cultural rot

Chris Knight's avatar

Gonna have to gripe about something here folks…

The 36 inch high-def Toshiba television that had faithfully served me since 2008 has given up the ghost. Well, it turns on okay. But the sound level goes WAY up on its own before it loses picture entirely. I decided it was time to retire it. In keeping with that whole “new life” theme going on with my life lately: new job, new car, new iPhone, new collar for Tammy… lots of good stuff happening.

Well, I thought that Amazon might have a good deal on a new TV. I went looking and quickly found one perfect for my needs. Not the biggest or fanciest, certainly not the smallest, but ideal for my situation. It definitely has a lot of high ratings on Amazon. I added it to my cart and checked out. Amazon told me that it would be here in ...

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Chris Knight's avatar
Danny de Gracia

Friend, fellow writer and fighter-in-the-good-fight Danny de Gracia has published some well-recommended thoughts this week about the correlation between the quantity of legislation and the resulting amount of public morality.  It has been the conventional wisdom throughout history that more laws equals a more perfect society.

But does it really?  De Gracia doesn’t think so.  In fact, as he writes in separate pieces for The Washington Times as well as his own blog, the ever-growing volumes of law being produced have made things worse.  They are, in truth, a symptom of a far worse problem: the spiritual condition of the human heart, which no act of government can change.

From de Gracia’s essay in The Washington Times:

When first-time candidates run for office, most pitch a platform
promising “change” in the form of new laws. Incumbent legislators are
often attacked by challengers not for the number of

...
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Chris Knight's avatar

In case you missed it the first time, tonight at 7 p.m. EST the SyFy channel will be re-broadcasting its natural disaster epic Sharknado.  Last week’s premiere of the movie – about a freak hurricane spawning off the coast of California and hitting Los Angeles, dropping shark-spewing tornadoes all over the place – became one of the biggest television hits of the summer.

(No, I did not watch this movie thing last week.  But the “#sharknado” hashtag on Twitter was sure a hella fun to behold!)

And then there’s this, which is certainly destined to become the centerpiece of every home entertainment library it finds itself ensconced upon: The Power Rangers Legacy: The First 20 Years DVD collection.  Just in time for the twentieth anniversary of the Mighty Moron… errrr, I mean Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers show which first unleashed this plague upon the land, Saban and ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Jobs are evaporating.  Manufacturing is disappearing from our shores.  Millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants are flooding across our borders.

And now, at long last, the population of Americans on government food assistance outnumbers that of private sector employees.

This is not sustainable.

From the story at CNS News…

The number of Americans receiving subsidized food assistance from the
federal government has risen to 101 million, representing roughly a
third of the U.S. population.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates
that a total of 101,000,000 people currently participate in at least
one of the 15 food programs offered by the agency, at a cost of $114
billion in fiscal year 2012.

That means the number of Americans receiving food assistance has
surpassed the number of full-time private sector workers in the U.S.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were 97,180,000 full-time private sector workers in 2012.

...
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Chris Knight's avatar

And by that I mean, Kermit Gosnell has chosen life in prison.

He could have chosen death.  Gosnell dropped his appeals in exchange for life, not death.

I’m not the first to note the irony that given a choice, Gosnell chose life.

If only his victims had been given the same choice…

Kermit Gosnell, abortion, abortionist
Kermit Gosnell: He chose life for himself, death for babies.

Kermit Gosnell, abortion “doctor”, found guilty yesterday of murdering three babies (he had been charged with killing four) during botched abortions at his “clinic”. Gosnell was quoted as remarking that Baby A was “big enough to walk around with me or walk me to the bus stop.”

You may not have heard much about Kermit Gosnell. In fact, you might not have heard anything at all about him. The mainstream media was curiously quiet about his case. I don’t know whether it was because the details about went ...

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Jason Collins is no Jackie Robinson.

In 1947 there was an institutionalized discrimination against non-white athletes playing in major league sports.  Jackie Robinson broke through that barrier not because he happened to have been a black man but because he was very, very good at playing baseball.

In 2013 there is no institutionalized discrimination against gay athletes, lesbian athletes, bisexual athletes or transgender athletes.

So what does Jason Collins think he is proving by telling everyone “I’m gay”?

Does that make him a better basketball player?  I thought the whole point of sports as a multi-billion dollar commercial venture was to hire the best players possible, manage the team to the best of your ability and turn a profit by winning lots of games, selling lots of tickets and letting fans buy lots of over-priced beer.

So where does “I’m gay” figure into the scheme?

I’ve worked many jobs over ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft, Ryleh“That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.”

— from The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft

It was 1928 when Howard Phillips Lovecraft published The Call ...

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