Category: Uncategorized

Julian Green on Manna

Diary 1928-1957, entry of 6 October 1941:

The story of the manna gathered and set aside by the Hebrews is deeply significant. It so happened that the manna rotted when it was kept. And perhaps that means that all spiritual reading which is not consumed — by prayer and by works — ends by causing a sort of rotting inside us. You die with a head full of fine sayings and a perfectly empty heart.

The consumption of a comestible is its physiological appropriation. To appropriate is to make one’s own. Green is referring to spiritual appropriation, the making one’s own of spiritual sayings by prayer and practice.

Did edible bread once fall from the sky? I don’t deny it, but must I affirm it? Would it not be enough to take the Old Testament passage in its spiritual sense and bracket the question of its literal truth?

 

NPR and PBS Finally Defunded

This is great news, and we have Trump to thank for this and for so many other things. In May of this year, I wrote over at Substack:

If you like NPR programming, write them a check! Just don't demand that they receive taxpayer support. We are in fiscal crisis, and budgetary cuts must be made. If such inessentials as NPR and PBS cannot be defunded, which programs can be defunded?

Some think that a refusal of sponsorship amounts to censorship. But that is foolishness pure and simple and duly refuted here.

So one reason to defund NPR is that we cannot afford it. But there is a much better reason.

Even if we could afford it, NPR in its present configuration should not receive Federal support. And this for the simple reason that it is plainly a propaganda arm of the Left.* If you deny the increasingly leftward tilt of NPR, even unto 'wokery,' then you are delusional and not worth talking to. So I'll charitably assume that you are sane and admit the bias. The next question I will put to you is whether you think it is morally right that tax dollars be used to push points of view and policies that half if not most of us in this land find deeply objectionable on moral grounds such as the policy of allowing biological males to compete in women’s sporting events. I say that it it is not morally right that the government take our money by force and then use it for a purpose that is not only inessential and unconnected to the necessary functions of government, but also violates our beliefs.

So that is my second reason for defunding NPR.

Perhaps, if NPR were balanced like C-SPAN, it could be tolerated in times of plenty. But we are not in times of plenty and it is not balanced.

Note that a reasonable liberal could accept my two reasons. But contemporary liberals are not particularly liberal in the classical sense, and the Democrat Party has been hijacked by the Left. I am not arguing that the federal government must not engage in any projects other than those that are strictly essential such as those connected with the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad). I am arguing that present fiscal facts and facts pertaining to NPR content dictate that defunding NPR is something that ought to be done.

Finally, you may enjoy watching the current NPR boss squirm and back track in the teeth of Congressional grilling.

_________________

*I stand not only for the separation of church and state, but also for the separation of leftism and state. Leftocracy is as antithetical to the founding principles of our constitutionally-based republic as is theocracy.

The Awesome Power of TDS . . .

. . . is demonstrated by the fact that George F. Will, horribile dictu,  voted for Kamala Harris. The bow-tied, yap-and-scribble pussy-wussy is hard at work destroying whatever legacy he might have enjoyed had he not gone bonkers over DJT, something he has in common with the rest of the Bulwark bunch. Staunch conservative and constitutional scholar that he is, Will voted for four more years of a wide-open border, with all that that brings in its train, including Tren de Aragua, drug smuggling, human trafficking and slavery, gun running,  not to mention the other outrages Kamala would have continued, such as the trashing of the Constitution.

You won't find an entry for TDS in DSM-IV, but it is real, and it has no counterpart on the Right.

So Racism and Misogyny Explain Kamala’s Loss?

Why did Kamala lose?  Here:

One answer has to do with race and gender. Too many Americans, especially white men, were still not willing to vote for a woman, even less a Black woman. 

Only a leftist scumbag could spew such slanderous garbage.  The vast majority of conservatives don't care about a candidate's race or sex. We care about ideas and policies.  If the contest were between Joe Biden and Tulsi Gabbard, most conservatives would vote for Tulsi Gabbard.

UPDATE (11/8)

Speaking of Tulsi Gabbard, on one of the talk shows last night she pointed out that Biden and Harris never once showed any concern about the very real threat of WW3 whereas Trump repeatedly demonstrated awareness of the grave danger we and the world are in under the 'leadership' of Biden and Harris.  I would add that one of the many reasons why the Clown got crushed was because of her insouciance regarding this genuine existential threat to humanity as opposed to the fake 'threats' cooked up by the Dementocrat tag team.

Two More on Politics

It may be a bit OTT in places, but I agree in the main with Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano's Open Letter to the American People on the eve of the 2024 presidential election. (HT: Catacomb Joe)

And here's Tucker Carlson to get your blood up. (HT: Vito Caiati)

WARNING:  Should our side win, expect violence from our political enemies. Never underestimate the depths of the Left's depravity. 

