I don’t think I could do this. I can fade away and I am in a situation where I am fading away from others but it’s from a resignation tinged with bitterness.
Left wingers assume that saying what a supposed intention of a government program happens to be is all that is needed to keep a government program going. Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water! they say to people who question the program.
Right wingers, for wont of a better label, say that the results of a program show that it is useless or even counterproductive. But, the bath has drowned the baby! they say to the left wingers who are deaf, and or are incapable or are unwilling to understand what the right winger is saying.
Indeed, Mr Carney may be worse than the Trudeau child, because his empty qualifications will confuse people, and Canadians are easily confused. He will be an ideal victim for Donald Trump, who fights rough sometimes, but is genuinely smart.
We never hear of great men until the time when all other men are small.
Case in point: Trump!
How to explain Zelensky’s strange behavior? He seems bent on having his country destroyed. He surely knows he has no cards, and Trump is offering him a dignified escape.
Zelensky is a grifter who either doesn’t want to be found out or wants to keep the grift going. Looking at it that way, his behavior can then seem rational. Zelensky, knowing that Trump & Vance were on to him, decided to appeal to the progressives who were worshipping him. And what better way to stay in their good graces than by making a scene with Trump. Even if Trump was substantively correct, Zelensky knew his left wing supporters would ignore that and see him as being bullied and thus heroic. And even if these people pledging support for him, like Trudeau and Starmer, had no cards either, it’s not important because he’s still a shining bauble in these peoples’ eyes. And so Zelensky’s grift can continue.
While it does appear that we have reached the end of a cycle of madness, perhaps several historical cycles that culminated in the last decade, it is going to be a long road back to normal. The crazies will not simply go away. They must be defeated, caged, and only released when the conditions that created them are eradicated. The normals will have to be trained in the new way of engaging in politics. Much like Russia after communism, America is on the road to recovery, but it is a long road.
With some election coming up in Germany, I hear the German authorities are trying so hard not to be Nazis, that they are turning into Nazis. Shit posting and Meme posting can apparently get you thrown into jail, or be raided so that your phones or computers can be seized. And apparently some NGOs that are fine with this sort of thing are receiving USAID-style funding from the German government to help in these persecutions.
Maybe the Germans should also have made it illegal to be Stasi.
I suppose this blog post would earn me prosecution if I had posted it from Germany.
“Of a sane man there is only one safe definition: he is a man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
I think modern people have somehow got their minds all wrong about human life. They seem to expect what Nature has never promised; and then try to ruin all that Nature has really given.
The proverbial iron rice bowl is, simply stated, someone’s way of making a living. Hopefully, most iron bowls are honorable; but surely many iron bowls are rackets and grifts.
What to do if you have a government iron rice bowl? You have the bowl because there is a problem that exists and you are said to be solving it. So, what to do if a reformer enters government and questions how you are dealing with the problem and even questions if you’re solving the problem at all? Your iron bowls being threatened, you can exacerbate the problem and then blame the reformers. Or you can expose what hithereto had been a result of your workings that you had hidden, and blame it on the reformers.
“Consider a few measures of cultural oblivion. We have college graduates who have not read a single book in their lives. We are not replacing ourselves with children. Marriage is not on the rocks; it hardly gets out of port to begin with. Churches are closing. Ignorance of Scripture, in part bound up with a general ignorance of history and the cultural heritage of Western civilization, is endemic.”
Esolen is another favorite writer of mine. What he writes has that hard slap of the unvarnished truth.
This is how we arrived at this odd time where John Derbyshire and Paul Gottfried share a pew with RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. The excesses of progressivism, unconstrained by the necessity of the Cold War, have put everything at risk, thus calling forth an old force that has been dormant since Gettysburg. That force is prudentialism. The thing that lies at the heart of Western conservatism is a set of precautionary principles that act to avoid unknowable negative consequences.
Without entering overmuch into details, I am an enthusiastic monarchist, and see it as the solution to many little problems; that, and an appointive legislature. I think this would appeal to that sizeable majority of Americans who approve Mr Trump’s policies, on immigration and everything else, and might also assuage the minority of voters who worry what might happen if he were ever deposed. For with democratic practices, the future is always unsound.
Immediately we have the lovely Queen Melania, and a very plausible, impressively tall heir in Prince Barron, together with an extensive royal family. But more to the point, Canada and Greenland could join this American Union uncontroversially, together with other entities including Panama and Gaza, for our own various monarchical traditions (British, Danish, Spanish) could be easily revised.
Mr (surely, Lord?) Vance would make an excellent Prime Minister — a job he already has de facto — and any one of Mr (surely, Lord?) Elon’s youthful staff could be given the Treasury to mind, assuming the rocket-man himself wouldn’t have time.
—Acabamos tratándonos recíprocamente como bienes fungibles cuando dejamos de creer en el alma.
—We end up treating each other as fungible goods when we cease believing in the soul.
It’s not enough to be learned, in addition to being a good Christian. If you don't correct the brusqueness of your character, if you make your zeal and your knowledge incompatible with good manners, I can't
see you ever becoming a saint. And despite your learning — because of it — you should be tied in a stall, like a mule.
