Sunday, July 31, 2022
Something to think on …
It is the low drive for sameness and the hatred of otherness that characterizes all forms of leftism, which inevitably are totalitarian.
— Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, irn on this date in 1909
Something to think on …
Democratism and its allied herd movements, while remaining loyal to the principle of equality and identity, will never hesitate to sacrifice liberty.
— Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, born on this date in 1909
Saturday, July 30, 2022
Very much worth reading …
… Carson's "Silent Spring" fails test of time - The New York Times.
Carson used dubious statistics and anecdotes to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass. She rightly noted threats to some birds, like eagles and other raptors, but she wildly imagined a mass "biocide." She warned that one of the most common American birds, the robin, was "on the verge of extinction" - an especially odd claim given the large numbers of robins recorded in Audubon bird counts before her book.
This will raise some hackles …
… SCOTUS Justice Alito Criticizes World Leaders for Opposing Abortion Ruling, Cites ‘Hostility to Religion’.
“There’s … growing hostility to religion or at least the traditional religious beliefs that are contrary to the new moral code that is ascendant in some sectors,” the justice said.
Appreciation …
… A tribute to my friend James Lovelock | The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Historically our view of Earth was defined by two disciplines – geology and biology. Darwin had triumphantly unveiled the nature of the biological processes of life but his picture was incomplete. What Lovelock realised was that these disciplines could not so easily be separated. They were joined together in a four billion year old dance, life constantly changing the planet to suit its own device.
Something to think on …
Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress, there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters.
— C. Northcote Parkinson, born on this date in 1909
Friday, July 29, 2022
Something to think on…
I don't know Who, or what, put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone, or Something,and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, born on this date in 1905
Thursday, July 28, 2022
Since these people know everything …
… why are they wasting their time in school: “Woke” students walked out of an event for a pathetic reason.
By the way, I may not agree with these people, but I always pay attention to what they have to say. Just don’t start oushing me around.
Something to think on …
If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
— Karl Popper, born on this date in 1902
Wednesday, July 27, 2022
Hmm …
… Who’s It For? — ‘Craft in the Real World’ (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Salesses’s foremost concern is the way that the behavioral and artistic norms of writing workshops suppress or distort the voices of writers of color, but his deeper purpose is to suggest that the question “What makes a story ‘good writing’?” can’t be answered until you know who the story is for.
Maybe they’re thinking about it too much. I’ve been earning my living from my pen for nearly 60 years. I have never attended a writer’s workshop. It was on-the-job training right from the start.
Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence is the second of Edith Wharton's novels which I've read (the other is The House of Mirth). And I must say, Innocence is a great novel: it's full of life, and characters, and rich descriptions of New York in the later nineteenth century. Wharton had a gift for composition: by which I mean her novels are not only well written, but very well constructed. Innocence, especially, proceeds with a master's touch: secondary and tertiary characters circle outer orbits of the story, only to emerge, later, as critical players in the drama. Wharton's attention to character and personality is matched by her sensitivity to place: both in the sense of New York as a locale, but equally, in the sense of social status, of families occupying a certain position or place. Wharton was famous, of course, for this ability: to detail the differences between families and their social rankings. Innocence is a novel in pursuit of this detail, this serious, if sometimes humorous, hierarchy of wealth, marriages, and ambition. I greatly enjoyed Innocence (more than Mirth), and was surprised by the readability of the novel: Wharton offers pleasure, and critique, in a manner both accessible and rewarding. The last word is reserved for her:
"Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to pray every day."
Something to think on …
When one remembers how the Catholic Church has been governed, and by whom, one realizes that it must have been divinely inspired to have survived at all.
