Soundingsjohnbarker: ‘You can write that?’ You bet

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) debuted as a WordPress blog two years ago today with a small post headlined “Labour history: Mine-Mill v. Steel” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/labour-history-mine-mill-v-steel/) on September 3, 2014 about Mick Lowe’s The Raids, a 295-page fictionalized work centred on the epic battle in Sudbury in the late 1950s and early 1960s in relation to the Cold War, international politics, McCarthyism, Communism, and the inter-union rivalry between the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) and the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers Local 598, which had just been published that May by Robin Philpot of Baraka Books in Montreal. Here in Thompson there is a still partially untold story of that same inter-union rivalry between the Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers and United Steelworkers of America between 1960 and 1962. Mine-Mill was the first bargaining agent here in Thompson when Inco workers unionized and had negotiated a contract with Inco that ran through 1964. But the USW was certified by the Manitoba Labour Board as the bargaining agent for Inco employees in Thompson on May 31, 1962. Because the USW itself went on to merge five years later with the United States section of the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers in Tucson, Arizona in January 1967, a lot of that nastiness has been papered over, at least publicly.

There was also a post that day headlined “Black Death: Not so bad?” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/black-death-not-so-bad/) which went onto explain a new study in PLOS ONE, an international peer-reviewed journal, authored by University of South Carolina anthropologist Sharon DeWitte, which suggested that people who survived the medieval plague, commonly known then as the Black Death, lived significantly longer and were healthier than people who lived before the epidemic struck in 1347. The Black Death killed tens of millions of people, an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of the European population, over just four years between 1347 and 1351, which, it turns out, may not have been such a bad thing after all.

Finally, on Sept. 3, 2014, soundingsjohnbarker had a third posting headlined “A bigger picture,” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/a-bigger-picture/) which focused on Samaritan’s Purse’s “Operation Christmas Child,” which was started in 1990. By 1993, it had grown to the point it was adopted by Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization founded by Dr. Bob Pierce in 1970 and now run by Franklin Graham, son of 97-year-old Asheville, North Carolina evangelist Billy Graham.  While “Operation Christmas Child” has its share of supporters and critics with meritorious arguments on both sides for and against its “shoebox” gifts collected and distributed in more than 130 countries worldwide each Christmas [each shoebox is filled with hygiene items, school supplies, toys, and candy. Operation Christmas Child then works with local churches to put on age-appropriate presentations of the gospel at the events where the shoeboxes are distributed], Samaritan’s Purse is about much more than Operation Christmas Child, whatever your views might be on that, I pointed out. In the midst of the deadliest Ebola viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak recorded in West Africa since the disease was discovered in 1976, Samaritan Purse’s Ebola care centre on the outskirts of the Liberian capital of Monrovia was right on the front lines. Dr. Kent Brantly, the medical director of the centre, contracted Ebola and was medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, the first patient ever medically evacuated to the United States for Ebola treatment, where he was given ZMapp, an experimental drug treatment produced by U.S.-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, while Nancy Writebol, who was with Serving in Mission, (SIM), which runs the hospital where Samaritan’s Purse has the Ebola care centre, was also medically evacuated to Emory University Hospital and treated with ZMapp.  Both Brantly and Writebol survived their brush with death Ebola experiences and returned to Liberia.

So that was Day 1 for soundingsjohnbarker on Sept. 3, 2014. And in some ways it set the tone for the 226 posts that have followed since over the last two years. Some of them tell Thompson stories but many don’t. Some (OK, many) are offbeat and the range of topics that has struck my fancy to write about has been eclectic, if not downright eccentric at times. I explained some of my thinking behind how I choose what to write about in a blog post March 7 headlined “Tipping points and blogging by the numbers” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/tipping-points-and-blogging-by-the-numbers/) where I noted, “Write local if you want some big numbers on a given day. While I do from time to time, if some local issue or story interests me in an unusual way, I stay away from that kind of writing for the most part. For one thing, those kind of stories, I find, have little staying power, with three or four rare local exceptions (an unsolved murder story; a story about Dr. Alan Rich’s retirement and local lawyer Alain Huberdeau’s appointment to the provincial court bench; and several Vale stories come to mind). But most of them are one or two day wonders. It’s the more eccentric pieces on other places and even times that have a deeper and wider audience in the long run. Fortunately, I prefer to write on more eclectic things these days without any particular regard for geography or subject matter if the topic strikes my interest. Thompson city council may well make decisions that affect me in myriad ways, not the least of which is in the pocketbook as a local taxpayer, but even that can’t remove the glaze from my eyes long enough to write much about local municipal politics, although our water bills are tempting me to make an exception. But reading newspaper accounts of such goings on is usually painful enough. Mind you, I realize what strikes my fancy to write about when I don’t write local, is not for everyone, and I have no doubt that I’ve created some eye glazing of my own especially when I write on eschatology or some other arcane to some of my local readers religious topic.”

