Monday, April 15, 2024
“'But I'm trying to explain how American politics worked in the 20th century.' Stolen elections are a big part of American politics. They're just a part that's never been really examined…in the depth that I think it should be examined. I said, 'I'll really be adding something to our understanding of how democracy works, how politics works, how government works in America in the 20th century, if I show people what a stolen election is. Let's see what it really is.'
Here's a man who was like 30,000 votes behind on Election Day. Where did those 30,000 votes come from?”—Robert Caro, Turn Every Page documentary, discussing LBJ’s 1948 primary election to run for the US Senate, known as the “Box 13 Scandal”.
Friday, April 12, 2024
"We know they are lying. They know they are lying. They know that they know they are lying. We know that they know that we know they are lying. And still they continue to lie.”—Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Tuesday, April 2, 2024
“The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.”—Suzanna Arundhati Roy, Power Politics p. 7
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
“I do not advise you what you should believe or not believe. But I do advise you that we all need to learn as much as we can about everything we can, because one thing I have learned in my life is that most of what we have been taught is a lie.” William (Bill) Cooper, former US naval intelligence officer, The Hour of the Time, aired 11th February, 1993
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
“Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.” – Henri Bergson
Monday, March 18, 2024
“The greatest kindness one can render to any man is to lead him to the truth.”—att. St. Thomas Aquinas, found in Feargus O’Connor Greenwood 180 degrees
Thursday, March 14, 2024
“Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.”—Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”—Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying”
Saturday, February 24, 2024
“The most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of Men who wanted to be left Alone. They try, so very hard, to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing the forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them, are over. The moment the Men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be. Which is why, when forced to take up violence, these Men who wanted to be left alone, fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate, and a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play-acting at politics and terror. True terror will arrive at these people’s door, and they will cry, scream, and beg for mercy–but it will fall upon the deaf ears of the Men who just wanted to be left alone.”—Author Unknown
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”—William Shakespeare The Tempest (Act 1 Scene 2)
Thursday, January 18, 2024
“To see that God the Father exists is no great difficulty for an honest heart and open mind. Nothing comes from nothing, therefore logic needs Logos. Creation needs a Creator. Nature needs the supernatural. Law implies a lawgiver, both for laws of physics and laws of morality. The hierarchy of being requires a Highmost. All causes in the cosmos point to a First Cause. All purposes in life point to a Final Purpose. All meanings sought by man or found in life point to an Ultimate Meaning. And this all men know to be God.
“Likewise, it is no great difficulty for an honest heart and open mind to see that God, in order to be God, must be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal, transcendent, benevolent and immortal. God is one, and there is only one God.
“Lacking any of these attributes, God would be a creature, a created thing. God would be a being, not the source of being. If he were very powerful, but not all-powerful, or very wise, but not all-knowing, or ancient, but not eternal, or present but not everywhere. In which case there would be aspects of reality, places in time and space, for which He was not responsible. The powerful and ancient but not omnipotent nor eternal being would be, so to speak, a character in the play, not the playwright.
“But to see that God the Son exists is a paradox and a puzzlement, if not a shock and scandal. For then the playwright enters the play. How can this be?”—John C. Wright
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
“When one understands that the most shocking thing about Christianity (in it’s historical context) was not it’s claims to the miraculous or the divine, but rather it’s morality, and how, if society gets too adjusted to Christian morality (ie: love your neighbor, humans have “rights”, be a “good samaritan”) for too long, without understanding where those very moral precepts started/came from, then finally, when people throw off religion as an oppressive garment, they will be left in a place where, although they may feel liberated at first, they will soon discover that the “values” and “morals” that seemed to them so obvious… were in fact not obvious at all.”—Rontimus
Monday, January 1, 2024
“To a child who is fond of maps and stamps
The universe is the size of his immense hunger,”—Charles Baudelaire, Le Voyage, 1859
Thursday, December 7, 2023
“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.”—Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1965
“Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth.”—Mark Crispin Miller, The Project on Media Ownership
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.”—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
“Why do you trust those who lie to you?”—Paul Craig Roberts
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”—Simone Weil (1909-1943) French philosopher, Gravity and Grace [La Pesanteur et la Grâce], “Evil” (1947)
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”—Gustav Mahler
Wednesday, November 15, 2023
“People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy. They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy; it is: ‘Don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.’”—Col. John R. Boyd, U.S. Air Force
Friday, November 10, 2023
“I got so many skeletons in my closet that if they could vote, I could be King of the World.”—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Friday, November 10, 2023
“An appreciable number of Americans really do believe the Great Fraud of the mass culture, what the French call the hallucination publicitaire. They only know what they read in the papers… The art of being civilized is the art of learning to read between the lies.”—Kenneth Rexroth
Friday, October 27, 2023
“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”—GK Chesterton
Saturday, October 7, 2023
“That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”—Morpheus, The Matrix by the Wachowski brothers
Saturday, September 23, 2023
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”—Paul Atreides, Frank Herbert, Dune 1965
Sunday, September 17, 2023
“We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”—Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Friday, September 15, 2023
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”—Theodore Roosevelt, campaign speech recording made for the Edison Company, August, 1912
Thursday, August 24, 2023
“Unless my own pastoral experience is quite different from that of any other priest, it is certain that this group of Proficients is larger than is generally recognized, rapidly growing, of incalculable importance to the Church and to the world, and cruelly neglected by both. And, unless I am much mistaken, they have certain characteristics which have dictated the style and content of this book. In the first place they are very much in the world and rightly concerned with its problems, they face the dark clouds around them without wishing to escape into a sentimental “other-worldliness”. They realize nevertheless that the love and power of God, manifested in Christ, offer the only possible hope; despite everything they have faith in the redemption of the world by Jesus Christ in and through his Church, and they want to play their full part in the process. And here I think, enters a certain sense of frustration; Sunday worship, untutored personal religion, a brave attempt at some ethical standard, and an occasional “Day of Prayer for peace”: all this satisfies neither their religious desires, their minds, nor their conscience. Doubtless God can use such things, but might not he demand, and the world need, something a little more solid?”—Martin Thornton, Christian Proficiency p. ix
Published in 1959, still very much true today.
Thursday, August 10, 2023
“My advice to everyone who consumes news and opinion is to take up the cry of “Show your work!” Do not assign automatic, unquestioning credibility to anyone.”—Arnold Kling
Thursday, July 27, 2023
“Central to the activist core’s institutional infiltration strategies is that they use your vocabulary, but not your dictionary. Key words have exoteric (public) and esoteric (hidden) meanings. They get the rest of us to accept meanings based on the first but later, when convenient, activate the second. This can have a disorienting and demoralising effect.”—Lorenzo Warby
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
O LORD, thou hast dealt graciously with thy servant, * according unto thy word.
O teach me true understanding and knowledge; * for I have believed thy commandments.
Before I was troubled, I went wrong; * but now have I kept thy word.
Thou art good and gracious; * O teach me thy statutes.
The proud have imagined a lie against me; * but I will keep thy commandments with my whole heart.
Their heart is as fat as brawn; * but my delight hath been in thy law.
It is good for me that I have been in trouble; * that I may learn thy statutes.
The law of thy mouth is dearer unto me * than thousands of gold and silver.
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
“The same team that tells us that we must “listen to the experts”, won’t listen to any experts they don’t like. They rave about “UN Experts” that hide the decline, but run a mile to avoid the giants of science.”—Jo Nova referring to the “cancelling” of Nobel Prize winner John Clauser for his calling the climate emergency narrative “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.”
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
“..if the news media were not a pseudopod of the Blob..”—James Howard Kunstler
Sunday, July 23, 2023
“Fairy tales used to start with, ‘Once upon a time’. Today, fairy tales begin with, ‘According to experts’.”—Another Internet Meme
Sunday, July 23, 2023
"No sane country goes to war against Russia"—Any Military Textbook, Ch 1, Para 1
Sunday, July 23, 2023
"If Tony Fauci or anybody had admitted that hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin are effective against COVID, it would have been illegal for them to give the emergency use authorization to the vaccines, and they could have never gotten them approved."—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Monday, July 18, 2023
“The Church has survived many dark periods. It is our misfortune to live in one of them.”—Evelyn Waugh, 1966
Friday, July 14, 2023
“The legacy media which traditionally was functioning as guardians of the First Amendment…They’ve now become the opposite. They’ve become propagandists for the powerful and oppressors of free speech, and the enemies of the First Amendment.”—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., commenting on what he learned through his litigation against the Trusted News Initiative
Monday, June 26, 2023
“’God made the world and He saw that it was good.’ Sofia’s father had always told her when she complained of some injustice during her brief childhood, ‘Not fair. Not happy. Not perfect, Sofia. Good.’”—Mary Doria Russell, Children of God p. 25
Monday, June 6, 2023
“You greatly delude yourself and err, if you think that one thing is demanded from the layman and another from the monk; since the difference between them is in that whether one is married or not, while in everything else they have the same responsibilities… Because all must rise to the same height; and what has turned the world upside down is that we think only the monk must live rigorously, while the rest are allowed to live a life of indolence”—St John Chrysostom, Pros piston patera (To the faithful father)
Sunday, May 16, 2023
“Successful treaties calm things down and let us get back to what’s really important. Sometimes, the fight becomes the entire point.”
“Not surprisingly, when we’re busy fighting a war in our head about a previous injustice or slight, we can effectively consummate a treaty without the other person even knowing about it.”—Seth Godin
Friday, April 6, 2023 (Good Friday)
“Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.”—1 Kings 19:18
Monday, March 13, 2023
“A dogmatic belief in science is contrary to the principle of science itself; yet philosophy, not science, has appealed to the rational prohibition against closing of investigation, in the precise issue of the authoritativeness of science. Affected as we are by the tremendous prestige of science, we are well reminded that the power of science is a metaphorical expression for the power of man and that knowledge about man thus in a most important sense overrides the truth possessed by man about non-human things. For the power of man is a power to procure human good or ill; and as freedom undirected by reason is called license, so power undirected by human reasoning about human good or ill is tyranny or folly, or, most probably, both.”—Joseph Cropsey (1964)
Sunday, 26 February, 2023
“Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.”
“Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest sense Catholic, which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors.”—St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium Primum sect. 2 ca. 434 AD
Wednesday, 22 February, 2023
“All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.”—C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Wednesday, 22 February, 2023
“No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crises of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order.”—Eric Voegelin
Tuesday, 07 February, 2023
“I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television—words, books, and so on—are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.”—Richard Feynman, What is Science? (1966)
Thursday, 12 January, 2023
“And the people shall oppress one another, yes, every man his neighbor. The child shall be bold toward the elder, and the base toward the honorable. …Their very look bears witness against them; their sin like Sodom they vaunt, they hide it not. Woe to them! they deal out evil to themselves.”—Isaiah 3:5-9
Friday, 27 January, 2023
“Many passengers stop to take their pleasure or make their profit in [Vanity] Fair, instead of going onward to the Celestial City. Indeed, such are the charms of the place that people often affirm it to be the true and only heaven, stoutly contending that there is no other, that those who seek further are mere dreamers, and that, if the fabled brightness of the Celestial City lay but a mere mile beyond the gates of Vanity, they would not be fools enough to go thither.
“…The Christian reader, if he have had no accounts of the city later than Bunyan’s time, will be surprised to hear that almost every street has its Church, and that the Reverend Clergy are nowhere held in higher respect than at Vanity Fair. And well do they deserve such honorable estimation; for the maxims of wisdom and virtue, which fall from their lips, come from as deep a spiritual source, and tend to us as lofty a religious aim, as those of the sagest philosophers of old.”—Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Celestial Railroad”, found in Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven, 1991.
Saturday, 28 January, 2023
“‘if you distrust us, we’ll manipulate the data you see until we seem honest,’ said no one trustworthy.”—bad cattitude blog
Saturday, 31 December, 2022
“I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes except extreme devotion to the Enemy are to be encouraged.”—C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters
Tuesday, 30 November, 2022
“The modern tyrant is evil because of his elusiveness. He is more nameless than his slave. He is not more of a bully than the tyrants of the past, but he is more of a coward.”—G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered
Tuesday, 08 November, 2022
“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”—Thucydides
Monday, 07 November, 2022
“[W]e compare the result of [a theory’s] computation to nature…[and] 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.”—Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, 1965
Friday, 14 October, 2022
“The spirit of wrath—not the words—is the sin; and the spirit of wrath is cursing. We begin to swear before we can talk.—Mark Twain
Thursday, 13 October, 2022
“If learning were profaned by extending it to all kinds of people one would see far more men capable of raising doubts than of resolving them, and many would be better able to oppose truth than to defend it.”—Cardinal Richelieu, The Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu, chapter II (1642)
Monday, 22 August, 2022
“Science is a process for learning about nature in which competing ideas about how the world works are measured against observations.”—Richard Feynman, The Meaning of it All
Friday, 15 July, 2022
“It is as much a crime to disturb the peace when truth prevails as it is a crime to keep the peace when truth is violated. There is therefore a time in which peace is justified and another time when it is not justifiable. For it is written that there is a time for peace and a time for war and it it the law of truth that distinguishes the two. But at no time is there a time for truth and a time for error, for it is written that God’s truth shall abide forever. That is why Christ has said that He has come to bring peace and at the same time that He has come to bring the sword. But He does not say that He has come to bring both the truth and the falsehood.”—Blaise Pascal, Pensées #974
Friday, 08 July, 2022
“If anyone makes himself his own master in the spiritual life, he makes himself scholar to a fool”—St Bernard
Friday, 08 July, 2022
“That was the night they arrived. Remember the shooting star? That was them. Nothing happened at first. They were getting ready, burrowing in underground, preparing. Not long after you lot left, people started to change. One or two at first, then more. They replaced people of influence, taking over the institutions, remaking, remodelling, refurbishing. Doing everything they could to make us join them.”—Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, The World’s End
Friday, 08 July, 2022
“Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already—it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”—David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College Commencement, May 21, 2005
Monday, 04 July, 2022
“The Gospel is a Law of Liberty. We are treated as sons, not as servants; not subjected to a code of formal commandments, but addressed as those who love God, and wish to please Him.”—John Henry Cardinal Newman, Tracts of the Times No. 8
Wednesday, 25 May, 2022
“If we elaborate the Pauline analogy of balanced ascetical dietetics we can think of four stages: milk, gravy, vegetables, beefsteak in infant to manhood diet. There is no need to linger over the arrangement of these in any hierarchy of value, since all are needed equally by the mature adult. Nevertheless, there is a hierarchy of grade by way of digestibility. We cannot, that is to say, call beefsteak better than milk, but beefsteak is only usable and digestible by adults. We are, then, faced with something rather frightening. We have a full synthesis of agreement between such seemingly diverse schools of religious thought as St Ignatius Loyola and Professor James Ward; the one medieval, ascetic—even in the idiomatic sense—and Catholic; the other modern, ethical-humanist and Protestant. These agree, but their agreed conclusion is categorically opposed to the general consensus of pastoral practice.
“This synthesis gives us a clear-cut order of development stage by stage: (i) the “first form of contemplation”, or “natural” contemplation, then (ii) meditative prayer, then (iii) vocal prayer, then (iv) corporate worship. Yet at the first stirrings of religion in the modern soul, the religious birth of a babe in Christ, at the very first stirring of spiritual consciousness, such a soul—irrespective of physical age, which might be anything from 4 to 90—is told brusquely to go to church. This implies corporate worship (iv), raw beefsteak to the newborn child. After which the child-soul is told to say his prayers (iii)—boiled potatoes; and all the time meditation (ii) is fit only for the very advanced—light gruel for the adult stevedore; and admitting the ambiguity of the term contemplation, words like Recollection, purgation, humility, and consecration are the very last thing in advanced technique. The whole order, by some Satanic twist, is exactly reversed.”—Martin Thornton, Pastoral Theology: A Reorientation, p. 189
Tuesday, 17 May, 2022
“It is almost universally assumed to-day that becoming a Christian means in essence the adoption of a new set of beliefs or the initiation of a new mode of behaviour. A Christian would be defined as one who “believes in Christ” or “worships Christ” or “tries to follow Christ’s teaching.” Now it is far from my purpose to belittle either Christian dogma or Christian ethics. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that to define the essence of Christianity in terms either of belief or of practice involves the neglect of two principles that are fundamental to all sound theology. The former of these is that the act of God precedes and is presupposed by the acts of man: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us” (1 John iv. 10), “Ye have come to know God, or rather to be known of God.” (Gal. iv. 9) The second is that what a being is precedes what it does; our actions are a consequence of what we are, operari sequitur esse. It will follow from this that the Christian should be defined not in terms of what he himself does, but of what God has made him to be. Being a Christian is an ontological fact, resulting from an act of God.”—E.L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian, and the Church, p. 77
Sunday, 15 May, 2022
“If thou seest a young man ascending up to heaven by his own will, catch him by the foot and throw him down, for it is not expedient for him.”—Abbot Lucius, seen in Fr. Martin Thornton, Pastoral Theology: A Reorientation, p. 77
Monday, 28 March, 2022
“If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions.”—Richard P. Feynman.
Thursday, 24 March, 2022
“A plant severed from its roots is more likely to attract parasites than to bear fruit. There is no substitute for direct connections with the past.”—David Kucharsky, The Man from Plains, p. 116
Thursday, 24 March, 2022
“Bonaventure would see truth primarily as an attribute of God—“I am the Truth”— and so as lovable, in itself, as the inherent virtues of a beloved person. A man can be said to love, not only his wife, but her faithfulness, sense of humour, good temper, or any other characteristic. The truth, therefore, whether scientific, personal, or theological, is lovable as part of God; to live in the truth is, in part at least, union with God. Dishonesty is rejection of divine love, and almost a marring of his beauty; it is not only immoral but ugly.”—Fr. Martin Thornton, English Spirituality, p. 124
Thursday, 10 March, 2022
“The doctrine of the Trinity, far from being merely academic, is the expression of the most fundamental human experience, and, we shall see later, it is of much practical use. Only the view that God is transcendent, majestic, almighty, the creator of the universe and standing outside it, can fully satisfy the human mind. Yet we know that he must also be immanent—in the world, close to us, giving us life; "in him we live, and move, and have our being." This is an absurd contradiction without the mediation of the second Person of the Trinity. The experience is common to all men, though only the Christian revelation adequately expresses it, and that is why the idea is hinted at, groped after, throughout the Old Testament: Jehovah—the God of all, the Messiah—his anointed, and the indwelling Wisdom.”—Fr. Martin Thornton, Christian Proficiency, p. 6
Sunday, 06 March, 2022
“We can never attain to a completely synthetic view of what God has revealed Himself to be. For that would involve a level of unified knowledge which can belong to none but to God Himself. Such a simple and simultaneous knowledge of what God is must exist in God Himself. But we on our part must be content to approach the sanctuary from the outside and from a number of different points of view.”—L.S. Thornton, “The Christian Conception of God”: Essays Catholic and Critical, p. 126.
Monday, 28 February, 2022
“It must also be remembered that “spirituality” is the totality of Christian life guided by prayer. There is thus a sense in which all decisions and factors of human life come under the influence of “spiritual” guidance. On the other hand, spiritual guidance should be firmly limited to the development of the controlling prayer; it must consist in “counsel” not “advice”. That is the Caroline position, in which all moral decisions in a recollective life depend on a well-trained conscience: the conscience is trained by spiritual direction, but it is that conscience, not the director, which makes its own practical decision in daily life.”—Fr. Martin Thornton, English Spirituality, Chapter 22
Monday, 22 February, 2022
“‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded—and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed such emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist.”——F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty
Monday, 22 February, 2022 (2/22/22)
“I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”—George Orwell (in Homage to Catalonia, Chapter 10)
Sunday, 13 February, 2022
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”—George Orwell — maybe, I can’t find a source — or maybe this:
“News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.”—William Randolph Hearst — maybe, or maybe Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth). Or maybe a whole raft of others.
Orwell seems to be joining Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, the Dalhi Lama, Dr. King and Albert Einstein as the go-to attribution for anything at all. Just remember that Abe Lincoln said, “You can’t trust anything you see on the Internet.” Or my Grandma Smith, “The paper holds still and you can write anything you want on it.”
At any rate, I’d say that there’s an awful lot of PR and advertising in the “newspapers” these days and precious little news/journalism. But that’s just my opinion, your mileage may vary.
Saturday, 22 January, 2022
“Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.”—Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons, May 17, 1916
Sunday, 16 January, 2022
“In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”—Mark Twain, Autobiographical dictation, 10 July 1908. Published in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3 (University of California Press, 2015)
Sunday, 16 January, 2022
“I have recently concluded that many people who accept or oppose the vast tapestry of lies within which we now exist, the closing down of freedom and the rise of a new totalitarianism, have in a strange way unknowingly embraced a trick of the propagandists: they have become so one-dimensional in their obsessive need to defend or oppose their positions that they have forgotten to relish life.”—Edward Curtain, Communing with Camus in 2022
Sunday, 16 January, 2022
“The strange superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness; as though the knowledge and experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant.”—Sir Roger Scruton, Becoming a Family, City Journal, Spring, 2001
Tuesday, 11 January, 2022
“If you thought that science was certain — well, that is just an error on your part.”—Richard P. Feynman, The Quotable Feynman, p. 349, Princeton University Press
Tuesday, 04 January, 2022
“For conservatives have long understood that free markets and political liberty go together. What if it turned out that free markets plus the cultural revolution of the Sixties added up to spiritual poverty and political exploitation?”—Roger Kimball
Saturday, 01 January, 2022
“Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.”—Frederick Douglass
Wednesday, 15 December, 2021
“The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.”—Sir Roger Scruton
Thursday, 09 December, 2021
“Beware the prophet who profits.”—Bill White
Sunday, 05 December. 2021 (Advent 2)
“Son”, he said, “grab your things, I've come to take you home.”—Peter Gabriel
Sunday, 05 December. 2021 (Advent 2)
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed—in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical—and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from ‘After Ten Years’ in Letters and Papers from Prison
Sunday, 05 December. 2021 (Advent 2)
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friday, 03 December, 2021
“There are things you don’t ask in this world, and ‘what’s that meat?’ is one of the first ones you don’t ask.”—Cedar Sanderson
Friday, 03 December, 2021
“The scientific perversities of Timaeus were mistaken for scientific truths. I cannot mention any other work whose influence was more mischievous, except the Revelations of John the Devine. The apocalypse, however, was accepted as a religious book, the Timaeus as a scientific one; errors and superstition are never more dangerous than when offered to us under the cloak of science.”—George Sarton, A History of Science (Harvard University Press, 1959)
Sunday, 28 November, 2021
“Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament—There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.”—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
Friday, 26 November, 2021
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes.
—William Butler Yeats, To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing
Tuesday, 09 November 2021
“I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”—Richard Feynman
Wednesday, 03 November 2021
“It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else."—Arthur Schopenhauer
Sunday, 24 October 2021
“When men are most sure and arrogant, they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities.”—David Hume
Monday, 18 October 2021
“Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.”—C.S. Lewis, On The Reading Of Old Books
Monday, 04 October 2021
“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”—George Orwell
Sunday, 26 September 2021
“It is strange for a man living in a post-Christian and Christophobic era to see a film made in a Christian era, when the audience was assumed to be familiar with the Bible and Biblical imagery, and to react not with scorn and derision, but with affection, to these images. A modern and openly Christian film would not introduce such images so unselfconsciously, without any explanation, because the modern audience must be assumed to be ignorant and hostile. The vocabulary of images is closed to them.”—John C. Wright, From Barsoom to Malacandra: Musings on Things Past and Things to Come
Monday, 13 September 2021
“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end with doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.”—Francis Bacon
Monday, 06 September 2021
“We would not have had the pandemic if we did not have sufficient technology to allow Experts, elites, and rulers to escape most of the consequences of their bad decisions.”—William Briggs
Wednesday, 01 September 2021
“Fascism is the organized attempt to introduce socialist planning with the consent of big business.”—Edward Conze (1934)
Monday, 02 August 2021
“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything that I cannot explain as a fraud.”—Carl Gustav Jung, address to the Society for Psychical Research, 1919
Monday, 02 August 2021
“A perfect example of how The Science is conducted these days. Which is to say, badly. The conclusion foregone, the assumptions unverified, the methods shoddy, the results political.”—William Briggs
Friday, 23 July 2021
“ πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα (‘a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing’).”—Archilocus Ἀρχίλοχος, 680-645 BC
“ Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum ”—Erasmus, Adagia, 1500.
Sunday, 11 July 2021
“Monarchs are, in a very real sense, the voice of history, and the very accidental way in which they gain office emphasises the grounds of their legitimacy, in the history of a people, a place, and a culture.”—Sir Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism
Sunday, 11 July 2021
“It is amazing how many drivers, even at the Formula One Level, think that the brakes are for slowing the car down.”—Mario Andretti
“If everything is under control you are just not driving fast enough.”—Sir Stirling Moss
Wednesday, 30 June 2021
“The reason why authors which are yet read, of the sixteenth century, are so little understood is that they are read alone; and no help is borrowed from those who lived with them, or before them.”—Samuel Johnson to Thomas Warton
Tuesday, 22 June 2021
“History is linear memory and, as such, beyond organization and indifferent to reason. The characteristic common to the modern man of reason is this loss of memory, lost or rather, denied as an uncontrollable element. And if it must be remembered, then that evocation of real events is always presented as either quaint or dangerous. The past, when it involves a failed system, disappears from the mind. The past is always ad hoc. The future is always optimistic, because it is available for unencumbered solutioneering. And the present lies helpless beneath his feet, just begging to be managed.”—John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards p. 85, 1992
Saturday, 19 June 2021
“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated … What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system.’”—Doris Lessing
Saturday, 29 May 2021
“If you’re a thoughtful person, as I’m sure you are, your favorite kind of question is the question for which you have no answer. Thinking about such questions is thinking. Thinking about any other kind of question is not thinking, just shouting at yourself.”—Curtis Yarvin
Saturday, 29 May 2021
“ Stamp collecting means doing science just for the sake of doing science—or rather, of racking up genuine, novel, but pointless publication points. Self-licking ice-cream cones are problems caused by the attempts to solve them. Playing with fire is self-explanatory. Covid is a kind of perfect trifecta of all three tropes.”—Curtis Yarvin
Monday, 17 May 2021
“Not all the beasts that were kept out of the Ark had the decency to perish.”—Tim Powers, Declare
Sunday, 02 May 2021
“One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.”—Arthur Koestler
“The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.”—Arthur Koestler
“If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.”—Arthur Koestler
“When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man’s history.”—Arthur Koestler
“Wars are not fought for territory, but for words. Man’s deadliest weapon is language. He is as susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over.”—Arthur Koestler
Saturday, 24 April 2021
“History teaches us that it is not the lies that are censored.”—Nick Hudson
Saturday, 24 April 2021
“That which can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”—Christopher Hitchens
Saturday, 17 April 2021
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”—Ernest Hemingway
Saturday, 17 April 2021
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”—Albert Camus
Saturday, 17 April 2021
“Early in life, I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.”—George Orwell
Saturday, 27 March 2021
“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”—George Bernard Shaw
Saturday, 13 March 2021
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.”—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Friday, 12 March 2021
“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”—P.J. O’Rourke
Tuesday, 09 March 2021
“Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.”—Richard Feynman
Monday, 08 March 2021
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”—Daniel Boorstin
Sunday, 07 March 2021
“The field of the finite is all that we can see, hear, touch, remember and describe. This field is basically that which is manifest, or tangible. The essential quality of the infinite, by contrast, is its subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word spirit, whose root meaning is “wind or breath.” This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy to which the manifest world of the finite responds. This energy, or spirit, infuses all living beings, and without it any organism must fall apart into its constituent elements. That which is truly alive in the living being is the energy of spirit, and this is never born and never dies.”—David Bohm, an obituary for a friend (and read at his own funeral)
Tuesday, 02 March 2021
“Man is essentially a story-telling animal, but a teller of stories that aspire to truth.”—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition
Tuesday, 02 March 2021
“All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely.”—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition
Tuesday, 02 March 2021
“What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means,”—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition
Tuesday, 02 March 2021
“To cry out that the emperor had no clothes on was at least to pick on one man only to the amusement of everyone else; to declare that almost everyone is dressed in rags is much less likely to be popular.”—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition
Tuesday, 02 March 2021
“If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.”—Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition
Thursday, 25 February 2021
“Doesn’t mean that much to me to mean that much to you…”—Neal Young, Old Man
Monday, 15 February 2021
“Vision without execution is hallucination.”—Walter Isaacson
Monday, 15 February 2021
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but, ‘That’s funny.’”—Isaac Asimov
Monday, 15 February 2021
“We have this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know.”—Richard Feynman
Tuesday, 02 February 2021
“Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”—Oscar Wilde
Monday, 01 February 2021
“By honest I don’t mean that you only tell what’s true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.”—Richard Feynman
Sunday, 31 January 2021
“Oligarchy is rule by a few persons with no special claim to respect other than for their wealth, ability or vigour.”—C. Northcote Parkinson, The Evolution of Political Thought
Thursday, 28 January 2021
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”—William James
Wednesday, 27 January 2021
“The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
“We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems.”—Michael Crichton (from a 2003 speech)
Tuesday, 26 January 2021
“The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.”—Hubert Humphrey
Tuesday, 26 January 2021
“Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum.”—P.J. O'Rourke
Tuesday, 26 January 2021
“Love me when I least deserve it, because that's when I really need it.”—Spanish proverb
Tuesday, 26 January 2021
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”—Moliere
Monday, 25 January 2021
“A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good, just because it’s accepted by a majority.”—Booker T. Washington
Sunday, 24 January 2021
“Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”—Jack London
Sunday, 24 January 2021
“What ever crushes individuality is despotism, no matter what name it is called.”—John Stuart Mill
Sunday, 24 January 2021
“The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.”—Benedict Evans
Sunday, 24 January 2021
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”—Albert Camus
Saturday, 23 January 2021
“All free men remember that in the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.”—Dwight D. Eisenhower
Saturday, 23 January 2021
“At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.”—Italian Proverb
Saturday, 23 January 2021
“That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”—Christopher Hitchens
Friday, 15 January 2021
"Show me a man who thinks he's objective and I'll show you a man who's deceiving himself,"—Henry Luce
Friday, 15 January 2021
"The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion."—Paul Coelho
Monday, 11 January 2021
"Though Jesus Christ is very hard to satisfy, He is very easy to please. Think of that and it will help you a little. He is very easy to please, but very hard to satisfy. If you will but let Him in, and you have not much to put on the table. You cannot share much of life because you have not got it, He will be so pleased, if it be but a cup of cold water that you can give him. Let it be something genuine, something real." – George MacDonald. From the sermon "The Father's Appeal", preached in Westminster Chapel.
Friday, 08 January 2021
"For some years now, the comfortable classes in today's America have lost track of the fact that control over the public narrative does not equal control over the facts underlying the narrative…Convince yourself that something is true, and the universe has to play along: that's the mentality of a frighteningly large share of the privileged in America these days."—John Michael Greer
More pithy comments on the falsehoods behind the narrative, and the possible or even likely consequences, can be found there. Worth the read.
Friday, 08 January 2021
"As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”—Enoch Powell MP, quoting Virgil in The Rivers of Blood speech, April 20, 1968
And that was 1968. I remember 1968. I turned 21, but too late to vote in that year. I remember watching much of Hippy evolve into angry thug.
Friday, 08 January 2021
"Remember that the people that hid Anne Frank were breaking the law and the people that took her to the camps were enforcing it."—Seen on a blog and no reference found yet…still looking.
Monday, 04 January 2021
"The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one's life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified."—Lewis Mumford, Authoritarian and Democratic Technics (1964)
Monday, 04 January 2021
"To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, or worse for the heart."—Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment
Monday, 04 January 2021
"Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."–J.B.S. Haldane, Possible World and Other Papers (1927) p.286
"Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it."—Niels Bohr, Essays 1932-1957 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge
"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."—Niels Bohr
"I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far."—Niels Bohr, after the Solvay Converence (1927) quoted by Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond (1971) found at Wikiquote
Monday, 04 January 2021
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."—Albert Einstein
Monday, 04 January 2021
"Hell can't be made attractive, so the devil makes attractive the road that leads there."—Saint Basil the Great
Monday, 04 January 2021
"A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside their control."—Naval Ravikant
Monday, 04 January 2021
"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers."—Nassim Taleb
(ed.) A year? A week, if that! Should work with expert blogs and cable news shows, too.
Thursday, 31 December 2020
"I would encourage you to take this one lesson with you: everything is fake. The news, the science, the hits, the celebrities, the bestsellers, the wealthy, the economic statistics… they are all elements of a false and ever-mutating narrative intended to shape your perceptions. Perception isn't reality, but since perception always affects Man's decision-making, shaping his perception is one way to change future reality."—Vox Day
Tuesday, 29 December 2020
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."—Voltaire
Monday, 28 December 2020
"It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money."—G.K. Chesterton
“For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man.—G.K. Chesterton
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
"There are two ways to live your life. On is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is."—Albert Einstein
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
"It is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are those least suited to do it… Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."—Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
"The bully is the man who acts on the assumption that he will not have to fight."—G.K. Chesterton
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
"If you're gonna put it on the front page, you gotta make sure it's right. Because if it ain't, you gotta eat it for the next 24 hours."—Ben Bradlee
That's how newspaper editors used to think—or at least said that they thought.
Tuesday, 22 December 2020
“Marxism has a noble vision - for humans to retain their humanity while living as one big happy family.
“However, that vision fails to consider that familial bonds have limits.
"Most people would take a bullet for their kids, siblings, or parents, but I don't know anyone who'd take a bullet for their fourth cousin's husband, whom they've never met."—Louis Pereira
Sunday, 20 December 2020
"There is, nevertheless, an aspect of time that has survived the demolition inflicted on it by nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics. Divested of the trappings with which Newtonian theory had draped it, and to which we had become so accustomed, it now shines out with greater clarity; the world is nothing but change."—Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time p 96
Time Physics
Sunday, 20 December 2020
"I'm not upset that you lied to me; I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."—Friedrich Nietzsche
Friday, 18 December 2020
"It is our knowledge—the things we are sure of—that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning."—Lincoln Steffens
Friday, 18 December 2020
"Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm."—Publilius Syrus
Monday, 14 December 2020
"The two most important days of a man's life are the day he was born and the day he finds out why."—recently attributed to Mark Twain, but almost certainly inaccurately.
The Quote Investigator traces it to a January 25, 1970 sermon delivered at Riverside Church in New York City. Whoever said it first, it's a useful thought. It's always wise to be suspicious of any quote attributed to Twain, Einstein, Dalai Lama, etc. As Abe Lincoln used to say, "Don't trust anything you read on the Internet."
Monday, 07 December 2020
"If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company."—Jean Paul Sartre
Monday, 07 December 2020
"Government does not exist to make us equal, but to treat us equally. It does not exist to make life fair, but to treat us fairly."—Andrew Klavan
Monday, 07 December 2020
"Moreover, the celebrity's apparent talent and relevant success teach him to do the things he must not do: to trust himself, to believe that he is a person of virtue, to believe that he is important. This is particularly dangerous when talent and success almost always create both opportunity and motive for serious sin."—David French
Saturday, 05 December 2020
"It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover."—Henri Poincaré
"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."—Immanuel Kant
Thursday, 03 December 2020
“The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
"We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems."—Michael Crichton, Environmentalism as Religion speech at Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, CA 15 September 2003
Thursday, 03 December 2020
"I wish I were dumber so I could be more certain about my opinions. It looks fun."—Scott Adams
Thursday, 03 December 2020
"Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things."—G.K. Chesterton
Thursday, 03 December 2020
"If you have everything under control, you're not moving fast enough."—Mario Andretti
Sunday, 29 November 2020
"Men do not know how to be either entirely wicked or entirely good… they do not know how to employ violent measures which are honourable in themselves, and as a result, remaining undecided, between their own indecision and their ambiguity they are eliminated."—Niccolò Machiavelli
Sunday, 29 November 2020
"Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."—Teddy Roosevelt
"Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em ‘Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it."—Teddy Roosevelt
Friday, 27 November 2020
"The problem is not you being uneducated. The problem is that you are educated just enough to believe what you have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what you have been taught."—Richard Feynman
Monday, 23 November 2020
"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet."—Niels Bohr
Sunday, 22 November 2020
"What is a rebel? A man who says no."—Albert Camus
Sunday, 22 November 2020
"He that would live in peace and ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees."—Benjamin Franklin
Tuesday, 17 November 2020
"A generation which ignores history has no past—and no future."—Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
Tuesday, 17 November 2020
"The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future."—George Orwell, "As I Please" column in Tribune, 4 February 1944
Tuesday, 17 November 2020
"A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud."—George Orwell The Prevention of Literature, 1946
Monday, 16 November 2020
"You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending."—C.S. Lewis
Sunday, 15 November 2020
"A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires."—Paulo Coelho, The Fifth Mountain
Sunday, 15 November, 2020
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."—Søren Kierkegaard
Saturday, 14 November 2020
“Organized sports often turn into a play about status roles and dominance. Bullfighting, pro wrestling, even hockey, are about who's winning, who's losing and who's in charge.