— Hilaire Belloc, born on this date in 1870
Anniversary …
… 50 Years of Making Nonfiction Creative - Creative Nonfiction. (Hat tip, Gwen Hansell Hendry)
Fifty years ago, on Valentine’s Day of 1972, New York magazine published “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe,” a proclamation that, it is clear from this vantage point, provided a standard and direction and a way of unifying nonfiction writers—essayists, journalists, memoirists—into one cohesive, albeit loosely determined, category that we now call creative nonfiction
Tuesday, July 26, 2022
Gee, think there’s any chance these guys are bigots?
… White Christian Nationalism ‘Is a Fundamental Threat to Democracy’.
They better watch where they say this sort of shit. They might find themselves nursing a knuckle sandwich.
You have been warned …
…
In the early 20th century, a German school of philosophy called the Frankfurt School developed a social philosophy called Critical Theory. In a nutshell, Critical Theory critiques culture and challenges the underlying power structures of society. It is a movement to “liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them,” reinterpreting western culture as a story of the oppressor vs. oppressed. In Critical Theory, the only things that exist are hierarchies of power, and those hierarchies must be torn down. The goal of this movement, whether stated or not, is nothing less than the complete dismantling and rebuilding of western culture from the ground
I have met some of these people. They do not impress.
The dumbest generation …
… Rhode Island restaurant posts horrific meme of Anne Frank and the Holocaust | Daily Mail Online.
How did whoever posted this not know who Anne Frank was?
Something to think on …
I cannot prove to you that God exists, but my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern in the individual has at its disposal the greatest transforming energies of which life is capable. Find this pattern in your own individual self and life is transformed.
— Carl Jung, born on this date in 1875
Tracking the decline …
… Grading 'reforms' teach kids they can 'do nothing, get something'.
"We’re deluding ourselves and the students into the idea that they’re something they’re not,” the teacher said. Students are learning that "you can do nothing and still get something." That will not serve them well in college -- or life.
Hmm …
… Charlie Kirk: College is a ‘scam.’
He has a unique perspective in writing The College Scam: How America's Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth. Kirk was encouraged to start Turning Point USA out of high school and never attended college. He jokes about taking a "gap decade."
Monday, July 25, 2022
How one writer learns from another …
… Evelyn Waugh's sincerest form of flattery - The Spectator World. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Throughout Vile Bodies, the echoes of Jazz and Jasper are everywhere apparent. Agatha Runcible’s plaintive cry in Vile Bodies of “Faster, faster!” is exactly the same as Lord Ottercove’s in Jazz and Jasper. Lord Monomark’s omnipotence — “Get me the Home Secretary!” — is identical to Lord Ottercove’s overweening power in control- ling government and ousting prime ministers.
I quite understand …
… Blogging Note — we’re “house hunting” in the land of Oz.
My wife is living in an assisted living facility in Connecticut, near where her son and his family live. I am looking for a ranch house upstate (she has Parkinson’s and cannot navigate the stairs here). As Bette Davis said, growing old ain’t for sissies.
Something to think on …
Far more critical than what we know or what we don't know is what we don't want to know.
— Eric Hoffer, born on this date in 1902
Sunday, July 24, 2022
I’m not optimistic …
…
The Nobel jurors in Norway should be honoring the pandemic’s true heroes, starting with an obvious candidate across their border: Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist of Sweden. While the WHO and the rest of the world panicked, he kept calm. While leaders elsewhere crippled their societies, he kept Sweden free and open. While public-health officials ignored their own pre-Covid plans for a pandemic—and the reams of reports warning that lockdowns, school closures, and masks would accomplish little or nothing—Tegnell actually stuck to the plan and heeded the scientific evidence.
Which is why it’s increasingly irrelevant …
… Academia Neglects Its Most Important Function: A Free Marketplace of Ideas - American Thinker.
In one eye-opening finding, 74 percent of undergrads endorse the view that a professor who says “something that students find offensive” should be reported to the university. By a majority almost as lopsided, 65 percent believe that a fellow student who says something they consider offensive should be turned in. That informers’ mindset is especially pronounced among students who identify themselves as politically liberal, fully 85 percent of whom would report a professor who offends them. But even among self-identified conservatives, a solid majority, 56 percent, are of the same mindset.
