Friday, March 29, 2013

For His Garments, They Cast Lots

From England, 2008:

EVEN though Good Friday remains one of the few blanks in the British racing calendar, the nation's biggest bookmaking chains are set to open the doors to the majority of their betting shops tomorrow for the first time in a controversial move which looks set to have major repercussions among staff and also will be met with consternation by the Church of England and other faith groups. 
Most shops will be open for business as usual tomorrow after changes in the law mean that for the first time since betting shops were legalised over 40 years ago, cash betting can now take place on Good Friday. Previously, under the Betting, Gaming and Lotteries Act 1963, it was illegal for licensed betting offices to open, or for betting at racecourses to take place on both Good Friday and Christmas Day. However, when the Gambling Act 2005 came into effect in September last year, prohibitions relating to Good Friday were abolished. 

From Australia, 2009:

SYDNEY - Tabcorp says its punters want to bet on Good Friday, but its outlets will only operate if staff are willing to work.
The decision to open TABs on Good Friday for the first time ever has drawn widespread condemnation from politicians, anti-gambling groups and religious organisations.
Rob Nason, managing director of Tabcorp, told Macquarie Radio they were "last to the market" because gambling was already occurring on Good Friday in pubs, clubs and the casino.

From Ireland, 2010:

A Limerick judge ruled that the city's 110 pubs can open April 2, because the city is hosting a major Irish rugby match attracting tens of thousands of visitors.
Such a judgment would have been unthinkable in the Ireland of old, where the Catholic Church enjoyed unquestioned authority from the public and deference from the government.
Commentators were quick to suggest that the judgment represented a watershed in the shifting relations between church and state in this country.
"This could be the beginning of the end of Good Friday, because now legislation will have to be changed," said a jubilant David Hickey, one of the Limerick pub owners who successfully sued the state for the right to do business like any other Friday. "The option should be given to let publicans open if they want to and close if they want to. Today was a huge decision in that direction."

From the United States, 2013:

With the move, the [Baltimore] Ravens will now become the first defending champion to open on the road since Tampa Bay opened at Philadelphia in 2003. The NFL opener has been held on Thursday night in each season since 2004, except for last season when it was held on Wednesday to avoid conflict with President Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention.
The NFL had previously ruled out moving the game to Wednesday night this season because it conflicts with Rosh Hashanah.


Nine Catholic schools played NCAA Tournament basketball games on Good Friday in 2008. Four Sweet Sixteen games were played this year with not even a ripple of controversy, despite the NCAA Tourney now having reached such a level that it is competing with the Super Bowl as the biggest gambling event in sports.

78 percent of Americans are Christian, less than 2 percent are Jewish.

Four countries that seem to be making a deliberate effort to distract their Christian citizens from solemn observations of the most somber day on the Christian calendar. Meanwhile, the NFL will not even consider playing a game on a religious holiday celebrated by a statistically insignificant portion of American citizens.

One cannot fail to observe how big-time sports is being used to destroy one particular faith and the Western cultures that traditionally embraced it.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Supporting Homosexual Marriage Will Give You Diabetes

As someone who tries to live a healthy, organic lifestyle, I have noticed more and more that in our culture today one is allowed to say things about people's eating and fitness habits that you would never get away with saying when it comes to people's sexual habits.

Take diabetes, for example. Diabetes is a too-common affliction in America today. But even if you disagree with what the following people say, what is interesting is that they are saying these things with no scolding from the usual suspects: mainstream media powers, grandstanding politicians and airheaded celebrities, et al. Nobody is calling these people bigots or haters or anything of the sort. And, in fact, there is a lot of truth in what they have to say.

To start off, there are people who say they are born with a genetic predisposition to diabetes but that is being rejected as a main cause by the burgeoning natural health movement in this country today:

The incidence of diabetes has skyrocketed in the past couple of decades, but is takes centuries for genetic drift to occur in a population. This means that the increase of diabetes in Americans is not due to changes in the genes. Instead genes are being turned on and off all the time by the environment around them. The food we eat has the greatest impact on what is turned on and off and research is showing that exercise, toxins, and stress also have strong influence.
How amazing!  We are no longer doomed to have the same diseases as our families!  But here is the catch… many families pass down their lifestyle which will in turn impact susceptible genes. So if you parents are overweight, sugar-loving, couch potatoes who have ripe gene environments for diabetes and you also love sitting around eating doughnuts and Coke, then those genes will be turned on in you too. The nurture is more important than the nature.

In other words, your genes may make you more susceptible to fall prey to diabetes but your own actions are far more meaningful.

