Thursday, September 21, 2023
As Whitman said ….
This is really worrisome …
Just ask the J6 protesters who peacefully walked through the Capitol. The feds are still hunting them down and arresting them. And ask the Catholic father who was arrested in a heavily armed FBI raid on his home for the crime of trying to save unborn lives. And ask the father who demanded to know why no action was taken at the school where his daughter was raped why he was treated like a terrorist.
Methinks the FBI may have outlived its usefulness. By the way, guys, I have journalist credentials. Bear that in mind (presuming you have such).
Something to think on …
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
I’ll be joining …
Something to think on …
Tuesday, September 19, 2023
No lie there …
Via Nellie Bowles on The Free Press, who adds: "If you can't read the sexy kids' book in Congress without grossing people out and having them tell you to please stop, Dad, maybe children shouldn’t read it."
Begging to differ …
I kept asking myself: Pier? Granite? Bell? Face of Steel? A nail or drill? Where might all these things be found? On a 19th century locomotive passing through Concord! That’s where. (And Concord was a railroad town.)
Hmm …
When you ask me the question "How can I bring myself around; I am pregnant two months," you are asking for abortion. Please understand that Birth Control, as I understand it, is never abortion. I do not approve of abortion, nor can I give the address of anyone who will perform this operation... The object of this movement is to help women avoid abortion and the dangers attending it.You can read more here.
Something to think on …
Monday, September 18, 2023
Ouch …
… perhaps the most wince-inducing moment was his meeting with “a charming and beautiful young philosopher” in Prague. “I later learned that Roger Scruton . . . was extremely irritated by the fact that on his next visit to Prague, all she could talk about was Dan Dennett! A small ignoble pleasure for me.”
Something to think on …
Sunday, September 17, 2023
Just so you know …
“Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled … “Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. … The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
Q&A …
In 1968, during the Black Power movement, when black Americans were, as one sociologist put it, “seeking ways to alter their relationship to the society and the shared expectations of themselves as a community of people.” As a twenty-three-year-old poet concerned about the world and struggling to find a place in it, I felt it a duty and an honor to participate in that search. With my good friend Rob Penny, I founded the Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh with the idea of using the theater to politicize the community or, as we said in those days, to raise the consciousness of the people.
Something to think on …
Saturday, September 16, 2023
Something to think on …
Friday, September 15, 2023
These people really are crazy …
Something to think on …
The creative imagination …
… perhaps the single most thrilling object in the collection, one of the single most thrilling graven images I’ve encountered, the one book in the collection that most seemed to speak from beyond the grave and the graven realms, was a unique Nabokov book, one he created himself by hand, one never before seen by the world, and one that I believe discloses an important secret about his esoteric passion.
Thursday, September 14, 2023
A true master …
Wolfe was politically deft. He championed conservative notions of patriotism and morality, but avoided partisan politics, which he considered a boring backwater. (His editor at the Washington Post was amazed that, unlike the other reporters, he had no ambition to cover the White House and Capitol Hill.) In footage from “Firing Line,” when William F. Buckley Jr. asked him to describe his political views, Wolfe quoted Balzac’s description of the politics in his novels: “I belong to the party of the opposition.
I had the privilege of meeting him once — at the White House. Laura Bush had invited him and me to an event D. C. schoolkids. Classy guy.
Sad and true …
Something to think on …
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
Something to think on …
Tuesday, September 12, 2023
Good news …
“OH is a key player in the story of atmospheric chemistry. It initiates the reactions that break down airborne pollutants and helps to remove noxious chemicals such as sulfur dioxide and nitric oxide, which are poisonous gases, from the atmosphere.”
Something to think on …
Monday, September 11, 2023
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Finding words for The Word …
… Barton declares his summary position early: "While there can be translations that are simply wrong, there cannot be one that is uniquely right." Rather, The Word is a thorough mapping (to use the author’s cartographic image) of the translators’ terrain. And that complex landscape is, to simplify, defined by two promontories.
Something to think on …
Words and the Word …
What is so bad about spending all this time on computer screens? More interestingly, do people read less because they spend time on a computer? After all, right this moment, you are looking at a screen and reading a review of a book about reading. Wilson’s book is available on Kindle and those lectures I encouraged for viewing are on a screen. Yet, Wilson empathically says, “[W]e have to be aggressive in turning off the screens… After you remove the time wasted on technology, you may find more time available for reading. You can bring a book with you wherever you go.”
Books these days tend to have small type. I am an old man with cataracts that have yet to ripen. So I use my Kindle a lot.
Sunday, September 10, 2023
Appalling …
Do no harm …
… The trans kids madness needs to stop. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.
Gotta hand it to these doctors: “gender-affirming care” is genius branding. Usefully, “gender” has become a nonsense word. What could possibly be wrong with “affirming?” Why, the adjective exudes niceness, solace and esteem. And no physician or parent could oppose “care.” Yet the euphemism translates to “sex-denying medical experimentation.”