The problem with this, obviously, is that since they think they think they know everything already, why are they in school?
Anniversary …
… Having a “kitchen debate” on July 24, 1959.
I graduated from high school in May of that year, and turned 18 in October.
Just so you know …
… From the New England Journal of Medicine: Monkeypox Virus Infection in Humans across 16 Countries — April–June 2022.
Something to think on …
God is full of mercy for everyone, as He has been towards you. He is a father before He is a judge.
— Alexandre Dumas, born on this date in 1803
Saturday, July 23, 2022
Sad, but with hope …
… Erasures. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
We chose ‘Erasures’ by Maryann Corbett to be our Friday Poem this week because it’s such a beautiful story — whether it’s true or not — and beautifully told, with a lovely little kicker at the end. Corbett uses delightfully precise and evocative detail — the beast-mark, the ribbon markers, the Palmer-method script — and leaves us mourning not only the little poetry books and their long-forgotten authors but all endeavours which cost so many “blood-sweated hours” and are rewarded with indifference in the long run. It’s a joy of a poem and we like it a lot.
Good …
… Cancel culture’ backfires as donors pull cash from Edinburgh University.
The institution said that 24 donations and 12 legacies had been “cancelled, amended or withdrawn” in response to the September 2020 renaming of a prominent campus building dedicated to its former student, one of the leading figures of the Scottish enlightenment.
In case you wondered …
… Are Fish Good for the Brain? | The Russell Kirk Center. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Cuppy, in How to Get from January to December, a book with a comment on all 365 days of the year, would often begin with a question someone (usually with the name “Frantic” or “Admirer”) had addressed to him. On October 14, it was a gentleman, or gentle lady, by the name of “Worried.” What “Worried” wanted to know was the following: “Dear Sir: Is it true that fish are good for the brain or is it only a rumor?”
Oct. 14 happens to be my birthday.
Who knew …
… Russell Kirk : Inkling Without the Inklings. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
By 1950-1951, his compelling tales of the supernatural, their themes imbued with conservative values, had begun to appear in the London Mystery Magazine. Lewis read The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; did he see in a 1953 issue Kirk’s “What Shadows We Pursue”?
I did not know until now that he wrote fiction.
Something to think on …
Liberty of thought means liberty to communicate one's thought.
— Salvador de Madariaga, born on this date in 1886
Friday, July 22, 2022
Hmm …
I see that Steve Bannon has been convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress. I thought contempt o Congress was one of our constitutional rights. As Mark Twain put it: “ Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”
The best are always sentimental …
… A Sentimental Education. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Shoulders and elbows were also necessary to secure my 1922 second edition of Trivia by Logan Pearsall Smith, published in 1917 by Doubleday, Page & Company, as well as my 1921 first edition of More Trivia, published by Harcourt, Brace, and Company. I hadn’t heard of Logan Pearsall Smith (the best name ever for an essayist, though he mainly composed vignettes in “moral prose,” some no more than half a page long) until Gore Vidal wrote a piece about him for the New York Review of Books in 1984. Smith may not be to everyone’s taste, but to me he was the adult in the room: sensible, sensitive, and seeming in my mind to look like Leslie Howard. Well, he didn’t, as it turns out (Google Images set me straight), but he looks every inch a man of letters, without my knowing, of course, what that looks like.Paging through the essays today, I see that reading him at too young an age is an affectation, while reading him at too old an age calls into question the slightness of many of the pieces, and there may be no happy medium. Here is the entire last entry of More Trivia; it’s called “The Argument”: “This long speculation of life, this thinking and syllogizing that always goes on inside me, this running over and over of hypothesis and surmise and supposition—one day this Infinite Argument will have ended, the debate will forever be over, I shall have come to an indisputable conclusion, and my brain will be at rest.”