That’s not to say I’ve lost my interest in local affairs. I live here after all. But I don’t have the inclination, or time even if I had, to write about all of them. So, pretty much like everyone else in Thompson, I rely on the local media, including the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, CBC Radio’s North Country, Arctic Radio’s thompsononline.ca and Shaw TV to keep me informed with occasional stories about Vale’s proposed Thompson Foot Wall Deep Project, at the north end of Thompson Mine, previously known as Thompson (1D), and what the chances of the 11 million tonnes of nickel mineralization, which form a deep, north plunging continuation of the Thompson deposit, have of being developed into a new mine that will sustain the Thompson operation for up to 15 years when nickel is selling on the London Metal Exchange (LME) for US$4.5269/lb, with the refinery and smelter, which opened March 25, 1961, set to close sometime in 2018, resulting in lost jobs – don’t kid yourself and think otherwise – as more than 30 per cent of Vale’s production employees in Thompson work in the smelter and refinery.

Take away nickel mining, which isn’t destined fortunately to happen for at least several decades yet in even the most pessimistic scenario, and there’s not much reason for Thompson, at least as we have all come to know it, to exist, all mindless happy talk from politicians, newspaper publishers and other spin doctors aside. Mind you, I have admittedly been a tad critical of newspaper publishers in this space before, writing on Sept. 14, 2014: “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone.”(https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/).

But if you think being a regional hub for Northern Manitoba, or tourism, or even both, is going to give Thompson a new raison d’etre for continued existence at its current size and state in a somehow magically more diversified local economy sans nickel mining some day in the near-to-mid future, I’m afraid you’ve been drinking too much of the Thompson Economic Diversification Working Group (TEDWG) Kool-Aid.

I’m a bit of a contrarian when it comes to the local good news peddlers of all stripes. So it’s perhaps best for everyone’s peace of mind, mine included, if I stick these days to writing mainly about the faraway and eclectic. Bad news prophets have a short best-before date at home.

And besides there is something just plain fun about writing about the weird and whacky. It’s a good antidote to taking either yourself, or life for that matter, too seriously. Hence I’m just as incorrigible when it comes to posting stories or links from others about the offbeat and odd on Facebook, as I am about my own blog post writing, I must confess. “The internet has been aflame this summer with predictions the Antichrist was coming Aug. 30,” I mentioned in a Facebook posting Aug, 31, noting I had forgotten all about it until the next day. “Me bad,” I wrote. When my old friend from Iqaluit Michèle LeTourneau found herself among those who couldn’t resist joining the thread to comment, she observed “OK. I think I just officially outed myself as a weird nut that posts really weird things on Facebook. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not.” I reassured her by replying, “I think I could give you a bit of competition for the ‘weird nut Facebook poster’ title, Michèle!”

Locally, the Thompson Citizen was moved to editorialize Aug. 31 that “Northern Manitoba’s summer of woe turned [a] deeper shade of blue with the announcement Aug. 22 that Tolko was shutting down its operations in The Pas.”

Tolko Industries said they were going to pull the plug Dec. 2 on their heavy-duty kraft paper and lumber mill in The Pas after 19 years, leaving all 332 employees unemployed. The mill in The Pas has been a money-loser for years. It was conceived by the Progressive Conservative provincial government of premier Duff Roblin in 1966.

Less than a month before Tolko pulled the plug on its mill in The Pas, OmniTRAX, the Denver-based short line railroad, which owns the Port of Churchill, announced on July 25 it would be laying off or not re-hiring about 90 port workers, as it was cancelling the 2016 grain shipping season. OmniTRAX bought most of Northern Manitoba’s rail track from The Pas to Churchill in 1997 from CN for $11 million. OmniTRAX took over the related Port of Churchill, which opened in 1929, when it acquired it from Canada Ports Corporation, for a token $10 soon after buying the rail line. The Port of Churchill has the largest fuel terminal in the Arctic and is North America’s only deep water Arctic seaport that offers a gateway between North America and Mexico, South America, Europe and the Middle East. OmniTRAX created Hudson Bay Railway in 1997, the same year it took over operation of the Port of Churchill. It operates 820 kilometres of track in Manitoba between The Pas and Churchill.

At the time the cancellation was announced, OmniTRAX did not have a single committed grain shipping contract. Normally, the Port of Churchill has a 14-week shipping season from July 15 to Oct. 31. When the Canadian Wheat Board lost its grain monopoly, creating a new grain market several years ago, and was renamed G3 Canada Ltd. by its new owners, the newly-minted G3 Canada Ltd. began building a network of grain elevators, terminals and vessels that bypasses Churchill and uses the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence River and West Coast to move grain to foreign markets. Surprise.

