which we wouldn't need anyway-- should someone actually suggest that, he'd get completely marginalized, pushed into inconsequence.

Yet still, Christ wants faithfulness from His followers. The World doesn't like it? That's kind of the way it is supposed to be.

A Christ follower can't not like it. Sure they may not have the fruits of the World's value extraction. Even if the Christ follower has none of it, he is rejoicing.

He has Him.

And the Kingdom that comes with it.

The Very Nearly Perfectly Accurate Primer on the Financial Meltdown

2011-12-01T19:59:00.000-08:00

Another fine piece appeared in the Washington Post from Matt Miller, who likes telling us the way things really are. This one was called "Europe Made Easy," and it does indeed read like a primer. I found it quite interesting that the great and powerful men-behind-the-green-curtain felt the need to put this out there for general consumption. It seems too many just haven't a clue about what all the fussing is about. Greece and banks and bond auctions and the Euro and why on earth there are a bunch of young folk occupying things.

Miller sets us straight with it all, fine work, yes, fine work indeed. Except for one not-so-minor point. Most of the all standard exposition about these things from all the uber-pundits such as Miller does get it right, pretty much, but just the same most get derailed right at the end. That's where the World keeps the full story from you and as such predictably holds you in some agitated state of consternation, rage, or even rebellion.

His wholly exploitive conclusion is this, well, I'll just let it speak for itself. It is rather simple, so simple that spiritual simpletons just shrug it off and then get right back to seething. It is:

"The moral of the story? When you’re an adult, never trust politicians and bankers who say they know what they’re doing, because they’re only looking out for themselves."

Sounds plain and truthful enough. And it is! It is very truthful.

The point is that it doesn't get to the full truth.

And what it is missing is precisely what keeps people in their present-day hells. What is it that is missing?

You and me.

It isn't just the politicians and bankers who say they know what they're doing but only looking out for themselves It is you and me. We do that too.

We too engage in the rank value extraction practices that these guys are so very good at. When an Occupy-x-streeter waves his fist at a banker, he's just saying he wants as much of the human sacrifice loot as he's getting. When a proud Constitutionalist shakes his finger at a politician telling him he's got to do things his way, he's telling him he wants as much of the tribute collection booty as he's hacking off of everyone else.

No one trusts anyone else because in their heart of hearts everyone knows the other guy is an other-sacrificer just like they are.

Not only is the only way out of this body of death a full unabashed 180 degree turn to Jesus Christ, but it is a complete abandonment of all the contracts one has with the World System that make all that Miller elucidates happen. It isn't economic illiteracy that dumbfounds people, it is a deep benighted spiritual illiteracy that keeps them from seeing what Miller describes has happened a thousand times before in history, and it will happen a thousand times again unless Jesus returns first.

Those contracts? W-4 tax liabilities--from companies and by individuals alike. Incorporation establishments. Voter registration commitments. Social Security identifications. Mortgage and debt obligations. Yes, yes, if you are truly Christ's get rid of all of them.

Love with His love.

Oh, you can't do that? You need all this stuff? You require the force of law to constrain your behavior? And that behavior is what now?...

Because so many look at what I just said as the most sickeningly vulgar swearing in the strangest foreign language means that there is no way the World will not ultimately complete its systematic implosion. You see, it's already been imploding all along. It's just the expert marketers succeed quite often in getting us to believe it's all really okay after all. Right now it's just a time when some people are getting a bit frightened of the death seeping through.

You can't get out of it by trying ever-so-much harder to whack off more of the other guy's value before he gets you. That's still death, but sadly, it is all that entrenched World inhabitants know. And so they'll keep paying their politicians and bankers handsomely just the same.

No, the only way you can escape is if you are not in it at all when the final implosion occurs.

And you can be, if you're over there in the Kingdom.

"Why Did They Do Nothing?"

2011-11-12T15:45:00.000-08:00

Right after the Los Angeles Times regaled us with the latest news of the day, at the top of the second page were these words, those in the title of this post. They were the words Sandy Banks used to title her piece, her remarks about the Penn State sex abuse scandal. In it are the typical laments along with all the "They had to know because..." stuff.

Well, Sandy, I can answer your question. In fact, I can even share why you even ask the question, and it doesn't have anything to do with your moral excellence or superior assessment skills. You ask the question because you are a shill for the World operatives whose job it is to get people riled up about things which they provoke, foster, and encourage as a matter of practice.

For you see, Sandy, if asked the question "Why does no one do anything about sodomy? Or adultery? Or promiscuity?" I'd venture to say that a progressive culturally hip individual such as yourself would say something like, "Well, people can just choose to do what they want. We are a sexually liberated society. Don't be intolerant."

As comical as this kind of response would be in light of her alarm at the Penn State affair, I actually feel a bit of anger at this brazen expression of iniquity, but I mostly feel sorrow. Tremendously visceral sorrow.

Last Saturday I went to the memorial services for a wonderful student of mine who I taught and coached eight years ago. He was an airline flight attendant, and he was murdered in his hotel room while on layover in Mexico City. News reports have claimed that he allowed a male prostitute to come into his room that evening. My former student was found the next morning naked, bound, and strangled with a belt around his neck. His things were strewn about the room.

I later discovered that he had been in a homosexual relationship with a gentleman, and it was said the prostitute resembled his boyfriend.

At the services there was grief all around. Completely understandable. But do any of these people have a clue about the extent to which their sexual sin or the wholehearted endorsement of its practice led to the death of my former student?

Do Sandy Banks and anyone who simply refuse to call on the name of the Lord have the faintest idea why no one did anything to keep my former student from succumbing to the world that contributed to his death? Why no one did anything to help protect the victims of the Penn State predators? Do they really? Are they just the most hypocritical fools on the planet, or is this more of the insidious apparatus of the World System and its operatives to get people to keep thinking that they are the only purveyors of good even in and around their sneering revulsion of them?

"Rahr-grr-arrrgh WE HATE YOU ___ [fill in the blank with priest, president, banker, top college football program head coach] but we know you manage our sinfulness so we have the most perverse affinity for you after all."

Are there just so many who refuse to see the putrid wretchedness of this state of existence? It is indeed the very reason to have an agency of Cain, the leaders and followers of which haven't the faintest idea of Who is the way out of this body of death.

This is all death. No matter how much ultrarighteous-sounding folk like Sandy Banks hold up their megaphone plapping out their faux indignation, it'll never ever stop. It's all death, the foulest ugliest death covered with sweet vanilla World frosting.

The only way to have The Kingdom -- and freedom from all this -- is to turn around, acknowledge that not only will no one do anything but they won't because the problem is the charred, smoking wicked hearts in each of us, the perpetrator and perpetrated alike. The only out is to take the hand of the One who genuinely and eagerly invites us into His Kingdom.

Even when we confess it's really really really hard to not be sinful anymore, He knows that, He died to take care of that business, and all we have to do is let Him do His work.

Stay with the World?

Then they will do nothing.

And it'll happen all over again, and other Sandy Banks types will ask the same question over and over and over and over and over again.

My latest home page piece has a bit more about The Answer.

It's Just Not That Hard to See The Lie

2011-11-02T19:54:00.000-07:00

Matt Miller had a piece in the Washington Post last week that basically said, in so many colorful words so it gets into the Post to begin with, that the world is imploding under the weight of its gargantuan lie. I wanted to include his remarks in my own latest home page piece, but the point can be weighed down a bit too much I think.

The Answer is already there. Just not hard to see. Unless of course your sight has been seared by the World and you are simply too blind to see it. Or your sensibilities have been yanked by the Operatives that it sounds like the ugliest blithering.

What is happening with Europe and America and any part of the world that is not already shredded by the poverty brought about by the immense value extraction practices of the most powerful exploiters is that the value claims for stuff-all-around have been being so overstated for so long that it is starting crack under the weight of the virulent deceit exercised for the required human sacrifice that it is.

It is as simple as this. Derivatives claims right now are at about one quadrillion dollars. The estimated actual value of all the stuff on the planet is $250 trillion. That's a $750 trillion overassessment. The math is really not that hard. (If you want the more complicated version and the detailed reasons why, that is here.)

Asking Christ to make your own value assessments true, that is harder.

That's because he'll ask you to sacrifice yourself, put your life in His hands, and then go love people like you mean it.

Ouch.

Unless the massive implosion of the World's financial system and resulting eruption of sin management oppression is less painful.

Suit yourself.

Another 1,000 Words on The Real Slavery

2011-10-15T23:16:00.000-07:00

In my last post I opined about a blogging pundit's remark that a good blogger must write a thousand words a day to be effective. I did agree one must blog often enough, but also made mention of extraordinarily meaningful time constraints. There are indeed other things more important.

I've since thought that I must add another important facet to the blog-posting-somewhat-more-infrequently-than-every-day position. That is simply that one must take time to actually discover things about which to blog. Certainly sometimes those things require an entire day of plain discovery sans any writing at any time.

I thought today I'd add some examples of the things I've been looking at over the past few days.

One is an event that happened just yesterday: Rome itself has been overrun by the "Occupy Whichever Powers-That-Be Street There Is" fever. This particular revolt has resulted in some violence, I'm told, so the rebellion is stirring quite nicely it seems.

Tired of all the pressing anxiety, the finance officers of the G20 nations scolded the eurozone and insisted they get cracking to calm things down. They haven't really meant business about doing anything of substance for millennia, why would it be any different over the course of the next week? It's all really just part of the docudrama in the sin management extravaganza.

The rebellious revelers are no better. I heard a soundbite on the radio from one "Occupier" who said, "We're doing this for your children."

No you're not.

You're just as much a fool as those you are railing against. They lie and you buy their lie even in your strident objections that you don't. You lie because you think you are good and wholesome without Christ. How dare you claim you aren't as power hungry as those you excoriate. You are being played and are playing everyone else because you get to have a microphone shoved in your face.

Earlier in the week I read a piece from Hernando de Soto, the acclaimed economist who made one of the most salient points in recent economic thought in his book The Mystery of Capital. He declared (as he did again in the piece) that capital is dead without binding legal transcription of the value of that capital.

But read the piece carefully because you'll see that even that doesn't matter in the end. He writes with such despair, crying out for the forces of the law to do their work in spite of the harrowing nature of the World inhabitant's predicament. The truth is that

Without Christ, you are dead.

No matter how much capital you have, and how much it is recorded with gold plated inscriptions in vaults of marble, in the end it is all just dust in the wind. It is amazing enough that he actually made mention of the fact that claims to the world's wealth exceed the actual value of that wealth by ten-to-one (that's one whopping lie by a heck of a lot of people). But even that fact is moot when one realizes that without Life, any wealth is ultimately meaningless.

Finally I must make mention of a piece I read by Walter Williams. Like de Soto, I like reading Walter Williams. He really nails things with simplicity and style. He wrote a piece a week or two ago about how terribly loose Europe has been with its entitlement generosity. He chides the U.S. for being so profligate.

The thing that struck me was his last sentence:

"We must find a compassionate way to wean people off government."

Wow.

Here's the thing! I know that Way! He is Compassion Himself! Yes, definitely! Get off Caesar's teat and walk into the open, gracious, splendid embrace of Christ!

Sadly, I don't think many people know what that means. They think Jesus is the hifalutin dude they see a bunch of religious people talk about in churches on Sunday, and that's pretty much it. But one reason that's the case is that coming off the intense addiction to Americanism is as awfully difficult as it is coming off meth.

I happen to love NASCAR racing, but it breaks my heart to watch someone lead a prayer for thousands in attendance and millions watching at home -- with the name of Jesus in the prayer, wow! -- and then in the very next moment they all betray that devotion by singing a worship song to an idol. "Oh say can you see..." You lift your eyes up to... what?

As good Americanists it is what they should be doing, I understand. The wholesome Americanist version of Cain's agency is supposed to rally the faithful. But that also means they are engaged in the standard value extractions practices that Americanist doctrine engenders. Williams' plea at the end of his piece sounds more like lamenting a hopelessly doomed effort than any realistic expectation that he will actually find that way.

That is because it is so simple: If it isn't Christ, he will never find it. It isn't there. All there is is the fake one, the one Caesar runs at the behest of Cain's legacy of brutal law enforcement.

Funny, just went to Apple's movie trailers site and caught the newest preview of The Avengers. Those are the idiosyncratic and delightfully popular Marvel superhero guys, you know them all, Ironman, Thor, Hulk, and of course, ta-da! Captain America. Don't get me wrong, I really like all those movies.

But they resonate with us because deep inside we have the need to see justice done (Hey, the DC Comics version is "The Justice League"). What so very few can grasp is that there is One who will see it done all right, but He won't spare anyone who's been unjust,

Including us.

Both Cain's minions through history and his slaves wherever they occupy are on the docket for that trial. And the judgment has already been made.

Do you know of That One who is The Compassion? The One who died to be your mercy in the face of that justice? The One who literally rose up out of the grave to rule over the heavens and the earth and who will give all of the bounty and glory and wonder of the Kingdom to those who want to enjoy it with Him?
_

I like watching the whole pop culture fascination with superheros, and wrote about it a while back when Watchmen was made into a feature film. That's here. And here's why many of the very best looking Christian churches are just subdivisions of Cain's vast governing operation.

1,000 Words on The Real Slavery

2011-10-04T17:08:00.000-07:00

I saw a note from some web expert guy who says to be an effective blogger, you must write 1,000 words a day. A day. Now I'm all for writing prodigiously -- I simply won't stop sharing the things I think are most important for the Kingdom. But I have a family, a job, and a home. Attention to those three things takes up 98% of my time. Yes I have a ministry, but much of that is wrapped up in those three things. I try to squeeze what I can into The Catholicist Nation and Wonderful Matters from the other 2%.

I am wholly devoted, though, to this ministry. But to write 1,000 words a day? I'd have to sacrifice far too much of those other things. Can I be a successful blogger otherwise? The only reason I'd consider myself to be relates to another critical aspect of web success, and that is that there must be content.

That's what I try to achieve, and I just think slapping 1,000 words on the splendor of today's dog-walking experience is just not worth it.

For example, I can't refuse to blog on what happened on Sunday, something that very few people are addressing from an Ungrafted Church perspective. Oh there is the World System perspective, and there is the Catholicized Church perspective, and there is the Average Joe perspective...

And then there is the core truth about things.

I'd like to share with you the core truth about this event and its ramifications all around. You're more than welcome to critique it, I'm great with that. If it isn't the truth let me know. But if it is, you'll either foolishly reject it or wisely embrace it. And if you do the latter, it only means something if you then decide to do the one thing that really matters in it all.

The event was "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," the day pastors felt the need to boldly shout about all the political evils that ravage the country. They even went so far as to say who people should and shouldn't vote for in elections for civil office.

The move was really a protest against what they see as excessively constrictive regulations against their right to speak freely. Rules for 501c3 non-profit tax-exempt organizations include provisions against partisan activity that strictly prohibit pastors from openly endorsing any given candidate in the service of their duties. These particular pastors consider that this is an undue violation of their First Amendment rights.

I guess my question is, how can you reject the rules so stridently when you agreed to the terms of the contract you signed? Furthermore, how can you reasonably expect your demands to be respected when you are getting paid so generously for the expressed purpose of following them?

It has been made clear in no uncertain terms that the pastors are hoping to goad the IRS into some rabid prosecution of their disobedience in order to draw attention to the onerous condition they must endure, but do you know what's been happening?

Nothing.

On Sunday the bleats and roars and wails screeched from pulpits across the country about the devastating effects of abortion and same-sex marriage and illegal immigration and a host of other social ills, and about that rascal Obama and his cohorts and how evil they all are. It was deafening!

The problem is that, it was just that. It didn't matter, because deaf ears can't hear it, and coming from spiritually impotent speakers it is just mumbo-jumbo.

Right now the IRS is completely ignoring it all, effectively marginalizing the World-church-flailing-about-trying to-be-Christian. These pastors are yelling, "Listen to us everyone!" and everyone is yawning, helped along by the entrenched World System powers. And what is funny is that

The pastors are very aggravated.

"What? No wall-to-wall media attention? No televised coverage of dozens of valiant pastors being dragged to jail? No prime-time network newscasts of our noble plight?"

Nuttin.'

"It's frustrating," said a senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, the point group for the event. "The law is on the books but they don't enforce it, leaving the churches in limbo." (quote from the New York Times)

There it is. What World operatives have done is very strategically left the church hanging out to dry. By heeding the World's call to enter into rebellion against the temporal authorities, these pastors have made themselves wholly impotent to have any lasting impact in the spiritual lives of those desparate for Christ. By continuing to seek benefits of a legal obligation without fulfilling the contract's requirements and defying Caesar in a pathetically unbiblical way, they are breaking God's law and thoroughly eviscerating their witness for the One they foolishly believe they are honoring.

Yes, they are breaking His law. They are hypocritically saying one thing and doing another. This is an awful offense to God. They've signed on with Cain's agency for the purpose of law enforcement (by firmly girding 501c3 non-profit tax-exempt status), expected the law to protect them (in complete rejection of God's generous call for His own to live by Truth and Grace), and then demanded that Cain provide for them even in their own vocal objection to Cain's sworn officers (open challenge to those officers and their ordained duties).

And they are having their just desserts, being shown for who they really are. Even worse than that, no one knows about it, and no one cares.

Should the System care, and should the IRS actually take care of business, they will do it quietly, subtly. IRS officials have given lip service to the offense, but only to sound like they know what's going on. They've said some churches are being "audited." Ooo, scary. But as long as no one really gives a rip (which most don't) why make a big deal out of it?

Should there be any media attention, it will only come with everyone seeing the rank hypocrisy of the church leaders. The very clever strategy: just wait until enough can see the brazen behavior of these people, and if there is any publicized prosecution, it will be wholly justified in the public's eyes.

And what if there is that remote chance that there is actually any widespread sympathy for the pastors? Then there is ripe opportunity to rationalize more fomented rebellion against Caesar, which feeds the voracious appetites of World System powers. They will find someone to step up and use this to further strengthen the System's grip on the populace, to the Catholicized church-goer's glee.

These fools cannot win. And it is made to be that way.

Actually, that may be the best thing for Christ. Maybe more people will see these people for who they are. Even better maybe people will see Christ for who He really is -- leaving the World and its puny little 501c3 churches for what they are. Hey, I agree that abortion and same-sex marriage and all those things are horrific, I'm with them on that.

But people will not be free from them as long as they interminably continue to try to get Caesar to fix them. Much much less when they alienate the people to whom they should be ministering.

The True Church of Christ is free from Caesar's clutches. Free from having to say anything to his officers. Free from the oppressive law enforcement he administors, which includes any 501c3 entanglements. Free from expecting to get anything from Caesar that God hasn't already ordained should be the follower of Christ's anyway by way of His divine protection.

The 501c3 pastor and those who enable them are slaves to the World System, and as a result they rage and rail and have very high blood pressure all the time, making everyone around them very uncomfortable.

The follower of Christ is a slave to righteousness, His righteousness, rapturously serving Him and others in His Kingdom, and as a result they know and experience and revel in His bountiful joy and peace.

There are my 1,000 words for today. Probably a few more than that.

But hey, gotta make sure I make up for all the other days I don't blog.

The Tangled Factor

2011-09-02T19:31:00.000-07:00

The other night my daughter insisted I watch one of her favorite movies with her, Tangled. It is the Disney telling of Rapunzel, and it was a fun film.

I was kind of taken by the lanterns thing, and thought of it as similar to what followers of Christ do in their hearts waiting for Him to return. Hey, I rarely find any truly Biblical connections from Disney stuff, and sure, this is a stretch. I'm not saying anything except how it made me feel, that's all.

Another thing that got me was how much Rapunzel was convinced by her fake mom that she needed to stay in her large room at the top of the remote tower because the world out there was too dangerous, what, with all the evil people out there. All of us viewers are certainly expected to think of how rotten that woman is for convincing her of such a falsehood, but then...

That's exactly the way we all behave.

Wherever I go, drive, walk, bike, I always take a look at the sides of houses for the satellite dishes. The times I see drivers with their cell phones on their ears (no matter how illegal it may be in their state). I mean, out walking one night I watched a driver pull into his or her driveway, open the garage remotely, pull in, then close it.

We all live in our London Towers, radars protuding looking for people who won't hurt us.

Oh yes the wicked fake Rapunzel mom was somewhat right -- there are indeed a lot of repugnant people out there. But because of information technology it is getting easier and easier for us all to seek out and coalesce into our own little cliques of comfortable people.

I wrote my latest home page piece about the power of the group, and the power of the World to keep people in their groups for the expressed purpose of shielding them from their sinfulness and relieving them of their need for a Savior.

In fact just today I learned the U.S. government is suing banks for lying about their novel investment vehicles (which is mostly their worthless "toxic asset" mortgage-backed securities stuff). I think it is striking how brazen the feds are, considering how much they enabled the banks to do that. I can tell they are tenderly pursuing this lest they unwittingly expose the insidiously incestuous relationship they have with the most powerful financial institutions.

The banks, the feds. The 501c3 churches, the Company. They're all into arranging groups.

But whatever group you're in, you're still in one of two positions. You're either being fattened for consumption by World value extractors, or you've already given it up and died with Christ. With the former you'll be eaten, with the latter you'll love and experience love.

Wait, that idea was really more from my previous home page piece, but hey, can't emphasize it enough...

Jesus Said People Were Worthless

2011-08-23T12:29:00.000-07:00

Last week a federal appeals court ruled that much of the money lost to Bernard Madoff's humongous Ponzi scheme is lost forever and ever and ever. The funny thing is their reasoning.

It was never there to begin with.

Seems lots of investors are straggling about clamoring to get their money back, and they are finding stark ugly reality whacking them up-side the head. The value assessments they thought were veritable were not exactly that. In other words, somebody somewhere sounding really on-the-ball about these things told them their value was one thing, and, well, it wasn't.

Even funnier -- or sobering if you'd rather -- is that Jesus said something even more stunning.

You're worthless.

Hey, don't take my word for it. Look in the gospel of Luke, 19th chapter, 22nd verse. Jesus spoke of someone who was supposed to take the value of their God-given gift to do something valuable for someone, and they didn't. What did Jesus say to this person? Did He say, "No big, just live and be happy"? Did He say, "You're a winner inside and just unlock that wonderfulness"? Did He say, "I love you anyway"?

Ahem, He said

You're worthless.

And what is more amazing is that He added it was proven by the very words the worthless person spoke.

We don't usually think of Jesus calling people worthless. But the truth is we are. We're all just tiny bits of stardust held together by the laws of physics God put in place. God can make us a vapor with barely a breath. It is comical to think so many of us are so deluded to think we are even close to anything.

The amazing thing is that even so... He still loves us enough to die for us, so that we will be -- to use a phrase -- worthful. It is by Him that we have anything, anything to be who He made us to be and enjoy the beauty of His creation humbly, graciously, appreciatively.

The real problem comes in when we think we're worthful without Him, and we go around like Madoff investors thinking there are clothes on the Emperor when, well...

The further problem comes when all the megaphone blastings of the World seep into our consciences and convince us that we're something because of ___ (fill in the blank: job, house, reputation, income, smarts, education, possessions, status, standing, privilege -- lots more I'm sure you can think of).

I've recently had a very tumultous summer in which I've been in settings where the worthlessness is amplified, and the contrast is striking. Some people out there waaay more exposed worthlessness-wise, while most walk through life thinking they're something and they are very successful trying to get away with it for a while. But the fact is

We're all worthless. Each and every one of us.

The World will tell you you're worthful through all the splendid World things there are. The Kingdom tells you something very different:

You're only worthful by His blood.

I've found that the more one lets the Kingdom words of redemption and restoration and righteousness from Him in spite of our rank worthlessness, the more one finds that which is truly valuable and how much He wants us to enjoy that.

Another One Hits the Wall Hard

2011-07-23T16:31:00.000-07:00

I saw that controversial musical artist Amy Winehouse was found dead in her London apartment. One thing that struck me about it was that she died at 27, the same age as my oldest son. I really didn't pay attention to much of what she did except that she was extradordinarily popular and she did some crazy stuff in some of her concerts.

This happened as I was polishing my latest webzine feature, yet another letter to a college student. I'd already written a few letters and published them, but I just haven't been pleased so far. I'm still not fully satisfied with the latest, even though I think this one hits closest to where young adults are. But I'm feeling much like most young adults do, which relates to why so many young adults are wrecklessly careening about with their lives, which is wrapped up in one profoundly insightful declaration I heard from one:

"I want to keep talking until I know what I want to say."

The reason I spend so much time blogging and webzining -- not a whole lot unlike most people -- is that my state of existence is a bit more like this:

"I already know what I want to say, I just want to keep talking until I know how to say it."

What is it I want to say? What exactly is that?

That Jesus Christ is the Only Answer. It is not any of the World's pathetic concoctions shoved in people's faces and gleefully schlurped up.

That highly-paid dutifully-sworn skillfully-trained operatives work the System to keep people in their deceit and wickedness, and it always looks so inviting. Often it looks just like the most smiley compelling Jesus character.

That it isn't just people like Amy Winehouse who are captivated by it all -- her anti-Christs ultimately cost her her life. Millions and millions of young people are seduced into remaining mired in their own wretchedness, and they scratch and claw at trying to find what they know is truthful or joyous or gracious or merciful or meaningful or truly really actually fulfilling.

That all they come across is more of the slop the Jesuits spill into their feeding troughs, just with different flavors each month.

What college students and the Amy Whitehouse's of the world need are those who belong to Christ.

No, they are not the typical "Christians" because too many of them are just sanctimonious Catholicized smartasses. Young people use their shit-detectors most proficiently to see this and spend their lives making a cross with their fingers at arms length in front of their faces to fend them off.

What they need are Jesuses with skin.

Yes, I confess I'm not a Jesus with skin to them now. Not in cyberspace. I can share a word or two here, but even the most eloquent 57th attempt at a "Letter to a College Student" from waaay over here at my desk doesn't really help much.

What anyone needs is someone who knows the life-saving power and strength, joy and wonder, beauty and glory of Christ, and who can share that with them in a bountifully self-sacrificial way.

That's it. What hurts is that anything I say will never connect with the World-maintained contraption that so many have installed in their souls. The young adult dismisses anything said after two or three words, and it isn't even as though I'm speaking Greek. It is more I'm swearing in Greek, so it isn't even that it isn't understandable, but that it is filled with the most offensively foul expletives.

And it isn't just me. I'm not that foolishly arrogant. I don't give a rip if it is or isn't me saying it.

Just any Jesus with skin

Who loves with His love.

Codependent Charity

2011-07-08T22:05:00.000-07:00

Today's Los Angeles Times featured an opinion piece from a Jesuit professor and community organizer who made the case that one of the best ways to douse the raging federal budget conflagration is to tax charities.

As it is non-profits may register with the federal government to acquire a measure of legitimacy, and in return they are afforded tax-exempt status. The author of the piece makes his case, and closes by simply stating that everyone needs to make sacrifices, and he is willing to be the first to step up and lay on the altar.

In the brief author bio at the end of the piece is a statement that rarely shows up: "The views expressed here are his own." I have a feeling these words were added in this instance because of the volatile nature of his argument.

"Tax a non-profit?! That's just wrong."

And I further surmise that one reason it is considered so wrong is that the religious institutional infrastructure of this country would be the most violently averse to such an idea.

