"Back in the USSR! You do not know how lucky you are, boys!" After a wonderful and great, but difficult trip, to marry Alex Musser and Autmun Burdett at Pretty Place, South Carolina, we sadly had to quickly turn around and head back to the former Soviet Union with our first stop in Kyiv, Ukraine - and then off back to Almaty, Kazakhstan overnight tonight. We wanted to spend some more time with family, but were not able to do so. It is time to get back to the daily work schedule and grind, the unavoidable reality check on our lives which cannot be escaped from no matter how hard people try - particularly those on the Left side of things - and in spite of the cultic virus madness which has currently seized our postmodern world to an all time high of suffocating proportions, pun intended.

The so-called bourgeois, the empty-headed capitalism which was spawned under the authoritarianis m of the various kings and kingdoms of Europe (Russia too!) during the 1800's, which Marxism and Socialism strongly opposed because of its inherent alienation, was all anticipated and presaged by Solomon's own kingdom in the book of Ecclesiastes when he writes, "There is nothing good for a man under the sun except to eat and to drink and to be merry, and this will stand by him in his toils throughout the days of his life which God has given him under the sun." Solomon often complained it was all in vain. In other words, since God has cursed the work environment by cursing the very ground upon which we live and work, the problem of alienation in a very fallen world cannot be rectified even by politics and science, let alone philosophy and/ or religion. In fact, one might argue - the bourgeois, so roundly condemned by Marx and company, not to mention the hippies of the 60's generation - is probably the best one can do this side of the grave in spite of its empty materialism. Such a sad state of affairs is, of course, an insult to the pride filled progressivist mindset which presumes it can overcome the fallen world through evolution - a scientific and political eschatological fantasy of virtually semi-apocalyptic proportions as we see the day approaching closer and closer.

As we do our best to navigate the postmodern world of madness today, the old Beatles song, "Back to the USSR" rings loud and clear - yet with a fascist twist to it all since the primary guru of postmodern exisentialism is/was National Socialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, who, Frenchman Jean Paul Sartre, followed too closely in his "life is absurd" philosophy, as did Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurth School. Thanks to such wonderful western thinkers, our postmodern existential world is now a place full of absurdity, madness, foolishness, and abject lunacy. Sadly and tragically, all too many are even publicly justifying and promoting the same as our world sinks more and more into the abyss of God's impending judgment in one form or another.

As people reject the obvious truth that the God of the Bible is the Creator of the universe, Job himself warns us, "With Him are strength and sound wisdom, the misled and the misleader belong to Him. He makes counselors walk barefoot and makes fools of judges. He loosens the bond of kings and binds their loins with a girdle. He makes priests walk barefoot and overthrows the secure ones. He deprives the trusted ones of speech and takes away the discernment of the elders. He pours contempt on nobles and loosens the belt of the strong. He reveals mysteries from the darkness and brings the deep darkness into light. He makes the nations great, then destroys them; He enlarges the nations, then leads them away. He deprives of intelligence the chiefs of the earth's people and makes them wander in a pathless waste. They grope in darkness with no light, and He makes them stagger like a drunken man (Job 12:16-25)." Today, even in America, we are now witnessing the judgment of God against the idiocracy of its leaders as they have foolishly rejected the Creator of Genesis, "But now ask the beasts, and let them teach you; And the birds of the heavens, and let them tell you. Or speak to the earth, and let it teach you; And let the fish of the sea declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this in whose hand is the life of every living thing, And the breath of all mankind?" (Job 12:7-10)

The silly love songs of the Beatles of 1962-66 spawned the postmodern madness of their hippy-drug infested eastern guru mysticism of the 1967-70 where songs like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I am the Walrus" became routine. I have always been skeptical of the touchy-feely love fest pop-psychology which characterized the early Beatles, even though I liked their harmonies and tunes, precisely because it invariably leads to the contentless insanity of their later songs and escapades. They then all divorced in 1970 which shows their appreciation of what love was all about was only a figment of their own aritistic imagination. The Beatles music thus became a tragic prophecy of things to come, which has affected and effected our entire western world these days as they are no longer just songs, but now an enforced way of life. Hippyism, which my uncle (late) Charles (he was a barber for many years) used to whistle at on the streets of Olympia, is now demanded of all or else. Yet sadly, my first inklings of enforced hippy madness was at church where the silly and banal silly love songs of the beatles became the litmust test for true spirituality beginning in the mid 1980's when I first began to walk with the Lord. My old boss, Tom McCabe, said such were songs that can/could be sung in the shower. Yet so many Christians presumed such songs were the ways of the Spirit and had to be sung to be really spiritual in tune with God.

