Matthew 5:14-16

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

I’ve been reading the New Testament for over forty years.  This saying of Jesus is recorded, variously, in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.  I have probably read this saying at least one hundred times. . .

And every time I read it, my conscience is seared. . .

I have had the Light of Jesus’ Gospel for over forty years. . .but it has not shined before men.  

I have not hid the light 100% of the time.  But certainly I have hid it more than 99% of the time.  More than 99.5% of the time.  

I think of all the people I have been acquainted with over the decades.  The vast, vast majority of them never knew I was an admirer of Jesus, and that I esteemed His gospel above all else.

Every time I read the saying of Jesus presented above, my conscience is seared as I admit how little I have displayed it.  

It’s not that I would be ashamed if people knew I was a Jesus person, or that I was afraid people would think less of me if they knew I was a Jesus person.  I don’t care what people think about me. . .  

I wish it were that I was ashamed or fearful.  It wouldn’t be more excusable, because it can’t be excused.  But it would be more comprehensible. . .

For the plain truth is incomprehensible: I have the gospel of the Savior, and almost all the time I do nothing with it.  I live as if there is no Kingdom of God.  I live exactly as the people who are ignorant of the gospel of Jesus live. 

I ask myself: why is this?  I don’t have an answer.  I can say that I don’t care enough about other people to illuminate them with the gospel of Jesus, and this is certainly true, but I can’t answer why I don’t care enough about them.  Why am I reasonably content to just pass the time here waiting to die as if there is no Kingdom of God, as if there is no other way to live than the way unbelievers live?  The way they live is not the right way to live, of that I have no doubt.  The world goes about everything the wrong way, of that I have no doubt.  And yet, as I said, I am reasonably content to go along, anyway.

And so when I read the saying above from Jesus, and must acknowledge the power and splendor of the gospel, and yet I can't be bothered about it, my conscience is seared as I contemplate the extraordinary labor Jesus undertook to bring His gospel to the world. 

I can only hope this confession serves as an introduction to the gospel of Jesus to any who pass here. . .

Faces

I don’t know when it started. It’s been a couple months at least. Probably longer.

I just can’t stand looking at peoples’ faces, anymore. It’s painful. It really is. Just a glance at somebody makes me ill. Something toxic there. I hate to say it because it will seem like I think I am better than everyone, which is the furthest thing from the truth.  I can’t stand to look at my own face.  When I see my own face, I automatically bark fuck you, motherfucker! or fucking idiot!

 When I look at a face I see the. . .wrongness.  The misuse.  The abuse of their own being.

No.  No.  It’s not really their own being.

It’s the abuse of their purpose. . .their design. . .their blood.

On the other hand, I don’t mind looking at small children. Toddlers. I feel tremendous sympathy. I feel so sorry for them. Look at them. Wobbling around this world. Most of them smiling, waving at strangers. They don’t know they’ve been set on the path to Hell. This life will be a hell, and then most of them will conclude in Hell.  I could cry, I feel so sorry for them, wobbling around this world.

Just Released

 

Uvalde: The Simple Answer

Here we are. . .again.

This ain't a complicated issue, people.  Don't be fooled by wicked ideologues (on the right or left) who try to score political touchdowns off the dead bodies of children.

If you stand Salvador Ramos next to a stack of 100 machine guns, and he is content with his life, he won't pick one up and shoot up an elementary school.

This ain't about gun control. . .

It ain't even about *mental health*. . .

It's about quality of life. . .

It's about the intent of life. . .

We are herded from birth into anti-life world.  If we have faith in Christ, we call it an anti-Christ world.

It's a purely material existence that can have no lasting value for a biological creature. . .

Most people deal with the shabby quality of their life by seeking escape in alcohol, narcotics, sex, domestic violence, gambling or any of the other Western *recreations.*

An increasing number are now moving beyond domestic violence to community violence. . .or maybe it's not an increasing number, who knows?  It doesn't matter.  

The issue of community violence can be solved by:

Removing guns,

or

Improving the quality of Western life by cutting out its materialistic core.

Neither will be done.  Right wingers are too indoctrinated into the faith of the 2nd Amendment to give up their ridiculously unnecessary guns (what the fuck does a 21st century human being need a gun for?), and both right and left wingers worship mammon.

Life is cheap, anyway.  Look how undervalued it is in Ukraine, where it counts less than a cloth flag.

Don't act like Uvalde is a tragedy if you accept as a necessity abortion or war.  

You can't choose either a little life or a little death.

Lastly, Salvador Ramos had no *mental health* issues.  The quality of life in the Western world is awful.  To sit and stare at a smartphone all day and eat Chipotle for dinner is a more a sign of poor mental health than shooting a school.  Shooting a school is the act of a soul on its last nerve in an insane world.