What so many don't get is that the Jesuit infrastructure is always shaping and molding people's thinking as we rage and seethe about such supposed folly. They are always working with the Iagoan boast in mind: "It doesn't matter what happens, either way I will win."

If the writer can be successful in disseminating his idea -- and he certainly has help as a major metro paper is publishing it, closing disclaimer not withstanding -- then he is putting the wedge in the door for more federal control over charitable activity. In this case finding a gold mine (non-profits) to pay for it, and let's be honest, most of federal government activity (Social Security, Medicare, Fannie and Freddie housing subsidies, etc etc) is quasi-charitable activity. Dutiful Americanists have succumbed to much worse.

If the writer is sufficiently reviled, then he has succeeded in fomenting enough outrage to scuttle the idea and move the boastfully resolute non-profit stakeholders -- the millions of them across the landscape -- to proudly slither back in to their 501c3 tax-exempt incorporated conditions doing the bidding of...

The federal government.

There is one thing the law is good for. Really. If you are someone who actually reads Jesus' words and pays some heed to them, look at the first letter of Paul to Timothy. Look there in verse nine, that the law is made for lawbreakers and rebels, for the ungodly and sinful, for the unholy and religious, and for a few other not-so-nice kinds of people.

Signed on as a wholesome tax-exempt non-profit of some stripe? That is perfectly reasonable. The World is a cesspool of codependent interactions, everyone fearfully paying big bucks to keep other lawbreakers and rebels out of their way. The law is the cruelest taskmaster and perfectly suited for such an environment.

But do you say you belong to Christ?

Then there are only two options. One is the belief on one of the many, many Catholicist concoctions of Jesus -- a good number of them designed for an individual's particular codependent needs to be met. Those with some substantial say in a non-profit in any form even if it is the most wholesome 501c3 Christian-oriented church are firmly entrenched in the World System that governs the affairs of liars, thieves, and murderers.

Or you could actually be listening to Him, doing the things He said to do, and be living and worshipping in an assembly with others worshipping Him in Spirit and in Truth. You could be regularly committed to building the highest skyscraper, composing the most beautiful sonata, or sweeping the floor of the back break room at the factory.

You are following a very cleverly disguised Cain, or you are following Christ.

And if you're following Christ, then the Jesuit professor's words cannot affect you. They mean nothing to the one who truly does live, and love, by the words and power of Christ. A completely free assembly doesn't require taxation one way or the other. It instead uses the entirety of its congregants' wealth to do something only Kingdom people know about...

Love others.

Doing the real charity, not the codependent kind the World slogs about trying to do.
_

My latest home page piece gets a bit into the monolithic nature of the World System. It is brutally monolithic, no matter how many boffo storefronts it has. The Kingdom leads to One, Logos, Salvation is His very name, and from Him you may have everything. You may also visit my page on church non-profits.

Departed

2011-07-01T22:11:00.000-07:00

A week ago on this day, two notable individuals departed. No, they didn't "depart" as in the metaphor for dying. They just departed their place of note and went somewhere else. Both have some extraordinarily profound similarities.

The first departure was that of Whitey Bulger, the notorious organized crime figure and FBI's most wanted, found holed up in an apartment in Santa Monica after 18 years on the lam. On this day, he was put on a plane and taken to Boston for prosecution. The funny thing is that apparently he was the individual upon which the 2006 Oscar-winning film The Departed was based.

The other departure was that of Sheila Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. She was stepping down, and on this day she gave her departure speech prominently containing some choice "what's-what" words for the banks. During her tenure she oversaw the -- well, I guess you'd call it "reorganization" of hundreds of banks throughout the country.

What do the two have in common?

To get to Bulger, the FBI sent out some quite visible public service announcements about the gal they figured was his girlfriend, a woman by the name of Catherine Greig. Some who saw her or knew her tipped the feds off, and they simply followed her to Bulger.

Presto. You've got your man.

For a couple years now millions of World inhabitants, pusillanimously enabled by the grand punditry class, have screeched about how the financial crisis started, has gone, has kept up -- all of that. Raging raging and more raging, all of them snarling with some exasperated desire to know what happened. I see that Ron Paul and his crew are still squealing about getting rid of the Fed by getting at what it does with their typical threat of an audit. I can see Ben Bernanke there still peeing his pants over this.

They will never get at why it's all the way it is, because they simply won't follow the clues where they go.

Just like the feds trailed Greig, you could discover a lot from trailing Bair's words at her departure. She essentially ripped the banks a brand-spankin' new asshole for having too little capital. The Bank of International Settlements lately has been really moving to get those banks to increase that capital, get that Basel III agreement going (I always wonder what on earth happened to I and II, but then...)

Well, the banks are squawking back. "A whole 10% capital requirement? Are you nuts?" Oh my, yes, how could we be so insensitive. That a bank would know the full value of what they're lending money for, let alone 10% of it -- scandalous.

When you look a bit further, track the chain of command a bit, see all the power brokers in the mix, and then observe their customer's dependence on the job of making their value assignment fantasies look as real as possible, you can see how nervous the banks would be. It is the same nervousness the president and legislature have, indeed the news media and Romanist churches have. They all actually would pee their pants should anyone who keeps paying them gobs of their income as tribute actually see the worthlessness of their lives, turn away from them as sworn agents of Cain, and drop at the feet of Christ who would actually make them whole.

Follow the money (or lack thereof) and you'll see the World System humming nicely on all cylinders.

You just have to look at it.

And when you're tired of looking at it, turn around and see Christ waiting there for you to find True Freedom. The Kingdom is a million facets of beauty, wonder, and glory that Christ wants to share with you.

The World is one monstrous monolith with a million storefronts that look really nifty. They all get you to the same place: the alter of human sacrifice for whichever slobbering bunch of power brokers have managed to get at the front of the line for you.

To where are you departing tonight?

--

I've written much more about this dynamic at my webzine with this month's home page piece. Would love for you to find The One Who Loves there, or anywhere He extends His hand. That's cool.

There is Quite a Lot to Choose From in the Catholicist Nation Buffet

2011-06-12T18:54:00.000-07:00

Today I caught a terrific hour-long interview with a prosecutor regarding the merits of a new book by Vincent Bugliosi that proports to blow the lid off of Christianity. He claims he brings up ideas that had never before been introduced, from the perspective of a prosecutor looking for the concrete evidence to see if a thing is true or not.

The interview was broadcast on a pretty solid apologetics show, Stand to Reason, and filling in for the regular host Greg Koukl was J. Warner Wallace who himself is a police investigator, and the prosecutor he interviewed was Al Serrato. If you remember, Bugliosi is the famous prosecutor who put Charles Manson away, but he also wrote books on O.J. Simpson and recently on the assassination of John Kennedy (he supports the lone-gunman story, by the way). Bugliosi's book about which J. Warner and Al conversed is called Divinity of Doubt.

According to Bugliosi, it is the settled case that no one can know. The prosecution has got to have iron-clad evidence to say a thing is a certain way, and the Bible and all the rest of Christian stuff just haven't got it. So, the only meaningful position anyone can rationally hold is one of firm agnosticism.

Besides all the relatively easy philosophical weapons that can be launched against Bugliosi's conclusion, he really doesn't introduce anything new. This was detailed quite well in the interview, which again was truly informative as two very seasoned truth-uncoverers (investigator and prosecutor) went at it. They essentially reduced Bugliosi to a little pile of logically and rationally pulverized dust.

But the one key thing I wanted to add here is a critical factor in all of this. It is something that I really don't think Wallace and Serrato have any kind of true grasp of, and I think that's because they are still so inculcated with World System conceptions. That idea simply lies in the answer to this question:

Why is it exactly that Bugliosi feels the way that he does?

One of the interesting things the two brought up was that nothing Bugliosi says has not been addressed before, even covering the hundreds of years people have wrestled with the issues of Christian philosophy. They'd said his whole approach just smacks of someone who is very late to the game yet still boasts that he really knows what he's talking about.

Which again, leads to the question.

Why does he say all these things? From where do his ideas come? And why does he just have no clue?

The answer lies in the Catholicist Nation premise, merely that highly paid, deftly trained, extraordinarly skilled, and phenomenally powerful operatives work from deep within the World System informing society of what they are to think, feel, believe, and accept as truth. When Bugliosi lights into "Christianity," he is really just taking on what the World wants him to believe about Christianity.

The things that Wallace and Serrato cited that Bugliosi said or wrote reflect a comically inept understanding of the Bible and Christian matters. But all Wallace and Serrato could do is refute them -- very proficiently, yes. But they don't get that Bugliosi is taught to think those things, very deliberately, very purposefully, very expertly.

He absorbs those things just as readily as anyone who isn't informed by Truth and Grace would absorb those things. And Bugliosi does the work of those operatives by getting his work published, presented, talked about all over the place in promotional work, reviews, interviews, appearances, mentions anywhere and everywhere about it...

So when people hear Bugliosi and have their agnosticism confirmed, they are getting the words from the people who shared those words with Bugliosi, or even those who shared those words with those who shared those words with him.

For more on where Bugliosi and most agnostics get their world view, check out my webzine. There you will see the striking contrast between the World and the Kingdom. If you're only absorbing what the World tells you, they may look very much the same.

Who you follow makes all the difference as to which one you live within.

Following Cain By The Millions

2011-05-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

Found this photograph in the home page of a major news outlet. It is an image similar to others that profoundly illuminate the state of the Catholicist Nation, which appears to be very healthy.

It seems a bazillion people in Spain have violated the rule about being up past midnight the day before an election. I imagine Spain wants things to be decided at the ballot box and not in the streets. It does seem that people are bit disappointed with the ways of proper enfranchisement, beings they're pounding the pavement so enthusiastically.

Upset with high unemployment and certainly other abuses of all sorts, they've taken to let their exploiters have the what's-what. Stop exploiting us so much. Many in the throng even taped their mouths to "make the statement" that their marginalization is unacceptable. I guess they want their exploiters to notice them a bit more so they can...

So they can do what?

A few days ago the Roman Catholic Church came clean about their pandemic clergy sex abuse problem. They got right at the heart of the problem.

Society.

It is society that is to blame. The sexual revolution originating with the whole Woodstock generation and all that stuff has captivated the hearts and minds of priests to get them to do bad things.

Don't get me wrong, I chuckle a bit at this also. But the truth about all of this is something that is rarely mentioned. Many will deride such gutlessness. Others will consent with some measure of resignation. Most all of them will yell a lot at people who say such things and keep yelling at them to simply get those guys to keep their pants on the presence of children. Everything shoved into the World's megaphone will reflect similar sentiments.

But that's understandable, because all those remarking about it are also victims of society's plap.

The truth is that society's plap -- whether motivating the lascivious behavior of the priests (and pretty much the lascivious behavior of everyone else of the World) or informing the words about it -- is all generated by the Agency of Cain, most notably its ecclesiastical branch, the Roman Catholic Church.

Yes, indeed.

When the Roman Catholic Church says "Society made me do it," they are indeed saying "The Roman Catholic Church made me do it."

Quite a noteworthy facet to this truth is that the organization charged with the task of molding and shaping society's hearts and minds is officially titled The Society of Jesus. So yes, if the experts say "Society is the reason," they are indeed sharing an extraordinarily profound truth.

For any dismissive detractor, I offer this simple challenge, based on the simple fact that society isn't some nebulous haze of neuron-twisting electrons somewhere-- it is people.

The real question is, which people? What people out there that make up SOCIETY are the ones who have the most power, the most authority, the most legitimacy, the most wherewithal, and the most expert training and industrious proficiency to get people to do things that would keep them in the hegemonic institution of oppressive sin management?

How on earth is it the case that those ten thousand people demonstrating in Spain could be so moved to brashly approach exploiters who'll continue to exploit them? It doesn't matter how much they get to them, they'll still be compelled to slog through the World System no matter how much more smiley they can make their exploiters or how many other more smiley exploiters they enable.

The Answer is even simpler.

Go to the One who moves His followers to simply turn to one another and say, "Hey, I have a God-given gift and you have one too. Let's get together and love one another with the breadth of our talents. I'm giving up myself and all my selfish desires to hack off something from you so I can have it. I'm done with that.

"And how about we leave these exploiters to exploit those who like being exploited. Really, do we need them? God's already sent them out to crack heads of those who refuse to call on Him, what do we have to do with that if we belong to Christ? He's given us something far, far better."

At that point people would go do their business simply because they love one another. Everyone in community would be free to revel in the beauty, glory, and wonder of God's Kingdom. Their words can never be muted because they speak of those things with bountiful joy and effusive praise to the One who gives His own everything anyway. People will either listen and also come to Him, or they'll murder those who speak and live in such ways.

Huh? Murder them?

Jesus said it would happen. But if it does...

Then what?

He said nothing could separate us from His love. Not a single thing, not even death.

I look forward to being among the ten thousand -- nah, the ten million (or more!) who'll be gathering simply to worship Him in Spirit and in Truth.

No matter what happens.

Following Someone, Who It Is Says a Lot

2011-05-16T21:33:00.000-07:00

Today in the news I happened to catch a couple of stories that highlight the pathetic nature of following someone other than Christ. Hundreds of millions do, you know. No matter how pathetically pathetic, they still do.

There is the lead story everywhere about this French guy, the head of the International Monetary Fund no less -- oh, I hadn't heard of him before this -- Dominque Strauss-Kahn, who was caught with his pants down. Everyone was so startled that the euro dropped a bit. I thought, hmm, this guy must be a pretty major leader-guy -- you know, lots of people following him and his moral guidance -- for the entire currency to take a hit, however mild it will ultimately be.

I also wondered, why all the shouting about his sexual exploits? People in power do this kind of thing all the time. Was he just that stupid to let himself get snagged in such a foolish way? Sorry, but this is just too stupid. Please don't misunderstand me. Any sexual assault is demonically reprehensible. But the simple plain real world fact is that powerful people do sexual assault all the time, and they get away with it all the time. How come this guy is different? I haven't looked deeply into it, but anyone who knows how the World operates can't presume this incident was about anything other than taking down someone who was in the way somehow.

Then there was this nifty little bit. Lady Gaga was the first to get ten million Twitter followers. It is perfectly understandable that a grandiose performance artist like her would get such attention. Say what you want about her "art," she is popular for it. Understandable.

But ten million people are following the vapid exhibitionism of an insipid celebrity, and I can't count on one hand the number of people I see really truly incisively sharing and expressing and elucidating the contrast between the World and the Kingdom.

Oh yeah, some come close. And yeah, maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. I have looked around a bit, but I see no clues that lead me somewhere deeper or farther along to get to who is actually speaking of the Kingdom in ways that are moving people to get out of the Catholicist Nation and into Christ's embrace.

In my last post I mentioned that I'd like to write and write and write, and perhaps someone will also see the things I'm seeing and be a part of the expression. But I thought after I'd written that, hey, I'm great with just finding and reading someone else share it just as expressively.

And I wonder now, in light of the very profound truth that you are who you follow, what the lives of those ten million Lady Gaga followers are like. Do they have the deepest, inner contentment? Yes I know everyone has problems and everyone has issues and everyone feels pain. But ten million people think they'll have life from Lady Gaga? In any form?

At least her performances are honest, we all know they're a put-on. How many know the Strauss-Kahn episode is one as well?

The Galleon Verdict Revelation

2011-05-13T21:15:00.000-07:00

I wish I could blog nonstop here. I wish many more people would read what I would be writing here if I could write more. I wish I wasn't so tired all the time from all my regular commitments, simply because there is so much I see out there that confirm the brutal realities that exist in a very oppressive World in such striking contrast to a vibrantly liberating Kingdom.

I'd keep writing and writing and writing until perhaps at least someone would also see those confirmations. To be honest I wouldn't even be writing now but for the fact that one of the more elucidating of those really quite common revelations was made this week in a standard piece of financial punditry. I just have to remark about it, if only for a brief blog post.

Check out Frank Partnoy's "The real insider tip from the Galleon verdict." He addresses the very common concern of all who are paying attention that insider trading just isn't really anything defined, much less something that can be efficaciously prosecuted. He simply writes that the conviction of hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam only gives value extractors the precise instructions they need to carry out the most proficient human sacrifice. To wit:

Don't let yourself be recorded. Be cryptic. Don't buy lots at once. Buy derivatives and swaps. And have lots of excuses for why you did a thing netting you a few extra millions-of-dollars when it really looks like you exploited information to whack off a nice juicy chunk of someone else's value.

The key is to make a note of who the guy is writing this all down for you.

A professor of law at the University of San Diego.

A Jesuit institution of higher learning.

Yes, there is something of great significance there, something quite plain and obvious to those who have asked God to drop the scales from their eyes so they can see truth and grace in its profound glory.

Indeed, if they genuinely knew the One who is Truth and Grace, they'd know. With an inner peace and steady contentment they'd know what is really going on. The best thing going on is that -- in the midst of this kind of harrowing revelation, in the whirlwind of so many others allowing this abjectly incessant body of death to ravage them, in the sorrow of the pain they endure no matter how much authentic followers of Christ seek to share His abundant mercy with them no matter how much they are virulently reviled for it -- they are firmly in His deep abiding care.

Without Him, you're on the alter of human sacrifice.

Now that so many know how best to do it, don't count on getting off any time soon.

Unless...
_

The Essence of Value Disassessment

2011-05-01T16:01:00.000-07:00

Just putting in a blog post to announce my latest home page piece. It is on a subject that I truly believe hits at the core of life's meaning and one's eternal destiny. You'd think that little is said about value and what it really is, but there is actually an amazing amount of information out there. It is just most of it is vomited up by a World System that can only do value disassessment in its duty to sustain rich, vibrant human sacrifice.

Recently the widely celebrated and declared supergenius of economics, Joseph Stiglitz, joined with a number of other economists to officialy propose that Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund would suffice as a means of keeping the World's value assignments stable, you know, beings there've been a few financial crises recently.

Just so you know if you don't already, SDR's are merely specially authorized value assignments as a way to measure assets and thus facilitate financial transactions. They are used by whole nations depending on their need, and they are not really much different than a standard currency. The special feature is that instead of trying to peg value to an internationally accepted reserve currency, like the U.S. dollar, SDR's are pegged to a basket of four different currencies.

Otherwise, the IMF is really doing nothing other than that which any central bank does.

Pretend like they can actually do value assessment.

The problem is that they never can, never will be able to, simply because you cannot assign value to an individual if that value is simply not there. And if those individuals say it is when it isn't, then they are lying. And when World institutions try to pronounce that those individuals have value to keep them in the fold then they are also lying.

That's the World.

A lie.

Don't get me wrong, it is all a very useful lie, put into place by God Himself so that the behavior of sinful individuals may be gallantly constrained. Check out the fourth chapter of Genesis to see this all set in motion. Make sure to note that God has nothing to do with the lie, He only necessarily sends the liar out and away from His presence to build an entire nation around which to commence his duties. Central banks, even ultra-mega-super-duper ones like the IMF, are simply doing their job of lying magnificently, as they should for those who buy its service.

The reality of this institutional deceit rests in the simple question: How're you going to get the true value of things from four liars trying to make value assignments instead of just one of them? Seems to me the IMF is setting itself up to be four times more confused. Or to provide four times the strength of the lie. Or both, really.

I could have added this development to my home page piece, but when I thought about it, I really don't need it. As I elaborate in the piece, it doesn't matter what method of value assignment you use, if it isn't based on the blood of Christ, it is ultimately worthless.

Sure you can be a rich guy and have a yacht and a mansion and an island in the Pacific and even a Bombadier Global 5000 private jet to get you there.

But if you're dead, what difference does it make.

Again, the piece is at my webzine The Catholicist Nation at yourownjesus.net. Would certainly like to know what you think. Give me your take. Put a comment here in the comments section or send me an email. Would love to hear from you.

Liberation from Bondage

2011-04-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

Last night I attended a Passover seder demonstration, and while I'd been to one before, I was still blown away at how everything God does points to Jesus Christ. Anyone who even slightly contemplates the meaning of Passover can't miss it: God loves us so much that He sent His Son to be the very sacrificial lamb for our sins, simply so He could have deep, abiding fellowship with us forever. It is just as the Elijah whom Jews seek every year once said, as he gazed into the eyes of the One Savior, "Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world."

It is only through Christ that one may have freedom. He's the One. That's it. He's it. Any other kind of freedom is not a freedom at all, but merely a way to keep people slightly happy while still enslaved to their sin and the head-cracking hegemony that only goes so far to rein it in.

He is the "liberation from bondage" as the seder presenter said is the theme of the Passover commemoration.

The most prominent way World operatives go ballistic spewing out all kinds of pseudo-freedoms is through two key institutions: higher education facilities and mainstream media outlets. The people who work there hold the megaphones to seduce a World population whose psyches are filled with the virulent precepts of humanism drilled into them by those given the immense power and authority to do so: the Society of Jesus. Before you think these people have anything to do with the real Jesus of Scripture, know that this is part of the grand ruse. A fake Jesus marketed by fake disciples from a fake church hawking a woefully fake freedom.

An example of this occurred one night when I happened to catch a bit of "The Newshour" on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter marking the beginning of the most seminal point in U.S. history, the American Civil War. Three guests appeared, all celebrated college professors, all touted as experts on all things Civil War.

They were introduced after the results of a survey were shown, indicating that most people in this country believe that the war was much more about federalism than it was about slavery. The three experts all dismissed the findings with disgust, gushing that the real cause was slavery and effectively implying that anyone who thought otherwise were idiots.

Oh how boldly and fiercely must you lie when you hold the World's megaphone. This PBS forum extended no alternate view. No professors were given the opportunity to graciously and articulately offer a perfectly reasonable contrary view. The reason is simple.

These people have to convince you that slavery does not exist anymore. It is their very reason to live. These professors have been taught, indoctrinated, brainwashed with the idea that whites must persistently wallow in the most consuming guilt for the rank oppression of the antebellum black population, and that all measures must be taken to keep that flame alive. It is their zealous crusade to stridently shout "That group of people were oppressed, we've been the ones to free them, and we enlightened ones are the ones to continue to fight the cause of liberating any who are in any kind of bondage today!"

The problems with this benighted thinking are manifold. For one, not only is the world is racked with all sorts of modern-day forms of slavery -- you know them: human trafficking, overwhelming debt burdens, frightening tribute obligations -- but those things are put in place by the very same people who claim to work ever-so valiantly to end it. It is actually a very profitable racket. These professors are part of keeping the slavery thriving, then they can hop on their high horses and get paid extraordinarily well for the pretense of rescuing people from it.

The most insidious problem is that the "It was all about federalism" people and the "It was all about slavery" people are both right, but they haven't a clue about how they are. As devotees of Cain's legacy, they too are out of the presence of the Lord and just can't get how it all works. Like those professors, they're puppets moving their lips to blap whatever it is they are supposed to blap to make themselves look like they really know.

The truth is that the Civil War was a finely choreographed, deliberately managed affair to expressly consolidate more power in the hands of Caesar, a perfectly legitimate duty of Cain's agents. More power to the federal government would eventually mean more intimate administration of the means to disseminate humanist doctrine throughout the populace. Ostensibly ending a scourge like institutionalized racist enslavement would direct the people's attention away from the plethora of other equally abominable compulsions that are just as rife today as they ever were.

But this is all the way it is supposed to be.

A nation of sinners requires the most ferocious head-cracking by a force with seven times more power than anyone challenging it. In fact, take a peek at the 13th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the one that supposedly ends slavery once and for all. Take a look at it, go ahead. It essentially says, "No more slavery, except..." Not very conclusive as an item that truly fully takes out slavery.

Which leads to the only real liberation from any bondage...

The Subject of the Passover.

His blood is the only thing that frees.

From sin. From Caesar. From the psychological terrorism used against everyone who rejects Y'shua's merciful love and denies His saving power.

Look at what Elijah says and pay attention.

Your freedom depends on it.

Abjure

2011-03-25T20:10:00.000-07:00

If you pay even the slightest attention to current events, you may have caught sight of an unprecedented incident. It was announced on a Friday afternoon, a time notorious for rapt inattention when most are speeding out of the office to hook up the trailer and head to the river. Even if you did catch it you'll see that any significant meaning will be seriously muted by the divinely ordained power of the order. It always is for such occurrences.

The ho-hum story was the Jesuits' record payout of some $100+ million in a settlement over sexual abuse claims made in the Pacific Northwest.

You'd think something like this would thoroughly discredit the Roman Catholic Church, but sadly, most will rationalize it away with casuistry having to do with their respectability in at least paying those seduced into their convenient prostitution. There's always a good reason, and the Jesuits are best at coming up with good reasons. They run the World System and are experts at all forms of murder and deceit. Do you actually think this isn't small potatoes for them?

For the benefit of a world full of reprobate sinners, it is very good that the Jesuits are so good at what they do. They run the Agency of Cain's ecclesiastical division where they can best use the weapons of psychological terrorism to achieve their ends. For those who refuse to come to Christ and find their righteousness in Him, they are truly the next best thing.

This story is a fine pretext for addressing an interesting book that is getting some press called Endgame by John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper. It is a penetrating look into what the global debt crisis is really all about. I admit I haven't read it, but from the various punditry and scattered author's remarks, I get the idea that the conclusion is that we all just need to pay attention and shape up and get with fixing our borrowing addiction.

Yeeeah.

A while ago my cousin shared a George Carlin YouTube video on Facebook. I was curious and watched the three minute or so clip, and it was one of those times when Carlin really says what's what. In it he does his best schtick in speaking of the power the banks, brokerages, corporations and whoever else financially high and mighty have over everyone.

As those in the audience watched him with that goofy smile on their faces, you know the one, it says "We all think you're really funny even though you're telling us what benighted slaves we all are and, hey, we are laughing on the inside because we can sure relate to that!" Carlin concluded with this essential truth, rather ferociously delivered I might add:

"They own you."

Oh. That's nice. While it is indeed true, my cousin regrettably joins bazillions of others gushing "You tell it like it is, George!" and they all gird the intractable presumption that the only way to change things is to challenge the owners. Revile and rail and rant loudly in their faces, that's the solution.

What folly.

Everyone without Christ is like those sexual abuse victims in the Oregon Province. It is not just that they own you, they're paying you to stay slaves, and you keep gleefully lapping it up. You like the fine meats and wines of Egypt, and if you were so blessed to be liberated from that slavery and spend a couple days in the desert, you'll predictably whine to God. When He graciously drops manna from heaven to abundantly care for you, you scrounge for more even when it spoils in your hands.

The only end game to all the awfulness of the World, from priest sexual exploitation to harrowingly overwhelming debt burdens, is to abjure the realm all together.

Get out of it.

It is the only end game that counts at all in the very end of all the ends World pontificators say are the ends. The virulent debt crisis is only the most pronounced economically visible symptom of a planet full of wicked people doing human sacrifice to the joy of the Society. Don't want to be a part of it anymore?

Get your ass out of it.

Don't complain to anyone who's just going to keep you a slave. Don't remonstrate against the firmly legitimate duties of the Jesuits to form the minds of those who administer the head-cracking hegemony -- the legislators, bureaucrats, bankers, ministers, educators, and journalists -- all of whom are figuratively ramming their genitalia into your orifices and paying you nicely to do so. Yeah, if you don't want that anymore, it unequivocally requires -- as colorfully explicit as it is -- you getting your ass out of the way of their you-know-whats.