A lesson in science …
… Professors Challenge The Canard of Anthropogenic Climate Change - Bookworm Room.
Scientific knowledge is determined by scientific method. Prof. Richard Feynman, a Nobel Laureate in Physics, provided an incisive definition of scientific method:
“[W]e compare the result of [a theory’s] computation to nature, … compare it directly with observations, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.” The Character of Physical Law (1965), p. 150.
Something to think on …
Our greatest human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.
— Tom Robbins, born on this in 1932
Thursday, July 21, 2022
Interesting …
… Turns Out The Vex Likely Caused Myocarditis & Pericarditis After All.
As Alex says, “If you can’t trust the Bundesgesundheitsministerium, who can you trust?”
Something to think on …
Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.
— Marshall McLuhan, born on this date in 1911
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
The art of labor …
… 37 El mundo by Esteban Rodríguez | American Life in Poetry. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
I like this guy …
… US Open confirms vaccine status will rule out Novak Djokovic from tournament | Novak Djokovic | The Guardian.
Like me, he must be a disciple of Brian of Nazareth. We’re both individuals. We can think for ourselves.
I also used to be a medical editor. Doesn’t make me a doctor. But it does make medically literate. So I know where to look — the British Medical Journal, the German Medical Journal, the new England Journal of Medicine. There’s also the Lancet, the oldest medical journal. Yes, a couple of years ago they did have to retract a piece about hydroxychloroquine trials. But the retraction demonstrated their integrity.
Something to think on …
An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels its votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.
— Paul Valéry, who died on this date in 1945
Updike the poet …
… The Lyric Updike. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Updike collected his poems in 1993, separating them into two categories, with his light verse occupying the second section, given less important status. In his preface to the collection he wrote, “If a set of lines brought back to me something I actually saw or felt, it was not light verse” (Collected Poems xxiii).
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
Being Catholic these days …
… Summer Reading Series: Frank Freeman on Richard Rodriguez - Today's American Catholic. (Hat tip, Day Lull.)
Despite his revulsion at the new liturgy and his own doubts, Rodriguez continues to believe. He echoes the words of Saint Peter: “Lord, where else would we go?” “If I should lose my faith in God, I would have no place to go to where I could feel myself a man. . . . Though [the church] leaves me unsatisfied, I fear giving it up, falling through space.” “Even in today’s Catholic Church,” he adds, “it is possible for me to feel myself in the eye of God, while I kneel in the presence of others.” Secular institutions cannot provide what “the temple and the mosque and church” can, he says. Then he warns, presciently, that secular institutions “deny their limits” and “pretend there is no difference between public and private life. The worst are totalitarian governments.” He winds up this third essay with the heartfelt lament: “If God is dead I will cry into the void.”
Something to think on …
Above all am I convinced of the need, irrevocable and inescapable, of every human heart, for God. No matter how we try to escape, to lose ourselves in restless seeking, we cannot separate ourselves from our divine source. There is no substitute for God
— A. J. Cronin, born on this date in 1896
Monday, July 18, 2022
Indeed …
… Ignorance of Scripture is Ignorance of Christ - The Catholic Thing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In its Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council taught that “holy mother Church, relying on the belief of the Apostles, holds that the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself.”
Emmaus
And it came to pass, whilst he was at table with them, he took bread, and blessed, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him: and he vanished out of their sight.
He appeared to us that day to disappear
The moment that He broke the bread,
A moment still encompassing our lives,
Drawing to itself, like a magnet at once
Minute and infinitely strong, our present,
Past and future, so that the choking dust
Along the road, the splinters on the benches
At the inn, the glare and scorching of the sun
That afternoon have shaped and shaded
Every moment ever since. He disappeared
Into the moment, into the bread, into us,
Nourishing time with its absence.
Something to think on …
I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster.