Even trendy organic grocer Whole Foods agrees that it is human behavior that is the culprit here:
Instead of combating plagues, we are combating a mindset of complacency about health. Many people haven’t been properly educated about their health, while others still chalk up their diabetes to: “it runs in the family.” However, research shows that while people may inherit a susceptibility to diabetes, they do not inherit the disease itself—making healthy choices and prevention more important than ever.

Thus we have a large and growing group of citizens issuing dire warnings about a serious health condition that may or may not have a genetic predisposition but is mostly caused by correctable human behavior that a leading natural health doctor says is known to increase one's chances for an early death:

Not only does type 2 diabetes increase your overall risk of heart disease, the condition can also bring on fatal and non-fatal heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular events an average of 15 years earlier than in those without diabetes.

From the above we can conclude that making poor choices with one's food appetite has dire consequences. Changes in behavior are strongly encouraged.

Imagine if there was a growing natural health movement that applied this same mode of thought to those who make poor choices with their sexual appetites.

These three details that we have shown are considered to be unacceptable when it comes to diabetics are never seen as a problem when it comes to homosexuals today:

1. Homosexuals claim they are indeed "born this way" and thus powerless to change "who they are."

2. Homosexuals choose to ignore the health consequences of their actions.

3. Homosexuals are statistically more likely to die earlier than those who engage in natural sexual behavior.

Fact: Unnatural eating habits cause disease and death.

Fact: Unnatural sexual habits cause disease and death.

Is anyone out there going to seriously attempt to argue that the sexual urge is stronger than the urge to eat?

No?

Then it is a matter of overcoming distorted appetites.

Compulsion is not "orientation". 

It is weakness that needs to be overcome.

God did not intend for us to engage in homosexual acts any more than he intended us to eat absurd amounts of toxin-laced, heavily-processed artificial "food".

You can do both. You can have a powerful urge to do both. But that does not make it natural or right.

I have a friend who had what can only be called an addiction to Diet Coke. His compulsion was so strong he was drinking a 12-pack a day. Does that mean he was born to drink Diet Coke and any attempt to overcome this unhealthy habit kept him from "being himself"?

Of course not. That's ridiculous.

His appetite was distorted.

My friend struggled with his compulsion, made many changes in personal behavior and eventually managed to stop drinking Diet Coke (it wasn't easy). He is a healthier person for it today. I congratulate him.

In a similar albeit admittedly more difficult vein, encouraging homosexuals to overcome unnatural compulsions that only warp and enslave them in a world of misery does not keep them from "being themselves". Quite the opposite.

Their sexual appetites are distorted.

We are created by God to overcome obstacles, not to give into them and embrace them.

Our modern culture rejects this. It not only embraces obstacles but self-identifies with them in a truly sick way.

Homosexuality, which is a form of unnatural sexual behavior, is celebrated as a lifestyle.

So it should be no surprise that diabetes, which is caused by unnatural eating behavior, is also being pushed as a lifestyle. It has its own magazine and you can even go to the American Diabetes Association website for "Dating with Diabetes" tips.

That last bit is eerily reminiscent of those "Dating with HIV" campaigns in the early days of AIDS.

Our culture today gives more attention to managing the negative consequences of unnatural behavior than we do to encouraging people to avoid the actions that led to the negative consequences in the first place.

This is a mindset that is corrosive to the health and well-being of all Americans and it has been brought about in a substantial way by the logic that accepts and promotes homosexuality.

Self-improvement is the hallmark of a healthy society. Working to become a stronger and better person mentally, physically and spiritually is the essence of what makes a productive citizen. 

Our culture has chosen the weaker way. It puts a priority on Empathy because it is easy and totally disavows Self-Improvement because it is hard.

It is a recipe for our destruction.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Rite of Passage on the Way to Slavery

Winter is nearing an end and, once again, it's accompanied by the usual disturbing articles about the reckless behavior of young college students at Spring Break. The debauchery only seems to be getting worse:

Every year, 1.5 million students go on spring break, with approximately 100,000 going to Cancun. They spend over $1 BILLION total 
College students consume on average six drinks a week. During spring break, they have as many as 10 a DAY
More than half of spring breakers have sexual relations with more than one partner 
Sixty per cent of women say they know a friend who had unprotected sex during spring break
More than 2,500 students are arrested just while overseas during the break

The deluded kids who debase themselves like this have been brought up their entire lives by their two parents - TV and the Internet - to believe that they are supposed to do this, that there is something wrong with them if they don't do this and that they are missing out on cherished coming-of-age experiences if they don't do this.