Hit the Road, Jack (Smith)

A soupçon of sanity returns to the body politic. Roger Kimball:

“Upon careful study of the foundational challenges raised in the Motion,” Cannon wrote in her ninety-three-page ruling, “the Court is convinced that Special Counsel’s Smith’s prosecution of this action breaches two structural cornerstones of our constitutional scheme — the role of Congress in the appointment of constitutional officers, and the role of Congress in authorizing expenditures by law.” 

Result? “The Superseding Indictment is DISMISSED because Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution.” 

Hit the road, Jack (and don’t you come back no more).

In another encouraging development, Elon Musk delivered a stinging rebuke to that noisome knucklehead Newsom by ordering the transfer of X and SpaceX from San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, to Texas.

According to the WSJ, Musk plans to pony up $45 million per month to a pro-Trump Super Pac. 

The tables are beginning to turn. But no complacency!  We know a priori that our political enemies will cheat their asses off as they did last time. It is important that we not only defeat them electorally but also demoralize them by crushing them in a landslide. All hands on deck!

Outstanding oratory last night at the RNC meeting #2 in Milwaukee. The best speeches in my view were by Vivek Ramaswamy, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, and Ben Carson, in that order. The ordinary citizens who came forward were also impressive with their tales of tragedy caused by the insanely destructive immigration policies of Biden, Harris, Mayorkas, and the Deep State reprobates who pull their strings.  

Can What is Impossible to Achieve be an Ideal for Us?

This Stack topper proposes a generalization of the age-old principle from Roman law, ultra posse nemo obligatur.

Excerpt:

This is an important topic because having the wrong ideals is worse than having no ideals at all.  Many think that to be idealistic is good.  But surely it is not good without qualification.  Think of National Socialist ideals, Communist ideals, DEI-driven ‘wokester’ ideals and of their youthful and earnest and sincere proponents.  Those are wrongheaded ideals, and some of them are wrongheaded because not realizable.  The classless society; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the racially pure society; the society in which everyone is made materially equal by the power of the state including the states’ agents of equalization.  Ideals like these cannot be achieved, and if the attempt is made terrible evils will be the upshot.  The Commies broke a lot of eggs in the 20th century (100 million by some estimates) but still didn't achieve their fabulous and impossible omelet. 

Their ideals were not realizable because not warranted by the actual facts of human nature. The possibility of their realization was merely imagined, merely ‘cooked up’ or excogitated in the febrile heads of such utopians as the Nowhere Man John Lennon.

 

The Fall of the USA: Immigration Madness

When the USA is no more, what will future historians point to as the main causes of our collapse? One of them will be the foolish immigration policy that got its start in the '60s. Somehow we collectively forgot that

  • There is no right to immigrate
  • Immigration is justified only if it benefits the host society 
  • There is a distinction between legal and illegal immigration
  • Illegal immigration runs counter to the rule of law and national sovereignty
  • There is an important distinction between legal immigration and political asylum
  • A nation is not merely an economy but also a culture
  • A culture has a right to defend and perpetuate itself
  • Some cultures are superior to others in point of their contribution to human flourishing
  • Immigration without assimilation leads to disaster
  • Only certain groups are likely to assimilate and benefit their host country.
  • Only these groups should be allowed to immigrate.

How many of these points do you agree with? How is it that we have collectively lost our minds in respect of these (obvious) points? What are the chances of a return to sanity? How long before we collapse into hot civil war?  Are you ready?

Why No Jew-Haul?

U-Haul is raking it in these days renting moving vans and trailers to folks eager to flee such Dementocratic crapholes as San Francisco for rather more habitable places far from the Left Coast. Why then no Jew-Haul? Because the Jews ain't goin' nowhere, to allude to a song written by a Jew. Bill Maher makes the point, displaying along the way considerable historical savvy.

He also says something that supports the point I make in my Pollyanna post:

History is brutal, and humans are not good people. History's sad and full of wrongs but you can't make them unhappen because a paraglider isn't a time machine. People get moved, and yes, colonized. Nobody was a bigger colonizer than the Muslim army that swept out of the Arabian desert and took over much of the world in a single century. And they didn't do it by asking.

Maher is dead wrong on much, like the late Christopher Hitchens (d. 15 Dec 2011), but both are/were brilliant, articulate, courageous, and right about much.

I stand with them for free speech, open inquiry, the life of the mind and against the anti-civilizational forces of wokery and Islamism. And that is why I stand with the Jews.