While OmniTRAX accepted a letter of intent last December from Mathias Colomb First Nation, Tataskweyak Cree Nation and the War Lake First Nation to buy its rail assets in Manitoba, along with the Port of Churchill, the deal has not been completed to date, and its future looks murky to non-existent. Rail freight shipments measured by frequency along the Bayline have been cut in half by OmniTRAX this summer.

“Government announces more grant money to develop tourism during visit to Churchill” headlined the Nickel Belt News in an unbylined front page story Sept. 2.  Don’t get me wrong. I love Beluga whales and polar bears. I’ve seen both visiting Churchill (known as Kuugjuaq in Inuit.) And guess what? While Beluga whales and polar bears will support some local tourism and related businesses, it’s still not enough to make for a local sustainable economy of any scale in the community of less than 800 permanent residents now along our Hudson Bay coast.

That’s about as likely to happen as calling itself the “Wolf Capital of the World” is going make a game-changing difference to Thompson’s economic future. A difference, sure. Great. But don’t bet Northern Manitoba’s future on tourism. We’re still either a resource-based economy or no economy to speak of.  If it’s any comfort that remains largely true for most of our provinces and territories and Canada as a whole. Sure there’s the capital cities and a few other kinda largish provincial cities – Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec City, Moncton, Saint John, Halifax and St. John’s (this is a very generous reading BTW) – and even a few more genuine high-tech areas such as Gatineau, Québec and Kanata, Ontario on either side of Ottawa, along with Kitchener, Ontario and elsewhere in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, all of which are exceptions to the hewers of wood and drawers of water reality, but the exceptions are few and far between.

Oops … did I say that out loud? Me bad.

Kool-Aid anyone?

I may need to quench my thirst unless I intend to pen my next post on UFOs, eschatology or perhaps some virulent disease, preferably a safe distance from Thompson.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tipping points and blogging by the numbers

I have been blogging at soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) for about a year and a half now. Recently I reached some kind of magical tipping point where I no longer have to write anything, at least for the foreseeable future, to garner more than 100 readers a day on average. It’s got so easy, I missed marking the few days it took to go from 49,000 readers to 50,000 readers because I hadn’t been looking at my stats much (the bane of every self-respecting blogger, or so it seems anyway) because I hadn’t written anything new since Feb. 16.

Not that it really matters much. Even if they were inclined to disclose such proprietary information, which they’re not for the most part, I’m not mathematically enough gifted to really understand how various Google and Facebook algorithms work, so I can’t explain why this is so.

I do know this: About 75 per cent of the daily views right now on the almost 200 posts I’ve written since September 2014 come from my home or landing page on the blog, with a handful of stories, or blog posts, if you will, garnering views of at least one or two readers somewhere in the world every day.

I’m delighted to say “Red Barn, Big Barney and the Barnbuster” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/red-barn-big-barney-and-the-barnbuster/) one of my early posts from Sept. 13, 2014 joined that rarefied company of posts recently. On an ordinary day, readers in about a dozen or more countries around the globe read what I have written here. The makeup of the countries changes somewhat but the overall number of 12 or slightly more on a daily basis, has been the same almost from the beginning. It doesn’t go up or down much.

It seems that the majority of the stories being read right now, where a reader goes to a specific story rather than my homepage, come disproportionally from my earlier work, say between September 2014 and last May. Is that because I wrote better stuff back then? Possibly. But I think it more likely has a lot to do with the mysteries of Google search and how things cycle around the World Wide Web (WWW) on the Internet. I expect perhaps that in six months from now, some of the stories I’ve penned more recently will find their stride.

Along the way, I’ve learned a few tricks, of course. Write local if you want some big numbers on a given day. While I do from time to time, if some local issue or story interests me in an unusual way, I stay away from that kind of writing for the most part. For one thing, those kind of stories, I find, have little staying power, with three or four rare local exceptions (an unsolved murder story; a story about Dr. Alan Rich’s retirement last year and local lawyer Alain Huberdeau’s appointment to the provincial court bench; and several Vale stories come to mind). But most of them are one or two day wonders. It’s the more eccentric pieces on other places and even times that have a deeper and wider audience in the long run. Fortunately, I prefer to write on more eclectic things these days without any particular regard for geography or subject matter if the topic strikes my interest. Thompson city council may well make decisions that affect me in myriad ways, not the least of which is in the pocketbook as a local taxpayer, but even that can’t remove the glaze from my eyes long enough to write much about local municipal politics, although our water bills are tempting me to make an exception. But reading newspaper accounts of such goings on is usually painful enough. Mind you, I realize what strikes my fancy to write about when I don’t write local, is not for everyone, and I have no doubt that I’ve created some eye glazing of my own especially when I write on eschatology or some other arcane to some of my local readers religious topic.

The other thing I’ve learned is a bit about the value of tags and search engine optimization. And what I’ve learned, I must confess, is not exactly high culture or high-minded for that matter. Sex sells. Sizzle sells. Self-referential sells. Surprise!

