Lead me, Lord, in your righteousness because of my enemies - make your way straight before me. Not a word from their mouth can be trusted; their heart is filled with malice. Their throat is an open grave; with their tongues they tell lies.

- Fifth Psalm, verses eight and nine

 

The universe makes infinite idiots just to eat them.

- Rick from an episode of the television cartoon show Rick and Morty

My latest favorite film and book-that-is-its-source is The Big Short. I did see it a couple years ago, even introduced a home page piece with a significant reference to it. But I watched it again the other day, and decided I should read the book and presently have been doing so.

It blows my mind the extent to which people can be short sold.

No surprise.

The Bible speaks about the short selling of people throughout.

The reason people don't talk about this phenomena, to be summarized shortly, is because of the astoundingly profound quote from one simple frame of a single Dilbert panel I pulled ten years ago.

There is the courageously sincere Alice character saying truth like no one ever has. The gentleman there is her boss, and while I think we can all admit we'd sometimes like to call out our superiors on some things as our better natures inevitably prevail, this isn't about bosses at all — I very much appreciate my job and those who make it happen.

This is about the fear we have getting in trouble for seeing the truth and calling people out on it.

I wrote about short selling people in a home page piece a number of years ago, augmented by this blog post. Just some thoughts. Really, anyone who prayerfully studies Scripture and incisively peruses current events on some regular basis could see it. I'd add that after a modest survey of Tupper Saussy's Rulers of Evil and a variety of other honest sources elucidating the real powers and purposes behind all System operations, anyone would be able to see, hear, and understand — even join together and speak meaningfully and charitably about important things.

It's not hard. It is made hard by people who will not only refuse to humbly bend the knee, but are sworn to rigorously prop up people and tell them things to keep them from paying attention.

The entirety of The Big Short is how a number of Wall Street financiers made millions shorting the nation's mortgage bond industry just before it collapsed in 2008. The details are coated in technical financialese, but the book slows it down and the film even features beautiful women in bathtubs to explain things. The numbingly arcane language and turgidly complicated procedures are much of why it happened, but make no mistake.

While Michael Burry at one point in the book says, "I'm not making a bet against a bond, I'm making a bet against the system," what he really means is he was making a bet against the people, millions and millions of people in this nation who lie and are subject to more powerful liars putting them on the altar. This is the seldom explored truth about the System: Cain definitely sets people up to be shorted.

It is arranged to be that way.

When World devotees in Cain's service do human sacrifice, they do nothing other than what he did in murdering Abel. Did you see that, there in the fourth chapter of Genesis? He "talked with his brother," (KJV) the implication clearly that he said something outside the bounds of his true intentions to convince him to go into the field.

Caesar's legion of minions do this 24/7, they're supposed to do this, dutifully laboring as they should — from government bureaucrats to university professors to church leaders to television pundits to community organizers to bank lenders, oh those bank lenders — "No, you're good! You're a fine individual, worthy of our exploi-er-assistance!"

God tells you something much more veritable. He says you're worthless because of your sinfulness. Yes, He does love you still the same and He allowed Himself to be nailed to a cross to take the penalty for that sinfulness and clothe you in His righteousness. Because the System was put in motion after Cain's actions, those sustaining it know nothing about God and everything about building a city and prosecuting his brother in order to be his "keeper."

In an interview on Greg Koukl's Stand to Reason, apologist Abdo Murray detailed the characteristics of this product quite graphically. This is a bit of a paraphrase, but it is very close.

 

Today if you are sexually confused you are considered a hero. If you are morally confused you're a progressive. If you are religiously confused you are tolerant. These things are lauded as virtues, but if you are clear about those things you are a bigot, a regressive, intolerant. Clarity is decried as a sin. Our "post-truth" society now features a tyrannical deference to feelings and preferences over truth. How do we get the value of clarity back with conviction and compassion, and actually honor what is true?

 

It is simple: We don't really want clarity, truth, much less righteousness. We don't even want justice or mercy or anything hifalutin-sounding folk say we want. We just want to feel good and commission those good-looking people to keep telling us how good we're supposed to feel.

I watch so many holding the World's megaphones saying things people want to hear, and then I look over and see the hearers smile at me and pat me on the back — yeah, that's what I want. I really have no idea what those things are, but I do know I want to feel good no matter what.

That is what ends up being mindlessly adopted as TRUTH. Why go through the trouble of finding out what it really is — that'd be too narrow-minded, and just too hard! Instead they enthusiastically tell me I'm supposed to like it and that so many do too, so... YEAH!

The truth above all truths is that deep inside each one of us is a broken, bewildered, wounded, and please, let's face reality — a reprehensibly evil individual. I believe deep down each one of us knows that yet we spend our lives trying so hard to smother it in juicy wholesomeness. What is less understood is that there are gushing professionals out there to help us do that on the widest scale possible.

 

I have to say that at the end of the week just after the first day of summer this year I happened to be in Santa Barbara, and there couldn't have been a more striking demonstration of this truth than in what I witnessed. There was a buzz in the air because they were preparing for the Summer Solstice parade and events that Saturday. From what I gathered it involved all kinds of hip, colorful things happening related to artistic expression and drinking.