Sadly, there is more to the story than mere youthful excess. At a time when the job prospects for recent college graduates have never been worse and the debt burden accrued to get the fabled degree that was supposed to open all doors has never been heavier, this quote leaps to mind:

"As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom... it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate." - Aldous Huxley, Preface to Brave New World (1932)

We're losing our country and everything that made it great. Unfortunately, our young men and women have long been conditioned to meekly accept this state of affairs.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

The Mental Laziness of the Massachusetts Liberal

Gotta LOVE the stereotypical white Boston liberal, still alive and kicking after all these years:

For the students of color in the group, the selection of the first Latin American Pope was cause for optimism that the church is getting its act together, reaching out to ethnic groups who may have felt disenfranchised in the past. And all the kids we spoke with expressed hope that new leadership might find ways to bridge the generation gap.

Forget for a moment that "the first Latin American Pope" is of Italian heritage.

It's a commonly-known fact that the Church is experiencing its biggest growth in Africa and yet here is our fearless New Frontier pioneer whining about perceived slights he likely stumbled upon in some scarcely-attended aging hippie parish in Waltham. For in his mind, ostracized angelic little black Catholic kids in neat, spotless, wrinkle-free school uniforms are still being forced to drink from the segregated bubbler at Our Lady of Judgmental Severity Elementary.

Being hopelessly out of date deters him not. Reality, after all, was never the Massachusetts Liberal's strength. 

The West Chose Wrong

Esoteric aside


A few more thoughts on Pascal and our dying West...

The highlight of my university days was European Intellectual History class. Of the dozen or so philosophers and scientists we read up on during the course of the semester, three stood out and the reactions each induced in me remain stark in my memory to this day:

Descartes - Ice-cold robot. Instinctively hated him with a passion. Made a god of Reason and Science.

Voltaire - Rutting animal, bitchy little critic. If he were alive today he'd be one of those fruity guys on TMZ.

Pascal - Sticks of dynamite going off in my brain! Heart and soul, fire, a man who adamantly refused to hide from the unpleasant facts about the human condition.

He's painted as this ultra-pessimist but I immediately embraced the warmth of his convictions. A hard truth is a million times more enjoyable to ponder than an effete, self-indulgent lie or some damn "I think therefore I am" machine-like BS.

Pascal was so much more brilliant and so much more human than anyone else we learned about in that class. And it wasn't even close.

Unfortunately, the world went in the direction of the robots and the perverts.

Gee, it's all turned out so well, hasn't it?

Thoughts Inspired By Our First Jesuit Pope

Esoteric ramblings


The Jesuits were the intellectual vanguard of the Church at the time after the Reformation. They covered themselves in glory for centuries fighting the Protestant heretics and converting the savages of the New World, especially in South America. If you want to read about true heroism read about the English Jesuits who volunteered to leave the safe harbor of Continental Europe and go back to Protestant Elizabethan England and were tortured horribly and executed for being Catholic priests:

Then they produced a warrant for putting me to torture. They had it ready by them and handed it to me to read. (In this prison a special warrant is required for torture.) 
I saw that the warrant was properly prepared and signed, and then I answered, 'With God's help I shall never do anything that is unjust or act against my conscience or the Catholic faith. You have me in your power. You can do with me what God allows you to do - more you cannot do.'

The confidence that comes with a reply like that -- totally missing in the Western man of today. All gone.

Being intellectuals, however, they fell for the Modernist heresy at the turn of the 20th century more than any other Catholic order and went from being the Pope's most trusted footsoldiers to being a nest of revolutionary subversives.

All that orthodox Catholics despise they pushed in the Church and society throughout the 20th century. Multiculturalism, feminism, homosexuality, communism, contraception and abortion, the whole rotten ball of wax. The decline of the major U.S. Catholic colleges into complete apostasy is largely their doing.

The brilliant French philosopher Blaise Pascal had their number as far back as the 17th century. Even when they were still very good Catholics, their belief in and promotion of casuistry was seen by Pascal as a destructive system of thought that would eventually end in laxity and corruption. 

Casuistry is basically situation ethics, I don't care how many theologians say it isn't, that is exactly what it is. The Jesuits would teach that you could commit an evil to serve a greater good as long as you didn't intend to commit the evil you knew you were committing. They didn't say it that way but that is exactly what they stood for. It's a very important theological point that has been lost in the honorless world we inhabit today:

Pascal properly foresaw that someone who could lie to promote a greater good AND convince himself he wasn't really lying at all was capable of doing and justifying any kind of behavior, including grave evil.

