Meme: The Holy Septalogue for Atheists, Dummies, and Progressives

Hours before Memorial Day, Tom Roeser returned to Christ. Tom was a brilliant original thinker among a throng of 'Wait, Wait -Don't Tell Me!' group thinkers. Group thinkers are the readers of Cliff's Notes for Life or Redaction Graphic Novels. Cutting edge.

Across the pond of our continental east, lies the island nation of my forebears. The insular Irish are recovering from economic disaster and cultural vaporization. The Irish are Euro's - chock full of PC. The Irish pews are empty and the Mass Rock now has PC mold. During and after the Famine, the Faith kept the people resilient. The Faith is now Meme'd as the Sex Scandal of Cassocked Buggers and Croziered Cover-ups.
RTE -Raidió Teilifís Éireann or Irish PBS crows doctrines from its secular pulpit - just it it does here in Yankland.

Against this tide of slick imbecility is writer Kevin Myers of the Irish Independent. Mr. Myers is a witty, well-read, principled and courageous social critic, not unlike Chicago's angelic curmudgeon and 18th Century Man Tom Roeser.

Where there is original thought given voice there is hope. Last week I read two insightful criticisms by Mr. Myers of group thought - one on Aggressive Feminism and the other on the daffy Arab Spring ( Arab Spring was developed by NYT's Tom Friedman, or fed to him by NSC Samantha Power to remind us that the Mideast all of us helots that 'Just Like" Prague in 1968). In both cases, Kevin Myers links the atheist Darwinian Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene - Meme. Meme is the hot word tossed out by hip tossers and poseurs in print and on the air-waves.

Meme one writer states, "A meme is an idea that behaves like a virus--that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects."

Thus, Casino Gaming cures Budgetary Cancers; Marriage Can Be Legislated; Racists Don't Hope.

Kevin Myers is especially brilliant in taking down the goofy notion (meme) called the Arab Spring. This is the current group thought in currency among readers of the New York Times, Salon, listeners of NPR and viewers of PBS.

However, what makes the Arab Spring meme so fascinating is its sheer power. Consider Prague, home in 1968 to one of the finest symphony orchestras in the world and to one of the greatest ballet companies in Europe, with many lively schools of philosophical and literary debate.

I must have missed this somehow or other, but is there a Cairo Symphony Orchestra? A Syrian National Theatre? A Saudi Ballet Company, whose quite Diaghilevian brilliance, alas, is largely concealed by the ballerinas' burkas? Is there an intellectual ferment in Yemen about the role of the welfare-state in a post-Marxian neo-Hegelian dialectic? Does Kuwait resound to the chatter of female students discussing the maternal rights of lesbians? Are gays in Algiers preparing their first wedding ceremony, to be conducted by a transsexual rabbi?

Now that is one solid palate cleansing gulp of insightful original thought. The Meme crafters or the Selfish Genes in popular culture and print have succeeded in underminng Faith. Why understand human behaviorin the light of Faith? The Meme Doctors tell us that the Koran and New Testament are alike. Don't bother reading the Koran, trust us.

Imagine, if you will, Carol Marin objecting to the patriarchal hierarchy of the Imams,with the same vim and vigor that she castigated the Catholic Church for not ordaining women. Would Carol's noggin be receptive to stones and boulders of Islamic critics?

Current Memes demand that we accept on faith that !. Gay couples and married couples produced the same number of children, after all homosexuality is Gay! Think not? Homophobe!!! All convictions are the result of coerced confessions. Coerced Confessions are the result of torture; All Convictions must be paid off in millions of dollars/



Mosaic Law? Shucks we got these here Memes and there are only seven.


Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":[16]

1. Quantity of parenthood: an idea that influences the number of children one has. Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas that directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates.
2. Efficiency of parenthood: an idea that increases the proportion of children who will adopt ideas of their parents. Cultural separatism exemplifies one practice in which one can expect a higher rate of meme-replication — because the meme for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas.
3. Proselytic: ideas generally passed to others beyond one's own children. Ideas that encourage the proselytism of a meme, as seen in many religious or political movements, can replicate memes horizontally through a given generation, spreading more rapidly than parent-to-child meme-transmissions do.
4. Preservational: ideas that influence those that hold them to continue to hold them for a long time. Ideas that encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes.
5. Adversative: ideas that influence those that hold them to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those that hold them. Adversative replication can give an advantage in meme transmission when the meme itself encourages aggression against other memes.
6. Cognitive: ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them. Cognitively transmitted memes depend heavily on a cluster of other ideas and cognitive traits already widely held in the population, and thus usually spread more passively than other forms of meme transmission. Memes spread in cognitive transmission do not count as self-replicating.
7.Motivational: ideas that people adopt because they perceive some self-interest in adopting them. Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted memes do not self-propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with memes self-replicated in the efficiency parental, proselytic and preservational modes.

Behold! The Meme Septalogue!
Memorize and repeat after me: Thou shalt have no God other than Meme.

Tom Roeser - Chicago's Plutarch

Greece, by the turn of the first millennium, was a sad ruin of its former glory. Mighty Rome had looted its statues and reduced Greece to conquered territory. 1 Despite these circumstances, Mestrius Plutarchus (known to history as Plutarch) lived a long and fruitful life with his wife and family in the little Greek town of Chaeronea.

For many years Plutarch served as one of the two priests at the temple of Apollo at Delphi (the site of the famous Delphic Oracle) twenty miles from his home. By his writings and lectures Plutarch became a celebrity in the Roman empire, yet he continued to reside where he was born, and actively participated in local affairs, even serving as mayor. At his country estate, guests from all over the empire congregated for serious conversation, presided over by Plutarch in his marble chair. Many of these dialogues were recorded and published, and the78 essays and other works which have survived are now known collectively as the Moralia. . . .
Plutarch's plan in the Lives was to pair a philosophical biography of a famous Roman with one of a Greek who was comparable in some way. A short essay of comparison follows most of the pairs of lives. His announced intention was not to write a chronicle of great historical events, but rather to examine the character of great men, as a lesson for the living. Throughout the Lives, Plutarch pauses to deliver penetrating observations on human nature as illustrated by his subjects, so it is difficult to classify the Lives as history, biography, or philosophy. These timeless studies of humanity are truly in a class by themselves.

I looked at a replay of the Kirk-Giannoulias debate on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last night and was struck by the fact that the match-up shows the weaknesses and imperfectability of the human condition when squeezed by the vise of politics as nothing else has.
Nixon. A Success but Still Filled With Grievance.
Comparing it with the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon imbroglio which I have seen (in addition to its initial performance live) four times is fascinating. I am a great believer that experiences, good and bad, show up on people’s characters and faces beginning when they hit active middle age. In 1960 Nixon was 47, 5 feet 11 inches tall. 170 pounds, with wavy hair, brown eyes shaded by black, heavy eyebrows, a prominent ski nose, somewhat sagging jowls and a slightly protruding jaw—a face that narrowly missed being good looking. His health was generally adjudged as excellent but with a tendency to hypertension.

Tom Roeser

Plutrach paralleled the lives of the noble Greeks and Romans of history and myth- Theseus with Romulus, Themistocles with Camillus Cicero with Demosthenes, Phyrrus with Gaius Marius, Lysander with Sulla, Alexander with Caesar, Demtrius with Antony, andDion with Brutus - in all there were twenty three parallel lives.

Tom Roeser has been a public voice and an active civic leader in America from the time that he scooped an interview with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt after WWII, through his work with the Nixon Administration on Civil Rights right up to today's feature in Chicago Daily Observer.

Mr. Roeser wears his heart on his sleeve and speaks with a clarity and simplicity that seems lost on the dodgy and self absorbed columnist icons who bore a hole through Chicago Readers with cant, smarm and agendas.

Tom Roeser offers context and historical fact.

Like the Greek historian of the 1st Millennium Plutarch, Tom Roeser has offered in his Sun Times and Catholic Wanderer columns, as well as his editorials for Chicago Daily Observer, parallel lives of American public figures -FDR/Coolidge; Lincoln/GW Bush; John Brown?Pro Life Activists & etc.