Something to think on …
Saturday, September 09, 2023
Wokeness at its most ludicrous …
“The 'magical creatures' are a mixture of races and genders, and we all applaud that," he added. "But they're sacrificing the careers of short people to achieve diversity. And that does not sit right with me. The studio doesn't seem to be aware that dwarfs are also born in all races and genders."
Something to think on …
Friday, September 08, 2023
I quite understand
Indeed …
Another load of crap …
Faith and doubt …
… Joseph Epstein: Opinion | Pious Agnosticism as a Form of Judaism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
After all the worst has been said against religion, one can’t deny the comfort it has brought. I had a neighbor, a woman 10 or so years older than I, unmarried, a former schoolteacher, a serious Catholic, who told me she wasn’t in the least afraid of death. She wished to avoid a painful or sloppy end, but death itself held no fears for her, for she had a good sense of where she was going. As she told me this, I can recall feeling a stab of what I can only call faith envy.
Something to think on …
Thursday, September 07, 2023
Very important …
You might be wondering at this point if I’m disowning my own paper. I’m not. On the contrary, I think it advances our understanding of climate change’s role in day-to-day wildfire behavior. It’s just that the process of customizing the research for an eminent journal caused it to be less useful than it could have been.
Something to think on …
Wednesday, September 06, 2023
God bless Karlyn …
The disguise — including “Kelty,” an alias — was necessary because Borysenko had been “preemptively banned” from the conference after gatecrashing the Socialist Reproductive Justice conference earlier this year.She might just be our real-world Sherlock Holmes — what an impressive young lady.
if I still had kids in school I would make it plain to the people in charge that I want a say in what want my kids to read. An I have credentials. They may not.
Something to think on …
Poetic realist …
One of the things I appreciate about Hilbert is the understated realism of his work. He tries to capture—without theatrics or moralizing—what it feels like to live in the contemporary world. In fact, realism is a kind of ethic for him. His work is, in many ways, about facing the suffering and cruelty of life with honesty and courage.
Sure looks and sounds that way …
Tuesday, September 05, 2023
As well she ought …
Tracking the decline …
Howe’s prediction rests on a model that at its core is timeless and simple. In fact, it can be summed up by a four-line Internet meme: “hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” Howe’s version manages to fill most of 500 pages with further nuance, however
I fear so …
The results for consumers have been disastrous. In the new media world, all news coverage is geared towards upholding pre-established narratives. Actual reporting has become exceedingly rare.
Something to think on …
Monday, September 04, 2023
Peculiar …
Something to think on …
Sunday, September 03, 2023
In case you wondered …
In his introduction to a collection of McGinley’s verse, W.H. Auden places her in the company of Jane Austen, Colette, and Virginia Woolf. Versifiers like McGinley were often held in high esteem by sophisticates like Auden and also managed to entertain millions of readers who had probably never been exposed to the works of Woolf, Colette, Austen, or even Auden himself. Auden was in fact an excellent writer of light verse. He became an American citizen at the age of 39, so much of his verse can be categorized as American, at least technically.
Saturday, September 02, 2023
Then he’s breaking the law …7
Something to think on …
Friday, September 01, 2023
A poem …
… written by my daughter, Jennifer Knox.
Summer Lightning
What were you doing when the lightning came,
When the world fairly glistened with fireflies?
And then there was thunder, like God at the door.
Your heart did not stop, though maybe it tried.
And what were you doing when the lightning came?
Thoughts of my true-love, a flash of his eyes.
And then came the thunder to snuff us like ants,
Come to your senses, this lady-bug flies!
And what were you doing when the lightning came,
To shatter the glass of the jewel-cleaved sky?
A heartbeat, a heartbeat, then thunder came.
My children lay sleeping, and never a cry.
By light of lightning my lover I see
A pause, then thunder; he's crying for me
This is wonderful …
… My Summer With Leo Tolstoy. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… At some point I understood I hadn’t made a commitment of time but entered a world. It is about life—parties and gossip and thwarted elopements in the night, religious faith and class differences and society, men and women and personal dreams and private shames. It is about military strategy, politics and the nature of court life, a world that exists whether the court is that of Czar Alexander in 1812, or the White House or a governor’s office today. And of course it is about the Napoleonic wars, and Russia’s triumph after Napoleon’s invasion.
Something to think on …
Thursday, August 31, 2023
For those who believe and those who don’t …
Espaillat’s precision with regard to language exists to show language’s limits. This is the revelation she offers for religious readers: spiritual truth is not, at the end of the day, reducible to language.
But Espaillat has a revelation for agnostic readers as well.
Something to think on …
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
Poem …
Discernment
Amid the darkness place the sun,
That veteran god, from deepest night
Evoking brightest day. Make plain
Imagination’s gestures are
But acts of faith, and loss of faith
An absence of imagination.
Merely perceiving misperceives:
We must invite what our eye bears —
Sunflower, catbird, passing cloud —
Into the tabernacle of the heart,
There where the lamp of vision flares.