Wolf is responsible for the deaths of thousands he ordered sent to nursing home. He is despicable.
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Good …
… Pennsylvania: Judge Rules Wolf, Levine's Shutdown Orders Unconstitutional. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Dealing with scolds …
… Anecdotal Evidence: 'The Disapproval of the Dietarily Correct'. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Asparagine, a nutrient found in meat, eggs, and dairy products, is essential for healthy brain development. Red meat is rich in vitamin B-12, which is not found in most vegetables and cannot be produced by the body. Doesn’t mean you should live on Big Macs, but an occasional helping of boeuf bourguignon is good for you.
Monday, September 14, 2020
I couldn’t agree more …
… Mike Ditka to Newsmax TV: Protesting at NFL Games 'Makes No Sense to Me' | Newsmax.com.
"If you can't respect this country, get the hell out of it," Ditka said …God knows, they can certainly afford to live elsewhere, and why live someplace that you loathe?
In case you wondered
… PJ O'Rourke: This is why millennials adore socialism. (Hat tip, Paul Davis.)
How times change. My first job upon leaving college — which I started just days after leaving college — paid $200 a week. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $1,676.89. Not bad.
Sunday, September 13, 2020
Facing the truth …
… Bookings to Utopia by Peter Hitchens | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Here is my review of Martin Amis's Koba the Dread. And here is my review of House of Meetings.
Now you may be in the intelligentsia, and be rude about Stalin, as well as rude about the U.S.A. and the British Empire. Anti-Stalinism has become not just respectable on the left but almost obligatory. Mainstream publishing houses that once would have regarded anti-Soviet books as close to fascism fall over themselves to publish volumes about how evil Stalin was. The Gulag is admitted to have been really quite bad. Even Western novelists, such as the modish Martin Amis (Koba the Dread and The House of Meetings) and the intelligent thriller-writer Robert Harris (Archangel), have joined in. This sort of thing will never rival the vast literary and historical industry devoted to Nazi Germany, but beyond doubt something has changed. One man who deserves a great deal of the credit for this transformation is Vasily Grossman (1905–1964). He has become the left-wing Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a bridge across which former sympathizers of Soviet power have travelled to a renewed and cleansed version of their utopian faith. Leftists hated the conservatism and Christianity of the author of The Gulag Archipelago. They did not want to have their dreams trodden on by such a person. So, they hated what he said, even though it was true, because he was the one saying it. But now, almost all thinking radicals have finally rejected the Soviet experiment, or think they have. The generation of 1968 is convinced that its version of utopianism has no risks.
Here is my review of Martin Amis's Koba the Dread. And here is my review of House of Meetings.
Seeing all the way to here …
… Chekhov’s 2020 vision by Kyle Smith | The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A condition of widespread contempt for one’s own way of living is a sign of a weak, defenseless, decadent culture. Today’s Yashas pick up a copy of TheNew York Times that spreads the claim that America always was, and is today, defined by racism, and think, “Bravissimo, it’s about time someone stood up and told the truth about how immoral we are. What time is our dinner reservation?” Cultural elites cheer as the symbols of our heritage are torn off their pedestals and introduced to the bottom of the nearest river. A brief video, much shared this summer of unrest, showed a young white fellow in an apartment filming himself giving a thumbs up sign to a passing mob, only to be rewarded by having a brick thrown through his window: “Holy shit, we’re on your side,” someone in the apartment calls out, as a second projectile breaks another window. Pure Chekhov, that.
Judging the past …
… On Reading Badly | Stand Firm. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… it is very bad to go back and read modern virtues into the past, holding the long-dead accountable for sins they didn’t imagine to be sins. Though, I would say, doing that is what we do. We always judge the past, just as we will be judged, and it’s one reason literature goes out of fashion, and notes have to be made at the end of the page, and children have to learn how to read books and walk the delicate line between empathy and judgement. But it is also very bad, if not worse, to not see the nuance in a book for what it is, to assume some sin, where a more careful reading would show there is not, in fact, sin. It is as bad as doing it to a real live person—assuming that the person is saying or meaning something they are not saying or meaning, because they haven’t used the correct terminology of the day, or don’t see all the contours of acceptable tastes of the moment.