Today, in considering the tepid candidacies of Alexi Giannoulias and Mark Kirk Tom Roeser contrasts those figure with the stark contrast of accomplished men -JFK and Nixon.

Click my post title and give Chicago's Plutarch a read.

http://www.freewebs.com/delicianleague/

SEIU's Andy Stern Will Turn America into Greece by Christmas! Obama Care Ain't Nothing Next to This Beauty!

SEIU's Mandarin Andy Stern has all the time in the world to 'give it to America- - good and hard!


Uncle Sam, grab them ankles! Red Andy is going to take flying leap ram home (ala Obama Care) the nail in your coffin, driving President Obama's Federal Deficit Reduction Panel!

SEIU which fuels President Obama's energetic drive to make America Greece*, Portugal, Ireland, France and et. has bullied its way into Roland Burris's claim to Obama's Senate seat; Obama Care; Card Check America; control of the American Auto Industry and onto the panel that will recommend that America pay a National Sales Tax - for starters - and pay for Government Takeover of everything not nailed down.

Andy Stern, President of SEIU, make ACORN look like a Quaker Meeting House. Andy Stern and Anna Burger have spent the last five years talking to the Chinese Government. Newsweek and Time have scrubbed those stories on the internet.

Andy Stern is no union leader - he is a Marxist. He owns the nitwits on MSNBC and most other cable news outlets, print paper editorial boards and his armada of SEIU websites - Illinois Progress, here at home. Of you think Obama Care is shady, hold the phone Sally.

Wait until Andy Stern dictates America's economic policies*.

President Obama's decision to appoint his close political ally, union leader Andrew Stern, to the newly created National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has set off a firestorm of criticism from business and conservative groups who charge he is a political radical who should be investigated for failure to register as a lobbyist.

The prestigious 18-member commission will study and recommend ways to whittle down the $12 trillion debt the federal government has amassed. Stern is one of six panelists Obama has named; the House of Representatives and the Senate will each appoint six others.

*

Reminder: The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. is probing the SEIU for possible violations of the Lobbying Disclosure Act for Stern’s frequent visits to the White House and with members of Congress in 2009.

Reminder: As head of the SEIU, Stern has groomed his own den of labor management thieves tangled in embezzelement/fiscal abuse across the country:

*Vat’s This? Hat Tip Tom Roeser!

The word’s going around Washington that Obama and the Left who have moved us to the status of a European state-controlled democracy will more than likely want to pay for it by having the National Deficit Commission…organized to come up with a strategy after this November’s election on how to cut the deficit and the debt…come up with the recommendation that the U. S. adopt the Value Added Tax or national sales tax which would be just like Europe’s. It would trigger as well-spring of revenue and allow the Left the option of presenting a good many other socialist ideas. It’s bound to be a key debate issue in 2012.


http://michellemalkin.com/2010/02/22/biggest-sign-that-white-house-deficit-panel-is-a-joke-o-wants-to-appoint-andy-stern/

Ben Stein,Mensch- UnDamaged by Celebrity and Touched With Humanity

This is a full text of Ben Stein's Last column Monday Nights at Mortons a glimpse at celebrity lifestyles in Hollywood.

Ben Stein, like my pals Mike Houlihan, Tom Roeser, Elias Crim, Steve Rhodes, John Powers and Max Weismann, is a Renaissance Man. Mr. Stein is a film maker, comic, wit, economist, professor and political analyst. More importantly, Mr. Stein is a Mensch* - a human being to the backbone! Read this fine analysis of fame, fortune and fraility.

Huge Hat Tip to Leo Hero - Robert Hylard ( Leo '44):

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?

As I begin to write this, I 'slug' it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is 'eonlineFINAL,' and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened.
I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a 'star' we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.

They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit , Iraq . He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad . He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordinance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad .

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer co mfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament...the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.

I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin...or Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York . I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.


Faith is not believing that God can.
It is knowing that God will.
By Ben Stein

* "Reason in man is rather like God in the world."- St. Thomas Aquinas

Click my post title for Ben's House!