But it only counts if you hightail it to the One Who Liberates. He said Himself that you can proudly rid your soul of one demon, but if you don't replace it with His Spirit many more demons just as wretched will fill the vacuum. The World has millions of spirits festering and spewing out of the hearts of millions of slobbering value extractors, all of whom want you for dinner. A lot of them even look a lot like Jesus.

Heaven has the One Alternative. The One -- there is Only One.

Do you put your faith in Christ?

Then mean it and live for Him, letting Him love you, then loving others and telling them the truth about things and providing what you can for them with grace and kindness and compasion. Furthermore make your devotion to Him exclusive by working with others to prayerfully and studiously abandon all the commitments and obligations you have with the Agency, as well as all the benefits you get from them.

And as you gather with other followers of Christ, nurture an insightfully firm knowledge about the true meaning of the Roman Catholic Church. Don't do anything with it except to understand it. It can't stop sodomizing itself and any who enter its sphere of influence, which is very wide and insidiously diverse. It does what it is supposed to be doing and has been doing it for millennia.

As you abjure, trust Him -- really. You don't think the God of the Universe would bring you the most complete fulfillment in whatever He knows is best for you? You don't think He'd empower you to pool your resources (which are His anyway) so you could have all the nice things you have now, if not more? You don't trust a God who created the heavens and the earth to take care of you for everything you'd ever really need or want, in a rich vibrant community of others who love Him and love others? Really?

One reason you may not trust Him like that is because the Jesuits have taught you quite well not to. That's cool though. As long as you give consent and keep eating at their table you'll remain under their hypnotic power -- remember, quite legitimate by God's design for those who simply will not bend the knee and call on His name. Look at the fourth chapter of Genesis to see more of what I'm talking about.

But if you want the true, real, most rapturous freedom there is, the only way to get it is to

Abjure.

And don't look back.

All that matters is you taking The Shepherd's hand, and looking forward to the Kingdom He longs to enjoy with you.
_

"Everybody's Gotta Bleed"

2011-03-19T15:31:00.000-07:00

This is kind of an addendum to my last blog post, "Everything is Window Rebuilding." I took issue with Caroline Baum's remark that earthquake's are bad for an economy, not because they aren't, but because everything that anyone does is about repairing something.

The Jewish mystics even had a term for it, tikkun, and it is a certain truth that the world around us is broken, battered, beaten, and in dire need of an expert handy man.

The problem with the concept of tikkun is simply that there are two types of handy men in the Yellow Pages. One is sitting in a modest throne room in some presently little known location processing all the information the World System gathers to better manage the sin of the inhabitants he is charged with constraining. This often requires extraordinary deceit and calculated murder, and it always involves grand acts of provocation for the most proficient implementation.

And it can never be anything other than human sacrifice.

This is why all the Caroline Baums and Frederic Bastiats given over to the World cannot fathom how broken windows happen, and what precisley is the best solution to the agony they cause. The first handy man can only smile at you and employ lots of bleeders to patch it up a bit.

What about the second Handy Man?

He's the One who shed His own blood so that the window may be completely replaced.

There's the difference. It is the most profound difference of anything there is a difference for. That sounds kind of odd, a bit melodramatic, yes, but it is true.

Here's a good look at the distinction.

In my newspaper today was an article about the budget impasse in the state's legislature. Some Republicans are being criticized for joining the enemy, the Democratic governor, and one of those lawmakers offered these words.

"Everybody's got to bleed a little bit."

I can't see how someone sworn to Cain's service can't mean precisely what he says in the duty of enforcing the World's precepts. Everyone without Christ will do or be a victim of human sacrifice. The burglar smashing through the window is as natural an occurance as a 9.0 temblor and massive tidal wave. It will always happen in a world by people who can't help but get bled or make others bleed.

I found a very interesting passage in the Bible that confirms this prescription. It really captivated me -- Psalm 124 was the one. It is simply an affirmation that God is the one who protects anyone. In this instance "...when men rose up against us [and] would have swallowed us alive."

So what is it that God is protecting one against?

There is no question.

It is human sacrifice.

Christ has already made it so those who are His, who have been put "on His side" (see the Psalm), do not have to bleed except by the self-sacrifice they readily make by His love -- crucified with Him, yes, but also with His power to overcome the evil one and thrive gloriously with Him.

The World System hacks off parts of everyone who looks to it for moral and spiritual guidance with the pretext that "Everyone's gotta bleed." Fear, bitterness, and privation follow.

The Kingdom and all that God possesses is guaranteed by the measure of Christ's blood for those who want to revel in it and draw others into it with His bountiful charity. Joy, contentment, and abundance reign there.

This whole blog and webzine endeavor is all about encouraging people to leave be those in the World System whereever they are, the legislators and pundits, the generals and pontificators -- leave them to bleed dry everyone whom they're ordained to, and do so by completely jettisoning all those significations that they are their lords -- the 501c3 non-profit incorporations, the W-4 tax liability commitments, the voter registration rolls, the usurious debt contracts, the Social Security identifications, the guilt-driven tithing obligations -- all of them.

Get into community with other truly devoted Christ followers, pray and fellowship and sing hymns and do this with great abandon, and then get serious and pool all your resources so you would generate great increase of the Kingdom in your very midst right now.

Really, look in your Bibles, go ahead, look there -- see where it says anywhere that worship communities and anyone in them must be contracted with Caesar in any way for those in that community to work hard, provide for loved ones, and grow in Christ.

It is simple, really. If you choose to stay in the World, you'll just be bled some more. That's all.

Everything Is Window Rebuilding

2011-03-16T19:45:00.000-07:00

I've been so consumed with and subsequently exhausted from work and home and family running-around-with that I just haven't been able to post much here recently. But sometimes I see something that just cries for me to say something about. Since I'm still pretty tired I can slip it in here quickly.

Today I caught Caroline Baum's blog-like piece about the "benefits" of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami disaster. She initially makes a great point about how things like earthquakes are actually bad for economies in spite of Keynesian minded pontificators blapping about how helpful they are -- you know, providing jobs to get the rebuilding going and all that.

She quotes Bastiat, and it seems anyone who channels Bastiat is worshipped as a prophet with the most sublime wisdom of some sort. The oft-quoted truthism she references is the one about broken windows. If you remember, it is his refutation of those who say broken windows are good because they provide window makers with gainful employment. Bastiat posits that we just can't know what good would've come if we could've used the resources to go to other more productive items.

My question here is, what exactly are those other items? My refutation of the considerably flippant "Well we could've planted 57 bazillion trees with that money" is that

Everything is window rebuilding by its very nature.

If you're going to go off and plant 57 bazillion trees with the wonderfully available funds not used to repair serious glass damage because some dingleberry stickball batter couldn't hit the ball in fair territory, aren't you then still spending resources to do the metaphoric "window rebuilding"? Aren't you indeed working hard to alleviate the "barren landscape" problem? Or the "stale air" problem? Or the "unsightly skyline" problem?

Or how about "We could've educated 219 gazillion kids with that money"? Aren't you then trying to take out the ignorance problem? How about just not having ignorant kids to begin with?

"Harumphh," some people might say. "You're making light of the earthquake and such awful events that really hurt people." No, on the contrary, I don't like there to be earthquakes either, especially if they are going to hurt people.

Thing is, God made a world that requires earthquakes to move stuff around for whatever reasons He needs. Yes people may die, but then what? Have you repented and made your peace with Him by the blood of His Son? Then you have nothing to worry about because by His love He has you in His grip no matter what happens.

And if you complain that some -- well, quite a lot -- of the bad things are done by evil people, then what are you going to do about that? Do you have it in you, or, perhaps Him living in you to go change that? To love someone else with His love so they'd be less likely to do evil things?

Furthermore, what do you do if you're bopping about when all around you there is suffering from earthquakes? Or people breathing nasty air? Or people doing foolish things because they didn't listen in class?

The fact is window rebuilding is all that people do when they live and work and breathe throughout each day they walk the earth. If fires happen firefighters put them out. If people get hungry bakers make bread to eat. If cars get smashed up a car body guy is there to patch them up. Even if you're sitting on the couch snoozing you're repairing cells that will soon be getting your body to do something that really is, essentially,

Rebuilding something in a fallen, broken world.

I guess the real question from that is, what are you doing that for? And who are you doing that for? Ahh, there's a question for you. Do you know who that is?

Or Who that is? (with the cap there, if you didn't quite see it there...)
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I've written a whole home page piece on who people follow, it is here if you're interested. Some stuff about what it means when terrible things happen to people, even if those things kill them, is in the gospel of Luke, there in chapter thirteen. (I also used the term "truthism" very deliberately, because all the World's plap is all about "truthiness," and even Stephen Colbert's version of truth -- derived from the World as it -- is just as much about truthiness as much as he uses it to skewer the World foolishness.)

Again, The Real Question Is, Who Do You Follow?

2011-03-02T19:05:00.000-08:00

My most recent home page piece has been uploaded, and while I really try to work at introducing it here at my blog with at least some kind of flourish, tonight I think I'm just going to have to pass. I am so exhausted from my job and running the standard family errands that I'm tucking in very early tonight.

This is not to say that I don't want to jump at sharing the dozen or so different things I keep seeing out there in this delightfully smothering World, items that I'd love to highlight and remark about simply to show quite categorically that, as the entirety of my latest declares,

Everyone does quite wholeheartedly follow the words and ideas and evocations of someone else somewhere.

My simplest of simple questions to you is,

Do you know who that individual is for you?

Eating Your Own

2011-02-04T22:45:00.000-08:00

Michael Lewis has a wonderful new piece out in March's Vanity Fair about Ireland. He had one a few months ago on Greece, and if you know what's been going on in the financial innards of both you'd have an idea about what his exposition is about.

I'm interested a bit more in the Ireland take because I am mostly Irish myself, many of my ancestors coming over here from Londonderry to build lives in the midwest. It was a brutal existence, and I think often of them and how hard they worked when I whine about this or that piddly inconvenience.

I haven't read the entire piece, but I just wanted to share that as I have absorbed Lewis' words, I've had an image in my mind that is quite disturbing. It is a classic work of art that is as repulsive as it is sublimely telling.

It is Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Children," and I'm not even going to reproduce it here. You can find it easily in Google's Image finder.

But I have to say that I can't help but think of this and feel deeply for all who find it as disturbing but fail to see that those without Christ do the very same thing as a matter of practice. No, it doesn't appear as gruesome as this graphic depiction. Very few literally dine on another's physical body part. Quite common, however, is the way people hack off huge chunks of value of others, indeed it is far too frequently that of good friends or family members.

Human sacrifice is alive and well on planet earth, enabled, cajoled, prodded on by thousands and thousands of powerful operatives sworn to do nothing else, and by the millions and millions who dutifully follow their every command however unwittingly. Value extraction is what it is about for all World inhabitants, and there are so many ways it can be done, marketed in so many different forms.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission issued its final report this week. I didn't even hear about it except through the various remarks by some in the punditsphere. It seems the FCIC did a spiffy job of pointing the finger at all the usual suspects. It was as if they just wrote "It was those goddammed subprime mortgages and those goddammed predatory lenders and those goddammed greedy bankers and those goddammed regulators asleep at the wheel." Goll derned it, that tells us a lot.

What it fails to mention is that the culprit really is the typical sinful individual with a dark empty heart who can only thrive by eating his own. Yes it is the banker in the highest ivory tower, but it is also the blue collar worker scratching to get his. It is the highest ranking federal examiner of any stripe, but it is also the nice warm pastor who presides over a 501c3 church and can't say anything of substance about the World System because he's paid so handsomely by it. Sure he could rant and rave like so many of them about how evil Caesar is. Lots of pastors do that.

But how many understand it for what it is and share that truth graciously with congregants who have ears that want to receive and minds that want to process what it takes to actually draw people from the sewage of the World into the embrace of Christ? How many truly and graciously leave Cain's Agency to do its work as it must but have a deeply impassioned heart for those gripped by it and want to show them Christ and free them from their benighted Saturn worship? How many do the truly biblical thing and call people out of their System obligations -- with no loud obnoxious undue remonstrations against it --and into vibrant mobilization to authentically love others with the bounty of His Kingdom?

I hear of very little from the pulpit about the World System and its standard human sacrifice practices. I know why. I understand. How many dismiss the fact when it stares them in the face is disturbing enough. What is going on in Ireland the Lewis so comprehensively articulates, what offices like the FCIC are completely impotent to do, what wise people like Goya saw long ago that we completely disregard today because all that stuff is considered just meaningless old mythology.

It is only because they all still like doing it so much and are so seduced into thinking they aren't.

The only pure rapturous freedom from the rank extraction in all its institutionalized glory is Jesus Christ.

It is the worst slavery to be in denial of the way the World truly works and sustain an existence of novel rationalizing to keep getting that chunk.
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I wrote my latest home page piece about That One Freedom, and a bit about the very real practical things His followers could be doing to enjoy the richest life in a World filled to the brim with extractors.

The Breadth of Value Extraction in America

2011-01-28T21:01:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I come across a piece of writing in the punditsphere that gets at the heart of the way the World works. All too often I think about how much I speak of meaningful things in my webzine, my blog, my ministry work; and I wonder where the articulation of support is out there.

This work by Jerry Bowyer, apparently a blogger of some sort for a major business news magazine, is one such piece. It is titled simply, "The American Nomenclatura," a clear reference to those whose job it is to collect the extraordinary amounts of tribute from those who ask them to constrain their evildoing. Really, "job" is too weak a term -- it is more like ordination.

Of course, please forgive me if I convey the idea that this is anywhere close to groundbreaking. That there are tribute-imposers and tribute-bearers is not that revelatory, though I do tend to try to shout that fact from the rooftops with my work. When I start to hear that the solution is something other than more pity for the exploited or more rebellion against the exploiters, then it'll be something to fully engage.

My premise, as far as I've gleaned from God's word, is that Jesus Christ is the only meaningful antidote to oppressive tribute bearing. Bowyer does a great job of describing the inevitability of tribute imposition. What he fails to share -- of no fault of his own since those intractably employed by the World System cannot see it -- is that the imposers do God's work, authorized by God Himself, as long as sinners need that severe constraint. Lloyd Blankfein was genuinely truthful when he said as much, however splendidly arrayed in vampire squid glory his company is.

Once again, when I see a Jerry Bowyer conclude with "...and the Answer is Jesus Christ -- not the one of the Roman Catholic ecclesia or any of the concoctions they market as saviors," then I'll see that they are getting it. Then I'll see someone is actually paying attention to what God has said.

Then again, if they did say that, I'd surely not see it there. No World megaphone holder would willfully allow such a sentiment from a dutiful agent to seep through. Another Jesus is a perfectly fine device to keep rearranging people's perception of their tribute imposer so they appear more palatable.

But that doesn't mean you can't tell a lot from the braggadocio of those who speak of him and his domain.

Human sacrifice is alive and well in America.

Jerry Bowyer just described it beautifully, however much he tries to wiggle out of the truth regarding its abject virulence with dismissals of how much better the U.S. is in contrast to the baaaaad extractors in other countries.

Nah. It is just as bad.

Now, what are you going to do about it? If you destroy others you pay tribute. If you destroy yourself you pay tribute. If you deny being a destroyer you pay tribute. If you rationalize out of your rear end that you can't possibly be a destroyer because you do so many other good things to make up for any of the most remotely miniscule destroying of yourself and others that you might do --

You pay tribute.

So what of it?

I wrote a bit more about the extraction as well as the Only Avenue out of the tribute imposers' clutches in my latest home page piece. I've also put together a page with a lot of the World's Jesus concoctions.
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Just the Right Amount of the Kingdom

2011-01-14T20:00:00.000-08:00

Recently I've been deeply pondering the idea of sowing, and in doing so I'm finding very little about it anywhere in the public discourse. No surprise. So many World inhabitants are entranced by what's blapped in the echo chamber that it doesn't get much airplay. Indeed, those so devoted to Cain and the humanistic principles of value extraction can't know a thing about it.

Today I came across this piece from Bloomberg Businessweek, nothing that hasn't already been written about a zillion times through the ages. Essentially it is more of the World's pap about how puny our existence should be, generously peppered with pithy remarks from the World's authoritative priests: economists and psychologists.

An added feature was a spiffy slideshow highlighting the 25 things the author and editors believe we have too much of. For your edification, they are :: big breath :: food law information books art medication longevity money education sex industry freedom entertainment work connectedness choice technology convenience friends productivity energy possessions credit beauty security. :: Whew ::

One of the problems right-off-the-bat is that the authoritative humanists want to convince us that we shouldn't want these things too much. Excuse me, but God made us to want things like these. They are good things, and to want them is a very good thing.

The problem is that we want them outside of what God intended them to be. God likes acquisitiveness, he hates covetousness. So many World devotees have gone so far as to make them idols. No wonder they get devoured by the excess of their worship.

Jesus made much of His ministry getting across a phenomenal idea. It was essentially this. "You could have all that the Kingdom is, really. It's a hundred times greater than whatever is you think is good. But you have to get your soul back, and that requires giving up the World."

Notice there are three key things not on the list "Too Much."

God, Truth, and Grace.

If someone hasn't already made however many of the things on the list their gods, their conception of God is usually whatever the civil religion architects have told them he must be. Truth is just whatever those with the World megaphone tells them it is. Grace is just pusillanimous niceties.

If you really knew God, really understood Truth, really practiced Grace, you'd have all of these things in the greatest abundance because you'd be doing sowing. You'd do that with the most accurate assessment of the meaning of every one of the 25. You can find it out, just pay attention to words of the one who made them. They're in a book, you know. So you can read them.

All the most powerful World operatives, all of them, the Obamas and Bernankes and Benedicts and the millions of dutiful minions following them tell you to keep craving them but not too much now. After they browbeat you for more than the 20% threshold all of their customers consider acceptable for tribute, they expcct you to enter into some violent rebellion in some manner, thus justifying your due prosecution and legitimizing their behavior.

If you are still doing things that would destroy yourself and others, what else do you expect them to do?

If you no longer want to be a part of it, why not come to the One Who Truly Graciously Liberates? He gives so much of the Kingdom that it is impossible to have excess. The bounty is perfectly portioned for maximum contentment.

What is amazing is that

He makes it so we can experience it now, right now.

But again, gotta do two simple things. That's all, two things.

Leave the World.

Come to Christ.

This doesn't mean become reclusively communal. It just means having a rich understanding of what the World is and what the Kingdom is.

See, that's what the "too much" stuff really means.

Can you see that meaning through the eyes of Christ?

Try asking Him to. I'll bet He'll let you.
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I've written more about this on my webzine's latest home page. I'd written a bit about the way the World shares its truth in an earlier home page piece.
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More From the Necessary Conspiracy

2011-01-07T22:04:00.000-08:00

As the new year opens many have their attention on the hundreds of birds dropping from the air (that or a charming homeless man suddenly scoring it big on the merits of his golden voice). The puzzlement about the bird weirdness is almost always coupled with the theories about why it has happened. Was it fireworks? Was it a freak of nature? Was it an invisible UFO? Or was it some insidious manifestation of the rank conspiracy the new world order has going to bring us into submission to tyrannically bad things?

Very few pay any attention to the more subtle, more telling, and more relevent revelations regarding the necessary conspiracy, the one started millennia ago to keep murderous man's murderous activities a tiny bit more in check.

They say this year many local governments will be declaring bankruptcy, that even some state governments will be defaulting on their overwhelming debt. I hear these things and think about the information found in any comprehensive annual financial reports, which reveal that every municipality or similar political entity has gazillions of dollars more in the till than they have used or ever will use for governing purposes.

Essentially governments cry about how broke they are, but insist that the people never look behind the green curtain, where they'd find not an old balding wizard but piles and piles of dough sitting there to ensure old balding potentates don't get too anxious.

Why the strident calls for more dough from the taxpayer if they've got it made already? Some of the answer is in the simple idea that the people can't know about the piles of dough because then they wouldn't keep coughing up more dough to keep things running. Seems to be a pretty good idea to hold -- and to be extraordinarily tight-lipped about holding -- a gargantuous surplus just to make sure government things are okay.

I think a more significant reason is that even with the piles of dough, government still needs to collect tribute from the masses whose sin it must manage. It is standard political science theory that it is a positive thing good wholesome people pay their gobs of taxes so they can secure their voice in a democracy.

I think even further about something much less considered, and that is the fact that these localities need the piles mostly because the federal government continues to debase the dollar with such sustained deliberation that they need so much in reserve to guard themselves against the inevitability of its depletion. It is indeed quite ironic that state and local governments rely so much on the federal government for their sustenance, yet the feds do so much to eviscerate the dollar's value that smaller political entities can't help but so industriously protect their piles of dough.

But then this seems to be the plan all along, when you think about it -- when you start to understand the necessary conspiracy. It is the World System in action, commencing with Cain's city introduced in the fourth chapter of Genesis, and rigorously girded by the federal government presently nurturing a richly codependent relationship with municipalities and all other incorporated institutions. Debasing the dollar is a classic way it can keep that relationship going.

In other words, human sacrifice is what all World inhabitants do. The Agency of Cain gets the biggest cut for doing its very demanding job of inflicting seven-fold vengeance against any who challenge it. In a federal system of government the states, counties, and cities know they're subject to as much of Cain's value extraction as anyone else, so they simply do what they must to protect themselves.

Have piles and piles and piles of dough at the ready so the gods may be gratified.

I do think about the great things state and local governments do. They do marvelous things to build and maintain a healthy infrastructure, one of the most important functions of them all. Most would argue that since they do such valuable things, we shouldn't put our noses too deeply into their financial affairs. That's dangerous. Best turn to the whimsy of guessing why birds are falling from the sky.

Better not get into why souls are falling into hell.

I still think further, about all the fine things we see temporal government does, and I ask, why couldn't followers of Christ do the very same things only better? All of it? All the infrastructure and building codes and zoning issuances -- all of it simply because they love the people for whom it is all being arranged. As it is, the World does a pretty good job of it, but without Christ they must by necessity do it all with the fruit of human sacrifice, along with the fear that bigger meaner priests will do their human sacrifice on them.

I don't know. Just some thoughts. I've written all of this merely to introduce my latest home page piece, all about sowing -- the way that followers of Christ make it so people are loved here and now. I've also assembled a page listing the forms of human value transfer, for those economists at heart.

And for those who may have Christ in their hearts as well.

The God-in-Flesh Issue

2010-12-22T19:09:00.000-08:00

Now is the time when Christmas things occupy everyone's attention in some measure. No matter how extremely anti-Christian-things one is, he or she cannot avoid noting the difference in the way things are in December.

Even as much as a lot of that Christmasy stuff is driven by those wholly given over to Roman Catholic commitment, it still does direct the observer to one single truth: That God entered our realm of existence as a man with one single purpose.

He was to die in order to shed His blood as the one single sacrifice that would cleanse us of our sin and rescue us from the grip of death.

How much of a contrast that was to the signing ceremony the president of the United States held yesterday, when he enacted into law the rescinding of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy of keeping an individual's proclaimed and presumed homosexuality from affecting military activity. Apparently the administration and defense department will work out how it will work to allow openly expressing homosexually minded individuals to serve.

Yes there are those who will shout about how wrong it is "to be homosexual" or "to be gay or lesbian" or to behave in a sexually immoral way that has been traditionally called sodomy. And on the other side are those who say it is fine and don't bother with what others do, we should all allow people to be who they truly are, we should be tolerant, and all of those sorts of things.

Both sides generally make up the Culture War, always stoked red hot when things like this signing ceremony occur. It is true that sexually immoral behavior that is given some substantial social sanction is repulsive. It is also true that people who spew the worst venom at sexually confused people is just as repugnant.

The truth that very few people see is that militant operatives within the extraordinarily powerful ecclesastical hegemony, conventionally known as the Roman Catholic Church, are sworn to do the dutiful job of fueling that conflagration. Because they are charged with the task of advanced sin management for the hundreds of millions of people who pay them well to do it (taxes, interest payments, tithes), they work like hell (to use a phrase) to see that a lot of people remain sinners and brazenly act on their sin, and that a lot of other people sustain a healthy vitriol against them in the ministry of condemnation.

Even if you are the most impassioned observer of the "Don't ask, don't tell" controversy, do you really think there will not be the worst violence occurring in the ranks? Even if it is not necessarily physical, it will certainly be tremendously emotional and spiritual.

In contrast to this is the Son of God, seeking the lost and asking if they'd want to join Him in the Kingdom. Even if you don't feel like leaving your life of sexual immorality, He'll make it so you can -- and find true inner fulfillment because He's freed you from your own wickedness. Even if you don't feel like refusing to continue screaming at people you don't like, He'll make your heart soft enough to be a reconciler too. Then you can be free from your own sense of entitlement and find peace in the One Who Provides All You've Ever Wanted.

I confess that my heart hurts for all those cheering, applauding people at the president's signing ceremony, left to their own iniquity which will continue to devour their souls. It hurts just as much for those whose fury against them will become more intense.

And yet, at least for this one month, they all still see the Christmas stuff all around them.

Is it just not possible for them to take the blinders off and the earplugs out

And see Him? Hear his word?

The WikiLeaks Horror Picture Show

2010-11-29T18:45:00.000-08:00

So, exactly what are you going to do with the information that was recently published on WikiLeaks?

You know what I'm talking about. The information that reveals the United States uses strongarm tactics in its diplomatic efforts. That it uses what is effectively subversive espionage to engage other nations. That it is wholly devious and underhanded in its strategy to gain the upper hand in all negotiations relating to the interest of maintaining stalwart national security.

Are you a Chicken Little who's screeching that the sky is falling? Are you a timid traveler on the Yellow Brick Road bleating "Lions and tigers and bears oh my!"? Are you dutifully rivited to the World's megaphone holders who are either soaked in denial, steeped in rationalization, or immersed in arrogance spouting some plap about being above it all?

Some may say those who cheer on the WikiLeakers represent a second kind of person, one who proudly bellows "I knew it all along, those pukes" and then gets really righteously indignant about it as a pretense to yet another stepped-up effort to tell guvment what's what and move on really getting them to get their act together. Nah, sorry. This individual is just another of the obsequiously fearful.

Or is it possible that...

Is it possible that you could perceptively see the World System humming away, churning on all cylinders just as it should be, marketing and exhibiting the typical horror movie featuring the valiant knights of Babylon riding to rescue the shaped and formed pusillanimous hordes just as it has for millennia?

Don't get me wrong. It is authentic horror. Countless more souls will be abducted, hearts captivated, bodies sacrificed in another chapter of the great conflagration that is the Grand Sin Management Administration Extravaganza.

Could it possibly be that you're one of those who do see all of this for what it is, and retire to the place where grace and mercy reign, where truth is given its just place, where agape expressions are bountiful -- indeed where broken and battered individuals find repentence and rest, quietness and trust, and in God Almighty they have genuine salvation and strength?

That place is nowhere other than right where you stand, except that by Christ you have a bit of light to shine upon those who wallow in this benighted nation. And by that light there'd be some who want out and join you in the Kingdom. As you turn to smile upon those ravaged by the World and its WikiLeak silliness, you draw them to rapturous contentment in the arms of One Who Loves.