Saturday, September 12, 2020
Hear, hear …
… The Coin of the Academic World – A Sunday of Liberty. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Everything about this annoys me. It annoys me that ‘intellectuals’ are so goddamned predictable. Here we have an intellectual idiot like deBoer, the sort of man who has spent his entire adult life in academia — and it shows — holding to puerile fantasies about communism that no small business owner could entertain for a minute. Here we have Sullivan thoughtfully stroking his chin and furrowing his brow as he insults his readers’ intelligence by pretending that this sort of academic gibberish is worth taking seriously and praising. Taxing the ultra-wealthy alone, even if it were politically feasible, which it isn’t, still wouldn’t cover the cost of these hallucinogenic social-democratic visions. There is even less appetite for taxing the middle class to the extent required to approach some Scandinavian welfare-state fantasy. So! Are we done here, then? Why are we even talking about this? Is there no such thing as natural selection in the hermetically-sealed intellectual environment? Is there no such thing as an idea too stupid to live? Do they just go on breeding indefinitely, producing ever-more mutant offspring, safe from predators in their academic zoo?See today’s Something to think on … post. It really is time to subject the universities to the relentless ridicule they increasingly so richly deserve.
The university clown show …
… Chinese alumni compare USC to Mao for removing professor over Chinese word that sounds like n-word | The College Fix.
UCLA’s Volokh criticized USC leaders for failing to teach students that “they should not be upset by such accidents of language,” and for implying that “Chinese speakers should watch what they say, not just in examples but in ordinary conversation that could be overheard.”
Forcing faculty to avoid certain Mandarin words would be “oddly Anglocentric” and offensive to Mandarin speakers, Volokh wrote in a sample letter that he said Garrett should have written.
Something to think on …
It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.
— H. L. Mencken, born on this date in 1880
Safe and sound …
… Universal Horror by Boris Dralyuk | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A prayer for us all …
… Dark Mercy by Cynthia Erlandson | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Friday, September 11, 2020
In case you wondered …
… Poem of the week: How Poems Arrive by Anne Stevenson | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
The man and the controversy …
… Anders Tegnell and the Swedish Covid experiment | Free to read. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Our meeting comes as things appear to be going his way. As coronavirus cases rise in pretty much all other European countries, leading to fears of a second wave including in the UK, they have been sinking all summer in Sweden. On a per capita basis, they are now 90 per cent below their peak in late June and under Norway’s and Denmark’s for the first time in five months. Tegnell had told me the first time we spoke in the spring that it would be in the autumn when it became more apparent how successful each country had been.
Historical moment, fictional imagination …
… Musings and Reviews: An elegy for 9/11 and lost innocence.
I was at home, recovering from an operation that day. I had come downstairs, made some coffee and turned on the TV to watch the news. I called up to Debbie and said, "You may want to come down and see this. I think it's going to be a very big news day." I am given to understatment.
Something to think on …
Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
— D. H. Lawrence, born on this date in 1885
In defense of ignorance …
… ‘Dismantling anti-black linguistic racism in Shakespeare’ guide earns support from academia | The College Fix.
“The language that may be accessible to you isn’t necessarily accessible to everybody else, and … your community isn’t the one that might be harmed by it.”No language is accessible to you until you learn it. Learning things that you don’t already know is called education.
Thursday, September 10, 2020
Just so you nbow …
… America’s 1984: Welcome to the Hate – AIER.
A cell does not reflect or judge. This is why the Hate escalates. And because our culture, like Orwell’s 1984, is bent on rewriting or canceling history, we are losing the sources that would enable us to fight this trend morally as well as politically.
Hmm …
… Unconscious learning fosters belief in God, study finds - UPI.com.
When I was maybe 15, on one of the long solitary hikes I was wont to take the, I had an experience of what Wordsworth recounts in “ Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”:… a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
The experience has guided my being ever since.
Good for him …
… Nick Sandmann fires back at ACLU official who decried his college admission, shreds cancel culture - TheBlaze.
Fre speech means free speech even for those who disagree, Apparently, a good number of people these days have a hard time grasping.
Something to think on …
Religion is the everlasting dialogue between humanity and God. Art is its soliloquy.
— Franz Werfel, born on this date in 1890
Learning how to perform …
… A Second Chance | by Janet Malcolm | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The second and most crucial part of the second-chance work was to make me faster on my feet under cross-examination, in fulfillment of the fantasy of saying what I should have said in the first trial instead of what I did say. Bostwick assumed that Morgan would repeat the questions that had served him so well, and he and I devised answers to them that brought l’esprit de l’escalier to a new level. At trial, Morgan did not disappoint us. He confidently asked the old questions and didn’t know what hit him when I produced my nimble new formulations. I remember one of the most satisfying moments. At the first trial Morgan had repeatedly tortured and humiliated me with the question: “He didn’t say that at Chez Panisse, did he?” I had wiggled and squirmed. Now I could answer him with crushing confidence.
