Woooooooot—it’s Halloween! At long last!
Halloween is particularly fun when it’s on a Friday. My little town “observed” trick-or-treating last night, but I’m going with Dr. Fiancée and my niece and nephews tonight (we’re not dressing up, but the kids are). I’m looking forward to some family time.
How are you celebrating tonight, readers?
With that, here is 31 October 2019’s “Happy Halloween!“:
We’re living in heretical times. All sorts of New Age nonsense is afoot.
The thing is, all the “New Age nonsense” is just Old World paganism and Gnosticism wrapped in therapeutic language. People are looking for answers—the easier the better. I’ve been reading the classic, authoritative book on the subject, The Kingdom of the Cults (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link, as are several others links in this post; I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links at no additional cost to you), by theologian Walter Martin, and it is wild how many of these cults share the same basic qualities—claiming to be “Christian” while perverting and distorting the very heart of the Gospels.
With that, here is 14 October 2024’s “Rooting Out Heresy: The Cathars“:
It’s remarkable to me how history rhymes. The 1920s and the 2020s have an awful lot in common: a more socially permissive climate coupled with a growing immigration restrictionist mentality; a massive respiratory disease epidemic at the start; a growing economy; and a simultaneous sense that times were/are changing and that we should try to get back to “normal.” I will note with some encouragement that, rather than sliding further into our depraved social progressivism, Americans seem to be experiencing something of religious revival, rippling just below the surface of our troubled cultural waters.
To quote myself from 4 January 2020:
In many ways, the 1920s presaged the coming social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s—also a peacetime, post-war boom period of rapid economic growth and social turbulence. Indeed, it seems likely that it was only the catastrophe of the Great Depression, with the struggles of the Second World War following on its heels, that prevented 1960s-style social breakdown forty years “early.”
For context, when 1920 dawned, the United States was in the midst of a post-war (this being the First World War) recession, one that was so deep that around one million Americans voted for Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate for president, in the 1920 election. Americans had a profound sense that entering the Great War, as it was then called, was a serious mistake—an error the nation would not repeat (thus the feet-dragging when it came to entering the Second World War). The rise of Italian Fascism in the 1920s only seemed to confirm America’s error: the war to make the world safe for democracy, as Democratic President Woodrow Wilson framed it, demonstrated further the failed idealism of the war.
We are certainly rethinking years of open immigration and disastrous foreign wars of choice. Socialists seem on the rise in the most progressive areas (like New York City), while everyone else is getting more conservative (I hope!). Trump is a better president than Harding, but he shares Coolidge’s pro-business outlook, if not his stoic quietness. Heck, even tariffs are back!
So I though it’d be worthwhile to look back at some posts on the 1920s:
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
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Yours portly went down a weird rabbit hole earlier this week: I was looking into how to grow mushrooms at home. I have some large mushrooms growing in my yard after some recent rainstorms, and it got me thinking about how feasible (and easy) it would be to grow them myself.
Suffice it to say: not easy enough. Apparently, nothing grows easily except for weeds—and stories about how businesses can’t survive without imported slave labor.
That’s what I stumbled upon while searching for YouTube videos about growing mushrooms. This video from Business Insider sounds innocuous enough—a small town in Pennsylvania grows millions of mushrooms every year—but the entire video is just a mainstream media sob story about how mushroom farmers have to destroy mushrooms because they don’t have fresh slaves:
At no point in the video does the reporter say, “maybe they could pay people more money to harvest these mushrooms, then they could harvest and sell their entire crop.” The video does mention that demand for mushrooms has increased 15%, which—according to the law of demand—should mean that mushrooms can demand a higher price. It seems as though mushroom farmers could use sell at a higher price and, therefore, pay their pickers more.
Regardless, the price of mushrooms will increase, but isn’t it worth it to pay a few cents more rather than employing indentured servants imported illegally from abroad? Not only is mass migration corrosive to culture and law and order; it’s also immoral on two counts: people break the law, and then end up exploited as slave labor.