Thus, for Pascal, and I agree with him, the betrayal of the Jesuit order centuries later was preordained by their lax moral code.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Cashing In on the White Male Terrorist Threat

The intentionally outrageous editorial by the Los Angeles Times comes out swinging:

There are, in increasingly frightening numbers, cells of angry men in the United States preparing for combat with the U.S. government. They are usually heavily armed, blinded by an intractable hatred, often motivated by religious zeal.
They're not jihadists. They are white, right-wing Americans, nearly all with an obsessive attachment to guns, who may represent a greater danger to the lives of American civilians than international terrorists.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been tracking hate groups for 30 years, released its latest report on the growth of these organizations this week. Its findings were, to say the least, alarming. 


And gets the response it wanted, in the form of attention to its completely irrelevant modern mainstream newspaper sinking ship. The desperation reeks of the final days of the print edition of Newsweek, when it went for shrill grandstanding in a pathetic attempt to keep itself alive.

But while we're all staring at the latest streaker prancing around the liberal media football field, we might as well consider the "source" used to justify this inane commentary.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has a rich history of charging imaginary right-wing dragons going back decades. It has proven to be a lucrative racket and an enduring one as well. The fact is, people have been on to founder Morris Dees' scam for years now:

In an article entitled "The Church of Morris Dees" in the November 2000 issue of Harper's magazine Ken Silverstein noted that the SPLC spends such a high percentage of its revenue on salaries, perks, and fundraising that "The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst rankings of any [nonprofit] group it monitors."
That, I suppose, is how it was able to move into its new palatial headquarters building in Montgomery, Alabama that is known locally as the "Poverty Palace."
All of this is undoubtedly why leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn wrote in the New York Press in 2007 that "I've long regarded Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center as collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life. The reasons: a relentless fundraising machine devoted to terrifying mostly low-income contributors into unbolting ill-spared dollars year after year to an organization that now has an endowment of more than $100 million . . ."


In short, Dees was in it for the money. And for the last 40+ years of decline in this nation, bashing white Americans has proven a fine way to make a comfortable living:

SPLC founder Morris Dees is a lawyer, but he began his career as a direct marketer, hawking everything from cookbooks to tractor seat cushions.  Indeed, the SPLC was a latecomer to the civil rights movement, as many of the biggest legal and legislative battles had been won before the organization was formed in 1971.
Dees' first law partner, Millard Fuller, had this to say of him and their legal and direct marketing business ventures in the 1960s:
Morris and I, from the first days of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. ... We were not particular about how we did  it. We just wanted to be independently rich.  During the eight years we worked together we never wavered in that resolve.

It's no wonder that the mainstream media continue to take this race-baiting con artist seriously. After all, it fits with their pre-conceived notions of what most Americans are like and it allows them to keep selling the stale myth of their role as "civil rights champions," even as the country is hurtling toward a path to fewer and fewer rights for ALL Americans, not matter what race they may be.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

The Tax Inequality Dog and Pony Show


No love for the superrich thieves but this is a hollow argument:





Why? It's all about giving a tyrannical federal government more money.

We don't need to tax the rich more. We don't need to tax anybody more.

We need to cut 90 percent of all taxes and 99 percent of government SPENDING.

The tax inequality squabble is intentionally inflamed to distract us from the real problem: out of control government spending that of course goes right into the pockets of the superrich thieves who own our corrupt lawmakers.

If you want to hurt the superrich, take away their Federal Daddy money, in the forms of military contracts, Big Ag subsidies and a million other examples.

Making them pay more taxes into the very same honeypot that they have their sticky fingers engorged in is not going to solve anything.

Monday, March 4, 2013

The Barren Rainbow

Love how the liberal, multicultural champion New York Times features a photo of a fertile Latino woman prominently at the top of this story it re-posted from a Texas source as a way to get the human insecticide campaign back on track.

The very same people who will accuse patriotic Americans of being knuckle-dragging racists because we want to secure the borders can't stomach the idea of these people procreating once they do make it across:

In the fiscal crunch of 2011, the [Texas] Legislature cut the state’s family-planning budget by two-thirds, with some lawmakers claiming that they were defunding the “abortion industry.” Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, found that more than 50 family-planning clinics had closed statewide as a result.
Now, amid estimates that the cuts could lead to 24,000 additional 2014-15 births at a cost to taxpayers of $273 million,  lawmakers are seeking a way to restore financing without ruffling feathers.

