Your friendly neighborhood blogger has covered all things “Spider-Man” for many years. Readers are familiar with the charge that Peter Parker has been emasculated in his own book, but inevitably there are always skeptics.
“Doug, it’s just one issue!” they essentially say. Whether it’s Captain America turning into a de facto Nazi, Iceman randomly turning gay, Iron Man being replaced by a teenage girl for years, etc., the refrain always comes up that Comicsgaters are “exaggerating” or “seeing things that aren’t really there.”
The past few weeks, however, presented the world with ThunderCats Roar — a bastardization of the original and the 2011 reboot — and now Peter Parker in all his “soy face” infamy.
The image is so striking and so telling on a deeper level that a single tweet from my account has reached nearly 30,000 pairs of eyes and over 400 likes in less than 24 hours.
This isn’t a one-time thing. Over … and over … and over again the creative teams assigned to watch over the character have found ways to turn him into an absolute buffoon.
Ask yourself this question:Why are all fictional heroes who represent many aspects of traditional masculinity being stripped of their credibility and turned into gags for ironic hipsters?
Check out my latest YouTube videos on both Spider-Man and ThunderCats for a clearer picture as to what’s going on.
As always, I invite you to leave your feedback section in the comments section below. I’d really like to hear what you have to say.
A book called The Death of Expertise came out not too long ago. The best way to describe it for regular readers of this blog is as follows: It’s as if author Tom Nichols read my mind and then put all my disparate thoughts on Western civilization’s slow-motion car crash into a nice package. His understanding of how modern technology, social media, and left-wing academics exacerbate the problem is, unfortunately for future generations, on point.
I spend a lot of time on social media for work, and over the years I have seen a disturbing trend take place on the internet and college campuses. A toxic brew of left-wing “social justice” indoctrination on American campuses mixed with digital echo chambers, available to men and women of all political stripes, slowly boiled. (We’ve seen the effects of this during the U.S. presidential inauguration protests, the Berkeley riots, and the insanity at Evergreen State College in Washington state.)
Mr. Nichols, however, is one of the few people I’ve seen who has a firm grasp of the dangerous social dynamics at play beneath the surface. Like your friendly neighborhood blogger, he seems to think a miracle is needed to stave off an ugly future.
“I fear we are witnessing the death of the ideal of expertise itself, a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers — in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.
Attacks on established knowledge and the subsequent rash of poor information in the general public are sometimes amusing. Sometimes they’re even hilarious. Late-night comedians have made a cottage industry of asking people questions that reveal their ignorance about their own strongly held ideas, their attachment to fads, and their unwillingness to admit their own cluelessness about current events. […] When life and death are involved, however, it’s a lot less funny. […]
The overall trend is one of ideological segregation enabled by the ability to end a friendship with a click instead of a face-to-face discussion. …
Underlying much of this ill temper is a false sense of equality and the illusion of egalitarianism created by the immediacy of social media. I have a Twitter account and a Facebook page, and so do you, so we’re peers, aren’t we? After all, if a top reporter at a major newspaper, a diplomat at the Kennedy School, a scientist at a research hospital, and your Aunt Rose from Reno all have an online presence, then all of their viewers are just so many messages speeding past your eyes. Every opinion is only as good as the last posting on a home page.
In the age of social media, people using the Internet assume that everyone is equally intelligent or informed merely by virtue of being online. — Tom Nichols,The Death of Expertise (Oxford University Press, 2017). Pages 3, 129.
Boom.
Across every personal and professional level of my life I have witnessed the proliferation of this mentality. Google gives people a false sense superiority. A five-second search that allows a man to throw out a random factoids convinces him that he’s an expert when, in reality, his depth of breadth of knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep.
Social media offers a one-two punch of perniciousness: It encourages people to dehumanize the guy on the other side of the screen while simultaneously fostering false pride and moral superiority. That, dear reader, is a recipe for violence.
Mr. Nichols’ book is by no means perfect (he sometimes shows off his own ideological blind spots by unfairly framing certain political issues), but it is still highly worth your time. It’s the perfect book to sit down with for a few hours by the pool or at the beach. Check it out if you want to better understand our widening political divide, or if you just like slightly terrifying reading material.
