Sunday, April 22, 2018

Seriously Silly Satire on HBO's "Silicon Valley"

Jared: You can be openly polyamorous. And people here will call you brave. You can put micro-doses of LSD in your cereal, and-- and people will call you a pioneer. But the one thing you cannot be is a Christian. Silicon Valley -Episode 4, Season 5
 Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own. Jonathan Swift
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On last week's episode of Silicon Valley, Mike Judge's send up of America's tech-culture on HBO, the uber-dweeb CEO of Pied Piper outs a fellow CEO who is openly gay, as a committed Christian - monogamous and church-going.  All sundry at a strategy meeting are shocked and both the outer and the outed stand to be shunned by the devout secularist majority.

  

This is satire worthy of Jonathan Swift -Swift is the guy who argued for the eating of Papist babies in the 17th century.

Jaimie Morrow of the Daily Post writes this
The show exists to call out the real Valley on its hypocrisy. To find the ruthless capitalism that glides beneath the veneer of “making the world a better place,” as when it highlights the dark side of the gig economy or presents tech billionaires powered more by self-aggrandizement and petty spitefulness than by their lofty rhetoric. This episode attempts to puncture the Valley’s much-vaunted commitment to diversity and inclusiveness by highlighting one group that is supposedly not included.

Yes, but later Morrow seems stung by the barbs and tries to salve those broad wounds with this in defence of Valley's ultramontane secularism

While the Valley has plenty of militant atheists, secular humanists and plain old nonbelievers, it doesn’t necessarily follow that Christians are oppressed. I’d certainly be interested to know what former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger and Electronics Arts co-founder Dave Evans, all prominent Christians, think of the matter.
Uh, huh. and professional law enforcement officers are asked to serve on Rahm Emanuel's police watch-dog inquisitions - COPRA et al. - as opposed to Peoples Gas activists. 

Christians are not approved in our Brave New World of cable, tech, politico-activism and that fact is causing  the great divide in the state of the civil union, once called the land of the free and home of the brave.

Mike Judge has taken a bold step toward bringing people together.

Sunday, April 15, 2018

The Sun Times in the 19th Ward? Don't Buy It

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The Sun Times has a perfect right to smear a whole neighborhood and I defend its right to do so. 

In the same way, the people who live in Beverly, Morgan Park and Mount Greenwood have a perfect right to ask that the Sun Times no longer be made made available for purchase.

My neighbors do not deserve to be regularly treated to this race-baiting editorial nonsense:

Like a match set to dry tinder, the slur set in motion a chaotic, Wild West-style melee on a sunny Saturday in November. Punches being thrown, bystanders forced to hide under restaurant tables, guns drawn and taunts called out?
That’s a scene that belongs in 19th Century Dodge City, not 21st Century Chicago.

This nonsense followed a fatuous cut-and paste job on Mount Greenwood by Frank Main and Sam Charles as an hors d'oeuvre to the above cited Sunday editorial.  People going to services at Mount Greenwood Community, Mount Greenwood Lutheran,St. Christiana, St. John Fisher, Queen of Martyr churches can pray for strength and a spirit of forgiveness.

After church and over breakfast maybe people can have a neighborly conversation about asking businesses in this neighborhood to stop carrying the Sun Times.

The Sun Times always wants to have a "conversation."


It goes like this , people who live in Mount Greenwood are hateful racists and  should accept any and all behavior - take it and like it and shut up about it. 

Fair enough. Well, in that spirit, sell your papers any where but here.

I pray that gas stations, franchisee-owned convenience stores located in and around the 19th Ward ask that Sun Times stop making delivery, because residents no longer want to read malignant nonsense from the Editors, Neil Steinberg, Mark Brown, Mary Mitchell, Jesse Jackson, Fran Spielman, Michael Sneed and the Watchdogs.

The people of my neighborhood will never, ever get a fair shake from the owners of Sun Times ( ChicagoReader et al) and they never have to this date.  The Chicago Reader called Mount Greenwood the worst neighborhood in Chicago - 'The Upside Down.'

I stopped buying the Sun Times years ago.

Where are our leaders on this?


Sunday, April 01, 2018

Jesus Rolled Back the Stone, but Anti-Semitism Reels Freely


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He is Risen!

My saviour rolled back a huge rock that denied God's promise to all men - "I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Exodus 20.2).