But they are also theatres of affiliation. The fans celebrate their unity as well as their divisions. The pomp and circumstance are a form of culture. There are insiders and outsiders, and the right way and the wrong way.”—Seth Godin
Saturday, 14 November 2020
"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false."—Paul Johnson, The Recovery of Freedom
Thursday, 12 November 2020
"We can view results as a threat, or see them as an opportunity. It depends on whether we're defending a little-understood status quo or seeking to make things work better."—Seth Godin, The Gift of Results
Wednesday, 11 November
"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."—Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Sunday, 08 November 2020
"If you're efficient, you're doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That's my way of life."—Jerry Seinfeld, Harvard Business Review interview
Tuesday, 03 November 2020
"If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."—Emerson Pugh
Monday, 02 November 2020
"Amateurs tend to focus on seeking brilliance. Professionals often know that it's far more effective to avoid stupidity. Side-stepping typical blunders is the simplest way to get ahead of the crowd."—Rosie Leizrowice
Friday, 30 October 2020
"…since men have no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past"—Polybius, Histories, 1.1.1-4
Wednesday, 28 October 2020
"Am I meant to know, but not to seek? Did you know how hard I'd find that? Is that why you made it this difficult? So I'd have time to work that out?"—J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Wednesday, 28 October 2020
"We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad."—John Green
Friday, 23 October 2020
"I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."–Enrico Fermi, quoted by Freeman Dyson, A meeting with Enrico Fermi
Friday, 23 October 2020
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Friday, 23 October 2020
"Harry, Harry, only because Voldemort made a grave error, and acted on Professor Trelawney's words! If Voldemort had never murdered your father, would he have imparted in you a furious desire for revenge? Of course not! If he had not forced your mother to die for you, would he have given you a magical protection he could not penetrate? Of course not, Harry! Don't you see? Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back! Voldemort is no different! Always he was on the lookout for the one who would challenge him. He heard the prophecy and he leapt into action, with the result that he not only handpicked the man most likely to finish him, he handed him uniquely deadly weapons!"—J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Friday, 23 October 2020
"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed."—Hannah Arendt
Friday, 23 October 2020
"The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards."—Gene Spafford
Similar to the expectation that, whatever you've done to secure your outward-facing network, the bad buys have penetrated it and do all the extra, expensive work to secure individual machines and data appropriately (which, in my experience, almost nobody is willing to do). IOW, you're never paranoid enough in today's world.
Sunday, 18 October 2020
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time"—Bertrand Russell
Monday, 5 October 2020
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person too fool."—Richard Feynman
Sunday, 4 October 2020
"The standard process of organizing knowledge by departments, and subdepartments, and further breaking it up into separate courses, tends to conceal the homogeneity of knowledge, and at the same time to omit much which falls between the courses."—Richard Hamming
A technique useful in software development, less so in other fields.
Thursday, 24 September 2020
“Only the person who becomes irate without reason, sins. Whoever becomes irate for a just reason is not guilty. Because, if ire were lacking, the science of God would not progress, judgments would not be sound, and crimes would not be repressed.
"Further, the person who does not become irate when he has cause to be, sins. For an unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices: it fosters negligence, and stimulates not only the wicked, but above all the good, to do wrong."—St. John Chrysostom, Homily XI super Matheum, 1c, nt.7
Tuesday, 22 September 2020
"Humility, therefore, is absolutely necessary if man is to avoid acting like a baby all his life. To grow up means, in fact, to become humble, to throw away the illusion that I am at the center of everything and that other people only exist to provide me with comfort and pleasure."—Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation
Monday, 21 September 2020
"One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England."—George Orwell
Friday, 18 September 2020
"But a curiosity of my type remains after all the most agreeable of all vices—sorry, I meant to say: the love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth."—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Wednesday, 16 September 2020
“Nobody every recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will.“—Ludwig Von Mises
Wednesday, 16 September 2020
"Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole."—Thomas Sowell
Monday, 14 September 2020
"History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality—if only for an instant—by means of creation."—Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings
Saturday, 12 September 2020
"If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism."—Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, 09 September 2020
"In debased eras like today's you can't speak with a straight face of such notions as honor or integrity (or just about any other quality of character that rises above the basest and most self-serving of human instincts). You have to express yourself ironically or with a certain bitter and self-distancing knowingness and despair. You certainly can't put words into a contemporary character's mouth that take seriously such notions as nobility or rectitude."—Steven Pressfield
Monday, 07 September 2020
"It is not doubt but certainty that drives you mad."—Friedrich Nietzsche, Why I Am So Wise
Sunday, 06 September 2020
"Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work; not the starting point."—Frederick Maitland
Sunday, 06 September 2020
"History isn't just something that ought to be taught or ought to be read or ought to be encouraged because it's going to make us a better citizen. It will make us a better citizen; or because it will make us a more thoughtful and understanding human being, which it will; or because it will cause us to behave better, which it will. It should be taught for pleasure: The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive, which is what education is largely about."—David McCullough
Friday, 04 September 2020
"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, preface
Friday, 28 August 2020
"I had not been prepared for just how stupid the apocalypse would be, how obscene, how inane."—William Tychonievich
Friday, 28 August 2020
"Creativity is intelligence having fun."—Albert Einstein
Wednesday, 26 August 2020
"There are two ranges in the growth of tools: the range within which machines are used to extend human capability and the range in which they are used to contract, eliminate, or replace human functions. In the first, man as an individual can exercise authority on his own behalf and therefore assume responsibility. In the second, the machine takes over—first reducing the range of choice and motivation in both the operator and the client, and second imposing its own logic and demand on both. Survival depends on establishing procedures which permit ordinary people to recognize these ranges and to opt for survival in freedom, to evaluate the structure built into tools and institutions so they can exclude those which by their structure are destructive, and control those which are useful."—Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)
Tuesday, 25 August 2020
“Two things are true simultaneously: We're running out of time. We have too much time on our hands.
“How can we be at a deadline and bored at the same time? We always are.
"Our experience of time relates to engagement, fear, opportunity and the culture."—Seth Godin
Monday, 24 August 2020
"It is as easy to deceive oneself without perceiving it as it is difficult to deceive others without their perceiving it."—François duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (1664)
Sunday, 23 August 2020
"A horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me is that the Conservative and the Progressive are secretly in partnership. That the quarrel they keep up in public is a put-up job, and that the way they perpetually play into each other's hands is not an everlasting coincidence."—G.K. Chesterton
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."—G.K. Chesterton
Sunday, 23 August 2020
"Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation."—W. H. Auden
Sunday, 23 August 2020
"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."—Flannery O'Connor
Wednesday, 19 August 2020
“If we look at this conflict as a straight eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between Empire and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing. But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to Empire. We may not have stopped it in its tracks—yet—but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world's stage in all its brutish, iniquitous nakedness.
"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling—their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them."—Arundhati Roy, War Talk
Monday, 17 August 2020
"Every kind of writing is good save that which bores."—Voltaire, preface to L'Enfant prodigue (1736)
Sunday, 16 August 2020
"Pretend your brain is a white board. Is it covered with to-do lists and 'DO NOT ERASE'? Is there space for drawing and combining ideas?"—Jessica Kerr
Saturday, 15 August 2020
"GNU Emacs, which is a sort of hybrid between Windows Notepad, a monolithic-kernel operating system, and the International Space Station. It's a bit tricky to explain, but in a nutshell, Emacs is a platform written in 1976 (yes, almost half a century ago) for writing software to make you more productive, masquerading as a text editor."—Steve Yegge
Wednesday, 12 August 2020
"To summarize, then, we have four main points: First, love is primarily a matter of will rather than passion. Second, pleasant feelings are therefore not of its essence, even if they are usually associated with it. Third, love is a matter of willing what is good for the beloved. Fourth, love of another for his own sake has priority over love of another merely for some benefit he provides."—Edward Feser
Thursday, 06 August 2020
"Remedies for Growth. The human thing is gardening, pruning. Nature is shameless & profligate, our job is editorial. We don't tell it to grow; we tell it where, and where not to."—David Warren
Thursday, 06 August 2020
"Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat. [Whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad.] … Dementia: loss of memory, history, & therefore of a future. That is our difficulty: we are all demented now."—David Warren
Friday, 31 July 2020
"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time."—Leonard Bernstein
Wednesday, 29 July 2020
"The brain being indeed a machine, we must not hope to find its artifice through other ways than those which are used to find the artifice of the other machines. It thus remains to do what we would do for any other machine; I mean to dismantle it piece by piece and to consider what these can do separately and together."—Nicolaus Steno, On the Brain, 1669
Tuesday, 28 July 2020
"Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not."—Bruce Levine, PhD
Monday, 27 July 2020
"For whenever a man in any way loses self-control, or is struck down by misfortune, or grows angry, or loses heart, he shows in this way that he finds things different than what he expected, and consequently he lived under a mistake."—Arthur Schopenauer, The World as Will and Representation
Monday, 27 July 2020
"All happiness depends on the proportion of what we claim and what we receive. It is immaterial how great or small the two quantities of this proportion are, and the proportion can be established just as well by diminishing the first quantity as by increasing the second."—Arthur Schopenauer, The World as Will and Representation
Thursday, 23 July 2020
"The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them. We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves."—Bill Mollison
Friday, 17 July 2020
“The oldest written history of the Slavs can be shortly summarised—myriads of slave hunts and the enthralment of entire peoples. The Slav was the most prized of human goods. With increased strength outside his marshy land of origin, hardened to the utmost against all privation, industrious, content with little, good-humoured, and cheerful, he filled the slave markets of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It must be remembered that for every Slavonic slave who reached his destination, at least ten succumbed to inhuman treatment during transport and to the heat of the climate. Indeed Ibrāhīm (tenth century), himself in all probability a slave dealer, says: 'And the Slavs cannot travel to Lombardy on account of the heat which is fatal to them.' Hence their high price.
"The Arabian geographer of the ninth century tells us how the Magyars in the Pontus steppe dominated all the Slavs dwelling near them. The Magyars made raids upon the Slavs and took their prisoners along the coast to Kerkh where the Byzantines came to meet them and gave Greek brocades and such wares in exchange for the prisoners."—/The Cambridge Medieval History,/ Vol. II, 1913
Friday, 17 July 2020
"Just as we have established a tradition of double-blinded research to determine drug efficacy, we must institute double-blinded research in other policy areas as well. Certainly the increased use of computer models, such as GCMs, cries out for the separation of those who make the models from those who verify them. The fact is that the present structure of science is entrepreneurial, with individual investigative teams vying for funding from organizations which all too often have a clear stake in the outcome of the research—or appear to, which may be just as bad. This is not healthy for science."—Michael Crichton, Aliens Cause Global Warming, Caltech Michelin Lecture, 17 January, 2003
Thursday, 16 July 2020
"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's."—William Blake
Wednesday, 15 July 2020
"We may have uneasy sensations from seeing a creature in distress, without pity; for we have not pity unless we wish to relieve them."—Samuel Johnson
"Pity is one form of being convinced that someone else is in pain."—Ludwig Wittgenstein
"The name of this intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention is love."—Simone Weil
Wednesday, 15 July 2020
"The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless."—Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
Monday, 13 July 2020
If we hadn't told my brother Stumpy not to clean out the wood chipper by hand, we'd still be calling him Edward.
The cat can have kittens in the oven. That doesn't make them biscuits.
She was a tall girl. She was so tall she could hunt geese with a rake.
Monday, 13 July 2020
"But our Lord said to me, 'I am the ground of thy beseechings: first, it is My will that thou have it; and then I make thee to wish for it; and then I make thee to beseech it, and thou beseechest it. How then should it be that thou shouldest not have thy beseeching?' … For it is most impossible that we should beseech mercy and grace and not have it. For all things that our good Lord maketh us to beseech, Himself hath ordained them to us from without beginning. Here may we see that our beseeching is not the cause of God's goodness; and that showed He soothfastly in all these sweet words which He saith: 'I am the ground.' And our good Lord willeth that this be known of His lovers in earth; and the more that we know it the more should we beseech, if it be wisely taken; and so is our Lord's meaning. Merry and joyous is our Lord of our prayer, and He looketh for it; and He willeth to have it; because with His grace He would have us like to Himself in condition as we are in kind. Therefore saith He to us 'Pray inwardly, although thou think it has no savour to thee: for it is profitable, though thou feel not, though thou see not, yea, though thou think thou canst not.'"—Julian of Norwich
Saturday, 11 July 2020
"What has been done, thought, written, or spoken is not culture; culture is only that fraction which is remembered."—Gary Taylor, The Clock of the Long Now
Friday, 10 July 2020
"It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you."—Roald Dahl, The Witches
Friday, 10 July 2020
"Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart."—Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Tuesday, 07 July 2020
“We are often told to trust in God, and many of us have counseled others who are anxious or downcast to do so. But what does that mean?
“In some cases, when people give this counsel they mean this: Don't worry, God will eventually give you what want. God will come around to your way of thinking at some point. Hang in there and wait for God to answer (your way). He'll take care of things (in a way that pleases you).
“This is not trust.
"To trust is to move to the stable conviction that whatever God decides to do is the right thing. It means being at peace with what He does, what He decides. It is to accept that God often acts in paradoxical ways, in ways that are different from, or even contrary to, our notions of what is best. God often permits evils for some greater good, even if this greater good is hidden from us."—Msgr. Charles Pope
Monday, 06 July 2020
"Once you start with openings, there is no way out… It is a little like developing the habit of stealing the test from your teacher's desk instead of learning how to do the math. You may pass the test, but you learn absolutely nothing—and most critically, you don't gain an appreciation for the value or beauty of learning itself."—Josh Waitzkin, Mastering the Fundamentals
Sunday, 05 July 2020
"Simple as it seems, action is the cause, vehicle, and outcome of education. Perceptions, thoughts, ideas, memories, and intentions are important, but they are not the end product."—James Zull, From Brain to Mind: Using Neuroscience to Guide Change in Education
Friday, 03 July 2020
"Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking. Such terms as oppressors and oppressed, the idea of classes—all that sort of thing is near to losing all meaning, so obvious are the impotence and distress of all men in face of the social machine, which has become a machine for breaking hearts and crushing spirits, a machine for manufacturing irresponsibility, stupidity, corruption, slackness and, above all, dizziness. The reason for this painful state of affairs is perfectly clear. We are living in a world in which nothing is made to man's measure; there exists a monstrous discrepancy between man's body, man's mind and the things which at present time constitute the elements of human existence; everything is in disequilibrium."—Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (1955)
Friday, 03 July 2020
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."—Mark Twain
Friday, 26 June 2020
"The use of fashions of thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there's a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under."—C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Monday, 22 June 2020
"Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary."—Sebastian Junger
Friday, 19 June 2020
"Should some sort of post-mortem ever be conducted on the catastrophic failure of all computer models, it will be done with the help of a computer model, that will cost billions in whatever currency to assemble. It will show the need for more computer studies. And therefore, it will be catastrophically wrong."—David Warren
Friday, 12 June 2020
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."—Philip K. Dick
Thursday, 11 June 2020
"My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death."—Oliver Sacks
Friday, 05 June 2020
"My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness. When in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know, have come out of people's suffering. The problem is not to undo suffering, or to wipe it off the face of the earth, but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to 'cure' ourselves of it constantly, and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call 'happiness'. There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him—of defining him, rather than letting him go! It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad!"—Arthur Miller
Friday, 05 June 2020
"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."—Henry David Thoreau
Thursday, 04 June 2020
"So I hope you can accept Nature as She is—absurd."—Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)
Thursday, 28 May 2020
"The whole point of Jacksonianism is 'You leave me alone and I'll leave you alone. You play fair with me and I'll play fair with you. But if you fuck with me, I'll kill you.'"—Steven den Beste
Tuesday, 26 May 2020
"The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination."—Adam Gopnik
Friday, 22 May 2020
"Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others . . . but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God “sending us" to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”—C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Friday, 15 May 2020
"Working hard for something we don't care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion."—Simon Sinek
Monday, 11 May 2020
"Does Political Correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe, the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever."—Doris Lessing, Language and the Lunatic Fringe 1992
Monday, 11 May 2020
"Things happen to a person; that is, life deals you a set of cards and you play them as you are able. If I do my best I can and make no trouble for my neighbors, then surely I cannot be blamed either for my existence or my government. There are forces that buffet us through life that no mere individual can withstand. Better to stick to my books and musings about literature and leave the government to those who know best. That was certainly what I believed for years, but this evening I had begun to wonder, foolishly perhaps, if it wasn't that sort of thinking which had helped bring about this current state of affairs."—Stephen Dobyns, The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini
Monday, 11 May 2020
“No matter how hard you try, you can't.
“After just a few steps, you'll be slightly enlarging the footprint. By the time six people have done it, the original is completely gone.
"Footprints might be a fine compass, but they're not much of a map. That's on us."—Seth Godin
Sunday, 10 May 2020
"The Church itself was regarded (and will continue to be regarded by its adherents) as immortal, but its administration is subject to perpetual threat of mortality, that is, of corruption and weakness tending to extinction."—Hilaire Belloc, The Crisis of Civilization
Friday, 08 May 2020
"The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists."—G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils
Thursday, 07 May 2020
"Man lives in a world of ideas. Any phenomenon is so complex that he cannot possibly grasp the whole of it. He abstracts certain characteristics of a given phenomenon as an idea, then represents that idea as a symbol, be it a word or a mathematical sign. Human reaction is almost entirely reaction to symbols, and only negligibly to phenomena. As a matter of fact," he continued, removing the cigarette holder from his mouth and settling into his subject, "it can be demonstrated that the human mind can think only in terms of symbols."
"When we think, we let symbols operate on other symbols in certain, set fashions—rules of logic, or rules of mathematics. If the symbols have been abstracted so that they are structurally similar to the phenomena they stand for, and if the symbol operations are similar in structure and order to the operations of phenomena in the real world, we think sanely. If our logic-mathematics, or our word-symbols, have been poorly chosen, we think not sanely."—Robert A. Heinlein, The Past Through Tomorrow p. 10
Thursday, 07 May 2020
(Paraphrasing and elaborating on something Bernardo Kastrup said) “The great taboo in science is not that there is magic (no one cares that the big bang is supposed to have magically come from nothing, or that mental processes like mathematics magically map onto the physical world so perfectly).
No, science is fine with all that. The great taboo in our scientistic world view is the idea that there could be meaning to it all!”
Saturday, 02 May 2020
"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known but to question it."—Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man
Saturday, 02 May 2020
"So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists."—G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
Thursday, 30 April 2020
We thought we ranked above the chance of ill. Others might fall, not we, for we were wise— Merchants in freedom. So, of our free-will We let our servants drug our strength with lies. The pleasure and the poison had its way On us as on the meanest, till we learned That he who lies will steal, who steals will slay. Neither God's judgment nor man's heart was turned.
Yet there remains His Mercy–to be sought Through wrath and peril till we cleanse the wrong By that last right which our forefathers claimed When their Law failed them and its stewards were bought. This is our cause. God help us, and make strong Our will to meet Him later, unashamed!—Rudyard Kipling
Wednesday, 29 April 2020
"Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them."—William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
Monday, 27 April 2020
"Every separate day in the year is a gift presented to only one man—the happiest one; all other people use his day, to enjoy the sunshine or berate the rain, never knowing, however, to whom that day really belongs; and its fortunate owner is pleased and amused by their ignorance. A person cannot foreknow which day exactly will fall to his lot, what trifle he will remember forever: the ripple of reflected sunlight on a wall bordering water or the revolving fall of a maple leaf; and it often happens that he recognizes his day only in retrospection, long after he has plucked, and crumpled, and chucked under his desk the calendar leaf with the forgotten figure."—Vladimir Nabokov, from "The Potato Elf," The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage, 1997)
Saturday, 25 April 2020
"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'"—David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College Commencement Address, May 21, 2005
Friday, 24 April 2020
When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide; "Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?" I fondly ask. But Patience to prevent That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need Either man's work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o'er land and ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait." —John Milton, When I Consider How My Light is Spent
Thursday, 23 April 2020
"The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Thursday, 23 April 2020
"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist"—Charles Baudelaire
Wednesday, 22 April 2020
"Coincidence can be interpreted, even spun. Back in 1777, Horace Walpole announced that 'what is called chance is the instrument of Providence.' Théophile Gautier called chance God's pseudonym, and Doris Lessing supposedly said that 'coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous'—though the quote is often hopefully (or impishly) misattributed to Albert Einstein. The legendary editor Sol Stein put it this way: 'If you think something is a coincidence, you don't know how God works. Pay attention. He doesn't have time to give you private lessons.'"—Jeanette Cooperman, Making Sense of a Random Universe
Saturday, 11 April 2020 (Holy Saturday)
"It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones."–C. S. Lewis, Introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation
Friday, 10 April 2020 (Good Friday)
"It's so important that we never be defined by tragedy. Shaped by it, but never defined."—Amanda Holden, on Britain's Got Talent, 2018 Week 2
Monday, 06 April 2020
"Every one of us is like a man who sees things in a dream and thinks that he knows them perfectly and then wakes up to find that he knows nothing."–Plato, Statesman quoted in Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
Monday, 06 April 2020
"Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about … when I am alone without being able to split up into the two-in0one, without being able to keep myself company."—Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
Saturday, 04 April 2020
"[…] it is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man."—Richard Feynman, John Danz Lecture 1963
Friday, 03 April 2020
"I don't quite know what we're doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best as he can."—Walker Percy
Friday, 03 April 2020
"No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain their freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race."—Richard Feynman
Friday, 03 April 2020
"The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable, what then?"—George Orwell 1984
Friday, 27 March 2020
"Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made"—Franz Kafka
Friday, 27 March 2020
"If people offer many remedies for an illness, you may be sure it is incurable"—Anton Chekhov
Friday, 27 March 2020
"Anything can happen, but it usually doesn't"—Robert Benchley
Friday, 27 March 2020
"You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd"—Flannery O'Connor
Friday, 27 March 2020
"Hope is patience with the lamp lit"—Tertullian
Sunday, 22 March 2020
"Why do you insist the universe is not a conscious intelligence, when it gives birth to conscious intelligences?"—Cicero, c. 44 B.C.
Sunday, 22 March 2020
"The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity."—Lucius Annaeus Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae c. 48 A.D.
Sunday, 15 March 2020
"We are the bees of the Invisible. Passionately, we plunder the honey of the visible, in order to gather it in the great golden hive of the Invisible."—Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to his friend Witold Hulewicz, 1925. Seen here
Thursday, 12 March 2020
"Notes aren't a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process."—Richard P. Feynman
Thursday, 12 March 2020
"Science is what we do to keep us from lying to ourselves."—Richard P. Feynman
Sunday, 08 March 2020
"I should like to report here an experience I had during my last trip to this country, when I visited a world-famous scientist whom I had known from Europe. He received me on the porch of his house which was adorned with a horse shoe. I tried to make a funny remark by saying, “But Professor, you don't believe in that sort of thing, do you really?" whereupon he answered quite naively, "Of course not, but you know I have been told that it works even when you don't believe in it."—Carl Alfred Meier
Saturday, 07 March 2020
"The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds… In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda."—C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man p.32-33
Sunday, 01 March 2020
"Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all."—Richard P. Feynman
Saturday, 29 February 2020
"Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: 'everyone is entitled to know everything.' But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information."—Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart (1978 Harvard Commencement Address)
Saturday, 29 February 2020
"If the biographers of the saints would write of their defects as well as of their virtues, their biographies would be longer." So said Saint Alphonsus de Liguori to one of his novices.—David Warren
Friday, 28 February 2020
"Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere. Love what you do and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life. We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts."—Ray Bradbury
Friday, 21 February 2020
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."—C.S. Lewis
Saturday, 15 February 2020
"Once you can sincerely say: 'I don't know' then it becomes possible to get at the truth."—Robert A. Heinlein, The cat who walks through walls
"Dear G-d: lead me in the company of those who seek truth and spare me from those who have found it."—(attributed to André Gide)
Friday, 14 February 2020
"The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril."—Niall Ferguson
"History never repeats itself. Man always does."—Voltaire
Saturday, 08 February 2020
"If someone has consistently good luck, it ain't luck."—Zvi Mowshowitz, Moloch Hasn't Won
Friday, 07 February 2020
"[This argument] fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture."—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Friday, 07 February 2020
“Education is what, when, and why to do things. Training is how to do it.
"In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it."—Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (1997)
See also You and Your Research
Monday, 03 February 2020
"The world-conquering West of the nineteenth century needed a philosophy of life in which realpolitik—victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts—was the guiding principle. Thus the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be. So we vied with each other to make the Fully Automatic Model of the universe as bleak as possible."—Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth and Belief
Monday, 03 February 2020
"The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism—relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity. And since then, generations of intelligent students under the guidance of their enlightened professors have looked into the abyss, have contemplated those beasts, and have said, “How interesting, how exciting."—Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss (1994)
Saturday, 01 February 2020
"I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular plan of study . . . . A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good."–James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, quoting Johnson
Saturday, 01 February 2020
“The bookish blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head.”—Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711)
Monday, 27 January 2020
"By contrast, Hitler is a criminal lunatic… yet Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood."—George Orwell, Wells, Hitler and the world State (1941)
Friday, 24 January 2020
"The first step is to reject the misguided belief that 'everything is physical', and replace it with a much more humble—but true—thesis: only observation is physical. Physics is the science of observation."—Adur Alkain
Which is to say, save the appearances? Friday, 24 January 2020
"Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age."—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Wednesday, 22 January 2020
"An ounce of prudence is worth a pound of cleverness."—Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658)
Wednesday, 22 January 2020
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."—Marcus Aurelius
Wednesday, 22 January 2020
"People are only your friends in opinion ghettos as long as you agree with them."-James Altucher
Monday, 20 January 2020
"A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence."—Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)
Friday, 17 January 2020
"Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it—we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today."—Hilaire Belloc: The Great Heresies
Thursday, 16 January 2020
"Eeyore's pessimism is the expression of inadequacy and fear. I distinguish the right kind of pessimism, which means simply recognizing the deep incompetence of human nature, from the wrong kind, which tells us to stop hoping."—Roger Scruton, (27 February 1944 – 12 January 2020)
Thursday, 16 January 2020
"It seems that perfection is finally attained, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."—Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Terre des Hommes (1939)
Monday, 13 January 2020
"The hope that new experiments will lead us back to objective events in time and space is about as well founded as the hope of discovering the end of the world in the unexplored regions of the Antarctic."—Werner Heisenberg, quoted in Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics
Monday, 13 January 2020
"Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning."—Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1959)
Monday, 13 January 2020
"I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighboring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?"—Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1958)
Monday, 13 January 2020
"The evil man destroys even himself."—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Monday, 13 January 2020
"According to Democritus, atoms had lost the qualities like colour, taste, etc., they only occupied space, but geometrical assertions about atoms were admissible and required no further analysis. In modern physics, atoms lose this last property, they possess geometrical qualities in no higher degree than colour, taste, etc. The atom of modern physics can only be symbolized by a partial differential equation in an abstract multidimensional space. Only the experiment of an observer forces the atom to indicate a position, a colour and a quantity of heat. All the qualities of the atom of modern physics are derived, it has no immediate and direct physical properties at all, i.e. every type of visual conception we might wish to design is, eo ipso, faulty. An understanding of 'the first order' is, I would almost say by definition, impossible for the world of atoms."—Werner Heisenberg, Philosophic Problems of Nuclear Science, trans. F. C. Hayes (1952)
"Atoms are neither things nor objects…atoms are part of observational situations."—Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (1972)
Monday, 13 January 2020
"I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously."—Erwin Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks (1954)
Monday, 13 January 2020
"Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology–we are quite unable to imagine the contrary."—Erwin Schrödinger, The Arithmetical Paradox: The Oneness of Mind in What Is Life? (1944)
"For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and woman have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else?"—Erwin Schrödinger, Seek for the Road (1925)
Monday, 13 January 2020
"But my interest was drawn not only to the noun in the title of Bejan's book but also to the adjective: mere. Her use of that word delighted me. Like a lover of endangered species, the lover of endangered words jumps for joy when he sees a word being rescued, and is grateful when a writer restores to currency a semantic possibility that had fallen into desuetude. It is as if a lovely antique table has been rediscovered after many years of gathering dust up in the attic, and when brought downstairs and cleaned up and polished, imparts a splendor and unbought grace to the room that no shiny new object could possibly match."—Wilfred M. McClay
Saturday, 11 January 2020
"Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is unavoidable."—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Saturday, 11 January 2020
"At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you."—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Saturday, 11 January 2020
"No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks."—Mary Wollstonecraft
Saturday, 11 January 2020
"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about"—John Von Neumann (unsourced)
Saturday, 11 January 2020
"I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more."—Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions
Saturday, 11 January 2020
"To be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, in the right way—that is not easy."—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Wednesday, 08 January 2020
“A simple editing trick:
“Every sentence has a purpose. It doesn't exist to take up space. It exists to change the reader, to move her from here to there.
“This sentence, then, what's it for?
"If it doesn't move us closer to where we seek to go, delete it."—Seth Godin
Saturday, 04 January 2020
"Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."—Nietzche
Thursday, 02 January 2020
“Satire can never compete with real life for its sheer absurdity.
"While Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor of Punch, it was announced that Khrushchev and Bulganin were coming to England. Muggeridge hit upon the idea of a mock itinerary, a lineup of the most ludicrous places the two paunchy pear-shaped little Soviet leaders could possibly be paraded through during the solemn process of a state visit. Shortly before press time, half the feature had to be scrapped. It coincided exactly with the official itinerary, just released, prompting Muggeridge to observe: 'We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.'"—Tom Wolfe, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A literary manifesto for the new social novel", Harpers, November, 1989
Thursday, 02 January 2020
"In human problems, there are no solutions, only trade-offs."
Thursday, 02 January 2020
"The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C's interests, are entirely overlooked. […A and B] ignore entirely the source from which they must draw all the energy which they employ in their remedies, and they ignore all the effects on other members of society than the ones they have in view. […T]he State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man [C] who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man."—William Graham Sumner, The Forgotten Man
Thursday, 02 January 2020
"Political tags—such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth—are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."—Robert A. Heinlein, The notebooks of Lazarus Long
Thursday, 02 January 2020
"Intelligent and educated people are less likely to learn from their mistakes, for instance, or take advice from others. And when they do err, they are better able to build elaborate arguments to justify their reasoning, meaning that they become more and more dogmatic in their views."—David Robson, The Intelligence Trap
Thursday, 02 January 2020
"We have an implicit [but wrong] assumption that intelligence and rationality go together—or else why would we be so surprised when smart people do foolish things?"
"I coined the term “dysrationalia" (analogous to "dyslexia"), meaning the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence, to draw attention to a large domain of cognitive life that intelligence tests fail to assess.”—Keith E. Stanovich
Wednesday, 01 January 2020
“The Games sacred to Zeus were held every four years at the city of Olympia in Greece. The stadium is still there. You can walk through the tunnel that the athletes took to enter the arena and even wriggle your toes into the stone grooves that served in ancient times as starting blocks for the races.
“In those days, the spectators sat city-by-city. The Athenians took their seats all in one section. Same for the Corinthians, Argives, etc.
”The stadium was packed on this particular day, when an elderly gentleman entered seeking a seat.
“No one would get up for him.
“The old man crossed painfully through the Theban section. Nobody stood. The gentleman next entered the Achaean section; again no person vacated his seat. By now the full stadium had noticed the elderly fellow's ordeal. They began jeering and mocking him. The man worked his way through the sections of two more cities. Still no one stood. The laughter and derision now dominated the entire field.
“The old man next stepped toward the Spartan section. As soon as his foot crossed the margin, every single Spartan stood, offering the gentleman his seat.
"At this, the entire stadium burst into applause. The ovation lasted for minutes. When the cheers finally died down, one spectator turned to his neighbor and observed, 'See? The Greeks all know what is right. But only the Spartans practice it.'"—Steven Pressfield
Fri, 11 Jan 2019
“A naive understanding of materialism attributes to it a naive understanding of matter. Matter, common sense says, is more or less the way it appears to us in ordinary experience. It is solid, colored stuff that always tastes, smells, sounds, and feels a certain way. Materialism, on a naïve understanding, is the view that everything that exists is like that. Even unobservable particles are assumed to be tiny solid, colored objects that have their own tastes, smells, sounds, and feels to them. Like little stones or marbles.
"Of course, this is all wrong."—Edward Feser
A pretty "Barfieldian" statement for someone who seems determined to ignore Barfield, even when his name is mentioned dozens of times by his commenters. Well, 'philosophers' are like that.
Sun, 13 Jan 2019
“Surface plausibility, reasonableness, persuasiveness, enjoyability… yet all the time, underneath, nagging away at me—there a revulsion, a rising tide of suspicion. The 'balance' of 'evidence' suggests that these are 'well-meaning' people, saying things that have 'some value'… yet from the start, and all the time, there is this drum-beat of inner rejection.
“This is what I call That Antichrist feeling—that sense that I am here dealing with an Antichrist phenomenon…
"It is the knowledge of my own heart that I am dealing with some person, institution or product that has (to some degree—perhaps unconsciously to itself) a rotten, corrupt, dishonest, manipulative heart. That is pretending to be on the side of God, while actually working against God… That is pretending to be on the side of God in order to work against God."—Bruce Charlton
Sun, 13 Jan 2019
“It is going-against a very mainstream—especially Protestant—view of Christianity (and the emphasis of the Apostle Paul) when I say Christianity is not—or is hardly at all—about justice.
"Indeed, quite the opposite: the promise of Christ is that salvation comes to all who follow him in love—and that is a massive short-circuit of anything like justice."—Bruce Charlton
Reminds me of the AA saying, "Good thing that God's love is greater than His sense of justice—I'd hate to think where I'd be if I got what I deserve!"
Sun, 13 Jan 2019
“The intelligentsia was driven to create literary modernism by a profound loathing of ordinary common readers. The intellectuals feared the masses not because they were illiterate but because, by the early twentieth century, they were becoming more literate, thanks to public education, adult education, scholarships, and cheap editions of the great books.
"If more and more working people were reading the classics, if they were closing the cultural gap between themselves and the middle classes, how could intellectuals preserve their elite status as arbiters of taste and custodians of rare knowledge? They had to create a new body of modernist literature which was deliberately made so difficult and obscure that the average reader did not understand it."—Jonathan Rose
This explains Virginia Woolf, Stein and Pound. And a lot of Joyce, Kafka, Eliot. Not to mention a lot of newer stuff. Or is it just me?
Tue, 15 Jan 2019
"Modern, Linear Faustian Science has run it's course. The decline is obviously visible when the spokesmanship passes from Albert Einstein to Carl Sagan to Neil DeGrasse Tyson. It's been about 40 years since we really smashed through any scientific barriers."—Jonathan Wilkinson
Fri, 18 Jan 2019
“Today's 'let's all get along, not judge or challenge anyone' groupthink also reminds me of a major scene sequence in Milos Forman's adaptation of Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
“Jack Nicholson portrays R.P. McMurphy, a good time Charlie with authority figure issues. He's playing crazy at a maximum-security insane asylum to get out of a work detail jail sentence. Years ago, they sentenced petty criminals to hard labor. I remember as a kid being in the backseat driving South and watching chain gangs cutting overgrown brush on the median of I95—Donn Pearce must have seen them too. He wrote Cool Hand Luke.