There’s a “thing” that sometimes happens to me when I discuss philosophical or religious issues with my wife, which she finds incredibly humorous — I shed tears and get temporarily choked up. I told her for years that my theory on the phenomenon is something like this:
Deep in your heart is a conduit to the transcendent. There are times when your mind comes into direct contact with Truth with a capital ‘T’, but the finite parts of your being are obviously not equipped to handle the infinite. To grab hold of the transcendent, even for a brief moment, is like grabbing hold of a live wire. The difference is that the pain you feel is something beautiful, the charring and burning of spiritual impurities like rust on the soul. So you happily search for that place again and again because you wish that you could share it with everyone.
I was recently watching a video with Jordan Peterson, the famous professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He was talking with Dave Rubin about Pinocchio, and when I saw where he was going with it I could almost predict the point at which he would tear up.
Mr. Peterson said:
“Most of your viewers will have watched Pinocchio. There’s a scene in Pinocchio where Geppetto wishes upon a star. What it means is he lifts up his eyes beyond the horizon to something transcendent — to something ultimate — because that’s what a star is, it’s part of the eternity of the night sky.
And so he lifts his eyes up above his daily concerns and he says, ‘What I want — what I want more than anything else — is that my creation will become a genuine individual.’ Right? It’s a heroic gesture because it’s so unlikely. And that catalyzes the puppet’s transformation into a real being. And we start as puppets. And so the trick is to get rid of your god**** strings.
And you remember in Pinocchio, he faces a lot of temptations. One is to be a liar; the other is to be a neurotic victim. That’s how he ends up in Pleasure Island where he just about gets sold into the salt mines and turns into a braying jackass … because it’s run by authoritarians.
Well, okay, so what you do is lift up your eyes and you say, ‘Look, I would like being to progress in the best possible manner. And that’s best for me, best for my family, best for society — maybe best for the world. Simultaneously, I would like to attain that, whatever that is. That’s what I want. You commit to that.
Then you tell the truth. And you can tell if you’re telling the truth. You can tell it physiologically. And so this is something to learn. […] That’s really the core idea in Western civilization, to build yourself into a forthright individual who’s capable of telling the truth and capable of bearing the responsibilities of citizenry.” — Jordan Peterson.
Bingo.
Here’s another way to explain it. Imagine your mind’s eye witnesses the transcendent, and it’s like an ocean. A whole ocean can fit inside your head and you can see it clearly, but the person sitting across from you has no clue what you’re “looking” at. The only way you can make this ocean known is by embarrassingly running it through the tiny sink that is your mouth and the filter of language. Your task is to convince someone of the beauty of the transcendent ocean — or God, or Truth, or Love — when all you can give them is a bucket filled with water.
So you cry.
You cry because in some sense the metaphysical ocean has burst forth into the physical world.
You cry because you’ve seen what lies beyond and you know that if others saw it too then they would change their lives in profound ways.
You cry because you are unworthy of something so magnificent, and you cry because of all the souls who will never have a similar experience through the misbegotten application of their own free will.
If you have never watched Jordan Peter’s videos, I highly suggest you begin sooner rather than later. He knows what he is talking about. He speaks the Truth. If you listen to what he says and actively carry out his advice, then your life will be exponentially better for it.
Last night my church had a presentation on the Internet and social media. I attended because I thought my job (and the many hours it requires me to be online) might give me some insights into the subject that may benefit others. The Sacrament of Reconciliation was offered afterward, which got me thinking about a time in my life when I embarrassingly yelled at God — and the lesson that followed shortly afterward.
Roughly six years ago, my life was filled with many personal and professional transitions. There were stresses involved, and on one bad day I pulled the car over to the side of the road and screamed, “What the f***! I’m just trying to be a good person! What the F***! Why are you doing this to me?!”
Without going into details, something I would deem miraculous happened following that outburst, which would lead me to believe the following: We weren’t mean to “just” be “a good person” because we were meant to be saints. We obviously cannot all die as saints, but that is what we must strive to be.
We live in a world where the Internet is omnipresent and the rule of thumb is that it gives us what we want faster … and faster … and faster. Anything you crave, the Internet can provide in a hurry. If you want to be a saint, you have access to all of their wisdom. If you want to explore all sorts of fiendish behavior, then your desire is just a click away. Whatever you want to put into the infinite caverns of your heart, social media can supply — good, evil; love, hate; peace, violence; temperance, concupiscence, and on and on.
The point is that “just” being “a good person” is never good enough, but especially not in a world where technology allows for hyper-exposure to our worst vices. Perverts become hyper-perverts. Partisans become hyper-partisans. Rage is intensified, and flesh’s already-ravenous desire for flesh is awash in images of bodies … and bodies … and bodies.