The dominant slanted media is quick to always paint nationalists of any stripe as bloodthirsty fanatics eager to ethnically cleanse those who are not like them. However, those who want to preserve the established ethnological makeup of this nation have a much more humanitarian response to the real-world pressures of costly brown babies. It is simply this:

If you want fewer expensive Latino minority babies in your country, have a strong homogenous culture by, for and about your traditional ethnic makeup. Control immigration, secure the borders and preserve your national identity.

Anything else leads to demographic anarchy, violent unrest and infanticide on a massive scale.

Meanwhile, in little articles such as this, the paragons of tolerance who want to usher in a brave new borderless world reveal, every now and again, the ugliness and sheer meanness of their agenda.

Look at that second picture!

In an article pushing contraception!

The implication is ominous and obvious: This newspaper can barely stand the fact that that thing is alive.

So, to sum up: Wanting to keep these people from coming to our country illegally makes you morally bankrupt. Wanting to prevent these people from reproducing once they arrive to manicure our lawns, pick our apples and clean our offices is the height of human tenderness. Got it.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

They've Been Watering Down Our Catholic Beer For Centuries

No surprise that another large multi-national corporation is accused of cheating its customers:

“Our information comes from former employees at Anheuser-Busch, who have informed us that as a matter of corporate practice, all of their products [mentioned in the lawsuit] are watered down,” [attorney Josh] Boxer said, according to the Associated Press. “It's a simple cost-saving measure, and it's very significant.”
The excess water is added just before bottling and cuts the stated alcohol content by 3% to 8%, he said.


Now when I think of watered-down beer I immediately think of one brand: Miller Lite. How anyone could drink a bottle of that liquid nothingness was always beyond me and I'm one of the great lightweights of all time. The fact is, Lite tastes like a glass of water with a slight hint of beer. Hell, Aquafina holds more of a kick.

And so THAT got me to thinking about the whole Lite Beer from Miller ad campaign, going back to the '70s and '80s, when they used ultra-macho pro sports athletes: 


to talk skeptical American males into believing that they weren't the following if they drank light beer:



Of course, the notion that drinking light beer can make you feminine is long gone in our modern American society. So far gone that contemporary Lite beer campaigns make drinking their dainty swill a test of manhood in and of itself:





The ridiculousness of that last ad isn't just in the claim that drinking Lite beer makes you more manly. It's in the very fact that they are bragging about the so-called "triple-hops brewed" quality of their beer. What makes that so outrageous is the simple fact that hops is estrogenic, so adding "triple hops" to the process means they are giving you manly macho men THREE TIMES the estrogen you would normally be consuming.

Triple the estrogen makes you more of a man! Only in our modern American corporate wasteland could something like that fly.

And so THAT got me to thinking about this post I came across one day:

Prior to the German Beer Purity Act of 1516, beer almost never contained hops. In fact, more than one hundred different plants were used in brewing beer for at least ten thousand years prior to the introduction of hops in the middle ages. For the last thousand years of that period, the most dominant form of “beer” was called gruit, which contained a mixture of yarrow, bog myrtle, and marsh rosemary. These herbs, especially in beer, are sexually and mentally stimulating. (It is rare to become sleepy when drinking un-hopped beers.)
The Catholic Church had a monopoly on the production of gruit, but competing merchants and the Protestants worked together to break their monopoly and force the removal of all sexually stimulating herbs from beer. They replaced them with an herb that puts the drinker to sleep and dulls sexual drive in the male. The legislative arguments of the day all hinged on the issue of the stimulating effects of other herbs that were used in beer. A pilsner, for example, was originally a henbane beer (pilsen means “henbane”), which is an incredibly strong, psychoactive beer, used earlier in history by German berserkers before battle. The German Beer Purity Act was, in effect, the first drug control law ever enacted.


And then THAT got me to thinking about the extra research I did into this fascinating topic:


One of the arguments of the Protestants against the Catholic clergy (and indeed of Catholicism) was Catholic self-indulgence: in food, drink, and lavish life style. And it was this Protestant outrage that was the genesis of the temperance movement. (It would not stop, of course, with the assault on gruit ales but would continue on to include ale itself and any kind of psychotropic or inebriating plants and drinks by the twentieth century.)
The Protestant reformists were joined by merchants and competing royals desiring to break the brewing monopoly of the church. The result was, ultimately, the end of a many-thousand-year tradition of herbal beer making in Europe and the narrowing of beer and ale into one limited expression of beer production, that of hopped ales or what we today call beer.


The fact of the matter is, the potency of your beer had been weakened immensely a long time before Anheuser-Busch got bought by a soulless Belgian multinational. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Protestant Reformation - the original buzzkill.