"Erase Women 2021."

Amy Welborn finds that Commonweal has joined the "personification" crusade against the female half of the human species.

That once-formidable publication has taken the last part of "there is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus" to a new level. 

And she has plenty of other examples, including the ACLU, the British Labour Party and now the LaLeche League.

At the rate we are going, they'll probably bring back lobotomization of women who object.

But always remember--blame anybody other than those acting like the Thought Police.

Especially when they're acting like the Thought Police and doing their damnedest to stop anything resembling an honest societal conversation.

Who is 2021 America to judge?

The federal prosecution of FGM cases in Detroit came to a probable end today.

An undoubted horror we are sure to see more of, sadly.

In the meantime, increasingly-common and legal versions of child genital mutilation were given further protection in one-seventh of America. 

An undoubted horror we are sure to see applauded, sadly. 

A difference being that the latter will be lavishly-funded and lucrative for the doctors and corporate suppliers involved.

Good luck trying to have it both ways, dying empire of empty men.

    The eyes are not here
    There are no eyes here
    In this valley of dying stars
    In this hollow valley
    This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
   
    In this last of meeting places
    We grope together
    And avoid speech
    Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
   
    Sightless, unless
    The eyes reappear
    As the perpetual star
    Multifoliate rose
    Of death's twilight kingdom
    The hope only
    Of empty men.

2021 is apparently making a run at 2020's "Worst Year of the Century" Award.

According to Claremont colleague Dave Reaboi, Angelo Codevilla has passed away.

A fine scholar, writer and patriot, he will be greatly missed--especially now. May he rest in peace.

And in Year Zero News, Ford's Theatre has some revisionist thoughts about its most famous attendee.

I have some thoughts of my own, the most printable involve increasing disgust and impatience with living in an era where moral and mental Lilliputians run the show. 

I will let Leo Tolstoy have the last word:

“If one would know the greatness of Lincoln one should lis­ten to the stories which are told about him in other parts of the world. I have been in wild places, where one hears the name of America uttered with such mystery as if it were some heaven or hell. I have heard various tribes of barbarians discussing the New World, but I heard this only in connection with the name of Lincoln. Lincoln as the wonderful hero of America is known by the most primitive nations of Asia. This may be illustrated through the following incident:

“Once while travelling in the Caucasus I happened to be the guest of a Caucasian chief of the Circassians, who, living far away from civilized life in the mountains, had but a fragmentary and childish comprehension of the world and its history. The fingers of civilization had never reached him nor his tribe, and all life beyond his native valleys was a dark mystery. Being a Mussulman he was naturally opposed to all ideas of progress and education.

“I was received with the usual Oriental hospitality and after our meal was asked by my host to tell him something of my life. Yielding to his request I began to tell him of my profession, of the development of our industries and inventions and of the schools. He listened to everything with indifference, but when I began to tell about the great statesmen and the great generals of the world he seemed at once to become very much interested.

“‘Wait a moment,’ he interrupted, after I had talked a few minutes. ‘I want all my neighbors and my sons to listen to you. I will call them immediately.’

“He soon returned with a score of wild looking riders and asked me politely to continue. It was indeed a solemn moment when those sons of the wilderness sat around me on the floor and gazed at me as if hungering for knowledge. I spoke at first of our Czars and of their victories; then I spoke of the foreign rulers and of some of the greatest military leaders. My talk seemed to impress them deeply. The story of Napoleon was so interesting to them that I had to tell them every detail, as, for instance, how his hands looked, how tall he was, who made his guns and pistols and the color of his horse. It was very difficult to satisfy them and to meet their point of view, but I did my best. When I declared that I had finished my talk, my host, a gray-bearded, tall rider, rose, lifted his hand and said very gravely:

“‘But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest gen­eral and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know some­thing about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would con­ceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.’

“‘Tell us, please, and we will present you with the best horse of our stock,’ shouted the others.

“I looked at them and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend. I told them of Lincoln and his wisdom, of his home life and youth. They asked me ten questions to one which I was able to answer. They wanted to know all about his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength. But they were very astonished to hear that Lincoln made a sorry figure on a horse and that he lived such a simple life.

“‘Tell us why he was killed,’ one of them said.

“I had to tell everything. After all my knowledge of Lincoln was exhausted they seemed to be satisfied. I can hardly forget the great enthusiasm which they expressed in their wild thanks and desire to get a picture of the great American hero. I said that I probably could secure one from my friend in the nearest town, and this seemed to give them great pleasure.

“The next morning when I left the chief a wonderful Arabian horse was brought me as a present for my marvellous story, and our farewell was very impressive.