It is my prediction that in the years ahead you will see a small cadre of rare spiritual pearls emerge within a black sea of ghouls already torturing and raping people live on social media, beheading people in the Middle East and North Africa, and living only for hate.
That is why “just” being “a good person” is not good enough. From all sides you are being bombarded with spiritual blows to sap and warp your will. Invisible sludge is being thrown in your spiritual eyes and shoved down your throat because in time it blinds a man and clogs the arteries of his soul.
The answer to all of this is to strive — every day — to become more like the saints. The process is painful, but it is a good pain. I promise.
Perhaps the best way to explain the spiritual growth that is needed in this time and this place in history, I should point to the old bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Witness the physical and emotional strain he imposed upon himself while sculpting the perfect body and winning the Mr. Olympia title. Anyone who exercises knows that pushing the body — the finite body — to its limits is painful. Now consider doing that to the spirit, which is infinite.
Virtue is something that is very real and tangible, despite being invisible. It paradoxically has a kind of mass and a weight to it even though it’s not something that can ever be measured. The reason for this is because virtue is part of the realm of the infinite. The human heart contains conduits to the infinite — chambers to the divine, if you will — but your body as a whole is, again, finite. That is why as one grows in spirit it often feels like his body is under enormous strain.
Like the weightlifter who adds more iron to his routine, the man or woman who engages in strenuous spiritual exercise brings themselves to tears. The difference is that instead of muscle breaking down and building up, the soul often feels like it is being torn asunder. In some ways it is, because its worst elements are being ripped off and replaced with that which is good and pure.
If you’re wondering why sin does not produce similar experiences, it is because that behavior produces a kind of spiritual atrophy. Just as a man often does not feel the pain of a slothful lifestyle until diseases like diabetes set in, the soul can shrivel in slow and steady increments.
We are living in a very unique time in history. Every year it seems as though technology improves by leaps and bounds. Each new milestone brings with it enormous potential for spiritual growth or decay. It is my hope that you realize that aiming to be “a good person” is like shooting for the the outer ring of the bullseye in a game of darts — only life is not a game and the consequences of your actions here and now have eternal consequences.
If you push yourself each day to live as a saint, then I have no doubt in my mind that upon your death you will be welcomed home by the one true God who loved you in eternity well before you were cradled, in time and space, in your mother’s arms.
Roughly 17 years ago I exited the military after a stint as a mechanized infantryman in the U.S. Army. Even though the September 11, 2001, terror attacks and the nation’s “long war” had not yet begun, I found myself having a difficult time with the transition to civilian life. Understanding why I missed my old platoon — and why I felt a growing fear and sadness for the country I loved — took years (and a blog like this) to figure out, but author and former war reporter Sebastian Junger articulates it all in his must-read book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.
Americans who have not lived under a rock for the past 20 years have witnessed the slow-motion implosion of our culture.
Cable news pundits obsessively talk of “red states” and “blue states.”
The politics of personal destruction reigns supreme.
Saying “all lives matter” is interpreted in a Twilight Zone-ish twist by millions of people as somehow racist.
Americans watch carefully constructed social-media feeds that tell them all Republicans are the equivalent of Darth Vader, or that all Democrats have shrines to Fidel Castro in their bedroom.
In short, the modern world is deficient in something that is causing tens-of-millions of people to feel isolated, alone, and empty. The void is filled with confusion, and that in turn fuels the kind of anger and hate that was the hallmark of the 2016 election cycle.
Why is it that many soldiers and civilians who have lived through war sometimes get nostalgic for it?
What are the consequences for society when a person “living in a modern city or suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day — or an entire life — mostly encountering complete strangers”?
Why are we often surrounded by others, yet “feel deeply, dangerously alone”?
One of the answers can be found in tribal societies. And no, your friendly neighborhood blogger is not saying Native Americans should have won the clash of civilizations at our nation’s inception. I am merely saying, like Mr. Junger, that we can learn from their ability to provide “the three pillars of self-determination — autonomy, competence, and community.”
Mr. Junger writes:
“After World War II, many Londoners claimed to miss the exciting and perilous days of the Blitz. (“I wouldn’t mind having an evening like it, say, once a week — ordinarily there’s no excitement,” one man commented to Mass-Observation about the air raids), and the war that is missed doesn’t even have to be a shooting war: “I am a survivor of the AIDS epidemic,” an American man wrote in 2014 on the comment board of an online lecture about war. “Now that AIDS is no longer a death sentence, I must admit that I miss those days of extreme brotherhood…which led to deep emotions and understandings that are above anything I have felt since the plague years.”