"Let me get through today, and I shall not fear tomorrow." - St. Philip Neri

The Roman Catholic Church was on the canvass in the late 16th Century, because the clergy had become secularist - priests, bishops, and even Popes more interested in promoting political action than in Doctrine.

Martin Luther threw the hay-maker when he challenged the Church theologically by nailing his 95 theses for debate on the Church door of Wittenberg.

All of the smart money was on the Protestant reforming factions and the Islamist threat posed by Suleiman the Magnificent.

The Catholic Church was not knocked out, but it did hear the ref doing the counting.

Before the ten count, it got off the canvass. The Church went back to its corner, swished some holy water around its choppers and spit the bad blood in the bucket - at the Council of Trent. The Church returned to its roots.

However, Catholics more so than the Red Hats seemed to make the practical difference - Ignatius Loyola - a Dog Faced Wounded Vet - formed the Jesuits and set about actually doing what the Apostles were told to do.

Another gent, Philip Neri worked up the lay people.

Neri was a rich kid from Florence. He decided to put business aside and work to help the Church and moved to Rome. For three years he toyed with idea of being a priest, but determined to work with lay people.

He amassed a group of like minded lay people and through conversations during the business day sought to live lives that would strengthen the Church. It worked. He developed a concept called the Oratory - a place where lay people could pray and discuss their Faith.

Philip Neri's Oratory became so popular that Neri's Confessor urged him to get himself ordained a priest - he did.

Neri used humor to poke fun at false assumptions doctrine and the practical life of most people.

There are Catholics out there concerned with the sad state of Church and continued lap-dogging of some in the clergy - like the President of that PR Driven School in Indiana, gutless 'catholic' politicians who go to Pancake breakfasts with the Knights of Columbus and then do the bidding of Planned Parenthood to kill more kids.

John Powers and Tom Roeser are two of the most public Philip Neri's in Chicago.

My neighborhood is packed with people who live the Gospel, while the chaps being paid to say Mass act like bitchy little girls.

There are priests like Father C. Frank Phillips,C.R. of St. John Cantius Parish at Chicago Ave. & Sangamon on the north side who have sparked devotion through the beauty, grace and dignity of the Traditional Latin Mass ( Novus Ordo & Tridentine) and he has helped attract more Americans to Holy Orders than any seminary. Go to St. John Cantius and witness a Church alive! Packed. Every Mass.

http://www.cantius.org/

The Catholic Church has been on canvass many times in history.

There always seems to be a Philip Neri to help the Church spit out its busted teeth and get back in the fight.


http://stbarbara.blogspot.com/

http://tomroeser.com/

Governor Lisa Madigan - and not because of her Dad. Read Tom Roeser and Steve Rhodes

Even The Hoods like Lisa Madigan.

Mr. Tom Roeser and Master ( He's Way Younger than Tom and much younger than me) Steve Rhodes are two very sharp Chicago political observers and clear political journalists.

They are poles apart politically and pols mean very little to them personally.

Today both gents treated the discerning reader to the expected arrival of Governor Lisa Madigan (D.IL).

First the insight and judgment of Tom Roeser. After giving Rep. Mark Kirk (R.) a tune-up over his Pro-Choice on Abortion -a Woman's Right to Kill Her Kid - Tom Roeser nails it:

At this writing no one has heard from Kirk about his plans. But this is just to say to the party’s financial leaders who are planning that double-digit budget: it will all go to waste and be lost in the election of Lisa Madigan (likely to be the Dem gubernatorial nominee) if you don’t consider conservative grassroots people in the gubernatorial selection. Madigan is a veritable pinwheel of grassroots movement support: pro-aborts, feminists, labor, gay rights. You name a nice little guy with a cute button nose and smile but no grassroots and you’ll once again have to relearn what you should have learned when you nominated Judy Baar Topinka: a Republican nominee for governor with no grassroots conservative support can’t make it.

http://www.tomroeser.com/

Attorney General Lisa Madigan has performed as a solid Attorney General for Illinois and has made that Office her own and no adjunct to her Dad, Speaker Michael Madigan's adult direction of Springfield. Governor Pat Quinn is a lovely guy, who made a career as the earnest clean-government hobby-horse rider in the sky. He's is Governor of Illinois because Illinois wanted Rod Blagojevich and gave that goof enough gas in his Mo-Ped to ride all over that desire. Why to go Land O' Lincoln!

