Michael Bates: August 2023 Archives
Eternity 1950-1989 : Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive
The Internet Archive has borrowable grayscale scans of the full 1950-1989 run of Eternity, a monthly Christian magazine founded by Donald Barnhouse, pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Christian philosopher Douglas Groothuis writes: "I am taken by the earnestness of the topics addressed and the quality of the writers, such as John Stott, Bernard Ramm, Billy Graham, G. Elton Ladd, and others. It was a magazine of serious evangelical commentary. I found articles on the God is dead theory, race relations, various political issues, LSD, youth culture, television (note the cover I posted from 1976), and other issues of moment.... I wrote a few articles for them [in the mid '80s], one rather long piece on New Age politics. By combing through these old issues, I see that Eternity gave us solid evangelical commentary and Bible study back in the day and for many years. For this, I am grateful and look forward to working my way through the years of their magazine." Because the magazines are still under copyright, you must have an Internet Archive account to check out a copy for viewing one hour at a time. The final issue dated January 1989 has cover stories by Brian Frickle regarding the moral content of architecture and by Thomas L. Kerns on architecture and creating a place of worship.
The late king, who reigned over Thailand for 70 years as Rama the 10th, had a keen interest in science and farming, and developed and patented a method of "super sandwich" cloud-seeding, combining warm-cloud and cold-cloud seeding. This article has illustrations of the techniques.
MORE: A photo of the king with sweat dripping from his nose, often seen on display in Thai restaurants: "His Majesty was working on irrigation projects to help the farmers, with his sweat running down his face and nose...Such was his concern for the well being of the people."
Why Bill Watterson Vanished - The American Conservative
"The trouble with Calvin and Hobbes started at the very beginning, when Watterson was a year out of college. In those days, he was nothing if not earnest. He was working at the Cincinnati Enquirer as a political cartoonist, a job he had scored through Jim Borgman, a school connection on the paper's staff. (Borgman is better known now for illustrating Zits.) The job was a bad fit: Watterson had no feel for horse race politics. At Kenyon College, he had studied political science under the school's resident Straussians, reading Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke--but decontextualized theories of political life did him little good in the 1980 presidential primaries, which he had been assigned to cover. Watterson recalls absentmindedly doodling George H.W. Bush in an editorial board meeting as the rest of the staff drilled the future vice president on Ronald Reagan's fitness for office. He felt totally lost. Within a few months, he was fired.
"Then came a long period of bitterness. Watterson moved back in with his parents and took a job designing layouts for a weekly free ad sheet which was handed out at his local grocery store. He received minimum wage and slaved in a windowless basement office. His boss shouted at him frequently. His car was in constant need of repair. During his lunch break, he read books in a cemetery. He did this job for four years.
"And he developed a monomania that would become the force behind his life's work. He had failed at politics. He could feel himself failing at advertising. There was only one other career he could envision, and it was in humor. But there was nothing funny about how he achieved it. Calvin and Hobbes was conceived in desperation and executed in panic."
Education: How to Destroy and Reconquer
Thought-provoking analysis of the problem by Arthur Milikh and Scott Yenor, but the proposed remedy doesn't seem right or realistic.
"The Right's defensive crouch is present in everything it does: While the Left writes and implements curriculum and educates the educators, the Right seeks educational choice. While the Left burrows into administrative roles and teacher colleges, the Right demands testing and accountability. While the Right is concerned about declines in literacy, numeracy, and citizenship, the Left sees these declines as part of closing the racial achievement gap. While the Left obtains vast funding for woke education, the Right begs for "opt-outs" from sex education programs and seeks to ban pornographic books from school libraries.
"In its current state, this Right can only fritter around the edges of the Left's institutional conquest. It more or less tacitly accepts the Left's moral goals of sexual and racial radicalism. The growing anger on the Right at the incompetence, expense, and moral corruption in our schools is not matched with a plan to take away the Left's institutions or to provide an alternative vision of education. The Right's solutions are so based in narrow policy-wonkery and so lacking in spiritedness, that even if all its policy fixes were instantly implemented not much would change. This is what political defeat looks like. The New Right must endorse government and private actions to harm, humiliate, and destroy our education establishment and rebuild a competitive, patriotic, moral educational model suitable for a great country."
Disease X, Covid, and medical greed: this has been happening for years | The Spectator Australia
Alexandra Marshall writes: "Years ago, I wrote an article for this publication called, Digital darkness: the third apocalypse. In it, I included a discussion about 'conditioning' in which global bureaucracies were 'training' leaders to respond in a predictable manner to unpredictable scenarios - such as a catastrophic disease outbreak.
"It sounds like a great idea until you realise that bespoke and varied solutions made by unpredictable governments is how we solve problems as a species. Tightly controlled, regimented answers lead to public health disasters, such as we saw during Covid under the godly command of the World Health Organisation and its deeply vested interests.
"Sitting beneath this problem is that of corporate interest. Big Pharma requires predictable responses from government so that it can monetise the next pandemic (even more so than the last one). A product sitting on a pharmacy shelf, or even better, mandated by the state as part of a health passport, is worth a fortune that would make Alexander the Great quiver with desire."
A Brief History of the Plastic Pink Flamingo - New England Historical Society
"Then in the 1930s another invention put Leominster on the path of birthing the plastic pink flamingo. A German-American named Samuel Foster started a company called Foster Grant. In 1931 he visited a New York factory and saw an injection molding machine. He immediately ordered several and had them shipped to Worcester. He then had a team of mechanics and engineers spend two years modifying them so they worked.