What people miss presumably isn’t danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender. There are obvious stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation, so during disasters there is a net gain in well-being. Most primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are very few instances of lone primates surviving in the wild. …
Whatever the technological advances of modern society — and they’re near miraculous — the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.” — (Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (New York: Hachette Book Group, Inc., 2016), 92-93.
Tribe covers issues like PTSD, depression, and anxiety among combat veterans, but it would be a big mistake to solely think of it as a book for the military community. It is much more than that, because it is a blueprint for getting the nation on a path to cultural healing.
The author continues:
“The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs — and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought — will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.
So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself? How do you make veterans feel that they are returning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place? […] I put the question to Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. …
“if you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different — you underscore your shared humanity,” she told me. “I’m appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?” […]
Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn’t, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves. (127-128).
Tribe is by no means “the” answer to the nation’s deep-seated cultural problems, but it is a significant piece of the puzzle. To get a good look at the big picture, I suggest pairing Mr. Junger’s quick-read with George Weigel’s Letters to a Young Catholic. Each book provides a template for transcending dead-end partisan bickering, and in turn getting America efficiently focused on becoming a more-perfect union.
Former Jesuit priest Malachi Martin died in 1999, but he wrote one of the most comprehensive books on possession and exorcism in 1976 — Hostage To The Devil. Those who are unfamiliar with the man’s work may dismiss Hostage as fare for old school Catholics, but it is much more than that. Anyone who is interested in humanity’s struggle with morality, truth, free will, sex and gender, spirit and psyche would do themselves a favor by purchasing it soon.
Regular readers of this blog know that the intersection of politics and popular culture are covered on a regular basis. Movies, music and comic books are reviewed, but at the heart of it all is a fight against moral relativism.
The message is simple:Good and Evil exist. To deny that, or to pretend as though a man can go through life making morally neutral decisions, is to walk down a road of confusion. And, as Fr. Malachi notes, confusion seems to be a “prime weapon of evil.”
The author says:
“The surest effect of possession in an individual — the most obvious and striking effect common to all possessed persons, whether observed or apart from Exorcism — is the great loss in human quality, in humanness.
Curiously enough, the difficulty in talking nowadays about possession and describing its progress and effects in those attacked does not come from the weird, bizarre, or ‘unimaginable’ happens that may accompany possession.
The difficulty comes, instead, from the insistence of latter-day opinion makers that the religious view of good and evil is outdated; that the personality of each man, woman, and child exists only as a cross section of single traits and attributes best revealed in scores we achieve in psychological tests; that the truest and purest models for our behavior come from ‘lower animals’ and from ‘natural man,’ a mythical invention that has never existed and that we cannot imagine. …
Even though our coverage of these questions concerning Jesus and Lucifer must be brief due to limitations of space, we are not merely indulging in a comforting cliché when we make one observation: The best that latter-day prophets and modern doom sayers seem able to do with these matters is to ignore them and tell us to do the same. They cannot prove them false, but only increase their efforts to persuade us so. And for all their mighty efforts, they cannot repair the damage they do in this way to our humanness.,” Malachi Martin, Hostage to the Devil (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1992), 409, 411-412.
In short, the bulk of Hostage deals with five cases:
Zio’s Friend and the Smiler — 29
Father Bones and Mister Natch — 83
The Virgin and the Girl-Fixer — 173
Uncle Ponto and the Mushroom-Souper — 249
The Rooster and the Tortoise — 321
As readers can see by the pagination, trying to respectfully break down any one of these cases in a book review would be difficult. Exhaustive interviews were conducted with all parties involved, written records were examined, and hours upon hours of audio recordings analyzed.
What is important to know before buying the book — particularly for skeptics — is that Fr. Martin is not an intellectual slouch. He is a very intelligent man. He is serious, and the content within Hostage is extremely disturbing.
The fact of the matter is that possession is nothing like Americans see in Hollywood movies. It is much more insidious than that because bodiless beings that can glean knowledge from eternity are not stupid. Possession is a process by which patient demons wait for an entry point, exploit confusion, and ultimately seize control when victims voluntarily present their souls on a silver platter.
Exacerbating this threat is a culture that grants Satan “the ultimate camouflage” — the belief that he does not exist.
“Raised more and more in an atmosphere where moral criticism is not merely out of fashion, but prohibited, [we] swim with little help in a veritable sea of pornography. Not merely sexual pornography, but the pornography of unmitigated self-interest. Whether spoken or acted out without explanation, the dominant question of the younger generations among us is, What can you do for me? What can my parents, my friends, my acquaintances, my enemies, my government, my country, do for me?