— Nathalie Sarraute, born on this date in 1900
Sunday, July 17, 2022
I thought everybody knew …
… Wow, who knew singer David Crosby was such an a-hole?
Actually, the painting is pretty good (I once managed an art gallery.)
For everyone …
… St. Therese: 5 Incredible Lessons.
A photo of Saint Therese (complete with a real rose pressed within) is just a few feet from me. It came from a Carmelite convent and I saved it from being thrown away at The Inquirer. I have been reading The Story of a Soul. It is a literary masterpiece, not just a spiritual one.
We could use this sort of thing today …
… Ancient Queens in French Academic Paintings.
It might help the historical illiteracy so endemic now.
Makes sense to me …
… Let's Give Duke Ellington the Pulitzer Prize He Was Denied in 1965. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
As it turned out, no jazz work would receive this honor until Wynton Marsalis took home the Pulitzer in 1997 for his Blood on the Fields. Since that time, jazz has been occasionally recognized, and even Ellington got a special citation in 1999—one of a number of posthumous awards that the Pulitzer started giving out, largely as a rearguard action to deflect criticism of past omissions.
Something to think on …
The doctrine of the Trinity is much more abstruse than anything in relativity or quantum mechanics; but, being necessary for salvation, the doctrine is stated in the Bible. If the theory of relativity had also been necessary for salvation, it would have been revealed to Saint Paul or to Moses.
— Georges Lemaître, born on this date in 1894
Saturday, July 16, 2022
This sounds to me like a living faith …
… The Crooked Heart of W. H. Auden. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The poems written in the remainder of his career may best be understood as a running verse commentary on human freedom and obligation, not very different in voice from the books of the Protestant theologians that drew him back to the faith.
Hmm …
… A Time Of Sonorous Prose - The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The author apparently doesn’t know that when Kafka read his stories to his friends, they found them hilarious. At the end of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus notes that Kafka was not really an Absurdist because he always offers a glimpse of hope. Camus himself came to dislike being considered an Absurdist.
It is is true, though, that these times tend to be prosaic in the worst sense.
Something to think on …
I remember a table in Barchester Towers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.
— Anatole Broyard, born on this date in 1920
Friday, July 15, 2022
Down-to-earth thinker …
… Work Hard and Read Hoffer - Econlib. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I remember how scornful I felt when I first Marx’s description of the worker’s attitude toward work in a capitalist society. The worker, he said, feels physically and morally debated by his work. He is like an exile in his place of work and feels at home only when away from is job. Marx never did a day’s work in his life, and never took the trouble to find out how a worker reply feels when on the job. He naturally assumed that works were a lesser breed of intellectuals.
I saw the two interviews Eric Severeid did of Hoffer. They had an immense influence on how I think. I should re-read him.
Then and now …
… The Lost World of Jazz | Peter Tonguette | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The film’s consistent focus on the faces in the crowd reveals something that would surprise none of us but is startling to see nonetheless: namely that, during the second term of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency, ours was a country that still valued manners, courtesy, and a certain decorous kind of joy.
Something to think on …
For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
— Iris Murdoch, born on this date in 1919
Thursday, July 14, 2022
Thoreau the poet …
….A River Scene, by Henry David Thoreau, b. July 12, 1817. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Remembering a great poet …
… A Brave Voice Stilled: R. S.Thomas’ life and poetry explored in new exhibition.. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A new exhibition at Bangor University sheds light on many such aspects of his life, such as the R. S. the staunch pacifist, who railed against the slaughter of the Second World. Then there is the young and sporty R. S. who played tennis, cricket and rugby and, in the case of the last of these, believed that ‘wingers had cold feet.’
Just so you know …
… FDA Agrees to Cancel All Safety Trials for Pfizer’s New COVID Booster Shot This Fall.
There are two things about this vote that are causing some doctors to worry. First, VRBPAC has never before in the history of its existence made a recommendation for a pharmaceutical company to modify a vaccine in order to target a variant. We’re in totally uncharted waters here with this decision.
