I found the above witticism in an essay by Kelly James Clark. It works in German as well:
Hier (ver)stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders.
In German the allusion to what I allude to is transparent to my class of readers.
I'll book this quickie under Varia.
Substack leader.
With linkage to a passage (pun intended) from the doctor angelicus.
How sweet it is to watch the despicably mendacious Atty Gen'l squirm in the hot seat under interrogation by such patriots as Gaetz, Jordan, Roy, and others. In the last bit I caught, the crapweasel was asked whether it was illegal to question an election. He couldn't seem to grasp the question. Finally the superannuated Demento-shill tried to dismiss it as 'hypothetical.' He must think we are stupid.
Nothing hypothetical about it at all: a simple question about the law. Is it illegal to ask questions or to express opinions about the legitimacy of an election? Obviously not. The right to do so is guaranteed by the First Amendment. Hillary did it re: 2016, and so have others about 2016 and other elections.
The panel is now back from recess, but I've had my fill. Linkage later.
UPDATE (9/21)
Representative Victoria Spartz is a woman who grew up in the totalitarian, authoritarian, stifling, single party, communist state of the Soviet Union, and she's now worried that her voters, her constituents, the citizens who live in her district who asked her to represent them are now afraid of their own government.
Substack latest.
Here, via Victor Reppert, who cleverly speaks of Rand's "Jack-hammering":
Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-metaphysical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.)
My posts on Miss Rand are collected here.
Here is Flannery O'Connor on Ayn Rand:
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
Miss O'Connor is exaggerating, but she is essentially correct in her literary judgment. Both women are firm adherents of worldviews that inform their novels, and in the case of O'Connor, short stories.
The difference is that . . . well, you tell me what the difference is. Why do I have to do all the work?
It's a pretty good article until the final paragraph:
I don’t think the election of Donald Trump in 2024, if it were to be allowed, would make any fundamental difference in The System. He couldn’t change it in his first term, and he wouldn’t be allowed to change it in a second. At the same time, I completely understand the desire of many Americans to instinctively support someone who at least appears to be hated by The System.
This is just plain stupid. Did the capture of SCOTUS by conservatives during Trump's first term make "any fundamental difference in The System"? The question answers itself. The overturning of Roe v. Wade would not have occurred had Hillary been elected. And that is just one of Trump's numerous accomplishments. Trump has proven himself as president. If Trump wins the White House in 2024, he will immediately reverse most of Biden's unspeakably destructive policies, the most traitorous of which is the open border policy. He will have the people behind him and the political savvy he acquired in his first term. The filthy Dems understand this, which is why they wage illegal and extra-constituional lawfare against him. But don't take my word for it. Listen to those lions of the law Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley, both (unaccountably) still Democrats.
And what's with the last sentence? Trump "at least appears to be hated by The System"? Nothing is clearer than that the oligarchs hate Trump in adamantine fact, as is shown by their willingness to overturn democratic norms to save 'our democracy' in their Orwellian way of putting it.
We need to collect more examples of political defeatism. Here is an old chestnut from Geraldo Rivera. "Build a twenty-foot wall, and the the illegals will show up with a twenty-five-foot ladder." Can you think of others?
Top o' the Stack.
Library 'science' now attracts the mindlessly presentist, the terminally woke-assed, the viciously anti-civilizational, and the erasers of the historical record. See here and here.
Build private libraries and be prepared to defend them. In your will, specify a worthy, like-minded heir to whom to bequeath the library that you have spent a lifetime building along with the tools for its defense.
Related: Withdrawn from Circulation
Substack latest.
Is it my brain that feels and thinks when I feel and think?
Both of the following arguments are valid, but only one is sound. Which one is it?
Argument A. Meat can't think. My brain is meat. Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.
A in Reverse: What thinks in me when I think is my brain. My brain is meat. Therefore, meat can think.
The Roman Catholic Church with Bergoglio at its head is an impostor church. So William Kilpatrick asks:
. . . how can one tell the imposter Church from the Church established by Christ?
Although there are several indicators, the main giveaway, I believe, can be found in differing attitudes toward sin. The true Church takes sin very seriously and warns about it constantly. Indeed, the main mission of the Church is to save us from our sins. On the other hand, one of the main goals of the Church which Francis and his followers are building is to diminish the importance of sin.
On several occasions, Francis has belittled sexual sins, referring to them as the “lightest of sins” or jokingly as “sins below the waist.” He reportedly told a group of Spanish seminarians that they must absolve all sins in the confessional, even if there is no sign of repentance. On one occasion, when asked about the exploits of a homosexual priest, Francis replied, “Who am I to judge?” But—with the exception of sins against the environment and “sins” of rigidity—he seems to take a “Who-am-I-to-judge” attitude toward almost all sins.
In a Substack article from a couple of years ago, I explore the real root of the rot in the Roman church. See The Role of Concupiscence in the Decline of the Catholic Church.
Related
Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained: Why do the powerful arguments against abortion have such little effect?
Here. Good riddance!
Who will the Democrats replace him with?
Here:
In America, when you hear media figures and politicians gassing on about “threats to democracy,” you should be aware that what they really might mean is “threats to a system that favors current elites and their prejudices, against the common good.”
And this despite Dreher's to-me-incomprehensible case of TDS.
Delete the might and Dreher's point is spot on.
No word or phrase is safe from an Orwellian language-hijacker, and leftists are language-hijackers, as I have been documenting online since 2004.
John Searle famously remarked that Derrida gives bullshit a bad name. Striking indeed is the French penchant for pseudo-literary vaporosity.
"Something" took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the "thing." But this very thing, the place and meaning of this "event," remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it's talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy—a name, a number—points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.
For the entire piece, go here. You are forgiven if you have had enough.
Top o' the Stack.
Was 9/11 an 'inside job'? I take no position on this question. Here is a review of David Ray Griffin's latest.
To say it again: linkage does not constitute endorsement in whole or in part.
UPDATE
New York Tony writes:
Since I was a kid, I would annually see the demolition of public housing, buildings imploding and pancaking into their footprint in the last half-minute of a local news broadcast. So had millions of others. But in a macabre illustration of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, nearly everyone, including me, fell for it on 9/11: the Towers fell after the planes hit, therefore they fell because they hit, imploding and pancaking into their footprint, so geometrically conveniently. And Tower 7 wasn't hit at all. (In Iran, a jet slammed into a smaller building which burned for three days but didn't collapse.) It was a controlled demolition (see videos here), so the only question, which I remember posing to you then as I do now, is who strategically placed and who detonated the explosives? And why did we not instinctively connect what we saw with what we remembered and so easily accept the official narrative? Someone did, even if we can't agree on who.
I have never gone in my interpretation beyond the conclusion that in some real sense, God had removed His hand from America, and had given us over to our sins, as He had done in ages past with Biblical Israel. Of course I have no proof of that, but if you look at the trajectory of our country since that terrible September day, you will find ample evidence to confirm the thesis.