“McMurphy's Moriarty is Nurse Ratched, the head nurse in the asylum. Louise Fletcher played this role so brilliantly—all ice and pursed lips—she had difficulty finding work after winning the Oscar for it.
“One afternoon, during an interminable group therapy session, McMurphy requests that the guys be allowed to watch the World Series that evening. Knowing that the last thing the other men would want to do is stand up and challenge the way she rules her kingdom, Ratched sees an opportunity to put McMurphy in his place.
“She'll put the request up to a vote.
“McMurphy sticks his hand up to vote 'yea' assuming that his fellow patients will come to the same conclusion that he has. By simply raising their arms, together the men can let this lady know that denying a simple pleasure like watching a ball game to a bunch of lunatics is absurd.
“Which one of you nuts has any guts?
“The needy fuser Cheswick is the only other one who has the courage to challenge Nurse Ratched's command. Meeting adjourned. The men are then shuttled into the shower room for their evening cleaning. McMurphy is out of his mind with anger.
“If you're a writer, this scene is a perfect example of a set-up that dramatically portrays a character's inner change. How does Ken Kesey pay it off?
“From the first moment McMurphy lays eyes on Ratched, the reader/viewer knows he judges her as rotten to the core. McMurphy is not afraid to judge. His problem is that he acts on his judgments too quickly. That's what got him in the clink in the first place.
“In the nuthouse, though, he is forced to keep the judgment to himself. He's supposed to be crazy! And to McMurphy, only crazy people don't judge, so he shouldn't either.
“But when the evidence of Ratched's evil is incontrovertible to him, he can't help himself but act. He's the novel's protagonist. He's the hero. If he doesn't act on his judgments, there's no story.
“Kesey could have made any number of choices with this scene. He could have had McMurphy act selfishly, like a child, and physically attack a guard or an inmate or himself. Something the character has a reputation for doing earlier in his life.
“Instead, for the first time (and the perfect time) Kesey has his character act beyond himself. He changes his behavior. McMurphy sees that these men have it within themselves to judge Ratched as a tyrant. If he can make them understand how important it is to make a judgment and to act on that judgment—even if it puts them in harm's way—he will help them. And helping them will help him bring down tyranny. He'll win.
“McMurphy, already known as a consummate hustler, challenges all of the men to take a bet. He puts all of his money on his succeeding. He will pick up a thousand pound marble bathroom vanity, throw it through the barred window, walk to a nearby bar with his buddy Cheswick, wet his whistle and watch Mickey Mantle play in the World Series…Who wants some of this action?
“He's so convincing that only the most cynical among them take his bet.
“Playing McMurphy as only he could play him, Jack Nicholson grabs the edges of the vanity, squats and surges into the plumbing. He turns blue from effort. He commits to the action, gives it his best shot. When he's drenched with sweat, spent and defeated, he walks out of the room. But not before turning to the stunned assemblage and saying:
“'At least I tried.'
“As a child in the 60s and 70s, I was raised on stories like this. (I wish we had more of them today) And they've had a profound influence. This is why art is so important.
"These stories taught me that to passively disengage for fear of reprisal is cowardly. Making a judgment, taking a stand and then acting against an injustice or acting to support excellence is the stuff of the everyman hero."—Shawn Coyne
Fri, 18 Jan 2019
“All problems have solutions.
“Tha's what makes them problems.
“The solution might involve trade-offs or expenses that you don't want to incur. You might choose not to solve the problem. But there is a solution. Perhaps you haven't found it yet. Perhaps you need to do more research or make some tradeoffs in what you're hoping for.
“If there is no solution, then it's not a problem.
"It's a regrettable situation. It's a boundary condition. It's something you"ll need to live with.
“Which might be no fun, but there's no sense in worrying about it or spending time or money on it, because it's not a problem.
"“I want to go to the wedding, but it's a thousand miles away." That's a problem. You can solve it with a plane ticket and some cancelled plans.
"“I want to go to the wedding, but I"m not willing to cancel my meeting.” That's not a problem. That's an unavoidable conflict. If you need to violate a law of physics to get out of a situation, it's not a problem. But you”ve already given up turning it into a problem, so it doesn't pay to pretend it's solvable.
"Once we can walk away from unsolvable situations that pretend to be problems, we can focus our energy on the real problems in front of us."—”—Seth Godin
Wed, 23 Jan 2019
"There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues."—Albert Camus, The Plague
Thu, 24 Jan 2019
“The great Greg Cochran will often point out that a smart person is someone who says smart things, but more important, they don't say many dumb things. Everyone, no matter how smart, will get a dumb idea in their head or get carried away and say something stupid on occasion. It's just not common with smart people, at least not as common as it is with dumb people. Being smart is as much the absence of stupidity as it is getting right answers or having a long list of brilliant insights.
"This comes up often in public discussion of the human sciences. It is remarkable how often an allegedly smart person will say things that are laughably wrong about something in biology or human evolution." It's worth reading the rest at: The Z Man blog.
Thu, 24 Jan 2019
"Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favors. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death."—C.S. Lewis, 1944
Thu, 24 Jan 2019
"Democratic education, says Aristotle, ought to mean, not the education which democrats like, but the education which will preserve democracy. Until we have realized that the two things do not necessarily go together we cannot think clearly about education."—C.S. Lewis
Thu, 24 Jan 2019
"As long as we are thinking of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economies, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of the spirit. Collective activities are, of course, necessary, but this is the end to which they are necessary."—C.S. Lewis, "Membership" in The Weight of Glory
Wed, 30 Jan 2019
“The aim of Lucifer is to conserve the past too long; to maintain, in the present, conditions that rightly obtained in the past, but should now be superseded. He adores tradition. In particular he seeks to maintain the permeation of the mind by the 'given', the physical, the instinctive warmth, which men bring with them from the past and must indeed use, but which should no longer permeate, or at least not involuntarily, their mental powers. You and I, my friend, have watched him at work already, for we have seen him trying to preserve into your time the psychology and the social patterns of the Gabriel age.
“And what is the function, or the aim, of Ahriman?
"You must distinguish the function from the aim. It is the aims of both beings that we are at present concerned with. Their aim is to oppose those whom it will suffice for the present to call the true gods; but their function is to serve these gods against their will, and by means of that very opposition. Do not take this lightly, or repeat it glibly. The aim of Ahriman is to anticipate the future, but which can only appear in the present as a wicked caricature. In pursuit of this aim he will persuade you, if he can, to eradicate the past instead of transforming it. He abhors tradition. History is his bane. He operates, in the present age, principally in the field of mind, leaving the feelings for Lucifer to exploit. He freezes. His purpose is to destroy everything in human thinking which depends on a certain warmth, to replace wonder by sophistication, courtesy by vulgarity, understanding by calculation, imagination by statistics."—Owen Barfield, Unancestral Voice
Wed, 30 Jan 2019
"I am suggesting therefore that what we have to think of, and what future legislation must somehow learn to deal with, is not so much a public opinion that is sharply divided in two as it is two different publics: an A public and a B public. Or that, if this is not already the case, it is rapidly becoming so; and it seems that in the near future it will be so. Anyone who has felt the pulse, so to speak, of the intellectual climate in the English-speaking world, and of the changes that have been occurring in it over the last forty or fifty years, is likely to be impressed by the circumstance that, even at the philosophical level—even, that is, when a bona fide attempt is made to bridge the communication gap by recognizing the presuppositions, formulating them, debating them—it generally turns out to be impossible."—Owen Barfield, The Politics of Abortion
Sat, 02 Feb 2019
“'And what about yourself?' asked Merry.
"'Hoom, hm, I have not troubled about the Great Wars,' said Treebeard; 'they mostly concern Elves and Men. That is the business of Wizards: Wizards are always troubled about the future. I do not like worrying about the future. I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me: nobody cares for the woods as I care for them, not even Elves nowadays…'"—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, book 3, chapter IV
Sat, 02 Feb 2019
At least a few of my strong memories are strongly associated with a very particular place. The bed at nine-mile, the sofa on Stanley street, the entry hall on Dale Drive.
This last with just a flash, that "we" could easily take a "wrong turn" in our thoughts and carry merrily on down a "wrong" path. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…and that has made all the difference."
Brought to mind several times recently reading Barfield's writing about the history of consciousness.
Sat, 09 Feb 2019
"They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear."—Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well
Thu, 14 Feb 2019
"God is not a lesson plan or an intellectual construct. God is not one more thing to do well at, God is someone—or something—we meet, each in our own way."—Julia Cameron, God Is No Laughing Matter
Mon, 25 Feb 2019
youngster: "You were online 30 years ago? Was it different back then?"
me: silence
youngster: "Well?"
me: "We didn't pretend we were doing anything important."
David's comment: well, some of it seemed important—it was for work, after all, but mostly, yeah.
Fri, 01 Mar 2019
"And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector's armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line."—Tom Wolfe Bonfire of the Vanities
Wed, 06 Mar 2019
"Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring."—Edward J. Gorey
Mon, 11 Mar 2019
"You could say that 'magic' is a recognition that you have been underestimating the world, assuming that it is boring and limited when it is your own mind that is bored and limited. And this is important, for it brings the great fundamental insight, the insight that has come to all mystics and poets : that a large part of man's misery and pain is his own fault. For nearly three thousand years, cynical philosophers have been declaring that human life is disappointing and brief and miserable, and that the wise man has no objection to dying. But moments of “magic" bring a clear recognition that the world 'out there' is infinitely interesting—so interesting that if we could 'turn on' the magic at will, we would probably live for ever—or at least, want to. The magic doesn't get in past our senses, which have thick filters on them. Blake recognised that it is as if man lived in a cold, damp cave, when outside there is warm sunlight and fresh air. 'Five windows light the caverned man, through one he breathes the air . . .'”—William Arkle A Geography of Consciousness
Sun, 17 Mar 2019
"Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite."—Max Scheler Ressentiment
H/T Francis Berger
Thu, 21 Mar 2019
“As far as I can tell, the words contained in the list below no longer define what they are meant to define.
"I hear these words repeated ad nauseam every day, yet I rarely perceive the things they are meant to delineate. What a truly confusing time to be alive."—Francis Berger
Sun, 24 Mar 2019
"There are some things that cannot be verified, or falsified. These would include all axioms of logic; even those of post-modern “paraconsistent" logics, wherein the very Law of Non-Contradiction is (implausibly) denied, but which are axiomatic on their own terms. We are out the door of "science" when we discuss logic; or the principles of mathematics for that matter. All we can say is that the world makes sense on axioms; and not otherwise.
"For science, or human knowledge more broadly, God is not an hypothesis, but an Axiom. Start in Aristotle, if you will, to see that the world has no purchase on sense, without the Unmoved Mover. The “Five Ways" by which the inevitability of God was demonstrated by Thomas Aquinas, and the related ways in which this was done by others before and after him, are easily misunderstood, because they are not proofs of an hypothesis but recursions. They show that, without that "God Axiom," there can be no causation, no change, no being in itself, no gradation, no direction to an end. We need a Still Point, from which to depart. It cannot be hypothesized. It is too simple for that. You need to assume it even to contradict it.”—David Warren
Mon, 08 Apr 2019
“One of the more misunderstood of the cardinal sins is sloth. Most see it merely as laziness, but there is more to it than that. Let's take a moment and consider some aspects of this cardinal sin.
“The Greek word we translate as sloth is ἀκηδία akedia (a = absence + kedos = care), meaning indifference or negligence. St. Thomas Aquinas speaks of sloth as sorrow for spiritual good. By it, we shun spiritual good as too toilsome (cf Summa Theologica II-II 35,2).
"Some modern commentators describe sloth as a “don't care" feeling. Some even say it is a kind of falling out of love with God and the things of God (cf Rev 2:4). On account of sloth, the idea of right living and the gift of a transformed humanity inspires not joy, but aversion or even disgust because it is seen as too difficult or as requiring the setting aside of currently enjoyed or sinful pleasures. Through sloth, many experience sorrow rather than joy or zeal in following God and receiving a transformed human life. They are distressed at the prospect of what might have to occur should they embrace the faith more deeply.
"Sloth also tends to dismiss the power of grace, focusing instead on the “trouble" or effort involved in walking in the Christian way.
"Sloth is not merely laziness; it is more properly understood as sorrow or indifference. While sloth may sometimes look like boredom and a casual laziness toward attaining spiritual good, it can also be manifested by a frantic “busyness" with worldly things so as to avoid spiritual questions or living a reflective life.”—Msgr. Charles Pope
Tue, 09 Apr 2019
"What with history being rewritten so often, nobody knows what is true anymore. They lose track of who is an enemy and who an ally. It's that kind of story."
"“They rewrite history."
"“Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime."
“Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.
"Tengo went on, “Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us—is rewritten—we lose the ability to sustain our true selves."”—Haruki Murakami 1Q84
Fri, 12 Apr 2019
“I broke two bowls today.
“I was emptying the dishwasher, holding both small clean bowls in one hand. One of them slipped, and I watched, aghast, as it started to fall in slow motion toward the hard kitchen floor.
“In a valiant but vain attempt to miraculously catch the bowl, I dropped the second one as well.
“Now both were gone.
"Often, the best thing to do with a lost cause is to let it go. Because pursuing it gets in the way of the causes you haven't lost yet."—Seth Godin
Sat, 13 Apr 2019
"Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance."—Daniel Kahneman
Sat, 13 Apr 2019
"If you are inclined - late in life though it be - to reconnoitre a foreign sphere of limitless extent, then be persuaded that the first quality that is needed is Audacity. There really is no time for the deliberate approach…We must not be too ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride. And for this Audacity is the only ticket."—W. S. Churchill—/Painting as a Pastime/
Wed, 17 Apr 2019
Students exist who will scare quote "right," "wrong," "good," and "evil," as though one were talking about gnomes, trolls and "'cultural' studies." — Richard Cocks
Sun, Apr 21, 2019
One of those "blasts from the past" that seem like original-to-me thoughts (as in I don't remember reading them first) which I recall with complete visual memory of where I was when they first came to me. Location is the office at Saint Saviour's Pro-Cathedral in Nelson, BC. Late winter or very early spring (slushy snow in the street), early 1980s.
"Christ didn't die to convince God to love us — He died to convince us that God loved us."
I am, in general, disinclined to give too much value to detailed theological/philosophical analysis of the inner-workings of the Creator — the interaction of the Persons of the Trinity, which Person spoke to Moses, Who divided the waters, etc., so I won't further analyze or defend that thought. John 14:15 seems an adequate entry point to a Holy life: "If ye love me, keep my commandments."
We can analyze what the commandments are, and how to keep them in a particular circumstance without delving into why He considers them important, or which Person originated or communicated them. "Our Lord Jesus Christ said: Hear O Israel, The Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love your neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets"
Sun, 21 Apr 2019
"MEN do not live long without gods; when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. One might put it in a sentence, and say that the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism." — Hilaire Belloc: Essays of a Catholic.
Sat, 27 Apr 2019
Owen Barfield (1898–1997) Our destiny is to become both conscious and free.
Barfield was writing for everybody and for all time — his core concern was nothing less than the divine destiny of each individual person and of all people collectively.
Barfield's immediate relevance is profound; it is to solve the core problem of modern times - which is 'alienation': i.e. the deep sense of meaninglessness, purposelessness, and isolation from people and things.
The understanding which makes this possible is that history, the present and the future can be understood as aiming at both consciousness and freedom (where consciousness means awareness of our thinking and ourselves, and freedom refers to free will, or human agency).
Barfield's scheme is that humans began as conscious-but-not-free; and we evolved — evolved in the sense of changing by unfolding according to a (divine) developmental plan — to become free but not conscious (which is where we are now, in modern times — unaware of meaning, purpose, relation) — and we ought to be aiming at the condition where we are both self-aware and fully-conscious. Engaged with (and participating in) reality as free agents.
Even more briefly, humanity began as conscious, became free; and is destined to become both — simultaneously.
Barfield proposes real, coherent, and clear answers to the most fundamental problems.
Wed, 1 May, 2019
“I have found that one of my favorite quotes from St. Augustine is not all that well known. Here it is in Latin, followed by my own translation:
Quod minimum, minimum est, Sed in minimo fidelem esse, magnum est.
What is a little thing, is (just) a little thing. But to be faithful in a little thing is a great thing.”—Msgr. Charles Pope (from St. Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana, IV, 35)
Sat, 4 May, 2019
"The past is a foreign country; They do things different there."—L. P. Hartley The Go-Between
Sun, 5 May, 2019
"A changeless society would be as intolerable for people as the present society of constant change. Convivial reconstruction requires limits on the rate of compulsory change. An unlimited rate of change makes lawful community meaningless. Law is based on the retrospective judgment of peers about circumstances that occur ordinarily and are likely to occur again. If the rate of change which affects all circumstances accelerates beyond some point, such judgments cease to be valid. Lawful society breaks down. Social control does not accommodate community participation and becomes the function of experts. Educators define how people are to be trained and retrained throughout their lives—shaped and reshaped until they fit the demands of industry and are attracted by its profits. Ideologues define what is right or wrong. The tooling of man for the milieu becomes the major industry when this milieu changes beyond a certain rate; then man's need for language and law, for memories and myths, imposes limits to the change of tools."—Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
Sun, 5 May, 2019
"The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."—Hilaire Belloc (A comment made to William Temple, quoted in The Life of Hilaire Belloc by Robert Speaight)
Seen at Carlos Cassetti's Blog
Sun, 5 May, 2019
"Serenity is not the same as apathy, although both words denote a state that is beyond caring. One difference is that serenity is cheerful and apathy is gloomy. The serene man has overcome the world, whereas the apathetic man has been overcome by it. Both men have lost their ambitions, but the serene man left them behind, like a newspaper on a park bench, whereas the apathetic man had them torn from his fingers in a desperate but losing fight with a band of wild banditti."—J. M. Smith
Sun, 5 May, 2019
"I am, however, equally troubled by another specter, another threat. I'm not sure what to call it, perhaps the threat of emancipatory technics, the emancipation here being something like the total emancipation from our embodied-in-the-world human condition. Together they constitute what I think of as the Charybdis and Scylla of the modern techo-social order. What I have in mind here is the development and deployment of technology without any regard for the givenness of our condition (any, I should note, does a lot of work in this sentence). We might also refer to the temptation of what Albert Borgmann has termed"regardless power" or, as Katherine Hayles once put it, to view our bodies as "fashion accessories rather than the ground of being." It seems to me that such power is, yes, problematic whether it is authoritarian or democratic. I am, in other words, indiscriminately suspicious of post-humanist fantasies whatever their ideological sources.
"I suppose one way of thinking about all of this is to ask whether it might not be best to respect the integrity of each component in the circuit I described above: mind, body, technology, world. That presupposes, of course, that we might be able to arrive at some meaningful understanding of what such integrity might entail. (Needless to say, I think we are just beginning a hard lesson in what happens when we do not respect the integrity of the world, a lesson which will not be halted by our inability to get a theoretical handle on nature's integrity.) Or, to put it another way, should we yield to the temptation of allowing our minds and our technology to act in tandem without any regard to the limits implicit in our being bodies in the world?"—L. M. Sacasas
Sun, 5 May 2019
"CREEDS must disagree: it is the whole fun of the thing. If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue humanely, we may argue with great mutual benefit; but, obviously, we must argue. Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent's faith is to say I must not discuss it . . . It is absurd to have a discussion on Comparative Religions if you don't compare them."—G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, Oct. 10, 1908.
Mon, 6 May 2019
"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."—John F. Kennedy Commencement Address at Yale University, 11 June, 1962
Mon, 6 May 2019
"NOW the human mind needs—─if it would be united to God—the guidance of the things of sense; for as the apostle says to the Romans (1:20): 'The invisible things of him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.' Hence in divine worship it is necessary to make use of certain corporal acts, so that by their means, as by certain signs, man's mind may be stirred up to those spiritual acts whereby it is knit to God. Consequently religion has certain interior acts which are its chief ones and which essentially belong to it; but it has also external which are secondary and which are subordinated to the interior acts."—St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica, II-II, 81, 7.
Mon, 6 May 2019
"I understand the impulse, I really do. I think it was from Alan Jacobs that I first learned about the poet W. H. Auden's distinction between those whose tendency is to look longingly back at some better age in the past and those who look hopefully toward some ideal future: Arcadians and Utopians respectively, he called them. Auden took these to be matters of temperament. If so, then I would readily admit to being temperamentally Arcadian. For that reason, I think I well understand the temptation and try to be on guard against it."—L. M. Sacasas
Mon, 6 May 2019
“/Fahrenheit 451/ isn't really about censorship, after all, and it's unfortunate that the novel has been reduced to that theme in the popular imagination.
“Bradbury makes clear that the firemen who famously start fires to burn books are doing so only long after people stopped reading books of their own accord as other forms of media came to dominate their experience. Actually, to be more precise, they did not stop reading altogether. They stopped reading certain kinds of books: the ones that made demands of the reader, intellectual, emotional, moral demands that might upset their fragile sense of well-being.
"Fahrenheit 451, in other words, is more Huxley than Orwell."—L. M. Sacasas
Mon, 6 May 2019
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the"wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."—Michael Crichton
h/t to Jerry Pournelle
Mon, 6 May 2019
From Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature
"Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and the plains. Even grown-up persons with children of their own cannot give a reasonable account fo concepts such as entropy, sacrament, syntax, number, quantity, pattern, linear relation, name, class, relevance, energy, redundancy, force, probability, parts, whole, information, tautology, homology, mass (either Newtonian or Christian), explanation, description, rule of dimensions, logical type, metaphor, topology, and so on. What are butterflies? What are starfish? What are beauty and ugliness?" p. 3
Chapter II, "Every Schoolboy Knows"
Quoting Macauley: "Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma and who strangled Atahualpa."
"Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing but know-how." p.28
"It is worthwhile to attempt a tentative recognition of certain basic presuppositons which all minds must share or, conversely, to define mind by listing a number of such basic communicational characteristics:" p.29
Section Headings:
Science never proves anything.
The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing.
There is no objective experience.
The processes of image formation are unconscious.
The division of the perceived universe into parts and wholes is convenient and may be necessary, but no necessity determines how it shall be done.
Divergent sequences are unpredictable.
Convergent sequences are predictable.
"Nothing will come of nothing."
Number is different from quantity.
Quantity does not determine pattern.
There are no "monotone" values in biology.
Sometimes, small is beautiful.
Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.
Causality does not work backward.
Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction.
"Stability" and "change" describe parts of our descriptions.
Bateson is another connection that I owe to The Whole Earth Catalog. I believe that I purchased and first read Steps in about 1984, then reread and made these notes in early October of 2008. Reading them now, I'm struck by how closely they seem to relate to Owen Barfield's writing.
Wed, May 8 2019
"The message of the Book of Revelation is a strong antidote to times like these, now, in the past, and in the future: be strong, be prepared, and be willing to suffer, realizing that no matter how powerful and glamorous evil may seem, Jesus is the victor. We must persevere and realize that we are swept up into a cosmic battle that is much larger than our current situation but that reaches us nonetheless. We must choose sides. Don't think that you can sit on the fence. Satan owns the fence; he will come for you and say, “You belong to me."”—Msgr. Charles Pope
Thu, 9 May 2019
“Most scientists are not corrupt but doing good science is hard, even for very intelligent and diligent people. I also suspect most researchers have inadequate education in statistics.
“The pressure to publish, the pressure to publish conclusions that won't get you ostracized of your scientific community, the pressure to make whoever funds your research happy, are all corrupting influences on science.
"If a theory makes reliable predictions, and those predictions are used by engineers, I consider it to be solid science. Otherwise, it's most likely bunk."—Commenter jermo sapiens at SlateStarCodex
Thu, 9 May 2019
"Ronald Knox said, of The Imitation of Christ, that anyone who claims to be “fond" of it is either a saint, or he is lying. This most formidable of late mediaeval spiritual guides — to call it a "devotional book" is to set out in the wrong direction — was meant as an acid bath. It strips off the skin of one's vanity, then claws at what lies underneath. The charm in the writing lands like salt. There are no "happyface" moments, unless one counts a surprising chapter, whose number I won't give lest some innocent try to start there. That chapter can be read as a transcription of mystical experience, along the unitive way. But I take it not as "encouragement" but as grounding and orientation, for the book is deadly serious beginning to end, and the point of it is to point the reader where the Christian must go: on a path that unavoidably includes "the dark night of the soul."”—David Warren
Mon, 13 May 2019
"But in God there is a passionate and anguished longing for man. In God there is a tragic deficiency which is satisfied by the great gain of man's birth in Him. The mystics taught the mystery of God's birth in man. But there is another mystery; that of man's birth in God. There is a summons, a call in man, for God to be born in him. This is the mystery of Christianity, the mystery of Christ, which is unknown to the Hindu mystics, to Plotinus, or to any of the abstract monistic mystics. God and man are greater than God alone. The substantial multinomial being revealed in One is greater than a One undifferentiated. Only the myth of God's longing for man and for man's love can bring us near to the final mystery."—Nikolai Berdyaev The Meaning of the Creative Act
Mon, 13 May 2019
"The crux of today's cosmological paradigm is that in order to maintain a mathematically unified theory valid for the entire universe, we must accept that 95 percent of our cosmos is furnished by completely unknown elements and forces for which we have no empirical evidence whatsoever. For a scientist to be confident of this picture requires an exceptional faith in the power of mathematical unification."—Bjorn Ekeberg Scientific American
Sat, 18 May 2019
Illich: Hospitality was a condition consequent on a good society in politics, politaea, and by now might be the starting point of politaea, of politics. But this is difficult because hospitality requires a threshold over which I can lead you — and TV, internet, newspaper, the idea of communication, abolished the walls and therefore also the friendship, the possibility of leading somebody over the door. Hospitality requires a table around which you can sit and if people get tired they can sleep. You have to belong to a subculture to say, we have a few mattresses here. It's still considered highly improper to conceive of this as the ideal moments in a day or a year. Hospitality is deeply threatened by the idea of personality, of scholastic status. I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality— recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand — on the other hand radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community.
—Ivan Illich Interview with Jerry Brown
Sat, 18 May 2019
"…the problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it's not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It's like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we're connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one. In sociology terms, we strengthen our feeling of 'in-group' belonging by increasing our distance from and tension with the 'out-group'—us versus them."—Zeynep Tufekci
Sat, 18 May 2019
Brown: So Deschooling was based on the insight that the school industry teaches people, not teaches them but manipulates them, into thinking that they have certain needs that the school itself alone can satisfy?
Illich: That they have needs. Not all people whom I knew as a young man had needs. We were hungry but we couldn't translate the hunger into a need for food stuff. They were hungry for a tortilla, for comida, not calories. The idea that people are born with needs, that needs can be translated into rights, that these rights can be translated into entitlements, is a development of the modern world and it's reasonable, it's acceptable, it's obvious only for people who have had some of their educational needs awakened or created, then satisfied and then learned that we have less than others. Schooling, which we engage in and supposedly creates equal opportunities, has become the unique, never before attempted way of dividing the whole society into classes. Everybody knows in which level of his twelve or sixteen years of schooling he has dropped out, and in addition knows what price tag is attached to the higher schooling he has gotten.
Brown: So you get a precise definition of where you are in the social hierarchy by how much schooling your had or how much schooling you don't have, so you didn't know you needed fourteen years and a postgraduate degree or to get out of high school depending upon where you lived.
Illich: It's a history of degrading the majority of people.
Brown: So you take somebody who's poor and you modernize the poverty by not only having a person that doesn't have a lot of material goods but now lacks the mental self-confidence that his father or grandfather had before that.
Illich: And I can create a world for him in which he needs constantly something which–at that time I searched for a word I didn't findd, context sensitive help. You know, when you are in front of a computer and when you are in that program and put in Word Perfect it tells you what help you need at that point at which you are. This is instructions for use. This is incorporation of teaching into the object with which you encounter at its high point. We have created a world in which people constantly are grateful if they are taken by the hand to know how to use a knife or to use the coffee maker or how to go on from here in text composing.
—Ivan Illich Interview with Jerry Brown
Sat, 18 May 2019
Illich: …Inevitably modern technology has polarized society. It has polluted the environment. It has disabled very simple native abilities and made them dependent on objects.
Brown: Like an automobile.
Illich: An automobile which cuts out the use value from your feet. Like an automobile which makes the world inaccessible when actually that means in Latin using your feet to get somewhere. The automobile makes it unthinkable. I recently had the question, "You're a liar!" when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the 16th, 17th century did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning but he can't walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.
Brown: So the objects, like a car or even like a school, change who we are.
Illich: Who you are and even more deeply they change the way your senses work. Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia [?], my soul's limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us which is this relationship, and this relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo at the time of Kepler, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you separate from me even when I look at you. Even if I gaze at you. Even if I enjoy your face. People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, I want to have an interface with you, I say please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror. Anybody who says, I want to communicate with you, I say can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are.
—Ivan Illich Interview with Jerry Brown
Sun, 19 May 2019
I was recently informed by David Warren that men (or, if you prefer, persons) of the 13th Century counted their age in moons, not years.
If that is the case, and I've not independently verified it, and if I'm able to do simple arithmetic on my fingers and in my head, yesterday was my 845th birthday.
In lieu of cards or gifts, please attend the most orthodox (small "O") Christian Church of your choice.
Mon, 20 May 2019
"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. they may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest."— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence 1919
h/t to Sarah Hoyt
Mon, 20 May 2019
"The Church is not in crisis, as Cardinal Sarah was saying the other day. We are in crisis. The Devil wants us to think that God has abandoned His Church. He hasn't. In fact, He can't, if I may add my theological understanding of the matter. I like to quote Joan of Arc: “About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they're just one thing, and we shouldn't complicate the matter." It is only when we redefine the Church, to be something it is not, that complications arise.”—David Warren
Mon, 20 May 2019
"Even going through the motions has value, when the motions are in service to a cause that is divine. Inspiration is anyway for special occasions. The Mass is valid, when we go through the motions; it was actually designed to be hard to invalidate. We needn't bother our little heads with whether the priest is worthy. That is his business. We need only ask if we are in any way adequate to receive the Host, for the consequences of my not being worthy do not fall upon anyone else, except tangentially; and neither can my guilt be transferred to my neighbour."—David Warren
Thu, 23 May 2019
"What greater proof of his divinity could there be than the fact that he is still resisted, even hated, after 2,000 years? Nobody hates Julius Caesar anymore; it's pretty hard even to hate Attila the Hun, who left a lot of hard feelings in his day. But the world still hates Christ and his Church."—Joseph Sobran, Subtracting Christianity: Essays on American Culture and Society
Thu, 23 May 2019
"When we jumped into Sicily, the units became separated, and I couldn't find anyone. Eventually I stumbled across two colonels, a major, three captains, two lieutenants, and one rifleman, and we secured the bridge. Never in the history of war have so few been led by so many."—General James Gavin, quoted in Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven Oath of Fealty
Thu, 23 May 2019
"In his book The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton describes the power of orthodoxy to renew itself, in a chapter titled “Five Deaths of the Faith." Christianity, he tells us, was never really reborn, because it never really died. The cultures it lived in died, so Christianity was rediscovered five times in the history of the West, as one cultural epoch was superseded by another. This happened after the fall of Rome, then in the twelfth century at the end of the feudal era, again when the medieval synthesis gave way to the secular energies of the Renaissance, again when the Renaissance fell to the new rationalism of the Enlightenment, and yet again as Enlightenment values have begun to dissolve with the arrival of our postindustrial age.”—G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 250 quoted in Robert Inchausti, Subversive Orthodoxy, 16
Thu, 23 May 2019
"Eckhart had neither the desire to take aught away from the content of Christianity, nor the wish to add anything to it; but he desired to bring forward this content anew in his own way. It forms no part of the spiritual needs of a personality such as he was to set up new truths of this or the other kind in the place of old ones. Such a personality has grown completely intertwined with the content which it has received from tradition; but it craves to give to this content a new form, a new life."—Rudolf Steiner, Mystics of the Renaissance
Sat, 25 May 2019
"But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period."—G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
Sat, 25 May 2019
"It's like this: It takes a smart dog to hunt birds, but it takes a hunter behind him to keep him from wasting time chasing rabbits. And the hunter needs to know nearly as much as the dog."—Robert A. Heinlein, Solution Unsatisfactory
Sat, 25 May 2019
"There are but two ways of forming an opinion in science. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. One can judge from experiement, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no lo0nger fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority."—Robert A. Heinlein, Life-Line
Tue, 28 May 2019
Facts don't care about your theories,— Ben Hunt
Thu, 30 May 2019
The two most important words are 'over' and 'next'.
When something's over, move on to what's next.
If there was a hammock between over and next, that would be what living in the now would mean.—Norman Lear (age 93)
Tue, 04 Jun 2019
"The soul … has grown aware of her obligations and observed that life is short (Job 14:5), the path leading to eternal life constricted (Mt. 7:14), the just one scarcely saved (1 Pet. 4:18), the things of the world vain and deceitful (Eccles. 1:2), that all comes to an end and fails like falling water (2 Sam. 14:14), and that the time is uncertain, the accounting strict, perdition very easy, and salvation very difficult."—St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle
Thu, 06 Jun 2019 "Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship."—Ivan Illich, The Cultivation of Conspiracy
Fri, 07 Jun 2019 "The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern."—G.K.Chesterton, On Reading
Sat, 08 Jun 2019 "At the same time that we were studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he (Bowyer, Head Master of the Grammar School, Christ's Hospital) made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to bring up so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent upon more, and more fugitive, causes."—S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
Tue, 11 Jun 2019 "A familiar A.A. cliché describes the fellowship's program as “spiritual rather than religious," and members of Alcoholics Anonymous tend to enforce this distinction vigorously upon both those who comment on their program and themselves at A.A. meetings. This deep and real concern over its image as "spiritual" bears vivid witness to A.A.'s authentic modernity, especially as a religious phenomenon. The mistrust of religious claims that matured in the Enlightenment has so deepened and spread that, in the twentieth centure, secularization has become the hallmark of modernity. Over those same two centuries between the Enlightenment and the present, however, the reaction of Romanticism against Enlightenment rationalism has also become culturally internalized and effectively stylized. Thus, in yet another paradox, moderns readily accept "feeling" even as they resolutely reject "belief" as a wellspring of personal action, at least so long as it does not intrude upon the autonomy of others.”—Ernie Kurtz, Not God
Sun, 16 Jun 2019 "Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant."—James Madison (1751-1836) American statesman, Founding Father, Slave owner and Dead White Man
Sun, 16 Jun 2019
"The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes."—Thomas Paine (1737-1809) American pamphleteer
Sun, 16 Jun 2019
"Both the wise and the witless scribble"—Horace, Epistles of Horace
Or, as he is actually quoted: Scribimus indocti, doctique
Sun, 16 Jun 2019
"Now, just as there is a difference between higher and lower intellectual substances, so also is there such a difference between corporeal substances. But intellectual substances are ruled by the higher ones, since the disposition of divine providence descends proportionally to the lowest, as we have said already. Therefore, on a like basis, the lower bodies are ordered through the higher ones."—St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles Book 3
See also Thomas Troward, Rudolf Steiner, and who knows how many others.
Tue, 18 Jun 2019
"What I am saying is this: There is internal evidence in at least one of my novels that another reality, an unchanging one, exactly as Parmenides and Plato suspected, underlies the visible phenomenal world of change, and somehow, in some way, perhaps to our surprise, we can cut through to it. Or rather, a mysterious Spirit can put us in touch with it, if it wishes us to see this permanent other landscape. Time passes, thousands of years pass, but at the same instant that we see this contemporary world, the ancient world, the world of the Bible, is concealed beneath it, still there and still real. Eternally so."—Philip K. Dick How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later
Tue, 18 Jun 2019
"A very deep form of grief is grieving over our own intuitive knowledge of our own value which we have not paid proper attention to, and we have not properly learned to use in the world for our own sake, or for the sake of others. It's as though the grief is about a beautiful treasure that was within our reach all the time and yet we didn't stretch out and use this treasure and enjoy it in the way it should be used and enjoyed."—William Arkle The Great Gift
Fri, 21 Jun 2019
"Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off his head."—G.K. Chesterton: All Things Considered
Sat, 29 Jun 2019
"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts."—H.L. Mencken
Sat, 29 Jun 2019
"Respect, I note, was once conferred upon the dutiful. It was not until recently that a “theory" was hatched — a bastardization of ancient Christian teaching — that compelled us to show respect to all, and civility even to the uncivil. This was an important abridgement of our freedom: to decide, for ourselves, whom to love, admire, ignore, fear, detest, &c. It interferes with our duty to make sound judgements, thus dehumanizing us.”—David Warren
Mon, 1 Jul 2019
John Perry Barlow's 25 Principles of Adult Behavior:
Be patient. No matter what.