Payton Gendron, Victim

A teenage white supremacist who murdered 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket threatened to shoot a classmate at his high school graduation last year. Officials at the Susquehanna Valley High School brought in New York State Police to investigate Payton Gendron, 18, of Conklin, NY, in June of 2021 after he made statements that he would shoot fellow students. A year later he ended up shooting 13 people - 10 of them fatally - during an attack motivated by his hatred for black people at a Top Market supermarket in Buffalo. A school official reported that this very troubled young man had made statements indicating that he wanted to do a shooting, either at a graduation ceremony, or sometime after.  After police looked into the account, Gendron was referred for mental health evaluation and counseling.

Gendron is one of four boys born to Paul and Pamela Gendron, two civil engineers with the state who live in Conklin, NY, three and half hours south of Buffalo. Paul coached his kids in the town soccer league and at least one neighbor found him 'strange.' His mother appeared conceited, locals said. 'To be honest, the mother was kind of snooty,' a local parent who asked not to be named said. 'Like she was better than everyone else. The father was strange. Like when you meet someone and they just seem off.'

Another shooting. . .

The reaction to these shootings is always the same. . .the same tiresome rush to blame *the other side.*

This time, since the shooter is white, the reaction is devoted to blaming Tucker Carlson's rants and Lauren Boebert's Christmas card.  It's the same after every shooting: juvenile ideological score settling.

So tiresome. . .

So tiresome. . .

Look, even if Gendron had ingested and then adopted Carlson's idiotic rantings, at a certain age the individual becomes responsible for the trash he allows to pollute his psychospace.  Gendron is of that age. . .old enough to willfully deceive himself.

Whatever source for his racial angst, he choose to make racialism his creed.  Living in America, he cannot have failed to have heard the name Jesus, and thus he either refused to study Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, or he read and rejected them.  Whichever, he bears responsibility for rejecting the gospel for the moronic manifestos of racial mischief makers.

[And anyway, racialism seems rather the excuse to kill, than the reason to kill, since he had earlier threatened a school shooting in his neary-all white hometown.]

If any external actors can be assigned the sin of omission for Gendron's actions, it must be his parents, for they clearly failed the test of Proverbs 22:6. . .

But instead of making a second agent guilty, and smearing *the other side,* which again has now become so predictable and tiresome, let us show how there is no *other side,* there is only one side.

Please, do you really believe Gendron killed 10 people because he doesn't like black folk?  That's as far as it goes?  

Whether a white kills a black or a black kills a white, or an Arab kills a Jew or a Jew kills an Arab, or an incel kills a girl, or whoever kills whoever, the killer does so for the same reason:

The killer believes he is the victim.

The victim believes he’s under attack, and thus believes when he reacts with Satanic violence he’s acting in self-defense, and is therefore innocent.

Our friend Payton Gendron wasn't under attack from black folk.  He had to drive hundreds of miles to find enough to kill to calm his nerves.

Every human being, including Adam and Eve, was brought out of nothing and thrown into this world. . .but Adam and Eve were brought into a world of perfect harmony, they lived free of care. . .how must they have shined, compared to the anxious wrecks who walk the earth today?. . .but Adam and Eve victimized all who followed when they rejected their Easy Living for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  They were banished from harmony, and every one of us who followed, follows them into this world of chaos.  It's impossible to live in this world.  That is the lesson of history.

Every person who followed rightly believes himself a victim.  Even those who chance into material favor believe they are victims.  Look at Donald Trump.  Over and over, he paints himself the victim.

If Payton Gendron could live, he wouldn't kill black people.  He killed black people because he couldn't live.  It was impossible for him, or anybody else, to live in this world.  Black folk are merely the scapegoat.  Without black folk to blame, Gendron has no hope.  How can he live if he admits life is impossible?  So he adopts one of the fairy tales of racialism: without black folk, I can live.

No person can live in this world, which is out of order, but to admit that means the only answer is to live in God's world. . .but the door to that world is Jesus.  No other way into it.  

Payton Gendron didn't want that. He passed over Jesus, the door to life, and instead choose a retarded racialism.

Every person is a victim of Adam and Eve, and in that, there is some pity.  Whether or not that pity withers when we see Gendron pass over God's remedy for an assanine rememdy of his own depends upon our willingless to believe Gendron passed over Christ and choose negrocide from *Free Will.*

In any event, Tucker Carlson is not the problem.  The problem is the impossibility of living outside the Kingdom of God.

