How many view the Trump campaign

As this.

(Conceivably NSFW, depending. Hat tip: R.D. Brewer @ AOSHQ))

Latest Video from Center for Medical Progress

Heroes. They are undaunted.



Gotta run.

Today's pick-me-up

We hear too many stories about professional athletes misbehaving and worse.  So it's time for a nice story about some great hockey guys:

I dig the banter among the players and the kid -- Ben's just one of the guys that day.

That could make me into a Blackhawks fan, were such a thing possible (I grew up a North Stars fan).

H/T The Gormogons.  (Great blog.)

UPDATE:  I believe #65 in this video is this guy whom I wrote about some time ago.  Too bad the videos on that post have since been taken down.

Rubio is not Bush

Good article about Jeb and Marco. Excerpt:

Primary seasons, though, are when the tectonic undercurrents of our politics reveal themselves. And what’s become clear in the months since is that Bush fundamentally misread the seismic signs of the moment.

Having been out of elective office for eight years, Bush took too long to grasp that the anger fueling conservative revolt was as much about the Republican establishment — with which the Bush name had become synonymous — as it was about Obama.

He entered the race without even thinking through a response to questions about his brother’s foreign policy. Somehow he conceived of his own candidacy as tangential to the family legacy.

It would be hard as a politician to see yourself the way others see you, and in the case of Jeb Bush, he never seemed to grasp the infamy of his last name with certain people.

I make no secret I support Marco Rubio at this point. I like him better on immigration and domestic policy than Ted Cruz, he has a better temperament and he's more electable.

How your Benedict Option sausage is being made

Your Benedict Option sausage: lots of chewy word casing, plus other stuff!

Following an impressive image-post intended to suggest to your emotionally seducible eyes how hard its author is working on Your Benedict Option book, this jarring, corrective truth in advertising; emphases mine:

[NFR: It is a great job, and I am extremely blessed to have it. I’m not reading A Secular Age all the way through; I don’t really have the time to do it. I’m reading Jamie Smith’s guide to it, though, and when I want to dig more deeply into certain Taylor points, I go to the Taylor text using references from Jamie’s book. It’s extremely helpful. I’m researching for the Ben Op book. — RD]

You remember this process: cribbing that book report a half hour before school starts using Google or, for older readers, Cliff Notes.

Your current Benedict Option facts as revealed by Rod Dreher himself:

1. There is no coherent concept of the Benedict Option, although Rod Dreher has been flog-marketing the buzz word for years. Why? Because the Benedict Option has never been important enough in its own right for its beneficiary - Dreher, not you - to devote his time and energy to conceptualizing.

It's not even worth his reading a possibly relevant work by someone else all the way through. Frankly, your would-be Benedict Option book author would rather eat something tasty instead of thinking about his own signature buzz phrase, and he would rather just footnote-drop a reference to someone more notable than himself than even fully read and understand his own, self-chosen research material.

2. Contrary to the suggestive deceit Dreher has practiced upon his own Christian readership, as of this post there is no contracted publisher yet for a Benedict Option book. What Dreher is working on he is working on on spec only, hoping his agent will finally find a publisher foolish enough or desperate enough to bite. Those not yet biting have warned Dreher not to blog about the actual substance of the Benedict Option in the meantime, which is why so many posts are suggestively tagged with the term instead.

3. You, gullible Benedict Option-attracted Christian, are an agronomic commodity in the process of being husbanded and harvested to serve Rod Dreher's publishing income needs only, as if you were no more than so many hogs or soybeans. Happily for you, you are still free to choose which commodity describes you best.

So, based on Dreher's own accounts of the Benedict Option project to date, what will this sausage recipe actually look like?

Your Benedict Option Sausage Recipe

• Casing: 2 yards of 1/4" delicious, chewy suggestive word casing

• Anecdotes: 1 or more from a potential Benedict Option sausage lover, to taste

• (Other stuff*)

*If the level of litter in your cat box drops mysteriously overnight, don't blame your cat. And if your cat is smirking, see 3, above.