Governor Pat Quinn wants to shoot Illinois' feet off with a tax from hell. Alpha Mike Foxtrot, as Marty Tully would say. Marty did a bunch of tours in Vietnam before becoming one of the two best homicide cops in Chicago.

Mr. Roeser, the Illinois Samuel Johnson, picks up the Governor Madigan specimen with the delicacy of a Loyola University Medical Center Neurosurgeon. This Butterfly Lives! Lisa Madigan flies on gossamer-like wings made of a cotton and linen blend, with red and blue minute silk fibers running through it -dollar bills miles of them.
Those dollars come from real Labor Unions and also PACS -ACORN/SEIU/Planned Parenthood & etc.the Democratic Party Astro-turf. The GOP tends to draw dough from businesses and rich guys.

Lisa Madigan will be the governor of Illinois.

Then, at the NBC website, the brilliant and witty Steve Rhodes with more pithy prose and Progressive sympathies states the glaringly obvious -

Madigan can always change her mind, or opt to run for another office, but right now she - or somebody on her behalf - is raising money in preparation for something, and seeing as how the e-mail references a poll that looked at a match-up with Quinn, there is no other conclusion to draw at the moment.

That poll, sponsored by the Service Employees International Union, showed Madigan with a 48-24 lead over Quinn in the city of Chicago, with 28 percent undecided. An early poll like this has limited value, but its portentous that Madigan is raising money off it.

The path to Springfield is paved with dough - that is nothing new, nor is something to pull your skirts up and shriek like a fair, fat and fifty something Maiden Aunt.
There is a right way to raise money and the Blagojevich way - 'Hey, I'm gonna be Governor . . . know what I mean? That's some wallet you got there. Gimme it!'

All the Campaign Reform nonsense comes from losers who could not get anyone with the pilot light going to drop them a nickel. That is why SEIU and Planned Parenthood shower dough on Forty Watt Howlers like Jan Schakowsky. I could care less if anyone financed his own campaign or had the backing of Uncle Moneybags. The smart money goes on the horse with the best blood, feed, trainer and record.

Lisa Madigan is the Class of Field. The Oat-blowers of the Democratic Party and the Glue Bottle-Aspirants of the GOP should be aware of the very sound drubbing they will get from Lisa Madigan.

Chicago Genius Tom Roeser Skewers and Broils Chicago Media Morons!

Thomas Roeser, Chicago's answer to 18th Century genius Dr. Samuel Johnson, skewers huge chunks of the meat heads who pass themselves off as journalists in Chicago.

Roeser, whose resume is longer than a Studs Terkle story, helps John Powers, local philanthropist and businessman, run Chicago's only balanced and authentic news and opinion organ Chicago Daily Observer.

It is so nicely balanced, that my south side musings appear along side those of Progressive genius, journalist, historian and political analyst Don Rose, who sent more brain cells down the drain of the gents at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap than I'd ever hope to have.

Roeser deconstructs the Chicago Media icono-sphere with all of the glee of Smash McKenna ( Pipe Coverer Extraordinaire!) in doing similar justice to a bust-out who grabbed Nualla's tip money at Keegan's Pub - more gore than Titus Andronicus and much more hilarious!