The Witch Who Came From The Sea

Molly’s enjoying a relaxing day at the beach, regaling her tween nephews with stories of their family’s adventures at sea, when she notices a group of male bodybuilders working out. She nearly salivates at the sight of their bulging muscles and, more particularly, the huge bulges in the crotches of their speedos. From her erotic revery, she descends into a trance-like state which climaxes(!!) in a blood-stained vision of their deaths-by-mutilations! Well, can any movie have a better opening scene? Nope. No way. But can any movie NOT go downhill from such a brilliant beginning? Probably not. And certainly not this one, a low-budget ‘70s grindhouse sexploitation shocker which has long dreary sequences of inept police procedural as the authorities try to track down the psycho who is mutilating he-men who appear on TV (football players, Marlboro Man-type commercial actors, etc.). Of course, the psycho is Molly, and the only other memorable moments are the porn-grade death scenes and ultra-lurid flashbacks which distastefully detail the nautical childhood trauma which turned adult Molly into an alcoholic homicidal nymphomaniac(!). Despite the tedious whodunnit interludes, the film remains watchable to its gOOfball tragic ending because of the offbeat seductive S&M charm of lead actress Millie Perkins. Her Molly is the strangest broken character you’ll ever see, and that she remains somewhat believable and always sympathetic throughout the muddled psycho-sexual babble is a testament to her performance (and her forty-year-old body, which shines like a star in its several nude scenes). And has any actress ever played two more polar-opposite characters than Millie Perkins? Molly in this crazy-ass thing, and Anne Frank in her film debut seventeen years earlier! That’s about as insane as this Shudder trash bin movie.

Trauma

The only point in attempting to detail the plot of a Dario Argento movie is for the amusement value that results from the realization the story is actually 10x more absurd than what you thought it was while watching it.

So:

Trauma:

16-year-old anorexic Aura (played in one of her trademark *eccentric* performances by Argento’s thin 18-year-old daughter Asia) runs away from her treatment clinic and half-heartedly tries to jump off a bridge (why is she suicidal? Who knows? Maybe because food is depressing?) before being talked down by a passing motorist who just happens to be a TV reporter who is investigating the Headhunter, a by-the-numbers Argento maniac who decapitates *his* victims with an *As Seen On TV*-looking motorized slicing thingy. . .next, the reporter returns Aura to her parents' house on the very night Aura’s by-the-numbers Argento weirdo spiritualist mother (played by the ever-grand Piper Laurie) performs a seance (!?!? Because? Argento!) which ends with her and her effeminate husband being decapitated by the Headhunter and Aura being sent back to the anorexia clinic by the cynical hard-ass police detective played by James Russo, but, of course, the Headhunter's next victims just so happen to work at that same clinic, so while a couple nurses are being decapitated, Aura escapes with the help of the reporter who was coming to the clinic to break her out because, well, just because maybe Aura is a little bit jail-baity, because soon Aura and the reporter are having some statutory rape-type sex in between Aura’s bouts of not eating, or eating and then vomiting, in between trying to figure out who the Headhunter is, all before Aura becomes so depressed she wanders off giving the reporter, for some reason, the impression Aura has drowned herself which causes the statutory rapist reporter to become even more depressed than Aura was, so he immediately becomes a drug addict bum stumbling around for days or weeks or who knows how long before he sees a still-alive Aura and follows her to a house where all the insane secrets of the Headhunter are revealed:

[SPOILER ALERT!]

20 years or so prior, while giving birth to her first, pre-Aura child, Piper Laurie's baby is accidentally decapitated (!?!?), and the bumbling hospital staff responsible for the atrocity decide to give Piper Laurie a massive jolt of electroshock therapy so she will forget their little blunder. . .then, for some reason, the soul of the dead baby waits about 20 years to contact its spiritualist mother and tell her about the maternity ward massacre, urging her to seek revenge on the incompetent medical staff, some of whom, of course, ended up working at her anorexic daughter’s clinic, and so, yeah, Piper Laurie is the Headhunter, and had, of course, merely staged her earlier presumed decapitation, apparently James Russo and his crack police staff didn’t bother doing any DNA or any of that kind of detective shit on the headless corpse which they thought was Aura’s mother, but, that's just a typical by-the-numbers little Argento detail not to be bothered with. . .anyway, Aura and mom are now living in this random house, and when the reporter follows Aura there and discovers her and her mother are still alive, mom, of course, is going to have to decapitate him, and is just about to when she herself is decapitated, for real this time, by the nosy next door neighbor butterfly collecting kid who has been mad at Piper Laurie ever since he saw her pet lizard eat a butterfly. The End.