Nature …
… Beside the Waterfall by Mary Oliver | Poetry Magazine. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Mary Oliver was born on September 10, 1935. Here is my review of Owls and Other Fantasies.
Wednesday, September 09, 2020
Something to think on …
Surely there comes a time when counting the cost and paying the price aren't things to think about any more. All that matters is value — the ultimate value of what one does.
— James Hilton, born on this date in 1900
Tuesday, September 08, 2020
The need for church …
… The Other Mary | Anne Kennedy. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.j
So anyway, I got the book, I opened it up, I was so excited, I read the first few paragraphs, and then I sat back and wept and continued to weep for the next many many weeks. Because this book is about how you—You, whoever you are—should go to church. And that was the very thing I desired to do.
Proust as radio drama …
…In search of ‘English Proust’ | Christopher Prendergast | Standpoint. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The elephant in the room is of course that artistically difficult and complicated beast: the Narrator who is also a character evolving in the time of the narrative. The character “Marcel” (a naming that opens a whole can of worms) is divided between two actors, the boy Marcel and the older narrator. The former is unfortunately all too often stamped with (ha!) a Brideshead inflection; the childhood world of Combray is a cosseted one, but the boy didn’t attend Eton. The latter falls to one of our greatest living actors, Derek Jacobi, who brings his hugely versatile gifts to bear on two key dimensions of the narrating voice: rhythm and register. The key challenge is Proust’s notoriously elaborate syntax. Jacobi provides a master class in how to navigate these hypotactic structures.I’ve not read Proust and the brevity of life suggests I may never. But I suppose listening to a radio adaptation would be worth a try. But will we be able to hear it on these shores?
The lowdown …
… Inside an Elite Cancel Culture Session, Where Leftists Met the Enemy and It Was ... One of Them | RealClearInvestigations.
The funny thing about the affair, but also telling, is that the 66-year-old Romano has for his long professional life been a quintessential liberal intellectual. He's critic-at-large for the Chronicle of Higher Education and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He was book critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 28 years and wrote “America the Philosophical,” a maverick interpretation of American thought noted for its breadth and inclusiveness – the Wall Street Journal called it “a roll call for identity politics.”
Carlin was still The Inquirer’s book critic when I was the paper’s book editor. He is not remotely racist and anyone suggesting otherwise would seem to lack the faculties necessary to be a member of an organization of book critics — You know, things like skill in gathering and evaluating evidence, logical thinking, etc. The more of his accusers who resign the better off the NBCC will be.
Something to think on …
In actual life, every great enterprise begins with and takes its first forward step in faith.
— August Wilhelm Schlegel, born on this date in 1767
Monday, September 07, 2020
Pushing back …
… Washington Post Acknowledges They Misquoted Me, Buries Correction – OutKick.
The paper’s owner certainly has enough money to hire good journalists. I wonder why he doesn’t.
Poetry in a time of war …
… Robert Chandler - Comrade, Shed No Tears | Literary Review | Issue 489. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
A vast amount of poetry was published in the Soviet Union during the war in journals, books and mass-circulation army and civilian newspapers. Poems were broadcast on the radio and quoted in speeches by frontline political commissars – and not all of these poems were mere propaganda. Some were both good and genuinely popular.
The art of cimbing and the art of life …
… The Mountain and the Meaning of Life: René Daumal’s Alpine Allegory of Courage and the Measure of Wisdom – Brain Pickings. (Hat tip, Virginia Kerr.)
There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know.
Hmm …
… What Will Not Recover: Government – AIER.
In 2006, the great epidemiologist Donald Henderson warnedthat if government pursued coercive measures to control a virus, the result would be a “loss of confidence in government to manage the crisis.” The reason is that the measures do not work. Further, the attempt to make them work turns a manageable crisis into a catastrophe.
Prophetic.Of course, Henderson was just the guy who directed the 10-year international effort that eradicated smallpox.
