“Arguing with a woman is like reading the Software License Agreement. In the end, you ignore everything and click I agree.”
Eyden I., "Kiss Friendzone Goodbye"
"The artist is not a freak or an oracle or a genius. In fact, the artist is at the epicenter of normality. Poets are wounded in the same ways as everyone else, but with one particular distinction--they are not wounded to the point of speechlessness. Instead, they are wounded into speech. Their job, unlike the roles assigned to most of us, is not to conceal or to disguise their woundedness, but make it glaringly evident. Poets are useful to the culture precisely to the extent that their experience is representative--representative, and murderously frank."
Tony Hoagland's essay, "The Poet As Wounded Citizen" in the December issue of The Writer's Chronicle.
Eyden I., "Kiss Friendzone Goodbye"
"The artist is not a freak or an oracle or a genius. In fact, the artist is at the epicenter of normality. Poets are wounded in the same ways as everyone else, but with one particular distinction--they are not wounded to the point of speechlessness. Instead, they are wounded into speech. Their job, unlike the roles assigned to most of us, is not to conceal or to disguise their woundedness, but make it glaringly evident. Poets are useful to the culture precisely to the extent that their experience is representative--representative, and murderously frank."
Tony Hoagland's essay, "The Poet As Wounded Citizen" in the December issue of The Writer's Chronicle.
Probably most of them would claim to be 'spiritual but not religious', that ghastly phrase that is unctuously self-congratulatory, in that it implies that the person who says it of him- or (more frequently) herself is not crassly materialistic, believes that there is something to human life over and above the day-to-day flux of getting and spending, and is an all-round good person, unlike most of humanity.
ReplyDeleteTheodore Dalrymple
https://www.takimag.com/article/thoughts-and-prayers/
For the first time since 2011, we will have a budget surplus. We are about to reach the federal budget surplus of 2.1 percent of the GDP.
http://russialist.org/russialink-transcript-vladimir-putins-annual-news-conference-kremlinru/
The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New Testament, and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it would startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and all modestly refrain from applying.
R.L.S.
“Why would I hate Arabs? I love Arabs. They buy my 15 million dollar apartments.”
The Donald
https://observer.com/2018/12/glenn-greenwald-on-sucker-journalists-and-why-theres-no-silver-bullet-coming-for-trump/
If we do not leave now, we will be chained to a corpse.
Baroness Deech
Churchill liked to say that a key distinction between nations is whether “the people own the government, or the government owns the people.”
https://americanmind.org/features/citizen-statesmen-cotton-on-foreign-policy/
“Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.”
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
In one sense, these malcontents—“gilets jaunes” as they are called for their yellow vests—are doing the world a favor. They are telling the immense coalition of Marxists, eco-alarmists, camp-followers, dupes, and garden variety political cowards that they will not put up with this bunk about climate change requiring drastic reductions in carbon emissions and therefore justifying absurdly high fuel prices as the world oil price declines. This was too easily accessible an escape hatch for political leaders who have no idea how to square the circle of bloated public expenditures, sorely irritated taxpayers, bourgeois insistence on retention of some value for our currencies which have no value other than in relation to each other, and the irresistible temptation to promise to spend more.
The West Needs to Rediscover Talent for Self-Government
By Conrad Black December 5th, 2018
“Nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that . . . everything is the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged from the fertile mind of man.”
Theodore Dalrymple
And there’s a saying about optimists and pessimists which I love, which is that an optimist is a person who believes we live in the best of all possible worlds and a pessimist is a person who’s afraid that might be true.
Michael Griffin
Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering
ww.hudson.org/research/14284-full-transcript-regaining-the-strategic-advantage-in-an-age-of-great-power-competition-a-conversation-with-michael-griffin
I seldom know in any given circumstances whether the Lord is giving me a reward or a punishment.
ReplyDeleteFlannery O’Connor
“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
André Gide
"At Morning. The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day, bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep."
Petition that Stevenson composed for the use of his household at Vailima
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
Flannery O’Connor
Question: What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor? Answer: Make me one with everything.
Samuel Johnson about James Macpherson’s poetry: “Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.”
“My definition of man is, ‘a cooking animal.’ The beasts have memory, judgment, and all the faculties and passions of our minds ,in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook.”
James Boswell, Life of Johnson
‘The only thing we can do alone is go to hell.’