The difficulty is that as individuals and as a society, we are no longer willing — many of us are no longer able — to give an answer to that question that will satisfy anyone for long. …
Not to believe in evil is not be be armed against it. To disbelieve is to be disarmed. If your will does not accept the existence of evil, you are rendered incapable of resisting evil. Those with no capacity of resistance become prime targets for Possession,” (Preface, XIII, XIV, XV).
As Fr. Martin says, “no one wants to believe in evil, really, above all, not in an evil being, an evil spirit,” because acknowledging that places a perpetual responsibility on our shoulders.
“That [disbelief] is the opening through which [Satan] crawls, stilling all suspicions, making everything seem normal and natural. This is the ‘thought,’ the unwariness of the ordinary human being which amounts to a disinclination to believe in evil. And, if you do not believe in evil, how can you believe in or even know what good is?” (389)
Hostage is an amazing book. Anyone who is remotely spiritual should read it, but they must be forewarned that it will leave them shaken to the core.
If you have any questions about the cases covered by Fr. Martin, then feel free to ask in the comments section below.
“PizzaGate” is now being picked up by major media outlets. There is no denying it now that The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Fox News affiliates in the nation’s capital have filed reports. That is the good news. The bad news is that they are liars and deceivers of the highest magnitude.
For those who are new to the story surrounding Comet Ping Pong, WikiLeaks, Washington’s 49th “Most Powerful” man and the Podesta brothers, here is the quick run-down:
WikiLeaks revealed roughly 50,000 stolen emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. Some of those emails revealed that he had very bizarre friends and often seemed to really, really, really like “pizza.”
Individuals on Reddit, 4chan, YouTube, and other websites started looking into John and Tony Podesta’s connections (Tony is one of the biggest lobbyists in D.C. and has an art collection that features nude teenagers). One of those indiviuals was No. 49 on the GQ’s “Most Powerful” individuals, James Alefantis.
Mr. Alefantis (former boyfriend of Correct the Record’s David Brock) owns Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. The establishment next to his business is another pizza place called Besta Pizza, which until the past few weeks had a pizza logo that was a dead-ringer for a symbol that law-enforcement agencies warn is favored by pedophiles. The guy who owns Besta Pizza worked under Bill Clinton in the Department of Justice investigating human trafficking, sex crimes, etc.
Mr. Alefantis’ Comet Pizza Instagram account and the accounts of his employees featured highly troubling images for a “kid-friendly” and “family friendly” establishment. (That is how the company bills itself. That is not my opinion.)
Comet Ping Pong features entertainers who are weirdly obsessed with sex. It has commissioned promotional work to a woman whose portfolio includes blatant imagery of sex abuse of children.
Those investigating this on the internet say this is clear evidence that warrants an investigation. They have been accused of creating “Fake News” by every major media outlet that has covered the story.
Read the following articles and then ask yourself why all of them either completely avoided linking to publicly available images, or weirdly tried to make it sound like this was all a partisan thing started by Donald Trump fans.
Note: The url of The New York Times piece was originally “technology/fact-check-this-pizzeria-is-not-a-child-trafficking-site…” Got that? First they are “fact checking,” and then when it was obvious they were not checking any facts they decided to call evidence they did not like “Fake News.” It’s the perfect Orwellian storm.
Note: If you see a “kid-friendly” pizza place sharing images that say, “Shut up N F*ck Men,” and you want the FBI to look into it, then you’re on a “witch hunt.”
Note: Once again we have the doubly-whammy url “fortune.com/2016/11/22/comet-ping-pong-hillary-clinton-fake-news/” because a “kid-friendly” pizza place that shares images of two gay men sucking on a pizza like it was a giant pepperoni penis is totally normal to the writers at Fortune.
Note: Nothing says “Fake News” like questioning why a “kid-friendly” pizza place would host an “all-ages” show with the musical stylings of “Sex Stains.”
This is not about Donald Trump. This is about innocent children. This is about teenagers who are lured into an establishment with grown men who make it crystal clear what kind of “pizza” is on the menu.
Honest reporters do not shout “Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake!” That is not how it’s done.
James Alefantis and his employees do not get to post sexually explicit material all over the internet and then play the victim when people start talking about it, sharing the images, and wondering what the heck goes on at these late-night events featuring “Sex Stains.”