Hop aboard …
… 'The Socrates Express' takes readers on a ride through applied philosophy | MPR News. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
“The Socrates Express” defies classification. Yes, it is a book about philosophy, but it's also a book about being human, travelling, learning and — sometimes — coffee. Weiner, a former reporter for NPR and author of “The Geography of Bliss,” takes readers with him on a journey to understand the teachings of philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Henry David Thoreau, Simone Weil, Confucius, Simone de Beauvoir, and Socrates. Along the way, he explores his relationship to their work, shows us how their ideas can help us improve our lives, and manages to sneak in a biography of each.
Something to think on …
It is part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.
— Edith Sitwell, born on this date in 1887
Sunday, September 06, 2020
Cautionary tale …
… Timothy W Ryback - Bonfires of Reason | Literary Review | Issue 489. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Perhaps Ovenden’s finest achievement in Burning the Books is to demonstrate the importance and enduring power of preserved knowledge, whether in clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, bound codices, printed books or digital bytes. ‘Rulers wanted to have information that would help them to decide the optimal time to go to war, plant a crop, harvest a crop, and so on,’ Ovenden writes of the cuneiform tablets of ancient Mesopotamia. ‘Today, the future continues to be dependent on access to the knowledge of the past and will be even more so as digital technology changes the way we can predict what will happen.’
The essentials …
… The One and Only: Andrew Louth on a New History of the Orthodox Church - Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
As a form of Christianity, “Eastern Orthodoxy” is both familiar and unfamiliar, not because it is an exotic Christianity, but rather the reverse: it is a form of Christianity not ashamed of its history and of the way it must still carry with it a lot of baggage from its long past. In the modern Western world, marked by forgetfulness of the past, the Orthodox Church must seem a bit like Borges’s Funes the Memorious, the one who cannot forget anything.
Little big man …
… Musings and Reviews: This singular 4’11” Scottish giant wore many hats well.
IN grade school and high school, I spent many a happy day in the Holmesburg library, one of the many Carnegie built.
Blogging note …
I have to take Debbie for a Covid-19 test, in preparation for a procedure on Wednesday. Blogging will resume later.
Something to think on …
Within ourselves is not very far and yet it is so far that one's whole life is not always long enough to get there.
— Julien Green, born on this date in 1900
Saturday, September 05, 2020
I guess so …
… The Problem With Facebook and Shared Social Media ‘Spaces’ | The American Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I don’t have a Facebook account and have no intention of getting one. I do have a Twitter account. But I never use it. I just don’t have time for that sort of thing. Email is time-consuming enough. But at least it has a purpose beyond just shooting off one’s mouth.
Something to think on …
The evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality.
— Arthur Koestler, born on this date in 1905
Odd couple …
… Orwell in the Waugh-zone – The Orwell Society. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
As David Lebedoff (2008) stresses, Orwell and Waugh can appear polar opposites: Orwell the dedicated socialist and anti-Catholic who was prepared to live with tramps in order to expiate his guilt of having worked for the ‘racket’ of the British Empire as an Imperial Policeman in Burma (1922-1927) and who always hated bullying. Waugh, in contrast, the bully, the Catholic and dedicated social climber. Yet both came to see the 20th century in a similar way – imperilled by ideologues, lies, cultural decadence and assaults on tradition. Orwell, the atheist, deplored the decline of religious faith as much as Waugh the Catholic convert.
Friday, September 04, 2020
Pushing back …
… Black Pastors Demand Nike Drop Marxist Black Lives Matter.
“We the leaders of Conservative Clergy of Color have watched with sadness and frustration as the country we love has been torn apart by violence and looting,” the letter begins. “This civil terror, perpetrated and lead by the Black Lives Matter movement, has turned American against American and possibly set race relations back decades.”
“Black Lives Matter, a movement run by anti-Christian, self-proclaimed Marxists, hijacked legitimate calls for police reform and turned it to their own ends,” the letter explains. “This is not a group interested in constructive change; through their vicious campaign to defund police and silence anyone who disagrees with them, they have destroyed livelihoods and gotten innocent children killed. It is antithetical to the nonviolence that Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement stood for.”
Where we stand …
… COVID – why terminology really, really matters | Dr. Malcolm Kendrick. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
On the 28th February, yes that far back, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD (A.S.F., H.C.L.); and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta. 4
In this paper ‘Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted’ they stated the following:
‘On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate (my underline) may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza.’Which appears to be where we are headed.
Plus ça change …
… First Known When Lost: Heraclitus in Japan.