Rod Dreher knows sex sells

My emphases, just to save you time:

[NFR: In doing more research on the book last night, I discovered that the slutty protagonist turns out to have had an abusive past that is meant to partly explain her behavior. That, and we are exposed to the horror of “slut-shaming,” which is condemned. Seems to me that the author gets to present softcore porn to her readers by wrapping it in a moralistic message, like the church lady gossip who says, “I’m just telling you this so you can pray for her.” — RD]

Wait, what doggy is this tail wagging? What post does this comment above belong to?

Why, this one:

New in the Young Adult section, a novel called Firsts. From the publisher MacMillan’s description...

You can read the book’s first chapter here. It’s soft-core porn. Here’s more, from inside the book. I’m going to put this below the jump, to spare those who would rather not see it. I think it’s important that you see it to know what’s out there.

But, really, now, what is a Christian-flavored carnival barker supposed to do?

This sexy underage teen post has already received 27 comments as I write this, while a previous one trying to flog his Dante book for this Lent has only received 8. Can't take an oyster-slurping European vacation on 8 Dante comments, now, can you.

Sex sells, Rod Dreher knows it, particularly if it's a voyeuristic ogle of some forbidden underage teen sex, so he's got the Popular Mechanics wrapper to put around your National Geographic when you want to examine that underage native teen culture in more depth.

But watch out when he gets back to that Caitlyn Jenner stuff. Sooner or later he's going to get the itch to put German tranny hi-jinks below the fold, too, and nobody wants to see that.

WHAT?! I CAN'T BUY FULL AUTO!?

Hilarious.

The sky is falling, and Rod Dreher is selling Benedict Option shelters

Fresh from a feverish week of market-making by seamlessly pureeing everything from Donald Trump to Pope Francis (visually presented as always in a Dreher post as a sappy, goggle-eyed Fred Flintstone) canoodling with Lutherans to the ravages of the Reformation itself into a foaming smoothie of existential angst, our very own Christian Offer Shlomi leaves us with
 

We live in a society unmoored from our past, our future, our God, and each other. And nobody really knows what to do about it. God knows our institutions do not. But I think most people sense, deep down, that this can’t last.

Red skies indeed. Night is falling. Time to shelter.

Time indeed. Just look at this chart:

Act now - BenOperators are standing by.

Fortunately, there's an app for that. We'll get to that in a minute.

I wonder how many Christian marks for Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ ever really realize how perfectly identical his marketing pitch is to the frenzied hawking of precious metals during typical stock market volatility - like, well, like the market we're experiencing right now.

What should you do when you're feeling a financial panic? Why, something radically different, definitely involving a vehicle even its vendor doesn't fully understand, right?

Of course you should. So why shouldn't you handle your faith the same way, with the same emotional, bolt-directly-into-a-door-jamb response?

Of course you should. Absolutely. What if night were to fall on you and your family before you did?

You made the right decision, neighbor! You're certainly BenOpping now.

Now, I know what you're thinking, faithful EQE reader. You believe I pulled this next image just above from a Monty Python skit, right? Nuh-huh. I pulled it from here, from an adoration of a re-enactment of a period before the sacred was supposedly driven from our world.

Fortunately, as I mentioned above, you can re-enact putting the sacred back into your life by doing as your pitchman would like you to do, by committing yourself right now to buy his not yet outlined, not yet researched, not yet written, not yet contracted Benedict Option book so that you can learn what its author hasn't yet either discovered or attempted, how to re-enact your living as if you had been born in a different time and place, within an entirely different physical and historical cultural matrix, complete with entirely different views of everything from the nature of stuff itself to your own natural place in the order of things.

Speaking of your own natural place in the order of things - sorry. Not everyone gets to be the nobleman and own the land, you know. This whole liberty thing is still some years out.

You have to walk behind the horse and give your lord - not your Lord, your lord - a good chunk of what you spend your entire nasty, brutish, and short life producing. And you'll want to have lots of children, not necessarily because you value life, but because you'll bury three out of five and you'll still need a couple to survive as your pension.

Wait...what am I saying? Of course you get to be the lord of the manor. Everyone does. Because this is nostalgic historical re-enacting, the SCCA: the Society for Creative Christian Anachronism, and, like the children of Lake Wobegon, everyone automatically gets to simultaneously be above average.

Better known as Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™. 

If you do, you'll automatically become simultaneously above average and re-sacramentalized, too. Charts don't lie.

Still, you'd better not delay. Night is falling, and no one's lived through sunset before.

Act now - BenOperators are standing by.