This guy grew a nose. Does it look familiar?

I’m keeping it frozen to preserve it. Might auction it off.

MK

How far out of touch are the “elites”?  Who knows?  I’m pretty sure they live on the same planet with the rest of us, but whether or not they breathe the same air is up for discussion. For sure, their brains are wired differently.

We have some pretty desperate things going on in this world.  I’m going to try and avoid getting into Chicken Little fear mongering, but for crying out loud, there are seriously important things happening!  There are wars and rumors of wars – horrible situations where mass murder and intentional starvation of whole populations are occurring right now.  Extreme weather phenomena unlike anything we’ve ever experienced, flooding in Brazil, tornado outbreaks in the US and places like China, countries that have until now been known as desert lands are getting catastrophic flooding, and the whole world seems not to notice. At least these things aren’t getting much press.

At this writing, the earth is in the crosshairs of multiple coronal mass ejections from the sun. CMEs are extremely high-energy blasts of electromagnetic plasma.   Last night my daughters and I drove to a vantage point and witnessed and photographed normally unheard-of low-latitude auroras here in southern Missouri.  Even scientists are not able to predict the level of damage these solar events might cause to our electrical infrastructure.  Three CMEs have arrived at our rock with four more to come this weekend.  Might not disrupt anything, and might destroy our electrical grid, sending us all back to the early Pleistocene, and if these concerns are not enough to get your attention, the Met Gala was just celebrated a few nights ago. Talk about getting some press…

Yes, while 99% of the world’s population was distracted by such mundane occurrences as climate catastrophes, landslides, savagely imposed genocide, starvation, war, and cosmic wave bombardment, the “biggest” event of the year happened in New York, complete with red carpets and half-dressed women.  Wikipedia calls it “the most prominent, glamorous, and exclusive social event in the world.” It’s the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute fund raiser.  Enough jet fuel was undoubtedly burned to guarantee a significant rise in the world climate temperatures just to get all those private jets to this fete of idolatry, and don’t think for a minute that Greta didn’t notice. 

I wonder just how many of my hillbilly friends here in the Missouri Ozarks will be stressed today when they find out they have missed out on this event, caught up in lesser world affairs like trying to work on their cars, or sitting up at night trying to figure out how they’re going to buy groceries and pay their bills.  Such trivial considerations should have been put aside at least long enough to expend a little saliva over this Hollywood set and their multi-million-dollar party.  There’s just not that many nights when we have opportunity to fawn over glitz like the Met Gala, and those folks didn’t spend all that time and money on make-up and costumes just to go ignored by the peasant class. 

This post should serve as a reminder to the lesser members of society like us that we are being incredibly selfish by allowing ourselves to be caught up worrying about our health care and praying for unfortunate peasants being slaughtered in distant lands while we could be fawning and adulating over celebrities stepping out of limousines and movie directors who all have taken time out of their own lives at incredible sacrifice to themselves to put on this event for us.  Of course, these folks are accustomed to being victimized by the underclass, but still, it’s simply not fair.  If you did happen to catch some or all of it, you might have been left feeling as if there was an air of decadence to the whole affair.  If this is the case, rest assured it was intended.

We get to see widespread acceptance of many genres of worldliness intersecting with idolatry these days, such as the Gotthard Tunnel opening ceremony, the opening dance of Cern, the Oscars, snippets from the Bohemian Grove, and now this Met Gala thing, and if you can’t see the connection, you cannot know much about God.   If you don’t understand what Jesus warned us about when He admonished us not to be a part of this world, try to watch something like this while concentrating on starving children in Gaza.  The very same servants of Satan are involved in the worldly pursuits of the “rich and famous”.  This is how they view the world – it’s what they’ve come to know.  Fawning crowds and armies of photographers are what they’ve come to expect.  They could never appreciate sitting out in the edge of the woods at sunset and enjoying the sweet songs of night birds.  They’ve sold their souls and part of that transaction has cost them any appreciation for God’s creation.  They are enslaved to their notoriety and can never again be free, and they hold folks like us in contemptuous disregard because we haven’t made the deal – those of us who have chosen a different path never will – for any amount of wealth.

Jacob Rothschild died recently.  So did Sheldon Adelson.  These were extremely wealthy men.  Where are their souls now?  “For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?”, asks Jesus.  I’m sure that while their meteors are streaking across the sky before the adulating eyes of the world, they do not concern themselves with such trivial thoughts as the fate of their eternal souls – apparently, there’s just too much fun to be had in decadent insouciance.  But I wonder how well they sleep.