Slave labor has another downside: it massively depresses wages for legal workers. The rest of us pay an invisible but real tax: in exchange for cheaper mushrooms (or any produce), we get lower wages across the board.
It’s time for a second abolitionist movement on American farms.
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It’s hard to believe that a year ago, we were gearing up for a presidential election. Now Trump is back in office—woooooot!—and he has a worthy successor in the wings.
It’s going to be tough sledding in the years ahead, but it’s reassuring to know that we have a legitimate successor ready to roll in 2028. Vance’s incredible speech to the various heads of Europe’s governments earlier this year was a call to government accountability—and for Europe to wake up. It was not an attack on Europe, per se, but a powerful plea for its leaders to do something to improve the lives of their people.
I’m excited to see more from Vance in the years to come.
With that, here is 17 July 2024’s “VP Vance: A Worthy Successor“:
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Every summer for the past three summers I’ve taken a trip to see my older brother, who lives in Indianapolis, Indiana. I go the week of the Fourth of July, when everything slows down and we can enjoy some quality time together.
As part of my visits, we always spend a day or two in Chicago. We will drive a couple of hours north from Indy to Hammond, Indiana, where we catch the South Shore Line train to Chicago’s Millennium Station.
Every visit is different, as Chicago contains multitudes of everything: museums, restaurants, public artworks, parks, libraries, theatres—and a Dunkin’ Donuts on every block. It is also a wonderland of architecture, as various Gilded Age magnates competed with one another following the Great Chicago Fire to build the biggest, tallest, most ornate buildings in the world. I love how every nook and cranny of Chicago seems to possess some beautiful architectural flourish and Gothic ornamentation.
This trip, we decided to spend the morning of our second day to visit the legendary Field Museum of Natural History. The Field Museum is most notable for Sue, the massive Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil, a replica of which is on display deep in the bowels of the museum. Her actual skull is displayed nearby, as well as this impressive Triceratops skull:
I love museums, and while I love art and historical museums, I think natural history museums are my favorites by far. There is something mind-blowing and humbling about witnessing the breadth and depth of God’s Creation, from ancient beasts to exquisite gemstones to human artifacts (the last of which, really, is an extension of God’s Creative Power, that small sliver with which he endowed us humans, made in His Image).
The Field Museum had all of that—and more!—in glorious abundance.
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Before I dove headlong back into Civilization VII, I spent a solid two or three weeks playing Sid Meier’s Colonization on Governor difficulty (the penultimate difficulty level). I finally won a game as the Dutch, with a strong colonial basis in modern-day Argentina and Chile:
I first played this game in the mid-1990s when I was a kid. I was hooked immediately, and this game is largely responsible for sparking my interesting in teaching American history. It also ignited a lifelong interest in the American Revolution.
So, how does it hold up thirty-one years after its release?
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Back in January 2025 I subjected the longsuffering Dr. Fiancée (then still Dr. Girlfriend) to an excited and probably tedious explanation of Sid Meier’s Colonization, the game that was probably most responsible for me becoming a history teacher. Since then, I started a few games, but never finished them. Like many Civ and Civ-adjacent games, Colonization drags a bit in the middle, becoming at times a laborious economic management sim (which, essentially, is what the game is).
However, the end of the game is exciting, and is essentially an entirely different game from the rest. The goal is to declare independence from your mother country, which becomes possible only after building up a self-sufficient economy in the New World. A major part of that economy is the ability to produce massive amounts of muskets and horses, as well as populating your colonies with immigrants and natural-born settlers who will use those muskets.
Late Monday night—far too late to be up before heading to work—I finished up a game as New France, successfully gaining independence from the mother country after a tough fight for independence.
My church had revival services earlier last week, and it seemed like the right time to look back at some classic church-related posts this Lazy Sunday:
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
I have been a blast unearthing some old technology, so this weekend’s Lazy Sunday is dedicated to the glory of ancient tech:
More ancient alien technology to come!
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
The Portly Politico 