Don't badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn't say to him.
Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
Expand your sense of the possible.
Don't trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.
Tolerate ambiguity.
Laugh at yourself frequently.
Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.
Give up blood sports.
Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don't risk it frivolously.
Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)
Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.
Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.
Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.
Praise at least as often as you disparage.
Admit your errors freely and soon.
Become less suspicious of joy.
Understand humility.
Remember that love forgives everything.
Foster dignity.
Live memorably.
Love yourself.
Endure.
Mon, 1 Jul 2019
"Nature uses digital coding for the storage, replication, recombination, and error correction of sequences of nucleotides, but relies on analog coding and analog computing for intelligence and control. No programming, no code. To those seeking true intelligence, autonomy, and control among machines, the domain of analog computing, not digital computing, is the place to look."—George Dyson
Tue, 2 Jul 2019
"What is this mind of ours; what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes!"—Richard Feynman
Assuming, of course that there is a one-to-one exclusive relationship between mind/consciousness and brain, which seems to me to be extremely complex. There's clearly a relationship, but is it exclusive? Without a brain—divorced from living matter—is there some element of mind or even consciousness? Soul? Spirit? Arr, that's the question! Or perhaps a step on the way to the question…
Sat, 6 Jul 2019
"History is a fairy tale true to its telling…"—Andrei Codrescu
Sat, 6 Jul 2019
"I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem."—Richard Feynman
Sat, 6 Jul 2019
“Of course there was more. If you ask the right questions, there always is.
"That's the problem."—Robert Caro, Working
Sat, 6 Jul 2019
"To sum up all in one word–what the soul is in the body, that are Christians in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body; and Christians dwell in the world, yet are not of the world. The invisible soul is guarded by the visible body, and Christians are known indeed to be in the world, but their godliness remains invisible. The flesh hates the soul, and wars against it, though itself suffering no injury, because it is prevented from enjoying pleasures; the world also hates the Christians, though in nowise injured, because they abjure pleasures. The soul loves the flesh that hates it, and [loves also] the members; Christians likewise love those that hate them. The soul is imprisoned in the body, yet preserves that very body; and Christians are confined in the world as in a prison, and yet they are the preservers of the world. The immortal soul dwells in a mortal tabernacle; and Christians dwell as sojourners in corruptible [bodies], looking for an incorruptible dwelling in the heavens. The soul, when but ill-provided with food and drink, becomes better; in like manner, the Christians, though subjected day by day to punishment, increase the more in number. God has assigned them this illustrious position, which it were unlawful for them to forsake"—Diagnetus, The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus
Mon, 8 Jul 2019
"The aim of the chapter is to draw attention to a fundamental right that is neglected in the law but that is highly relevant for neuroethics: cognitive liberty or freedom of thought. Although an internationally accepted human right, it has not gained practical legal importance. However, any regulation of neurotechnologies has to be evaluated in its light. As the right is unfamiliar to policy makers and even to many lawyers and legal scholars, its historical development and the main arguments for its recognition are sketched. Furthermore, some suggestions for its interpretation, scope, and contours are forwarded and remaining open questions identified. According to international human rights law, the right is of absolute nature so that interferences cannot be justified for interests of the common good or paternalistic reasons. Whether this strict prohibition of intervening into other persons' minds can and should be sustained even in light of putative pressing public interests and various neuroethical considerations is one of the novel questions neuroscience poses for the law."—Christoph Bublitz, Faculty of Law, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Cognitive Liberty or the International Human Right to Freedom of Thought
Mon, 8 Jul 2019
"Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind."—Milton, Comus
"Everyone has the right to freedom to hold opinions without interference." (United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
"Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth &mdash more than ruin — more even than death…. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man."—Bertrand Russell
Found in Bonnie Burstow, PhD. On Cognitive Liberty: A Principle to Rally Behind
Mon, 8 Jul 2019
"The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book."George Steiner
"There's a way of reading that is like writing. You feel in collaboration… You have a pen in your hand, you're going along in a way that's, like, half creating it as you go. And you're also strip-mining it for anything you can use… you're sifting for what could be gold."—Patricia Lockwood
"Every piece of art I've ever made was because I saw bad and could do better, or saw great and needed to catch up."—John T. Unger
"Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it. Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author. Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author….Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements…It is the highest respect you can pay him.."—Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren , How To Read A Book
h/t Austin Kleon
Tue, 9 Jul 2019
"I don't know of any teaching more self-centered and further from the facts than Marxism. Ordinarily, people are anxious to test their theories in practice, to learn from experience. But those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they turn their backs on truth as squarely as they can. Politics mean nothing to me. I don't like people who are indifferent to the truth."—Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Wed, 10 Jul 2019
"Printing diffused true knowledge, but it also diffused (and on a far greater scale) false knowledge and unproved irrational affirmation."—Hilaire Belloc, The Crisis of Our Civilization
Wed, 10 Jul 2019
"But if I be asked what sign we may look for to show that the advance of the Faith is at hand, I would answer by a word the modern world has forgotten: Persecution. When that shall be at work it will be morning."—Hilaire Belloc, Survivals and New Arrivals
Wed, 10 Jul 2019
"Free-floating, petty gripes are a result of Miserabilism as a world view, the idea that viewing Western Civ as a hellish, gruesome burden destined to collapse of its sins and conceits is the only possible worldview for a Serious Person. Hence the more fault you find, the deeper you are. It comes from being grounded in nothing but the shallow soil of the present, with no sense of history except for a series of pre-approved narratives intended to culminate in an argument against the recent past, which was bad because it prevented the wonderful possible Tomorrow from happening Today. It's a recipe for life-long alienation."—James Lileks
Wed, 10 Jul 2019
"Big money isn't hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of devotion. But no ballerina ever works harder. Captain, that's not your style; you don't want to make money, you simply want to spend money."
"Correct, sir! So I can't see why you would want to take Mike's wealth away from him." "Because great wealth is a curse—unless you enjoy money-making for its own sake. Even then it has serious drawbacks."
"Oh, piffle! Jubal, you talk like a harem guard trying to sell a whole man on the advantages of being a eunuch."
"Possibly," agreed Jubal. “The mind's ability to rationalize its own shortcomings is unlimited; I am no exception. Since I, like yourself, sir, have no interest in money other than to spend it, it is impossible for me to get rich. Conversely, there has never been any danger that I would fail to scrounge the modest amount needed to feed my vices, since anyone with the savvy not to draw to a small pair can do that. But great wealth?….Captain, you don't know what an Old Man of the Sea great wealth is. Its owner is beset on every side, like beggars in Bombay, each demanding that he invest or give away part of his wealth. He becomes suspicious—honest friendship is rarely offered him; those who could have been friends are too fastidious to be jostled by beggars, too proud to risk being mistaken for one.
"Worse yet, his family is always in danger. Captain, have your daughters ever been threatened with kidnapping?"
"What? Good Lord, no!"
"If you possessed the wealth Mike had thrust on him, you would have those girls guarded night and day—still you would not rest, because you would never be sure of the guards. Look at the last hundred or so kidnappings and note how many involved a trusted employee . . . and how few victims escaped alive. Is there anything money can buy which is worth having your daughters' necks in a noose?"
Van Tromp looked thoughtful. "I'll keep my mortgaged house, Jubal."
"Amen. I want to live my own life, sleep in my own bed—and not be bothered!"—Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Fri, 12 Jul 2019
"The sage Confucius was once asked what he would do if he was a governor. He said he would “rectify the names" to make words correspond to reality. He understood what General Semantics teaches; if your linguistic map is sufficiently confused, you will misunderstand the territory. And be readily outmaneuvered by those who are less confused.”—Eric S. Raymond
esr goes on to make interesting and important comments about the currently hot Richard Epstein scandal and its larger context, seriously worth reading and thinking about.
I'm posting it here, however, to note the map/territory statement, which Gregory Bateson speaks about at length in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and/or Mind and Nature (1979), Bateson being an "English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist" per Wikipedia and a founding participant, with his wife Margaret Mead, in the Macy Conferences. Stewart Brand introduced me to his work via the WEC, and it's been at least somewhat influential in my muddled thinking.
And now, the question is how does this form of General Semantics fit in with (or survive?) Barfield's philological analysis of how consciousness evolved and relates to the "unrepresented" as well as the "appearances".
Fri, 12 Jul 2019
"GOD is therefore truly the Father, inasmuch as He is Father of truth; He does not create the Son from outside Himself, but generates Him from His own substance. That is to say, being wise, He generates Wisdom, being just, Justice, be eternal, the Eternal, being immortal, the Immortal, being invisible, the Invisible. Because He is Light, He generates Brightness, and because He is Mind, the Word."—Rufinus: Commentary on the Apostles' Creed, 4. (5th cent.)
Sat, 13 Jul 2019
Principles that we suspend during difficult times aren't really principles. Principles really count when they're difficult to maintain.
That's not the same thing, though, as refusing to consider the edge cases.
"Free speech," is a fine principle, one to live by. But shouting "fire" in a crowded movie theater isn't allowed, for good reason.
The edge cases are always subject to endless debate. There are no easy bright lines. It's tempting, then, to never consider the edge cases. A rule's a rule.
But principles without judgment aren't the easy path they seem to be. Because without our judgment on the edge cases, we've given up responsibility. It's no longer our decision if we're not making a decision.
The hard work involves willingly being on the hook for making a tough call.
Sun, 14 Jul 2019
Isn't it rich? Are we a pair? Me here at last on the ground, You in mid-air. Where are the clowns?
Isn't it bliss? Don't you approve? One who keeps tearing around, One who can't move… Where are the clowns? There ought to be clowns.
Just when I'd stopped opening doors, Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours. Making my entrance again with my usual flair Sure of my lines… No one is there.
Don't you love farce? My fault, I fear. I thought that you'd want what I want… Sorry, my dear! But where are the clowns Send in the clowns Don't bother, they're here.
Isn't it rich? Isn't it queer? Losing my timing this late in my career. But where are the clowns? There ought to be clowns… Well, maybe next year.
Stephen Sondheim, A Little Night Music 1973
Wed, 17 Jul 2019
"In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence."—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Haunted Mind
h/t J.M. Smith
Thu, 18 Jul 2019
"Lying can be cognitively demanding. You must suppress the truth and construct a falsehood that is plausible on its face and does not contradict anything known by the listener, nor likely to be known. You must tell it in a convincing way and you must remember the story. This usually takes time and concentration, both of which may give off secondary cues and reduce performance on simultaneous tasks."—Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools
Thu, 25 Jul 2019
"Three rules [Lou Reed] and I came up with – rules to live by. The first one is don't be afraid of anyone. Imagine living your life so that you are afraid of no one. Second is get a really good bullshit detector and learn how to use it. And third is be really, really tender."—Laurie Anderson
Fri, 26 Jul 2019
W -I went outside and it was worse.
Dr - How was it worse.
W - There was this storm.
Dr - So, how did you feel when you saw the storm?
W - I felt frozen.
Dr - Heartbreaking?
W - Frozen.
Dr - Frozen, cold frozen? Frozen to the touch?
W - No, like how you feel when you are scared and can't breath or talk or do anything. I felt like this evil, like it was looking at me.
Dr - This evil. Well, what do you think this evil wanted?
W - You.
Dr - You?
W - Not me, everyone.
Sat, 27 Jul 2019
"In a society caught up in the race for the better, limits on change are experienced as a threat. The commitments to the better at any cost makes the good impossible at all costs. Failure to renew the bill of goods frustrates the expectation of what is possible, while renewal of the bill of goods intensifies the expectations of unattainable progress. What people have and what they are about to get are equally exasperating to them. Accelerating change has become both addictive and intolerable. At this point the balance among stability, change and tradition has been upset; society has lost both its roots in shared memories and its bearings for innovation. Judgement on precedents has lost its value."— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
Sun, 04 Aug 2019
"'Need' now means wanting someone else's money. 'Greed' means wanting to keep your own. 'Compassion' is when a politician arranges the transfer."—Joseph Sobran
Mon, 05 Aug 2019
"Our modern conception of science is a bureaucratic mechanism called 'scientific method' which denies the existence of human intuition, and thus our humanity. It is never actually followed—no scientist ever discovered anything in a time-serving, methodical way; especially not on billion-dollar machines. But still we praise and believe in this method, or such derivatives as Popper's 'falsifiability,' because we are easily pleased, profligate, and hopelessly glib."—David Warren
See Saving the Appearances Chapter IX.
Tue, 06 Aug 2019
"A scientific discovery is very convincing, but at the same time scientific knowledge is never definitive and is always open to revision. This is a central point. Science establishes its credibility and its reliability through its refusal to be definitive and certain."—Carlo Rovelli
Tue, 06 Aug 2019
"Silence must be excluded at all cost, since it awakens you to the emptiness that looms on the edge of modern life, threatening to confront you with the dreadful truth, that you have nothing whatever to say."—Roger Scruton
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."—Aldous Huxley
Tue, 06 Aug 2019
"A genius is the one most like himself."—Thelonius Monk
Wed, 07 Aug 2019
'Jack,' said Stephen, 'I have been contemplating on your words about the nature of the majority, your strangely violent, radical, and even — forgive me — democratic words, which, with their treasonable implication of ‘one man, one vote', might be interpreted as an attack on the sacred rights of property; and I should like to know how you reconcile them with your support of a Tory ministry in the House.'
'Oh, as for that,' said Jack, 'I have no difficulty at all. It is entirely a matter of scale and circumstance. Everyone knows that on a large scale democracy is pernicious nonsense — a country or even a county cannot be run by a self-seeking parcel of tub-thumping politicians working on popular emotion, rousing the mob. Even at Brooks's, which is a hotbed of democracy, the place is in fact run by the managers and those that don't like it may either do the other thing or join Boodle's; while as for a man-of-war, it is either an autocracy or it is nothing, nothing at all — mere nonsense. You saw what happened to the poor French navy at the beginning of the Revolutionary War…'
'Dear Jack, I do not suppose literal democracy in a ship of the line nor even in a little small row-boat. I know too much of the sea,' added Stephen, not without complacency.
'…while at the other end of the scale, although ‘one man, one vote' certainly smells of brimstone and the gallows, everyone has always accepted it in a jury trying a man for his life. An inclosure belongs to this scale: it too decides men's lives. I had not realized how thoroughly it does so until I came back from sea and found that Griffiths and some of his friends had persuaded my father to join with them in inclosing Woolcombe Common…
‘Stephen, I do assure you. I was brought up rough when I was a little chap, after my mother's death, sometimes at the village school, sometimes running wild; and I knew these men intimately as boys, and now to see them at the mercy of landlords, farmers, and God help us parish officers for poor relief, hurts me so that I can scarcely bring myself to go there again. And I am determined the same thing shall not happen to Simmon's Lea, if ever I can prevent it. The old ways had disadvantages, of course, but here — and I speak only of what I know — it was a human life, and the people knew its ways and customs through and through.
—Patrick O'Brian, The Yellow Admiral
Wed, 07 Aug 2019
Is this the real life?Is this just fantasy?Caught in a landslideNo escape from realityOpen your eyesLook up to the skies and see—Freddie Mercury, Bohemian Rhapsody
A fitting introduction to Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances?
Fri, 09 Aug 2019
"Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present."—Mario Vargas Llosa
Fri, 09 Aug 2019
"Politeness is the chief sign of culture."—Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658) Spanish writer.
Fri, 09 Aug 2019
"It is always easier to quote an authority than to carry on a chain of reasoning."—William Hazlitt, A Reply To The Essay On Population
Mon, 12 Aug 2019
"Those who seek the truth run the risk of finding it."—Isabel Allende
Fri, 16 Aug 2019
"We don't live our lives by choice, but by default. We play the roles we are born to. We don't live our lives, we dispose of them. We throw them away because we don't know any better. And the reason we don't know any better is because we never asked. We never questioned or doubted. Never stood up. Never drew a line. We never walked up to our parents or our spiritual advisers or our teachers or any of the other formative presences in our early lives and asked one simple. honest, straightforward question. The one question that must be answered before any other question can be asked: “What the hell is going on here?"—Jed McKenna, Spiritual Warfare
Fri, 16 Aug 2019
"What do we know for sure? That's the real question. That's what the cogito is. That's what solipsism is. This isn't theory. This isn't belief or faith. This is the basic fact of existence. It's all about figuring out exactly what we know for certain as opposed to everything else. It's truly amazing that something so glaringly obvious and irrefutable is so universally ignored by science and philosophy and religion."—Jed McKenna
Fri, 16 Aug 2019
"I am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy."—Dylan Thomas
Fri, 16 Aug 2019
"Have an uncomfortable mind; be strange. Be disturbed: by what is happening on the planet, and to it; by the cruelty, and stupidity humanity is capable of; by the unbearable beauty of certain music, and the mysteries and failures of love, and the brief, confusing, exhilarating hour of your own life."—Kim Addonizio, Bukowski in a Sundress
Fri, 16 Aug 2019
"The reason for writing it down on paper or on a computer where you can see it is because the brain, unlikely as it may sound, is no place for serious thinking. Any time you have serious thinking to do, the first step is to get the whole shootin' match out of your head and set it up someplace where you can walk around it and see it from all sides. Attack, switch sides and counter-attack. You can't do that while it's still in your head. Writing it out allows you to act as your own teacher, your own critic, your own opponent. By externalizing your thoughts, you can become your own guru; judging yourself, giving feedback, providing a more objective and elevated perspective."—Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing
Fri, 16 Aug 2019
"Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won't do what they want - won't give them more money, won't be more successful, won't see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft. A writer friend of mine suggests opening the jar and shooting them all in the head. But I think he's a little angry, and I'm sure nothing like this would ever occur to you."—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, p. 27
Sun, 18 Aug 2019
"I am, by calling, a dealer in words; and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, ergotise, narcotise, and paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain, very much as madder mixed with a stag's food at the Zoo colours the growth of the animal's antlers. Moreover, in the case of the human animal, that acquired tint, or taint, is transmissible. May I give you an instance? There is a legend which has been transmitted to us from the remotest ages. It has entered into many brains and coloured not a few creeds. It is this: Once upon a time, or rather, at the very birth of Time, when the Gods were so new that they had no names, and Man was still damp from the clay of the pit whence he had been digged, Man claimed that he, too, was in some sort a deity. The Gods were as just in those days as they are now. They weighed his evidence and decided that Man's claim was good - that he was, in effect, a divinity, and, as such, entitled to be freed from the trammels of mere brute instinct, and to enjoy the consequence of his own acts. But the Gods sell everything at a price. Having conceded Man's claim, the legend goes that they came by stealth and stole away this godhead, with intent to hide it where Man should never find it again. But that was none so easy. If they hid it anywhere on Earth, the Gods foresaw that Man, the inveterate hunter - the father, you might say, of all hunters - would leave no stone unturned nor wave unplumbed till he had recovered it. If they concealed it among themselves, they feared that Man might in the end batter his way up even to the skies. And, while they were all thus at a stand, the wisest of the Gods, who afterwards became the God Brahm, said,"I know. Give it to me!" And he closed his hand upon the tiny unstable light of Man's stolen godhead, and when that great Hand opened again, the light was gone. "All is well," said Brahm. "I have hidden it where Man will never dream of looking for it. I have hidden it inside Man himself." "Yes, but whereabouts inside Man have you hidden it?" all the other Gods asked. "Ah," said Brahm, that is my secret, and always will be; unless and until Man discovers it for himself.”—Rudyard Kipling, Surgeons and the Soul, A Book of Words
Sun, 18 Aug 2019
"The widespread cultural notion that science has explained most of the world is scandalously unjustified. For all we know, we've explained only very, very little; practically nothing. We just don't know what kinds of fundamental causal forces and organizing principles may kick in when systems become complex enough to be seen with the naked eye outside a laboratory. Inability to acknowledge this represents a catastrophic failure of skepticism."—Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond
Sun, 25 Aug 2019
"Tolerance is creditable in our liberal ethos, and liberal sentimentality therefore guarantees a surfeit of false, affected and exaggerated tolerance. You can, in fact, be tolerant only under two very rigid conditions. You must disapprove of the behavior you tolerate, and you must have the power to stop it. If you do not disapprove of the behavior, you are indifferent, not tolerant. If you cannot stop it, you are merely resigned. Most of what passes for tolerance is actually indifference or resignation."—J. M. Smith
Tue, 27 Aug 2019
"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself—educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.'"—Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, p. 16
Wed, 28 Aug 2019
"And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make."—Paul McCartney
Thu, 29 Aug 2019
“'It's just politics.'
“No one ever says, 'it's just governance.'
“Politics is organized sparring about power, without much regard for efficacy or right or wrong.
“Governance is the serious business of taking responsibility for leadership.
"Over the last twenty years, the mass media has shifted, from “here's the news," to, "hey, it's just media." As a result, a system has been built in which situations, emergencies and bad news have been packaged and promoted twenty-four hours a day.
“In the face of that maelstrom of noise, it's easy to come to the conclusion that the world is more dangerous and unstable than it has ever been.
“When we have a chance to speak up for governance, we can strike a blow against politics.
“Because even though it doesn't make compelling TV, the long-term challenges ahead of us aren't going to respond to politics.
"Dedication, resilience and concerted effort have saved us before and they can save us again. Except once again, it's on us to speak up and do something about it."—Seth Godin
Thu, 29 Aug 2019
"Contemporary man … attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it."—Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
Fri, 30 Aug 2019
"A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't."—Roger Scruton
Fri, 30 Aug 2019
"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none is undeservedly remembered"—W.H. Auden
Sat, 31 Aug 2019
"The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered…it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful."—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Sun, 01 Sep 2019
"By necessity, by proclivity and by delight, we all quote."—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sun, 01 Sep 2019 “Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us.
"To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty."—Oscan Wilde, from his commonplace book
Mon, 02 Sep 2019
Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries,for false witnesses have risen against me,and they are breathing out violence.
I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lordin the land of the living.Wait for the Lord;be strong, and let your heart take courage;wait for the Lord!
—Psalm 27
Tue, 03 Sep 2019
"If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style."—Quentin Crisp
Tue, 03 Sep 2019
"Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked."—Quentin Crisp
Wed, 04 Sep 2019
"Everyone has their own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is. If you can get it down on paper, in words, notes, or color, so much the better. The great artists don't even bother to put it down on paper: they live with it silently, they become it."—Henry Miller, Stand Still Like The Hummingbird
Wed, 04 Sep 2019
"It's like everything in life right now; it has to do with being in the right place at the right time. The universe will bring you an abundance of opportunities and possibilities. It's really all about trusting that before you got there, when you were sleeping, the universe was conspiring to give you something to blow your mind. Would you be open to receive it?"—Carlos Santana, interview, AARP Magazine August/September issue
Sat, 07 Sep 2019
"If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop."—Kingsley Amis
Sat, 07 Sep 2019
"I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."—Mark Twain.
Robert Mugabe is reported to have died yesterday.
Mon, 09 Sep 2019
"To this day he (Carlos Santana) still sends me texts to remind me that the only three things I can control are my motive, intention and purpose. And to always remember to do what I do with gratitude. I'm not the vessel; I'm the passenger. But sometimes I can be the engine."—Rob Thomas
Wed, 11 Sep 2019
"I believe that this crisis is rooted in a major twofold experiment which has failed, and I claim that the resolution of the crisis begins with a recognition of the failure. For a hundred years we have tried to make machines work for men and to school men for life in their service. Now it turns out that machines do not 'work' and that people cannot be schooled for a life at the service of machines. The hypothesis on which the experiment was built must now be discarded. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men."—Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
Seen on the "Convivial Society" letter,
Wed, 11 Sep 2019
“Our civil institutions were founded upon an assumption that people would be able to agree on what reality is, agree on facts, and that they would then make rational, good-faith decisions based on that. They might disagree as to how to interpret those facts or what their political philosophy was, but it was all founded on a shared understanding of reality.
And that's now been dissolved out from under us, and we don't have a mechanism to address that problem.”—Neil Stephenson, in a ”podcast” with Tyler Cowen
Thu, 12 Sep 2019
"Words tend to last a bit longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. Entire categories of objects disappear - flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber bands - and for a time you will be able to recognize those words, even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish."—Paul Auster, Country of Last Things
Thu, 12 Sep 2019
“The new world picture, as it turned out, consciously and unconsciously drew on the machine as an organizing principle. The answer to the cultural upheavals, then, was to build institutions that would generate consensus not through the arduous work of contesting and resolving differences, but by automating the public realm and cultivating subjects qua citizens that would be willing to buy into the validity of 'objective facts,' neutral institutions, etc.
“In short, modernity was built upon a myth: the myth of neutrality or objectivity—neutral facts, neutral procedures, neutral institutions, neutral technology. It was this myth, wielded as a weapon against all manner of superstitions, that sustained the ideals of 'Reason,' 'Progress,' the 'Rational Actor,' etc. Reader: It, too, was a superstition.“—L. M. Sacasas
Thu, 12 Sep 2019
"There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening."—Marshall McLuhan
Thu, 12 Sep 2019
"People cannot forgive what they cannot punish."—Hannah Arendt
Fri, 13 Sep 2019
"O GOD, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal: Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ's sake our Lord. Amen."—/Book of Common Prayer/, quoted by C.S. Lewis in his essay, "A Slip of the Tongue", 1956 in The Weight of Glory
Mon, 16 Sep 2019
“Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked. When we have realized the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we shall be well launched on the study of philosophy—for philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after exploring all that makes such questions puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas.
"In daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe. In the search for certainty, it is natural to begin with our present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong. It seems to me that I am now sitting in a chair, at a table of a certain shape, on which I see sheets of paper with writing or print. By turning my head I see out of the window buildings and clouds and the sun. I believe that the sun is about ninety-three million miles from the earth; that it is a hot globe many times bigger than the earth; that, owing to the earth's rotation, it rises every morning, and will continue to do so for an indefinite time in the future. I believe that, if any other normal person comes into my room, he will see the same chairs and tables and books and papers as I see, and that the table which I see is the same as the table which I feel pressing against my arm. All this seems to be so evident as to be hardly worth stating, except in answer to a man who doubts whether I know anything. Yet all this may be reasonably doubted, and all of it requires much careful discussion before we can be sure that we have stated it in a form that is wholly true."—Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 1912
Wed, 18 Sep 2019
"Why is it so easy for people to reject Christianity? When by contrast the same people will be prepared to put immense time and effort into (for example) trying to rehabilitate some version of Leftist politics as a possible answer; or paganism, Hinduism or Buddhism as a possible answer?"—Bruce Charlton
Fri, 20 Sep 2019
”The only interesting ideas are heresies”—Susan Sontag
"Technology is the reason we get old enough to complain about technology."—Gary Kasparov
"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything."—Dwight Eisenhower
"If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not."—John Cage
"Remember, you can't be stuck in traffic; you are the traffic."—Kevin Slavin
Tue, 24 Sep 2019
“One of the consumer's little-known rights is, not to buy stuff. This is easier than may appear. He (or even she) may be, in some sense, suffering from an addiction. But I've been told by the experts, this can be overcome. Take up reading, instead. Whenever the urge to shop afflicts you, open a book. Make a pot of tea, and relax somewhere. Think about things.
In Canada, today, you are even allowed to think officially disapproved thoughts, so long as you don't tell anyone what they were.”—David Warren
Tue, 24 Sep 2019
"There is a road, no simple highwayBetween the dawn and the dark of nightAnd if you go no one may followThat path is for your steps alone."—Robert Hunter, June 23, 1941—September 23, 2019
Wed, 25 Sep 2019
"In Washington, where there's smoke, there's mirrors."—Don Surber
Fri, 27 Sep 2019
"A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong"—Francis Crick
Sun, 29 Sep 2019
“But our Lord said to me, 'I am the ground of thy beseechings: first, it is My will that thou have it; and then I make thee to wish for it; and then I make thee to beseech it, and thou beseechest it. How then should it be that thou shouldest not have thy beseeching?'
"For it is most impossible that we should beseech mercy and grace and not have it. For all things that our good Lord maketh us to beseech, Himself hath ordained them to us from without beginning. Here may we see that our beseeching is not the cause of God's goodness; and that showed He soothfastly in all these sweet words which He saith: 'I am the ground.' And our good Lord willeth that this be known of His lovers in earth; and the more that we know it the more should we beseech, if it be wisely taken; and so is our Lord's meaning. Merry and joyous is our Lord of our prayer, and He looketh for it; and He willeth to have it; because with His grace He would have us like to Himself in condition as we are in kind. Therefore saith He to us 'Pray inwardly, although thou think it has no savour to thee: for it is profitable, though thou feel not, though thou see not, yea, though thou think thou canst not.'"—Julian of Norwich
From a note that I wrote to myself, 12 March, 2012.
Tue, 01 Oct 2019
"Aidos (Greek: Αἰδώς, pronounced [ai̯dɔ̌ːs]) was the Greek goddess of shame, modesty, respect, and humility. Aidos, as a quality, was that feeling of reverence or shame which restrains men from wrong. It also encompassed the emotion that a rich person might feel in the presence of the impoverished, that their disparity of wealth, whether a matter of luck or merit, was ultimately undeserved. Ancient and Christian humility have some common points, they are both the rejection of egotism and self-centeredness, arrogance and excessive pride, and is an recognition of human limitations. Aristotle defined it as a middle ground between vanity and cowardice."–Wikipedia entry
From a note in my notepad from sometime in March, 2019—”Greek 'Aidos' "Walk humbly to appease the Fates."
Wed, 02 Oct 2019
“The sin is the lie, or intent to mislead - unaffected by the justification that it was just about a small matter…
“The sin is the spite: the wanting to harm another for one's own gratification - not in the magnitude of that which is wished upon them.
“The sin is in the resentment - it does not matter whether criticism is 'deserved'.
"Evil is in the believed and argued inversion of virtue - not in whatever harmful consequences of this inversion."—Bruce Charlton
Saturday, 05 Oct 2019
"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenceless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one's prejudgement simply need not be believed—in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical—and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous."—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Monday, 07 Oct 2019
"Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. They learn more and more that their group is right, that its actions are justified; thus their beliefs are strengthened. At the same time, such propaganda contains elements of criticism and refutation of other groups, which will never be read or heard by a member of another group…Thus we see before our eyes how a world of closed minds establishes itself, a world in which everybody talks to himself, everybody constantly views his own certainty about himself and the wrongs done him by the Others—a world in which nobody listens to anybody else."—Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (1973)
Seen on the "Convivial Society" letter, link below.
Monday, 07 Oct 2019
"As many have noted, facial recognition in some circles amounts to data-driven phrenology. I'm sometimes inclined to think that we are doomed to repeat the worst errors of the past but in a digitally augmented fashion. Often this is connected with a characteristically modern desire or urge to achieve a God's-eye-view of things without, you know, God. Much of what we might now think of as traditional postmodernism—thirty years ago I suspect no one would have imagined speaking of traditional postmodernism, but there it is and I think it works—was basically an acknowledgement that the modern quest for certain, objective, universal Truth had exhausted itself. Digital technology has re-animated the corpse, which is why we now see zombie versions of phrenology, eugenics, and the like floating around."—L.M. Sacases
Read the whole thing…
Monday, 07 Oct 2019
"What does a man do when he finds himself living after an age has ended and he can no longer understand himself because the theories of man of the former age no longer work and the theories of the new age are not yet known, for not even the name of the new age is known, and so everything is upside down, people feeling bad when they should feel good, good when they should feel bad? … What is he then? He has not the faintest idea. Entered as he is into a new age, he is like a child who sees everything in his new world, names everything, knows everything except himself."—Walker Percy, "The Delta Factor" in The Message in the Bottle
Seen on the "Convivial Society" letter, link above.
Monday, 07 Oct 2019
"Recollection is a discarded garment that does not fit, however beautiful it is, for one has outgrown it. Repetition is an indestructible garment that fits closely and tenderly, neither binds nor sags… recollection is a beautiful old woman with whom one is never satisfied at the moment; repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never wearies, for one becomes weary only of what is new."–Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition
Saturday, 12 Oct 2019
“I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.
“Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. It's easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.
"We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners."—Paul Graham
From Graham's 2004 essay, "What You Can't Say". Only more pertinent fifteen years later. RTWT.
Saturday, 12 Oct 2019
"And then a man of forty or so, with a French accent, asked, 'How do you achieve the presence of mind to initiate the writing of a poem?' And something cracked open in me, and I finally stopped hoarding and told them my most useful secret. The only secret that has helped me consistently over all the years that I've written. I said, 'Well, I'll tell you how. I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day?' The wonder of it was, I told them, that this one question could lift out from my life exactly what I will want to write a poem about. Something I hadn't known was important will leap out and hover there in front of me, saying I am—I am the best moment of the day. 'Often,' I went on, 'it's a moment when you're waiting for someone, or you're driving somewhere, or maybe you're just walking across a parking lot and admiring the oil stains and the dribbled tar patterns. One time it was when I was driving past a certain house that was screaming with sunlitness on its white clapboards, and then I plunged through tree shadows that splashed and splayed across the windshield. I thought, Ah, of course—I'd forgotten. You, windshield shadows, you are the best moment of the day.'"—Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
Wednesday, 16 Oct 2019
"For if I believe anything, it is that the primary business of literature and art is cognitive, a kind of finding out and knowing and telling, both in good times and bad; a celebration of the way things are when they are right, and a diagnostic enterprise when they are wrong."—Walker Percy
Wednesday, 16 Oct 2019
"My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it's poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or listener or viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so, what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know."—Walker Percy
Saturday, 19 Oct 2019
"You never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives."—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
Saturday, 19 Oct 2019
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy."—George Orwell, 1984
"If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a Goodthinker), he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion."—George Orwell, 1984
Sunday, 20 Oct 2019
"The friendship of a blockhead shun,Said Israel's monarch, David's son."—Samuel Low, The Fool's Friendship (c. 1800)
"And all that pity you are made your prey."—Thomas Otway, The Orphan (1680)
"Unlike Nietzsche, I accept pity (compassion) as a virtue, but unlike many modern Christians, I see pity as a secondary virtue that degenerates into pathological altruism when it is not regulated by the primary virtues of justice, prudence and courage. A man without compassion is certainly a bad man, but a man who is guided by nothing but compassion is a King Midas of misery. Everything he touches turns to mold."—J.M. Smith
Tuesday, 22 Oct 2019
"Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming,"—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
Wednesday, 23 Oct 2019
"A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."—Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
Tuesday, 29 Oct 2019
“About 25 years ago I was active in university politics, nationally and locally; and after several experiences I realised that we were in an era in which the leadership were not bound by words.
“They would say anything that was currently expedient, but it meant nothing. In particular promises, resolutions and commitments meant precisely nothing.
“I began to adopt a veterinary attitude. The term comes from my training in medicine. When patients are unable to talk (e.g. children) or unreliable 'historians' of their symptoms (e.g psychosis or dementia) then we practiced veterinary medicine, like a vet, based purely on our own observations.
“So it is a long time since I took notice of what chief executives, politicians, bishops or any kind of bureaucrat has to say. I don't believe what they claim they are doing or have done. I wait to see what I observe for myself.
“Brexit has led to an unprecedented concentration and sustained output of empty speech, and this continues. I do not believe any of it. I will not believe it even if They say we have 'now' left the EU. I will wait to see if I can observe it myself in my own life or immediate circle of trusted and competent persons.