It was generally not a whole lot different than anything pagan ritualistic religions have done for centuries — and I'd say Santa Barbara is a prime breeding ground for that. A promotional piece of artwork shows a group of people with their arms raised high, in worship of... what?

Don't get me wrong. Floats and costumes and music and dancing and displays and merchandise can be joyously wonderful things. I just wonder, what is it for? I'd venture most would say something like, "Just go with it! Makes us happy! Celebrate!" It is certain that all this is explicitly a celebration of the unusual, the unconventional, the untraditional — meaning there is a profoundly implicit connection to sodomism ("You may give full vent to your sexual preference"), socialism ("We must forcefully take from some to give to others"), and racialism ("If you don't agree you're racist").

It's not hard to see its ugliness right there in Abdo Murray's ruthlessly insightful observations.

The ironic thing is that up and down this quaint city's finely manicured main drag, State Street, are bars, bars, and more bars. Next to just about every fashion boutique or ice cream shop or real estate office is a bar. What is it, exactly, that these people with gargantuan pasted-on smiley-faces trying to smother with alcohol?

That handful of investors who've found a way to short the American people peered into this circumstance and pounced — yet even in raking it all in they each do feel something about it.

Towards the end of The Big Short one of them, Ben Rickert, turned to a couple of young traders gleefully high-fiving each other about scoring huge on their credit default swaps and growled: "No dancing. This is the American people you're talking about, people with jobs and families."

Mark Baum knew his shorts were going to pay millions and sat dejected at a table on a high-rise patio, wrestling with his epiphany that his actions were the ones required to reveal how much the country is made up of so many savagely destructive liars — rich, poor, doesn't matter. As he was badgered by his colleagues about making the call he struggled mightily with the perverse truth that the only way they could be called on it was for him to cash in.

Jarod Vennett held a $47 million check in his hand and looked up to the camera and said, "I'm not a hero, never said I was one. You don't have to like me." Oh he is a hero, definitely, to those who accept what he did to make the call and expose the grand lie — short sellers do provide a legitimate public service. The catch is that so many forces, institutionally established and sustained, perpetually keep people in the most entrenched denial. One of them used billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize the take.

"Don't pay any attention to that very bad-looking thing that just happened just then — never mind that, you're still good! No worries at all!..."

In one of his several brief explications author Michael Lewis for his part declared: "No one seemed able to see what was so plain to him: These swaps were all part of [Michael Burry's] global search for value." Burry added "I don't take breaks in my search for value. There is no golf or other hobby to distract me. Seeing value is what I do."

Out of the thoroughly System-propagandized universe a more accurate rendering of "seeing value" here would be "shrewdly identifying where proficient cutthroat exploiters have lied to eager naïve exploitees about their value and punishing them both by collecting the difference while at the same time unwittingly inviting the magnificent political and religious mandarins to rescue both so they'll look really good."

 

What about me? Why don't I "short the people"?

Yeah, you'd think. I don't for a number of reasons.

One, yet again, I know the System is fixed. I don't rail or remonstrate against it. Many spend lifetimes seething and crusading against Caesar and his hordes, but that rebellion is their lifeblood because they are justified in crushing it with seven-fold strength. There are thousands of sworn bad guys out there, but most of us average folk don't grasp that the worst of them are the smiliest gushiest people holding court in that religious organization with the nicest looking branches right around the corner from our homes.

 The other reason I don't short people is that as a follower of Christ, yes as brutally uncaring as it seems, I do want them to viscerally comprehend the reality of their complicity. I admit in a way I am like a short seller standing right there, and just like Alice from Dilbert and our friends in The Big Short asking, "What am I missing here? You habitually do stupid things and constantly lie about it." Yet they still bleat, "No, no, I'm good and all these people can prove it, so back off."

Thing is, I can't force them to see something they can't see, but I also can't cash in on it — I want them to be honest with themselves and turn to the One Person who makes people not liars and murderers anymore. I simply won't exploit them — I can't, God won't let me. All I'm to do is share with them, that's what I did in Santa Barbara.

I ministered and prayed. I talked with people and prayed for them.

Yes the Bible says that's risky. Most of these people will still reject Him. Many would want my head for saying things that just don't comport with the spirit of Summer Solstice where positive energy vibes abound. That is indeed the pushback to apocalyptic revival — the book of Revelation is full of references to the ultimate destiny of people who'll heed their master who, from the tenth verse, second chapter, "...will put some in jail."

Read the rest of Revelation to appreciate that intention. Jesus said they'll contemptibly marginalize you, believing they are doing it for God. They're rabidly into it now — just listen to what they'd say if you challenge the reigning zeitgeist at Summer Solstice: "We don't bring here the religion, the dogma — that's gotta go! You can believe in Jesus if you want, that's fine, but don't tell us how to live." This is merely a whacked-out form of Hinduism reworked for more Americanist sentiments, the mantra of this now rampant New Age dominion "Every belief is a good one!" Those who spout it don't seem to recognize that the belief of not believing in Hinduism is the one they most adamantly refuse to embrace — quite dogmatic if you ask me.