The Beatles were prophets and gurus of things to come. Even Elvis Presley was critical of their antics. I am always very suspicious of such self-fulfiling prophecies, but have the utmost faith in those prophecies which are not - the biblical kind which cannot be explained mathematically - but are yet nonetheless very real and historical in spite of all the philosophical, political, and religious opposition arrayed when the Messiah, Jesus Christ, was born, lived, died, and was resurrected from the dead according to any numer of Old Testament prophecies which found historical fulfillment in the New Testament during the Gospel period.

The apostle Paul himself summarized, "Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 1:1-4)," Paul goes on to say later on, "For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5:6)." I will take such prophecies and histories any time compared to what I am now being routinely subjected to day in and day out - a lunacy of cultic proportions which only the judgment of God apparetly can sort out in a world gone mad.

1 Two points:

1. Napoleon was a great appreciator of classical music and had a great ear for the quality thereof. Many musicians said they were nervous performing for him because he focused totally on the performance and wouldn't let anything interfere. And he wasn't chary about telling musicians that they were second-rate.

2. Solomon, for all his God-given wisdom, "fell off the wagon" by marrying many women, some of whom were not Israelites and eventually seduced him into, at least "interest" in their modes of worship. It's not out of line to suppose that the beautiful African woman described in the Song of Solomon was one such. If he'd stuck with Jewish women he would not have gotten depressed and decided that "all is vain." Because to those who truly follow God, it is not at all in vain.

2 I never knew that about Napoleon. I would have thought him uninterested in music or other artistic endeavors. He was rather a brutal philistine, I always believed.

Yeah; Solomon's willie got the better of him. And it made him miserable. Being led by your gonads has a tendency to do that.

3 Napoleon also knew well that "an army marches on its stomach," and I read somewhere that his campaigns were always accompanied by Italian cooks. The army ate well, whenever possible, and some people credit this as the beginning of French cooking. 

4 This is inspiring. I have a lot of feedback in here and it did not fail me to agree with them. You haveone ramarkable thoughtful carrying here. Keep it up. view

5 Yeah; Napoleon is credited with that phrase about an army and it's stomach. He clearly understood the value of the little things in maintaining morale.

I read a book about the Falkland Island War in '82. The authors concluded one of the big reasons Britain won was because they did those little things - supply clean socks in a soggy, wet environment, for instance, and Argentina did not.

I wouldn't be surprised if the French stole their cooking from Italy. The Italians REALLY know how to eat! I've not had much French cooking but I have been unimpressed with what I have had. Not so with Italian food.

And it makes sense. Napoleon was not really French but Corsican, and that island was kicked back and forth between France and whoever ruled Italy. (It's why they have their own mafia that is actually more brutal than the Sicilian version.) Napoleon was probably exposed to a lot of Italian cooking in his youth.

I can see it now; Napoleon's army marching on Russia and sitting down to a nice plate of pasta fazul in the evening! Ciao!

At least until it ran out and Moscow was burned and they had to eat the horses (and maybe a few of the Italian chefs they brought.)

6 French cuisine can be exquisite, but is often very complicated and takes hours to prepare, whereas Italian cuisine prizes simplicity. Give me a plate of pasta with sauteed shrimp and I'm your pal.

7 Another conjecture about Solomon, who asked the Lord for wisdom rather than riches, and received both. By the time he said in effect "All is vain, give yourself up to pleasure," I wonder if he was becoming senile. Because those thoughts are NOT those of a wise man.

8 He seems to have drifted away from The Lord as he grew older - and he grew unwise in the process.