Americans who are revolted by YouTube videos of Comet Ping Pong performers making comments about pedophilia (i.e., “We all have … preferences.”) are not “fevered.” Their outrage is healthy because normal people don’t take little kids to that kind of “performance.”
What is going on between the media and those who are taking down publicly available material is insidious. This needs to be clearly explained so there is no mistaking what is happening.
There is a systematic effort to cast anyone who is upset about this as a weirdo or a “conspiracy theorist.”
By making it impossible or near-impossible to actually find the evidence, the media shrinks the pool of people who know the truth. When that happens, righteous anger sounds like the ranting and raving of lunatics.
When the rest of the population cannot see the evidence, they are inclined to believe the media because to do otherwise would require confronting evil.
The practical effect of all this is that anyone with integrity within the media is discouraged from doing the right thing because they do not want to lose their jobs, be seen as kooks, audited by the IRS, confronted by corrupt law enforcement officials, or wind up dead.
You are being manipulated, and the manipulation is not being done by your fellow Americans on Reddit. It is being done by powerful people in the nation’s capital and their friends in places like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, and Fortune magazine.
The mainstream media is corrupt.
Do not take anything they tell you at face value.
“Fact Checkers” are partisan hacks and “Fake News” is a euphemism for “Opinions or Facts We In The Mainstream Media Do Not Like or Want to Cover.
If you do not realize and accept this, then you will continue to live in a world where “kid-friendly” pizza places can promote “Shut up N F*ck Men” without repercussions. That is not just unacceptable — it is evil.
Exit Question: Would you bring your child to a “Sex Stains” show? The reporters at The New York Times and The Washington Times apparently would, since this is all one big “Fake News” story.
Your friendly neighborhood blogger has heard people in political conversations — for years — bring up how “weird” it was that Nancy Reagan believed in astrology and what implications it might have for the country since her husband was the commander in chief. This week, however, the mainstream media ran as fast as possible away from a WikiLeaks reveal that Hillary Clinton’s right-hand man, John Podesta — and his Clinton-bundler D.C. lobbyist brother Tony — are good friends with Marina Abramovic. She is the “performance artist” who has a passion for getting naked, cutting herself, and doing all sorts of bizarre things with sperm and blood.
Translation:Republican wife who thinks there may be something to astrology = Scandalous. Liberal elite rings who think “Spirit Cooking” and blood mixtures painted on golems (clay figures used during religious ceremonies) is normal = non-story.
Earlier this week I was sifting through WikiLeaks files when I ran across an invitation from Tony Podesta to his brother John to attend a “Spirit Cooking” dinner with Ms. Abramovic (i.e., the lady who gets upset on Twitter when she’s accused of being into satanic rituals despite creating an @AbramovicM666 account).
“Are you in NYC Thursday July 9 Marina wants you to come to dinner Mary?” — Tony Podesta, June 28, 2015.
“Dear Tony, I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place. Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? All my love, Marina.” — Marina Abramovic, June 25, 2015.
These people are obviously good friends. This is how you speak with your inner circle. Therefore, it is newsworthy that someone who will literally be able to whisper in the ear of the commander in chief if Hillary Clinton is elected president hangs out with freaks.
Here is what the New York Times said of Ms. Abramovic on Nov. 1:
“You will need to be able to withstand a great deal of conversation about clairvoyants and tarot cards and didgeridoos and kundalini life forces and monks and gurus and ‘how the soul can leave the body through the center of the fontanel of the head’ to make it very far in this memoir. …
Ms. Abramovic reports in ‘Walk Through Walls’ that under the right circumstances, she can foresee world events,” the newspaper wrote. “‘I dreamed of an earthquake in Italy: 48 hours later, there was an earthquake in southern Italy. I had a vision of someone shooting the Pope: 48 hours later, someone tried to shoot Pope John Paul II.’”
Ask yourself this question: Who are your friends and what do you guys do on the weekend? Do you fill tubs with blood-like goo and naked women and then eat from their bodies, or do you go to a steakhouse and have fun over a few beers?
Ask yourself this question: Why does Hillary Clinton’s inner circle include Anthony Weiner — a man who is under FBI investigation for sexual messages to a teenage girl; Bill Clinton (need I say more?); and people who think Marina Abramovic’s naked self-mutilation and occult “art” is normal?
I wrote a story on this subject for work, but not a single mainstream media outlet covered it. They ignored it. They shunned it, ironically, like the devil. Meanwhile, Twitter and YouTube and other social media platforms exploded with “Spirit Cooking” trends. The traffic for the story was through the roof — and yet, silence.