We start with Carol Marin the political columnist of the “Sun-Times.” She made her mark as a smooth TV anchor and feature reporter where her views were not readily known. Then came her rebellion at Channel 5 when management wanted to include Jerry Springer as a commentator. She left with a tsunami of favorable publicity but what wasn’t realized at the time was that her renegotiation was up for grabs and she might not have been retained anyway. But it worked. She has a smooth TV style--but as soon as she went over to the “Sun-Times” her mood 1960s Mother Superior attitude…literally…conveyed her true beliefs, that of a morally superior dilettante in politics who wants to enable true social justice on earth. Social justice means the welfare state…and which party better represents this goal than the Dems. All tied up in her sense of religious self-rectitude -which betrays, of course, a sense of vacuous non-theology.
Her first column was to celebrate that 14-carat phony with a self-embroidered history of radical activism from yesteryear, Studs Terkel, 96, a self-promoting agnostic windbag who named one of his kids after declared Communist stage actor and singer Paul Robson and , to hear Terkel tell it in his rasping voice which thrills his listeners since they fathom the real man of the street is talking… marched with the Wobblies, braved assaults from the club-wielding goons in the Armour strike, endured beatings with Walter Reuther in the Detroit sit-down strikes of the 1930, fought the white racists who opposed blacks swimming off a South Side pier in the 1920s, was black-listed because of his opposition to that hideous Joe McCarthy…all the stories inflating in coloration by the year-some invented out of whole cloth--while Ms. Marin beamed expressively and accepted his supposed man-in-the-street lingo as true genre.

As the late Steve Neal, no conservative, pointed out in a column Terkel never did anything of note for the “working class,” is in reality a b.s’ing blatherer of tales who would long since have been thrown out of a neighborhood bar for inculcating terminal boredom, since he has lived far longer than most and has license to exaggerate scandalously without fact-checking. Aside from a brief acting career on early TV, Terkel’s has done nothing noteworthy except to snap on a tape recorder and capture stories from first-hand participants for which, as a canny capitalist, he paid nothing but from which he made a fortune for himself-beginning with “Division Street America.” A self-proclaimed man of the people, he deliberately never learned to drive and rides a bus, taking care to sit by the window where he, festooned in his red-checked shirt, can be quickly glimpsed. I debated him once at Bughouse Square. A coward when confronted, this giant puff ball self-inflated turned into a clawless pussy cat. I actually went easy on him after he caved. It was the first time he was ever called on any of his stories because his recollections were at variance with history. Marin the dilettante swallows it all.
The late John McDermott a once squishy soft liberal but always a truly authenticist Catholic (who changed to a Reagan voter because of the pro-life issue,…and who was for years an office mate of mine)…once embarked on a self-designated campaign to encourage Marin, either a fallen away or fallen away wanna-be to re-embrace the faith. According to McDermott her conditions involved the whole swath of feminism: contraception, abortion rights, keep-your-hands-off-my-womb, women priests, women bishops, gay rights. Oh, said I, sarcastically, by all means let us immediately reformulate 2000 years of theology so Carol will go back to the church! He never gave up on her and remembered her in his prayers every day. I said: save your breath.
So Democratic party cross-eyed is she that when she interviewed Henry Hyde for her paper she had to put in the piece that she told him she came from a family where the women never voted Republican-as if anyone cares…but it was her way of squaring herself to write about him at all. Her way of getting an insight into how the presidential campaign is going is to sit down with David Axelrod whom (ith her little girl naivete) he thinks will give it to her straight. So cross-eyed is she that she actually believes this stuff.

Always a treat to see Tom tune-up the fatuous loudmouth Studs Terkle. Avail yourselves Citizens! Avail Yourselves!


Skewered and Grilled! Get some more with Tom Roeser!

Illinois' s Tom Roeser - Authentic

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble. Samuel Johnson ( 1709 -1784)

We must be authentic. We should not wish to be like anyone else but be true to ourselves. Tough business.

Principles, ethics, integrity, commonsense and authenticity are the core values that tend to make us act better toward one another and they are the roots by which we too often fabricate an artificial framework from which we operate. I tend to dodge and hide from what I know needs to be done in keeping with what I hold to be true.

'I am a Catholic'

'Go to Mass, Yesterday?'

'No, why?'

'It was a Holy day of Obligation ( Catholics should go to Mass - Feast of the Assumption ( August 15th The Dormition of the Theokotos to Greek & Eastern Rite Catholics) - The Mother of God was Assumed into Heaven; thus, avoiding natural decay of the Body - we say we believe that this is Doctrine)

'My Kids wanted to go to the Air and Water Show after I got off of work.'