"Veterinary politics has advantages! It frees up a lot of time and energy for other and more fundamental activities, including the most important of all."—Dr. Bruce Charlton
Tuesday, 29 Oct 2019
“Because a knowledge of letters is entirely indispensable to a country, it is certain that they should not be indiscriminately taught to everyone. A body which had eyes all over it would be monstrous, and in like fashion so would a state if all its subjects were learned; one would find little obedience and an excess of pride and presumption.
“The commerce of letters would drive out that of goods, from which the wealth of the state is derived. It would ruin agriculture, the true nourishment of the people, and in time would dry up the source of soldiery, whose ranks flow more from the crudities of ignorance than from refinements of knowledge.
“It would, indeed, fill France with quibblers more suited to the ruination of good families and the upsetting of public order than to doing any good for the country.
“If learning were profaned by extending it to all kinds of people one would see far more men capable of raising doubts than of resolving them, and many would be better able to oppose truth than to defend it.
"It is for this reason that statesmen in a well-run country would wish to have as teachers more masters of mechanic arts than of liberal arts."—/The Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu/, chapter II (1642)
Sunday, 03 Nov, 2019
"To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the events; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect … One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man's capacity to forget is unlimited … This situation makes the 'current-events man' a ready target for propaganda."—Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (1973)
Sunday, 03 Nov, 2019
"Anyone claiming to know the future is really just trying to own it."—Margaret Heffernan
Sunday, 03 Nov 2019
“Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:
Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.”
—Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
Sunday, 03 Nov 2019
“Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.
“What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
"If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it—that the earth moves."Paul Graham January, 2004
Monday, 04 Nov 2019
"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."—Martha Graham
Wednesday, 06 Nov 2019
"I love the sound policy makes when I break it."
From a cartoon about kids being allowed to read "above their grade level." I'll find a link to it someday, maybe.
Tuesday, 12 November 2019
"I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet—a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things."—Bertrand Russell
Tuesday, 12 November 2019
"There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas."—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
Thursday, 14 November 2019
“To be an ally means that you won't get in the way, and, if you are able to, you'll try to help.
“To become an accomplice, though, means that you've risked something, sacrificed something and put yourself on the hook as well.
“We need more allies, in all the work we do. Allies can open doors and help us feel a lot less alone.
“But finding an accomplice–that's an extraordinary leap forward.
“Willie Jackson is leading that conversation in an area where we need it urgently: around race. Once you see it there, you'll see it everywhere.
"When do we care enough to lean into the work, the mission or the problem? Even if we think it's 'someone else's work.' Because it probably belongs to us as well."—Seth Godin
Thursday, 14 November 2019
“Marriage and Family fundamentally are not systems - they precede all systems. Their basis is outwith all systems - because they are based on Love.
“Love is not abstract, nor is it the product of a model. Love is something real only between Beings; and Beings are not abstract, nor are they systems.
“(Indeed, any System could be described as an abstract model of a Being…)
“Marriage and family involve Beings (in reality, not in the system-induced subversions and distortions that we see in politics and law and the mass media - where they are reduced to abstract definitions). beings (such as you and me) are eternal entities; and Love - which is the primal relation, the primal cohesion, before system.
“When God created, it was Love that made possible creation - it is Love that distinguished creation from chaos.
"So there is an alternative to The System - and it is based on Beings in Loving relationships."—Bruce Charlton
Thursday, 21 November, 2019
"If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge."—Hannah Arendt
Sunday, 24 November, 2019
"After 1789, politics ceased to be considered as the prudent management of men and circumstances, in order to become the 'realization of ideas'. Political thinking became irredeemably ideological: an imposition of ideas on political life rather than an emergence of policy from living experience."—Irving Kristol, Yale Review 1958
Sunday, 24 November, 2019
"Imagine that everyone in the older age brackets had to write two books—'Smart Things I Have Done in My Life' and 'Dumb Things I Have Done in My Life.' Be frank. Which book do you think would be bigger? Even some of the smart things we did were a result of having done dumb things before and suffered the consequences."—Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, 26 November, 2019
"I'm not interested in documenting. Documenting is extremely dull and I'm a very bad reporter. When I had an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, my friend, Robert Capa, told me, “Henri, be very careful. You must not have a label of a surrealist photographer. If you do, you won't have an assignment and you'll be like a hothouse plant. Do whatever you like, but the label should be 'photojournalist.'"
"All my training was surrealism. I still feel very close to the surrealists. But Capa was extremely sound. So I never mentioned surrealism. That's my private affair. And what I want, what I'm looking for — that's my business. Otherwise I never would have an assignment. Journalism is a way of noting — well, some journalists are wonderful writers and others are just putting facts one after the other. And facts are not interesting. It's a point of view on facts which is important, and in photography it is the evocation. Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them."—Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1971 interview with Sheila Turner-Seed
Tuesday, 26 November, 2019
"He had the rage without the anger."—John Mayer at Stevie Ray Vaughn's induction into the R&R Hall of Fame
Wednesday, 27 November, 2019
"Existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality. Further, one is programmed for interactive communication, one's whole being is sucked into the system. It is this radical subversion of sensation that humiliates and then replaces perception. We submit ourselves to fantastic degradations of image and sound consumption in order to anesthetize the pain resulting from having lost reality."—Ivan Illich, "To Honor Jacques Ellul" (1993)
Wednesday, 27 November, 2019
"With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. And just as enlargement not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly 'in any case,' but brings to light entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them … Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. 'Other' above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious … It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious."—Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
h/t to L.M. Sacasas
Wednesday, 27 November, 2019
"An irony of studying history is that we often know exactly how a story ends, but have no idea where it began."—Morgan Housel
Housel suggests that, if we work backwards from any issue at hand today, eventually we arrive at WWII—that the shift from 1939 to 1945 was fundamental. IMHO, that might be pushed back to 1914, but then we could push back to 1812, or 1789, or …
For Housel the other Big Things today are demographics, inequality and access to information. I'd probably choose others that are equally "transformational and ubiquetous" but the basic thought is there…my old mantra, "There's more to it than that."
Wednesday, 27 November, 2019
"All ages have said and repeated that one should strive to know one's self. This is a strange demand which no one up to now has measured up to and, strictly considered, no one should. With all their study and effort, people are directed to what is outside, to the world about them, and they are kept busy coming to know this and to master it to the extent that their purposes require. How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for."—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Thursday, 28 November, 2019
"So: we come to rest with the mysteries… We do not abandon reason, we merely recognize its limitations. We reason to the existence of God, it is revealed to us that His Son was the incarnation, and that such was His love of us that He endured a torture excruciating in pain, and unique in aspect—the God of hosts, mutilated by His own creatures, whom He dies forgiving, loving. Can we do less? Yes, we do less, but must try to do more, until we die."—William F. Buckley, Jr., Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith
Thursday, 28 November, 2019
"The Internet is self destructing paper. A place where anything written is soon destroyed by rapacious competition and the only preservation is to forever copy writing from sheet to sheet faster than they can burn. If it's worth writing, it's worth keeping. If it can be kept, it might be worth writing…If you store your writing on a third party site like Blogger, Livejournal or even on your own site, but in the complex format used by blog/wiki software du jour you will lose it forever as soon as hypersonic wings of Internet labor flows direct people's energies elsewhere. For most information published on the Internet, perhaps that is not a moment too soon, but how can the muse of originality soar when immolating transience brushes every feather?"—Julian Assange, Self destructing paper, 5 December, 2006
Thursday, 28 November, 2019
"Special knowledge can be a terrible disadvantage if it leads you too far along a path you cannot explain anymore."—Brian Herbert, Dune: House Harkonnen
Thursday, 28 November, 2019
"Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!'"—Gian-Carlo Rota
Thursday, 28 November, 2019
“My late friend Stan Ulam used to remark that his life was sharply divided into two halves. In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group; in the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period.
“I now realize how right he was. The etiquette of old age does not seem to have been written up, and we have to learn it the hard way. It depends on a basic realization, which takes time to adjust to. You must realize that, after reaching a certain age, you are no longer viewed as a person. You become an institution, and you are treated the way institutions are treated. You are expected to behave like a piece of period furniture, an architectural landmark, or an incunabulum.
"It matters little whether you keep publishing or not. If your papers are no good, they will say, 'What did you expect? He is a fixture!' and if an occasional paper of yours is found to be interesting, they will say, 'What did you expect? He has been working at this all his life!' The only sensible response is to enjoy playing your newly-found role as an institution."—GianCarlo Rota
Saturday, 30 November, 2019
“When the world extended to one's surrounding hills and mountains and over them was only legend, saving the world was approchable and a natural activity to all of independent character.
“You do not need to justify the possession of these noble instincts. Such attributes are normally distributed. You have a constellation of these attributes and that makes you who you are. Recognise that the substantial ones are invariant.
“You must satisfy your invariant instincts or you will be at odds with your own character. It is only when we are not at odds with our basic makeup that we can find life meaningful.
“To exercise your instinct for saving the world, requires saving what you perceive to be the world.
"Being modern, educated and wordly, the world you perceive is immense and this is disempowering compared to the valley world of your ancestors where your feelings were forged and where saving 10 people saved 10% of the “world"'s population.
“Here lays the difficulty in actualising your character. Your perception is of a world so vast that that you can not envisage your actions making a meaningful difference.
"People try to fool themselves and others into believing that one can “think globally and act locally", however to anyone with a sense of proportion (not most people, btw) thinking globaly makes acting locally seem to be a marginal activity. It's not setting the world to rights.
“To meaningfully interact with the world, you have to either constrain your perception of what it is back to valley proportions by eschewing all global information (most of us here have engaged on just the opposite course which is what has provoked this discussion), losing your sense of perspective, or start seriously engaging with the modern perception of the world.
“That latter path can be hard to find, because it is only satisfied by creating ideas or inventions that have a global impact. Perhaps I have found one, and there's others out there, but for most people of your character a combination of eschewing knowledge of those parts of the world they can't change, and robust engagement with the parts they can is probably optimal.
“Do not be concerned about when one is to do good, who defines good, etc. Act in the way you do because to do otherwise would to be at odds would to be at odds with yourself. Being on a path true to your character carries with it a state of flow, where the thoughts about your next step come upon waking, unbidden, but welcome.
"I support similarly minded people, not because they are moral agents, but because they have common cause with my own feelings and dreams."—Julian Assange
Monday, 02 December, 2019
I watch zero cable news.
I don't read Twitter.
I use Facebook only to keep up with people who I care about personally. I tell myself to never, never comment on or share political posts on Facebook.
On my blog, I do not comment on any story I come across for at least 48 hours. Often, this means that I do not comment at all, because many stories do not stay in the news cycle more than two days. I almost never publish any post immediately. Instead, I schedule posts several days ahead. I am trying to make sure that I engage system 2 (sober and reflective) rather than system 1 (emotional and instinctive).
I try to give priority to long-form reading: books, essays, and journal articles. I also give priority to my own writing. Still, I need to get better about limiting the time that I spend on short-term reading.
I believe that it is a good idea to keep all devices in airplane mode for a 24-hour period once a week. I have difficulty executing this one, particularly when I travel.
I spend at least an hour a day doing physical activity (for me, it's walking or biking or working out in the basement) accompanied by nothing but my thoughts and daydreams.
My sleep-time ritual is to curl up with a physical book or journal.
Tuesday, 03 December, 2019
"The Dutch language knows the priceless verb 'doodzwijgen', literally 'kill something by keeping silent about it'. This has been a favorite tactic of European Brahmandarins for a long time—the near-media silence on the continuing Yellow Jackets protests is only the most recent example."—Nitay Arbel
Tuesday, 03 December, 2019
"When we say 'Humanism' today we are invariably talking blithering nonsense. The actual Humanist tradition was, like Erasmus himself, a mixed blessing, and finally a disaster. Our modern, atheist, 'humanist' creed is, by contrast, unmixed: a contumacious disaster from beginning to end. It carries none of the sincerity and well-intended zeal of the late mediaeval reformers, who were dedicated not to the overthrow of the Church, but to her renovation. They were more, not less, eager to enforce her morals, her faith, her splendour; to exalt her Christ. Only their vanity stood in their way."—David Warren
Wednesday, 04 December, 2019
“The primary emotion that the ego lives by is fear.
“The primary emotion that the self lives by is love.
“What then, is Resistance?
"Resistance is the weapon the ego uses to prevent the individual from seating her identity in the Self."—Steven Pressfield
Friday, 06 December 2019
"Everything rests on a few ideas that are fearsome and cannot be looked at directly."—Paul Valery
Saturday, 07 December 2019
"Oscar Wilde's mot—that men are made by books rather than books by men—was certainly not pure nonsense; there is a very real sense, humiliating as it may seem, in which what we generally venture to call our feelings are really Shakespeare's 'meaning'."—Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: a Study in Meaning, (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928. Third Edition. Middleton, CN: Wesleyan UP, 1973) 136–37
Saturday, 07 December 2019
"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."—Robert Frost
Monday, 09 December 2019
"Change breaks the brittle."—Jan Houtema
Monday, 09 December 2019
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work."—John Gall
Although known as "Gall's Law" to software development gurus like Grady Booch and Ken Orr, Gall was a pediatrician and primarily interested in systems that support child rearing. in 1975 he wrote Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail. I'm inclined to think that it's applicable to situations where those in power want to replace gradually developed economic or political systems with "more efficient" versions.
Monday, 09 December 2019
"The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades."—Paul Graham
Tuesday, 10 December 2019
"It is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little."—Franz Kafka Letter to my Father
Saturday, 14 December 2019
"… Implicit Materialism—that is, an underlying, unexpressed, conception that material causes explain all things—survives. Men do not commonly say, nowadays, as many did not so long ago, that man is to be explained as a machine or a set of chemical formulae. They no longer, in any great numbers, deny flatly the presence the presence of immaterial factors in the universe. But when they speak of life or death, or when they propose an explanation of anything, they imply, often without knowing it, that all of which they talk is material: that life is a material process, death but the cessation of that process, and that any human occasion—for instance any social development—can be completely understood when it is stated in terms of material things."—Hilaire Belloc: Survivals and New Arrivals
Tuesday, 17 December 2019
"I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package, I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it."—Joan Didion, excerpt from a commencement address, University of California, Riverside, 1975
Tuesday, 17 December 2019
"At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is, so to speak, His name written in us…"—Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
Wednesday, 18 December 2019
"Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth."—William S. Burroughs
Thursday, 19 December 2019
"It is a testament to the genius of the software industry that it has neutralized the hardware gains of the last half century."—John Gregg
Friday, 20 December 2019
"To understand the method which Pascal employs, the reader must be prepared to follow the process of the mind of the intelligent believer. The Christian thinker—and I mean the man who is trying consciously and conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminated in faith, rather than the public apologist—proceeds by rejection and elimination. He finds the world to be so and so; he finds its character inexplicable by any non-religious theory; among religions he finds Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to account most satisfactorily for the world and especially for the moral world within; and thus, by what Newman calls 'powerful and concurrent' reasons, he finds himself inexorably committed to the dogma of the Incarnation. To the unbeliever, this method seems disingenuous and perverse; for the unbeliever is, as a rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally concerned (in modern terms) to 'preserve values.' He does not consider that if certain emotional states, certain developments of character, and what in the highest sense can be called 'saintliness' are inherently and by inspection known to be good, then the satisfactory explanation of the world must be an explanation which will admit the 'reality' of these values. Nor does he consider such reasoning admissible; he would, so to speak, trim his values according to his cloth, because to him such values are of no great value. The unbeliever starts from the other end, and as likely as not with the question: Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible? and this he would call going straight to the heart of the matter. Now Pascal's method is, on the whole, the method natural and right for the Christian; and the opposite method is that taken by Voltaire. It is worthwhile to remember that Voltaire, in his attempt to refute Pascal, has given once and for all the type of such refutation; and that later opponents of Pascal's Apology for the Christian Faith have contributed little beyond psychological irrelevancies. For Voltaire has presented, better than any one since, what is the unbelieving point of view; and in the end we must all choose for ourselves between one point of view and another."—T.S. Eliot
Sunday, 22 December 2019
"I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest."”—Ralph Ellison, /Invisible Man /
Tuesday, 24 December 2019
"In the new environment (post WWII, ed.), being “working class" became steadily less of a purchasing-power distinction and more one of culture, affiliation, and educational limits on upward mobility. A plumber might make more than an advertising copywriter per hour, but the copywriter could reasonably hope to run his own ad agency—or at least a corporate marketing department—some day. The plumber remained "working class" because, lacking his A-level, he could never hope to join the managerial elite.
"At the same time, state socialism was becoming increasingly appealing to the managerial and upper classes because it offered the prospect not of revolution but of a managed economy that would freeze power relationships into a shape they were familiar with and knew how to manipulate. This came to be seen as greatly preferable to the chaotic dynamism of unrestrained free markets—and to upper-SES people who every year feared falling into poverty less but losing relative status more, it really was preferable."—Eric Raymond
Thursday, 26 December 2019
“Joseph Carter, in the article cited above, finds it natural to say, without blinking an eye, 'As a materialist, I think …'—as if 'material' and 'matter' were perfectly routine concepts. Yet I doubt whether any philosopher of science today would be so rash as to venture a confident definition of 'matter'. Certainly our technological know-how does little to lend it content.
"Much the same can be said of the terms often considered basic to science, such as energy, space, force, and time. Feynman himself remarked in his famous lectures that 'we have no knowledge of what energy is'. Anyone who senses the disquieting shadow of the unknown enveloping our science will hardly pronounce upon the true nature of the 'material' world. To do so might only suggest a tendency toward insecure bluster and a habit of uncritical thinking."—Stephen L. Talbott
Sunday, 29 December 2019
"Well over two thousand years ago, science as we know it was offered to the West with a warning tag attached to it: Use this, but don't be tricked by it. And of course, impatient little children that we are, we tore off the tag and ignored the warning."—Peter Kingsley, Reality (2003).
Tuesday, 31 December 2019
Quotes from Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site:
"The most courageous decision that you can make each day is to be in a good mood."—Voltaire
"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final."—Rainer Maria Rilke
"A good marriage is one in which each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal, and this is true also of our friendships."—Anne Lamott
"Things usually happen around us, not to us."—Unknown, found on Reddit
"We suffer more in imagination than in reality."—Seneca
Sun, 07 Jan 2018
We do this in two ways:
The first is refusing to be clear and precise about what the mission is. Avoiding specifics about what we hope to accomplish and for whom. Being vague about success and (thus about failure).
After all, if no one knows exactly what the mission is, it's hard feel like a failure if it doesn't succeed.
The second is even more insidious. We degrade the urgency of the mission. We become diffuse. We get distracted. Anything to avoid planting a stake and saying, "I made this."
It's possible to spend 7 hours and 52 minutes out of an eight-hour day in doing nothing but hiding from the mission. And it's exhausting.
Wed, 10 Jan 2018
"Because God is not a finite object over against you as a subject, you cannot simply turn away towards 'something else.'; He is the ground and end of all desire and knowledge as such, the Good in itself. You cannot choose or not choose God the way you would choose or not choose a cup of coffee. You desire anything because of your original desire for God as the transcendental Good and Beautiful; you know anything because of your original intellectual appetite for God as the transcendental Truth as such. Even in desiring to flee God, you are desiring God as the ‘good end" you seek in godlessness. He is inescapable because all being, goodness, unity, truth, and beauty simply are God in their transcendent truth, and because a rational nature is nothing but an infinite dynamic orientation towards that transcendent end. The natural will, as Maximus says, can will only God. Don't think of God as a candidate in a political race, whom you could simply reject and be done with; he is the original and final act of your every discrete act of desire. And, in the ages, since God is all and there is literally nothing beyond him, the natural will is always seeking its natural supernatural end. Simply said, God is not an object of desire; he is the end that makes desire.”—David Bentley Hart
Wed, 10 Jan 2018
"It is almost universally assumed today that becoming a Christian means in essence the adoption of a new set of beliefs or the initiation of a new mode of behaviour. A Christian would be defined as one who 'believes in Christ' or 'worships Christ' or 'tries to follow Christ's teaching.' Now it is far from my purpose to belittle either Christian dogma or Christian ethics. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that to define the essence of Christianity in terms of belief or of practice involves the neglect of two principles that are fundamental to all sound theology. The former of these is that the act of God precedes and is presupposed by the acts of man: 'Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us'; 'Ye have come to know God, or rather to be known of God.' The second is that what a being is precedes what it does; our actions are a consequence of what we are operari sequitur esse. It will follow from this that the Christian should be defined not in terms of what he himself does, but of what God has made him to be. Being a Christian is an ontological fact, resulting from an act of God."—E. L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian, and the Church p.77
Mon, 15 Jan 2018
I will relax and not get tense. I will have no fear, because everything will work out in the end. I will learn soul-balance and poise in a vacillating, changing world. I will claim God's power and use it because if I do not use it, it will be withdrawn. As long as I get back to God and replenish my strength after each task, no work can be too much.
Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may relax and that God's strength will be given to me. I pray that I may subject my will to God's will and be free from all tenseness.
From the original AA Meditation book, Twenty-Four Hours a Day, by Richmond Walker
Sun, 21 Jan 2018
"Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end"—John Lennon, or maybe Paulo Coelho, or maybe someone else.
Tue, 23 Jan 2018
"What did Jesus want to say to us? What does he want from us today? How does he help us to be faithful Christians today? It is not ultimately important to us what this or that church leader wants. Rather, we want to know what Jesus wants. When we go to hear a sermon, his own word is what we want to hear. This matters to us not only for our own sakes, but also for all those who have become estranged from the church and its message. It is also our opinion that if Jesus himself and Jesus alone with his word were among us in our preaching, then quite a different set of people would hear the word and quite a different set of people would again turn away from it."—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
Thu, 25 Jan 2018
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter 4.
Thu, 25 Jan 2018
“A man, walking through the forest saw a fox that had lost its legs, and wondered how it lived. Then he saw a tiger come up with game in its mouth. The tiger ate its fill and left the rest of the meat for the fox. The next day God fed the fox by means of the same tiger.
“The man began to wonder at God's greatness and said to himself, 'I too shall just rest in a corner with full trust in the Lord and He will provide me with all I need.'
"He did this for many days, but nothing happened, and he was almost at death's door when he heard a voice say, 'O you who are in the path of error, open your eyes to the truth! Stop imitating the disabled fox and follow the example of the tiger'"—Ernie Kurtz
Sun, 28 Jan 2018
"If the gospel demands that we renounce this world . . . , then the simple thing to do is: do it!"—Sören Kierkegaard, Journals
Tue, 30 Jan 2018
They will declare: Every journey has been taken.
You shall respond: I have not been to see myself.
They will insist: Everything has been spoken.
You shall reply: I have not had my say.
They will tell you: Everything has been done.
You shall reply: My way is not complete.
You are warned: Any way is long, any way is hard.
Fear not. You are the gate—you, the gatekeeper.
/And you shall go through and on . . ./—Alexandros Evangelou Xenopouloudakis
Courtesy of Gerard VanDerleun
Thu, 01 Feb 2018
"A state cannot be constituted from any chance body of persons, or in any chance period of time. Most of the states which have admitted persons of another stock, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by sedition."—Aristotle, Politics
Thu, 01 Feb 2018
“The hard part isn't coming up with a new idea.
The hard part is falling out of love with the old idea.
That's why editing work is so difficult. In order to make the new thing, to make the old thing better, you need to destroy it first.
Situation switching, acting as if, loving the idea enough to sketch it out and then caring enough to stop loving it… that's where the tension often lies.”—Seth Godin
Thu, 01 Feb 2018
"If you've got an infestation of rats, you call the guy to come in," she says.
“You don't care if his crack's showing. You don't care if he's swearing.
"You don't care if he's got tobacco-stained teeth. You want the rats taken out."
—from BBC's take on why Michigan flipped for Trump in 2016.
Thu, 08 Feb 2018
Quod minimum, minimum est,
Sed in minimo fidelem esse,
magnum est.
What is a little thing, is (just) a little thing,
But to be faithful in a little thing,
is a great thing.—St. Thomas Aquinas De Doctrina Christiana, IV,35
Mon, 12 Feb 2018
"IF Americans can be divorced for 'incompatibility of temper,' I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible."—G.K. Chesterton: What's Wrong with the World.
Thu, 15 Feb 2018
A "critic" is a person who creates nothing and thereby feels qualified to judge the work of creative people. There is logic in this; he is unbiased—he hates all creative people equally.—Robert A. Heinlein
Sat, 17 Feb 2018
"A great deal of false history was written, by people who never strayed north of London, about working-class hardship in those parts. Yes, there was plenty, but what we get from the entrepreneurs of socialism is twisted to their agitprop needs. Rewriting the history, to make it more true, makes another nice hobby; and in the course of it we discover that the ugliest of the capitalists often did less damage than the philanthropists."—David Warren
Sat, 17 Feb 2018
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
—William Butler Yeats, 1919
Sun, 18 Feb 2018
"IF I had only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride. The more I see of existence, and especially of modern practical and experimental existence, the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis; that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven."—G.K. Chesterton: If I Had Only One Sermon To Preach
Wed, 21 Feb 2018
Sometimes the light's all shining on meOther times I can barely seeLately it occurs to meWhat a long, strange trip it's been.—Hunter/Garcia
Steven Pressfield posted this today:
“I have a theory about the Hero's Journey. We all have one. We have many, in fact. But our primary hero's journey as artists is the passage we live out, in real life, before we find our calling.
“The hero's journey is the search for that calling.
“It's preparation.
“It's initiation (or more precisely, self-initiation).
“On the hero's journey, we see, we experience, we suffer. We learn.
“On our hero's journey, we acquire a history that is ours alone. It's a secret history, a private history, a personal history. No one has it but us. No one knows it but us. This secret history is the most valuable possession we hold, or ever will hold. We will draw upon it for the rest of our lives.
“The hero's journey ends when, like Odysseus, we return home to Ithaca, to the place from which we started. We wash up on shore. We have survived. We have come home.
Now what?”
Well, what? There's a calling, that calling, the one that's mysteriously been whispering and talking and yelling and screaming obscenities at you/me all along. Only now, it's explicit. It's there, not "out there" but "right there" and there's some question but not much and not enough to put it off anymore.
Now what?
It's been a long, strange trip, and it isn't over. Hell, it's not much more than just started.
Now what?
Thu, 22 Feb 2018
"As we should be genuinely sorry for tramps and paupers who are materially homeless, so we should be sorry for those who are morally homeless, and who suffer a philosophical starvation as deadly as physical starvation."—G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, Nov. 24, 1934.
With a hat tip to the GKCDaily blog…
Thu, 22 Feb 2018
"O MAN, scorn not that which is admirable in you! You are a poor thing in your own eyes, but I would teach you that in reality you are a great thing! . . . Realize what you are! Consider your royal dignity! The heavens have not been made in God's image as you have, nor the moon, nor the sun, nor anything to be seen in creation. . . . Behold, of all that exists there is nothing that can contain your greatness."—St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335—c. 395): In Cantica, Homily 2.
Thu, 22 Feb 2018
The monologue that runs in our brain is loud. It's heavy-metal loud compared to the quiet signals we get from the rest of the world.
All day, every day, that noise keeps going. It's the only voice that has seen everything we've seen, believes everything we believe. It's the noise that not only criticizes every action of every other person who disagrees with us, but it criticizes their motives as well. And, if we question it, it criticizes us as well.
Is it any wonder that projection is more powerful than empathy?
When we meet people, we either celebrate when they agree with us or plot to change or ignore them when they don't. There's not a lot of room for, "they might have a different experience of this moment than I do."
That noise in our head is selfish, afraid and angry. That noise is self-satisfied, self-important and certain. That noise pushes intimacy away and will do anything it can to degrade those that might challenge us.
But, against all odds, empathy is possible.
It's possible to amplify those too-quiet signals that others send us and to practice imagining, even for a moment, what it might be like to have their noise instead of our noise.
If we put in the effort and devote the time to practice this skill, we can get better at it. We merely have to begin.
:CUSTOMID: you-cannot
Fri, 23 Feb 2018
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.
You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
—-William Boetcker, 1873-1962
:CUSTOMID: what-you-believe
Sat, 24 Feb 2018
"I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency, self-respect, and whatever courage may be required, is to know where you, yourself, stand. That is, to have in words what you believe, and are acting from."—William Faulkner
:CUSTOMID: that-within-me
Sat, 24 Feb 2018
But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:
My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
And my frame perish even in conquering pain,
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire:
Something unearthly, which they deem not of,
Like the remembered tone of a mute lyre,
Shall on their softened spirits sink, and move
In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.
—Lord Byron; Childe Harold's Pilgrimage CXXXVII
:CUSTOMID: the-inquiry-of-truth
Mon, 26 Feb 2018
"The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief in truth, which is the enjoying of it—is the sovereign good of human nature."—Sir Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Alban
:CUSTOMID: it-happened-again
Sat, 03 Mar 2018
Well, to be perfectly honest, it keeps happening, but that's another story. Or maybe not—maybe that's the whole story. Yeah, that's the ticket, but since I turned 70 a while back, and the Web prefers haiku to War and Peace, we'll have to see The Big Picture in bite-sized pieces.
The bottom-line is that [redacted] has been on my butt for a year or more to stop solely studying and meditating and avoiding and studying some more and start writing it down. And I've been writing blips and blabs—mostly memories of times when It Happened sixty or fifty or forty or, well you get the idea years ago so they don't sink back into the oh-so-understandable distraction (and Distraction with a capital-D is Satan's favorite tactic with this one).
And yesterday, backed into a corner in a small room, I promised [redacted} that I'd repurpose this place to do just that, and so here it is. Begun. Take that.
:CUSTOMID: true-terror
Mon, 05 Mar 2018
:CUSTOMID: it
Mon, 05 Mar 2018
So, that was a bit coy, I must admit. "It happened again…" and then a month of silence. Were anyone reading this it would be just too, too. But enough of that.
There actually is a there there, or an it to it, and if it were easy to nail it, or to name it, I'd have done it already. The thing is, it isn't a thing. It doesn't even have a name, not properly so, at least. Not that it doesn't get talked about, but the point is, talking about it isn't the point. You remember the Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye, don't you? Sure, you do. They're (Nick and Betty Jo Bialowski, whom everyone knows as Nancy) in the Old Same Place and Nancy says, "We can't talk here" and Nick says, "Wadda ya mean blurfp mlurg…oh, you're right, we can't talk here." Now, since Nick and Nancy were just characters in a radio script, they could just go into the Chapel and they could talk. Here in Consensus Reality, there are things that we can't talk about at all. Well, actually they aren't really "things" but, the point is, words fail me. They fail you, too, but that's just the way things are.
So, there is an "It" to the "It" but we can't name it or even give it a useful definition. So, what's the point? Why throw down so many words talking about something that I can't talk about? And why have so many others over so many ages done the same? I can't speak for them, but in my case (not including [redacted] insisting that I should write) it's because it just won't stop, or just won't go away, or just isn't over yet. See what I mean? It's hard to even explain why I'm talking about something that I can't talk about!
So, now what? Seems to me that the next best thing is to talk about the side effects of it's breaking in on my otherwise bland and very ordinary life. Just a few examples – it's currently a seventy-year-old story, and it has been busting in at least since I was eight or nine.
What does it do ? I'm eight or nine years old – it's 1955 or '56, there's a new World Book Encyclopedia in the little, built-in bookshelf next to the fireplace in the living room, and I'm exploring those Adult Books. It might have been Durant's "The Mature Mind" or maybe a book of quotes. What I remember is a page with mostly white space, just the words "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao" credited to Lao Tzu. When I was eight or nine it was Tao with a T, not a D the way it was in my later incarnation as a "Hippie seeker after truth," but it managed to smack me up side of the head. I didn't know it then, but it had broken in. That's a hint, but not the whole picture. Let's try another example.
What does it really do? It's late summer, 1969, and I'm in Georgetown waiting for the machinist who balances parts for our (Bill Scott Racing's) engines to finish so that I can get back to the shop. He says he'll be an hour or so, and I head out to poke around in the head shops along M Street. Georgetown Leather Design turned into a really posh, expensive outfit eventually, but in those days it was sandals, rolling papers and other long-haired weirdo paraphernalia. My jeans had holes in both front pockets from carrying keys and I couldn't keep any change smaller than a quarter, so when I saw a pocket-sized leather pouch for $3 in the window, I was sold. I kept that pouch in my right-front pants pocket so long that it finally disintegrated, but there was another item in that window that caught my eye and had an even longer influence on me. The second Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1969, $4 was deep black with a paste-up image of the "whole earth" and the moon taken from Apollo flights. Apollo 11 had either just landed or was just about to take off and my brief stint at IBM's Apollo support office had left me hyper-aware of the moon shot. I probably wouldn't have done more than notice the image otherwise, but since I was going inside to buy the pouch, I thumbed through the tabloid-sized magazine/book/catalog and was hooked. I met Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Weiner, Carl Jung, Hannah Arendt, Joseph Campbell, Olaf Stapleton, Rene Dubos, and that's just the first few pages of that first WEC (and as far as I could I bought them all). In 1971 there was an article about George Dyson and his baidarkas, with a sidebar about British Columbia and becoming a landed immigrant. In April, 1972 we were there, and the rest is history. Did it have anything to do with the crankshaft and flywheel not being ready, and Georgetown Leather Design putting the pouch and the WEC both in the window, or was that a coincidence (whatever that means)?
Over those sixty years between that first taste of Lao Tzu and today, those bursting-ins or it (or those coincidences) have happened often enough for my imagining that there's a pattern. It happens, I'm exposed to a new metaphor for thinking about it, and then Life Happens and I return to unadulterated Consensus Reality until the next time that it happens. I say "a new metaphor" because it's pretty clear now from the neurosciences that each of us lives in a "constructed reality" – that while we each seem to be constructing a reality that's close enough to our friends' and neighbors' that we can all talk about "blue" and most of the time safely drive our cars, what we see and hear and apprehend with our senses is largely created "inside" us. Insofar as we are our "consciousness" we operate within a limited frequency of electromagnetic energy, such that we sense things as being "hard" and "wet" and "bright" and "dark" and a second is a very short time and a year is very long. What exists outside those limits, and those limits as they are expanded by our various physical and mental tools, are things that for the most part "we can't talk about" because our languages have been developed for other purposes. And yet…and yet at least some of us are certain that there are other…what, other worlds? No, that's too "consensus reality" – other dimensions? No, that's still too…something. There's something else, something more, and we use metaphor to talk about what we can't talk about because we have no choice and that's the best we can do.
Whatever that is, I can't help but feel/believe/think/whatever-verb/ that it's It in some respect and it breaks through now and then. Maybe one more (extended) example:
It's 1990. I had my last drink a year ago and a friend suggested that I might like Emmet Fox's Sermon on The Mount – that it had been a staple of AA since the earliest days. I got a copy, got most of his other books, and was greatly influenced by them for many years. It's almost twenty years later – 2009. I describe Fox's interpretation of the Garden of Eden story to Valerie, and she asks, "How did he know that?" I decide to research Fox's backstory, and discover Thomas Troward. Fast forward another nine years to this February. I've looked at Troward's "Bible Mystery, Bible Meaning" again and wonder whether anyone else is thinking about what he said about what Jesus taught. Googling "Troward Christianity" I discover a site devoted to a fifty-two-year-old book The Shining Stranger and whoops! It's happened again. Or I'm desperately trying to find meaning in an otherwise absurd world – am I right, or is Sartre?
:CUSTOMID: our-times
Sat, 10 Mar 2018
"War, by imposing hardships and controls on daily life, produces an aggressive mentality and degrades people's character according to their wretched conditions. The result in this case was a general state of public disorder in all countries. As time went on and the earlier atrocities became an accepted fact, the later ones were marked by refinements of technique and novel methods of retaliation. Even words lost their proper meanings and were changed to suit current propaganda . . . . family ties were broken for the sake of party loyalty. . . . Relations between people were governed not by the security of established customs but by the prospect of selfish gain in defiance of the law."
Does this sound familiar? Is this an apt description of our lifetime and that of our parents (or grandparents, that Greatest Generation)? These words were written by Thucydides to describe Athens as it warred with Sparta (ca. 400 B.C.).