Here we are on a rainy Ozark morning.  It’s Tuesday and another civilization’s end has come and gone.  Yesterday we survived the horrendous solar eclipse, the devil comet, a fatal planetary alignment, and a rapture in which no one was raptured.  Shame on all Christians who bought into that, and double shame on all the preachers who garnered You Tube clicks stirring up such claptrap.  Although the National Guard was activated, nothing noteworthy happened in all of those towns named Ninevah along the track. Apologies to Jonah.  As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, there was no Mayan calendar influence this time, nor did all of the world’s computers kill off all humanity as you remember happened in that Y2K event a few years ago.

It’s as though every time something odd happens these days, we’re supposed to expect Armageddon to materialize, and everyone should run to whatever underground facility they might have contrived to wait it out.  My family, ignorant of such necessary precautions, sat out in the yard and watched the Pac-Man sun gobble up the silhouette of the moon through those cheap cardboard glasses, and, oddly enough when the solar disc was blotted out, none of us were able to make out that mysterious planet that hides behind the sun, although it is nonetheless there, teeming with extraterrestrials – each undoubtedly with probe in hand waiting for the next ship to earth to practice whatever fearsome cosmic version of proctology is required nowadays.

Speaking of those eclipse glasses, I’m trying to figure out how to hawk mine on Ebay.  I doubt if I’ll be around to need them for another horror-evoking moon shadow, and they’ve only been used once, albeit for several minutes.  They’re in like-new condition, and If I can keep my kleptocaniac pup from stealing and eating them, they’d be easy enough to ship to a new user.  If someone would buy them now, they could avoid the panicked rush of the next end of the world, in which people would no doubt again find themselves groping about in another maelstrom of horror.  They could thus avoid extraneous pursuits such as trying to find glasses in the last few minutes of the earth’s existence once more.  It’s obviously much more profitable and spiritually rewarding to spend those moments poring through social media video menus for terror-inducing information such as the cicada invasion that was supposed to accompany this most recent termination of humanity.  As our Ozark farm darkened with the ominous and obvious conclusion of our earthy existence, I listened intently for the heart-stopping forest echoes that no doubt had scientists in a blind panic across the country, but as I’m old and kind of hard of hearing, I guess I missed it.

When end of the world events like that eclipse happen, people should always try to get plenty of video and record the sights and sounds, for there’s nothing like sitting around with the family later on in life sharing all the captured marvels of the most recent planetary ending. 

Hope y’all had a wonderful end of the world this time – maybe a better one next time!

MK

Think tanks. That’s what they call them. They have important sounding names. They do important work. You don’t know what a think tank is? Think of a septic tank, only one that works backwards. These are institutions of magnificently knowledgeable people who, among many other very wise abilities, can see into the future and prognosticate – such as an opponent’s next move if one moves the queen to the knight’s third row and so forth. Such prescience concentrated within a relatively small bandwidth should at the very least warp time and space; of course, government leaders know this and bend their collective wills accordingly and apply whatever dictates that result from these esteemed academicians’ well-considered formulations and strategies. Especially when it involves US foreign policy. This level of wisdom cannot be contained by any known means and kept within the bounds of their group psyche, so it must by virtue of its virtuousness, be disseminated as the wisest of any available wisdom and it is therefore sought and unquestioningly applied in all profound decision making. And all their products come with the caveat that any strategic failure is to be blamed on the decision maker (conveniently neglecting to mention that the decision was based on their advice).

It was from these very founts of effusive omniscience that there were determined to be horrific threats of dominoes falling in southeast Asia and the existential challenges to freedom and the American way of life those damnable falling dominoes would surely bring upon us. All-prescient determinations were made with the certainty of these deemed threats in mind, and as always in avoidance of (and with the obligatory contravention to) common sense and/or any evidence of human compassion, they directed the government to apply military might in such a way as to avert the falling domino catastrophe, while befriending the locals’ hearts and minds by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of them, and with generous donations of napalm and agent orange onto their villages and the surrounding countryside. What could possibly go wrong? Beginning with the Gulf of Tonkin, this was one of the signature achievements of our academic caliphates, and by April of 1975, it had demonstrated to the world the effectiveness of the American think tank. (The tragedy that was the Vietnam war was/is no laughing matter, please do not read this as an attempt to make light of that – what is important is to realize what an unnecessary and complete failure it became).

There are countless examples of the value of think tanks to foreign policy. Due to their unparalleled genius, advice from outside-the-box thinkers like Brzezinski and Kissinger heavily influenced courses of action such as the partial destruction of southeast Asia, the complete destruction of select European countries, and the entire Middle East. Why, these efforts might have never been undertaken, much less accomplished with such thoroughness and rigor if not for the prescient instigation by such wise and learned groups of men and women. These types invariably advise the application of conflict and death in scenarios for which their impeccable wisdom is sought and most of the time these tidbits of proverbial insight have the unexpected (and surely unintended) result of a boon of massive profits for various contractors and arms suppliers.