Second, VRBPAC made no recommendation on whether new safety trials should be conducted on these altered booster shots. If the FDA approves VRBPAC’s recommendations (which they always do – it’s a rubberstamp process), there will not be any safety trials on these new booster shots.
I have not been vaxxed. I am in the top 1 percent of the population to die of a heart attack and there are coronary issues connected to the vaccines. I also have nit have Covid. I have certainly been tested enough. My wife has been in and out of the hospital and rehabs and I have been tested every time I went to visit — often several times a week. Obviously, I always tested negative. Hardly surprising to me, since I never seem to get anything (touch wood).
Lest we forget …
… once upon a time : Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and God (and two highly recommended books by David McCullough).
I’m so old — I was born seven weeks before Pearl Harbor — that I grew up being patriotic. The country is different, but I still love it. Sorry.
Blogging note …
My wife is in the hospital. And I have to be in touch with hospital, etc. I also have to take my morning walk (doctor’s orders). So I won’t be blogging again until this afternoon.
Maybe it’s not the kids …
… but their dumbass woke teachers: Mark Twain’s novel too rough for today’s “woke” children?
Mark Twain’s novel is one of racial redemption, not bigotry.
A philosopher divided …
… Wittgenstein at war - New Statesman. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
People are fascinated by the hidden lives of creative geniuses, the more sordid the better. Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks, 1914-1916 appeals to that interest by allowing the reader to eavesdrop on his agonised emotional life in two of those years of military service, during which he produced one of the most influential philosophical works of the 20th century. The Tractatusis a founding document of the analytic tradition in philosophy. It set out a theory of logic, language and the limits of meaning which revealed, Wittgenstein argued, that traditional philosophical problems were based on linguistic confusion. The two tracks of his life – the emotional and the intellectual – can be followed in some notebooks Wittgenstein kept during that period. On the right-hand pages he entered his philosophical thoughts, in legible German. On the left-hand pages, in code, he entered his personal feelings – hopes, fears, prayers, despair, loathing of himself and other people, and gratitude when he was able to work.
Something to think on …
I spend several years trying to get inside the brain and heart of my subjects, listening to the interior monologues in their letters, and when I have to bridge the chasms between the factual evidence, I try to make an intuitive leap through the eyes and motivation of the person I'm writing about.
— Irving Stone, born on this date in 1903
Wednesday, July 13, 2022
Begging to differ …
…Wait, Haven’t I Heard This One Before? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The underlying argument of Batuman’s didactic, semi-memoirish production is that because the narrator is forced to read canonical works by men who told stories about women they invented, this book’s mere existence should place its author up with the greats.
I wonder if the narrator has read Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, the characters of which — both women and men — I recall as being wondrously vivid.
Reading Either/Or felt like reading a politician’s memoir, where the name of the game is to list achievements that readers will agree are worthy and admirable and to deny any evidence of wrongdoing and wrong-think.
I can’t help pointing out that the author of this review, in his lead sentence, makes plain he accepts the new rules about the pronoun they.
I don’t. Oh, and it’s A Fan’s Notes.
By the way, my crankiness notwithstanding, the review seems pretty much spot-on.
Something to think on …
I cannot accept the definition of collective good as articulated by a privileged minority in society, especially when that minority is in power.
— Wole Soyinka, born on this date in 1934
Tuesday, July 12, 2022
This is certainly worth knowing …
… New study: COVID booster significantly delays end of infection | Israel National News - Arutz Sheva.
Here is the article from the New England Journal of Medicine:
Duration of Shedding of Culturable Virus in SARS-CoV-2 Omicron (BA.1) Infection.
Well, hire people who know how to report …
… News engagement plummets as Americans tune out.
Reporting involves getting off your ass and leaving the office. You learn it by doing it.