:CUSTOMID: trivial-and-great-truths
Mon, 12 Mar 2018
"There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true."—Niels Bohr
:CUSTOMID: authoritative
Mon, 19 Mar 2018
Christianity has projected Jesus as the long-suffering, meek, and gentle "lamb of God." The Gospels present another picture: Gentle and compassionate, yes, but the Jesus of these pages is predominantly strong, candid, and above all authoritative. As Harold points out:
At the time, people did not marvel so much at what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount as at the authority with which He spoke:
"…the people were astonished at his doctrine; for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes."
Today, "scribes" have rewritten these words. In The New English Bible, read the translation thirteen scholars offer to men whose souls are starved, and scared, and scarred—it is a timid bit:
". . . he taught with a note of authority."
The translators write in the tenor of their age—a "note" of faith in anything, a "note" of authority in anything, is all that is left. But because of this, the twentieth century is a time pregnant with the possibility of grasping truth, for now man must seek the authority within himself.
—-Winifred Babcock, Jung-Hesse-Harold, p. 35, quoting Preston Harold, The Shining Stranger, p. 256
:CUSTOMID: pure-simple-truth
Mon, 19 Mar 2018
"The truth is rarely pure, and never simple."—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
:CUSTOMID: five-stages
Tue, 20 Mar 2018
“Every human being, if he lives his normal span, suffers five traumatic events that serve to expand his consciousness and increase his need to know the truth of himself in being: the trauma of
:CUSTOMID: empathy-not-conscience
Fri, 23 Mar 2018
"In man, empathy, not conscience, is the resonator. But conscience has a vital role to play. Just as a satellite must have a continuous sensing of its motion and attitude in space, keeping itself horizontal in relation to the surface of the earth below if it is to perform its complicated maneuvers, so man must have a continuous sense of “right or wrong," regardless of the compassion his empathy arouses within him as he views good or evil in this world. Conscience, which is of the closed world of the past, acts as an "inertial reference package" to balance the course empathy takes.”—Preston Harold, The Shining Stranger, p. 161
:CUSTOMID: it-happened-again-1
Tue, 3 Apr 2018
Well, to be perfectly honest, it keeps happening, but that's another story. Or maybe not—maybe that's the whole story. Yeah, that's the ticket, but since I turned 70 a while back, and the Web prefers haiku to War and Peace, we'll have to see The Big Picture in bite-sized pieces.
The bottom-line is that [redacted] has been on my butt for a year or more to stop solely studying and meditating and avoiding and studying some more and start writing it down. And I've been writing blips and blabs—mostly memories of times when It Happened sixty or fifty or forty or, well you get the idea years ago so they don't sink back into the oh-so-understandable distraction (and Distraction with a capital-D is Satan's favorite tactic with this one).
And yesterday, backed into a corner in a small room, I promised [redacted} that I'd repurpose this place to do just that, and so here it is. Begun. Take that.
:CUSTOMID: it-1
Thu, 5 Apr 2018
So, that was a bit coy, I must admit. "It happened again…" and then a month of silence. Were anyone reading this it would be just too, too. But enough of that.
There actually is a there there, or an it to it, and if it were easy to nail it, or to name it, I'd have done it already. The thing is, it isn't a thing. It doesn't even have a name, not properly so, at least. Not that it doesn't get talked about, but the point is, talking about it isn't the point. You remember the Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye, don't you? Sure, you do. They're (Nick and Betty Jo Bialowski, whom everyone knows as Nancy) in the Old Same Place and Nancy says, "We can't talk here" and Nick says, "Wadda ya mean blurfp mlurg…oh, you're right, we can't talk here." Now, since Nick and Nancy were just characters in a radio script, they could just go into the Chapel and they could talk. Here in Consensus Reality, there are things that we can't talk about at all. Well, actually they aren't really "things" but, the point is, words fail me. They fail you, too, but that's just the way things are.
So, there is an "It" to the "It" but we can't name it or even give it a useful definition. So, what's the point? Why throw down so many words talking about something that I can't talk about? And why have so many others over so many ages done the same? I can't speak for them, but in my case (not including [redacted] insisting that I should write) it's because it just won't stop, or just won't go away, or just isn't over yet. See what I mean? It's hard to even explain why I'm talking about something that I can't talk about!
So, now what? Seems to me that the next best thing is to talk about the side effects of it's breaking in on my otherwise bland and very ordinary life. Just a few examples – it's currently a seventy-year-old story, and it has been busting in at least since I was eight or nine.
What does it do ? I'm eight or nine years old – it's 1955 or '56, there's a new World Book Encyclopedia in the little, built-in bookshelf next to the fireplace in the living room, and I'm exploring those Adult Books. It might have been Durant's "The Mature Mind" or maybe a book of quotes. What I remember is a page with mostly white space, just the words "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao" credited to Lao Tzu. When I was eight or nine it was Tao with a T, not a D the way it was in my later incarnation as a "Hippie seeker after truth," but it managed to smack me up side of the head. I didn't know it then, but it had broken in. That's a hint, but not the whole picture. Let's try another example.
What does it really do? It's late summer, 1969, and I'm in Georgetown waiting for the machinist who balances parts for our (Bill Scott Racing's) engines to finish so that I can get back to the shop. He says he'll be an hour or so, and I head out to poke around in the head shops along M Street. Georgetown Leather Design turned into a really posh, expensive outfit eventually, but in those days it was sandals, rolling papers and other long-haired weirdo paraphernalia. My jeans had holes in both front pockets from carrying keys and I couldn't keep any change smaller than a quarter, so when I saw a pocket-sized leather pouch for $3 in the window, I was sold. I kept that pouch in my right-front pants pocket so long that it finally disintegrated, but there was another item in that window that caught my eye and had an even longer influence on me. The second Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1969, $4 was deep black with a paste-up image of the "whole earth" and the moon taken from Apollo flights. Apollo 11 had either just landed or was just about to take off and my brief stint at IBM's Apollo support office had left me hyper-aware of the moon shot. I probably wouldn't have done more than notice the image otherwise, but since I was going inside to buy the pouch, I thumbed through the tabloid-sized magazine/book/catalog and was hooked. I met Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Weiner, Carl Jung, Hannah Arendt, Joseph Campbell, Olaf Stapleton, Rene Dubos, and that's just the first few pages of that first WEC (and as far as I could I bought them all). In 1971 there was an article about George Dyson and his baidarkas, with a sidebar about British Columbia and becoming a landed immigrant. In April, 1972 we were there, and the rest is history. Did it have anything to do with the crankshaft and flywheel not being ready, and Georgetown Leather Design putting the pouch and the WEC both in the window, or was that a coincidence (whatever that means)?
Over those sixty years between that first taste of Lao Tzu and today, those bursting-ins or it (or those coincidences) have happened often enough for my imagining that there's a pattern. It happens, I'm exposed to a new metaphor for thinking about it, and then Life Happens and I return to unadulterated Consensus Reality until the next time that it happens. I say "a new metaphor" because it's pretty clear now from the neurosciences that each of us lives in a "constructed reality" – that while we each seem to be constructing a reality that's close enough to our friends' and neighbors' that we can all talk about "blue" and most of the time safely drive our cars, what we see and hear and apprehend with our senses is largely created "inside" us. Insofar as we are our "consciousness" we operate within a limited frequency of electromagnetic energy, such that we sense things as being "hard" and "wet" and "bright" and "dark" and a second is a very short time and a year is very long. What exists outside those limits, and those limits as they are expanded by our various physical and mental tools, are things that for the most part "we can't talk about" because our languages have been developed for other purposes. And yet…and yet at least some of us are certain that there are other…what, other worlds? No, that's too "consensus reality" – other dimensions? No, that's still too…something. There's something else, something more, and we use metaphor to talk about what we can't talk about because we have no choice and that's the best we can do.
Whatever that is, I can't help but feel/believe/think/whatever-verb/ that it's It in some respect and it breaks through now and then. Maybe one more (extended) example:
It's 1990. I had my last drink a year ago and a friend suggested that I might like Emmet Fox's Sermon on The Mount – that it had been a staple of AA since the earliest days. I got a copy, got most of his other books, and was greatly influenced by them for many years. It's almost twenty years later – 2009. I describe Fox's interpretation of the Garden of Eden story to Valerie, and she asks, "How did he know that?" I decide to research Fox's backstory, and discover Thomas Troward. Fast forward another nine years to this February. I've looked at Troward's "Bible Mystery, Bible Meaning" again and wonder whether anyone else is thinking about what he said about what Jesus taught. Googling "Troward Christianity" I discover a site devoted to a fifty-two-year-old book The Shining Stranger” and whoops! It's happened again. Or I'm desperately trying to find meaning in an otherwise absurd world – am I right, or is Sartre?
Enough said for now.
:CUSTOMID: what-about-thomas-troward
Thu, 12 Apr 2018
It's been a week, and by now I've learned that if something doesn't get posted at least once a week, it might well be months before I "find time" to write any more. At the end of last week's post, I mentioned how Valerie's innocent question nine years ago started me on a trek from Emmet Fox to Thomas Troward, and then in February, to "Preston Howard" and The Shining Stranger. This week's mini-topic is "what was it about Thomas Troward that has kept my interest lo these many years?" The crux of it is found in his Edinburgh Lectures, his first published work based on a series of lectures he gave in 1904 in, wait for it, Edinburgh. In his foreword to the original edition, he says:
This book contains the substance of a course of lectures recently given by the writer in the Queen Street Hall, Edinburgh. Its purpose is to indicate the Natural Principles governing the relation between Mental Action and Material Conditions, and thus to afford the student an intelligible starting-point for the practical study of the subject.
Couched in language appropriate to an educated Brit of the time, it's an attempt to provide a rational (i.e., non-magical) yet non-scientistic description of that basic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?"
Because it was written in 1904, it mentions "æther" and describes "atoms" as the basic components of matter. Because it is not scientistic, it offers a description of the act of creation, in fact the ongoing act of creation, without falling back on any form of mythology or other religious explanation. Because it is rational, it recognizes that "creation" implies a "creator" of some sort.
IMHO, a reader who is comfortable reading British English of the period and willing to exert some effort at open-mindedness might find The Edinburgh Lectures at least interesting. And if they do, they might also find Troward's other writings interesting as well.
Which, I suppose, is a longish way of saying "I found Troward's work interesting because it is a way to think about God, Creation and Jesus' message and what we know about physics, astronomy, biology, anthropology, and psychology all at once." Of course, Troward was using 1904 scientific metaphors, just as "Preston Howard" was using 1967 scientific metaphors, but that's for another day/week. And I'll get to why "Preston Howard" is in quotes later, too.
:CUSTOMID: make-politics-as-local-as-possible
Fri, 13 Apr 2018
"THE men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He's the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
—G.K. Chesterton: Cleveland Press interview, March 1, 1921.
:CUSTOMID: the-gospels
Sat, 14 Apr 2018
No concept of Jesus can be definitive if it is contrived by arbitrary dealing with the Gospels, choosing to affirm certain reports that support one's theory while dismissing others as falsifications, elaborations, interpolations, or errors deriving from the disciples' loss of memory. Casting doubt upon the veracity and reliability of the Gospels renders one report and one Gospel as suspect as another, because it is possible to make a case for accepting or rejecting any part of any Gospel. Thus, a theory resting upon the unreliability of the Gospels perforce becomes as suspect and questionable as the author holds the Gospels to be.
Whatever may be said about the rest of the Bible, if a concept of Jesus is to have a firm base it must rest upon the conviction that the four Gospels are honest reports, albeit each offers a subjective view. Therefore, in THE SHINING STRANGER, concomitant with the attempt to draw a true picture of Jesus, the integrity of the four Gospels is dealt with—for example, how each could be so contradictory and different from the others, yet true, and how the memory of each disciple could have been adequate to the task of recording Jesus' actual words. Here, it may be pointed out that no one can say when the disciples recorded their reports—information as to the earliest copies in circulation is all that is available. No doubt some errors in copying and omissions occurred, but such as these do not obliterate or seriously distort the full body of the record of Jesus as given in the four versions, in which the testimony of His mother is incorporated.
It is unlikely that the disciples deliberately falsified or contrived the story of Jesus' life or His words. If this were the case, the reports would be less contradictory, certain unfavorable passages would have been omitted, and certain gaps would have been filled. It is doubtful, also, that the early Christians would have suffered martyrdom to found a religion based upon their own inventions. For these and other reasons given in the text of this book, the author accepts the four Gospels as basically honest reports, and regards every word in every Gospel as given data with which one must deal in formulating as true and complete a picture of Jesus as it is possible to obtain.
— "Preston Howard", The Shining Stranger p. -1
:CUSTOMID: you-take-what-you-need
Thu, 19 Apr 2018
…and you leave the rest? Actually, that hasn't been true in my case. Looking back, I've been more likely to put the rest aside for another day, but knowing how way leads on to way…
Enough! Now I'm just being cute. Or am I? Actually, what I've noticed in recent years is that I have had the habit of "trying on" different worldviews, different perspectives, different orthodoxies/heterodoxies, lived/immersed myself with each for a longer or lesser time, then moved on. "Leave the rest?" More like "leave some and take some" with lots put on hold for later.
Perhaps the image from "The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci" is a good one – a gradually enlarged structure of rooms and hallways, crammed with furniture of various styles and ages, each with drawers and slots filled with "facts," images and metaphors sitting quietly, some moldering, some busily breeding and evolving, ready to be pulled out and used to build a new…something.
Is that so different from anyone else's experience? Does anyone start off down one road, outfit their memory palace with one chest of drawers, and pass by every other road that diverges in the yellow/green/brown wood without so much as a glance? Or do some folks take some of those divergent roads, but only upon orders from another?
I don't know. I may be the strange one. My ex-brother-in-law Daniel was sure that I was an alien.
:CUSTOMID: spiritual-add
Fri, 20 Apr 2018
It occurred to me that I have "Spiritual ADD"—that I'll get an inspiration that bounces all over, then gets lost.
And, since they are real inspirations (at least, sometimes) they'll come back, somewhat evolved, perhaps decades later. "David, it's Me again. Remember this…"
From a note that I left to myself, 6 April, 2017
:CUSTOMID: fate
Mon, 23 Apr 2018
"I DO NOT believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act." — G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News. (29 April 1922)
:CUSTOMID: fate-again
Mon, 23 Apr 2018
"THE point is not that if we go on as we are we shall collide with some frightful fate. The point is rather that unless we make a magnificent effort, our frightful fate will be to go on as we are." — G.K. Chesterton, Daily News, (Feb. 24, 1906)
:CUSTOMID: faith
Mon, 23 Apr 2018
Faith suppresses
No doubt.
Rather,
Illumines
Walking along paths
Commonly traveled without
Mindfulness.
Faith brings us
Deep
Into the essential
Superficiality of
Existence.
It mocks our
Seriousness.
It smiles at our
Sufferings
Through shared tears.
Yes, I suppose we
Can live without it,
But why?
To what purpose
Suppress
Doubt?
Rather
Plunge
Deep,
Drink of despair of
Meaning
That we may
Have
Faith.
Found again today on a sheet torn from a steno pad—almost certainly written in the late 1980s or early 1990s. I have no memory of writing it, but but it's in my scrawl with more than a few misspellings, and since there are many false starts and strike-outs, it's almost certainly not transcribed from someone else's work.
Not sure what to make of it, thirty years on, but I'll stand by it.
Addition Friday, 13 March, 2020—Just found in my yellow 'Rite-In-The-Rain' Cruisers Transit Book, dated 12/02/1977. The steno pad sheet was probably original, likely then copied into the notebook soon after. Nestled between many passages copied from Merton's No Man Is An Island to provide some context. Living at 9 Mile, expecting a child who turned into Jesse, before we went to Maryland for a few months.
:CUSTOMID: what-precedes
Mon, 30 Apr 2018
“Either way you believe, it seems to me that this world has been marvelously constructed (however you perceive that word) in such a manner as to scientifically defy the detection and absolute definition of its actual origin.
"Forget time. Forget matter. What precedes them is what really counts. Who or what invented this place is the sole question. Regardless of your first premise, no one can marshal any definitive and irrefutable physical evidence of the First Cause that has set this puzzle before us. No one can point to the glowing neon sign in the sky that spells it out in capital letters, with footnotes available. Which means each side is operating on faith, of some kind. Which makes for a Holy War, for all concerned." — Ianto Watt
:CUSTOMID: the-newman-option
Thu, 03 May 2018
Dear Other Reader; This week has been consumed by a greater than usual series of family crises and other developments, of interest to DAS and a very few others, with the result that cut-and-paste rather than write is the best that he can do. Maybe later…
"John Henry Newman, on the occasion of his elevation to the Cardinalate in 1878 made a short address that should be read and recommended repeatedly because of its prescience. Newman saw that the danger to the Church was not the public refutation of its principles but its subtle transformation into a humanitarian project in which the highest virtue was kindness or the desire to avoid pain for oneself and others, the highest concern the goods of this life to which a certain commercial morality was intrinsic, and theology a kind of religious atheism. He considered this more dangerous than such obviously incarnation-denying heresies as Arianism, because it would seem to be a kind of fulfillment of Christianity for modern times, providing a kind of quasi-religious object for sentiment while ignoring the purpose of the religion of Christ, which is to make us worthy Citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven who now live in Christ and who will live with Him forever." — Dr. James Patrick
:CUSTOMID: needlework
Sat, 05 May 2018
"Saint Luke was a painter, by some accounts, and by others a physician. I think he was both, and more, from acquaintance with his writings. But certainly a physician. When Matthew and Mark recount the saying of Jesus, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to pass through the gates of heaven, they use the Greek term for a household sewing needle. But Luke instinctively uses the term for a surgeon's suturing needle. Case closed, to my mind."—David Warren
:CUSTOMID: this-place
Thu, 10 May 2018
Another Thursday, another MWP (minimum weekly post). You, my sole other reader, already know that things are heating up around here – we closed on the single-story house that we've known for years that we'd eventually need. Given that it's a foreclosure and has been empty for ten years, it'll be a while before we have to pack up and move in, and it's going to be a busy summer. And, like so many of us, the busier I get the more open I seem to be to, whatever, the muse, organizing principles, call it what you will. Like when I had to write to a deadline for money, when, sitting there at the keyboard, the words stopped coming, even the least little exercise – the start of a walk – would pull the next chunk of text or story line out of the air.
So it was during this morning's walk. Not that it came shazam unexpected out of the blue, more that it congealed a little more so that it can be explained blog-post style. Well, not totally explained – it's a threescore-and-ten story, after all. In fact, it's more like the start of the Prologue before the Introduction, explaining that while the point of the story isn't to tell my story (as much as I love to tell my stories), things are the way they are because they got this way, and how they got this way is at least-off-and-on the story of me.
My parents, admirable folks both, wrote their memoirs in their last years. Great Depression survivors, WWII veterans, parents of five, teachers and much more, their detailed stories of what their childhoods were like, their school years, early marriage, the War Years, etc. are fascinating as a picture of life as it was and is no more, and my similar story may be of interest to my kids and their kids and etc., but that isn't what I foresee.
The memories that have been pushing their way into my meditations this past year or so seem more, in retrospect, like breadcrumbs dropped to mark, not where I came from as a way to get back home, but rather as markers to where I'm going, perhaps as a way to get back home. I've already mentioned some of them when I tried to explain what that "It" is that keeps happening over and over – how the reference to the True Tao or the Whole Earth Catalog fell into my life. So, maybe, since (as Shakespeare said in the Tempest and as someone carved into the marble over the front door to my high school) the past is prologue, I'll string together some of those breadcrumbs to get things started.
But not just now…
:CUSTOMID: education-and-training
Thu, 31 May 2018
Also, science (intentionally uncapitalized) and engineering:
"Education is what, when, and why to do things. Training is how to do it.
"In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it."—Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (1997)
:CUSTOMID: a-brief-note
Thu, 31 May 2018
To my other reader, acknowledging my absence…
Been trying to get into a single-story home, for the sake of our sadly abused knees, etc.
Succeeded three weeks ago, been consumed with "next steps" since then.
Posting may or may not continue to be erratic, but then it's always been like that, hasn't it?
:CUSTOMID: criticism-and-the-web
Thu, 31 May 2018
"When I first prepared this particular talk… I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn't been done. And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web. Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It's kind of a Gresham's Law—bad money drives the good money out of circulation. Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can't criticize anything."—Alan Kay, How Simply and Understandably Could The 'Personal Computing Experience' Be Programmed?
:CUSTOMID: the-language-of-nature
Thu, 31 May 2018
"We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature."—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
:CUSTOMID: powercorruption
Thu, 31 May 2018
“'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' We've all seen this quote of Lord Acton. Most people agree with it. I don't. Like many (if not most) great quotes, it is dead wrong. Why? Because it's exactly backwards, that's why…
"Let's reconstruct Acton's sentence in a way that reflects the truth of the matter (and energy) of power. Put the word 'man' in place of 'power', and then move the word 'power' behind the word 'corrupt(s)'. Now let's see what it should look like if we're truly seeking the truth: '(Man) tends to corrupt power, and absolute (Man) corrupts power absolutely'."—Ianto Watt, Lord Acton's Apostasy
:CUSTOMID: the-problem
Sat, 02 Jun 2018
"The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying."—Gilles Deleuze
:CUSTOMID: joyces-reality
Mon, 18 Jun 2018
"Beckett wrote that Joyce believed fervently in the significance of chance events and of random connections. 'To Joyce reality was a paradigm, an illustration of a possibly unstateable rule… According to this rule, reality, no matter how much we try to manipulate it, can only shift about in continual movement, yet movement limited in its possibilities…' giving rise to 'the notion of the world where unexpected simultaneities are the rule.' In other words, a coincidence such as sitting down to dinner with James Joyce is actually just part of a continually moving pattern, like a kaleidoscope. Or Joyce likes to put it, a 'collideorscape'"—Gabrielle Carey, Breaking Up With James Joyce
:CUSTOMID: we-must-sin
Mon, 18 Jun 2018
"According to Ellman, Joyce's view of sin was influenced by Hermann Suderman's play Magda: ‘Magda's philosophy of life may well have helped to shape Joyce's. As she says, “And one thing more, my friend—sin! We must sin if we wish to grow. To become greater than our sins is worth more than all the purity you preach."”"—Gabrielle Carey, Breaking Up With James Joyce
Is the nature of reality binary, dual? Is it in some way Gnostic, in that good deeds have those side effects of evil, and evil deeds have some atom of good? What does Preston Howard have to say about that?
:CUSTOMID: speaking-of-wealth-or-power
Thu, 28 Jun 2018
"The only man who should speak of wealth or power is one who did not extend his hand when they were within his reach"—Don Colacho (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
:CUSTOMID: the-artists-role
Wed, 27 Jun 2018
“The artist's role is to complete the circle that started with Adam and Eve. Her charge is to lead us back to Eden, not in the state of unconsciousness and dependence in which we stood before the Fall, but in full awareness of ourselves and our station, our mortality, and of the greater world around and within us.
"The artist's role is to make the unconscious conscious."—Steven Pressfield
:CUSTOMID: poetry
Fri, 29 Jun 2018
"John Keating: We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, 'O me! O life! . . . of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless . . . of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer. That you are here—that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”—/Dead Poets Society (1989)/ h/t Epsilon Theory (Dr. Ben W. Hunt)
:CUSTOMID: bloody-noses
Wed, 04 Jul 2018
"If there were more bloody noses, there'd be fewer wars."—/Hagbard Celene/ in The Illumninatus! by R. Shea and R. A. Wilson
:CUSTOMID: absurdum
Wed, 04 Jul 2018
"For the first time in history, we have reached a stage of absurdity in which a reductio ad absurdum is no longer viable as a rhetorical maneuver, for there is nothing so absurd that everyone recognizes it as such."—Theodore Dalrymple
History covers a long time and a lot of absurdity, but this is pretty clearly true—least in my lifetime.
:CUSTOMID: god-the-father
The, 12 Jun 2019
"GOD is therefore truly the Father, inasmuch as He is Father of truth; He does not create the Son from outside Himself, but generates Him from His own substance. That is to say, being wise, He generates Wisdom, being just, Justice, be eternal, the Eternal, being immortal, the Immortal, being invisible, the Invisible. Because He is Light, He generates Brightness, and because He is Mind, the Word."—Rufinus: Commentary on the Apostles' Creed, 4. (5th cent.)
:CUSTOMID: the-artists-role-1
Wed, 27 Jun 2018
“The artist's role is to complete the circle that started with Adam and Eve. Her charge is to lead us back to Eden, not in the state of unconsciousness and dependence in which we stood before the Fall, but in full awareness of ourselves and our station, our mortality, and of the greater world around and within us.
"The artist's role is to make the unconscious conscious."—Steven Pressfield
:CUSTOMID: kings-silverware-and-olympus
Tue, 17 Jul 2018
"The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long."—David Mamet
:CUSTOMID: horrible-old-person
Sat, 21 Jul 2018
"I've become a horrible person in my old age. And that goes way beyond falling asleep so hard that I slept through my alarm and left my poor long-suffering blog fans waiting for hours in vain. No, I've become one of those terrible people that Heinlein talks about who tell the unvarnished truth in social situations."—Sarah Hoyt
Mea Culpa—if not "the unvarnished truth" at least my honest opinion.
:CUSTOMID: call-it-george
Wed, 01 Aug 2018
"To write, you have to—to an extent—understand evil. You don't have to fondle, pet it, or call it George."—Sarah Hoyt
:CUSTOMID: the-problem-of-evil
Tue, 07 Aug 2018
"NO EVIL as such can be desirable, either by natural appetite or by conscious will. It is sought indirectly, namely because it is a consequence of some good. This is the rule for every type of appetite. A natural force works for a form, not the absence of form. Yet one form may extrude another. A lion kills for food, that means the death of the deer; a fornicator wants pleasure, and incurs the deformity of sin."—St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica, I, q. 19, a. 9.
:CUSTOMID: deciding
Mon, 13 Aug 2018
"How people decide, in what direction they decide, is something we cannot (and should not try to) control—although we should try to influence for Good in whatever honest and personal fashion presents itself."—Dr. Bruce Charlton
:CUSTOMID: improvement
Mon, 20 Aug 2018
"There's only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved member: yourself."—Albert Jay Nock
:CUSTOMID: the-true-ruling-power
Tue, 21 Aug 2018
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."—Edward Bernays Propaganda 1928
:CUSTOMID: understanding
Tue, 21 Aug 2018
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"—Upton Sinclair
:CUSTOMID: servitude
Tue, 21 Aug 2018
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution."—Aldous Huxley Brave New World
:CUSTOMID: de-mortuis-nihil-nisi-bonum
Sun, 26 Aug 2018
τὸν τεθνηκóτα μὴ κακολογεῖν—Chilon of Sparta
:CUSTOMID: the-plural-of-anecdote
Thu, 30 Aug 2018
"The plural of anecdote is data."—Fred R. Shapiro
I may have posted this before, but while trying to clean out my office before moving (yet again) I came across the scrap of paper that I'd jotted it down on when I first heard it, and wanted to be sure that I got it here with proper attribution before I tossed the paper.
:CUSTOMID: paint-it-black-er-red
Fri, 31 Aug 2018
"If you can't hide it, paint it red."
:CUSTOMID: enjoying-progress
Fri, 31 Aug 2018
"Why, he asked, are certain societies or groups content to enjoy the fruits of progress, while affecting to despise the conditions that promote that progress?"—V. S. Naipaul
:CUSTOMID: sometimes-a-cigar
Sun, 02 Sep 2018
"Sometimes analysis is simply denial with more words. Sometimes, as a frustrated student in a first-year literature course always mutters, the text just means what it says it means."—Andrea Long Chu
:CUSTOMID: minority-rule
Sun, 02 Sep 2018
It suffices for an intransigent minority—a certain type of intransigent minority—to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
:CUSTOMID: science
Sun, 02 Sep 2018
"We don't even know if it's scientifically possible for a non-American to go to the moon. It's never happened."—Frank J. Fleming
:CUSTOMID: love-of-liberty
Tue, 04 Sep 2018
"The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty—and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies."—H. L. Mencken
:CUSTOMID: models
Mon, 10 Sep 2018
"Yet my explicit metaphysical foundation is that ultimate reality is personal, not abstract—my bottom line is that reality is made up of beings (variously alive and conscious beings). Abstractions are therefore merely models—therefore (being models) always simplified and always incomplete and always not-true… no matter how expedient or useful in limited circumstances."—Dr. Bruce Charlton
:CUSTOMID: homo-economicus
Mon, 15 Oct 2018
"Theological error is at the root of all other errors of the Modern Age. The idea that man's most fundamental nature is that of a homo economicus, a rational agent whose chief end is material possession, is the common basis of both economic liberalism or capitalism and socialism. At its heart it is a denial of the classical and Christian idea that man has a spiritual as well as a physical nature and that the spiritual ought to rule the animal nature. The idea that most or all of human suffering can be eliminated by reorganizing society economically, socially, and politically is rooted in the ancient heresy of Pelagianism for it is a denial of the fact that since the Fall, human nature itself has been afflicted with the flaw of Original Sin, which is the true source of all human suffering, an affliction for which there is no economic, social, or political cure."—Gerry T. Neal
:CUSTOMID: the-aim-of-the-high
Mon, 15 Oct 2018
"The aim of the High is to remain where they are."—George Orwell, 1984
:CUSTOMID: god-does-not-ask-us
Mon, 15 Oct 2018
"When the Church emerged from the catacombs after Constantine won the battle of the Milvan Bridge and the Church was no longer persecuted, there came freedom and, worse, respectability. So with this freedom came terrible danger, a danger that is now convulsing the Church, namely what might be called the Imperialization of the Latin West. The pagans poured into the Church. This was a new organization, albeit sacred, where future generations could climb the ladder to power and wealth.
From the moment that the Roman Church, and to a certain extent the Byzantine Church, took on the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire as a model for its working structures, there was a foothold for the Devil. In the hands of a Gregory the Great it was safe, but when popes, cardinals, and bishops became worldly and ambitious then there was more than a whiff of danger, there were darkness and a terrible thing. What was this terrible thing? It was nothing more and nothing less than the re-crucifying of Christ, not by out and out sinners such as gangsters, murderers, and heartless dictators, but by Popes, bishops, and cardinals, and by far, far too many priests infatuated with ambition, wealth, power, and sensuality.
We must reflect profoundly on the fact that the great St. John Chrysostom and the utterly gentle Robert Bellarmine thought that most bishops go to Hell. We priests are in no better state, as witnessed by that other great saint, Alphonsus Liguori, who said that most priests go to Hell. Today the great temptation among Catholics, and the mainstream Protestant churches, is the First Temptation of Christ; namely, to turn stones into bread. As long as we are involved solely in the social Gospel, then that is all that is needed. This Utopian style Christianity best incarnated in Liberation Theology is exactly what Christ speaks against, when Satan tempts Him to assuage his hunger by turning stones into bread. We must in our materialistic age reflect on Christ's response to Satan, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" (Matthew 4: 4 ). When we become engrossed on feeding and clothing the World's population and getting everyone jobs, noble as this effort is, it is not enough. There is only one thing that is enough, and that is that we give ourselves totally and utterly to God, holding nothing back. However, because we are human most of us fail miserably, and before long there are programmes put into place that are anything but Christian.
God does not ask us to be successful, he asks us to be faithful."—An Anonymous Hermit Priest
:CUSTOMID: hell-is-empty
Mon, 15 Oct 2018
"Hell is empty, And all the devils are here."—William Shakespeare The Tempest, Act I Scene 2
:CUSTOMID: drowning-in-thought
Mon, 22 Oct 2018
He took me into his room, which smelt strongly of tobacco, and took out a book from one of the heaps, turned the leaves and looked for the passage.
"This is good, too, very good," he said, "listen to this: 'A man should be proud of suffering. All suffering is a reminder of our high estate.' Fine! Eighty years before Nietzsche. But that is not the sentence I meant. Wait a moment, here I have it. This: 'Most men will not swim before they are able to.' Is not that witty? Naturally, they will not swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won't think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what's more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown."—Hermann Hesse Steppenwolf
:CUSTOMID: the-marriage-at-cana
Wed, 31 Oct 2018
Reading this blog post today from Bruce Charlton and following interior link after link, I found some interesting "links" to Thomas Troward's thoughts on the "process" of Gd desiring a "conversation" and beginning the creation by "becoming" a dyad—a second Person. Since we're in the middle of actually moving stuff into the new house, there's no time to say more, just marking this with the thought that I'll be back.
:CUSTOMID: what-embitters-the-world
Wed, 21 Nov 2018
"WHAT embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism. It is comparatively of little consequence that you occasionally break out and abuse other people, so long as you do not absolve yourself. The former is a natural collapse of human weakness; the latter is a blasphemous assumption of divine power. And in the modern world, where everybody is quarrelling about the urgent necessity of peace, nobody notices how this notion has really poisoned the relations of nations and men."—G.K. Chesterton: "On Bright Old Things and Other Things," in Sidelights on New London and Newer New York.
:CUSTOMID: trusting-the-process
Mon, 26 Nov 2018
I love how just following the basic plan for hyperspace, link to link to yet another tenuously related source, I end up discovering new resources, new people, often long dead, whose thoughts all tie again into that "eternal golden braid."—Email note to self last Tuesday, triggered by whatever linked me to Bruce Charleton, the Inklings, Owen Barfield. Whee!
:CUSTOMID: enlightenment-the
Mon, 03 Dec 2018
"Ah well, the bones of the Enlightenment lie buried in a shallow grave somewhere along the Western Front. It had some nice ideals, but left us living rapt in the spell of Reason."—Gerard VanDerleun
The image is Goya's "The sleep of reason breeds monsters"…
:CUSTOMID: and-the-second-is-like-unto-it
Mon, 03 Dec 2018
"Nearly all human personal or emotional success depends upon being able to give and to accept love, and nearly all human personal failure reflects an inability to do so."—Peter Breggin, M.D.
:CUSTOMID: democracy
Fri, 14 Dec 2018
“Stephen's mind wandered away on the subject of authority, its nature, origin, base or bases: authority whether innate of acquired, and if acquired then by what means? Authority as opposed to mere power, how exactly to be defined? Its etymology: its relation to auctor. From these thoughts he was aroused by an expectant silence opposite him, and looking up he saw Dutourd and Vidal looking at him across the table, their forks poised: reaching back in his mind he caught the echo of a question: 'What do you think of democracy?'
'The gentleman was asking what you thought of democracy, sir,' said Vidal, smiling.
'Alas I cannot tell you, sir,' said Stephen, returning the smile. 'For although it would not be proper to call this barque or vessel a King's ship except in the largest sense, we nevertheless adhere strictly to the naval tradition which forbids discussion of religion, women, or politics in our mess. It has been objected that this rule makes insipidity, which may be so; yet on the other hand it has it uses, since in this case for example it prevents any member from wounding any other gentleman present by saying that he did not think the policy that put Socrates to death and that left Athens prostrate was the highest expression of human wisdom, or by quoting Aristotle's definition of democracy as mob rule, the depraved version of a commonwealth.'”—Patrick O'Brien, The Wine-Dark Sea
:CUSTOMID: medieval-minds
Mon, 17 Dec 2018
"But if we scrutinize the men of the Middle Ages more closely, contrasting them with ourselves, we shall find something yet more significant. And it is this, that they identified themselves with their thoughts. This is of the utmost importance. It is this that is at the bottom of all that strikes a modern observer as most incomprehensible and alien about the men of that time—for example, their intolerance. Identifying the thought with the words, they felt that truth could be wholly embodied in creed and dogma, and identifying the self with the thought, they were—quite rightly—intolerant. A wrong thought could strike them as far more immoral than a wrong action."—Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age p. 54
An example of a key "Barfieldian" concept—that we are profoundly different from our ancestors, that their experience of both external and interior realities was incomprehensibly different from ours.