Old saying
Conrad Black is a fat old uxorious fool who went to prison for stealing.
ReplyDeleteDon't kill the messenger... comment on this:
Delete"In one sense, these malcontents—“gilets jaunes” as they are called for their yellow vests—are doing the world a favor. They are telling the immense coalition of Marxists, eco-alarmists, camp-followers, dupes, and garden variety political cowards that they will not put up with this bunk about climate change requiring drastic reductions in carbon emissions and therefore justifying absurdly high fuel prices as the world oil price declines. This was too easily accessible an escape hatch for political leaders who have no idea how to square the circle of bloated public expenditures, sorely irritated taxpayers, bourgeois insistence on retention of some value for our currencies which have no value other than in relation to each other, and the irresistible temptation to promise to spend more."
Thanx for reading...
The Case for National Realism
ReplyDeleteDiversity is the hallmark of empires, not democracies.
E. M. Oblomov
January 2, 2019
Diversity is now, supposedly, the primus inter pares of our political values. But ethnic and racial diversity, in all its colorful pageantry, is traditionally associated with empires, not republics. Imperial Rome was a spectacular kaleidoscope of nations and religions. By contrast, republican Rome was merely, austerely, Roman.
It is a part of the Great Unlearning of our age that today’s progressives are forgetting the hard lessons that elevated national self-determination to center stage. Visceral hostility to the national idea is nearly universal among the West’s cosmopolitan ruling elites, who conflate it with racism and bigotry and blame it for the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century. The upper reaches of our social strata are composed increasingly of a class of transnationals who hold a passport of convenience (or three), and seem to drift along from San Francisco to Singapore to London to Hong Kong, equally at home in each, without permanent attachment to any. Today, a banker in New York has more in common with a management consultant in Tokyo or a lawyer in Dubai than with a soybean farmer in Nebraska or an auto mechanic in Jacksonville. The transnationals share few common assumptions, beliefs, and aspirations with their geographical compatriots from the lower orders, and they have little use for the nation-state, with its flag-waving, jingoism, and other sentimental expressions of folkish unity. History, it seems, continues to mock poor Karl Marx, who proclaimed that the proletariat has no country. As the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election clearly show, it is in fact the haute bourgeoisie that has no country; the proles are deeply attached to theirs.
Whether ethnic diversity is compatible with democratic republican government is open to question, though it is considered impolite, or worse, to raise that question. Democracy requires a demos. Truly free, democratic, and stable multiethnic societies are rare, as the Europeans are learning again. There’s Switzerland, sure, but a core principle of the Swiss solution is separation: the country’s four ethnicities are mostly concentrated in their own cantons.
In moments of clarity, when they are not reflexively accusing their opponents of racism, today’s progressives object to nationalism on the grounds that it is outmoded, “socially constructed,” contingent, and subjective—that nations are, in the words of one classic text on the subject, “imagined communities.” But even if something is imagined and socially constructed, it does not necessarily follow that it needs to be reimagined and deconstructed.
The tragic virtue of National Realism is that it contains the wisdom that public policy is most effective when it works with the grain of human nature, not against it. Societies are ecosystems. Don’t subject them to diversity shock through hare-brained utopian open-borders experiments cooked up by economists and politicians.
E.M. Oblomov is an attorney who practices international law in Washington, D.C.
Saturday, 5 January 2019
ReplyDeletePulling the Plug
by G. Murphy Donovan
Three issues apparently inspired Mattis to fall on his sword; rapprochement with Russia, allied burden sharing, and small wars in the Ummah. Trump’s sentiments on these issues were always prescient. And in all cases, Trump the amateur, exhibits more common sense, if not the policy high ground, on all three.
The Russians do make better allies than enemies. NATO partners are military security dead beats. EU member states do not pay their fair share of NATO costs. If two world wars proved nothing else, those blood baths demonstrated that smug and complacent West Europeans will do as little as possible as long as possible without a swift kick in their six o’clock.
Trump is correct about those Muslim wars too, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria included. America does not have any answers for an Islamic world that is unwilling to address the Shia/Sunni suicide pact and the many cultural pathologies that litter either side of that chasm. Muslim terror is a symptom not a cause.
Wars with fanatics, and their state sponsors, not prosecuted quickly and conclusively, inevitably end badly. ISIS is just another campaign, not the war. The larger global clash of civilizations abides.
https://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm?blog_id=68017