Which one are you?
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By the way, those words about repentence and rest, they're from the 30th chapter of Isaiah. Check them out.
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The Nature of Exploitation

2010-11-06T22:17:00.000-07:00

So what is it? Should we have severe government regulation to help things out or not? Should we let the free market be truly free when all it wants to do is be greedy and selfish and evil? What is it? What is it?

What is it?

You can actually find the answer. It is in the Bible. Thing is you gotta actually look in it. You can't just listen to the people who say they know what it says. That's a trick the Catholic Church has used for eons to keep their people ignorant. Sure the Protestant Reformation was supposedly the thing that enlightened us all, but the sad fact is many good wholesome Protestant churches have so thoroughly made themselves Roman Catholic again that they still hope people will only listen to those guys bellowing from the pulpits.

By all means, don't even listen to me. That's cool.

But here's one guy I really like to read because he is so much fun. His name is Bill Frezza, and he's a financial advisor guy of some stripe. Recently he wrote a piece railing against wealth distribution as carried out by the government. In some ways his cry for unfettered free market freedoms is similar to all the others. Don't et me wrong, I like the free market. I just don't think these people really know what it is. But he's still fun to read.

Anyway, in his latest he asked us to graphically imagine a world in which incentives are eviscerated, and his description of the power of government to exploit is pretty dang great. From the inimitable Bill Frezza:

"Imagine a society in which politically connected individuals enrich themselves by giving money to politicians in return for earmarked dollars extracted from taxpayers. Imagine political entrepreneurs displacing market entrepreneurs by weaving fantastic tales of energy independence and a green tomorrow, sucking down billions in taxpayer loan guarantees for businesses that cannot possibly achieve economic sustainability. This is how crony Capitalism works.

"Imagine a handful of executives earning hundreds of millions of dollars selling toxic mortgage bonds pyramided on low cost government-guaranteed capital made available by key Congressional committee chairmen who got special mortgage deals. Imagine a revolving door between reckless Wall Street derivative gamblers selling fraudulent unbacked insurance products and the regulatory agencies that bail them out using unlimited quantities of fiat currency printed up by unelected bureaucrats. This is how Washington works."

Ahh, yes. Very very true indeed. (And splendidly articulated.)

This is the way the World works.

The trouble comes when Mr. Frezza and just about every other of the thousands and thousands of highfalutin finance or economic guys and gals belch some marble-encrusted plap about this or that World solution.

But, umm, ahem,

Didn't you all just finish explaining that's how things work?

I can't tell you how many times I've read or heard about "The New Economics," about the new wave of intellectual rigor that must be employed and barfed about at the next Davos hoedown. Never ever do World people ever extend anything new, and if it looks new it's just the old dressed up in the latest fashion.

What people must do to be truly fulfilled is to do something that is very old but would certainly be radically new to a jaded World follower. What is that thing?

Recognize that you're worthless.

Wow, I know. An impossibility for people who've been told a thousand different ways they're special, they're okay like you're okay, they must love themselves, and all the rest of the ultimately pointless dreck that belies the truth that in the end it is all dust in the wind.

Unless, unless...

The solution to the economic crisis is merely getting people -- yes, thousands and thousands of them who know and understand and follow the One Who Is Worth to vibrantly live by loving others with His love and from that sowing, thousands of them doing nothing other than deep rich wise compassionate investment with the expectation of return simply being what the sowees continue doing for others with everything He has to give for us to do that.

That's all that sowing is. Having people who really know God's economics and finances, and building and sustaining the Kingdom here and now. This isn't pie-in-the-sky bring-heaven-here-now stuff. It is just doing what He wants us to do, authentically, truthfully, charitably...

I've put all this together as a blog post here simply to say that I elaborate a bit on this concept in my latest home page piece. I invite you to read it, and offer your thoughts. It is here.

A Wonderfully Wonderfully Fun Wonderful Matter

2010-11-01T21:21:00.000-07:00

I use this blog to write a lot about what I see going on in the World around and hope to do a decent job of articulating how much more wonderful the Kingdom is.

But tonight I simply have to get into the official open record a truly wonderful matter I've been waiting forty years for. It is simply this.

My favorite major league baseball team, the San Francisco Giants, are indeed

WORLD CHAMPIONS.

I can't even believe I'm writing those very words, but I can officially, fully, completely, and truthfully write in great big superfont capital letters

WORLD CHAMPION SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS.

I'm not going to go into all the splendid thrills of rooting for this team, nor detail the incessantly turgid of despair waiting for our team to finally get a ring, or as my good friend and I have always said, to do the dance on the mound. (And for those who'd say the Giants already have world championships, those were in New York. Just not the same.)

I just want to share with you two moments that I think about in all of this. Two simple moments in my life that are light years apart in emotional substance. I could write a book about this man's Giants fandom. For now, just these two items.

The first was when I entered a major league baseball park for the very first time, this one Candlestick Park in the summer of 1971. I was blown away, as all youngsters are, by the color and pageantry of a real live game. They were playing the Cardinals, and we won that game. I even think Willie Mays hit a home run, but it is hard to recall. I was ten years old and just liked it all.

Fast forward to 1987, this moment featuring the Cardinals also. This was about as harrowingly depressing as it could ever be. I don't know why I remember it so well, the particular image of me just looking out into the misty ominous darkness through the front windshield. Perhaps it was just because the oppression of my despair was so crushing at that moment that it stood out.

We had just given up the NLCS to the Cardinals. We were up 3-2 going to St. Louis where we lost the sixth game 1-0 on a handful of really stupid things that happened against us. The seventh game was over early when their light hitting shortstop hit a three-run homer to give them a whopping lead we couldn't overcome.

The evening of that game, for some reason I cannot for the life of me remember, I was driving alone down Hillside Boulevard in Colma near San Francisco, just along the southwest side of San Bruno Mountain. As I drove I just remember having a wretchedly shellshocked feeling, one I will never forget and never want to experience again. Yes, I know it's just baseball and all that, but if you are such a passionate fan of your team, you can relate.

The thing is, if you know what's in Colma then you'd know why this was such a perfect picture of that despondancy. Colma is essentially one big graveyard. It is cemetary after cemetary after cemetary. As I drove it was just dark and depressing and damned awful.

Tonight, the complete opposite of that feeling showered over me.

Just pure joy. Rapturous bountiful exhilarating joy.

It is just baseball, yeah. But tonight God bestowed a small blessing upon Giants fans everywhere who've stayed true to Our Boys no matter how heart-splitting things have been.

Tonight it happened.

They did the dance on the mound.
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The Still Raging Shrug: Erratum

2010-10-02T08:04:00.000-07:00

Last night I was contemplating the blog post I had from yesterday as I sometimes do, and I realized I'd made a logical misstep through my writing that I had not intended. I'm committed to only making minor clarifications in any edit of a previous blog post, and I thought it would be best just to add a note about the nature of that misstep. It will serve the purpose of making the post more meaningful, ironically in the sense that it was all about how much people plainly revile what is truly meaningful. But hey, in Christ -- it's all good.

I'd first written that for anyone to truly understand what really is going on when the large financial institutions announce they're closing their proprietary trading desks -- which, by the way, are those parts of the company that trade on their own profits for their own personal gain -- they'd have to be in one of the three groups. The intimation is that if you aren't in one of the groups, then you just wouldn't get it no matter how much you are being hosed.

But later I mentioned that everyone is in one of those groups. It is true that everyone is in one of those "ministries," but then that would also mean that they all do get it, that they all do comprehend what the large institutions are actually doing, and it is very clear that they don't.

How to resolve this logical misstep?

It is actually not hard. The answer is that within each ministry are different levels in which people have various considerations, desires, thoughts, passions, and yes, understandings.

The ones who understand in the ministry of sin do so because they are most successful in their human sacrifice. Others in different levels within that ministry stay there because they want to be as successful, but don't have a clue as to how they're being exploited themselves. Because of their reprobate covetousness, they simply can't squirm their way out. Of course, no one could without Christ. The interesting thing is that the best value extractors are just as exploited themselves, believing that their temporal riches will save them.

The ones who understand in the ministry of condemnation do so because they've listened so intently and followed so dutifully the instructions of their Superior Officer, disseminated throughout the Society for centuries by its sworn operatives mostly through the institutions of higher education and the mass media. These avenues are optimum for "spinning" everything, molding it all into a spectacle of humanist expectation and conduct, so understanding at the lower levels by those schlurping it up is really "disunderstanding."

The ones who understand in the ministry of reconciliation do so because they know they are loved by a Christ who died for them, and they in turn can "die" for others. They may ultimately give the full measure of devotion, but "dying" mostly just means sacrificing themselves daily to meet the needs of, to sow richly for, and to love charitably those God has sent them to fellowship with or minister to. Out of that comes an overflowing fountain of spiritual and, yes, material blessings for which the reconciler is always thanking God.

Even though everyone is in one of those camps, are there those in each camp who just can't, don't, won't understand? Absolutely.

Want understanding of that which is phenomenally meaningful? Extraordinarily liberating? Abundantly breathtaking? Splendidly impassioned? Exceedingly joyous?

It can only come through full devotion to the One Who Has All That.

The Still Raging Shrug About The Vast Dearth of Understanding

2010-10-01T20:31:00.000-07:00

I happened to catch a nice piece by Michael Lewis, you know, the guy who has written all kinds of books cutting right to what's going on in finance these days. It is a scathing exposition about what's really going on with the big institutions, but it only has meaning in light of three different perspectives.

One, you are one of the extractors he's showcasing and you're perfectly happy without truly understanding how hosed you are. Lewis brings up the possibility that there are fewer and fewer victims, but I really don't think so (and neither does Lewis). This is merely because the victims themselves are exploiter wanna-be's and can't stop salivating in their drive to be in tight with another Goldman Sachs.

Two, you are one of the regulators who gets paid big bucks to crack heads in this environment, and make no mistake, Lewis is a regulator. The media feed like sharks at a chum feast on all of this, and Lewis is just taking his highly regarded spot at the banquet table. Lewis doesn't even care that there is any meaningful enforcement, really, because his livelihood depends on the perpetuation of this value extraction.

Three, you are outside of this body of death altogether and in a place where you can insightfully discern all that this is about. That place is none other than the Kingdom of God clothed by the righteousness of Christ, by whose measure you can accurately gauge the horror of institutional human sacrifice and at the same time extend the hand of grace, peace, and wholeness to those who truly want to leave.

There they are, right there. The only three ministries that matter. Every human being on the planet is in one of them.

The ministry of sin -- the value extraction institutions enable it so well; the ministry of condemnation -- how proficient they are, the Michael Lewises and Carl Levins alike, constraining the evil enough to make it look like it really does any good in the eternal run; and the ministry of reconciliation -- deftly executed only by those truly sold out to Christ.

The thing that got me was Lewis' conclusion.

There it is, a truth in amongst the typically dreary World System pap.

"And yet news of the death of the Wall Street prop trader has been greeted with hardly a peep. And I wonder: is this the nature of our new financial order? Big decisions, in which the public has a clear interest, being made outside public view, with little public discussion or understanding."

Why no understanding? The reason comes from the words of Jesus. It is pretty simple.

"Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: 'You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.'"

Really, Michael Lewis? You think that addressing the evil more openly it will keep calloused, blood-soaked people from continuing to wallow in their spiritual sewer? That they'll stop doing their habitual human sacrifice simply because even the very best writers eloquently expose it a few times?

No, the answer is Christ. Not the churchly Christ or the cultural Christ or personal Christ but

The All-Powerful God of the Universe.

The One who loved with a self-giving love so an individual could find real joy out of that pit.

All Lewis could muster with his final closing words was

"If so [that this is the nature of the new financial order], it isn’t a future at all. It’s just the past, repeating itself."

Those in that first ministry say "Oh yeah, I can't wait to get mine." Those in that second ministry says "Keep doing it because then I have a job."

Those in the third one do precisely what Christ did.

They love them with their lives.

A Few More Splattered Thoughts on Persistent Deception

2010-09-25T19:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I blogged about something I've addressed before, the idea that people are worthless left to their own benighted devices. I know this isn't the most ingratiating thing someone could ever say, but it is about the most truthful thing there is. Dead people are pretty worthless.

Sure, just about everyone who has the teenchiest thought that they are anybody would protest, or even further completely dismiss such a truth. After writing yesterday I had a few more thoughts I'd like to splash in here to clarify, and merely point out that what I do is simply highlight the abject silliness of World activity and let it do the talking.

One way the rank deception persists comes from what hundreds of church pastors are planning to do tomorrow, Sunday the 26th. It is apparently "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," when they will all stand up on their respective soapboxes and boldly shout about who their congregants should vote for, mostly with the intention of irritating the IRS and its oppressive limits on political speech.

If these pastors are naming the name of Christ and are actually doing what the Bible really tells them, they would be a million miles from such folly. Even more insightfully they'd see how much they're being played and that the World wants them be sucked into the power of the law over their affairs.

What these pastors tomorrow really should be saying are these things:

- It is simple. It doesn't matter how sharp, smooth, or special you are, if you're dead you're worthless. It's completely foolhardy for one to go around boasting he is someone. The stark truth is that you are a glop of dust who happens to have a little breath for a while.

- I too am no one special. I'm worthless too. The only way I can be "worthful" is through Christ. That's it. His righteousness and only His righteousness can give life. One's own righteousness just keeps him fooled into thinking he's good, when he's really very dead.

- It is true, sadly, that lots of people who say they're Christ's, aren't. Are there those who haven't a clue about Christ who do His kinds of things--you know, kind, giving, gentle, charitable, thoughtful things...all that? Yeah, but if you scratch them you'll find someone deathly afraid and seeking the deepest meaning about things. And they're still dead. Are there those who look at straw-man Christs all around and mistakingly think any one of them is the True One? Absolutely.

- You can indeed vibrantly, graciously, profoundly, passionately love a worthless person. Yes, it is possible. Christ did. He loves all of them. He bled to death on a large wooden post for every single one of them.

- The powerful exploiters are just as worthless no matter how much stuff they have. Jesus condemned the rich not because they have lots of cool stuff but because they do human sacrifice so proficiently.

- When the worthless exploitee does value extraction he blithely expects others to pay him even though he did little or nothing to receive it. When the worthless exploiter does it he withholds payment when a job was effectively done as expected. Both of these common conditions multiplied by millions is what shows up in the depressed financial indices.

You only have to look at those indices to see the worthlessness. It's not only the evidences I shared yesterday and in my webzine, but it's the slow but steady dollar sell-off by countries around the world. It's the stampede to find security in shiny yellow rocks. It's the incessant hollering "Where in blazes can I get my retirement money!" You only have to look at the news stories of pastors screeching about their need for World System exploitation to see how little they trust Christ to be their righteousness.

And all of this is not just me blabbing in a remote blog post.

It is all there in Scripture. And it isn't that anyone has to necessarily read a big honking book with a nice silky ribbon in it. Jesus loves today through the lives of those who fully trust in Him, desire to follow Him, deeply long to bring the bountiful, glorious Kingdom to others.

The way to have life is not trying to get in good with Caesar's operatives and telling them what you want them to do. Jesus and those who love with His love are light years from that.

Thing is, many other highfalutin church people will denounce "Pulpit Freedom Day" events and sneer about how much it violates 501c3 rules and separation of church and state and all that, but that's only because they are simply working to get their favored alternate political operatives in power.

How many churches and their congregants have completely divested themselves from Caesar by firmly abandoning any 501c3 contracts, wisely refusing to have their gatherings incorporated in any way (including their commercial ones!), and then graciously appropriating any tribute to a World entity only as required and instead using the bulk of their resources, income, and wealth to sow into the lives of others?

How many people are truly actually really stepping out and blowing away others in the "worthfulness" of Christ? Really, how many?

I do sorrow when I see things like "Pastor Freedom Day." It is extraordinarily sad. Still so so many nice people needing the World to slather vanilla frosting on their worthlessness.
_

My webzine's latest home page piece gets into the striking distinction between true worshippers and the fine looking pretenders.

It's Said, "You Can't Expect People to Be Persistently Deceived." (Unless, Of Course, You Are Persistently Deceived About THAT...)

2010-09-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

A confluence of ideas and considerations is slowly blending together in my mind, the full picture of which seems to be pointing to more clear evidence of the human sacrifice practices that consume the behavior of World inhabitants. It certainly is the genesis of a home page piece in the future, but for now it is just something to splatter in a blog post.

When I see that standard axiom "You can't expect people to be persistently deceived," I treat that with great skepticism. People are constantly deceived about the fact that human sacrifice still thrives on a regular basis by everyone without Christ, and the law is merely in place to keep it all from getting too nasty looking. People are effervescently deceived about the fact that only Christ frees from that body of death and that all the remonstrating about government-this and government-that are simply declarations that the law is wholly required for them to keep human sacrifice behavior from appearing too uncouth.

Anyway, just been reading about how businesses in this country are sitting on billions of dollars they aren't investing, and I wonder, why aren't they getting that out there for bountiful capital utility when the economy is still teetering? Could it be because they think people are much more worthless than everyone wants them to think?

I've been picking up on how no one is borrowing, but the U.S. is doing tons of borrowing--which ends up being paid back by those not borrowing. Is this nothing other than the World System putting tons of window dressing on worthless people so they'll continue to fund its profligate hegemony?

Then there is how much people are afraid the still near-zero interest rates are simply feeding the next big smelly rotten awful bubble to burst all over us. Annnnd that is why? Maybe because people are too worthless to make any "bubble" actually be substantive production that would genuinely make others' lives better?

See, that's the issue, isn't it? When people think of others more than themselves, communities prosper. When people think of themselves above anyone else, they're just doing human sacrifice.

Jesus said as much. Please, I don't think people should be worthless. Worthlessness is very bad. But it is pretty simple. "If you have the Son you have life. If not, you don't have life." Jesus died to give people life. Believe in Him and you have life. And value. And worth. And joy and peace and wonder and love.

Funny, yesterday morning I just happened to catch a gal who regularly appears in economics reports on NPR say something pretty stunning to me. She was blapping about how Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will do anything to help out should bad things start to happen again, and she concluded, "This is a man who invented bullets out of thin air during the crisis. So, my faith is in him."

The plainest admission that someone is trusting in man, and not just any man but a man who directs the largest human sacrifice operation on the planet. Quite legitimate, I must say, for those who habitually do it.

But Jesus is 180 degrees the other way.

Classified American Information

2010-09-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

Since I'm here on my blog site pounding out posts for my Chiefs blog and my NASCAR blog, I should really just add a note that I'd written my home page piece for September-October. I was really working over some striking note I could make to introduce it to you, and I do have some good ones in mind, but they'll take time to flesh out. I'll still work at it, but for now, I just want to share with you that it's up and going.

As usual I'd love to know what you think. I laid out some thoughts about what Christians in the United States characteristically do in their behavior when it comes to government and politics. With the very eloquent help from Tupper Saussy I think it's pretty solid, but please. I never want to be presumptuous. Give me your take.

And yes, Tupper's very telling considerations do make an appearance. You'll see at the webzine.

The Law Can Take a Bite, Can't She

2010-08-18T20:27:00.000-07:00

I never watch golf, but lately my son and I have been getting into playing the game a bit. He'd received golf lessons from his grandmother as a birthday gift, and all he wants to do now is hit the links.

Anyway, we were watching the very end of the PGA Championship on Sunday, and it was very intense as a number of players were fighting to end up on top of the leaderboard when it was all over.

One of them, Dustin Johnson, had hit a ball into the gallery, and after everyone had moved out of the way he whacked it down the course for a shot at the title. Turns out he grounded his club in what was actually a certifiable bunker, and apparently the rules explicitly state you cannot ground your club there. Again, a total beginner with all this golf stuff, I had no idea what they were all talking about, but hey.

A rule is a rule.

It wasn't as much that the actual grounding was very slight, but that where he was addressing the ball didn't look like a bunker at all. A television commentator right there at the scene of the infraction even remarked, "It doesn't look like a bunker as much as a manger!" There was grass and roughage and bumps and divots and footprint marks all over the place. But alas...

A rule is a rule.

After all the reviews and discussions by very-official people, Johnson was penalized two strokes and it cost him a shot at the championship.

More newsworthy is all the trouble Congresspersons like Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters are in for breaking ethics rules. They've been charged with a number of convoluted violations that merely amount to doing favors for people regarding legislative business over which that they had some substantial management.

When confronted by the allegations, they made elaborately formal declarations of their innocence, essentially proclaiming that they had done nothing wrong. And you know?...

By the standards of the World System in which they live and work and play and exploit...

They're right.

They are doing nothing that any other World power broker does not do. They all demand -- and get -- perfectly reasonable perquisites and privileges in exchange for the magnificent task they've been given to administer the sin management program millions of Americans request of them. Really, come on,

Who doesn't do the things they do in the positions they've been assigned?

I think when the human sacrifice extraction haul becomes a bit uncomfortable for some then they look to reel them in a bit. Guess that's part of the standard window dressing part of the program.

On the radio yesterday there was a network news report I'd heard or seen nowhere else. It lasted about a half-a-minute, and it was simply that the charges against former Congressman Tom DeLay regarding his connections to felonious lobbyist Jack Abramoff were dropped. The reporter added, something like, "When you mix criminal prosecution with politics you get quite a mess," essentially conceding that it is very difficult to be successful against any powerful person when that happens.

Oh, all those in the golf world will remember Dustin Johnson's grave error, they say.

How come no one remembers the grave errors of those in the highest towers of the World oligarchy? It is certainly the case that it happens there so frequently that no one cares anymore, yes. But there are more significant reasons most people simply refuse to accept.

I can't close without adding that there is an Alternative. It is indeed what the blog effort is all about. He is the Wonderful Matter. If you've been peeking about in any of my work, you know who He is. But I still cannot emphasize this enough.

He has nothing to do with the World except leave it to constrain evildoing.

How awful is that.

How wonderful it is you can go straight to the Kingdom.

The Apparent Missteps of the Pro-Marriage Lobby

2010-08-05T17:25:00.000-07:00

It was announced today that a federal judge dismissed California's constitutional prohibition against same-sex marriage, and today a lot of people wanted to talk about it. It is so juicy because it is one of the more prominent battles in the incessantly raging Culture War, but most of what I hear being said is woefully uninformed, naive, or flatly foolish.

For two people to engage in a homosexual act is just as execrable as two people married to others having intercourse, or a person and a sheep committing bestiality, or any number of other sexually immoral activities. In that sense, then it makes perfect sense for the law to step in and regulate these behaviors, most notably for our day, homosexual acts. After all, as it says in the first letter of Paul to Timothy, "that law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious; for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for adulterers and perverts, for slave traders and liars and perjurers."

Isn't it ironic that when good, wholesome homosexualists cheerfully announce their pleasure with the ruling, they are confessing their need for the law to govern their sinful behavior. In that sense, I am fully in favor of the judge's ruling.

I still acknowledge that an individual or even any group who states marriage is anything other than a contractual or even covenantal relationship between one adult man and one adult woman does not make it that way.

This was the first supposed misstep of the pro-marriage crowd, that they submitted the matter to a vote. When has there ever been a vote to declare that some dogs are really cows? When you submit matters of unassailable truth to the whims of the god Democracy the perceptions of those truths may change but the truths cannot. The tricky part is that those living by the World are so easily seduced by operatives working to subvert their understanding.

The second supposed misstep was the atrocious job the pro-marriage lawyers did of presenting their case in court. They smugly neglected to present evidence about the vibrant meaning of marriage or introduce experts who could articulate its profound merits. Those who were paying attention were bewildered at how pathetically inadequate their entire presentation was.

There have been so many seemingly puzzling missteps like this that it can only mean they weren't missteps at all. If you see things through the Kingdom lens, you'd see that all of it has been designed to draw people into an extraordinarily benighted conception of marriage, family, sexuality, community, and even things like the meaning of the law, the boundaries of society, and the nature of truth and grace. But then if you only see things by the World lens they can't help but be in such darkness.

Those living by the World do definitely need the law. The law is a very good thing.

But it is not for Kingdom people.

Kingdom people already have Truth and Grace, Someone who is not outside the law or above it or even beyond it, per se. It is that He's the complete fulfillment of the law through life-giving love. When people love they have no need for the law.

They love.

They do so because The One Called Truth and Grace loves them, He empowers them, He encourages them, He has sent The Counselor to speak to them and intercede for them -- all of this in rich practical reality.

Much of what I hear is related to what the Constitution has to say about it and how the Constitution is being interpreted in all of this. That's fine. That's the law. That's what World people need to govern them and their affairs. Some will spout a thing or two about God and the Bible and all that. That's very cool too.

But when you're moored to the World no matter how much you appeal to those things, those in the World who you might be trying to impress can't hear you. Oh, except to the extent that they hear things like how much you hate them because you won't let them be who they are. When you say "Constitution!" and "Law!" and "Marriage!" and they sneer right back, that's just the Culture War raging on. But they are just as much in favor of those things constraining them as you are.

The sad truth is both of you are subject to a lord you may not be able to identify. Oh you've given him supreme rule over you. You've done so if you've got a W-4 obligation with your incorporated employer, you've got a membership in a 501c3 worship assembly, you've been particpating in a Social Security pyramid operation, or any number of other entanglements with Caesar and his "constitutional democratic" Institution. Even if you proudly voted against same-sex marriage and thought you were doing the principled thing, you were still appealing to the law to keep same-sex arrangements from using the law they needed to govern their conduct.

All those things his operatives have been doing to persuade the population to bring the homosexualist out of the closet and under the law? Perfectly within the scope of his well-defined duties. In fact Caesar can't be doing anything but.

On the other hand, do you want genuine freedom, whether you are a homosexually minded individual or a zealous Romanist bent on sustaining the weighty force of law?

You won't get it from the World.

It only comes from the Kingdom, and that means turning 180 degrees and looking to Christ.

Even so, I'm still learning. I'm still up for the interaction. I'm looking to hear from a few of the Kingdom people on this. I really am. I'd truly like to be further enlightened about all of this just like anyone else.
_

One of my home page pieces recently was about the true nature of the United States Constitution. That is here.

Who Owns You? Part II

2010-07-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

In my last post I shared some thoughts about the answer to the question, "Who owns you?" There are indeed a variety of answers to the question, but really only two that the World offers. Those two answers are so important to know because in many ways they are the fuel for the Culture War. Those two answers again are, "I own me" and "Others own some of me."

I thought I'd elaborate a bit on the extent to which government is involved in the mix, and there is just as much confusion about government as there is about the question.

The libertarian naturally has great disdain for government, yet even the most liberated individual utilizes the services of other individuals in some way. Because people are very prone to rotten behavior, that "transfer" of said services must be administered by government in some form. The classic error of libertarianism is the failure to accurately assess the degree of evildoing within each individual.

The utilitarian wants to enlist the strongest baddest meanest government to make sure they feel better when others are cared for. As often as possible it is dressed up with eloquent rationalizations. The classic failure of utilitarianism is that no matter how much they sing the praises of a democracy they can only accomplish what they want by enabling a tyrant.

The Jesuits capitalize on this with their extraordinarily deft capacity to convince all World inhabitants that there is only one government, namely whatever temporal material entity is available for allegience. It is always wrapped in grand mythologies and ample dosages of humanist indoctrination. After all, for so many there is only one governing entity, the one Cain was sent out to form at the beginning of mankind's history to prosecute rebellion with seven-fold strength.

