Can one get tired of Dylan? That would be like getting tired of America. It would be like getting to the point where no passage in Kerouac brings a tingle to the spine or a tear to the eye, to the point where the earthly road ends and forever young must give way to knocking on heaven's door.
The scrawny Jewish kid from Hibbing Minnesota, son of an appliance salesman, was an unlikely bard, but bard he became. He's been at it a long, long time, and his body of work is as vast and as variegated as America herself. We old fans from way back who were with him from the beginning are still finding gems unheard as we ourselves enter the twilight where it's not dark yet, but getting there. But it is a beautiful fade-out from a world that cannot last.
Thanks, Bob, it wouldn't have been the '60s without you.
Bullet is faster than Blitz. I've been playing over at Lichess: two-minutes with a one second increment, sudden death. I die a lot, but like Phoenix rise from my ashes to play again. The fastest bullet games are one minute per side, no increment.
What's the use of it? I count six uses.
1) It wakes me up. I out-monk the monks when it comes to early arisal from the bed of sloth. This morning I got up at 12:20 AM. (Usually I arise at 1:30) So by 4:30 I needed a second cup of java, but even that didn't turn the trick. So I logged on to Lichess and blasted out two bullet games, winning one, losing the other. And now I'm bangin' on all eight.
2) It gets me over a temporary writing hurdle. I hit a sag. Inspiration fails. How do I push this line of thought further? Stymied, I fire up the chess engine, bang out some games, and Seldom Seen Slim is back in the saddle, inspiration restored. I find my way forward.
3) It is good mental exercise. Exercise yourself every which way every day: mentally, physically, spiritually, morally. Mens sana in corpore sano, et cetera.
4) It is a challenge. The strenuous life is best by test.
5) It's fun. A little fun never hurt anybody.
6) It distracts me from what the filthy Dems and their media enablers are doing to the country. Chess is an oasis of sanity in an insane world. To swap out the metaphor, chess is the perfect drug, especially when enhanced by consumption of those less-than-perfect drugs, caffeine and nicotine.
I especially liked the section on the Boomer nuns of Benedictine College who were not happy with the Butker speech and are described as crotchety farbissinas.
A farbissina, I take it, is a person who is farbissiner, a Yiddish word that means sullen, mean, embittered, of a sour disposition.
Anthony Flood thinks so. Here is how his piece begins:
The dictionary defines a perfect storm as an “unusual combination of events or things that produce an unusually bad or powerful result.” The latter, as I see it, is life as we’ve become accustomed to enjoying it.
My list didn’t give sufficient attention to the open southern border of the United States, which is being invaded daily in great numbers, or the explosion of urban crime.
I was not thinking of the resurrection of Nazi-level, genocidalist antisemitism within the walls of the institutions tasked with handing on civilization’s treasures.
I inexcusably paid no attention at all to the moral depravity that acquiesces in (if not celebrates) infanticide and the gender confusion that spits on the revelation of God (Genesis 1:27, 5:2; Matthew 19:4-6) Whom the “perfect stormtroopers” hate because they love death (Proverbs 8:36). Structural instabilities have followed the culture of death as the night the day. (I’ll let others decide if the charge of post hoc, ergo propter hoc is relevant.)
The world-historical figure who may win the general election in 168 days (to which victory I will contribute) may slow the rate of decline and postpone some of its consequences, but he can’t reverse it.
On November 6, 2024, no perfect stormtrooper will say, “Well, you beat us fair and square! Better luck next time!” No, they’re prepared to “accept” such an electoral result the way the PLO famously “accepted” the state of Israel, that is, an enemy to be destroyed and whose people are to be exterminated. Their plans to destroy Western Civ in general and its American outpost in particular will be pursued.
Like Napoleon, Trump may reshape the trajectory of a post-revolutionary era and bevel a few of its sharp edges. In the offing, however, I see no counterrevolution worthy of the name. As I wrote in the cited post:
Call me a secular pessimist (although I’m an eschatological optimist), but I see no liberation in this dispensation, libertarian or otherwise, from those scourges. God will stop the wicked in their tracks:
So shall they [God’s enemies] fear the name of the Lord from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him (Isaiah 59:19).
He’ll lift it. God’s promised government is a future intervention that God, not man, will inaugurate; its blessings will be manifest to all, and delivered directly. “Thy Kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10).
Think you can cheer me up in the short run? Have at it.
Bill Vallicella
12 responses to “Will a Perfect Storm Soon be upon us?”