"In 1937, Foster Grant churned out 20 million sunglasses. The next year, Tupperware started up in Leominster....
"Featherstone designed the pink flamingo based on photographs in National Geographic Magazine. Sold in pairs, they went on sale in 1958 for $2.76. The Sears catalogue carried them, with the instructions, 'Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape.'"
A Simple Age Verification Law Is Blowing Up the Online Porn Industry - POLITICO
"An important consensus seems to have emerged that childhood exposure to pornography is one of many things negatively affecting the minds of Gen Z. Anxiety is mounting around the country over the devastating and humiliating mental health crisis afflicting my generation. Some blame social media; others chime in to add oversensitivity, overdiagnosis and a therapeutic culture. It hardly seems like a leap to throw limitless internet porn into the blame basket.
"As the Louisiana law posits, 'Pornography may also impact brain development and functioning, contribute to emotional and medical illnesses, shape deviant sexual arousal, and lead to difficulty in forming or maintaining positive, intimate relationships, as well as promoting problematic or harmful sexual behaviors and addiction.'"
Breezewood - The Rise and Decline of a Highway Rest Stop
"Section 113(b) and (c) of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 that created the Interstate system. Section 113(b) stated that an Interstate can have direct access through an interchange with a toll road as long as access to a free alternative is available. Section 113(c) allowed for interchanges to be built with federal funds as long as the toll road operating agency agreed to retire tolls once their bonds were paid off. The other option was for the Turnpike to fund and built their own interchange. In short, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission didn't want to spend its own funds on an interchange - they had feared that the not yet complete Interstate 80 to the north would cut deeply into their revenues - and the unique setup that would give birth to over 50 different roadside businesses and services was set in stone."
How Big is the United Methodist Split So Far? - Juicy Ecumenism
"In reviewing the official list of the 100 top-largest American United Methodist congregations in 2020, based on membership, I note that 26 have left since then. [Four of the top 100 are in Tulsa: Boston Avenue, 7,641; Asbury, 6,926; First Methodist, 5,824; and Christ Church, 5,086.]
"In 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic, Len Wilson produced a list of the 25 fastest-growing large congregations in American United Methodism, measured by worship attendance. Since then, 11 of these 25 have successfully disaffiliated from the UMC.
"So while some 21 percent of American United Methodist congregations have disaffiliated, 26 percent of the largest-membership congregations and 44 percent of the fastest-growing large congregations have disaffiliated."
The Big Eye painting craze of the 1950s and 1960s, started by Margaret Keane, with many imitators. An excerpt from Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind the Big Eyes by Adam Parfrey:
"[Walter] Keane's fortune was made from a style stunning in its simplicity. Weeping waifs. Tearful children. All bearing hypnotic, saucer-size orbs. It was said that if you looked at them long enough, the distressed children seemed to stare at you, even if you moved about the room. "Let's face it," he boasted to Life magazine: "Nobody painted eyes like El Greco, and nobody can paint eyes like Walter Keane." More discriminating art enthusiasts, critics, and academics didn't quite agree, finding the paintings formulaic and sickening in their sentimentality. But the rest of America fell in love with Keane's Big Eyes, and he became a household name.
"Meanwhile, lurking in the background, and painting Keanes in a basement studio, was Walter's long-suffering wife, Margaret, the true artist behind the Big Eyes. But more on that later.
"As the Big Eyes grew in popularity throughout the 1960s, dozens of imitators moved to cash in on the Keane style. Big Eye prints sprouted like toadstools; "Gig" painted moony-eyed mongrels and alley cats; "Eden" did corkboard prints of Keane-like waifs dressed as moppets in tattered clothing; "Eve" transformed Keane-like kids into precocious go-go dancers. Even black-velvet iterations of Big Eye kitsch followed in their footsteps."
There Is No Indispensable Man | The Art of Manliness
"...when Ike returned to Normandy for the 20th anniversary of D-Day and was asked to give a speech at a dinner commemorating the invasion, rather than use the occasion to wax poetic about his role in executing one of the most monumental military operations in history, this man of singular eminence instead used the opportunity to read -- 'The Indispensable Man.'...
"As Eisenhower replied to a reporter who asked whether the prevailing 'view that you are indispensable to a party victory' would influence Ike's decision to run for a second term as president: 'Did you ever think of what a fate civilization would suffer if there were such a thing as an indispensable man? When he went the way of all the flesh, what would happen? It would be a calamity, wouldn't it? I don't think we need to fear that.'"
Ten Reasons Why I Believe the Bible Is the Word of God by R. A. Torrey | Tony Cooke Ministries
"I found myself face to face with the question, Why do you believe the Bible is the Word of God? I had no satisfactory answer. I determined to go to the bottom of this question. If satisfactory proof could not be found that the Bible was God's Word I would give the whole thing up, cost what it might. If satisfactory proof could be found that the Bible was God's Word I would take my stand upon it, cost what it might. I doubtless had many friends who could have answered the question satisfactorily, but I was unwilling to confide to them the struggle that was going on in my own heart; so I sought help from God and from books, and after much painful study and thought came out of the darkness of scepticism into the broad daylight of faith and certainty that the Bible from beginning to end is God's Word. The following pages are largely the outcome of that experience of conflict and final victory. I will give Ten Reasons why I believe the Bible is the Word of God."
MORE: Charles Leach, Our Bible: How We Got It, published in 1898.