Since this is Caesar's divinely assigned task, rebellion by libertarians is the Agency's very life blood. That the Culture War rages as violently as it does ensures Caesar's legitimacy for those who refuse to allow Christ to govern their affairs.

Which means, yes, there is another government.

Alas, you see the harrowing ramifications of "one government" belief in so many things going on today.

You see it in the battle waging in Arizona over immigration concerns. The System never lets on about what is really going on, which is why all that's left for an intractable controversy is the rank spiritual violence spewed about. It is no incidental fact that, at least in several photographs I've seen, those zealously fighting for the immigrants are waving or wearing rosary beads.

You see it in the elaborate casuistry employed by Barack Obama to convince people that he is the single government official who can effectively manage the value. It is true people who assign management of their value to him will worship him; what they don't understand is that it is all designed to sustain the standard practice of human sacrifice.

You see it in the rage expressed over a few city government officers (such as those in the small Los Angeles suburb of Bell) earning a bit more than the media say they should. Never mind that people pay other officials governing their affairs thousands of times that, officials at so many different levels including ecclessiastical (the Catholic Church and its 501c3 subdivisions are themselves astoundingly wealthy) and commercial (concern over executive pay always simmers for a bit but because of the labor required to manage the value of so many it is seen for what it is -- nothing).

Only those who've given their hearts and souls to Christ can see the two governments. They know they are under the authority of one they serve with humility and love with their very lives -- that's the Kingdom government. They accept that they are owned, not by themselves, not by others,

But by Him.

Owned outright, a slave among slaves with never a chance to be free. The twist is that one in Christ is a slave to the Spirit and because he is no longer a slave to sin, no longer burdened by the turgid law and arcane regulations that plainly signify its grip, he has true freedom and is an heir to all He joyfully wants to give him.

When I wrote in my latest home page piece about the ungrafted church doing the things that people really want in their lives, you know -- getting healed, being freed from the power of the devil, reveling in His boundless grace to life eternal -- I also mentioned moving mountains. I am always careful about writing that because it just seems that mountains don't get moved around all the time, even though Jesus said at one point that one with faith in Him would not only be able to move it but put it in the sea. Wow. That's major.

While I do believe that He did mean moving mountains literally (and on the last day you'll see stuff that'll make such events seems like kicking a pebble), I really think He wants us to be doing things now that are far more important.

I'm in the process of putting together a brief prospectus of my vision for what we'd see should the church decide to actually act on being ungrafted. The three key areas of blowing the world away with the Kingdom are education, media, and business. That is, people would truly know what it means to worship God in Spirit and in Truth, they would have the most beautiful glorious expression of that (even as it leads to tremendous persecution), and they would interact with one another at levels that would bring 100-fold abundance to communities.

That's the moving mountains effect.

But it can only materialize in communities that live ungrafted, 100% abandoned to Christ and, yes, you got it...

Living in His Government.
_

A few home page pieces ago I wrote a bit more on the reliance we all have on others in some way (and yes, that does involve government). That is here. I've also written about the ungrafted church, here.

Who Owns You?

2010-07-20T11:13:00.000-07:00

I caught a lecture by a Harvard professor on one of those obscure suburban PBS stations last night in a series called Justice. The TV listings blurb said it was about Robert Nozick, so I was a bit interested. The professor was extraordinarily boring, but to his credit most college profs are. The gargantuan lecture hall, however, was packed with bright-eyed youngsters, all of them certainly the brilliant quite-recently-departed-from high school students from around the nation who squeezed their way into this fine institution of higher learning with A+'s in everything except Calculus G/H. The sad part is that everything the prof said was the most rudimentary political science stuff and everything the students shared in response was nothing beyond the typically elementary philosophical brain farts. But hey, everyone needs to take Poli Sci 101.

I wanted to bring up the core question addressed, and that was "Who owns you?" The prof set this up by speaking about the utilitarian perspective, which at the risk of oversimplification is the idea that we should be doing the things we do with chiefly everyone else around us in mind. The libertarian perspective is the one that states whatever it is each of us as individuals want should be the real determing factor.

After all the quasi-erudite bantering about these two positions, the question came up. Obviously the two answers are as follows.

Libertarian: "Who owns me? I own me, because I have the right of self-possession."

Utilitarian: "Who owns me? Others have a claim to me because I live in a society, therefore a good portion of me is under the obligation of others-possession."

Most of the discourse revolved around the role of government in this, and for good reason. How much should government regulate the behavior of someone who claims virtually complete autonomy, when that may mean he or she will commit rights violations against others? How much, precisely, do others in a society have a right to claim against an individual and how much power should government have in managing that?

These two questions were only superficially addressed, but not for any deficiency on the part of the participants. There is only so much time in one class period.

But there is another reason these questions will never see the light of day and perpetually be caked against the walls of a dark benighted lecture tomb.

It is because the World has no answers for them.

That is except for the standard blap Caesar and his minions are assigned to dish out in the service of the legacy of Cain.

These people will never come close to approaching the third option for understanding.

The Kingdom option.

I'd love to share it with you now. And don't worry. I'm nobody. This isn't my idea by any means. Anybody can see the idea anywhere they look in God's word, the Bible. They just need to open it, read it, and tune out the ways World operatives jumble those words for people not really interested in being authentically His. Hey, it's okay. If you are genuinely seeking Him, you'll see it. It's right there.

Again, remember the question?

Who owns me?

For review: The Libertarian -- "I own me." The Utilitarian -- "Others own a good portion of me."

The Follower of Christ -- "He owns me."

It is that simple. Here's a part of Scripture, even, that makes this crystal clear: "You are not your own. You were bought with a price." That's from the sixth chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians. Please, read the entire passage, the entire letter for context.

The fact is churches that are incorporated with Caesar's government and the people who listen to their "shepherds" can never truly understand the meaning of that perspective, simply because their are selling themselves to someone else. It is certainly not Christ who, if they've allowed themselves to be His, already bought them with His blood.

What are the ramifications of this? In terms of what people truly want from the core of what it all means to begin with? It is this...

That the World has its way of trying to get people gratified, and as was demonstrated in this lecture, it is woefully deficient. It is perfectly fine for people living by Caesar, but Christ wants people to have overflowing life. The Kingdom way, on the other hand, brings perfect fulfillment because those who live knowing they are owned by God also know that He provides with the greatest abundance for all, sacrificially, selflessly, with the deepest, widest, most compassionate love there is -- it is all His anyway, so how could you lose?

Being owned by God means He allows us to be wise stewards of His things and everyone is cared for. It is all about sowing into community as an act of worship to Him. Think you'll forget how to do that? If you are rejoicing always in the wonders of His creation even that of your fellow human, praying without ceasing to receive His guidance, and giving thanks in all things simply to bless God in what He does to bless you, then

It's all good.

As for the World, it is really the same for both the libertarian and utilitarian. It is all about fear, and either "Get me mine" (the libertarian) or "Get us ours" (the utilitarian). Doesn't matter.

It's exactly the same.

Every decision every person has made in all of human history has always been about whether you are doing a thing for Caesar or doing it for Christ. Every one. Just because very fancy educational people are elaborating on all the fancy ways Caesar does things with lots of fancy blithering about it doesn't change the fact that it is still an expression of devotion to Caesar.

And with it comes all the abject bewilderment about what to actually do with the virulent agony all around.

There is indeed another Option.

The One that truly frees and gives and never stops giving.

The Invisible Limits

2010-07-03T07:54:00.000-07:00

Last Monday I was struck by two pieces in the news/opinion aggregator I frequent. They weren't unusual by any means, but the topics are ones that are not addressed much. Each shared pretty amazing observations that few take seriously (which is precisely why they continue to periodically show up in some form), and they were from writers who are both very renowned in the financial punditry world. But because they are beholden to World operatives, neither could share anything close to the answer to the problems they elucidate.

Or I should say, as always, Anyone who is the answer.

The first was from Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post, and the title of his piece pretty much says everything: "We may be reaching the limits of economics." I like Robert Samuelson because he has lots of comprehensible and quite striking numbers to illustrate how much human sacrifice is actually going on out there. Oh, he certainly won't let on that it is indeed human sacrifice. His writing is more along the lines of "These numbers show exactly how awful things are in this area." In this piece he mentions several key questions that economists simply cannot answer, the most prominent one (paraphrased), "How much exactly should government do (spend, cut, raise, lower any number of financial instruments) to get people out working and producing and making things ever-so wonderful?"

Economists can't know the answer to that question, at least if they're still intractably tied to the World. Economists who live in the Kingdom and listen to the One Who Made Us To Begin With can answer that question. And much of it has to do with that second piece.

This one was by New Yorker columnist and author James Surowiecki, and his title says it all: "Greater Fools." He simply points out that as much as everyone hollers about Wall Street goofs messing things up for Main Street folk, it is truly the latter who are at fault. My dad always used to say "When you point your finger at someone there're always three fingers pointing back at you."

Yes, Main Street folk are just as foolish as anyone. But see, the World persepective stops there. Surowiecki can only go into the tired old ways average people don't know diddly about economics or finance. This is not news. What Kingdom people know is that it is not that they are foolish that is so destructive.

It is that they are sinful.

And while the World can indeed make a good case for people doing uncouth things, very few people ever bring up the fact that sin is not just saying an unkind word or gliding through the traffic stop every once in a while.

It is lying and murdering for the purpose of accomplishing human sacrifice.

Yes, I know about those three fingers. They've been pointed at me too. This is why the only way I can be freed from my well-deserved guilt and the punishment that goes with it is to put all of everything I have or think or feel into the hands of the One who died for me so I could live again.

The World offers its counterfeit Jesus to millions who worship it, and therefore require the federal government or the Federal Reserve banking system or the Roman Catholic network of tax-exempt 501c3 organizations to hammer away at spending or cutting or raising or lowering any number of value extraction instruments to pretend to make them feel good when all they are doing is laying them on the alter time after time after time.

The only way out is through Him, and fully committing to abandon the whole value extraction body of death and enter into value enhancement by sowing what God has given us into the lives of others. Yes, it does require the deft arrangement of fully terminating all those contracts with Caesar that signify one is still a sinner requiring neat and orderly human sacrifice services.

The other day my family and I went to see Toy Story 3, and in the lobby of the theater were two banners for the upcoming film Inception, hung on opposite sides. Each one had four people in seperate frames, each with a title underneath. The posters had different individuals on each except for one actor who appeared in both, the star of the film Leonardo DiCaprio.

His title was the same in both banners.

The Extractor.

Right now I know very little about the film, except that it is getting some buzz and looks like a film I'd like to see. For now I was certainly taken by the DiCaprio's character title. It is easy to see that people are intrigued by the idea of an Extractor.

I wonder how many of them know how much their value is being extracted as they breathe?

All of this was simply to introduce you to my latest, which gets into the distinction between the World doing its thing and what it would be like if people truly lived out the Kingdom doing its thing.

Where Are They?

2010-06-14T20:04:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I get a message from someone who is intrested in knowing more about what it means to be an ungrafted church. They've caught my webzine, most likely the "501c3 Q & A" page, and have more questions or are simply concerned about being incorporated.

As I thought, I wondered, how many such people look at my blog to see what kinds of things I'm saying about being ungrafted? And are they trying to get cues from the many times I've gone out and consulted people about what it takes to move on establishing a vibrant assembly that is not tied to Caesar?

And then I thought, hmm. They aren't going to find any such scintillating narratives here. Not that I don't want to fill this blog with them. I do. It is just

They aren't happening.

I have indeed offered my services to do some consulting about these matters, but no one has requested them. That is likely because very few see that I'm here. But I think the main reason is more harrowing.

It is because there are so few who really have any desire to get out of their Catholicist swamp.

I have introduced the idea of being ungrafted to many pastors. It's not that they've responded by telling me to take a hike -- they've responded by saying nothing at all. Dozens of pastors, some of whom are my good friends, are completely silent. Even after the most graciously respectful request that they give me their honest no-cost take, I hear nothing. It's like a disease.

Well, it is. It's the disease of being hopelessly obligated to the World. Please know that's not a bad thing. The Ministry of Condemnation is a good thing. There must be condemnation and the force of the law to crack heads. These pastors get paid big bucks to do Caesar's work. Perfectly rational behavior, really. No wonder they all think I'm speaking gibberish.

I'm nobody anyway. I'm nobody but someone who reads Christ's words and wants to do them. Someone who just wants to be thoroughly immersed in the ministry of reconciliation, with the wildest abandon possible. I confess I don't do it all perfectly, but I pray constantly that I never use that as an excuse.

And that God would do a miracle in my life to make me wholly ungrafted as much as I look for it among others.

I'm convinced that can't happen for me in a vacuum. I must be around others doing it. So yeah, right here, if you're reading this blog to get some grand wisdom to make all things happy happy happy in your worship community, all I can give you is this: That the church of Christ needs faithful people. Jesus had 72 guys to send out, two by two, and they radically transformed everything they touched.

Where are those people today?

So if you're reading this blog right now, I urge you to simply do what Scripture says to do. That's where the instructions are. Look at the fourth chapter of Galatians. Read that and tell me we can really keep making the excuse that our churches have to keep being 501c3's just because that's the way it has to be, and still think that God is pleased with our puny efforts to transform the world.

If you still want to get any remotely thoughtful remarks from this writing effort, go back and look again at some of what I've put down. I do lay out the case that the World is woefully lacking, simply that some may turn and see the Kingdom and His glory in it. It is a challenge, I try to be detailed but still engaging. Simply look at the last three blog posts I made, there at the end of May.

My "wishes."

All I say there is that I'm no Solomon, but it'd be nice if we got together and moved forward on doing what God asks us to do. Want to do that with me? I'd be happy to talk with you.

And FYI, I put together a whole webpage with some pretty basic ideas about what to do to be ungrafted as a worship community. That page is here.

One More Wish

2010-05-31T14:11:00.000-07:00

I blog because I really think I have something to say. Right now I know not a whole lot of people read this. I still write for a number of reasons. Maybe someone will come across it. At some point in the future my children may actually read some of this and think deeply about what their dad was about, what he was thinking and feeling. And I do this simply to "put on paper" what God has shared with me. "Share all good things with your instructor." I like that a lot. Here I may do that.

My last two blog entries were simply about things I want. Yes, call me selfish, but I don't think for a second God didn't put deep passionate acquisitiveness into each of us for a reason. After living many years in the World, I found its treasures profoundly lacking. What is still a bit amazing to me is how well the World fools people into thinking its things are the things to acquire. Oh I understand it. I understand why it does that, and I see at least a little bit of how it does that. I do understand.

Which is what leads me to that one more wish. I've already mentioned that the bulk of my wishes are oriented around hanging out with people who understand. I'm not so arrogant to say I'm the only one who understands, although some may take that away from what I've written. But the Holy Spirit does counsel me about all the things said to me. And He does give me a pretty good idea of what is of the World and what is of the Kingdom.

So yeah, I do very much want to hang with those who understand, even have light years more understanding than I do. I do so long for that. I'm even great with hanging with those who may not be there but do have the tiniest desire to get there -- to that understanding. What breaks my heart is that I see so few of them. Oh my, I so enjoy the company and devotion of my family and friends. God has blessed me immensely in that, I thank Him every day for them.

But they don't even understand. Again, I love them, I revel in being with them, but they along with most everyone else just don't understand. Even though, yet again yet again yet again, one of the key critical things that keeps me moved to share, to write, to effuse as I do, is that I have three beautiful young eager enthusiastic exhilerating children -- maybe after time, maybe they indeed...

Will get it.

And what is it I want them -- or anyone to get?

The one real wish...

That all things are answered in Christ. Anything you think you want is in Him. Things attacking you from all sides? No sweat -- if He's yours you have everything.

Thing is, the World is filled with counterfeit Christs, and they take so many different forms and are so powerfully compelling that they are no match for those who don't simply every morning say to Christ that He is theirs exclusively.

As I've learned more and more about the World's modus operendi and that contrasted to Scripture's description of what the Kingdom really truly is all about, I believe the only way to behave as Christ's in the midst of this World is to "abjure the realm," so to speak. This means getting out of all the contractual obligations one has with the agents of Cain, yet still explode using all the gifts God gave to all those in His community to bring the most phenomenal abundance of all good things for everyone. All of this I've laid out plainly in my webzine.

But to make it real, to make it so radical to a puny putrid World System, it requires those people to get together regularly and not remonstrate against anything that Caesar does, but rather do those things that would be truly abjuring the realm. Firmly covenant with God and one another, and then shed all those agreements together, the W-4's and 501c3's and debt contracts and voter registrations and government pension pyramid scheme extraction plans and all the rest of that sewage. Then with that covenant in place set up arrangements with one another in which the seal of Christ in their hearts is the only expression of their commitment to work hard in a self-sacrificial way, essentially "dying" for others simply because they love so much with His love.

What are those "arrangements"? Churches that have no incorporated status with Caesar. Businesses that are not incorporated as a way of evading responsibility to love those with they have to do. Schools (also completely unincorporated in any way) that are so vibrantly filled with overwhelming joy and purpose that people flock to them.

Are you given over to Christ, or do you just say you are?

So yeah, it is simple. My wish is to be among those who actually are. If I'm not one of those, then I want to be one too. I pray and pray and pray that I am -- all the time. I truly think some of this is that I'm around others who are. And I wish I could be right their with them being the Kingdom. Blowing everyone away by actually doing it in reality, no matter how much those in the World want to put us away or even execute us along the highways.

Jesus said so utterly plainly that this is what it should be like.

Can we love so much with His love that we'd really be ushering people into the Kingdom no matter what it costs?

So there it is. My wish. That's it.

More Wishes

2010-05-28T21:11:00.000-07:00

In my last blog entry I kind of went off on rank disunderstanding, if I may coin a phrase. Just thought I'd add a few more thoughts around the visceral feeling about it all. Yeah, I know. It was yet another time I laid it out there. My good friend from work with whom I pray is a very even-tempered guy, he's awesome. He said don't sweat it, God's got it, it's all good. That's fine. I know.

But I still feel it.

Today in the news/opinion aggregator that I habitually scan were these link headlines.

"What If It's All a Lie?" This was from blogger Edward Harrison, who is himself a financal advisor of some stripe. But look at that question. It actually makes me laugh. I mean, come on, how many times can you say "This guy/company/country just ain't payin' us back... um, aren't they?..." without actually getting a clue.

'Scuze me, I've got the answer to your question. I'm no genius because it's the answer that's been around for millennia, staring us plain in the face. It's just those who must deftly sustain the human sacrifice bloodbath keep so many from looking at it. The answer is

It is.

It is a lie. But wait. If Edward and all those waddling about with big fat question marks hovering over their heads are actually sworn value extractors themselves, then the question is merely asked to keep people hoping that it isn't, that the ones systematically hacking their spiritual limbs off are really not lying after all. Or if they were really lying, then the sales pitch is all ready to go: "Get hooked up with me and my value extraction services so I can get you ahead of the game!" Or yeah, get you a head from the human sacrifice game we all play. Okay, a bad pun, but not many people should be laughing anyway.

Then there was this gem, from Investors Business Daily no less. "Big Government Takes Over." Really. Like, when did this happen. This morning? Hurry, run for the hills. Hurry now. Go faster. ::Yawnn::

Crimeny, people, how many times can you say "The government now runs x percent of y part of our economy whatever whatever OH MY" and not keel over with laughter (or a bout of serious ulcer pain depending on your degree of disunderstanding).

Yeah yeah yeah, I do have the answer. But why write it down. Same thing applies that no one is getting here. These guys are screaming "The sky is about to fall" to get anyone they can to believe it isn't yet anyway, at least not without some valiant World System thing to keep happening. Or some novel World System thing to be employed. But the World System has already had everything taken over, yeah yeah, you got it (or not) -- for millennia.

So bazillions will never understand. I know that. I accept it. Jesus said it a long time ago, even quoting prophets who said it long before that. Nothing new there.

But I still want to talk about things understood with those who do. See, I so want to go to Jeremiah's lodge just to talk about things with people who get it. That's what happens at the lodge. But I think sometimes I expect too much.

Sometimes I think the lodge is just when I can read a book with my daughter. Or talk about the ball game with my son. Or watch my students really doing their damnedest to get what I'm teaching them, that's very sweet. Or revel in any of those things happening that just tell me, as my friend said, "It's all good."

Wishes

2010-05-26T22:08:00.000-07:00

I really wish I could blog more. I work ten hour days and spend lots of the other time I have with family.

'Course I really wish for a lot of things, like mixing it up with people who actually understand. Not to brag that I'm the one who does understand necessarily, or even that they'd read my blog. That's kind of the point. I do very very very much wish I could talk with people who get it -- I just want to be getting it.

Thing is, paying attention to Jesus' words, you'd get it. When I pay attention to Jesus' words I get it. Paying attention to Jesus' words and seriously getting out there and doing them, I already have the answer. That may sound arrogant, but as I've emphasized, it ain't me for jack.

It's Him.

Know Him and know the answer.

Don't know Him? Don't spout about how much He isn't or that I don't know the answer. It only means anything if someone else whoever that is gets it and knows Him and understands.

What is the reason I spend whatever time I can soaking up what the World megaphone holders say about things? It's simple. I want to know what the questions are. I want to form in my noggin the questions juuuuuuuust right and put 'em out there so that maybe someone'll come to see Christ as He is and not as their straw-man god.

Like this book I'm sauntering through called Fool's Gold by Gillian Tett about how JP Morgan messed up the financial markets. Turns out her solution is just that we all practice much much much more holistic thought. She's into social anthropology and how everything is intertwined and that if we just kind of got together about these things we'd be much much much better. Nice.

'Course, the only reason she gets a little megaphone is that she's blapping just what everyone wants her to blap. What she says is nothing new -- Let's just damn stop doing bad things damn it come on let's just stop being rotten to one another already damn it gosh. Really? That's a surprise to me.

Then there's this piece from today in the Financial Times. Great parable about the way the financial world works right now. It's dead on. It really is, I commend the guy for doing such a great job laying it out like this. Dead on.

But you see, that's just the problem.

It's all death, and he can't see that. The one thing he forgot to add is this: Really, all the ants and the grasshoppers really want to do is eat each other. Everyone without Christ is just doing human sacrifice. Without Christ all someone has is the endless pursuit of spilling someone else's blood because maybe-just-maybe that'll absolve them of their sins. Gallons and gallons and gallons of blood. The ministers of Cain simply do a really really really good job of lying about what they do. But if everyone is a liar anyway what difference does it make?

A guy was interviewed on NPR today, I think it was NPR, I don't know I'm really tired right now. He was the owner of some furniture store in South Carolina. He says he's just now learning about Greece yet he thinks the economy is picking up. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about but all but confessed he really doesn't. He may very well be a very good guy.

But one of the things he spoke about was that he was talking with others, and the idea he was getting across was that he was trying to get cues from them about what's happening. That's cool. That's fine. What I thought was...

Do they really truly actually understand?

Or are they all just listening to the World megaphone holders who tell them they aren't worthless without Him, this Jesus character is of no matter, or that the truly fake Jesus they believe in is just dandy? That you've got to hold yourself up by those bootstraps until your fingers bleed like a good American? That when you go to your Caesarian church on Sunday it's good to smile and say happy things with friends but to keep slitting other people's throats on Monday? Oh, and your church belongs to Caesar if it's a 501c3 incorporated entity.

So yeah, I do wish more people would read my blog. I know they won't because they are smothered in a zillion other web things, and cell phone things, and whatever else. I even wish someone would read my blog and go the distance and call me on my claim that I have the answer. Great. But I just get too discouraged not so much because of the vastness of the web universe in which my writing gets lost. It is simply because I have found so few people who understand. Again, this has nothing to do with me or my blog, it just has to do with rank willful blindness and deafness and muteness by virtually everyone I encounter.

Oh? Is that too harsh? Too arrogant? Too cynically dismissive?

Then understand with me and let's talk about it. Don't understand yet? Then take a few not-so-difficult steps and commit to doing so. But don't complain about a piddly little nobody like me. All I want to do is point people to the answer they all say they want.

Or 'scuze me, The Answer.

But I get discouraged. There are just so so so many people beholden to the World. They wouldn't know The Answer if it dropped on their heads like an anvil from the sky. That really shouldn't discourage me because intractable Catholicists will never stop being so. That's fine. They do the World thing, that's just the way it is.

I think I just see so much of it that it gets disheartening.

Sometimes I so need to be at Jeremiah's lodge. Okay, yeah, fine. I just need to be there. I so need to be there.

Honest Thinking

2010-05-04T19:49:00.000-07:00

I went with my family to see the film How to Train Your Dragon the other night. It was fun, and worth a couple of remarks to introduce my latest home page piece.

Much of it was about the idea that people can make mistakes about things based on their preconceptions. Vicious flying dragons frequently "raided" the vikings' village, but the vikings didn't understand the reality of their predicament. They honestly considered the dragons evil combatants, until a young man discovered what was really going on and learned how to benevolently interact with them.

This theme is often repeated in cinema, and it parallels my latest webzine feature. People honestly trust the Roman Catholic Church to save them, really honestly rationally because all they see is the World System in all its glory. There are too few Kingdom people out there to share Christ with them because so many who say they're Christ's are tied to one World god club or another.

I also thought about how World inhabitants would interpret this theme--taking the presumption from what I hear so many of them say so often.

"Look! What a terrific moral: we think we're seperate when we're all just the same! If only we'd all just be friends! Walk in one another's shoes! Chuck all those minor inconsequential differences! It's easy to get along if we just try!"

This denies the fact that the film still had a horrific adversary, the largest meanest dragon who had to be defeated in the end. And for those who think religion doesn't really matter after, the vikings still worshipped Odin, or at least he was mentioned. Why would the viking god (the real life viking god, not just the film-story one) be mentioned if he didn't have some significant role in their lives?

What I found most interesting is that the dragons were essentially victims of "dragon" sacrifice on the "alter" of the giant "god" dragon. All the other dragons very honestly, very reasonably, very rationally complied.

It was all they could do because all they did was fear.

Just like dutiful World inhabitants.

Want to get off the alter of habitual human sacrifice at the hands of sworn World operatives? Want to truly live and sow bounty into the lives of others? Want to pull yourself away from the codependent clutches of Cain's domain and instead experience the widest deepest love and envelope yourself in rapturous joy?

Thing is you'd need help.

The One Who Is Joy is right there at the entrance to the Kingdom to let you in. His nail scarred hands beckon you. Thing is...

He won't allow all that World baggage in with you.

To find out more, read here.

The Mind Over Money Folly

2010-04-28T16:30:00.000-07:00

Last night PBS’s Nova had a broadcast titled “Mind over Money” about the ways psychology affects economic decision-making. It was a standard World take on the latest in behavioral economics, namely that there is really no such thing as a rational market.

The typical proponents of this view were favorably interviewed, Robert Shiller and Richard Thaler among them, stridently advancing the idea that emotions play such an important role in decision-making that few people are truly rational about the decisions they make. This is all played out in the market, and with the financial markets recently demonstrating how hosed people got, it must be true.

Nah. Sorry.

Everything anyone does is always and perfectly rational, every time.

The reason is simple, and has a bit to do with a portion of the show that featured a scientist doing experiments to graphically see how much of a certain part of the brain is activiated when a subject is offered money. It turns out it is stimulated the same as it is when offered sex, drugs, or food. The scientist then said something along the lines of “The brain has evolved yadda-yadda.”

