Let it Go!

You allow mental clutter to collect in memory, and then you repeatedly sift through it, keeping it alive and present. What good is the memorial rehearsal of failures, foibles, and fatuities, of missed opportunities, and unpleasant encounters?

Let it go, not quite forgetting the details, but relaxing one's grip on them, while preserving the lessons.

A Not So Happy Warrior

Mark Steyn on Mike Adams (1964-2020):

He "seemed like" a happy warrior, but who knows? It's a miserable, unrelenting, stressful life, as the friends fall away and the colleagues, who were socially distant years before Covid, turn openly hostile. There are teachers who agree with Mike Adams at UNCW and other universities – not a lot, but some – and there are others who don't agree but retain a certain queasiness about the tightening bounds of acceptable opinion …and they all keep their heads down. So the burthen borne by a man with his head up, such as Adams, is a lonely one, and it can drag you down and the compensations (an invitation to discuss your latest TownHall column on the radio or cable news) are very fleeting.

Trump Delivers Once Again and Ends AFFH

This is a major victory against the Left.  Stanley Kurtz:

I am pleased to report that President Trump and Secretary Carson have together put an end to the Obama-Biden administration’s wildly radical Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. President Trump has delivered on this issue in a way that will preserve American liberty in general, and the freedom and self-government of America’s suburbs in particular.

Perhaps you saw Kurtz on Life, Liberty, and Levin last night. An impressive guest on the best political show on TV. 

La Decadenza

Dr. Vito Caiati writes:

Relevant to your post “The ‘Catholic’ ‘Universities’ Have Become Jokes: Fordham,” I call your attention to an interview by Marco Tossati of Archbishop Viganò, defender of the faith, on the evil that permeates the Bergoglian regime and the much of the Church, the “three elements” of which the latter characterizes as “heresy, sodomy, and corruption –[which] are so recurrent that they are almost a trademark of the deep state and of the deep church.”

As the interview, The Pope and the Sodomites, makes clear, here, we are generally dealing not with what you term “the unwitting agents of the demonic” but rather with fully conscious ones, who are bringing one of the greatest institutions and religious traditions of our civilization to ruin.  The cycle of decay in the Church and in Western society at large is rapidly accelerating . The moral horrors and violence that we are now witnessing in society, culture, and politics, orchestrated by the Left,  were largely unimaginable only a few years ago. This is not going to end well. “Saint Michael, the Archangel, defend us in battle against the wickedness and snares of the devil….”

I too do not see how this can end well.  The Left is now drawing from a cesspool of nihilism that  is reasonably viewed as literally demonic. The Unholy Spirit of he who "always negates" presides over them. But I still maintain that most of the agents of destruction "know not what they do":  they are foolish, pampered youth, products of an affluent and permissive society, brought up with no moral training by materialistic parents . . . in short, useful idiots, or as I say,  useless idiots.

BLM is Playing by the Book. Alinsky’s Book

Michael Brown:

In his insightful, 2009 mini-book, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, David Horowitz quoted an SDS radical who wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

As Horowitz explained, “In other words the cause — whether inner city blacks or women — is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution. That was the all-consuming focus of Alinsky and his radicals.”

When it comes to BLM, the purported issue, namely, that Black Lives Matter, is not the ultimate issue. Instead, a larger cultural revolution is the ultimate issue. (As many have noted, the founders of BLM are both Marxists and radical feminists, with two of the three women identifying as queer activists.)

And so, the mantra that “Black Lives Matter” specifically means blacks who are victims of white police brutality. Black lives in the womb do not matter. Blacks getting gunned down in gang violence do not matter. Black toddlers killed in random shootings do not matter. Not even blacks killed by black police officers matter — at least not nearly as much as blacks killed by white officers.

Those white officers, in turn, represent the larger system, which, we are told, is fundamentally racist. And it is that system that needs to be overthrown.

Thus, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Read it all, comrades.

Grammar is Propadeutic to Logic

So if grammar is 'racist,' then so is logic.

What is the criterion whereby a subject or activity is deemed 'racist' by leftists?  It appears to be this:  Whatever blacks and other 'people of color' are poor at is 'racist.' 

And what is at the back of that criterion?  It appears to be the assumption that we are all inherently equal, both as individuals and as groups, in all respects, and not just in respect of political rights.  Now we all believe in equality of rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; those among us with experience of life and good sense, however, know that there are all sorts of empirically measurable respects in which individuals and groups are not equal.  To take one of many examples, Asian students are superior to black students in point of knowledge of, and aptitude for, mathematics. 

Do I need to belabor this point among my astute readers? (Full disclosure: I am not now, and never have been Asian, and it is biologically impossible that I should ever become Asian.)

But if you foolishly believe that we are all inherently equal in every respect, with the same abilities and interests, then you may be tempted to embrace the following unsound argument:

A. We are all inherently equal in every respect. But:

B. This equality does not manifest itself as equality of outcome or result. Therefore:

C. There has to be a factor that prevents equality of outcome or result. And:

D. That factor is racism, both individual and 'systemic.'

This argument is multiply-flawed. But if you read this weblog, that very fact is evidence that you have the mental equipment to determine on your own where the flaws lie.  Why do I have to do all the work?

Thought, Prayer, Meditation

"Prayer is when night descends on thought." (Alain, as quoted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.) Knowing Alain, he must have intended his aphorism as a denigration of prayer. I see it the other way around. We cannot think our way out of our predicament; thinking merely allows us to map the terrain and discover the impasses.  It is merely a means of "consolidating our perplexities." (E. Cioran). It is the failure of thinking that leads us to pray, and the limitations of prayer that lead us to meditate  and wait, like Weil, in silence.  (Curious it is that Simone Weil was a student of Alain.)

So I say: Prayer is when night descends on thought, and meditation is when night descends on (discursive) prayer.  But all three are needed for a complete human life. Each of us should aspire to be a thinker, a believer, and a mystic with triple citizenship in Athens, Jerusalem, and Benares.

Rodin Buddha statue Genuflection