'I see.' Yes, Sir, that Hickey is one Fine Catholic!

Yep, so much for core principles reflected in my outer deportment. We Compromise. Rather, we Kop a Plea, more often than not. I am conflicted ( 24/7), I should be rejoicing every time a former bust-out lawyer who woke up one day and found that there is Gold in suing an entire Religion - Catholic - but I really can not. I hate pedophile priests, but I also hate ambulance chasers making millions off of the Clergy Abuse Scandal. They can sue the Catholic Church, no worry. The Catholic Church is an easy target, especially when a Progressive Media has an opportunity to howl and harrumph all high and mighty at the Church's expense, while ignoring any and all other institutions plagued with pedophiles, or citing get-rich-quick opportunists - fair is fair, and completely absent with the Media. The Ambulance Chasers and ther media stooges have no such luck when it comes to suing a Public School District when Coach Grabowski makes the same play for a child as Father Peckerphile. The Trial lawyers have a gren light suing the Catholic Church, but they can not do the same against a Public School District, or a Fire Department, or the Cook County Clerk's Office. They would not want to sue a black preacher's Church, for example the the celebrated and long forgotten Rev. Paul Hall - bad Progressive Juju that.

We learn to develop our behavioral patterns early in life and the more blessed of us have had great people to emulate. The woman who raised four daughters on a teacher's salary and sent them all to Ivy League Schools on Scholarships after her husband took off with another woman and looted their savings always brings tears to my eyes, when I remember her struggles in Kankakee in 1970's.

Progressives invent icons. People emulate real people.

I look to people like my Dad and my uncles as examples of Authentic behavior. My Uncle Bud once welded shut the incinerator at Cook County Hospital used to burn fetuses, while he was Chief Engineer there. He stared down Cook County President George Dunne - George Dunne caved and later appointed him Chief Engineer for all of Cook County. That was in the days before the Progressive took root and elected officials with steel spines could tell the activists to go piss up a rope.

In Public life, Illinois is blessed with Mr. Tom Roeser - a walking Renaissance Man: Publisher, Lecturer, Author, Radio Host, Raconteur, Government Man, Corporate Man, Catholic and American Patriot.


I find no one coming close to matching the 18th Century genius ( compiled the 1st English Dictionary) Poet, Wit, Essayist and Patriot - Dr. Samuel Johnson - with sole exception of Mr. Tom Roeser.

If you want to know what authentic means, talk with, or better yet, read Tom Roeser. Click my post title for what I consider to be one of Mr. Roeser's finest and most authentic pieces - a criticism of Democrat and Republican Catholic Hairsplitters on Abortion and the parsing away of integrity by too many of us. Tom Roeser holds on to Authenticity and has become the encorpified litmus test to living a good, productive, and sharing life. Be authentic, dodge not, and you will have no problem with Mr. Roeser, be you conservative, liberal, Marxist, Catholic, Orhodox or Reform Jew. Be what you are about, or save it for the tourists. Tom Roeser lives here!

Tom Roeser has more close friends than any person I know and many of those friends differ with Tom on religion, politics, music, liturgy, or most anything. I have been blessed with his friendship. Tom, like all great people, sets the bar a little higher for us. The True test of Love and Affection is to be found in our individual willingness to expect that our friends to live authentic lives - void of sham and cant and nonsense.

Tom Roeser makes all of us do spot checks on our unique Authenticities. Roeser on behavior is like Sterling on Silver - to snatch thought from the old Wanzer Milk ads.

Tom Roeser - Authentic.





Authenticity - refers to the truthfulness of origins, attributions, commitments, sincerity, devotion, and intentions.

Tom Roeser is a Chicago-based conservative writer and broadcaster, currently broadcasting on WLS 890 AM talk radio. [1]

Roeser is a former fellow of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard [2], former vice president of Public Affairs at the Quaker Oats Company [3], former Woodrow Wilson International Fellow at Princeton, and former Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Roosevelt University, Chicago. He is a Senior Fellow of The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free market-oriented think-tank[4].


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Roeser