: full of windings and intricate turnings : TORTUOUS
The Unbreakable Anfractuous
Plots and paths can be anfractuous. They twist and turn but do not break. Never mind that the English word comes ultimately from the Latin verb frangere, meaning "to break." (Frangere is also the source of fracture, fraction, fragment, and frail.) But one of the steps between frangere and anfractuous is Latin anfractus, meaning "coil, bend." The prefix an- here means "around." At first, anfractuous was all about ears and the auditory canal's anfractuosity, that is, its being curved rather than straight. Anfractuous has been around for centuries, without a break, giving it plenty of time to wind its way into other applications; e.g., there can be an anfractuous thought process or an anfractuous shoreline.
The video is about eight minutes long and puts me in mind of the old "Joe and Eddy" tune from the early '60s, There's a Meeting Here Tonight.
Black support for Trump makes perfect sense. These black citizens understand that an endless influx of illegal aliens will have a disproportionate impact (to put it mildly) on them. After all, where will the illegals be sent? To Martha's Vineyard? They will be sent and are being sent to black neighborhoods where they take over the schools, the playgrounds, drain the social services, etc.
Black citizens, most of whom are law-abiding, understand that the rule of law is good for them, and that the cadre leftists who have infiltrated and now control the Democrat Party have contempt for said rule, despite their mendacious mouthings to the contrary, mouthings that are belied by their actions.
My use of 'disproportionate impact' above is slightly ironic, as I am sure my astute readers have noticed. The leftist line is that the enforcing of laws is 'racist' because strict enforcement and appropriate punishment has a 'disproportionate impact' on blacks. And of course it does. But that doesn't make it 'racist' on any reasonable definition of the term. It can't be racist if it is true.
'Disproportionate impact' is exactly what one would expect given the well-established fact that blacks as a group are more criminally prone than other groups. And this even after adjusting for police brutality, and other forms of police malfeasance.
We conservatives are not racists or fascists with an 'authoritarian personality structure.' We stand for liberty and (therefore) for limited government. We appreciate that cops are a necessary evil. I dilate further in Cops: A Necessary Evil.
UPDATE (5/21)
Is Trump the first populist Republican? No surprise The Militantsticks up for him. Meanwhile, James Carville, junkyard attack dog, barks himself silly. (Looks like the video I was looking for has been removed.) What could the lovely Mary Matalin see in him?
Brian Bosse, musically literate, and a musician himself, tells me that he's never heard of Mose Allison. In furtherance of Brian's education, I link to some Allison tunes below.
Academic Marxists of various stripes still appeal to Lenin’s 1917 pamphlet The State and Revolution in an effort to find a more “libertarian” Lenin. But this is at once a chimera and a bad joke. Like Marx himself, but even more intensely and ferociously, Lenin combines a Jacobin defense of terror and tyranny with a confidence that once the bourgeois “machinery” of domination is “suppressed,” the state will quickly “wither away.” In 1918, Max Weber had already exposed the absurd logic, and the ignorance of human nature, underlying such a claim. On some level, as Solzhenitsyn points out to great effect in The Gulag Archipelago, Lenin was a fabulist. He had persuaded himself, in words quoted by Solzhenitsyn, that “’the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the hired slaves of yesterday is a matter so comparatively easy, simple and natural, that is going to cost much less in blood […] will be much cheaper for humanity’ than the preceding suppression of the minority.” The result of this delusory expectation was that millions, even tens of millions, would perish under Lenin and Stalin. Declaring war to the death on established customs, private property, religion, sundry “class enemies” and “enemies of the people,” and on political liberty and human nature itself, was never going to be simple or easy affair.
Lenin made of the Solovetsky monastery the SU's first and cruellest gulag. How different is the US from the SU? Different, yes, but how different? Headed in the same direction under the able leadership of that devout Catholic, Joe Dementia? Harrison Butker seems to have triggered our lefty pals, bigly. Interesting times. And that reminds me: to the range on Monday.
Related: Tony Flood wonders why Earth Day falls on Lenin's birthday.
Some friends to my Right think women have no place in politics. I strongly disagree. But there's no denying that the recent 'catfight' in Congress supplies these extreme Righties with ammo.
Tulsi Gabbard is one member of the distaff contingent who has more right to be in politics than a lot of men I could mention. Here she takes on the stupidest bunch of women on TV.
Good advice. I should take it. I am too enamored of my own formulations, which I tend to repeat. Anthony Flood, a hard-working editor who is doing some editing for me, just sent me this:
The phrase "murder your darlings" is often attributed to the English writer and critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. He used a version of this expression in his 1914 lecture titled "On Style," which is part of his book "On the Art of Writing." The original quote is:
"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings."
This advice encourages writers to remove their most cherished or self-indulgent passages for the sake of overall clarity and quality in their writing. Over time, the phrase has been popularized and widely used by writers and writing instructors to emphasize the importance of being ruthless in editing and prioritizing the work's overall effectiveness over individual beloved segments.
I've said some unkind things about editors, but they do provide a check on one's vanity and self-indulgence.
10 responses to “Notes on Van Inwagen on Modal Epistemology”