Now, if evolution is the culprit, then why isn’t that perfectly rational? Heaven forbid we’d have evolved not to have an emotional switch to move us to get food to eat and have sex to procreate, or make it easier to do those things which is what the very reasonable tool of money does. Now, the idea of evolution is crap, but it does make perfect rational sense to someone who buys into a materialist world view. The interesting thing is, how can someone with such a view say what is rational or what is not? If it is perfectly rational for a beast who has evolved with a larger body, stronger muscles, and sharper claws to eat you, what do you have to say about that?

The “there is really irrationality after all” folly was further exposed when another scientist did an experiment in which a good number of subjects were all put in front of a computer connected to a market exchange simulation, and they were told that over time the asset they were trading would be devalued to nothing. They then started trying to buy or sell the asset.

As they got going they actually overvalued the asset for quite some time, forming a speculative bubble. As time went on the price of the asset was far above the value the simulation had established, until eventually the prices started tumbling dramatically, popping the bubble. The experiment was a success! These subjects unwittingly created a bubble thus proving they behaved, ahem, irrationally.

Not.

What is never addressed in these kinds of experiments (there are so many of them) is that the experimenters must make an initial assumption about what the value of the test asset is. Here’s the bazillion dollar question:

Where did that come from?

Where did the initial consideration that the asset was falling come from to begin with? The experimenters may look at the aforementioned results with glee, but real life is not like that. In real life somehow someway a market value of an asset comes to be—laboratory dweebs are not there to just say “This is the value and what you think about it is wrong.”

Again, why is what they say it is wrong while what you say it is is right?

No, it wasn’t that people were behaving irrationally—those experimenters were dutifully (and very rationally) worshipping one of the most powerful gods, Hindsight. Those subjects were simply trying to maximize their self-interest (quite rationally) and when people lie and cheat and exploit markets… and engage in extraordinarily rational human sacrifice, bubbles form and pop and form and pop and form and pop and you get a business cycle.

Which means the issue is not that people are irrational.

It means they are unrighteous.

That is the true folly. It is even more foolish that they dismiss what they think is the folly, but it is not irrational to do so because they haven't a clue about God or who He is, even though many will boast zealously that they do. Makes perfect sense, perfectly rational. It is wholly unrighteous, however.

There is only one way to be righteous, and that is to link up with the one perfect value assessor, Jesus Christ. He’s it. He’s the One.

Jesus Christ is the one quant who gets value correct all the time, every time. All the other quants no matter how brilliant they are with the numbers are just guessing, and if they try to get what’s valued without Christ they are only arriving at what the Jesuits want them to see.

In fact, close to the end of this Nova episode was a surreal scene with a number of young bright-eyed quants searing their attention into huge computer screens. Scanning scanning scanning. They will scan and scan and scan ultimately to do only one of two things.

One, they will further the human sacrifice efforts of millions and millions of people paying them to peel off any and all of those market discrepencies and anomolies so they can have their retirement secured.

Or two, they will ensure the pool of veritably valued capital sowed into the lives of those who love with Christ’s love will be manifest broadly so all may benefit and further demonstrate His love as He did.

Know what? I think everyone is very rationally doing the former.

I think no one is doing the latter.

How unrighteous is that.

Human Sacrificers Circle the Wagons

2010-04-16T18:18:00.000-07:00

The biggest news on Wall Street is that the Securities and Exchange Commission is coming after Goldman Sachs. They've been hit with fraud charges, so significant that today the Dow took its first hit in a while. Everyone who watches what's going on there at street level isn't surprised that Goldman Sachs is in the crosshairs, and some are a bit surprised that the SEC is actually standing up and pointing its shaky finger at the behemouth.

Slate writer Heidi Moore got through a manhole and looked around a bit underneath the street, and saw some very interesting things. Among all the stories in the web aggregate I look at, my attention was drawn to her piece: "It's Not Just Goldman--It's the Clients." Sure enough, you'll find that all of our huffing and puffing about rich guys being eeevil is woefully misplaced. We need to do a lot more huffing and puffing about

Ourselves.

The fault, dear Brutus, lies with ourselves. Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself, for that's deeper down in the waterworks.

As for Moore's expose, she eloquently identifies uber-hedge-fund-manager John Paulson as the guy who convinced Goldman Sachs to arrange his notorious mortgage short-sells that netted him nearly $4 billion for the year a while back. Not only was Paulson working it working it working it, but many many many others were too. Getting deeper under the street now, in places where the rats roam. (Oh, don't worry, we'll go even deeper for you horrorphiles...)

A couple of posts ago I'd pointed out that Ponzi king Bernard Madoff was just the stupidest of all those working it. I'd wondered if some would think that a bit too inaccurate because before our (and his of course) hindsight he wasn't so stupid. Look at John Paulson now. Will he get in trouble simply for deftly gaming us dumb saps? Isn't the taxpayer the stupidest one of all?

The answer to the true meaning of "stupidest" can only come from understanding the distinction between the World and the Kingdom.

Here's the World's definition of "stupidest," when it comes to people like Madoff and Paulson and every other value extractor: 1. Did a rotten job of lying. 2. It was so rotten the liar got whacked by Caesar.

Here's the Kingdom definition: Wicked as all hell.

Madoff is the stupidest on both counts. But everyone else who successfully works it is only stupid on the second count. And as long as people continue to have their earphones plugged into the Catholicist megaphone they'll always be striving to avoid being stupidest by the World's definition no matter how stupid they are by the second.

A classic example of this spiritual lunkheadedness is in the No. 1 bestseller, Michael Lewis' The Big Short. Lewis does a super job of slithering around underneath the street close to where the biggest fattest ugliest rats are, but the only reason everyone wants to read it all is to see how they can be as good a liars as the John Paulson's of the world.

The Los Angeles Times had an interview with Lewis printed in its Sunday Calendar section. Calendar section??? What's with that? I guess they put it there because they thought The Big Short was a good book or something, except there is indeed a special section just for books. I think it was there because it's all just part of the great show.

A major reason this is so is because Lewis says in his interview that lots of people are politically agitated. Of course they are, it's part of the show. "That energy leads to change," Lewis said. The only thing that'll change is the switching around of the people who do value extraction in the biggest chunks.

He spoke of the complicated financial innovation "machine," one that "ended up being fooled by its own deceit." There's the World all right, big fat ugly rats swimming in sewage with a whole bunch of other big fat ugly rats trying to see who can lie the best.

When you get down further under the earthenworks, you'll start to taste the hell of all this.

In that blog post about Madoff I'd mentioned that Jesus did speak boldly about it, but I'd like to add here the way in which Isaiah wrote it down. It wasn't just that people don't listen, that they just don't get it--he wasn't saying "Hey you guys, come on, you should really try to listen a bit more carefully."

No, he was actually writing what God told him to say, and essentially it was: "You go right ahead and keep on being lunkheaded. Go ahead, keep being idiots. Keep being stupid. Go ahead. And as you keep doing that, just watch your cities crumble and your land go to waste."

Those weren't the exact words, I know. But read them there, right there, sixth chapter of Isaiah, verses nine on. You tell me if they are really any different.

This is where the horror story gets good. In and around that place waaaaay under the street are the voices of those sworn to make people stupid. The voices that say Jesus is of no matter, that He's just a spiffy fairy tale character we hear boffo stories about on Sunday mornings. Voices that tell us all that's all nice and all, but we've really got to get right back to work it work it work it so we don't let other liars get the better of us.

Only when you see things from the Kingdom can you see the hell that this is.

The SEC and Michael Lewis and all the other apparently brave, brave champions of non-stupidity can't do squat to rescue us from that hell. They're all just doing the bidding of Company men executing the best value extraction by profiting from value extraction. Moore even closes her piece by gushing that all this sudden SEC stirring may actually get us closer to who's in charge. I split a gut when I read that. They're only willing to go a few feet below the streeet to look--there they won't come close to finding out.

What lunkheads. They're very very wealthy lunkheads, I must say. Guess that's cool.

Or hot depending on where you're the richest lunkhead.
_

I wrote a home page piece a couple years ago about the "finders keepers losers weepers" philosophy employed by John Paulson and all World inhabitants. For more about living up in the fresh air, that's here.

Human Sacrificers Testify

2010-04-09T20:57:00.000-07:00

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is holding hearings this week and whenever, calling all sorts of really official finance officials to the table to 'splain themselves.

Today's featured showman was Daniel Mudd, at the helm of Fannie Mae when she started sinking. (Fortunately just before she went completely under, millions of taxpayers with buckets started bailing feverishly to get her back into fine sailing form.)

He said something interesting today, I think. He said that if Fannie Mae were allowed to diversify, they'd have been better off. Now, what precisely does this mean? Please, do enlighten me, I want to get it straight. Tell me if I'm wrong, please, I mean it, I invite your comments.

But does this not mean that if Fannie Mae were able to suck the blood from other sources, they'd have been able to cover their asses when the blood they'd been sucking from home mortgages ran dry? After all, they were required by law apparently to have "all their eggs in one basket" (the worst evil in financial wizardry), namely that of those dratted home mortgages foisted upon them by those bloodsuckers themselves, Congress, who really only reflect the wishes and desires of... errr, 'scuze me, it's not polite to call Joe and Josie Averageamerican, bloodsuckers... Forgive me... (And please, never mind the use-the-house-as-a-personal-ATM man and woman behind the green curtain.)

Earlier this week former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had his comeuppance. They're all making their cameos, how splendid, speaking with great eloquence and pontificating regally about that wonderful thing called hindsight -- brilliant show, just brilliant.

Greenspan defended his policy of not using the power of Fed enforcement to go after "predatory" lenders, because if he did it might have given borrowers a false sense of security. The thinking here is that with a bunch of regulatory agents quite visibly snooping about, people might get the impression that they were actually doing their job proficiently weeding out the baaad eeevil lenders, and as such whoever they'd be dealing must be okay when they're really just crooks.

So then, let me get this straight. According to Greenspan, regulation presents a moral hazard.

I know many may be laughing their socks off right now, but look at this. Please, let me know what I'm missing here, because I want to get it right. Please, tell me if I'm wrong in any of this. Please don't leave me in the dark, I want to be sure about this stuff. Help me out.

But isn't it true that it wasn't just Greenspan who was in on this? It was everyone who wanted him to enable their bloodsucking investment practices. Everyone, meaning millions of bankers, lenders, brokers, and yes, borrowers. It meant every government or quasi-government agent. It meant every top talking head in the media. It meant all personnel at all levels of human sacrifice enablement. Anyone who just went along with the ride on this are all Alan Greenspan toadies.

The other amazing thing about this dynamic is its verity. It is quite twisted, yes, but it is veritable nonetheless. What do I mean by this?

I mean that the law shines light on sinners.

If Greenspan did unleash every Fed agent on every questionable lending case, the workload would be impossibly gargantuan. This is something Greenspan even mentioned himself! So the rules were in place, and there were a number of intrepid agents ready to head out into the wild blue--er, I should say red--bloodsucking yonder, but so many people were doing their standard bloodsucking thing that it just wouldn't have meant squat.

The profound truth in all of it is this.

People do really awful things. Fed agents there, Fed agents not there, doesn't matter. People will still do really awful things. Oh, and not just really awful things, but really awful bloodsucking things. Oh, and they'll do really awful bloodsucking things while wearing really nice suits and smiling really big. Oh, and not just that but they'll be enabled and encouraged and provoked and stimulated to do those things by World operatives whose sworn duty is to keep it thriving.

They must. It's their job.

The World operates thusly. If you're listening you'll figure it out. If you want to you'll understand. It should frighten you like nothing else, really. What is it they say? "If you don't know the predator, you are the prey." In the World you're always prey. It doesn't matter how much you're sucking someone's blood, someone is always sucking yours. And the World makes it that way. Always has, for millennia.

The Kingdom, though, is there, not far away, just right there for anyone who wants to go into it.

Yeah, does have a narrow doorway, but that's okay.

I should write Doorway, capitalized, because the Door is a Person.

Thing is, the Door is narrow. It's not big enough to let you in if you are still sucking the blood from others--working for the World or contractually expecting the World to keep funneling its regularly drawn blood to you. You must give it up and get completely out.

The great thing is He knows you can't do that on your own.

He knows. He's there. He's got your back.

He loves you so much that He'll see you get in.
_

My most recent home page piece covers the World's human sacrifice a bit more. Just more evidences to share with those tired of doing it, of being an accomplice to it, and may want to make that radical turn and follow a Lord who loves with His life. Some more on The Door is here.

Oh! No One's Listening! What a Surprise!

2010-04-06T19:49:00.000-07:00

Harry Markopolos has a new book out, the one you’d think: “Bernie and Me.” Well, that’s not the title, but that is essentially what it’s about. If you don’t remember who in blazes Harry Markopolos is, he’s the mid-level high-finance seer who eagerly wondered how investment genius Bernard Madoff made bazillions in the markets when he really shouldn’t have. Markopolos then tried like crazy to duplicate Madoff’s success and discovered that it was not only impossible but certifiably criminal. He blew the whistle a number of times only to find he was blowing a dog whistle, you know the kind, completely inaudible to human beings fully immersed in keeping their human sacrifice humming along smoothly.

Thus, the real title of the book: “No One Would Listen.” Sure Markopolos is making the key point that incessantly screeching about bad things and shoving gobs of veritable numbers in the faces of those humming “Camptown Races” with their eyes closed and ears plugged by fingers makes a compelling narrative that’ll earn bazillions in royalties.

But the truth is this.

It is nothing new that no one listens to the loudest evidences of unrighteous behavior all around them in the highest levels of governance, in every institution—political, financial, commercial, ecclesiastical.

Not new at all.

It is really not new that it is not limited to those fancy schnazzy people. Human sacrificers in the ivory towers just make the rules and then spin them so they benefit the most. Crafting the words and images about it all is designed to elicit the most heaving shrug that we’re not like that, that it’s some other cretin to ferociously revile, that we shouldn’t worry that our piddly little human sacrifices are of any matter.

That everyone is deliberately kept in a state of abject reprobation is a key facet of Markopolos’ expose. We like to sneer at Bernard Madoff but the duplicity happens everywhere. Markopolos was himself a Jesuit-educated quant sworn to hunt down the worst of them, he should certainly know. He was all about figuring out what these investment wonks were doing to, as he writes, “make the numbers dance.” Much of the book is a grand but perversely indifferent citation of all the ways value extractors do their job. Madoff just happened to be the stupidest about it. If you look around it is just not hard to find many other fabulous examples.

Here's a good one. Just recently it was reported that film actor John Malkovich is seeking to recover his $2 million Madoff investment. Malkovich includes in this sum what he was told he should be getting. Guh? Where exactly is that amount of money going to come from? It never went anywhere to begin with. And if Malkovich gets any money at all, it will be from sales of Madoff’s assets, but then that means other bilked clients will not be getting their money back—why is Malkovich so special? Or could he be getting it from taxpayers who have handed gobs of money to Caesar only to have it wind its way through the tortuous maze of federal bailout codependency eventually landing in Malkovich’s favorable judgment?

What kind of observer are you? Are you enraged at Malkovich’s gall, or are you doing precisely the same thing? The key is: What’s the difference? The former means you’d like to kick his ass, the latter means you’re, well, kicking someone’s ass somewhere.

Is anyone out there any different than these two very typical kinds of persons?

Does no one listen?

Jesus knew. He knew that no one listened. He quoted Isaiah, from the sixth chapter, right there in the 13th chapter of Matthew:

“They hear but don’t listen. They see but don’t understand.”

He was the only one who knew this. He just knew.

What is phenomenal is that He asked those who’d want to know like He does to follow Him and find out.

And listen and understand.

They’d listen and understand that World inhabitants do human sacrifice, it’s what they do. Christ listeners would understand that they should just be left alone to do it, with maybe a mention about The Way out of it. A follower of Christ loves just enough to share Jesus’ words with them, the ones about the narrow gate. Some may just actually listen. They really may.

A beaucoup number won’t. They just won’t.

Those who really won’t are all the Roman priests dissembling up the gazotch about the most horrific sexual abuses, all the Obamaesque bureaucrats feverishly pounding out more piddly entitlements, and all the slobbering Wall Street vampires who valiantly work to keep the markets a fresh bloodbath.

They're supposed to not-listen. It’s what they do.

Don’t like it?

Are you someone who’s listening? Really listening? Then act on your understanding and get out of the World. Don't challenge it, don't question it, don't make demands of it, don't have a rally holding up big mean-spirited signs, don't run for office in it, don't do anything but acknowledge as Christ did that "because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold," but that with Him you may still love them but do it from the Kingdom.

Go for it, get out of the World and into the Kingdom.

But you gotta take your fingers out of your ears first.
_

That verse Jesus said is in Matthew 24. Right after it He said, "He who stands firm to the end will be saved." For more on the contrast between the World and the Kingdom, look here.

The Selective Reality Show

2010-03-25T17:58:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday’s Doonesbury strip highlighted the great folly of buying into Caesar’s ruses. Please don’t misunderstand me, I think much of Garry Trudeau's humor is much more lame than progressives think it is, and I am instinctively repulsed by what the federal government is doing with the “ObamaCare” mess.

But Trudeau nails it here. All “tea-partiers” are doing with their vicious protestations is demonstrating their devoted allegiance to Obama and his power over their affairs. Oh Trudeau is just as much beholden to Caesar as the tea-partiers, he’s just got his own ideologically profane spin on things. Trudeau tosses his grenades in the culture war, much like the media recently have succeeded in launching their missiles linking Republicans with the most obscene tea-partiers.

I do respect the principled stand tea-partiers are taking, but it is just as veritable that they don’t realize how much they’re being played by forces they refuse to identify much less understand. In fact the most visible ones are merely stooges who inflame those passions, sentiments which only mean anything if indeed the object of their scorn was significantly meaningful to them.

Seriously, if the tea-partiers actually cherished authentic freedom, what could anything that Barack Obama and the Democrats do have to do with them? If they were genuinely free to live richly and sustain a thriving, loving, charitable community, why do they need anything that Obama offers? Why complain about a legitimate service he is selling to those who want to buy it?

I believe the unequivocal answer is that they want Obama, they need Obama, they even worship Obama. It is easy to see how unequivocal it is simply by looking at the expanse of their objections. Not only does their expressed disdain give them away, but it testifies to how much they are being played by those powers. The more rebellion, the more Caesar is justified in doing his job. Everyone wants job security, and Caesar is no different. As long as people work to rearrange the terms of their contract, he can mercilessly prosecute them for doing so.

The same Sunday the Doonesbury strip came out the Los Angeles Times had a review of a book about conspiracy theories that was pukifyingly smarmy—I mean what World megaphone holder’s approach to the plain conspiracies in front of our eyes isn’t. In it was mention of an interesting technique Caesar’s operative uses to manage the System's profound influence over World inhabitants. It was called “selective revelation.” It is the idea that the government controls what information gets out about what people (cough cough "terrorists" cough cough...) Not really a surprise, but it is a very cool euphamism. “Selective revelation.” Oooo…

Funny thing is the media already do that with everybody and everything. In fact that this is firmly declared to be a sinister government thing is just another ruse to keep people thinking that the media don’t do it. And this universal health care vs. tea party battle is a classic case of selective revelation. “People!” the World megaphone holder bellows. “Get really riled up about how much you’ll have to pay for other people’s needs! People! Make sure you're sneering at this bad thing here, here! Over here! Look!”

Never mind that the real issue lies in the hearts of evil people. That Barack Obama and all those legislators are doing precisely what much more powerful but deftly disguised powers are requiring that they do. That the more you complain about them the more you reveal your true loyalties and the more they are justified in cracking heads. That those heads to be cracked are yours if you’re the ones who’ve signed on with their enforcement policies and as such willing to pay handsomely for them to make it a bit less painful.

Much much farther away from these minds is the truth that there is One who frees from this body of death. That Jesus Christ rules in the Kingdom and there is where beauty and grace and joy and peace reign. That these things reign with the deepest and widest vengeance, so much so that Jesus spilt blood to see them manifest—His own blood.

And that the Kingdom may be experienced right now, among people who’d just let Obama and whoever else is Cain’s sworn minion do their thing—right there in the midst of the World. Is Obama the enemy of the follower of Christ? Of course he is. But if the follower of Christ did precisely what his Lord asks of him, what really is he or she expected to do with that? You know the answer…

Love him.

What that means, however, is understanding what he does with clarity and insight, and leaving him alone. It also means abandoning all the contracts and debts and obligations you have made to him and sharing the Kingdom of God with others by Christ’s love and only that love. It means sowing every dime you have to meet the needs of any and all around you, who’d see how sublime His love is through you that they’d find hope and meaning and life. (“ObamaCare”? Pshaw, what’s that?...) And this means you’d stop paying gobs of your income in tribute you wouldn't otherwise owe to all these people who have seven-fold power to slam you against the thick marble walls of justice but also can't hold a candle to the searing light of Christ. That is, unless…

Unless…

Unless you are still just a Catholicist, someone pretending to be a follower of Christ and merely enabling the World System to continue its ruthless dominion over you. Then forgive me. Please. I sincerely do not want to be presumptuous.

I really don’t mean to intrude on the pleasure you have of screeching at the U.S. president whenever he comes on the TV. I don’t mean to barge into your enjoyment of the selective realities that command your attention. I don’t mean to derail your prefered lifestyle of fear and paranoia about how much these people can actually do to you.

And hey, it does make for a truly fun show. Just look at the Doonesbury cartoon.

Very entertaining, I must say.

Still contemptibly vile and reprobate, but still good for a nice show.

Some thoughts about the trudging through life in this Nation are here.

The World Dynamic is All About Human Sacrifice

2010-03-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

Sunday night I went to a very nice dinner with my folks and my daughter. As such I missed 60 Minutes, which I like to look at every once in a while to see what the World is blaring through its megaphone. I did want to catch Michael Lewis' take on the financial meltdown of '08, so I watched it online.

None of it was anything I hadn't seen or known about before. But I'd venture to say a few million or so who saw it were either (a) stunned about the inner workings of what happened or (b) further enraged over things they'd already been steamed about. What gets me is that nowhere do I see the true meaning behind all of what is going on. All I see is the rage, a lot of bewilderment, and quite a bit of shoulder-shrugging because so many know that they just want to be exploiters too.

In fact, one online commenter said about the 60 Minutes piece, somewhat sarcastically I'm sure but not entirely insincerely, "Where can I get a job where you get million dollar bonuses after your firm fails?!"

See, this is precisely where the World meets Kingdom Reality. The meaningful truth that Michael Lewis and hundreds of World pundits won't and even can't divulge is that no matter how much they say it's really just a few fat cats who are exploiting us all, it is actually

Everyone.

Everyone is in on the scam. From the lowest of the dregs to the highest of the powerful.

Anyone who doesn't have the Son is a human sacrificer.

What gets me is that so few people see this, much fewer have the ganas to say anything about it. I know too well that very few if anyone will read this blog post, but I just have to write, I just have to, I can't help it. While it may be the case no one will see a tittle of what I write here, there is no excuse for people to refuse to heed God's word in the Bible.

I'm not trying to brag or be a big shot, but I was writing about the horrors of World value assessment long before Michael Lewis started putting the pieces together. FYI you can look here and here and here. But enough about me. Again I really don't give a rat's nard about people seeing what I say.

I just want to see people actually truly really seeing what God said.

And doing it.

And so what's really what with all of this? It is simple, really.

It is all about human sacrifice. No, this isn't some crazed blithering from an insane mind, though I've been accused of that enough times. Go ahead, call me a loon, I'm okay.

But I simply cannot see how stripping value from millions of people no matter what powerful hegemonic institution is doing it for however many patrons is any different than some official priest hacking the pulsating heart from a POW at the top of some ziggurat in the middle of some jungle. That the latter takes about two minutes (okay, ten with all the chanting and swaying thrown in) and the former takes dozens of years shouldn't make a lick of difference.

It's still human sacrifice.

It's still a whole bunch of people worshipping mammon and doing nothing other than hauling their victims onto the alter of investment returns and systematically hacking away with all the legal and constitutional protections they are afforded.

I read a piece today called "Five Lies About the American Economy." It goes a long way in elaborating on some of the same things Lewis shared on 60 Minutes. I'm sure those who read it with only the World perspective filling their craniums will certainly rage and stumble about, as usual. Thing is they always forget the one lie that applies to everyone.

The most important lie of all:

You are a god.

Only by confessing to believing this travesty and extending a heart-rendering request for God's forgiveness can anyone see what's really going on. Entrenched World inhabitants will never see the human sacrifice for what it is because they are too much a part of it. It is only when they appropriate the Son's sacrifice for them can they give it up, step into the Kingdom, and look upon the horror with the most lucid understanding.

Until then, they'll just be gods battling it out for blood at every level--not just physical but emotional, spiritual, financial, commercial, political, ecclesiastical, institutional, everywhere and anywhere.

Hey, the newest film rendition of The Clash of the Titans comes out this week. But hey! Save yourself $11! You can see it all over the place, even in Michael Lewis' feeble attempt to expose things (and he will get a few million $$$ for his miniscule efforts).

I'm not jealous, really, I'm not. I don't care. Good for Michael Lewis. He did a lot of work to point things out. At least there's that. But the 60 Minutes piece ended with this statement from him that is exactly like every other statement at the end of every other "Errrgh-those-drated-Wall-Street-big-shots-I-so-hate-them-and-you-should-join-me-in-hating-them-too" expose. He said,

"And if you know you're gonna blow up AIG by putting $20 billion of bad subprime mortgage risk into it even though it's gonna be very profitable for you, you should stop and say this shouldn't be done."

Thuh end.

That's it. That was the end of the piece. Like that is so profound.

Well, it is actually. It is profound to the extent that Lewis is just confirming what's true, that these people are presuming they're gods. They're gods who really should've known better than to expose themselves so brazenly--they really should have lied much much better than they did. It shows clearly that these people are all still believing the very first lie of them all, and as all World gods will do, they will do human sacrifice. It is in their nature.

The only way out is by Christ.

And really truly actually giving it all up, going all the way over to Him in the Kingdom.

Completely sold out, thus losing yourself (and the World, by the way)

But getting your very soul back.

My most recent home page piece gets into human sacrifice a bit more.

If You Don't See Human Sacrifice Happening Everywhere, You Haven't Been Looking Closely Enough

2010-03-01T11:43:00.000-08:00

My latest home page piece is all about vampires. The real vampires, namely all of us who go crazy stripping off the value of others trying to gain the world.

In other words, it's about human sacrifice.

Yes, even in today's modern, progressive, advanced, enlightened world human sacrifice happens all the time. In fact one of the most modern progressive advanced enlightened things done out there is to convince most people their human sacrificing is not really human sacrifice.

After perusing the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, I saw five great opinion pieces that serve as a great introduction to the piece. All five covering both the last pages of the entire section, all having something to do with human sacrifice. To wit...

First was Doyle McManus there urging president Obama to be brazenly partisan. This means get your one group to take over governance. He even called it "old-fashioned," intimating it's been around a while. Does anyone ever bother to ask who those in the enthroned group (in this instance the Democrats) are listening to? Who are they taking their orders from? What is the source of the world view that governs their decisions? And aren't those decisions -- particularly regarding rank value extraction to enable their exploitees -- just a form of human sacrifice?