We’ve reached a point in history where leaders hardly make a move without going to one or more of such gaggles of wisdom for consultation with their resident oracles, always gathered at the gates to guide their steps. After all, when a leader takes advantage such veritable fountains of profound academic and strategic thought always at his disposal, how could he possibly make a wrong decision? We might not have arrived at the opportunity to show the world how rapidly American forces could vacate the Kabul airport, if it had not been for the omniscient think tanks who doubtless inculcated the notion that we should be there in the first place. The decision to recognize that Guano character as president of Venezuela has got to rank among the most embarrassing (to us American citizens most of all) foreign policy decisions in our relatively short history. Seriously. Wonder which think tank got bonuses for that one?

Here in the US, there are many places and issues that don’t involve mass murder which beg for attention. For instance, the western United States sits beside the largest known body of water in the solar system – the Pacific Ocean, yet there is very little potable water to sustain approximately 40 million people of the Southwestern US. I don’t know what the cost might be of desalinization plants to rectify the water shortage, but I do know that (at the behest think tank(s)), the US government is once more sending tens of billions of dollars to finance a war that has nothing to do with our country. Wonder how much desalinization Americans could get for 20 or 30 billion dollars? Someone should put that question before the resident geniuses. Or maybe they’ve already considered it and decreed that our contribution to people dying by the hundreds of thousands in a faraway land (once more) is vastly more critical to American interests than drinking water. And don’t even get me started talking about the homeless and drug problems.

At this writing, and in what is sure to be remembered as one of the most stellar of all state department achievements possibly in history, our country staggers as it begins to suffer the effects of ill-advised sanctions, undoubtedly instituted at the behest of think tanks; the state department then convinced European allies to also implement the same on a perceived adversary. Leaders of European nations promptly started clawing and scratching over each other to be recognized as the most subservient to their beloved Uncle (and his infallible panels of magi). The effects of this monstrosity of foreign policy action are yet to be completely felt but suffice it to say they are not looking good. Energy structures worldwide are what a spinning reel looks like after a bad cast. Europe, our supposed allies, are bleeding on the economic ropes. We in the US aren’t far behind. I’m sure the think tanks responsible for this fiasco will be handsomely rewarded – and if they could know about such a well-financed cognitive mediocrity lurking in, and actually directing, the highest decision centers of the planet, Dunning and Kruger would probably give up and go rock hunting.

Just in case the aforementioned sanctions do not win the think tank golden award for monumental foreign policy blunders, these same people have gone forward with a back-up plan to put a price cap on oil from aforementioned perceived adversary, an initiative which makes the incredible assumption that said adversary would be willing to sell its oil to such states as attempt put this ingenuity into practice while there are states in the East queued in line to buy the oil at market prices.

If there was a way to communicate with goldfish, maybe we could ask for policy guidance from them. I’d bet good money that the fish tanks could be at least as (maybe more) capable advisors than the “think” tanks. And a heck of a lot cheaper.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a neighbor and somewhere in the conversation, as in all extended hillbilly conversations, the obligatory weather prognostications surfaced, and he volunteered that we were in fact about to experience an unusually cold winter. He’d noticed some things to which only an elder statesmen of the hills would pay attention, and among the ominous perturbations of nature that foretell extreme weather, most fur-bearing critters were sporting heavier coats than normal. Furthermore, and with a thoughtful gaze across the wooded hills as snuff spittle drooled down his chin, he expounded on the bases for his prediction – with regard to such nuances as migratory birds having left the environs somewhat earlier than usual and the lack of late summer rains, and any other such observations short of nuclear winter that might lend credence to his prediction, no matter how tenuous.

Of course, the locals around here invariably expect the worst of all possible eventualities, be it a horribly cold winter, wetter than normal spring, or unusually scant profits at the local flea market. Most folks here speak as though they have post-graduate degrees in pessimism. But you have to give them credit, they stay prepared for the worst. I once saw a local woman headed into Walmart with an umbrella tucked under her arm on a warm sunny day without a cloud in the sky. I’ve heard of some locals out here in the hills with ammo closets that would make most military armories blush, you know, just in case they might have to protect their property.

To make a long story short – as warm as the fall has been this year, and as ridiculous as the old hillbilly sounded talking about a super cold winter coming, well we just had one of the coldest November cold spells we’ve had since I’ve been in the Ozarks. The forecast looks like it’s gonna be very cold at least through Thanksgiving. As to the aforementioned umbrella incident, guess who the Walmart customer was that got to her car without being soaked from a sudden thunderstorm? And about the need for lots of ammo to protect property? We’re not there yet, thank goodness, but just to be safe, I’m thinking about stocking up.