My leading search engine terms today are: “hot tub high school; Lauren German hot tub school; MKO audit; Red Barn restaurant; LBJ sworn in” and “hot tub high school movie.” If you detect a theme, it is actually from a more recent story Jan. 29 headlined, “Fox TV’s Lucifer Morningstar and normalizing evil: Does the devil get any cuddlier?” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/fox-tvs-lucifer-morningstar-and-normalizing-evil-does-the-devil-get-any-cuddlier/) where I wrote, “Multiple references by Morningstar to Dancer about her briefly being a B-list actress, best known for her topless scenes in a movie called Hot Tub High School, before she became a cop, like her dad, are not accompanied by flashbacks, although Neil Genzlinger in his New York Times review, described the devil in Lucifer as having the “sexist, salacious mind-set of a 14-year-old boy” when it comes to Chloe.”

Perhaps destined to join the ranks of stories read daily in a few months?

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

Blessed Pope Paul VI on the ‘tail of the devil’ and ‘Smoke of Satan’ and the disintegration of the ‘Catholic world’

“The tail of the devil is functioning in the disintegration of the Catholic world,” said Blessed Pope Paul VI on Oct. 13, 1977 in a formal address marking the 60th anniversary of the sixth and final Fatima apparition – the “Miracle of the Sun” – at Fatima, Portugal on Oct. 13, 1917. “The darkness of Satan has entered and spread throughout the Catholic Church even to its summit. Apostasy, the loss of the faith, is spreading throughout the world and into the highest levels within the Church.” Blessed Pope Paul VI’s remarks on Satan indwelling even the highest levels of the Catholic Church were reported on the following day – Oct. 14, 1977 – in the Milan-based daily Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

It was not the first time Blessed Pope Paul VI had sounded such a warning. More than five years earlier, in what is now known as his “Smoke of Satan” homily delivered on June 29, 1972 on the ninth anniversary of his coronation, the Pope gave the sermon that remains perhaps the most famous and most-argued about in terms of meaning sermons the Holy Father delivered during his 15-year-plus pontificate.

The are several difficulties in analyzing the homily, delivered by Blessed Pope Paul VI, as he celebrated the mass and the beginning of the tenth year of his pontificate as successor of Saint Peter, with 30  “porporati” (cardinals) present, including  Lord Cardinal Amleto Giovanni Cicognani,  dean of the sacred college; Lord Cardinal Luigi Traglia, the sub-dean; Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, substitute of the secretary of state; and Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, secretary of the council for the public affairs of the church.

The homily was  delivered in Italian, so it must be faithfully translated into English for many analysts to tackle it.

The translation here was provided by Father Stephanos Pedrano, O.S.B.,  a Benedictine monk and priest at Prince of Peace Abbey, a Benedictine monastery founded in 1958 in Oceanside, California, near San Diego. Pedrano was educated at the International Benedictine Athenaeum of St. Anselm in Rome and is fluent in Italian and the translation was rendered in 2006 at the request of Jimmy Akin, the Texas-born self-described nominal Protestant, who converted to Catholicism in 1992, and is now the senior apologist at Catholic Answers, the  El Cajon, California apostolate started in 1979 by attorney Karl Keating. You can read the English translation by Pedrano of the papal homily here from Akin’s Nov. 13, 2006 blog posting at http://jimmyakin.typepad.com/defensor_fidei/2006/11/the_smoke_of_sa.html

Aside from any translation challenges, Akin quite rightly points out the Vatican-issued Italian homily (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/homilies/1972/documents/hf_p-vi_hom_19720629_it.html) is by no means a verbatim account of Blessed Pope Paul VI’s words that day, as we might expect in such a document today, but rather for the most part a “narrative summary” of the Holy Father’s homily by an anonymous narrator, although certain statements are attributed with quotation marks as direct quotes from the Pope, the most famous being “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.” Akin argues that even if the reporting is accurate, Blessed Pope Paul VI’s 1972 remark should not be interpreted as a literal assertion “claiming that there were Satanists in the Vatican,” but rather as symbolic representation of  the “cultural crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s” and secular influences among Catholics.

The enigmatic Malachi Martin had a more literal take, suggesting the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurred exactly nine years to the day earlier – on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated ­­on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived.

In The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950, the Anglican writer C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century wrote, “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” Catholic writer Robert Hugh Benson, author of the 1907 apocalyptic and dystopian novel Lord of the World, (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/) , who has been quoted approvingly by Pope Francis, would have agreed with Lewis.

There is perhaps no more mysterious figure in the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century than Malachi Brendan Martin, born on July 23, 1921 in Ballylongford in County Kerry, Ireland, who we remember today mainly as a best-selling New York City writer of fiction and non-fiction, where in typical Martin style, the two genres were separated, if at all, by a very blurred line at times.