Just underneath that on the page was a piece by Niall Ferguson, and he always gets right up to what's going on and does it so eloquently. But he only gets up to it, not at it. He writes, "Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will ultimately lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default." Come on, is this not simply saying that lots of people involved in human sacrifice are always on the verge of actually seeing how much of someone else's value they've hacked off or how much they've had hacked off by other more powerful exploiters? Why can't Ferguson or any other smart thoughtful individual see that? Oh, forgot, these are top-class World operatives -- forgive me...

Over to the next page is Chris Ayres moaning and groaning and moaning some more about taxes. It is actually a somewhat fun whimsical piece, but it screams with the pain of politically instituted oppression by taxation. The convoluted tax system makes it more likely people will rage against it all, perversely keeping the ragers more tied to Caesar so he can check their rebellious proclivities. The question here: how much more like human sacrifice can this be? Tell me, why isn't encouraging whatever allowances you can get anything other than "Chop off a finger every year for us and we'll give you a really good discount on how many toes you have to give us"?

Ralph Nader chimes in with a note about the whole Toyota crisis, and how the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has failed to prevent this kind of thing. Yes we'd like authorized officials to help keep Toyota's from killing us, and most of us believe Toyota is not deliberately out to kill us. But everyone is asking, were there indeed things the company could have done to prevent this? If the answer is yes, then they should be prosecuted to some extend by a law enforcement entity instituted to crack heads over such matters. Nader is simply saying that enforcement should be even stronger, which simply means someone is doing really horrific things to someone somewhere. Not only that, but why be too draconian about it since they're such good business for head-crackers? Human sacrifice anyone?

Finally Marcia Meier writes of her schizophrenic brother, and while the piece is heartbreaking, the headline says it all: "Schizophrenic: Who Will Care?" As it is he's got some of his mother's estate, some payments from government, but in the end she asks what will happen when that runs out? "Who is responsible?" she asks, "Who is responsible for them all?"

Wow, those last two questions are the best ones of all.

After committing the most notorious act of human sacrifice on record, Cain asked "Am I my brother's keeper?" at which point God sent him out of His presence to make the greatest city ever to stomp around and be his brother's keeper for all those who refuse to call upon the name of the Lord. Those presently working and striving and governing in that city will prop up their brother, enable his reprobate behavior, and hack off their cut. This standard form of human sacrifice was all over this Times editorial section.

Those who've left it and gone into the Kingdom under the lordship of Jesus Christ have already had the sacrifice taken care of. Jesus shed His own blood to free them to sow beauty and wonder and goodness into the lives of those they encounter. Their love abounds because it is self-sacrificial, and as such the bounty of ecstatic joy and abundant provision is overwhelming.

The difference is elucidated a bit more in my March-April home page piece, where all the questions above are given some more penetrating consideration. I'd love for you to read it and share with me what you think.

Tiger, LeBron, and the Assigned Value Assessors

2010-02-19T20:23:00.000-08:00

A convergance of intriguing items to address materialized recently.

Today everyone gravitated from the water cooler to the office-floor plasma screen to watch Tiger Woods speak out for the first time since he was caught with his pants down a few months ago. The intrigue lies in just how attentive the country was. Woods is truly a sports idol, vitually everyone having some opinion about his exploits and their impact on... their impact on-- what exactly?

Come on, when you think about it, why should anyone give a rip about what this guy does outside of hitting a golf ball a mile? No wonder the one thing he growled the most fiercely was "Stay away from my family." No, a nation full of devout Catholicists must engage in stout moralizing and those who claim to be so progressive as to be above it all betray the fact that there is still some line they can't tolerate their idols crossing. If they still insist on impossible open-mindedness they'd be effectively marginalized and that's too frightening.

Then there was this a few days ago, another brief sports item of note: National Basketball Association commissioner David Stern declared the league will lose $400 million dollars this year. He added that a solution on the table is to slice first-round draft pick salaries dramatically.

The reason why the NBA is losing money does not lie with those particular player salaries--it is those first round picks that are the meat and potatoes of the league. No, the intrigue here lies with a game I happened to hear about on the radio driving to work this morning. It was the LeBron James- Carmelo Anthony match-up, a game that was said to be terrific. Two superstars facing off on the court, great contest -- how could the NBA be tanking?

The answer lies in the teams they are playing for. Cleveland and Denver. Two cities which along with about 25 of the 30 cities in the league perpetually evoke the biggest yawn from fans. The dilemma the league has is what would happen to league viability if they just cut the crap and put those guys on the Lakers and Celtics.

A good friend of mine told me a while ago that in England (I think it was) their soccer league is divided into strata, with a few teams at the top considered the elite, winning most of the time and just competing against one another for titles. Below that is a level of teams who would like to be at the top playing against one another, and then below them is a lower strata and so forth. I mentioned that is pretty much like it is with pro sports here in the U.S, really, they just don't let on that it is like that. My friend concurred.

Already there is talk about LeBron going to the Knicks or even the Lakers. Teams right now are making trades to maneuver to get him. Let's face it, like Tiger with golf, LeBron is pro basketball and if he were to stay with the Cavs it would be death for the NBA. But if it is let on that all 25 or so of the other teams are really just lower strata punching bags, what does that say about the "truth" of their genuine viability to contend?

So the lie is on... well, it's always been on, it's just very few care to see it for what it is. Many who think they get it like to scream and holler about it, or as one guy did yesterday fly his fuel-loaded airplane into a building containing people he didn't like very much. It just seems there are so few who actually seek to understand what's going on and then do the one thing that would truly give them peace about it all.

I can only add this last very intriguing item.

I was driving home late Monday night and saw this on the lightboard in front of a bank, you know the board I'm talking about, the one that shows the time and temperature. It was about 10:00 pm.

I'm not the best photographer in the world, I'm sure I could've grabbed a bit more light and detail. But it is very clear what the lightboard is saying about the bank. It simply can't be missed.

There are infinitely more important things in life than a couple of showboating sports superstars. I only write about them because I'm interested in it. I sometimes write a bit about other items of intrigue also.

But what it all comes down to is this simple fact. If you're going to live by the World and its system of provocative sin management, you're going to be lied to... and it's likely you'll be taught to be a pretty damn good liar yourself. Sometimes you can see the sewage of such items seeping up throught the grate in quite interesting ways as I did at this street corner Monday night.

If you decide to live in the Kingdom by the guidance of the One Who is Truth, you'll enjoy bountiful grace, see true beauty, and revel in inexpressible joy with Him and with others who have the capacity to authentically honor you and your wonderful gifts.

It is sad how many are conned into staying there in the World sloshing around in the sewage.

The Bountiful Wonderfulness of the Law

2010-02-05T21:16:00.000-08:00

Our neighbors across the street have a phenomenally beautiful home. It isn't anything special in-and-of itself, but what they've put into it makes it a top candidate for being showcased in one of those best home magazines.

Turns out the busy-body lady in the house behind them called them out for having too much awning over patio areas. So the city sped over to tell them to get rid of some of it. I've seen all the awning area they have. It is marvelous. Compliments the entire look fabulously. There is plenty of sky to be seen. Every time I'm over there I seethe with the worst jealouly, this back yard is to die for. Everyone who likes nice things would think it worthy of the gods.

That is, 99.9999 percent of us standard-issue human beings.

Not Mrs. Crabgrass behind them though.

And this thing called the law, which in this case dictates some rigmarole about exceeding acceptable awning space. Yes I know there are probably very good things about this law and certainly there are perfectly good reasons to have it.

But as God's word very clearly states, the letter of the law kills.

Why are there just so damn many murderers out there?

My wife mentioned that as this travesty is occurring, four houses down from where we live is a home that is literally a piece of shit. Now yes I did say literally, which means that when the conventional definition is considered it must mean I'm saying the house is actually fecal matter, which wouldn't make sense -- I understand. But really, who made the definition of the word "shit" anyway? Why can't it literally refer to a house that has a yard full of dry grass and bare dirt blotches, weeds overrunning the concrete everywhere, paint not just peeling but leaping off the house, old crappy looking cars parked at goofy angles in the cracked driveway...you know what these places look like. I mean come on, why shouldn't the dictionary state: "Shit. Noun. 1. A house that really looks like shit."

All this just makes me think of human sacrifice. Murderous people like this idiot lady have just got to find a way to shred the decent value of hardworking folks right off their soul. The governing authorities end up enabling it because of the strict and often draconion principles in "The Law." Meanwhile no one can do anything to the shit dwellers down the street because what're you going to do? The reason their place is shit because they're worthless anyway. "Make this house better or... or..."

"Or what?"

The answer to the murderous nosy lady and the worthless shithouse keepers, both of them, is Jesus Christ.

It is by His truth and grace that people can see the beauty of what our across-the-street neighbors are doing and rejoice in it, and also the worthlessness of people like our down-the-street neighbors can be wiped out -- really, I'm no less worthless without Him, I'm no one special. By His grace I also know that I don't know everything there is to know about either of their situations one way or the other.

But that's only because of Christ loving me, loving the busy-body lady, loving the lazy homeowners/renters/whoever as much as He does.

I'm waiting for the current economic debt bomb to explode in people's faces, only so that by it people can really see the pointlessness of the law to stop sinful behavior. Every time I read a finance expert's shrill cry for more and more regulation of reprehensible behavior by political and financial institutions, I think about when the tipping point will happen -- that point when people understand that this whole sin and law and worthlessness thing is for the birds, and that only Christ and His work shedding His own blood can truly end the horror of human sacrifice.

This thing with our neighbors is just a microcosm of all that.

Watch out. The fireworks are only just beginning.

Who is the Catcher?

2010-01-28T20:34:00.000-08:00

Last night Barack Obama gave his first State of the Union address, a celebrated affair in which he boasted about what a great president he is at fixing things. It was peppered with lots of Americanist platitudes meant to inspire, and I guess there's that. I just wonder if he's so Johnny-on-the-spot ready, willing, and able to make this country oh-so-wonderful again, what is it precisely that he's going to do that gazillons of potentates through the ages have failed to do already? How'd he get so wise? I didn't exactly hear that part.

Ironically this is the week the finance bigwigs from all corners of the globe are gathering at the Davos pow-wow to hash out economic things. If there was a place where the truly helpful wisdom would emerge, this has to be it. But, yeah, they've been having it every year for however long. We still had bad bad economic things happen very very recently, certainly since their last meeting. Oh well.

As I browse all the World punditry about what's really to blame and what's really the thing to do, as I frequently do, I am struck by the exhausting redundancy of it all. Here is a smattering, if I may.

From Newsweek was this piece by Rana Forooher called "May the Best Theory Win." (And I'm not going to link it, I'm just too lazy--sorry. Hey, you can Google it and it'll be there, really, it will.) It was about the goings-on at Davos and how everyone is appearing a bit more shellshocked than they were before. So now's the time for the really really smart econowonks to step up to the plate, the Paul Krugmans and the Joseph Stigletzes, to shine their shininess on things once and for all.

Whups, seems like they're already off to a shaky start, bumbling and stumbling, still clutching that ludicrous idea that there is actually anything that's irrational. Yes, behavioral economics is all the rage now, and I imagine they want to use its spiffy divining rod to figure out why people jerk others around--people jerking others around, oh my, how irrational.

Well, yeah. Once they start there they will be eternally stumped. Everyone does everything they do rationally, even if their rational decision is based on a lie. In fact, much of what the World System tells its followers must be a lie, and it does this quite rationally. So they all get to yabber at their fancy Swiss resorts and what we all get is theater. Quite important for the World, it is, but it is only theater, lots of grand pontificating about how this or that latest theory is the one everyone should consider.

Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote in the New York Times that there is--the title of his piece--"Still Needed: A Sheriff of Finance." He mentions that renowned financier George Soros made this point at Davos two years ago, before Bear Stearns and all the rest of it. Oh my.

Thomas Friedman followed this the next day with his take, "Adults Only, Please," in which he lights into those who behave with "situational values" as opposed to the Mother Teresa Bishop Tutu Mahatma Gandhi types who live by "sustainable values."

Excuse me, but we all live by situational values. Sorry, but if the situation requires me to run a red light to get to a driver in a burning vehicle, I'm going to do it. No, what Friedman is talking about is not situational values, but fearful people stripping other people of their own value, and it is something all World inhabitants do. It is nothing other than human sacrifice, and those who have not appropriated the sacrifice of God's only begotten Son must do human sacrifice.

Rahrrr rahrrrr RAAHHRRRRR Friedman screams in his piece. When are we going to start behaving like adults? We're all children around here, being so greedy and selfish. Friedman seems to be really steamed about this state of affairs. Yet all he does is echo the call for a better, leaner, smoother sheriff. Seems to me sheriffs are for people who dick with other people in some way. Seems to me people who call for a better leaner smoother sheriff are confessing that they themselves dick with others on a regular basis, and if not for the sheriff things would be really nasty.

God knew this. He put a sheriff in place already. It is Cain, and all the other sheriffs who've followed after him through the ages summarily cracking heads as sheriffs often do.

The fact is these guys, the Sorkins and Friedmans and all these guys blithering through the World's megaphones, just don't like it. At least they say they don't, but they're in on the lie just as much as the rest of them.

Barack Obama's up there wagging his finger too, but he's just one of the stars of the show. What a fabulous performance he had last night, wasn't it boffo?

Thing is, it won't do dick to actually make people free.

Only Christ can do that.

Funny, today J.D. Salinger passed away. I will tell you I loved Catcher in the Rye. It spoke so much to me, and it wasn't just the fact that it was about exposing the phonies. It was so eloquently articulated and rich with the meaning of what sincerity really is. It was a clarion call for the most beautiful probity.

What's that? Probity? That's a word never used anymore.

It simply means being so honest that it shows, so authentically honest that you can't help but allow others to see you for who you really are. It doesn't mean pusillanimous transparency or milquetoast vulnerability.

It simply means being true. It means being true to the point that you make yourself available, available to uplift and build and grow among all those in a community. Indeed this whole idea is the seminal part of The Catcher in the Rye.

I really think Salinger wanted that so much, and he wanted so much to be around such people, but so repulsively did he see how it couldn't happen in a World submerged in willful deceit that he became the sad recluse we all know that he was. He laid out the World for what it was, but didn't have a clue what to do about it. He may have known about Christ, but I'd venture to say the only Jesus he knew was one of the many World counterfeits the Catholicist Nation has vomited up.

I see so many of them, too. And I see all too well the product of those Jesuses. It is what I am all about, telling people about the Jesus who Actually Frees in contrast to the phony ones. And I very selfishly (but quite rationally, I think) want to hang with others who know Him.

Thing is, the only way I can do that is to out there, out there in the rye.

And that Catcher is there, with His mitt. Yeah, it's not even me. I'm nowhere, except caught in the webbing, there next to the small blood stains. There I can shout out to someone running past.

"Hey, over here, come here." They may get caught here in the mitt.

Who is the Catcher?

Would you be willing to give the deepest assent to the highest probity and allow yourself to see Him there?

To even be caught by Him?

The Avatar Message

2010-01-02T14:22:00.000-08:00

I saw Avatar last night with my two sons, and after hearing everyone who's seen it offer up the quite elaborate response of "Wow," I can see why they say that. I could go into great detail of every item of note regarding this groundbreaking picture, but I just want to briefly touch on two things. One is about the production itself, and the other is about something in the story.

First, the production. The 3-D effect has certainly come quite a long way. It has become so advanced that many more films, particularly those with the kinds of special effects that were in this one, will be adopting this format.

The key thought I had regarded the boundary of our vision, that is, the 3-D effect was limited within that rectangular box. In some sense I felt I was watching a motion dynorama, you know, like those scenes you'd create in the second grade with the cut-out shoebox containing little plastic figures and cotton and pipe-cleaners. Avatar was just like that except everything moved around within it.

My point has to do with this question: When are they going to make the screen big enough, yes even bigger than the IMAX screen, to encompass our complete field of vision? With the inevitable march of progress, that has to be coming down the pike in a few years. When it does, I think also about the extent to which filmakers can further blur the line between reality and fantasy.

The second point had to do with a theme within the story of the film, which I've read from more than a few commenters that it was just a more elaborate Pochahontas or Dances With Wolves. Yeah, yeah, got that. In fact it was more like James Cameron 1986 Aliens as far as the look goes, but I really liked Aliens so, that's cool.

But here's the point regarding the whole environmental thing. In the film the natives are really in touch with the environment, the trees, all that. A scientist even hypothesizes that the flora on this planet employ a special undiscovered network of sublimely ethereal communication among them.

Intriguing, but the more mundane aspect is merely that the enviroment is a resource. Indeed the battle between the conceptions of how to use the resources is a feature of the story. On the one hand you've got the invaders, the earth people with their big machines bent on exploiting the mineral riches underneath the natives' land, and on the other hand you've got the natives who have a keen sense of the power within the flora, and part of their livelihood is their connection to it. Yeah, yeah, cowboys and Indians, been done. I'm not here saying who's right and who's wrong.

All I want to do is point out the much more significant truth that

Someone must manage what's done with the resource.

It must be someone, and a whole bunch of people will line up behind that someone.

The film clearly takes the very politically correct side of the natives, and I'm not arguing against that position necessarily. The point is they are still dogmatically making a claim of their prerogative to manage resources. And if they get together to do that, they must form some turgid organization to govern that management. And if they have a government there must be laws to mitigate the effects of what is done by those who disagree with them. And if there is great enough conflict about that...

Then you have war.

And as the gratuitous war in the film got heated up, I could only think about how savage each group was -- yes, including the natives. They were just as savage as the invaders. (Hmm, this was the thread of my last webzine home page piece...)

No matter how righteous their cause seemed to be, they were just as virulently belligerent as the more technologically advanced exploiters. Darn it all, as it has been said bazillions of times before...

There are no good guys.

Well, at least among those bonking their heads on one another out there in the World anyway...

I've written all of this merely to direct you to my most recent home page piece, about the reality of resource management. Who does it, and who do the resource managers listen to regarding the arrangement of who gets what resources? Somebody is managing your resources. Do you know who that is? Take a look, I'd love to know what you think.

(A few years ago I blogged on the ramifications of more real looking CGI in film. That's here.)
_

Declared Affection for Caesar

2009-12-23T22:20:00.000-08:00

A whole lotta Christians of some renown have gathered to issue an official proclamation of their desire to continue to do things their way no matter how much the federal government hints that they comply with them. It's called the "Manhattan Declaration," and it says three key things.

One, we won't refuse to yell against abortion. Two, we won't refuse to yell against same-sex marriage. And three, we won't refuse to keep yelling. That last one was really an insistence on religious freedom, but what it really means is that they want to keep doing their thing and at the same time keep getting nice tax breaks for being otherwise good obedient tax-exempt non-profit congregations.

Sadly, if these people were truly heeding Christ's words they wouldn't have to make such a proclamation.

All they'd have to do is live out Christ's words.

They'd then blow away so many people that seen in all His glory would be Christ, instead of a batch of official looking fancy suits sneering about how against bad things they are.

At the very same time as all this churchly stuff is happening, the United States Senate is continuing to slam universal health care into legislation. Never mind that so few know how many more novel forms of human sacrifice will be accomplished with this, even fewer comprehend that as much as so many conservative libertarian types screech about how gruesomely socialist it is, they are actually revealing how much they put their faith in Caesar to do precisely what he is doing.

"Huh?" you may certainly scream from every orifice, "Are you saying those who say the most loathsome things about Obama and Reid and Pelosi for ramming this down our throats actually like those guys?"

Indeed I am. The fact is, after the shouters are all finished getting paid nicely to shout down all bad things they will go home and from the privacy of their own office they will cheerfully send Caesar a nice big check for checking their own sinful proclivities. If they didn't extend generous tribute to Caesar, they would be in gross violation of their signed contract, or perhaps... perhaps...

They might just be authentic followers of Christ.

Those who are abandoned to Christ form communities in which all are taken care of, everyone using their God-given gifts to the fullest including those of providing optimum medical attention to any who need it. They would not only be extending that kind of vibrant mercy to others but the love they would have for one another would be so profound that all would live with the greatest, deepest, most magnificent joy and from that would many others be drawn to Him simply because they want that.

It is even better.

Those kind of people cannot die.

Sure their bodies may give out, yeah, got that.

But because they are held by Christ they will never die. So they have nothing to lose. They've also already gained everything. So...

No need to sign up for or have anything to do with Caesar's medical plan in whatever form it is presented.

No need to shout down abortion because anyone beholding the way they love would know the truth about nurturing the preborn.

No need to shout down same-sex marriage because anyone witnessing true love in action would be wholly convinced of its rich verity, and live accordingly.

No need to cower and spittle platitudes about "religious freedom" because freedom from sin by the blood of Christ has already been granted and no other piddly freedom means anything. God then fully empowers one to live to love no matter what happens, and that is the most bountiful adventure of all.

I see and read too much about whiners who wag their fingers at Caesar for infecting them with more socialism when that's exactly what they want. I see and read too much about pusillanimous "Christians" who pound their chests about how great they are at shouting down bad things when they just want others to see them and their flowing robes shouting loud pious prayers in the middle of town.

I so revel in seeing and reading about those who just want to love Christ by loving others right now, right there, right really...

Oh, it doesn't have to be just a glass of water for a thirsty man--it can be an eloquent treatise at a top university.

Just something that's real, and Christ.

That's all.

Look at 100 Years of Weather in Antarctica and You'll Find the Meaning of Christmas

2009-12-20T07:14:00.000-08:00

I recently read an economics piece about the opportunity cost of a certain Christmas tradition. The writer--some young financial wonk somewhere--lamented the abject inefficiency of gift-giving, going into great detail about the real value of the practice. His argument went something like this.

Aunt Gladys gets you a $50 sweater when she really could just hand you the $50, at which point you could get what you really want. But because she gave you something you really don't want, the value to you is no higher than $30, graciously considering that even if you don't really like it, it may be serviceable for having on when picking an avocado off the tree on a mildly chilly morning. So it's not just $0, let's grant that it is something.

Making a valiant attempt to think like an economist, he concedes that there may indeed be a value to the simple fact that Aunt Gladys got you a gift, and tacks on another $30 for that, making the value $60. (If he were to be even more proficiently econ-esque, he'd add even more for the consumer surplus you'd get by having the $50 and presuming you'd get something that is even more valuable to you than what the $50 means, but that's a bit more advanced.)

He concludes, however, by saying the $60 item is still not as much as the $80 it would have been if you'd had the $50 to get the thing you'd like in the first place. Answer to the value equation: minus $20. Multiply that by a zillion for the zillion times throughout the world that people do this silly gift-giving thing and you've got quite a value deficit.

On the face of it this sounds reasonable, but as always, people trying to be value assessors, no matter how erudite their economics sounds, never get it.

There is indeed a value not considered here, and it isn't exactly the same value he affords to Gladys merely getting the gift at all (remember his grudgingly added $30?) It is the fact that Gladys had some idea of what you liked even if it was wrong. This may seem like it is just a pointless, but the fact is Gladys actually knew you in some way, some how. (Me personally, I actively try to avoid letting people know what I want because I take much greater pleasure if they get me something they think I'd like because they know who I am.)

Even if you know in your heart that Gladys hates your guts and gave out of the most selfish compulsion, her doing it at all and you being able to participate in the beautiful experience of having a wrapped present which you get to eagerly anticipate opening simply because someone thought about you has much greater value than the thing you yourself would be able to get that would be a tad more useful.

In other words (for the more exacting economist), the value of being loved in such a way is an added, oh, say, $200, making the surplus value to you $120--far above and beyond the maximum $80 value of whatever thing you could have had otherwise.

The point is that anytime we measure things by the World's standards, there will always be a deficit. In fact, there must be because those without Christ must engage in human sacrifice. Gladys must give me $50 because I must be served.

I've been peeking around a bit at Michael Lewis' book Panic, which is just a number of essays regarding the ways contemporary human sacrifice is carried out. That is, it is about the myriad ways exploitive people have exploited markets in recent years to do their value extraction. You've got the 1987 stock market crash, the 1998 Long Term Capital Management debacle, 2000 dot-com bubble burst, the 2007 housing market collapse, and of course a few snippets of the 2008 financial meltdown.

A vast panoply of hand-wringing and head-shaking and eloquent rationalizing on behalf of human sacrifice.

One of the pieces is about how the ratings agencies came to be so revered and ultimately so disgraced. Because value extractors became so ravenous it was very difficult to figure out precisely what they were doing, and many once respected institutions allowed themselves to get carried away with it all so they could stay in the loop.

It was pointed out that eventually Moody's used what was called the "Monte Carlo" method of rating bonds, a formula that essentially encompassed all the considerations of the ways that things have been valued in the past. But because more novel and exotic "innovations" made things so much different, one now-former Moody's exec likened it to "observing 100 years of weather in Antarctica to forecast the weather in Hawaii."

This struck me.

That's the World's value assessment philosophy right there.

Really, what is your value? What is the value of the things you treasure? The people around you? The things you like to have and to do? Your work and your leisure and your fine wholesome charitable contributions?

No, I'm not saying you have to be any kind of scholarly economist, though everyone does economics. The question is whether you do economics well or poorly. But then, you don't have to be a genius to do it well. You just need to understand a couple of things.

The World does its value assessment the way it does, and World inhabitants look to all Caesar's minions to see what that is. Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, all the top executives of the banks and rating agencies and all the rest of them, these are a few of the more prominent ones.

But all they do is use the "100 years of Antarctica weather" system for value assessment. Want to know your value? Guess how many candy corns are in the pumpkin at the harvest festival. Want to know the value of those around you? Keep up with how many points the Lakers scored Saturday night. Want to know the value of what's really meaningful? Divine what Obama is trying to say in yet another speech.

You'll always have a deficit.

The Kingdom does its value assessment one way. Or rather, One Way.

That is by Jesus Christ and His blood.

This is not the Jesus of chuches sold out to Caesar with their incorporation contracts--they live just as much by the deficit as any other World institution. Ever hear a 501c3 church talk? "We're so poor and you've got to give so much more to keep us afloat."

Jesus was never about any of that. He gives His entire Kingdom to His heirs, and those people are merely anyone who chooses to make him Lord exclusively. It comes with our response to serve others from His love, and out of that authentic sowing happens.

Then you've got rich, fulfilling abundance.

So yeah, wow. What an overwhelming joy to value things the Aunt Gladys way--that I am thankful God put her into my life to even remotely give me a single thing that I may wholly praise Him for.

Ironically, at the end of the ratings agency piece--after all of the foolish, deceitful value extraction methods are exposed for what they are--the question is asked, "Whom can you rely on?" While in the text the writer asks "What can they [the investors] rely on?" the title of the closing section is indeed "Whom Can You Rely On?" The key is that it is whom.

The answer is not given, because even in this small moment of brutal honesty the World inhabitant cannot answer it. Oh they search feverishly for it--Antarctic weather, candy corns in a pumpkin, Obama's words...it's gotta be in there somewhere!!!

All you need to do to really get it is look at the One Who Loves You.

But again, He is nowhere near the World.
_

Some more about why Jesus is here. Some other stuff about the reality of contemporary human sacrifice is here. The ratings agencies piece in Lewis' book was by the New York Times Roger Lowenstein from April 27 2008.