People like Katie Pavlich over at Townhall, one of the few writers who addressed it, tried to torpedo the story entirely using giant straw-man arguments. Because Ms. Pavlich felt Infowars likened Mr. Podesta to a “blood sucking, hair eating devil worshipper,” then ipso facto there was nothing to cover.
Wrong.
You can tell a lot about a man by who his close friends are, and it speaks volumes that the Podestas receive “all my love” messages from a woman who thinks it’s normal to get naked in front of strangers and cut herself, or to create “aphrodisiac” recipes that require “fresh urine” and “fresh sperm milk” for “earthquake nights.”
For Townhall writers like Ms. Pavlich, it apparently means nothing that Ms. Abramovic a.) sees herself as a mystic, b.) says that performing her rituals at home makes “magic” possible, and c.) told artist James Franco that she hates the studio and loves to “perform” at home.
“If you are doing the occult magic in the context of art or in a gallery, then it is art. If you are doing it in a different context, in spiritual circles or private house or on TV shows, it is not art.” — Marina Abramovic on question about magic via Reddit interview.
Move along. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Oh, and did I mention that the artist now says she called the “Spirit” dinner that because “we just call things funny names”?
What are all the chances that out of all the “funny” names she could have picked, she used “Spirit Cooking dinner”?
And here is what she told Mr. Franco:
“I hate studio, to start with. Studio is a trap. Studio is the worst place — the artist should never be [there]. The art comes from life — not from studio.” — Marina Abramovic to James Franco via Wall Street Journal interview, December 2009.
The mainstream media are terrified about what will happen if they cover an explosive story about Hillary Clinton’s inner circle and then she is elected president. That is why CNN and others had to be dragged kicking and screaming to cover WikiLeaks, FBI investigations into the former secretary of state, and the “pay-for-play” corruption of The Clinton Foundation.
But hey, maybe I’m wrong and the Podesta brothers’ buddy-buddy relationship with Marina “Eat the Pain” Abramovic is not worth your time.
Exit Question: What are the chances that late-night comedians and SNL would have a field day if Donald Trump’s inner circle included an “artist” whose works required her to sit on mountains of bloody bones, stab her fingers, and “eat the pain”?
George Weigel’s Letters to a Young Catholicis awonderful book, but oddly enough I must begin this review by griping about the title — it’s something that Catholics of any age should read. In fact, the publisher does not lie by billing the book as “a modern spiritual classic,” which is why I recommend it to anyone who is interested in such issues.
Like many Catholic kids, my parents took me to Mass every Sunday growing up. And, like many Catholic kids, I was not exposed to the writings of G.K. Chesterton, George Weigel or other intellectual heavyweights. What I did have access to were kind adults who lacked the ability to articulate the faith in a way that “clicked” for me. I drifted from the Church as a young man and did not come back until I learned many painful lessons. If I were exposed to a book like this as a teenager then it probably would have saved me a lot of lost time, although I admit to having a largely impenetrable chip on my shoulder in those days. (And yes, I know that some of you would argue that it’s still there!)
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Letters to a Young Catholic is that in many ways it doubles as a must-read for those who are wondering why America’s political institutions are crumbling before our eyes. The way in which the author travels the globe, goes back in time, covers essential questions about the Catholic faith that all young people ask, and then ties it into our contemporary political landscape is like watching a gymnast who puts everything out on the floor before the judges — and nails it.
Mr. Weigel writes:
If American popular and high culture could ever agree on a theme song that captured the idea of freedom driving much of contemporary life, it would almost certainly be Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” I did it my way seems to sum up the widespread notion that freedom is a matter of asserting myself and my will — that freedom is really about choice, not about what we choose and why. Suggest that certain choices are just incompatible with human dignity and with growth in goodness, and you’ll get some very strange looks these days, whether on campus or in the workplace.