The song that is faith …
… Christianity and Poetry by Dana Gioia | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Why do the Virgin—and Luke—do something so preposterous when they could just speak plainly? Because they both know that ordinary language will not suffice. Prose cannot express the extent of Mary’s wonder, joy, and gratitude. Plain statement will not evoke the unique miracle of God’s becoming man. The Incarnation requires an ode, not an email.
Something to think on …
Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.
— Henry David Thoreau, born on this date in 1817
Dealing with the worst loss …
… Good Grief - Joseph Epstein, Commentary Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Cholbi, while allowing that grief is “perhaps the greatest stressor in life,” finds it neither a form of madness nor worthy of being medicalized, grief being neither a disease nor a disorder. He finds it instead part of “the human predicament,” a part that eludes even philosophical understanding. “We can grieve smarter,” he writes. “But ultimately, we cannot outsmart grief. Nor should we want to.” We do not ultimately recover from grief; if lucky, we merely at best are able to adjust to it.
Monday, July 11, 2022
Interesting …
… Doctor on Verge of Death Fell in Coma, ‘Saw Heaven’ and Recovered in 2 Months.
In my coma, I found myself rescued by a slowly spinning white light with a perfect musical melody. The white light was surrounded by golden and silvery hair-like things. Then, a gorgeous and very real entrance valley slowly opened. At that time, my consciousness was only the size of a speck of light, on the wings of a butterfly. There were several million butterflies flying around me.
Something to think on …
Use the smallest word that does the job.
— E. B. White, born on this date in 1899
Sunday, July 10, 2022
I don’t get this …
… Language Log The ideology of short sentences, part 1. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I have been making my living writing for nearly 60 years. My sentences have always been as long as they needed to be.
Something to think on …
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
— Marcel Proust, born on this date in 1872
Saturday, July 09, 2022
Something to think on …
Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
— Oliver Sacks, born on this date in 1933
Friday, July 08, 2022
Poor babies …
… Campus Reform | 'I broke down and sobbed': Profs lose it over UF attempt to make them show up for work.
Maybe they should find another line of work. They don’t sound as if they’re suited for teaching.
Only as low as we let them …
… How Low Can NPR Go? | Power Line.
If NPR was a private entity, I would have no problem with this. I might disagree, but that’s OK. But this is a publicly funded entity.
NPR again …
… NPR reminds us former Japan PM Shinzo Abe was ‘a divisive arch-conservative’ (then deletes the tweet & doubles down).
Exploiting a man’s death to make cheap political points? Can we defund NPR, please? I don’t want to pay for this crap.
I don’t know about you …
… but I don’t want my tax money paying these clowns : How Low Can NPR Go? | Power Line.
Quite simply a classic …
… Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez - GODINE. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Resisting the easy way of following received dogmatic and conventional thought, Rodriguez has encountered kneejerk hostility for his provocative positions on issues such as affirmative action and bilingual education. But the extraordinary clarity of his iconoclastic writing—the surprising twists in his thinking, the view of public policy as it limits individual lives, and the story he tells of an American education—have made this book endure for four decades and counting
No lie there …
… once upon a time : There are some decisions in life you come to regret.
And this decision had dire consequences.
A lamb in name only …
… Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb by Eric G Wilson - review by Edward Weech. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Covering the gamut of Lamb’s life and literary career, Wilsonaims to demonstrate that Lamb ‘speaks to our age’, highlighting his enthusiasm for ‘the grit and speed and diversity of the urban’ and his ‘fluid, collaborative vision of identity’. Lamb’s absence from the syllabus has rendered him obscure to many readers, and while this book is based on rigorous scholarship, it does not assume extensive prior knowledge. Instead, it serves as a good introduction for non-specialists and will hopefully encourage more to seek out Lamb’s works.
Something to think on …
I have the ability to create and be in touch with God. I can't change bread and wine into body and blood, but I can take the scum or the slime of the earth and make it into a man or woman.
— J. F. Powers, born on this date in 1917