Asukagawa means "Asuka River." However, McCullough translates it as: "the River of Tomorrow." She provides this explanation: "The first part of the river name Asuka is homophonous with asu ('tomorrow'). This famous poem made the Asuka and its vagrant channel a symbol of change." (Ibid, page 205.)
"The River of Tomorrow" is quite lovely, isn't it?
Something to think on …
There is no religion without mysteries. God Himself is the great secret of Nature.
— François-René de Chateaubriand, born on this date in 1768
Family secrets …
… C. S. Lewis and His Stepsons | Jonathon Van Maren | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
David died several years ago in a secure Swiss mental hospital, and Douglas has finally broken his silence about a hitherto unknown aspect of life at The Kilns. His earliest memories, he told me, were of his brother, who was later diagnosed as schizophrenic. “When I was a small child,” Douglas said, “he was continually trying to get rid of me. This went on into our teen years.” Douglas said he recalls “running like crazy or defending myself from my rather insane brother. . . I would never have said anything to harm him or upset him while he was alive, because oddly enough I still loved him as a brother. In fact, I wept when he died.”
Thursday, September 03, 2020
Mary Oliver
There was something, well, something poetic about my first encounter with Mary Oliver. Today, as the fog cleared, and as the afternoon sun appeared, I found myself with a pile of books from the public library. One of those was Oliver's Blue Horses, a collection of her later poems.
There was something poetic because Oliver -- in a quiet, tempered way -- celebrates the beauty around us, and reminders us to savor those small moments of wonder. Blue Horses is a collection with a purpose: to embrace what's given, to seek clarity in nature's splendor.
All of which is not to say that I'd consider Blue Horses a success. In my reading, Oliver's poems are almost too informal. There's not enough holding them together, not enough grounding them. And perhaps that levity is another of Oliver's objectives: to keep things light, even when they are solemn. But for me, these poems often felt unfinished, as if Oliver had penned them without revisiting them. In that sense, they're vignettes, reflections on the rote and routine.
Despite the critique, I was happy to experience Oliver's writing as I did: at random, on a beautiful day, during an extended moment of silence. There was something about that, I think, which she not only would have appreciated, but indeed, would have celebrated.
Dutiful son …
… A famous misanthrope shows his heartwarming side - Daphne Merkin - Bookforum Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Was Eva really his “muse,” as James Booth suggests in his introduction, grounding him in the material of the mundane and the ordinary, the better that he might transform and set wing to it? “She is a muse,” Booth argues, “in the time-honored sense of being beyond the poet’s reach. Poetry is made of her, but she herself is unconscious of it.” This is certainly worth considering, especially given the fact that Larkin finished “Aubade,” his great poem about the pitiless, ungraspable inevitability of our own mortality—“Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true”—just days after Eva died on November 17, 1977, and wrote very little after it.
In case you wondered …
… Why the Words of Baptism Matter | Matthew Hood | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
One smart fellow …
… Gottfried Leibniz: the last universal genius | OUPblog. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
As I recall, one of his key questions was why is there something rather than nothing.
Leibniz was a monumental mathematician who changed the field of mathematics when he invented the first, early calculating machine. He also created the modern-day mathematical notation for the differential and integral calculus, and invented binary code which he explained in his 1703 essay, “Explanation of the Binary Arithmetic.” This two-point number system is used to write computer programmes and data processors, meaning that Leibniz’s invention was pivotal to how we live now, over 300 years later.
As I recall, one of his key questions was why is there something rather than nothing.
Prescient …
… The Advertiser by Eugene Field - Poems | Academy of American Poets. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Eugene Field was born on Sept. 2, 1850.
Eugene Field was born on Sept. 2, 1850.
Something to think on …
It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.
— Loren Eiseley, born on this date in 1907
A reminder …
…Charlie Hebdo Reprints Controversial Cartoons of Prophet Mohammad. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Still thinking after all these years …
… His Mind Forever Voyaging - NOEMA. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
“He is,” said the philosopher John Gray in one of the opening speeches, “one of the great thinkers of our time … a genius of a kind one would be lucky to meet in several lifetimes.”
Gray then gave everybody a route map into Lovelock’s mind. He said he relies “on a kind of mosaic thinking, in which a pattern of ideas surfaces in the mind and shows the way forward.” Mosaic thinking is the reason his ideas often sound, at first, confusing or just strange. He thinks like few other people. And the way he thinks cannot be separated from what he thinks.
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