Category: Culture

The Age Of Ugly

Look at the disco era, as portrayed by the movie Saturday Night Fever. You have all the things that define this era. There is the reckless personal behavior, the pointlessness of the character’s lives and the denigration of bourgeois values. The main character is basically a bum who works in a hardware store so he can make enough money to party with other degenerates. He treats his girlfriend so poorly, she eventually becomes a whore that his buddies pass around, so she can stay in the group.

Everything about the movie, like the lifestyle it portrayed, was degenerate. The disco era was basically just an effort to take the underground homosexual scene in New York City and vomit it onto Middle America. It largely worked too.

Despite growing up in the 70s I’ve yet to see Saturday Night Fever. Probably because I couldn’t stand Vinnie Barbarino. This just seemed like a movie about Vinnie after he dropped out of Kotter’s high school.

Anyway, I think the zman is on to something here.

Source: The Age of Ugly

The Coadjuvancy of Church and State

The modern notion that the separation of these powers implies opposition or incompatibility is a gross misrepresentation of the founders beliefs and intentions, imposed on the nation by a cabal of hyper-partisan Democrat secularists led by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black (a virulent anti-Catholic and one-time member of the Ku Klux Klan), along with his co-conspirator Lyndon Baines Johnson, author of the “Johnson Amendment” that purported to ban church involvement in politics.

Black wrote the majority opinion in the 1947 US Supreme Court case Everson v Board of Education which redefined the separation of church and state as a barrier to church/state cooperation – reversing over 150 years of legal precedent in which it had been recognized as a facilitator of church influence in government. It was this early and egregious example of judicial activism in Everson that shifted America from following the Judeo-Christian presuppositions of the founders to the Secular Humanist presuppositions of Cultural Marxism: preventing government from recognizing the authority of God in our law and history.

Read the whole article.

Source: The Coadjuvancy of Church and State

Related: Church of the Holy Trinity vs. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892)

The Unmade Bed and the Fall of Civilization

I didn’t make my bed, and as I drove away from home, I remembered it and felt a pang of guilt. It’s not the end of the world, I rationalized. How many people actually take the time to make their beds, anyway? I haven’t always been good about it, it’s just that I realized I like that small spot of order in an otherwise chaotic, uncontrollable world. I might not be able to predict the course of my morning commute, but at least my bedcovers are smooth and inviting when I finally return home.

Source: The Unmade Bed and the Fall of Civilization

Progressives are engaged in a “de-civilizing process” that will end badly – Bookworm Room

Everything Progressives do is part of a de-civilizing process that will plunge us back into the cruelty and murder that make up humankind’s natural state…

I’m going to interject here something that neither Pinker nor Elias address. Or at least, Pinker, who summarizes Elias (and I haven’t read Elias myself) doesn’t mention raise two issues I think also affected violence in pre-modern times. There were two constants in the pre-modern era: youthfulness and drunkenness. People were young because they didn’t live to see old age. Few people lived past their 40s. Moreover, because urban water was not potable, people in tight medieval quarters drank only beer or wine. In other words, the medieval world was a time in which most people were young and drunk. It was like perpetually living among 18-to-25-year-old junkies.

The world started “civilizing” in earnest when coffee and tea entered Western civilization, because those drinks required boiled water. Nobody understood germ theory, but they did quickly figure out that, if you drank tea or coffee, you were imbibing a non-alcoholic beverage that did not kill. Interestingly, the coffee and tea culture took off with a bang in England which — perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not — was Ground Zero for the “civilizing process.”

Now, back to Pinker’s discussion…

I find the coffee and tea theory interesting. Read the whole post.

Source: Progressives are engaged in a “de-civilizing process” that will end badly – Bookworm Room

The tenuously United States of America

America is barely a country at this point, defined only by its federal state. It is not a nation, lacking cohesion or commonality: we fight over history, the Constitution, the Electoral College and other constitutional mechanisms, immigration and birthright citizenship, not to mention sex, race, class, and sexuality. This utter politicization of American society — a Progressive triumph — is unsustainable over time.

Source: The tenuously United States of America

Yes – Wonderous Stories (Official Music Video)

I awoke this morning
Love laid me down by a river.
Drifting I turned on upstream
Bound for my forgiver.
In the giving of my eyes to see your face.
Sound did silence me
Leaving no trace.
I beg to leave, to hear your wonderous stories.
Beg to hear your wonderous stories.
He spoke of lands not far
Or lands they were in his mind.
Of fusion captured high
Where reason captured his time.
In no time at all he took me to the gate.
In haste I quickly checked the time.
If I was late I had to leave to hear your wonderous stories.
Had to hear your wonderous stories.
Hearing
Hearing
Hearing your wonderous stories.
Hearing your wonderous stories.
It is no lie I can see deeply into the future.
Imagine everything
You’re close
And were you there to stand
So cautiously at first and then so high.
As he spoke my spirit climbed into the sky.
I bid it to return
To hear your wonderous stories.
Return to hear your wonderous stories.
Hearing,
Hearing,
Hearing,
Hearing,
Hearing,