And quite insistent! Just as the bankers and ratings agents were screeching for years in the early 2000s "Look at this really valuable shit! It isn't shit at all, it really isn't, it's special! It's valuable! Buy it! It's all in the interpretation! Trust us!" — those bouncing up State Street were essentially saying the same thing.

"Look at how valuable I am with all this pomp and pretense! We can be whoever we want to say we are! Look at how special I say I am! And there are so many of us it has to be good! Woo-hoo!"

Push them a bit on the stark reality of that situation?

How annoying! How — ummm — constricting! ::Ee-yew!::

To fully protect these sentiments, the Solstice throngs are zealously urging Caesar to further codify the precedent of judicially certified ostracism: Critical of sodomism socialism racialism? You will be prosecuted. Put in jail or face some similar "hate crime" penalty? Absolutely. The latter part of Revelation clearly states that will even be death.

Jesus gently reminds us to remain faithful through it all — which means loving them with His self-sacrificial love right now, being truthful yet merciful, bold yet gracious, bracing yet caring. The reckoning will come, but the harvest is right now. They are subsumed in fear under Caesar right now, as always — they may instead fully enjoy God's bountiful forgiveness at no cost to them but at the cost of everything to Him.

Many think the Revelation is only about Armageddon and stuff like that. Much more it is about those who worship God in Spirit and in Truth reaching out with that rich, deep, overwhelming love to anyone who'll want to see and hear and touch and experience Grace and Truth.

It is also, however, about the destiny of those who just don't want it, and it is harrowing, truly harrowing. You think The Big Short was really that big? God is the ultimate short seller. Know what else though? He is long-suffering — He'll totally go long with you if you'd let Him. Jesus is infinitely valuable, connect with Him, He's reaching His hand out to give Himself to you, along with the Kingdom.

Don't believe any of that? No worries. There are always those scouring the vast value assignment disinformation to take care of that business, and they will.

 

I must add this note in closing. I'm not so obtuse to deny that there may indeed have been many people enjoying Summer Solstice activities who are strong faithful followers of Christ. Nor do I dismiss how industrious and accomplished the participants are doing good things for society during their work week, and I'm not getting in the way of what the World does with its pagan celebrations on the weekend.

I also do not think Jesus must be the Grand Marshall of some festival, that's not what He's about at all. I even wrote a home page piece some years ago about James Ensor's depiction of that very thing — it is itself pretty gruesome.

That's the whole point. Millions of people have Jesuses in their heads and in their hearts that really aren't Him, many of them put there by those who don't want you to know Him. I myself want to be sure Jesus is not some sublime concoction of mine — being in a relationship with anyone means you spend a lifetime getting to know an individual for who they truly are.

I do, however, want to be on track with how the World is trying convince me their Jesus is the one I should follow.

The question then in all of it is a good one.

Does your Jesus belong to the World, or does He reign in the Kingdom?

He'll help you find out if you'll ask Him.

 

***

Notes: The interview with Abdo Murray on Stand to Reason was from May 4 2018. He was speaking on his latest book Saving Truth. I simply had to include the photograph (my own) of the promotional banner with the lion and bear, I believe profoundly representing the culture war (Devout Romanists battling Radical Selfists) girded of course by alcoholic consumption - a vivid picture of what the solstice celebration is really about. The photographs of the dancing ladies and masked individuals were taken from the festival website. To be fair to the company "Firestone Walker," they explicitly declare that they do not support any given political cause or organization. I've discovered in reading The Big Short that some of the main characters in the film do not have the same names as those in real life, as they refused to allow the film to use them. For your information, Mark Baum in real-life is Steve Eisman, Jared Vennett is Greg Lippmann, and Ben Rickert is Ben Hockett. Michael Burry did allow his name to be used. Burry's quote about shorting the system is on page 49. The remarks about Burry's search for value are on page 56. Some rough thoughts of mine about value and its transfer from one to another are here. I've written a number of pieces about the political power of this sodomism socialism racialism triumvirate, here is one that gets into it in relation to today's ever metastasizing postmodernism. To get a better idea of how the World System operates, I invite you to take a tour of the webzine. Here is the site map to help with your navigation. I also have a "Table of Contents" page to go through this as if it were a book. I've compiled a modest list of Jesuses the World System likes people to follow. Here is a page of all the bad guys people like to revile. Here is a rough sketch about what modern human sacrifice looks like. One of the key ways churches enlist themselves as agents of Cain is to contractually obligate themselves as non-profit tax-exempt organizations. Here is a bit more about that dynamic. Here is a brief description of who is at the top of the World System psyche-molding apparatus. For a great read on how much people's wickedness breaks God's heart read the first few Psalms. The verses of one of them I put in the opening quote. For a great story about an entire city God wanted to reach read Jonah - it is much more about God's desire to save than a guy being swallowed by a fish. Some thoughts about Grace And Truth are here.