:CUSTOMID: walking-about
Mon, 17 Dec 2018
"Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."—G. C. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
:CUSTOMID: the-message
Sat, 22 Dec 2018
"Many Catholics have forgotten that the Church is established for the forgiveness of sins and the proclamation of the gospel, and believe instead that the Church is here to make the world a better place, and that this needs to be accomplished by all sorts of educational, social welfare, political and even revolutionary activities. “Preachers, priests and prelates have decided Jesus' kingdom really is of this world after all and have exchanged the gospel of salvation for the gospel of political activism. They are more concerned with saving the planet than saving souls. “Tell it straight. This is the message of anti-Christ."—Fr. Dwight Longnecker
:CUSTOMID: profination
Sat, 22 Dec 2018
“St. Mary's Church in Dublin, Ireland, built at the beginning of the 18th century and closed in 1964, was abandoned for a number of years until it was bought and transformed into a restaurant and bar in 1997. The transformation was given the Dublin City Neighborhood Awards 2006, where it won first prize in the category of Best Old Building. Now it goes by the name of The Church Bar and Restaurant.
"The travel destinations section of The Telegraph (London) notes that, at the historic heart of Assisi, Italy, you may enjoy the Nun Assisi Relais and Spa and Museum: “This stylish convent-turned-design-hotel enjoys a quiet spot in the historical heart of Assisi. An inspired renovation not only transformed the 13th-century structure into a sleek, minimalist haven; but also uncovered the ruins of a Roman amphitheater—now home to an atmospheric ‘spa museum".”
"Can ecclesiastical buildings be recycled, re-purposed, or transformed without profanation?"—Ines A. Murzaku
:CUSTOMID: back-again
Sat, 21 Jan 2017
There was a time, years ago, when there were fairly frequent, short posts here, mostly of the TOTD (Thought of the Day) variety—pithy sayings, sentences or paragraphs gleaned from the day's Internet prowling or the evening's reading. Then the day came when I realized that, for the most part, those pithy sayings tended to be, well, possibly impolitic given the nature of my business arrangements (my primary client being the Federal Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, or CSAT, in essence not only Federal bureaucrats but almost entirely social workers). So, like a prudent if not courageous undercover something-or-other not at all progressive or even liberal (unless maybe Classical Liberal), I censored myself. Or, as Archie Bunker would say, "Stifle yerself!"
So, enough deep background. I see that I told this story in more detail just a few months ago here so have a look if you're interested. Today's point, and I do have one, is that FaceBook and I are having a partial parting of the ways. And this is to tell why.
First, the parting is partial because FB is still the only place to keep up with Grandkids and Great-Grandkids, particularly the ones in British Columbia. And other folks I give a damn about. So, I'll be checking in off and on, liking and saying nice things about other folks posts now and then. Just trying to not see too much and saying as little as I can. It's just too depressing—the alternative reality that a lot of my friends and family are living in isn't somewhere I want to visit.
So, to wrap this one up, I just might be putting stuff of interest, and even the occasional output from my fevered brain, here. We'll see.
:CUSTOMID: twitter-and-me-and-very-strange-business-decisions
Sat, 21 Jan 2017
I had a Twitter account very early on. It's deleted now, and all the related emails that I've gotten from Twitter, so I'm not sure exactly when, but sometime in 2008. I "tweeted" maybe twice or three times before this summer, then I discovered The Strobist site and got excited about moving beyond "available light" photography. The Strobist has an amazing amount of information, including detailed tutorials, on using off-camera flash. Great resource, strongly recommended, but this is about Twitter. Sort of.
David Hobby, aka "The Strobist", decided some time ago to disable comments and move all communications with his viewers to Twitter, so I got on board to thank him for his generosity, and to ask a few questions. He responded generously and quickly every time, and all was right with the world. Since I'm not an habitual Tweeter (twitterer?) that was it until last week, when I got Yet Another weekly email from Twitter telling me how much I was missing by not logging in and tweeting. It was a slow day (they almost all are now) and David and Joe McNally and some other folks whose names I didn't recognize were bemoaning the demise of everything good an bright in the world as we know it, or as we knew it, or something like that. And scrolling back, it had been like that pretty much since the election (yes, That election). Like on Facebook. Except I don't get any pictures of my Great Grandsons on Twitter. So I shit-canned it. Nuked from orbit. Over after all these years.
And, I do get that lots of folks really do believe the kinds of things that they're saying, that it's the attack of the Nazi Zombies from Mars or something and the end of all the goodness and sweetness from life. I get that, although I can't comprehend how they get there, or seriously believe that it's at all rational or sane.
What I don't get is people conflating the kind of talk that goes with this, implicitly or explicitly calling people who voted "the wrong way" Nazis or the like, with their business identity. How anyone who is the public face for their business or product, like David or Joe, who want people to pay to attend their photography training events, or actors or singers who want the public to attend their concerts or plays or movies, can feel at ease alienating half the American public? I'm not inclined to take part in boycotts at the drop of the hat—I am inclined to do things like eat more often at Chick-fil-a or buy from L. L. Bean if they are being shamed and boycotted for expressing an entirely normal opinion or supporting one or the other side in an election. I'm just like that.
I'll go back to The Strobist site and give him my pageviews, and buy from him anyway, but I don't feel the same about doing it that I did before. I very well might buy a ticket to a movie that Meryl Streep is in (although I just might stay away from a movie that Ashley Judd is in after seeing her performance at the Womens' March today) if it's Really Special, but it's going to have to be a Really Special one.
I may be the only person who feels this way, and if so, it won't mean anything to anybody's business. I couldn't afford to attend David or Joe's seminar in Dubai anyway, and I don't go to very many movies at all, and I'm not part of Beyonce's crew, or whatever, so they won't feel the loss. But it seems like they really don't care, and that's what I don't get.
:CUSTOMID: just-a-thought
Sun, 22 Jan 2017
Spent a minute looking through FaceBook, making sure that everyone I know who chose to exercise their freedom of assembly in the city today made it out okay, and posting a picture I took of my granddaughter Sophia playing her violin. It occurred to me how nice it is that so many people feel free to say really disrespectful, vulgar things about the President of the United States in a public setting without fear of being called "Racist" and possibly losing their jobs. Just a thought.
:CUSTOMID: septuagesima
Mon, 13 Feb 2017
"It will be one of the confusions of the damned to see that they are condemned by their own reason, by which they claimed to condemn the Christian religion."—Pascal, Pensée # 562.
"A new species of philosopher is appearing; I venture to baptize these philosophers with a name not without danger in it. As I divine them, as they let themselves be divined—for it pertains to their nature to want to remain a riddle in some respects—these philosophers of the future, in many respects, might rightly, but perhaps also wrongly, be described as attempters. This name itself is in the end only an attempt, and, if you will, a temptation."—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, # 42.
Seen at The Catholic World Repor linked from David Warren's Essays in Idleness
:CUSTOMID: the-head-comes-loose
Mon, 13 Feb 2017
One character I think of—having known a long time—provides an especially poignant example. Long ago I suspected there was something wrong with him. He was "on my side," but I could never trust him. And this because, he always thought ahead. "He has more brains than he can handle," I once said of him. A very full head and a rather empty chest. He had no spiritual anchor, no faith beneath his clouds. His principles were mere thoughts: fluff passing over. Even his religious views were "solidly pragmatic," i.e. easily revised. He could not understand even his own body, because he was all brain. His views were in a constant state of "evolution": becoming ever more titched.
The head comes loose, when the heart is not screwed in.
Again from David Warren's Essays in Idleness
:CUSTOMID: truth-to-power
Tue, 14 Feb 2017
When you tell people what they want to hear, you don't have to be too careful about premises, facts, and conclusions.—Angelo M. Codevilla
What do we call those people in a society who are licensed or allowed to use violence?
No hints this time. We call these the people in charge.—William M. Briggs
I found the Codevilla quote at Mike Flynn's The TOF Spot, and the Briggs quote at this Stream page
:CUSTOMID: when-i-was-a-kid
Tue, 14 Feb 2017
Dan Gurney, Nurburgring 1000Km, 1959.
Ferrari 250 Testa Rosa 58, Scuderia Ferrari, #5, 5th place.
Won by the Moss/Fairman David Brown Aston Martin DBR1.
:CUSTOMID: just-to-be-clear
Tue, 14 Feb 2017
Apropos all the recent fuss: 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f), as currently posted by the Government Printing Office is the enabling statute (check it for yourself):
"(f) Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate."
This is what is called "black letter law" and to this High School Graduate seems pretty straightforward, but I'd be pleased to listen to any argument to the contrary that doesn't smell like politics.
:CUSTOMID: unintended-irony-department
Tue, 14 Feb 2017
Wikipedia has barred citations of The Daily Mail after editors of the online encyclopedia concluded Wednesday that the British tabloid is "generally unreliable."
Of course, it's doubly ironic that some won't understand the irony…
:CUSTOMID: heresy
Wed, 15 Feb 2017
"There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokeable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry."—Mark Twain
"When they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon—they little knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it!"—Mark Twain
He is also known to have used Bad Words in his published works, which have been widely banned and declared Badthink. Memory hole material.
:CUSTOMID: beware
Wed, 15 Feb 2017
"Beware of manufacturing a God of your own, a God who is all mercy, but not just— a God who is all love, but not holy—a God who has a Heaven for everybody, but Hell for none—a God who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and bad in eternity. Such a god is an idol of your own, as true an idol as was ever moulded out of brass or clay. The hands of your own fancy and sentimentality have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and besides the God of the Bible there is no god at all."—The Right Reverand John C. Ryles, Bishop of Liverpool (1880-1900)
:CUSTOMID: regard-for-power
Thu, 16 Feb 2017
"Somewhere in The Power Broker I write that regard for power means disregard of those without power. I mean, we're really talking about justice and injustice."—Robert Caro
I found a wonderful interview with author Robert Caro on the Paris Review site about "The Art of Biography"—linked to, from all places, Hacker News! That's the WWW, good stuff is where you find it. I love surprises.
:CUSTOMID: illegitimi-non-carborundum
Fri, 17 Feb 2017
I've been gradually working my way through all of the Heinlein corpus, and a year or so back I ran across his list of "things every adult should know" and one that I wasn't close on was a foreign language. I'm confident that my two years of High School Spanish wouldn't cut the mustard. So, I chose Latin.
It's been slow slogging, mainly due to distractions and inertia, but I'm making a little progress, so I thought that I should have been able to make more sense of "illegitimi non carborundum" than I did. "Illegitimi" and "non" were easy, but "carborundum" while familiar as a brand name didn't appear in any form in any of the Latin dictionaries or word lists that I could find.
Google saved the day—it's a joke, and one apropos today for any of us old-fashioned folk. "Don't let the bastards grind you down."
:CUSTOMID: why-become-a-journalist
Sat, 18 Feb 2017
"I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to depend on the press for my information."—Christopher Hitchens
:CUSTOMID: the-enlightenment-contra-grace
Sat, 18 Feb 2017
"The Enlightenment is always wrong, because its ultimate goal is to expose. Grace, by contrast, is founded on truth, because it covers a multitude of sins. What God once and for all does not wish to know should never become the object of human knowledge and investigation."—Hans Urs von Balthasar
Once again, courtesy of David Warren.
:CUSTOMID: polluted-vehicles
Sun, 19 Feb 2017
"Nothing can be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."—Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 14 June 1807
Quoted today by the President at a rally in Melbourne, Florida.
:CUSTOMID: miracles-again
Mon, 20 Feb 2017
"And I dare say the first time you saw a man raised from the dead you might think so too." He giggled unconvincingly behind the smiling mask. "Oh, it's funny, isn't it? It isn't a case of miracles not happening—it's just a case of people calling them something else. Can't you see the doctors round the dead man? He isn't breathing any more, his pulse has stopped, his heart's not beating: he's dead. The somebody gives him back his life, and they all—what's the expression?—reserve their opinion. They won't say it's a miracle, because that's a word they don't like. Then it happens again and again perhaps—because God's about on earth—and they say: these aren't miracles, it is simply that we have enlarged our conception of what life is. Now we know you can be alive without pulse, breath, heart-beats. And they invent a new word to describe that state of life, and they say science has disproved a miracle." He giggled again. ‘You can't get round them.”"—Graham Greene The Power and the Glory
Courtesy of William M. Briggs—Statistician to the Stars!
:CUSTOMID: history-and-leaves
Thu, 09 Mar 2017
If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree. ”• Michael Crichton
:CUSTOMID: luna
Wed, 15 Mar 2017
"The Moon is not a destination—it is a direction."–Mike Collins, astronaut
:CUSTOMID: simply-because-its-amusing
Thu, 16 Mar 2017
"Certain magazines have symposiums (I will call them ‘symposia" if I am allowed to call the two separate South Kensington collections ‘musea”)" – G. K. Chesterton
Amusing because it pokes at one of my own peccadilloes. Saying "peccadilloes" rather than "bad habits" deserves another clever poke at the same personal weakness, but it's too early and I've had too little coffee.
:CUSTOMID: straw-men
Fri, 21 Apr 2017
"Nothing burns as brightly as a straw man."—William M. Briggs (in re: those who are "against science")
:CUSTOMID: free-press-vs.-official-press
Thu, 04 May 2017
"WHEREVER I go, my first object, if I wish to find out the truth, is to get hold of the Free Press in France as in England, and even in America. But I know that wherever I get hold of such an organ it will be very strongly coloured with the opinion, or even fanaticism, of some minority. The Free Press, as a whole, if you add it all up and cancel out one exaggerated statement against another, does give you a true view of the state of society in which you live. The Official Press to-day gives you an absurdly false one everywhere. What a caricature—and what a base, empty caricature—of England or France or Italy you get in the"Times," or the "Manchester Guardian," the "Matin," or the "Tribune"! No one of them is in any sense general—or really national."—Hilaire Belloc: The Free Press, XI, B.
:CUSTOMID: am-i-a-bad-person
Fri, 05 May 2017
Just stopped into FB to post a silly picture. Couldn't help seeing the "Christians help the poor" and "If you don't love Obamacare you're a monster" pictures.
Almost posted something like "Somehow I can't make the leap from 'Christians should care for the sick and hungry' to 'Christians should make it illegal for other people to not give the Government their money to care for the sick and hungry" but I resisted the temptation (and avoided the firestorm).
Am I a bad person?
:CUSTOMID: a-sharp-moment-of-revelation
Fri, 05 May 2017
"ALL you that feel youth slipping past you and that are desolate at the approach of age, be merry; it is not what it looks like from in front and from outside. There is a glory in all completion, and all good endings are but shining transitions. There will come a sharp moment of revelation when you shall bless the effect of time"¦ All you that have loved passionately and have torn your hearts asunder in disillusions, do not imagine that things broken cannot be mended by the good angels.”—Hilaire Belloc: The Path to Rome.
:CUSTOMID: censorship-come-meet-the-new-boss
Tue, 09 May 2017
…the same as the old boss.
"AT present, it is not we that silence the Press; it is the Press that silencens us. It is not a case of the Commonwealth settling how much the editors shall say; it is a case of the editors settling how much the Commonwealth shall know." (Illustrated London News, Oct. 19, 1907)
"BUT the modern editor regards himself far too much as a kind of original artist, who can select and suppress facts with the arbitrary ease of a poet or a caricaturist." (ILN, Oct. 26, 1907)
"THE frivolous chatter is now all in public journalism." (ILN, Feb. 1908)
"THERE is no fear that a modern king will attempt to override the constitution: it is more likely that he will ignore the constitution and work behind its back. He will take no advantage of his kingly power: it is more likely that he will take advantage of his kingly powerlessness – of the fact that he is free from criticism and publicity. For the King is the most private person of our time. It will not be necessary for anyone to fight against the proposal of a censorship of the Press. We do not need a censorship of the Press. We have a censorship by the Press." (Orthodoxy, 1908)
"THE new method of journalism is to offer so many comments or, at least, secondary circumstances that there is actually no room left for the original facts." (ILN, Nov. 6, 1909)
"IT is by this time practically quite impossible to get the truth out of newspapers, even the honest newspapers." (ILN, Jan. 23, 1909)
"AND the papers are shouting louder and louder like demagogues, merely because their hearers are growing more and more deaf." (ILN, Dec. 8, 1928)
"WHAT I protest against is the prevailing fashion, in the Press and elsewhere, of parading all this perfectly natural indifference and ignorance as if it were a sort of impartiality." (ILN, Apr. 12, 1930) ~G.K. Chesterton
:CUSTOMID: the-best-words
Fri, 12 May 2017
"Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all."—Winston Churchill
:CUSTOMID: needles
Fri, 12 May 2017
"Frankly, I don't think you could have driven a needle up my sphincter using a sledgehammer."—Col. Barry Horne, F-117 pilot, on first mission over Baghdad
:CUSTOMID: secrecy
Fri, 12 May 2017
"The very word"secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it."—John F. Kennedy
:CUSTOMID: a-little-good-sense
Fri, 12 May 2017
"It is said that there is a technical term for people who believe that little boys and little girls are born indistinguishable and are molded into their natures by parental socialization. The term is 'childless.'"—Steven Pinker
:CUSTOMID: its-not-my-problem
Fri, 12 May 2017
But what if it was?
What if the apparently intractable cultural issues that you take for granted were instead seen as problems on your desk, things you could influence?
What if the rules others take for granted are seen by you and your team as standards you can change?
What if we take the responsibility instead of waiting for it to be offered?
From Seth Godin
:CUSTOMID: the-danger-of-books
Fri, 12 May 2017
"Directly above my head on the glass-topped coffee table are Doris's favorite books just as she left them…
Siddhartha
Atlas Shrugged
ESP and the New Spirituality
"Books matter. My poor wife, Doris, was ruined by books…, not by dirty books, but by clean books, not by depraved books but by spiritual books. God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places. My wife, who began life as a cheerful Episcopalian from Virginia, became a priestess of the high places…But books ruined her. Beware of Episcopal women who take up with Ayn Rand and the Buddha…A certain type of Episcopal girl has a weakness that comes on them just past youth, just as sure as Italian girls get fat. They fall prey to Gnostic pride, commence buying antiques, and develop a yearning for esoteric doctrine."—Walker Percy: Love in the Ruins
:CUSTOMID: men-have-forgotten-god
Wed, 17 May 2017
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.—Alexander Solzhenitsyn
:CUSTOMID: cold-civil-war
Thu, 18 May 2017
"Much of the heat in contemporary American politics comes from the attempt, principally from the Left but increasingly from the Right as well, to force the entire nation to live in precisely the same way with precisely the same values. Statesmanship should begin by questioning and moderating that tendency."—Angelo M. Codevilla
:CUSTOMID: let-them-paste-passwords
Thu, 18 May 2017
The British NCSC agrees with yours truly that those websites who prevent you, me and everyone else from pasting passwords (or using browser plug-ins that do it for us) in the name of "security" are in fact undermining security. I'm not always a fan of NCSC, but on this one they're 100% right on.
Read the report here.
:CUSTOMID: art-and-money
Wed, 24 May 2017
"When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money."—Oscar Wilde
:CUSTOMID: if-you-dont-read-books
Wed, 24 May 2017
"…the most suggestive thing I saw in America the past 18 months I actually think of an item in a hotel gift shop in southern Florida. It was a decorative kitchen towel, I think made locally. It bore these words: 'America, 2016.' Below that it said, 'Once we had Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash and Bob Hope. Now they're gone, and we're outta jobs, outta cash and outta hope. And below that it said,"Please Kevin Bacon, don't die."" – Peggy Noonan, at the Catholic University Commencement.
Clever line, but what's it got to do with reading? Well, follow the link and read the rest of her remarks—it's worth it!
:CUSTOMID: otherworldly-twits
Fri, 26 May 2017
"Do you wonder why the legacy media are such puzzled otherworldly twits? Why, for example, they had no idea what was happening in the recent election? Why they seem to know so very little about America or much of anything else?"Some thoughts from a guy who spent a career in the racket:
"Ask journalists when they were last in a truck stop on an Interstate, last in Boone, North Carolina or Barstow, California or any of thousands of such towns across the country. Ask whether they were in the military, whether they have ever talked to a cop or an ambulance crewman or a fireman. Ask whether they have a Mexican friend, when they last ate in a restaurant where a majority of the customers were black. Whether they know an enlisted man, or anyone in the armed services. Whether they have hitchhiked overnight, baited a hook, hunted, or fired a rifle. Whether they have ever worked washing dishes, harvesting crops, driving a delivery truck. Whether they have a blue-collar friend. Know what the Texas Two-Step is, have been in a biker bar.
"Now do you see why Trump surprised them?"—Fred Reed
:CUSTOMID: more-reed-on-todays-reporters
Fri, 26 May 2017
"Journalists are not stupid, running to well above average in intelligence. You could form a large chapter of Mensa by raiding newsrooms in Washington. However, with a fair few exceptions, they are not intellectuals, not contemplative, not studious. They are high-pressure fact-accountants, competitive, comfortable under tight deadlines, aggressive, combative, quick but shallow. This can be a serviceable substituent for stupid."—Fred Reed
:CUSTOMID: truth-essentially
Sat, 27 May 2017
"Sin is, in its essence, a renunciation of the truth."—Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger
:CUSTOMID: our-house
Sat, 27 May 2017
"we're not living in a two-story house with us on the bottom floor and God upstairs and that's it. Far more realistic is to realize that we're living in a skyscraper and that there are who knows how many dimensions of creation above us."—Mark Shea, at Archindy.org
:CUSTOMID: unthinkable
Sat, 27 May 2017
"IN a word, the world does not explain itself, and cannot do so merely by continuing to expand itself. But anyhow it is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything."—G.K. Chesterton: St. Thomas Aquinas, Chap. VII─The Permanent Philosophy.
:CUSTOMID: elections-matter
Sun, 28 May 2017
"We have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It's worse now, because capture of government is so much more important than it once was. There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time—not during most of your lifetimes, and for much of mine—and it will probably never be true again."—Jerry Pournelle
:CUSTOMID: wolves
Tue, 30 May 2017
"It is an act of charity to cry out against the wolf when he is among the sheep."—St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, Part 3, Ch.29
:CUSTOMID: laughing-at-honour
Tue, 06 Jun 2017
"We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."—C. S. Lewis
:CUSTOMID: heresy-1
Thu, 08 Jun 2017
"But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period."—G. K. Chesterton, "Heretics"
:CUSTOMID: a-great-man
Thu, 08 Jun 2017
"Whatever the word 'great' means, Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to think."—G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens
:CUSTOMID: adversus-haereses
Thu, 08 Jun 2017
"It would be futile to make a sketch of St. Thomas and conceal the fact that he fought with heretics; and yet the fact itself may embarrass the very purpose for which it is employed. I can only express the hope, and indeed the confidence, that those who regard me as the heretic will hardly blame me for expressing my own convictions, and certainly not for expressing my hero's convictions. There is only one point upon which such a question concerns this very simple narrative. It is the conviction, which I have expressed once or twice in the course of it, that the sixteenth-century schism was really a belated revolt of the thirteenth-century pessimists. It was a back-wash of the old Augustinian Puritanism against the Aristotelian liberality. Without that, I could not place my historical figure in history."—G. K. Chesterton Saint Thomas Aquinas—the Dumb Ox
:CUSTOMID: in-your-philosophy-horatio
Sun, 11 Jun 2017
"There can be no doubt that there is an essential relation between Christian revelation and certain fundamental natural truths. The existence of objective truth, the spiritual reality of the person, the difference between soul and body, the objectivity of moral good and evil, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, the existence of a personal God—all are implied by Christian revelation. Every word in the New Testament clearly presupposes these elementary truths. And any philosophy that denies them can never be accepted or tolerated by the Church."—Deitrich von Hildebrand, Trojan Horse in the City of God (p. 62)
:CUSTOMID: contagion
Fri, 23 Jun 2017
"There is nothing so contagious as holiness, nothing more pervasive than Prayer. This is precisely what the traditional Church means by evangelism and what distinguishes it from recruitment."—Fr. Martin Thornton, Pastoral Theology: A Reorientation
:CUSTOMID: belief
Sat, 24 Jun 2017
"I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."—George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism
:CUSTOMID: fantasies
Sun, 25 Jun 2017
"We say that it is in believing ages that you get men living in the open and dancing and telling tales by the fire. We say that it is in ages of unbelief, that you get emperors dressing up as women, and gladiators, or minor poets wearing green carnations and praising unnameable things. We say that, taking ages as a whole, the wildest fantasies of superstition are nothing to the fantasies of rationalism."—G. K. Chesterton, God and my Neighbour
:CUSTOMID: respect-and-fidelity
Sun, 25 Jun 2017
"Today, certainly it is important for us to show that same respect and fidelity to the Word of God, so as not to manipulate it to fit historical, political, or ideological circumstances, for the purpose of pleasing men and acquiring a reputation as a scholar or avant-garde theologian. . . . As Saint Paul says, 'We are not like so many [who] practice cunning or. . . tamper with God's word' (cf. 2 Cor 2:17; 4:2)."—Cardinal Robert Sarah, God or Nothing
:CUSTOMID: the-pagan-ideal
Sun, 25 Jun 2017
"My objection to Mr. Lowes Dickinson and the reassertors of the pagan ideal is, then, this. I accuse them of ignoring definite human discoveries in the moral world, discoveries as definite, though not as material, as the discovery of the circulation of the blood. We cannot go back to an ideal of reason and sanity. For mankind has discovered that reason does not lead to sanity. We cannot go back to an ideal of pride and enjoyment. For mankind has discovered that pride does not lead to enjoyment. I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past. I accuse Mr. Lowes Dickinson and his school of reaction in the only real sense. If he likes, let him ignore these great historic mysteries—the mystery of charity, the mystery of chivalry, the mystery of faith. If he likes, let him ignore the plough or the printing-press. But if we do revive and pursue the pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-completion we shall end—where Paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in destruction. I mean that we shall end in Christianity."—G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
:CUSTOMID: the-virtue-of-toleration
Tue, 27 Jun 2017
"There was a confused liberal notion that toleration was in some way a virtue in itself."—Hilaire Belloc, Essays of a Catholic
:CUSTOMID: in-which-case
Fri, 30 Jun 2017
"You can spend your own money on yourself in which case quality and price are paramount. You can spend your money on others in which case price is paramount and quality less so. You can spend others' money on you in which case you will have a fine lunch. Or you can spend other peoples money on other people in which case you have government."—Milton Friedman
:CUSTOMID: political-ideals
Mon, 03 Jul 2017
"Political ideals will vary according to men's views on human destiny. Those who are persuaded that the purpose of life is pleasure, or power, or honour, will reckon that State best arranged in which they can live comfortably, or acquire great wealth, or achieve great power and lord it over many. Others who think that the crowning good of virtue is the purpose of our present life will want an arrangement under which men can live virtuously and peaceably together. In short, political judgment will be settled by the sort of life a man expects and proposes to lead by living in a community."—St. Thomas Aquinas: Commentary on Aristotle's ‘Politics,” Book II, lect. 1.
:CUSTOMID: no-new-thing
Wed, 05 Jul 2017
"To say that the present is a time of change and upheaval, social, political and religious, is to state a truism so obvious as to invite ironic contradiction. The cataclysm through which we are passing is at once so vast in its dimensions and so profound in its penetration of individual life, that we may well shrink from looking to history for guidance on circumstances to which history itself affords no parallel. Yet it is no new thing for the established manners, customs and beliefs of men to be upset. In all such times of violent transition the same great problem of the reconciliation between old and new forces itself upon the judgement of mankind, and it should not be impossible to find in the lesser crises of the past principles of thought and action which may help us to deal with the gigantic perplexities of today."—Oliver Chase Quick, Essays in Orthodoxy 1916
:CUSTOMID: the-riddle-of-life
Thu, 06 Jul 2017
"The riddle of life is simply this. For some mad reason in this mad world of ours, the things which men differ about most are exactly the things about which they must be got to agree. Men can agree on the fact that the earth goes round the sun. But then it does not matter a dump whether the earth goes around the sun or the Pleiades. But men cannot agree about morals: sex, property, individual rights, fixity and contracts, patriotism, suicide, public habits of health—these are exactly the things that men tend to fight about. And these are exactly the things that must be settled somehow on strict principles. Study each of them, and you will find each of them works back certainly to a philosophy, probably to a religion."—G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age
:CUSTOMID: the-safety-of-antiquity
Fri, 07 Jul 2017
"What, then, shall a Catholic Christian do, if some small part of the Church cut itself off from the communion of the universal faith? What else but prefer the health of the whole body before the pestiferous and corrupt member? What if some new infection goeth about to corrupt, not in this case only a little part, but the whole Church? Then, likewise, shall he regard, and be sure to cleave unto Antiquity; which can now no more be seduced by any crafty novelty."—Vincentius of Lerin. The Doctrine of the Fathers
:CUSTOMID: paranoia
Wed, 12 Jul 2017
I'm sorry, I just can't help myself… I'm so old, I can remember when it was conservatives who saw Russians under every bed. There, I said it.
:CUSTOMID: religious-truth
Mon, 17 Jul 2017
"Men despise religion; they hate it and are afraid it is true."—Blaise Pascal
:CUSTOMID: secularization-of-christianity
Mon, 17 Jul 2017
"The conclusion to which I have found myself forced is twofold: first that what we are being offered [secularization, ed.] is not a reinterpretation of the Christian religion but a substitute for it, and secondly that the arguments offered, from whichever field of study they have been drawn, are quite unconvincing."—E. L. Mascall
:CUSTOMID: lost-trust
Mon, 17 Jul 2017
"Instead of asking themselves why they lost people's trust, the media instead asked why the people had lost trust in them. A subtle, but important difference."—Milo Yiannopoulos
:CUSTOMID: gone-64-years
Mon, 17 Jul 2017
"When I am dead, I hope it is said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read'." ─ Hilaire Belloc Hilaire Belloc died July 16, 1953. He was 11 days short of his 83rd birthday. Read a contemporary obituary
:CUSTOMID: the-gods-of-the-copybook-headings
Mon, 24 Jul 2017
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place, But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch, They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings; So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
:CUSTOMID: see-no-evil
Mon, 24 Jul 2017
"Why am I telling you all this? Because I fear that, except for a few of us remaining graybeards and some immigrants from the world's manifold tyrannies and anarchies, most Americans are too young to remember, even vicariously, the ills that the world can inflict and the effort it takes to withstand and restrain them. They have studied no history, so not only can they not distinguish Napoleon from Hitler, but also they have no conception of how many ills mankind has suffered or inflicted on itself and how heroic has been the effort of the great, the wise, and the good over the centuries to advance the world's enlightenment and civilization—efforts that the young have learned to scorn as the self-interested machinations of dead white men to maintain their dominance. While young people are examining their belly buttons for microaggressions, real evil still haunts the world, still inheres in human nature; and those who don't know this are at risk of being ambushed and crushed by it."—Myron Magnet in The City Journal
:CUSTOMID: on-the-d-word
Mon, 24 Jul 2017
"The part of Christian teaching that is most obscure to contemporary Christians and pseudos is the frequent reference in the Gospels to Demons, and Demonic inhabitation. Christ is Himself the source of this curiously unmodern “point of view." Then Paul carries it the further nine yards. If you haven't noticed this, you weren't reading carefully enough. (Or maybe you haven't read it at all?)"—David Warren
:CUSTOMID: the-answer
Wed, 09 Aug 2017
"People ask me what advice I have for a married couple struggling in their relationship. I always answer, “Pray and forgive"; and to young people who come from violent homes, "Pray and forgive"; and to the single mother with no family support, "Pray and forgive." You can say, "My Lord, I love You. My God, I am sorry. My God, I believe in You. My God, I trust You. Help us to love one an other as You love us."—Mother Teresa, A Simple Path
:CUSTOMID: acceptance
Thu, 10 Aug 2017
"Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love if it lacks the truth."—St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
:CUSTOMID: our-task
Mon, 14 Aug 2017
"Men, a species that includes bishops, are left with a certain radical freedom, which constant intervention by the Deity would cancel. We have been already provided with what we need to know in the Deposit of Faith. There is nothing that Christ absent-mindedly forgot to tell us. Our task is not to supply what he overlooked or failed to anticipate, or to “update" the teaching for a human condition which does not, itself, change. Nor is it to murkily redefine terms long since clarified. Neither popes nor bishops are above that Revelation."—David Warren
:CUSTOMID: seditious-and-tyrannical
Sat, 26 Aug 2017
"It seems to me that at a deep level, 'democracy' can be criticized for its intention: to replace the sometimes inscrutable judgement of God with the too-scrutable judgement of humans. Or to put this more plainly: it is seditious and tyrannical, both, from the start. Its effect can be seen from this cause: for we are all atheists today, insofar as we are enfranchised; all fully 'secularized' in the public square."—David Warren
:CUSTOMID: the-most-well-known-amount-of-people
Sat, 26 Aug 2017
Okay, time for a little "David admits his prejudices" post.
Apparently you can get a journalism (or it is "Communications" now) degree without reading Strunk and White? And you can publish articles without any perusal by an editor who has read Strunk and White? That has to be the case when foolishness like "amount of people" rather than "number of people" or "most well-known" instead of "best known" appears over and over and over again.
These are Heinlein's Crazy Years, we just live in them!
:CUSTOMID: when-not-being-angry-is-a-sin
Wed, 30 Aug 2017
"He who is not angry when he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is a hotbed of many vices."—St. John Chrysostom (Homily 11)
:CUSTOMID: thought-out-thought
Sun, 03 Sep 2017
"PHILOSOPHY is merely thought that has been thought out. It is often a great bore. But man has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out. The latter is what we commonly call culture and enlightenment today."—G.K. Chesterton: The Revival of Philosophy—Why?
:CUSTOMID: truth-and-error
Fri, 08 Sep 2017
"It is as much a crime to disturb the peace when truth prevails as it is a crime to keep the peace when truth is violated. There is therefore a time in which peace is justified and a time when it is not justifiable. For it is written that there is a time for peace and a time for war and it is the law of truth that distinguishes the two. But at no time is there a time for truth and a time for error, for it is written that God's truth shall abide forever. That is why Christ has said that He has come to bring peace and at the same time that He has come to bring the sword. But He does not say that He has come to bring both the truth and the falsehood."—Blaise Pascal
:CUSTOMID: democracys-fruits
Fri, 08 Sep 2017
"If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason."—Benjamin Disraeli
:CUSTOMID: correcting-is-judging
Sun, 10 Sep 2017
"We live in times in which there is a widespread notion that to correct sinners is to “judge" them. Never mind that it is sin that we judge, not the sinner. Never mind that in accusing us of judging, the worldly-minded are themselves doing the very judging they condemn. Never mind any of that; the point of the charge is to try to shame us into silence. Despite the fact that Scripture consistently directs us to correct the sinner, many Catholics have bought into the notion that correcting the sinner is "judging" him. In this, the devil, who orchestrates the "correcting is judging" campaign, rejoices; for if he can keep us from correcting one another, sin can and does flourish."—Msgr. Charles Pope
:CUSTOMID: rip-dr.-pournelle
Thu, 14 Sep 2017
Dr. Jerry Pournelle died in his sleep Friday, September 8th. Heavens, I'll miss him.
:CUSTOMID: courtesy
Thu, 14 Sep 2017
"As I"ve noted many times, I”m willing to believe the worst about the Trump administration. This is a courtesy I try to extend to every administration."—David Harsanyi
:CUSTOMID: facing-the-future-on-the-downside-of-the-liberal-revolution
Thu, 14 Sep 2017
"When everything that smacks of the transcendent is eliminated from the public life of a culture, something has to take its place. In our case it is largely commerce and the ideals and ideas that commerce fosters. Moreover, the liberty that accompanies such a commercial society is a liberty whose chief effect is the dissolving of traditional ties and the destruction of traditional communities, whether that takes place because of direct attacks on the family and chastity or indirectly because of an economic system that works as a solvent in hundreds of ways: driving mothers out of the home, exploiting sex to sell products, moving families about to seek employment, or emptying rural areas of farm families."—Thomas Storck
:CUSTOMID: atheist-for-a-day
Tue, 19 Sep 2017
"Often even fully catechized Christians act from unbelief. For the man who succumbs to a terrible temptation is playing atheist for the day. He might think himself Christian on other days, when there are no significant temptations. But he is fooling himself. For God IS watching."—David Warren
:CUSTOMID: work-and-pray
Tue, 19 Sep 2017
"Work as if everything depended on you; pray as if everything depended on God." Attr. to St. Augustine. Also to St. Ignatius of Loyola. And to Martin Luther.