The specific people He bonded with are Semites - Jews.  His covenant was fulfilled from the House and and Family of David, the Root of Jesse, the Seed of Abraham. We Christians believe that, but forget that and we tolerate and often parse the Jew hatred of Muslims, atheists and others.  Jews are targets 2018 years after Jesus rolled back that stone.

PARIS—On April 4 of last year, a 67-year-old Jewish woman in Paris named Sarah Halimi was beaten to death and thrown off the balcony of her third-story apartment in a public housing complex by a neighbor who shouted “Allahu Akbar.” It took 10 months and a public outcry that began with France’s Jewish community, the largest in Europe, before prosecutors officially called the attack an anti-Semitic hate crime. Last Friday, Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, was stabbed 11 times and set alight by a neighbor and a homeless man. This time, authorities immediately, perhaps even prematurely, called it an anti-Semitic attack. GĂ©rard Collomb, France’s interior minister, said this week that before killing Knoll, one of the two men arrested for the murder had told the other, “She is a Jew, she must have money.”

2018 years after Jesus triumphed over death, sin and despair,  a huge hunk of the earth's population want Jews dead.    In Paris and Berlin the issue of how to get a grip on the thuggish, intellectually and politically sophisticated, right wing and left-wing interpretations of Jew Hate fill pages of the world's newspapers.  The German police call 90% of the attacks on Jews 'right-wing' crimes, even though evidence points to Arab and Turkish immigrants doing the attacks.

Less vicious in America?  Not the rhetoric.

Our spineless, American media makes mild mention of the repulsively racist rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan without drawing a gurgle of outrage from Pussy Hat wearing, marching members of the pan-Resistance, or the gun-hugging Roseanne viewing Deplorables.  The media will not hound Farrakhan, because he gave Obama his first boost and a ground campaign from Fruit of Islam in 2000 against Bobby Rush.  Obama didn't forget and posed happily America's number One Jew Hater in 2005, when Dan Hynes handed the US Senate seat to him.

Obama also was knotted around the political rhetorical genius of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck or in eight years when he’s out of office. They will not let him talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is. I said that from the beginning. He’s a politician; I’m a pastor. He’s got to do what politicians do.”

I have heard these nuggets from Americans (white, black, Hispanic, educated) people
  • Jews own the news
  • Israel is not the 51st State
  • Free Gaza from Homophobes
  • They bring it on themselves
  • Jews began racism
  • What's the Holocaust?  A Good Start
These same people wept at Schindler's List and cite The Diary of Anne Frank as their favorite book from high school.

My people, the Irish, especially the younger Irish, now seem to exceed the British in their Anti-Zionist Jew-baiting.  The Norman Conquest is over - the Irish are now fully British, thanks to OxFam Marxists and the BBC's ugly step-child RTE. 


Due to a virtual broadcasting monopoly, the way in which RTE treats contentious issues of major social concern, such as terrorism, migrant waves, the resurgence of European anti-Semitism, etc., arguably has a greater impact on the thinking of the Irish Nation than equivalent broadcasting institutions in other countries, such as the United Kingdom’s BBC, that compete with a strong private sector.
RTE’s audience reach extends beyond the Irish Republic, with media saturation in Northern Ireland, and its radio and television channels are viewed quite widely abroad, particularly in the UK mainland.

Just before all of the St. Paddy's Wearing of the green the Irish Seanad (Senate)  passed the most vicious anti-Semitic legislation in Ireland's history.

The Irish and Jewish people share a common history of both suffering cruel persecution, and achieving national redemption against immeasurable odds. But today, modern Ireland is one of Europe’s fiercest critics of Israel. This tension was on display last week as the Irish Senate was considering legislation aimed at criminalizing trade with Israeli settlements.
The legislation, titled “Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018,” would “prohibit the import and sale of goods, services and natural resources originating in illegal settlements in occupied territories,” according to Senator Frances Black, the bill’s sponsor.
While the vote on the legislation was eventually postponed, many in Israel saw it as another example of the growing effort in Europe to single out and boycott the Jewish state.
President Trump told Irish that if they boycott Israel, America boycotts them and he is the deplorable one.  Hell, I didn't like Trump, until he became President.
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Jesus rolled back the stone and went to Galilee, where he ended His days on earth with a bunch of Jews.

Jesus wept.