The 2012 Factor

2009-12-13T11:23:00.000-08:00

Last night I finally went to see 2012, the film with the boffo special effects of the utter destruction of the earth. There has been lots of water cooler talk about whether or not the world will actually end in 2012 like the Mayans supposedly said it would. I'd even noticed a number of books on the shelf at Borders all about how justified the concern should be. Whatever.

The one book I read about all things significant is the Bible, and it pretty much has everything right there. It categorically says that the world as we know it now will indeed end. When that is only God knows. Sure he gave us some hints, but none of them amount to enough for anyone to say things like, "Yep, there it is, it'll happen on December 21st 2012 yessiree..."

The one thing that is for sure is that God will hold on to those covered by the blood of His Son, and whatever value that has for anyone depends on whether or not they simply put their faith and trust in Him.

When you watch this film it is flat-out harrowing to behold millions of people dying right there in wide screen brilliant technicolor. Interestingly it did show a lot of people praying or preaching about what's really going on. It also had a kooky conspiracy theorist (aren't they all kooky?) played by Woody Harrelson, who as googly-eyed as they portrayed him, he actually said stuff that ended up being true. Huh, you mean some of that stuff those kooky spooky conspiracy nuts say could actually have some merit? Huh.

As I watched the movie I was more and more convinced everyone should see this. They should be exposed to the horror of a world falling apart which the Bible says is a result of the sin that has infected it. As I looked over the reviews on Metacritic, it seemed to me that those who reviled the film didn't pan it because it had flaws but because they just don't like the idea that this could actually happen at all.

What? There's actually something called sin? Pshaw. A fallen world brings about this kind of end to all that we know? Puh-lease.

The film did have flaws, but the huge holes in the plot progression were merely an accepted product of the dramatic effect. Some of the more presposterous moments included for expressly illiciting a visceral response were actually kind of comical, so it made the movie kind of fun in that sense.

I must say, however, that while I do believe the Bible says the end of the world will be something like what they showed through most of the film--just read the Old Testament book of Zephaniah and revisit the Revelation to see why--the ending was probably the most frightening thing of all.

What? You mean the heart-warming part when the massive tectonic violence ends, the arks get their bearings, and they all eagerly set sail for the new landforms and renew civilization? How on earth can all that be so horrible?

It is simply because of the following simple question.

What will the people who arrive there do to protect them from themselves?

It is one thing for the earth to open up and swallow people whole. Horrific. It is no less horrific when people do things to swallow up other people. During the film there were lots of profoundly stirring moralizing about how we must stick with one another. But there was also lots of cutting, conniving, callous, and plainly wretched behavior.

When they make landfall, will all that just go away? I just don't think so. They'll have to begin yet another arrangement where someone with enough force to constrain sinners must be enthroned in some sense. And with it will come the same old body of death, the rebellion and the retribution and all the Sun-Tzuan machinations to keep the game going.

What will really happen when there actually is the biblically described end of the world? Oh yes, again, all that destructive stuff will happen, but the difference between the movie and real life is that in real life--

The destruction will be complete.

That is, the end of the world will indeed be the end of the world. All of what is physically there, including our very bodies, will be thoroughly destroyed. All of it, all of the universe even, will be totalled. Dust. Gone.

And a new one will be put in its place.

What of the people? Again, the Bible cannot be more clear: those covered by the blood of Christ are His. Their very souls are held in His hands and they will have new "resurrected" bodies. Check out the 15th chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians to see more of how this plays itself out.

The only reason I mention all of this is because, yeah, I am kind of a kooky conspiracy guy, but that's only because like the Woody Harrelson character I just see what I see and I'd like to share it with others.

And like those holding up the signs "For God so loved the world..." I want people to know about the One who they can put their trust upon, and in turn be fully protected from the effects of a completely destroyed earth.

The movie 2012 just tells you that even after the fall, there will be more of the same. Lying, cheating, murdering... Yuck. The Bible tells you that all the yuckiness will go away, albeit quite dramatically, but that there will be a brand new and truly wonderful place to live in by His love, His joy, His exuberance for life shared by all...

And God's ticket to that place has already been bought for you. All you have to do is get it.

Jimmy Stewart is Not Dead

2009-12-09T20:35:00.000-08:00

I was recently amused by a headline in the Los Angeles Times, but it was certainly not surprising considering the media are simply the spokesholes for Cain, indeed themselves a vibrant part of the World System's decision-making processes. Sometimes, though, your attention can be drawn to the folly revealed in their pronouncements.

It seems that all the money used to bail out important people "appears" to be paying off. It appears that things are getting rosier for important people. The article does mention a lot of things that are not going well with the bailout plan, but hey, it's best if things appear to be going well.

But this is the World speaking. Treasury Secretary and once New York Fed President Tim Geithner once said that the appearance of a powerful financial institution and its activity is most important for sustaining confidence, calling it "theater." At least it's entertaining!

Never mind that it is actually real. Never mind that people's values are actually respected and even enhanced instead of shorn for the purposes of important people's human sacrifice. Oh, and I don't necessarily just mean rich people's human sacrifice -- very poor people can be experts at value extraction. Everyone living by the World System's program of value rearrangement is guilty of human sacrifice.

Recently uber-pundit of finance Niall Ferguson and author Laurence Kotlikoff wrote a piece in the Financial Times about a plan for banking that they say is truly on the up-and-up. It was titled "How to Take Moral Hazard Out of Banking." Hmm, didn't know bankers lied as a matter of practice for there to be a suggestion that they don't, but what do I know.

What they suggested is something called "limited purpose banking," which is really just a nifty prescription of banking that recommends tape be wrapped around parts of the huge sieve that is its often comical attempt at capital movement. And really, the "tape" is just plain old honesty, integrity, and transparency.

Things the World knows nothing about because it is too busy keeping up appearances.

In fact, Kotlikoff is about to release his new book, Jimmy Stewart is Dead, all about how the days of the kind and caring Bailey Savings and Loan are long gone.

Come to think of it, that classic scene with the bank run reveals much more of what's real than anything, particularly about what's been happening today in high finance.

Remember when mean old Mr. Potter offers George Bailey's depositors at least something for their shares? Most of those nice but clueless folk were about to jump all over it, but George (the Jimmy Stewart character, for those who've lived in a cave and have never seen It's a Wonderful Life) boldly gets very truthful. He implores them, "Don't you see? Potter isn't selling he's buying! And that's because we're panicing and he's not."

Don't you see that this is precisely the same thing the World System led by the Federal Reserve is doing? They haven't just dangled $700 billion in TARP money to rescue poor dumb scared important people, they've shelled out several trillion to do the buying. It doesn't matter for squat that oh-golly-yay!-how-fortunate some of that money will come back, the fact is

You're still bought.

You're bought by the agents of Cain whose job it is to manage more ways of doing human sacrifice and put on a terrific show to make it all look like it's a-ok.

The only meaningful thing you can do is to let them continue to do that for the devout World inhabitants who demand that service, and get out yourself.

But that also means going over to the One who's bought you with the most valuable thing ever, His blood. After you do that, seek out others who've done that too, talk to one another, behold the amazing gifts He's given you to do wonderful things for your community, and for cryin' out loud don't sign up with the institutions of Cain! All the non-profit incorporations and undue tax liabilities and excessive debt obligations and all of those things seriously compromise what you'd otherwise do through a God who can do anything!

Really, you can want what's real, or you can settle for what's theater. All the stuff you believe that the World System is selling you is all about its purchase of you and your soul. They can get their hands on trillions if they want to do that. It's a lot, yeah.

But Jesus gave His life.

A bit more about how churches sell themselves to the World is here. The LA Times front page piece was from this past Friday, December 4th, 2009. Those trillions used for World purchases amounted to over $7 trillion early this year, the latest I saw it was up to almost $10 trillion.

The Human Sacrifice Dynamic

2009-11-24T20:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's New York Times' featured front page story was about how close the U.S. is to being unable to service its debt. It's no big deal when that punky kid who always asks for lunch money keeps putting off paying it back, as long as he coughs up some interest every once in a while. It starts to get dicey when he can't even do that. It gets really scary when the lender is a big mean Asian dude.

Front page story. In top World megaphone holder The New York Times.

I turned on the news this morning to check out the expansive coverage of this quite boggling progression of events. Guess what the networks featured at the top of their 7am morning-show news?

Barack Obama has all the information he needs to make and then announce his new strategy regarding Afghanistan. As I watched the newscasters (and I flipped to two different networks to catch essentially the same thing) blap about how valiant Obama and his "war council" (their term) have been to stay on top of all this, it dawned on me.

Think about it. It is very not-surprising. Very not-surprising indeed.

You need go no further than the very first words of the most renowned paean to authoritative World governance there is. Do you remember them from your introductory humanities class at New Hampshire Tech?

"I sing of arms, and the man."

It is simple. The World works thusly: Powerful rich people buy bonds and then employ the bellicose force of government to ensure their investments are secure. The way it's working now is that powerful rich people cannot sustain their returns without pounding down someone somewhere in order to appropriate their wealth.

It is nothing other than contemporary human sacrifice.

It is, as top value assessment dealer John Bogle once called it, value extraction. Interesting Bogle has a new term for what's happening. He's getting some mileage out of the "happy conspiracy." Oh, those eeeevil Goldman Sachs big shots. Yuck, what cruds.

The fact is value extraction is what everyone does who doesn't have Christ. Even if these guys get their comeuppance (or when if lots of smug-banker-loathing folk get their way), some value extractor will be there to take their place. And as such I can pretty much predict that Barack Obama will enable them--whoever they are--with his imminent announcement that he's adding more troops to Afghanistan.

You can growl. You can sneer. You can rage. You can stomp back and forth across your living room. You can devour books like Ron Paul's End the Fed and swear you'll do everything he says to do to stop these eeeeeeeeevil villains from destroying our liberty.

But you are spinning your wheels and shredding your living room carpeting.

How few seem to know the truth.

The World does human sacrifice. It is what it does. It must.

Those not given over to Christ and living by the World take human beings and rip their value off of them just as they were stripping skin and muscle and fat right off someone turning on a spit. Am I being a bit too melodramatic? Nah, I don't think so. Not if you actually grasped the magnitude of this thing--this body of death.

I happened to come across a fascinating piece by Hugh Ross at his Reasons to Believe site. It is called "The Physics of Sin." It is phenomenal, but it is all over the Bible. Sin is death. Real actual very-painful death. To not have this you need sacrifice. You can have Christ's sacrifice, then it's a done deal and you will love like He does. Or you won't, and you'll let the World dictate things for you...

And you'll need to do sacrifice. Over and over and over again--human sacrifice, just as the World does it.

Don't take my word for it. Here's a great place to find it, the book of Hebrews. Read it. Read about how sacrifice is required. Read about how it's either Christ, or an alternative.

All you have to do to behold the very plain reality of that alternative is look at the front page of the New York Times and then watch Obama do the inevitable and increase troop strength.

My latest home page piece is about how the U.S. Constitution is a wonderful tool in the hands of the top value extractors. Some more about human sacrifice is here, and also here. Why do so few know about contemporary human sacrifice? Here is why I believe most who call themselves Christians don't have a clue. "I sing of arms, and the man" is from Virgil's The Aeneid.

Doing God's Work

2009-11-13T20:25:00.000-08:00

I'm deeply intrigued by what the agents of Cain sometimes say that are dead giveaways as to the true nature of things. One recent item has run laps around the airwaves, and it was Goldman Sachs' boss Lloyd Blankfein's remark that he is doing God's work.

This has generally been treated with the loudest ribaldry from the boastfully jeering punditry. "Ha!" they're gushing, "This guy has taken taxpayer dollars by the billions and is stuffing his cronies' pockets with it! 'Doing God's work!' What a dork!"

The fact that it is considered in such a way reveals two things. One, that the World's megaphone is functioning perfectly, for the derision is designed specifically to get an obsequieous populace to firmly believe certain things, in this case that snotty banker types should be wholesomely reviled. And two, the pundits are faithfully doing their duty for their Superior officer, whether they know him or not.

By assessing the value of things and moving capital around in the way the World and its inhabitants demand for the purpose of seeing their needed returns on human sacrifice, Blankfein is indeed doing God's work. But he is doing God's work in the very same way Barack Obama does, even the same way Pope Benedict XVI does. They are doing God's work...

In the service of Cain.

Now Cain's work is done completely outside the presence of God. It is done under the authority of bold iconographic signatures God requires so their purposes are explicitly identified, which is why I find Blankfein's remark so veritable. And it is done with seven-fold strength, which makes perfect sense in light of Goldman Sachs crushing the competition with the aid of very convenient ties to the Agency's other branches.

Recently libertarian-minded economist Amity Shlaes had her take on whether or not this country's becoming socialist. She mentioned that once there was the Keynes fad, then there was the Friedman fad, then there was the Hayek fad which now has everyone thinking we're that frog in the slowly heating pot of water. She concluded that she doesn't think we'll ever really be socialist.

That's the remark that is the laugh.

But then, she's just one of the World's megaphone blappers. Here's pretty much what you hear, and naturally what World inhabitants are attuned to believe:

You've got those who listen to Shlaes who believe capitalism will emerge from the assault reasonably unscathed.

Then you've got the Hayek crowd who believe we'll be socialist soon enough and forget to notice.

Some will say we're socialist already and have been ever since that crud FDR, and we'd better jump on the Ron Paul bandwagon and start being constitutional for cryin' out loud.

A few have so despondently resigned themselves to the socialist condition that they've withdrawn completely, some even forming their own cult compounds in the woods to insulate themselves from the World's pollutants.

Here is what I see, something I think best reflects what history demonstrates, current events elucidate, and the Bible describes:

The World has been socialist for millennia, ever since the first murder after which God set in motion a system of governance to restrain those who prefer murder. Part of the socialist program is to convince people it isn't or to get them so stirred to rebellion about it that they actually legitimize it with their actions.

In other words, Cain's agents are supposed to crack heads of those who refuse to call on the name of the Lord, and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. Come on, ask yourself this question, for all those millennia, has the blood that has gushed from slain human after human ever decreased in volume because some people, even a lot of people at times, railed exceedingly against the potentate of the day?

Thing is, spilling blood all over the place is not exactly something Cain's agents want everyone to see happening too much, unless it is useful for compelling more obedience. So they rely on great religious figures like popes to pretend to give absolution, presidents to pretend to care and make incisive decisions, and...

Powerful bankers like Goldman Sachs chairmen to pretend that they aren't facilitating better and faster forms of human sacrifice.

Yes, indeed...

What a body of death.

If you're in it you may be very tempted to dismiss it and rationalize all kinds of things.

Or, you can come out from under the sheer exhaustion of spinning your wheels, acknowledge that the agents of Cain do precisely what they are supposed to be doing, and then perhaps, perhaps you can allow God to put that salve on your eyes so you can see.

That you can see that there is a completely different place than Blankfein's. Or Obama's. Or Benedict's. Or the sworn officers who move these guys' lips.

It is the One where God actually is.

That would be in the Son.

It is way way way over there. No where near those guys. Physically they may be right next to you. Jesus never ran from Pilate for an instant. Knelt right there in front of him. Stayed right there to smell his armpits and everything.

But spiritually...
_

My latest home page piece at my webzine is about how the U.S. Constitution is a fine instrument in the hands of Cain's agents. And some more about the Son is here. The biblical precedent for Cain's socialism is in the fourth chapter of Genesis, by the way.

The Vicissitudes of November

2009-11-06T19:57:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking about things that have happened or are happening here at the beginning of November that are worth mention.

I think about November 2, the date Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias executed that ultimate act of Agency enforcement against World inhabitants. Imaginations catastrophized into a quasi-catatonic state stir people to fiercely concoct "peace" while hyperviolence still festers in millions of souls.

I think about November 5, the date Guy Fawkes was supposed to carry out the designs of his unknown superior even if he didn't have a clue as to what he was doing. Zealous rage against the state cleverly invented and widely advertised keeps rebellious people riled up.

Funny how this year's November 5 featured a disturbed army psychiatrist shooting up his base. I thought about why we must have an army base at all--why can't Fort Hood just be a wonderful sports camp where people discharge their emotions on the field and later yuck it up over a beer. It can't be that, however, for two reasons.

One, hyperviolent prone World inhabitants still require the martial services of the Agency, and two, human sacrifice must be real or it simply isn't fun. Whack a ball with a wooden stick and see how far it goes in order to beat back an opponent? Nah. They've gotta be real dead.

Related to this is baseball's World Series extending past October, into November 4 to be precise. On that date the Yankees won yet another title simply by being able to earlier outbid the other teams for the best players. I tried to look a bit at the debate about whether what the Yankees did was legit, but I got so nauseated by the brazen idiocy of those who blap that it was.

I hear things like, "What about the fact that the Mets didn't win this year? Whaddya say about that?" This is like saying a shark doesn't eat because some of the fish are left in the water.

Just a quick note for the pathetically uninformed. Take the 15 World Series since the strike year of 1994, which effectively handed the free agency advantage unabashedly to the biggest metro/media teams. Then consider teams from just the four largest and most favored of those, New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Teams from those areas have nine of those titles.

9 of 15.*

Miami (the Florida Marlins)--really just New York South and a large metro/media area itself--had two. Atlanta, Arizona, St. Louis, and Philadelphia round out the totals. Philadelphia is itself also a huge metro/media market and Arizona squeaked in to win the 2001 affair because of a gift loan so it could buy the two best pitchers in baseball and a gift errant throw into center field by the pitcher in the ninth inning of the seventh game--otherwise the Yankees would have had yet another title.

It's all human sacrifice, just with different faces.

The vicissitudes of November. Not a whole lot different from the vicissitudes of other times, really.

It is just sad so many haven't a clue as to how the vicissitudes are so often arranged to play them like fiddles.

Some more about human sacrifice is here. Some words about the Antidote to the virulent hyperviolence done for human sacrifice is here. My latest home page piece addresses how the U.S. Constitution is an intregal part of all the human sacrifice. A piece about what Adrian Veidt did is here.

*The major league baseball teams winning from those four largest metro/media areas were the Yankees (96, 98, 99, 00, 09) the Red Sox (04, 07) the White Sox (05) and the Angels (02).

The Constitutionalist Crusade

2009-11-04T19:32:00.000-08:00

Mark Levin is a talk-show host I sometimes listen to because I really like his bulldog attitude towards all things foolish. His popular book Liberty and Tyranny is a being read voraciously by the conservative set.

Levin frequently offers a typical rationale for his entertaining rants, and it pretty much comes down to this.

"The Constitution says so!" (Or "The Constitution doesn't say so!" as the case may be)

Quite a few loyal Americanists feed on The Document for their political sustenance, and that is perfectly fine for those who like cruising in the hyperviolent crusade against other threatening savages. Americanist liberty means those other guys can't dick with them and the constitutionally authorized force of the law should make that happen. Tyranny to the Americanist is when those other guys get the upper hand and they get to rail against them with the most enthusiastic revulsion.

I address this a bit more in my webzine's home page, and share a bit of what I think is a reasonable alternative to the Constitutionalist savagery.

The Invention of Lying - Ooo, Let Me in at the Ground Floor!

2009-10-02T21:59:00.000-07:00

A new film with a novel premise is out today called The Invention of Lying. It stars comic actor Ricky Gervais and from what I glean from the guy he was made for a role like this.

The part he's got here is that of a fellow who lives in a world where truth-telling and all things truthful is the norm. No one knows of any other way to behave, until... Ricky finds out about lying.

Hey, cool.

Lying.

Now I'm pretty much getting the idea that by lying he finds he can get cash he wouldn't otherwise be able to get and generally do all kinds of neat things for mild enjoyment at the expense of stodgy straight-arrow types. And I'm sure as the film moves on he finds he gets into some awkward predicaments as well. I don't know a whole lot about it, but one review I glanced at said the premise can't sustain itself through an entire full-length feature. Not hard to see that.

Anyway, a couple things made me think about this whole lying thing, a topic I like to address a bit because ironically it says so much about truth.

One is that apparently in the film much of the truth-oriented nature of the society the Gervais character occupies is that nothing like drama or film or television or even story is allowed. My word, how could there be such a thing as the Incredible Hulk if a portrayal of such an individual would be somewhat less than factual. It would comprise, oh goodness, a lie.

I don't know that Invention of Lying gets into it, but it seems to me that Hollywood may use this vehicle to make the statement that those stuffy moralists are just wrong in their insistence that we all tell the truth about things because that would mean all that silly acting stuff would be unnecessary and how ridiculous is that. Yes, acting and dancing and singing and carrying on up there on the stage is frowned upon by some of the more extremely draconian religionists.

But both the Hollywood performance-libertarians and the Puritan fun-censors have it wrong.

The lie is not the same as the imagination.

What a beautiful thing an imagination is. It makes life joyous and engaging and sometimes quite ribald, which is often really fun.

In fact, God's prohibitions against lying are never put against the perfectly legitimate activity of protecting ourselves from hyper-authenticity, unnecessary divulgence, undue transparency, or insensitive remarks.

It is, however, always about whether or not a liar will hurt someone when he lies. And yes, one of those people is God, who does take it a bit seriously when someone lies and hurts another.

The other thing I thought of was related to a thought shared by a young apologist, something I blogged about a few years ago. Here is what he said:

"I know I believe false things."

In many ways this is just a silly thing to say. We'd generally like to think that if you knew a false thing you'd do what was necessary to not be holding to the false thought anymore. Or you'd confess that you did not know, but then this guy is saying he knows he knows false things. Guh.

Now, there is another option.

You could know it is false and deliberately mislead others. In other words, you could be a brazen liar.

But can you see what this means? It's kind of a twist, really.

It means that yes, you do know the truth about a thing.

Yes, interesting, when someone lies, they are stating that they know truth. Certainly someone may be lying and not know they are lying, but they are only lying because they got the lie from someone who back in the lie chain somewhere did know the truth.

This is an essential factor in the World System doing its job as it was charged to do by God millennia ago, the succinct transcription of which is found in the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis. Satan knows the truth, his task is to turn people from it in pleasurably seductive ways.

Because people do have an affinity for truth, it requires great skill to carry this off. It requires nothing other than what I've called Caesar's Arts, something I've written about at more length at my webzine.

The Most Telling Reality Show There Is - A Look Right Into the Lives of the Hazzards

2009-09-27T16:12:00.000-07:00

I just had to blog to direct your attention to this piece I read last week. It is so dead-on describing the behavior of those caught up in the whirling swirling world of World covetousness. It is at the same time hilarious in its exposition of folly, and sobering in its revelation of how criminal are the actions of everyone involved.

In fact one of the more hilarious/criminal parts -- depending on your disposition -- is the concluding presumption that if Caesar had directed his bailing-out efforts at those poor dumb middle to lower class saps instead of the banks it've been much better. Never mind that the boldly elucidating metaphor for idiocy still applies quite aptly to everyone who lives wholly and deeply in the World, by the World, for the World, of the World.

My recent elaboration of the insane reality of this habitual conduct is here.

Oh That Caesar, He's Such a Kidder

2009-09-25T19:41:00.000-07:00

I was thinking a bit about my last blog post, the one about the machinations of competitive duplicity required to keep professional sports economically viable. I ruminated over my little illustration about the Cowboys' new stadium and took it through a bit more logical progression. It's a great tool for identifying the truth about things.

Thus:

What if the Cowboys did have a million capacity stadium, one in which they charged $10,000 a seat for each game, one where such exemplery service was offered that some kind of maximum comfort vehicle personally delivered each and every spectator to their exquisitely equipped luxury box? And what if they did indeed fill every seat for every game, and as a result had millions of dollars at their disposal, millions of dollars that would certainly be used to--yes, you got it--

Buy the very best players on the market.

Furthermore let's say that to make sure the media darling teams do have that advantage most would like them to have anyway--I mean, come on, let's not be shy--let's just abolish the draft, remove the salary cap, and allow unfettered free agency.

It is obvious what would happen. The Cowboys could outbid every other team for every one of the best players coming out of college or those who have established themselves with other teams. They would indeed have a super-duper all-pro of all-pro teams.

Now, what's the next logical step in the progression? See if you can tell from the following:

Game 1 final score: Dallas 56, Tampa Bay 3.

Game 2 final score: Dallas 62, New York 7.

Game 3 final score: Dallas 49, Carolina 0.

Game 4 final score: Dallas 73, Denver 10.

I'm not even going to put up what the score would be against the Chiefs (whimper...) but can you see what would start happening?

The seats at the new boffo spectacular Cowboys stadium would start to be quite bereft of people.

Essentially most, not all (there are some fans who would love to see their team do this for all eternity--I certainly would if it were the Chiefs), but I'm afraid most fans would meet up with their fellow Cowboy rooters and, well-- let's just say the conversation would go something like this...

"Hey, wanna go see the Cowboys whup another team?"

"Why? They're going to win. It'll be over by the middle of the first quarter. You think I want to pay $10,000 to be bored for three hours again?"

So what to do?

What to do is have all that "competitive integrity" stuff in place enough so everyone sees that there will be some close games, and sometimes it'll even be the case that a team like the Cowboys may just not get to the Super Bowl, just to make sure enough people stay on board to tune in to the NFL.

Again, this is not so pronounced as it is in major league baseball. I will actually pay attention to my Chiefs because the pro football system does allow my team the chance to be the next Pittsburgh Steelers. But I also know those times will be few and far between.

I bring this up also because this is really a microcosm of the way it works in the real world. The power brokers of World System governance whether in the political, economic, or ecclesiastical realm will always make it look like they're keeping the playing field even-steven when all they're doing is putting up a grand front to ensure the flourishing of their human sacrifice.

In today's Los Angeles Times was a very interesting picture and caption. The caption was a note about how the G-20 nations will take over the job of what it said was the "permanent body for global economic cooperation." Why do they feel they need to do this? Why do they do it at all?

The answer to the first question is that those without Christ must submit to Caesar's rule in this way. The fact that this "permanent body for blah-blah whatever-whatever good thing" is being placed in other hands is just the shifting around of those most visible to those who must make more palatable the institutional human sacrifice required of all World inhabitants.

This gets to the answer to the second question, why do they do it? They've all been trained in the Deceptive Arts so well by those expertly qualified to do that. You will never know who the "trainers" are unless your mind is molded by the reality-honing stone of Scripture. Should their company be broached or names mentioned, most would shrug them off as pleasantly innocuous college professors.

In that picture is a protestor at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, and you'll note he is wearing that Guy Fawkes mask made famous in the film V for Vendetta. I'd venture to say his sentiments are something along the lines of...

"Don't fence me in, copper! I know you lie and I'm out to do whatever I can to stop you!"

Thing is, Caesar will lie, but he has the authority to lie. All he does is lie. That's who he is, what he is all about. Try taking the stripes off a zebra, that's what you'd be doing to try to get him to stop.

In fact he lies so proficiently that, ironically, those in his service are part of the forces actually mobilizing Guy Fawkes' around the world to rise up against something they can do nothing about. After all the very first Guy Fawkes was a classic case of an individual exploited by the Company to keep the ball game looking close.

I mean, come on, what would it be like if the Dallas Cowboyesque police officers there were seen as having too much power? That would simply be too boring. So guess who gets to be right there on the front page of one of the country's major metropolitan newspapers?

Wow! Touchdown Dallas with no time left! That'll make the final score 17-16, but those Chiefs sure put up a valiant battle! Wowwie zowwie how exciting was that?!

I wrote a bit about the whole V for Vendetta thing at my webzine. That is here.