He was ordained a priest for the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1954. Was he an insider at the Second Vatican Council from 1962, as peritus (expert advisor) for German Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea, or more accurately a somewhat lesser figure, albeit a highly skilled linguist, translator and Semitic paleographer? Did he act as a shadowy agent or advocate for certain Jewish interests during the council? Did he read the Third Secret of Fatima? Was he a liberal or a conservative? An agent provocateur? A double agent? Was he a valid exorcist? Secretly ordained a bishop by Pope Pius XII? Was he laicized at his own request by Blessed Pope Paul VI in 1965, or just given dispensation from his vows of poverty and obedience, but not chastity? Was he chaste or a serial womanizer who seduced a string of women, including Susan Kaiser in 1964, as alleged by former TIME magazine Vatican correspondent Robert Blair Kaiser in his 2002 book Clerical Error: A True Story, published three years after Martin’s death? And speaking of Martin’s death, even that is somewhat shrouded in mystery. Martin died of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 27, 1999 due to a fall in his apartment in Manhattan, four days after his 78th birthday. More than one conspiracy theorist has argued Martin was pushed by an unseen hand.

Martin first made his claim about the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurring  on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated ­­on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived – in his 1990 purportedly non-fiction work, The Keys of This Blood: Pope John Paul II Versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order, where he wrote St. Pope John Paul II came “up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishops’ chanceries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the ‘superforce.’ Rumors, always difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of [Blessed] Pope Paul VI’s reign in 1963. Indeed Paul had alluded somberly to ‘the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary’. . . an oblique reference to an enthronement ceremony by Satanists in the Vatican.”

He revisited the theme in his 1996 blockbuster fictional novel, Wind Swept House, where Martin wrote at length near the opening of the book about it:

“The Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer was effected within the Roman Catholic Citadel on June 29, 1963; a fitting date for the historic promise about to be fulfilled. As the principal agents of this Ceremonial  well knew, Satanist tradition had long predicted that the Time of the Prince would be ushered in at the moment when a Pope would take the name of the Apostle Paul. That requirement – the signal that the Availing Time had begun – had been accomplished just eight days before with the election of the latest Peter-in-the-Line.

“There had barely been time since the papal conclave had ended for the complex arrangements to be readied; but the Supreme Tribunal had decided there could be no more perfect date for the Enthronement of the Prince than this feast day of rhe twin princes of the Citadel, SS. Peter and Paul. And there could be no more perfect place than the Chapel of St. Paul itself, situated as it was so near to the Apostolic Palace.

“The complexity of the arrangements were dictated mainly by the nature of the Ceremonial Event to be enacted. Security was so tight in the grouping of Vatican buildings within which this gem of a Chapel lay that the full  panoply of the Ceremonial could not possibly escape detection here. If the aim was to be achieved – if the Ascent of the Prince was actually to be accomplished in the Availing Time – then every element of the Celebration of the Calvary Sacrifice must be turned on its head by the other and opposite Celebration. The sacred must be profaned. The profane must be adored. The unbloody representation of the Sacrifice of the Nameless Weakling on the Cross must be replaced by the supreme and bloody violation of the dignity of the Nameless One. Guilt must be accepted as innocence. Pain must give joy. Grace, repentance, pardon must all be drowned in an orgy of opposites. And it must all be done without mistakes. The sequence of events, the meaning of the words, the significance of the actions must all comprise the perfect enactment of sacrilege, the ultimate ritual of treachery. ”

 You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

News from the fringe: Back to the Future Part II and Chicago Cubs win 2015 World Series, Before It’s News, Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind!, Trunews: The Real News, Uncensored, Rapture Ready News, AboveTopSecret.com – Conspiracy Theories, UFOs, Paranormal, Politics, and other ‘alternative topics’ and Coast to Coast AM with George Noory

It’s a Thursday in a deep and dark (but surprisingly warm the last couple of days) December.  Winter solstice doesn’t arrive for 10 days until Dec. 21 at 5:03 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST) and Christmas comes two weeks from today. Dick Cheney and the CIA are back on top of the news agenda and serious sports analysts are discussing whether the 1989 movie Back to the Future Part II will now be prophetic with the Chicago Cubs winning the  2015 World Series next year (the Cubbies last won back-to-back World Series in 1907 and 1908) in a five-game sweep over Miami in a nine-game series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnmw6K1H-gQ), which, of course, didn’t have a MLB team when the movie was filmed 25 years ago. The Marlins arrived in Miami in 1993.

While the Cubs and Marlins both play in the National League, so won’t be meeting in the real seven-game  World Series in any conceivable scenario,  unless one of them were to switch to the American League soon, the Cubbies’ World series dream for 2015, aside from Back to the Future Part II, is the result of the team signing Jon Lester, the 31-year-old left-hander free agent starting pitcher, to a six-year contract worth $155 million at the 2014 major league baseball winter meetings.