Catholicism has a different idea of freedom. In the Catholic idea of freedom, freedom and goodness go together. A great contemporary moral theologian, Father Servais Pinckaers, OP, explained all this. […] Learning to play the piano, he reminded us, is a tedious, even dreary business at first: well do I remember my own distaste for a book of technique-strengthening tortures entitled Scales, Chords, and Arpeggios. But after doing one’s exercises for a while, what originally seemed like a burden comes into clearer focus — learning to do the right thing in the right way is actually liberating. You can play anything you like, even the most difficult pieces. You can make new music on your own. Sure, Father Pinckaers writes, anybody can pound away on a piano. But that’s a rudimentary, savage sort of freedom,” not a truly human freedom. …
I did it my way teaches us an idea of freedom that Father Pinckaers calls “the freedom of indifference.” Doing things “my way,” just because it’s my way, is like banging idiotically on the piano or talking gibberish. The richer, nobler idea of freedom the Catholic Church proposes is what Father Pinckaers calls freedom for excellence — the freedom to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons, as a matter of habit. That’s the truly human way. Because that’s the kind of freedom that satisfies our natural desire for happiness, which itself reflects our desire for God, who is all Good, all the way. […] What’s all this got to do with democracy? Everything. Freedom untethered from moral truth will eventually become freedom’s worst enemy. — Weigel, George. Letters to a Young Catholic. Basic Books, 2015. 305-306.
A friend of mine texted me on Monday and said she hoped that I would cover the first U.S. presidential debate on the blog. In many ways, the text from Mr. Weigel’s book shown here tells us everything we need to know.
Why is America forced to choose between a woman who should be wearing an orange jumpsuit in a federal prison, and an egomaniac with occasionally orange skin?
Answer: Because America long ago decided it wanted to untether freedom from moral truth.
There really is no way to read Letters to a Young Catholic and not have a crystal clear understanding as to why civil society in the U.S. is unraveling. Our cultural influencers embrace a kind of nihilism “that enjoys itself on the way to oblivion, convinced that all of this — the world, us, relationships, sex, beauty, history — is really just a cosmic joke,” and we are now paying the price.
Mr. Weigel counters that “against the nihilist claim that nothing is really of consequence, Catholicism insists that everything is of consequence, because everything has been redeemed by Christ. And if you believe that, it changes the way you see things. It changes the way everything looks.”
If for no other reason, wayward Catholics should read this book to realize that what they thought was Catholicism growing up was in all likelihood a grossly watered down version of the Faith that denied them knowledge of its true richness and beauty. There are numerous reasons for this, and the author does a masterful job spelling it all out. I found myself thinking, “Finally! Someone who gets it,” and I am sure you will too.
A funny thing happens in old video games when players reach a point that exceeds the cartridge’s available memory: the “kill screen.” The character may die, although sometimes users can continue playing a jumbled mess that ostensibly makes no sense. The reality that Donald Trump will square off against Hillary Clinton to be the next U.S. commander in chief is a clear indicator America has reached its own kill screen.
Kill screens may be fun to watch — there is no doubt that cable news networks are thrilled with the 2016 election season — but on another level (no pun intended), they are sad affairs. If you do not believe the U.S. is at its own kill screen, then ask yourself the following two questions:
What led to the rise in popularity of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (a self-described socialist), and Donald Trump?
Will the election of Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump mitigate or exacerbate the nation’s underlying problems?
Hillary Clinton has vowed to continue doing exactly what President Obama has done for eight years, which was a catalyst for Sanders’ groundswell of Democrat support.
Donald Trump’s popularity is based on the illusion that he is a political outsider who will “make America great again” via giant walls along U.S. border with Mexico and “great” deals with Congress. Ironically, the same people who have deified Mr. Trump regularly go apoplectic when “deals” are made in Congress. Unless Trump plans on becoming a dictator, his own supporters are in for a rude awakening if he wins in November.
Here is what the 45th president of the United States will encounter on Day One:
The U.S. is $19 trillion in debt, but there is no political will to get spending under control. This is due to economic illiteracy (thanks public education and academia), greed (it’s easy to rob from future generations when you know you’ll be old or dead when the bill comes due), lying politicians, and a whole host of other issues. There will be a day of reckoning.
The U.S. is culturally lost. Multiple generations have simmered in a stew of cultural relativism. Tens of millions of people have no idea why they believe what they believe — they just do. They have been taught to loathe the principles that made America the freest nation in the history. They have been conditioned to yearn for tyranny and not to care about it as long mindless viral videos, Facebook “likes,” and free pornography flows on their computers.
American media outlets are corrupt. The news long ago ceased to be about informing people and turned into a never-ending quest for “clicks” and “shares” and “tweets” and ratings. Journalists are usually more interested in showing they’re as witty and cool as John Stewart in his heyday than objectively reporting facts. Cable news shows are inspired by WWE wrestling matches and reality television shows, which is why the more appealing option is to just watch Food Network or turn off the TV all together.
In short, unless someone rewrites the U.S. “code” in the near future, we will soon disappear in the “integer overflow.”
Welcome to the kill screen. I look forward to seeing you after the “reset” button is pushed.
Douglas Ernst Blog 