This is one of Argento’s weaker efforts, for sure, with little of his renowned clever camera shots, and only the child birth/decapitation scene living up to the maestro's master giallo arch-gore-stylist/oddball Freudian psycho-babble reputation. It’s also Argento’s first movie filmed in America, in Minneapolis, of all places, although it seems more like Turin than Minnesota, perhaps due to Asia’s exotic accent and the cast’s weird wardrobe, they look like they are wearing leftovers shipped from the set of Deep Red rather than crap from Gadzooks, American Eagle, or even Mervyn’s. Beyond whether Aura will be able to choke down a grilled cheese sandwich without puking, there is almost no tension in the film. The music score is also sub-standard for an Argento film, and the nudity is kept to a *bare* minimum as well, perhaps due to some hesitation on Dario’s part for exploiting his own daughter, though he can’t resist shooting one brief scene with a topless Asia:

This is probably not even a mediocre movie, with the ludicrous script keeping you distracted from how boring it really is.  I mean, you barely even notice that the doctor at the anorexia clinic is Frederic Forrest, in one of his late oddball roles, or that one of the physicians who screwed up the childbirth is Brad Dourif, and he doesn't seem odd enough to even be a Brad Dourif character.  Not much of a movie, but then again, I saw it on Shudder, so what can we expect?

Ukraine Explained, II

So says the Hero of the Hour, Zelenskyy. . .

He says it's impossible to just say, OK, Ukraine is now part of Russia.  Well, no, it's not impossible.  It's very easy, in fact, and it would save many lives. . .

Zelenskyy says *Ukraine* is worth x number of human lives. . .

When these x number of people die, they will discover there is no *Ukraine*. . .

Ukraine Explained

1 March 2022: Residential areas in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, were being pounded by Russian shells while a massive 40-mile convoy of Russian tanks and vehicles rolled toward the capital of Kyiv on Tuesday as the war entered its sixth day.

At least 11 people were killed and 35 wounded in the rocket strikes on Kharkiv, Interior Ministry adviser Anton Herashchenko said. He said the rubble was still being cleared and the death toll was expected to rise.

Closed-circuit television footage showed a fireball engulfing a street in front of one building, and a few cars rolled out of the billowing smoke.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the attack on the city's main square “frank, undisguised terror. Nobody will forgive. Nobody will forget. This attack on Kharkiv is a war crime.”

At this point, blame for the deaths can no longer be solely placed on Putin. . .

It should be clear, even to the dumbest people, that lives would be saved if *Ukraine* surrendered. . .

Instead, Zelenskyy himself becomes a *war criminal* when he feeds the destabilized, psychologically fragile *Ukraine* people the following toxic spells:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy received a lengthy standing ovation before and after delivering an impassioned speech to the European Parliament. "At least two cruise missiles have hit the main square of that city. That is the price of freedom," he said. "We're fighting just for our land and for our freedom." Zelenskyy added: "Every square in our country will be called Freedom Square. Nobody will break us, we are strong, we are Ukrainians."

LOL Tragic!

Let's make this as simple as possible:

Imagine a *Ukraine* waitress struggling to pay bills and feed her kid.  How is her life worse if Putin's puppet government administers affairs where she lives?  Is she no longer a waitress with an unremarkably dreary life?  Conversely, what if *Ukraine* *wins?*  What will this *great victory* have added to her life?  Other than a few funerals to attend and streets riddled with potholes to maneuver?

At this point, how many dead *Ukraines* and dead *Russians* would still be breathing if Zelenskyy had done the sensible thing and *surrendered?*  He should have dissolved his meaningless government and welcomed in Putin's stooges, and he would have saved hundreds, thousands of lives.  This cannot be argued against.

We feel sorry for the *Ukraine* people, and wish they could look deep inside themselves, instead of looking outside themselves at the fever hallucination *Ukraine.*  This Zelenskyy poison, this war enchantment, is for the benefit of a phantasm, an unreality.  There is no *Ukraine.*  The *Ukraine* people need to look deep within themselves, to the cellular level, for that is where they exist.  That is what needs fighting for, and they can save their own cells simply by surrendering.

The longer Zelenskyy peddles these *Ukraine* fever dreams, the more responsibility he must assume for this:

"Yesterday, 16 children were killed," Zelenskyy said. "Again and again, President Putin is going to say that is some kind of operation."

Those 16 children would be alive had Zelenskyy dissolved his government.  He says Putin will call it an *operation,* but is that anymore dishonest than Zelenskyy's *patriotic* propaganda?  

There is no *Ukraine.*  There is no *Russia.*

Zelenskyy says he is fighting for *freedom!* LOL! The vast, vast majority of *Ukraines* wouldn't be any more or any less *free* no matter who runs their local government.  The *Ukraines* had a pro-Russian government less than ten years ago. . .I'm sure they can recall their lives were hardly different.

And so now they die of war madness. . .all the pointless *Ukraine* resistance glorified by the world's Media. . .when the *fog of war* lifts, and all parties look around at what's left, will they acknowledge they've been duped into a Satanic violence that accomplished absolutely nothing, other than lives extinguished so Zelenskyy could possibly keep his fancy job? 

[The Truth is: there is only the Kingdom of God. . .which most people couldn't give two shits about.  So, an argument could be made about this *Ukraine* situation along the lines of: Let them alone. They be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.]