All in all, what better time to check out some non-mainstream media (MSM) “news?” Might I suggest your tour include  Before It’s News (http://beforeitsnews.com/); Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind! (http://www.infowars.com/); Trunews: The Real News, Uncensored (http://www.trunews.com/); Rapture Ready News (http://www.raptureready.com/rapnews_db.php); , AboveTopSecret.com – Conspiracy Theories, UFOs, Paranormal, Politics, and other ‘alternative topics’ (http://www.abovetopsecret.com/) and Coast to Coast AM with George Noory (http://www.coasttocoastam.com/)

Just don’t let yourself get worked up into a lather about Code ICD E 978 and legal execution by guillotine coming to the United States via Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington if you stumble onto that meme. For some of the history of where that comes from, check out(http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/08/28/74549_secret-camps-and-guillotines-groups.html?rh=1) and http://urbanlegends.about.com/b/2013/06/21/government-purchased-30000-guillotines.htm

Back in November 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a famous 1964 essay for Harper’s magazine, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which opens with the sentence, “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” Masons, Jesuits, munitions makers, Bavarian Illuminati, the “Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome,” the list of enemies has been long and variable, Hofstadter noted.

“[O]ne of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen,” argued Hofstadter. “It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

“We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

At the same time, however, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” says Capt. John Yossarian, the 28-year-old fictional character and protagonist assigned to the 256th squadron of the Army Air Forces where he serves as a B-25 bombardier in Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22.

Take your pick for a worldview: Hofstadter or Heller. As for me, in the absence of conclusive proof to the contrary, I counsel that “Occam’s razor,” or the law of parsimony should apply. Namely, a problem should be stated in its basic and simplest terms and the simplest theory that fits the facts is the one that should be selected when there’s two or more competing theories and that an explanation for unknown phenomena should first be attempted in terms of what is already known.

Which means, while I approach conspiracy theories with an abundance of caution, I don’t automatically rule them out as London Times columnist David Aaronovitch, author of the 2009 book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, does in his de rigueur attempts at debunking same. But ad hominem arguments and smarminess  are no substitute for an open mind.

Some conspiracies are … well, conspiracies. Others remain unproven matters of conjecture. And still others exist on the fringes of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory speculation.

While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone in assassinating U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

The assassination of an earlier American president, Abraham Lincoln, however, was part of a larger conspiracy, a fact that’s largely forgotten today. What is remembered is that actor John Wilkes Booth entered Lincoln’s State Box at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865 undetected and shot him in the back of the head. Lincoln, mortally wounded, was taken to the Petersen House across the street and died at 7:22 a.m. April 15. On April 26, Booth was found hiding in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia and was shot and killed by a Union solider after he refused to surrender and the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze.

Co-conspirator Lewis Powell attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward, but only managed to injure him. At the same time, another co-conspirator, George Atzerodt was supposed to have killed Vice-President Andrew Johnson, but backed out.

Eight Lincoln co-conspirators were caught over the next few days and tried by a military court. They were found guilty on June 30 and given various sentences depending upon their involvement. Powell, Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt were charged with conspiring with Booth, along with various other crimes, and all were hanged in Washington on July 7, 1865 – with Surratt becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.

You might also want to check out: “Conspiracy and dissent for the 21st Century” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/conspiracy-and-dissent-for-the-21st-century/; “Some conspiracies are … well, conspiracies” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/07/some-conspiracies-are-well-conspiracies/; “Blood Moon rising” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/blood-moon-rising/; “Shemitah: The next sabbath year begins Sept. 25” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/shemitah-the-next-sabbath-year-begins-sept-25/;  “The Prophecy of Malachy” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/; and “Blessed Pope Paul VI’s famous ‘Smoke of Satan’ homily of June 29, 1972: The enigmatic Malachi Martin would later suggest the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurred exactly nine years to the day earlier on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived on June 29, 1963” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/blessed-pope-paul-vis-famous-smoke-of-satan-homily-of-june-29-1972-the-enigmatic-malachi-martin-would-later-suggest-the-enthronement-of-the-fallen-archangel-lucifer-occurred-exactly-nine-years/; “Winnipeg’s Dr. Omond McKillop Solandt, chairman of the Defence Research Board, and Project Second Story” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/winnipegs-dr-omond-mckillop-solandt-chairman-of-the-defence-research-board-and-project-second-story/; and “Edward Baker:’ Thompson, Manitoba’s microwaved telephone company night watchman 1998 urban legend owes its fame to real-life American scientist and a Denver newsman” at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/edward-baker-thompson-manitoba-s-microwaved-telephone-company-night-watchman-1998-urban-legend-owes-its-fame-to-real-life-american-scientist-and-a-denver-newsman/

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Faith and reason. Pray, think: Some recent posts on religion on soundingsjohnbarker

Some recent posts on religion on soundingsjohnbarker. Most have a decidedly Catholic flavour, but definitely not all, as my writing on religion can be as eclectic and wide-ranging into other areas of the Christian realm as my writing on non-religious topics can be. So, if you’re a Catholic, buckle in for some discussion of eschatology in the form of Bible prophecy, premillennial dispensationalism, Petrus Romanus, the Prophecy of Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes, the Antichrist, the False Prophet and The Rapture, and if you’re a Protestant evangelical … well, welcome to my world, which includes St. Denis, patron saint of Paris, and one of the Catholic Church’s most famous cephalophore (a.k.a. head-carrier) saints.