:CUSTOMID: why
Fri, 22 Sep 2017
‘Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others ; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”—George Orwell—/1984/ O'Brien to Winston
:CUSTOMID: tails
Fri, 22 Sep 2017
"If you call a tail a leg, how many legs would a dog have? Four, because, even if you call it a leg, it's still a tail."—Abraham Lincoln
:CUSTOMID: empathy-for-the-grieving
Sat, 07 Oct 2017
"The truest act of empathy for the grieving is to pray for the dead."—David Warren
:CUSTOMID: rules-or-maybe-intelligence
Sun, 08 Oct 2017
"Only rule-based societies value intelligence in their common participants, for it has value nowhere else."—Francis Porretto
:CUSTOMID: being-right
Sun, 08 Oct 2017
"Being right too soon is socially unacceptable."—Robert A. Heinlein
:CUSTOMID: we-learn-from-history
Tue, 10 Oct 2017
"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history."—G. B. Shaw
:CUSTOMID: schism-and-heresy
Fri, 13 Oct 2017
"Heresy and schism are distinguished in respect of those things to which each is opposed essentially and directly. For heresy is essentially opposed to faith, while schism is essentially opposed to the unity of ecclesiastical charity. Wherefore just as faith and charity are different virtues, although whoever lacks faith lacks charity, so too schism and heresy are different vices, although whoever is a heretic is also a schismatic, but not conversely. This is what Jerome says in his commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians [In Ep. ad Tit. iii, 10]:"I consider the difference between schism and heresy to be that heresy holds false doctrine while schism severs a man from the Church." Nevertheless, just as the loss of charity is the road to the loss of faith, according to 1 Timothy 1:6: "From which things," i.e. charity and the like, "some going astray, are turned aside into vain babbling," so too, schism is the road to heresy. Wherefore Jerome adds (In Ep. ad Tit. iii, 10) that "at the outset it is possible, in a certain respect, to find a difference between schism and heresy: yet there is no schism that does not devise some heresy for itself, that it may appear to have had a reason for separating from the Church."—St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 39, a. 1, ad 3
:CUSTOMID: society-is-dissolving
Fri, 13 Oct 2017
"Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it—we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today. The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines—the very structure of our society is dissolving."—Hilaire Belloc: The Great Heresies, Chap. III
:CUSTOMID: on-heresy
Fri, 13 Oct 2017
"Therefore, heresy is so called from the Greek word meaning ‘choice," by which each chooses according to his own will what he pleases to teach or believe. But we are not permitted to believe whatever we choose, nor to choose whatever someone else has believed. We have the apostles of God as authorities, who did not themselves of their own will choose what they would believe, but faithfully transmitted to the nations the teaching received from Christ. So, even if an angel from heaven should preach otherwise, he shall be called anathema.”—St. Isidore of Seville (c. 560—636): Etymologies, 8, 3.
:CUSTOMID: the-habit-of-neglecting-true-books
Mon, 23 Oct 2017
"IT is an interesting speculation by what means the Book lost its old position in this country. This is not only an interesting speculation, but one which nearly concerns a vital matter. For if men fall into the habit of neglecting true books in an old and traditional civilization, the inaccuracy of their judgments and the illusions to which they will be subject, must increase."To take but one example: history. The less the true historical book is read and the more men depend upon ephemeral statement, the more will legend crystallize, the harder will it be to destroy in the general mind some comforting lie, and the great object-lesson of politics (which is an accurate knowledge of how men have acted in the past) will become at last unknown." — Hilaire Belloc: On the Decline of the Book
:CUSTOMID: but-first
Wed, 25 Oct 2017
"One of the most dreaded transitions in any essay is,"but first we have to understand …". No. Actually, we don't. As Richard Feynman said, your theory is probably sound if you can explain it to your dear old Mom in a couple of sentences of plain words. Said differently, unless you're the Notre-Dame Cathedral, external props are not a good look. But this is just nitpicking by a guy in the cheap seats."—Ol' Remus
:CUSTOMID: eyes-shut
Thu, 26 Oct 2017
"Even in the very depths of the worst possible of worst-case scenarios of crisis in the Catholic Church, denial is not helpful. The crocodile does not care how tightly we close our eyes as it eats us."—Hilary White
:CUSTOMID: imposter-syndrome
Sun, 29 Oct 2017
"It's rampant.
"The big reason is that we're all impostors. You're not imagining that you're an impostor, it's likely that you are one.
"Everyone who is doing important work is working on something that might not work. And it's extremely likely that they're also not the very best qualified person on the planet to be doing that work.
"How could it be any other way? The odds that a pure meritocracy chose you and you alone to inhabit your spot on the ladder is worthy of Dunning-Kruger status. You've been getting lucky breaks for a long time. We all have.
"Yes, you're an imposter. So am I and so is everyone else. Superman still lives on Krypton and the rest of us are just doing our best.
"Isn't doing your best all you can do? Dropping the narrative of the impostor isn't arrogant, it's merely a useful way to get your work done without giving into Resistance.
"Time spent fretting about our status as impostors is time away from dancing with our fear, from leading and from doing work that matters."—Seth Godin
:CUSTOMID: origins
Thu, 02 Nov 2017
"Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge."—Dante The Divine Comedy
:CUSTOMID: what-the-people-need
Thu, 02 Nov 2017
"The Saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age. Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he is not what the people want, but rather what the people need."—G.K. Chesterton: St. Thomas Aquinas, Chap. I.
:CUSTOMID: proof-of-its-divinity
Thu, 02 Nov 2017
"The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine, but for unbelievers, here is proof of its divinity, that no merely human institution run with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."—Hilaire Belloc
:CUSTOMID: kerouac-on-the-buddah
Fri, 03 Nov 2017
"Buddha is only for the West to study as history, that it is a subject for understanding, and Yoga can profitably be practiced to that end. But it is not for the West an Answer, not a Solution. We must learn by acting, experiencing, and living, that is, above all by Love and Suffering,"—Jack Kerouac—letter to William Burroughs, 1954
:CUSTOMID: chestertons-fence
Tue, 07 Nov 2017
"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."—G. K. Chesterton, The Drift from Domesticity
:CUSTOMID: the-task-of-redemption
Thu, 09 Nov 2017
St. John Paul II describes how Christ's act of redeeming us from slavery to sin is both a free gift and a task:
"In the mystery of Redemption, Christ's victory over evil is given to us not simply for our personal advantage, but also as a task. We accept that task as we set out upon the way of the interior life, working consciously on ourselves—with Christ as our Teacher. The Gospel calls us to follow this very path. Christ's call"Follow me!" is echoed on many pages of the Gospel and is addressed to different people—not only to the Galilean fishermen whom Jesus calls to become his Apostles (cf. Mt 4:19, Jn 1:43), but also, for example, to the rich young man in the Synoptic Gospels (cf. Mt 19:16-22, Mk 10:17:22, Lk 18:18-23). Jesus's conversation with him is one of the key texts to which we must constantly return, from various points of view, as I did, for example, in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor.
"The call"Follow me!" is an invitation to set out along the path to which the inner dynamic of the mystery of Redemption leads us. This is the path indicated by the teaching, so often found in writings on the interior life and on mystical experience, about the three stages involved in "following Christ." These three stages are sometimes called "ways." We speak of the purgative way, the illuminative way, and the unitive way. In reality, these are not three distinct ways, but three aspects of the same way, along which Christ calls everyone, as he once called that young man in the Gospel.
"When the young man asks:"Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?", Christ answers him:"If you wish to enter life, keep the commandments" (Mt 19:16 et passim). And when the young man continues to ask: "Which?" Christ simply reminds him of the principal commandments of the Decalogue, and especially those from the so-called "second tablet" concerning relations with one's neighbor. In Christ's teaching, of course, all the commandments are summarized in the commandment to love God above all things and one's neighbor as oneself. He says so explicitly to a doctor of the Law in response to a question (cf. Mt 22:34-40; Mk 12:28-31). Observance of the commandments, properly understood, is synonymous with the purgative way: it means conquering sin, moral evil in its various guises. And this leads to a gradual inner purification.
"It also enables us to discover values. And hence we conclude that the purgative way leads organically into the illuminative way. Values are lights which illumine existence and, as we work on our lives, they shine ever more brightly on the horizon. So side by side with observance of the commandments—which has an essentially purgative meaning—we develop virtues. For example, in observing the commandment:"Thou shall not kill!" we discover the value of life under various aspects and we learn an ever deeper respect for it. In observing the commandment: "Thou shall not commit adultery!" we acquire the virtue of purity, and this means that we come to an ever greater awareness of the gratuitous beauty of the human body, of masculinity and femininity. This gratuitous beauty becomes a light for our actions. In observing the commandment: "Thou shall not bear false witness!" we learn the virtue of truthfulness. This not only excludes all lying and hypocrisy from our lives, but it develops within us a kind of "instinct for truth" which guides all our actions. And living thus in the truth, we acquire in our own humanity a connatural truthfulness.
"So the illuminative stage in the interior life emerges gradually from the purgative stage. With the passage of time, if we persevere in following Christ our Teacher, we feel less and less burdened by the struggle against sin, and we enjoy more and more the divine light which pervades all creation. This is most important, because it allows us to escape from a situation of constant inner exposure to the risk of sin—even though, on this earth, the risk always remains present to some degree—so as to move with ever greater freedom within the whole of the created world. The same freedom and simplicity characterizes our relations with other human beings, including those of the opposite sex. Interior light illumines our actions and shows us all the good in the created world as coming from the hand of God. Thus the purgative way and then the illuminative way form the organic introduction to what is known as the unitive way. This is the final stage of the interior journey, when the soul experiences a special union with God. This union is realized in contemplation of the divine Being and in the experience of love which flows from it with growing intensity. In this way we somehow anticipate what is destined to be ours in eternity, beyond death and the grave. Christ, supreme Teacher of the spiritual life, together with all those who have been formed in his school, teaches that even in this life we can enter onto the path of union with God." — St. John Paul II – Memory and Identity Rizzoli 2005:
:CUSTOMID: the-love-of-a-small-g-god
Mon, 20 Nov 2017
"As the old saying goes, the flip side of love is hatred. You cannot care about something, and fail to hate what threatens it. This leads us to the difficult question of what to love, and the Left posits universal love, which for them means pretending to be a god and loving everything, without understanding that the love of a god is love for creation itself, not a desire to preserve each part."—Brett Stevens
I like to think that I love God's creation, but I love my family more particularly. Don't threaten my wife and kids or there'll be ructions!
:CUSTOMID: a-conspiracy-of-a-very-few-millionaires
Fri, 24 Nov 2017
"The point about the Press is that it is not what it is called. It is not the"popular Press." It is not the public Press. It is not an organ of public opinion. It is a conspiracy of a very few millionaires, all sufficiently similar in type to agree on the limits of what this great nation (to which we belong) may know about itself and its friends and enemies. The ring is not quite complete; there are old-fashioned and honest papers: but it is sufficiently near to completion to produce on the ordinary purchaser of news the practical effects of a corner and a monopoly. He receives all his political information and all his political marching orders from what is by this time a sort of half-conscious secret society, with very few members, but a great deal of money."—G.K. Chesterton: Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays
:CUSTOMID: sauce-for-the-goose
Fri, 24 Nov 2017
"The fact of the matter is, one cannot be both a cultural relativist and a revolutionary. The revolutionary proposes changing the culture. A cultural relativist can never propose such a change. What standard could be used? A cultural relativist, were he honest, would hold his own culture to the same standards as a foreign culture, and say that our laws, traditions, and customs cannot be changed or criticized—for if the only yardstick of what is considered right or wrong comes from the culture, well, obviously this applies to Christendom (aka Western Culture) as well."—John C. Wright
:CUSTOMID: technology-dreams
Thu, 30 Nov 2017
"Technology does not fulfill man's perennial dreams, but craftily mimics them."
— Nicolas Gomez Davila
:CUSTOMID: political-wisdom
Thu, 30 Nov 2017 http://www.consultingsmiths.com/?p=839 "Wise politics is the art of invigorating society and weakening the State." — Nicolas Gomez Davila
:CUSTOMID: meditation-for-november-30
Thu, 30 Nov 2017
"The eternal God is thy refuge." He is a sanctuary, a refuge from the cares of life. You can get away from the misunderstanding of others by retiring into your own place of meditation. But from yourself, from your sense of failure, your weakness, your shortcomings, whether can you flee? Only to the eternal God, your refuge, until the immensity of His spirit envelopes your spirit and it loses its smallness and weakness and comes into harmony again with His.
Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may lose my limitations in the immensity of God's love. I pray that my spirit may be in harmony with His spirit.
From the original AA Meditation book, Twenty-Four Hours a Day, by Richmond Walker
:CUSTOMID: a-masterless-house-a-pilotless-ship
Thu, 30 Nov 2017
"When a house has no master living in it, it becomes dark, vile and contemptible, choked with filth and disgusting refuse. So too is a soul which has lost its master, who once rejoiced there with his angels. This soul is darkened with sin, its desires are degraded, and it knows nothing but shame.
"Woe to the path that is not walked on, or along which the voices of men are not heard, for then it becomes the haunt of wild animals. Woe to the soul if the Lord does not walk within it to banish with his voice the spiritual beasts of sin. Woe to the house where no master dwells, to the field where no farmer works, to the pilotless ship, storm-tossed and sinking. Woe to the soul without Christ as its true pilot; drifting in the darkness, buffeted by the waves of passion, storm-tossed at the mercy of evil spirits, its end is destruction. Woe to the soul that does not have Christ to cultivate it with care to produce the good fruit of the Holy Spirit. Left to itself, it is choked with thorns and thistles; instead of fruit it produces only what is fit for burning. Woe to the soul that does not have Christ dwelling in it; deserted and foul with the filth of the passions, it becomes a haven for all the vices."—St. Macarius, bishop, Hom. 28: PG 34, 710-711
:CUSTOMID: its-nature-is-to-live
Thu, 30 Nov 2017
"I think we have misunderstood the promise of Christ of the survival of the Church. You can't kill something whose nature it is to live. The Faith is like life itself; life is designed to live. It might not make it in this or that particular place, and it may go through periods of such reduction that we would hardly recognise it, but it can't be killed. Volcanoes make ash that enrich the soil; ice ages spread spores and seeds around the world. Life lives. The Faith is something even stronger."—Hilary White
:CUSTOMID: as-the-pervnado-turns
Thu, 30 Nov 2017 22:40:48
"Maybe Trump's voters aren't angry enough yet. It's not just a large number of women our elites have raped and victimized, it's our entire country. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our debt is astronomical, our universities increasingly resemble insane asylums, our largest inner cities are free-fire zones terrorized by a permanent criminal underclass. And what's the elite response? Oh, look, a squirrel—where the squirrel of the week is carbon emissions, or transgender rights, or railing at “white privilege", or whatever other form of virtue signaling might serve to hide the fact that, oh, look, they put remote-controlled locks on their rape dungeons."—Eric Raymond By all means, read the whole thing.
:CUSTOMID: lossy-press
Sat, 02 Dec 2017
"The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't."—from "Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already" by Patrick McKenzie
:CUSTOMID: senior
Sat, 02 Dec 2017
"The explosive growth of the tech sector keeps average age down and depresses average wages. Compared to industries which existed in materially the same form in 1970, we have a stupidly compressed experience spectrum: 5+ years rounds to"senior." This is not a joke."—from"Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already" by Patrick McKenzie
:CUSTOMID: not-learning-to-program
Sat, 02 Dec 2017
"CS programs have, in the main, not decided that the primary path to becoming a programmer should involve doing material actual programming. There are some exceptions: Waterloo, for example. This is the point where I joke"That's an exhaustive list" but not sure that a joke."—from"Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already" by Patrick McKenzie
:CUSTOMID: secular-civilization
Fri, 15 Dec 2017
"The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide."—T. S. Eliot, Thoughts After Lambeth, 1931.
:CUSTOMID: this-house
Sun, 17 Dec 2017
"This house where such good things are done year by year has suffered all the things that every age has suffered. It has known the sudden separation of wife and husband, the sudden fall of young men under arms who will never more come home, the scattering of the living and their precarious return, the increase and the loss of fortune, all those terrors and all those lessenings and haltings and failures of hope which make up the life of man. But its Christmas binds it to its own past and promises its future; making the house an undying thing of which those subject to mortality within it are members, sharing in its continuous survival."—Hilaire Belloc: A Remaining Christmas
:CUSTOMID: the-altar-of-love
Mon, 18 Dec 2017
"Where there is no giving of one self, one can only love the physical attributes of the other. Poets and philosophers have filled many volumes musing about the fleeting beauty of youth. Those who can only love that surface shine will soon grow bored. That boredom will be followed by some sort of hate or indifference. Those who love the soul are different because for them, their youth is a sacrificial present, an oblation offered in the altar of love. The men and women of God conquer each other not by possession but by surrendering and becoming part of the beloved."—Carlos Caso-Rosendi
:CUSTOMID: extraordinary-decency
Mon, 18 Dec 2017
"If you can think of times in your life that you"ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious."—David Foster Wallace
:CUSTOMID: sentimentality
Tue, 19 Dec 2017
"Call me a sentimentalist, but I liked the days when FBI agents went undercover as subversives better than today when subversives go undercover as FBI agents."—Daniel J. Flynn
:CUSTOMID: clay
Sat, 23 Dec 2017
"We may consider the material world as the clay which the artist works with, to make of it something beautiful or ugly. We need not fear material things, which are neither good nor bad in the moral sense. There seems to be no active force for evil—outside of human beings themselves. Humans alone can have either evil intentions—resentments, malevolence, hate and revenge—or good intentions—love and good will, They can make something ugly or something beautiful out of the clay of their lives."—Twenty-Four Hours a Day entry for December 19
:CUSTOMID: gender
Tue, 26 Dec 2017
"I want everyone to stop using the word “gender" for anything other than masculine and feminine nouns. I am male. I am of the male sex. I am not of the male gender. You do not have choice in participating in your sexual identity, contrary to all fashionable nonsense of the era. "Gender" is akin to the Marxist use of the word "exploitation". It is ideologically loaded; it is nonsense on stilts. Biology is not a social construct."—Written by one of those bloggers who, for whatever reason, won't use a"real" name. Found here.
Oh, and by the way, I agree totally and unreservedly. I'm certainly open to the thought that we need to be willing for men and women to dress, walk and talk in ways other than how John Wayne or Rita Hayworth dressed, walked and talked, but let's be serious. Once a man, always a man. And vice versa.
:CUSTOMID: respect
Thu, 28 Dec 2017
"If you want me to treat your ideas with more respect, get some better ideas."—John Scalzi
:CUSTOMID: expect-the-opposite
Fri, 29 Dec 2017
"If yours truly has learned anything living in Washington, D.C. since 1976, it's that when you need to know where the country is headed in the near future, check the conventional wisdom among America's political, academic and media elites, then expect the opposite to occur."—Mark Tapscott
:CUSTOMID: september-10-2001
Sun, 11 Sep 2016 00:58:53
It's a stretch to remember what concerned me fifteen years ago, on September 10, 2001.
William Butler Yeats wrote Easter, 1916 in part describing Easter Sunday, April 23, 1916, the day before the Easter Rising, and how after Easter Monday:
He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
And W. H. Auden, in September 1, 1939 covered the same ground as Germany poised to invade Poland:
Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death.
I can't help noticing a significant difference that we face today, however.
The Irish Republic was established three years after the Rising, and WWII had come to an end in just under six years after the invasion of Poland, long, terrible years that they were in both cases, but still the denouement was achieved.
And here we are, fifteen years later.
I had no idea. Did you?
Have you found the poem describing September 10, 2001? Is it too soon?
h/t to Gerard Vanderleun
:CUSTOMID: why-add-to-a-blog-in-2016
Thu, 22 Sep 2016 20:46:41
Why, indeed? When Facebook, Twitter and whatever other social media silos exist out there, where Everybody is following Everybody else, why write something new to add to something as old-school, so Last Year or Last Decade as a blog, where arguably nobody will see it?
Well, trust me, I've tried to share "socially", at least on FB. I resisted joining that Place where Youngsters Talk Past Each Other for a while. My tipping point came sometime in the spring of 2012 while I was visiting Maryland to stay with my ailing Father. My first night there, my baby sister (who lived next door to him) dropped in and said, "Congratulations!" I was grateful for the kind words, but didn't know why I was to be congratulated. "Because Caitlyn is having another baby—you're going to be a Great-Grandpa again!" It turns out that any family news is now shared on Facebook and nowhere else. OK, I may be a Canuck by choice, but I'm not going to be Canute, ordering the tides to cease. I joined Facebook and tried to play the game.
I've been as loyal a FB'er as an over-the-hill not-very-leftist Old Fart could, sharing family pictures, commenting kindly (most of the time) on others' family pictures, and sharing silly pictures with humorous (if sometimes a bit sharp) "memes" and links to interesting articles about this and that. For the most part, I've practiced "Stifle yerself, Edith!" as I learned to do during my career as a Federal Consultant, surrounded by Feds, Social Workers and Academics who either tolerated my trogdolitism or blithely assumed that I was One Of Them politically or ideologically.
This Federal Election Cycle, I've practiced and encouraged others to practice (with little effect) a strict policy of No Digs At Candidates—If You Must Talk Politics, Discuss What You're For, Not Who You're Repelled By. It's been a struggle, but rewarding. I haven't "unliked" anyone, although I've had to "unfollow" a few to not be constantly upset.
Anyway, there are topics of interest to Old Farts other than Federal Politics, although this close to the Imperial Capital that seems hard to imagine. Every now and then I'd wax so fulsomely on some topic that the dreaded "see more" would appear with most of the thought swallowed by the FB interface (don't get me started on the FB interface, though). All evidence is that none of those hidden words were ever seen or heard from again. I've been tempted to close a longer, thoughtful post with something bizarre, like a "farewell, cruel world" note just to see whether anyone at all read it, but instead I've decided to just hide it over here, in Consultingsmiths limbo. Cheers!
:CUSTOMID: on-discipline
Thu, 22 Sep 2016 20:57:18
David Warren's "Essays in Idleness" blog is usually at least amusing or interesting, and not uncommonly thought provoking. I don't know him personally, but I have the feeling that he'd be somewhat uncomfortable being described as "profound", so I won't do so. Today, he's at least worth quoting: "A lot of time has been wasted by busybodied fools arguing that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare; that someone other than Homer wrote Homer. (“Another poet of that generation who happened to have the same name.") The time would be better spent reading such authors. The same is true, generally, of the Church Fathers: better to read them in their breadth, and not with a view to pursuing small vexatious points—inevitably to factional ends." Do yourself a favor and read the entire article here 2016-09-22 16:57:18 2016-09-22 20:57:18
:CUSTOMID: back-in-the-game
Tue, 04 Oct 2016 12:16:55
Well, now I know that at least one person other than Me, Myself and I drop in here…I was asked to moderate the first spam comment in literally years this morning. Something about "arena oxides" and how much the princess, their friend, was edified by the deep thinking and perceptive helping nature that I displayed in a post a few days ago, accompanied by a gibberish email address and several links that even I am too timid to follow. I guess I should thank Google for the exposure.
:CUSTOMID: miracles
Tue, 17 Mar 2015 11:31:38
Emmet Fox challenges "believers" to accept that miracles are a necessary part of the gospel story, and likewise challenges "skeptics" to consider that they are a natural part of a universe that science doesn't fully comprehend.
Miracles
Now, one must extend every sympathy to the special pleadings of a man enthralled by the beauty and mystery of the Gospels, but who, in the absence of the Spiritual Key, seems to find his common sense and all the scientific knowledge of mankind flouted by much that these Gospels contain. But this simply will not do. If the miracles did not happen, the rest of the Gospel story loses all real significance. If Jesus did not believe them to be possible, and undertake to perform them—never, it is true, for the sake of display, but still constantly and repeatedly—if he did not believe and teach many things in flat contradiction to eighteenth-and nineteenth-century rationalistic philosophy, then the Gospel message is chaotic, contradictory, and devoid of all significance. We cannot ride away from the dilemma by saying that Jesus was not interested in the current beliefs and superstitions of his time; that he took them more or less for granted passively; because what really interested him was character. This is a feeble argument, because character must include both an intelligent and a vital all-round reaction to life. Character must include some definite beliefs and convictions concerning things that really matter.
But the miracles did happen. All the deeds related of Jesus in the four Gospels did happen, and many others too, "the which, if they should be written, every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written." Jesus himself justified what people thought to be a strange and wonderful teaching by the works he was able to do; and he went further and said, referring to those who study and practice his teaching: "The works that I do, ye shall do, and greater works."
Now what, after all, is a miracle? Those who deny the possibility of miracles on the ground that the universe is a perfect system of law and order, to the operation of which there can be no exceptions, are perfectly right. But the explanation is that the world of which we are normally aware, and with whose laws alone most people are acquainted, is only a fragment of the whole universe as it really is; and that there is such a thing as appealing from a lower to a higher law—from a lesser to a greater expression. Now the appeal from the lower to the higher law is not really a breach of law, for the possibility of such an appeal is part of the major constitution of the universe, and, therefore, in the sense of a real breach of law, miracles are impossible. Yet, in the sense that all the ordinary rules and limitations of the physical plane can be set aside or overridden by an understanding which has risen above them, miracles, in the colloquial sense of the word, can and do happen.
:CUSTOMID: moral-authority
Thu, 24 Sep 2015
When I heard that Pope Francis had visited the Little Sisters of the Poor last night, I heard Martin Luther King's voice saying his words from Birmingham Jail: "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
He deserves his propers for doing that.
:CUSTOMID: paul-and-orthodoxy
Sun, 13 Dec 2015
Reading Lietzmann's A History of the Early Church, it's tempting to think that due to accidents of timing, because Saul/Paul was a Hellenised Jew with a desire to reach others whose religious concerns were Hellenistic more than Jewish, and because he never heard Jesus speak in the flesh, the "Orthodox" or "Winning" interpretation of Christianity became more concerned with Hellenic mystery religion's issues and less with Jesus' teachings. Eh?
:CUSTOMID: the-american-student
Mon, 25 Mar 2013 18:43:24
Our educational system is about crowd control, but there is no small cabal of Lex Luthor-style evil geniuses that cackle with glee at their plan. The somnolence and mediocrity go all the way up and all the way down. The Secretary of Education herself would be horrified if she made a gun out of a Pop-Tart
:CUSTOMID: right-place
Thu, 15 Nov 2012 20:22:28
"If your main goal is to show that your heart is in the right place, then your heart is not in the right place." – David Schmidtz
:CUSTOMID: real-science
Fri, 21 Jan 2011
Real science looks at data, makes falsifiable predictions, and attempts to falsify or confirm those predictions. The rest is "other forces at work."Jerry Pournelle
:CUSTOMID: good-or-better
Tue, 25 Jan 2011
When everything is good enough, it takes work to discover what's better, and better is often a matter of whim and preference anyway.—Jerry Pournelle
:CUSTOMID: scientific-religion
Tue, 01 Feb 2011
So far neither Dark Energy nor the Multiverse seem to generate falsifiable hypotheses, removing them from science and relegating them to religion. I cheerfully admit that in the absence of evidence I prefer the religion I grew up with to these new ones, but perhaps I am insufficiently flexible in my views.—Jerry Pournelle
:CUSTOMID: discriminating
Tue, 22 Feb 2011
The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.—Chief Justice John Roberts Parents Involved In Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 June 28, 2007
:CUSTOMID: normal
Mon, 28 Feb 2011
Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you”re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.—Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
:CUSTOMID: relief
Fri, 15 Apr 2011
In life I know, there is lots of grief, But your love is my relief.—Bob Marley Wait In Vain
:CUSTOMID: marvels
Wed, 01 Jun 2011
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.—George Washington
:CUSTOMID: despair-as-pride
Wed, 25 May 2011
Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love.
Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that God is above us.—Thomas Merton (1961)
:CUSTOMID: portable-devices-and-phi
Thu, 07 Jul 2011
I recently sent the following to a behavioral health researcher who was planning to develop a mobile application for clinicians that would include client information—I believe that it may be of interest to others who are considering the use of smart phones and laptops in their clinical practice:
"As you know, any high-technology product aimed at the medical market (defined in the sense of being subject to the Federal privacy regulations HIPAA and Hitech) needs to not only take all appropriate steps to protect the clients' identity and other protected health information (PHI), but it must do so demonstrably. By that, I mean that it must protect the information and also appear to protect it to the satisfaction of funders, consumers and regulators.
"When we are serving the portion of the medical market which includes consumers of substance-abuse treatment (broadly defined) we must also satisfy the Federal privacy regulations found in 42 C.F.R. Part 2. These regulations represent a thornier matter for the provider of technology services not only because they are much stricter than HIPAA and Hitech, but they were written long before digital exchange of PHI was common, and thus were not written with an eye to ease of compliance (as were HIPAA and Hitech).
"In our particular application, then, we must look at two concerns:
Will we be putting PHI at an unusual risk; and
Will we be able to readily convince the reviewers at SAMHSA that our product is adequately secure.
"We all have heard about high-profile security breaches caused by sensitive data being stored on a portable device (typically a laptop) which is then either left in a public place or is stolen from a car or home. Credit card companies, hospitals and nuclear weapons laboratories have all found themselves on the front pages in recent years in this way, and they are never able to explain the breach away—because it is indefensible that the data in question were ever stored on a portable device in the first place.
"Portable devices are by their nature insecure. When we designed [a recent online assessment system], like any system designed to protect sensitive data, we designed"rings" of protection. The data were encrypted. Access to the servers both from the Internet and from within the data center was carefully restricted. And finally, physical access to the server devices was controlled in the most rigorous manner. This is, obviously, not possible with a laptop in the back seat of a car, in a hotel room or a living room table. This is even less possible with a cell phone, which will tend to be on its user's person most of their waking hours and can be dropped or stolen as easily as a wallet or a pair of glasses.
"So, from my personal professional perspective, without a compelling reason to use the cell phone as the platform for this application, physical security concerns strongly suggest a more secure platform. Added to this is the relative newness of the Android or iOS (iPhone) software environments. With years of experience (years from now), we will have a good idea how to measure and mitigate risk on those platforms, as we have learned to measure and mitigate risk on the more mature hardware/software environments. While Android is based on a Linux kernel, which has a good history, its application on the cell phone hardware, using the cell network, is largely unproven ground. This also tends to concern me. I'm excited about Android and have plans to develop for it, but nothing that needs to be secure.
"The IT engineers at SAMHSA will be asking themselves similar questions, and will very possibly come to a similar conclusion. We will have to write a Security Plan and submit it to them, and it will not have the same components that they are expecting. Were we to put my concerns to rest, we would then have to do the same in the Security Plan, and I would expect that would be difficult to write, and would be given extremely close scrutiny.
"Taken as a whole, my considered judgment is that the prudent course of action would be to redesign the application to use a more conventional architecture—a server behind a firewall in a secure data center—one that we can be more confident of securing and more confident of getting approved."
:CUSTOMID: its-not-your-computer-anymore
Wed, 31 Aug 2011
Over at Microsoft's Technet site, the folks at their Security Response Center have posted the 10 Immutable Laws of Security
Admittedly, it only covers security for computers (and remember, that means your cell phone and tablet) and websites, but it's still very worth reviewing. There's nothing new, nothing arcane there, but they are the cold, hard facts that we all have to remember if we make any pretense of caring about our clients' privacy. Simple things, like "If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your computer anymore." Do you have client phone numbers on your iPhone? Have you installed any apps? Think about it. Seriously.
:CUSTOMID: data
Fri, 01 Jan 2010
If they do that with marks and grades, should they be trusted with experimental data?—Harry Erwin, PhD
:CUSTOMID: research
Tue, 05 Jan 2010
If academic research is not devoted to finding the truth, it is a form of propaganda, and not necessarily to be preferred to other forms, much cheaper and perhaps more persuasive.—Conrad Russell (Academic Freedom. London: Routledge. 1993)
:CUSTOMID: trust
Wed, 20 Jan 2010
It is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.—Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, January 8, 1789
:CUSTOMID: commas
Fri, 29 Jan 2010
The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath.—Elizabeth Clarkson Zwart
:CUSTOMID: sex-and-science
Fri, 29 Jan 2010
Science is a lot like sex. Sometimes something useful comes of it, but that's not the reason we're doing it.—Richard Feynman
:CUSTOMID: habit
Fri, 05 Feb 2010
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, it's a habit.—Aristotle
:CUSTOMID: improvisation
Tue, 09 Feb 2010
Great improvisers are like priests. They are thinking only of their God.—Stéphane Grappelli
:CUSTOMID: expertise
Thu, 11 Mar 2010
Nobody is an expert on the future.—Matt Linderman
:CUSTOMID: smarts
Thu, 25 Mar 2010
You're not smart enough to tell me how to live.—Kathy Shaidle
:CUSTOMID: understanding
Mon, 19 Apr 2010
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.—Upton Sinclair
:CUSTOMID: reality
Fri, 30 Apr 2010
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.—Richard Feynman
:CUSTOMID: outrage
Tue, 11 May 2010
It is not more objective to narrate an outrage calmly.—James Chastek
:CUSTOMID: totd
Thu, 13 May 2010
If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.—Mark Twain
:CUSTOMID: totd-1
Tue, 01 Jun 2010
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.—Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies, credited to "my priest friend Tom")
:CUSTOMID: totd-2
Fri, 09 Jul 2010
All attacks on science are ultimately an attack on freedom. All attacks on religion are ultimately an attack on mind.—Robert W. Godwin
:CUSTOMID: totd-3
Wed, 14 Jul 2010
We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.—The Whole Earth Catalog (1968)
:CUSTOMID: totd-4
Wed, 28 Jul 2010
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.—Richard Feynman
:CUSTOMID: totd-5
Fri, 30 Jul 2010
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.—Gilbert K. Chesterton
:CUSTOMID: giving-and-forgiving
Tue, 12 Oct 2010
If you have ill will toward any, if you are prejudiced against any, if you have accused any even in your silent thought, of injustice, or if you have criticised any one, sit down alone at night before retiring and mentally ask him to forgive you. Calling him by name, silently confess to him what you have done, and ask his forgiveness, telling him as you do the others, over and over again, that you love him, and are sure there is nothing but God's perfect Love between you. Never retire until you have thus definitely "cleaned up the slate" between yourself and every other human being, having definitely forgiven—given love for—every one. Keep at this until all the tightened cords which have been cutting off the free flow of God's love and life through you are loosened; until a habit of forgiving is established within you.—H. Emilie Cady God a Present Help
:CUSTOMID: totd-6
Wed, 20 Oct 2010
Every atom of fear, or condemnation, or criticism, that we carry in our hearts, no matter for whom it may be, is a wall between ourselves and God.—Emmet Fox
:CUSTOMID: totd-7
Fri, 29 Oct 2010
Being intelligent is not a felony, but most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.—Robert A. Heinlein
:CUSTOMID: testimony
Mon, 08 Nov 2010
It isn't irrational to accept the testimony of eyewitnesses to miracles.—Antonin Scalia
:CUSTOMID: time
Wed, 10 Nov 2010
It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.—Thornton Wilder (The Eighth Day)
:CUSTOMID: superstition
Sun, 12 Dec 2010
We must do our best to see life as it really is and not as modern superstition interprets it.—Lewis Maclachlan
:CUSTOMID: science
Sun, 12 Dec 2010
We approach the subject (prayer) in a spirit of scientific enquiry. The question to be asked is not what according to our theology God ought to do, but what He actually does.—Lewis Maclachlan
:CUSTOMID: belief
Mon, 13 Dec 2010
In my experience over 90% of the arguments and criticisms made against Christianity can be answered with, "Yeah, I don't believe in a God like that either."—Jim S.
:CUSTOMID: hands
Wed, 15 Dec 2010
I would fain be to the eternal God what a man's hand is to a man.—/Theologia Germanica/
:CUSTOMID: section
:CUSTOMID: quotations
Sun, 09 Jan 2011
The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine.—Abraham Lincoln
:CUSTOMID: science-1
Thu, 23 Dec 2010
When everything is evidence of the thing you want to believe, it might be time to stop pretending you're all about science.—Ann Althouse
:CUSTOMID: fallacy
Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:55:38
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.—G. K. Chesterton
:CUSTOMID: proof
Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:17:13
You can prove anything if you make up your data.—Jerry Pournelle