Retroactively spiked: The post-publication killing of Msgr. Charles Pope’s blog post on New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade

In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time “kill” a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone. Freedom of the press is the last thing they want when it comes to staff.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/

EWTN: The late 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and The Hound of Heaven

Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) routinely offers intelligent television viewing, employing the best in Catholic faith and reason. But sometimes it offers something truly extraordinary such as its Oct. 16 special telling the story of the late and now largely forgotten 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and his famous 1893 poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” published in his first volume of poems.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/17/ewtn-the-late-19th-century-english-catholic-poet-francis-thompson-and-the-hound-of-heaven/

St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Saints vs. Scoundrels – EWTN’s TV for the Thinking Catholic (and atheists, too)

Whoever said television can’t tackle big ideas apparently forgot to tell that to Benjamin Wiker. Tomorrow Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), the network which presents around-the-clock Catholic-themed programming, founded by Mother Mary Angelica, which began broadcasting on Aug. 15, 1981 from a garage studio at the Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Irondale, Alabama, which Mother Angelica founded in 1962, will air in several different time slots Part 1 of its series Saints vs. Scoundrels, hosted by Wiker, a senior fellow at the Veritas Center for Ethics and Public Life at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. Wiker guides viewers through pairs of influential Catholic saints and thinkers and those the church considers important historical figures, but scoundrels and sinners nonetheless.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/st-augustine-and-jean-jacques-rousseau-saints-vs-scoundrels-ewtns-tv-for-the-thinking-catholic-and-atheists-too/

The Prophecy of Malachy

While most people looked at U.S. President Barack Obama’s first meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican March 27 as a brief getting-to-know you session at the Vatican between two charismatic world leaders, who while they both champion economic social justice, are deeply divided philosophically on other moral issues such as abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage, others see them working in concert ushering in an eschatological end times.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/

Blood Moon rising

Science and religion. In astronomical terms, on April 15 there was a total lunar eclipse. It was the 56th eclipse of the Saros 122 series. But in religious terms, it was known as the first Blood Moon of the 21st century.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/blood-moon-rising/

News and religion: Where the twain meets

“Is this the Gate of Hell? Archaeologists say temple doorway belching noxious gas matches ancient accounts of ‘portal to the underworld.’” For a minute, I thought I must be reading a headline on April 4, 2013 (after checking to make sure it wasn’t April 1) from what had to be the second coming of the late Generoso Pope, Jr.’s Weekly World News, a supermarket “news” tabloid published out of Lantana and later Boca Raton, Florida from 1979 to 2007.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/news-and-religion-where-the-twain-meets/

Spiritual warfare

Spiritual warfare?

In The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950, C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century wrote, “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”

Spiritual warfare was what Lewis was talking about almost six and a half decades ago, just as the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Ephesians almost 2,000 years earlier had said, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/

We’re caught in a trap: Suspicious minds

Way back when, 20 or more years ago, when I decided religion was a subject journalists should take seriously if they wanted to understand the world around them and what animates many people, I happened to read a book called Faith, Hope, No Charity: An Inside Look At the Born Again Movement in Canada and the United States, published 30 years ago in 1984 by Judith Haiven, now an associate professor in the Department of Management at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/were-caught-in-a-trap-suspicious-minds/

Today marks the Oct. 9 Feast of St. Denis, patron saint of Paris, and one of the Catholic Church’s most famous cephalophore (a.k.a. head-carrier) saints

St. Denis, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, who sometime after 250AD was martyred but not before, according to the Golden Legend, miraculously is said to have picked up his severed head and preached a sermon with it in his hands while walking seven miles from Montmartre where he had been beheaded.

The Catholic Church, of course, when it investigated the story of St. Denis wanted to make sure the distance he walked with his head in his hands was correctly asserted as about seven miles. There was some suggestion it was only six miles. Now, that’s a true Catholic debate. Also honored along with Saint Denis today are his two companions, a priest named Rusticus, and a deacon, Eleutherius, who were martyred alongside him and buried with him.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/today-marks-the-oct-9-feast-of-st-denis-patron-saint-of-paris-and-one-of-the-catholic-churchs-most-famous-cephalophore-a-k-a-head-carrier-saints/

John McCandlish Phillips

John McCandlish Phillips, who died last year at the age of 85, lived in relative obscurity in New York City, where he was affiliated with the Manhattan-based New Testament Missionary Fellowship, a small evangelical Pentecostal congregation of perhaps three-dozen members; it is a church he helped co-found in 1962.

From time to time, as part of their evangelization effort, Phillips could be heard proselytizing for Christianity in Central Park or the Columbia University campus, near his home. Phillips also spent part of his time managing Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., a small religious publishing house that buys remaindered religious books and reprints a few others, selling them to Christian bookstores.

John McCandlish Phillips, with his plain-sounding declarative writing voice, also happens to have been perhaps the single best writer who ever tapped the typewriter keys as a reporter at the New York Times. That is until he retired after 21 years at the age of 46 in December 1973. He had joined the paper as a night copy boy in 1952.

Just how good was McCandlish Phillips, the byline he would eventually write under after first writing as John M. Phillips, although colleagues knew him as John in the newsroom, as a reporter and writer? According to Timesmen, he was without peer. Fellow New York Times writer and noted author Gay Talese described Phillips as the “Ted Williams of the young reporters” after the legendary baseball slugger. “He was a natural. There was only one guy I thought I was not the equal of, and that was McCandlish Phillips.” His stories often focused on forgotten people and he was best known as a feature writer with a flair for style.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/john-mccandlish-phillips-the-best-reporter-of-his-generation-walked-away-for-god-at-the-top-of-his-game/

Shemitah: The next sabbath year begins Sept. 25

Most of us are familiar with the concept of sabbaticals every seven years for tenured professors in academia, where their university employers release them from regular teaching and research duties to re-charge their intellectual batteries and perhaps pursue some specialized interest or write a book in some suitably warm climate. What more convivial or better place to write a monograph on your latest polar research than some island in the Caribbean after all is said an done?

The roots of such sabbaticals or shemitahs, also spelled as shmitas, however, long pre-date the modern or even medieval university. Their ancient roots are 3,000 years old and are grounded in the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel and still observed in contemporary Judiasm. During a shemita year, the land is left to lie fallow. Israel has alloted $28.8 million to farmers for the upcoming shemitah year, budgeting $863,000 less than the last shemitah, when lands were left fallow seven years ago. More recently, some Wall Street analysts have pondered the mystery of what appears to be seven-year economic cycles tied to shemitah years. And wondered why crashes often seem to come in September and October.

The next shemitah year – and the first since the demise of Lehman Brothers investment bank on Sept. 15, 2008, triggering the financial meltdown that resulted in the Great Recession, the most financially cataclysmic event since the decade of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1939 – begins in less than three weeks on Sept. 25, running until Sept. 13, 2015. Before declaring bankruptcy in 2008, Lehman Brothers, founded by Henry and Emanuel Lehman in 1850 in Montgomery, Alabama, was the fourth-largest investment bank in the Unites States, behind Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, doing business in investment banking, equity and fixed-income sales and trading, especially in U.S. Treasury securities, research, investment management, private equity, and private banking.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/shemitah-the-next-sabbath-year-begins-sept-25/

High school redux

Being a Catholic high school graduate wasn’t high on the list of things top of mind when I moved to Manitoba in 2007. That’s mainly because my high school days were some 30 years behind me – or at least so I thought at the time.

Turns out, however, Sister Andrea Dumont, the longest-serving religious in Thompson, is originally from St. Catharines, Ontario and a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, who – wait for it – just happen to be the same sisters who taught some of my classes from September 1971 to June 1976 when Sister Conrad Lauber was principal and Sister Dorothy Schweitzer taught me several English classes – and Grade 10 general math at Oshawa Catholic High School (previously known as St. Joseph’s High School and later Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School.) Sister Dorothy also taught high school in Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton, as well as Oshawa.

Trying to teach me high school math must have given real meaning to terms like “long suffering” and “patience of a saint.” As I recall, there were two mathematics “streams” back then: “advanced” and “general.” Since these were in the days before there was much articulation of the concept of “bullying,” many of your classmates had no reservation about saying that “general” math was for “dummies” or “dunces.” Self-esteem aside, I’d have been hard-pressed to argue the point, especially since I struggled with math no matter what the label: algebra, geometry, functions and relations – shoot me now, just remembering the words, much less the symbols and equations. If I had known how many percentages I would have to convert as a journalist, I might have paid more attention to high school math, but perhaps not.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/high-school-redux/

Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’

The 10-day Toronto Film Festival (TIFF) from Sept. 4 through Sept. 14 just wrapped up yesterday. In the cinema world, TIFF is a big deal. An important arts event eagerly anticipated every September.

But flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar there is a whole slew of movies released over the last year or just about to be released, which  might surprise you both in their totality and who stars in them because Hollywood, for a season at least, has rediscovered the Christian movie genre and the religious, spiritual and supernatural themes that are woven into their fabric. In a word, Christian movies are “hot” in 2014. Hollywood, which is usually a synonym for  Sodom or Gomorrah  in the vocabulary for many Christians, is this fall on the side of the angels. There is apparently an upside for Hollywood where commercial potential stands in for faith in salvation if need  be.

https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22