“One of the riders agreed to accompany me to the town and get the promised picture, which I was now bound to secure at any price. I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend, and I handed it to the man with my greetings to his associates. It was interesting to witness the gravity of his face and the trembling of his hands when he received my present. He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer; his eyes filled with tears. He was deeply touched and I asked him why he became so sad. After pondering my question for a few moments he replied:

“‘I am sad because I feel sorry that he had to die by the hand of a villain. Don’t you find, judging from his picture, that his eyes are full of tears and that his lips are sad with a secret sorrow?'"

The Internet is NOT an archive.

Thanks to Amy Welborn for a link to this:

The internet does not preserve knowledge--it was not designed to, so it does not.

Enterprising students designed web crawlers to automatically follow and record every single link they could find, and then follow every link at the end of that link, and then build a concordance that would allow people to search across a seamless whole, creating search engines returning the top 10 hits for a word or phrase among, today, more than 100 trillion possible pages. As Google puts it, “The web is like an ever-growing library with billions of books and no central filing system.”

Now, I just quoted from Google’s corporate website, and I used a hyperlink so you can see my source. Sourcing is the glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together. It’s what allows you to learn more about what’s only briefly mentioned in an article like this one, and for others to double-check the facts as I represent them to be. The link I used points to https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing/. Suppose Google were to change what’s on that page, or reorganize its website anytime between when I’m writing this article and when you’re reading it, eliminating it entirely. Changing what’s there would be an example of content drift; eliminating it entirely is known as link rot.

It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has “billions of books and no central filing system.” Imagine if libraries didn’t exist and there was only a “sharing economy” for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It’s no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be—especially if someone reported a book being in someone else’s home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That’s what we have right now on the web.

. . .

The first study, with Kendra Albert and Larry Lessig, focused on documents meant to endure indefinitely: links within scholarly papers, as found in the Harvard Law Review, and judicial opinions of the Supreme Court. We found that 50 percent of the links embedded in Court opinions since 1996, when the first hyperlink was used, no longer worked. And 75 percent of the links in the Harvard Law Review no longer worked.

People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary—they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. Libraries exist, and they still have books in them, but they aren’t stewarding a huge percentage of the information that people are linking to, including within formal, legal documents. No one is. The flexibility of the web—the very feature that makes it work, that had it eclipse CompuServe and other centrally organized networks—diffuses responsibility for this core societal function.

I have seen it happen here: I have block-quoted from news and story links which no longer exist. But for the block-quotes, they might as well never have.

If you want it to last, print it. There is no other option.

Otherwise, it could inadvertently (?) go down the memory hole. 

Speaking of which, your daily reminder that Big Tech is only the friend of shareholders and congressbeings:

Similarly, books are now often purchased on Kindles, which are the Hotel Californias of digital devices: They enter but can’t be extracted, except by Amazon. Purchased books can be involuntarily zapped by Amazon, which has been known to do so, refunding the original purchase price. For example, 10 years ago, a third-party bookseller offered a well-known book in Kindle format on Amazon for 99 cents a copy, mistakenly thinking it was no longer under copyright. Once the error was noted, Amazon—in something of a panic—reached into every Kindle that had downloaded the book and deleted it. The book was, fittingly enough, George Orwell’s 1984. (You don’t have 1984. In fact, you never had 1984. There is no such book as 1984.)

At the time, the incident was seen as evocative but not truly worrisome; after all, plenty of physical copies of 1984 were available. Today, as both individual and library book buying shifts from physical to digital, a de-platforming of a Kindle book—including a retroactive one—can carry much more weight.

Physical copies of media, people. There are no substitutes.

Anyway, read the whole thing--it's the unpleasant reminder you need.

George Orwell describes American political narrative shifting in 2021.

 Hell, over the last 18 hours....

Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. 

On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. 

His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. 

The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia!

Just another sunny day in California.

An explicitly anti-Christian ethnic studies curriculum for public schools that encourages students to chant to Aztec gods in the name of social justice and advocates "countergenocide"?

The real face of "equity" is starting to be revealed. And it looks a lot like some very old, implacable and blood-stained stone faces from the human past.

Sane people need to starve these institutions by removing their children from them--or better yet, never enrolling them in the first place.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

 

[Update and Editor's Note, 3/15/2021]: sadly, there are insinuations that I post unverified propaganda. In response, I will note that the evidence is easily found and you can read the actual pages of the proposed curriculum here.]

Looks like I dumped Disney+ just in time.

The Mouse is putting disclaimers on The Muppet Show now. 

Your weekly reminder that the Woke Train has no brakes.

Raise the corporate tax rate you say? No objections here.

 

George Gascon: the Child-Murderer's Friend.

The newly-elected district attorney for Los Angeles County continues to impress.

Now, he has instructed his prosecutors to remove the sentencing enhancements for a murdering child molester. 

The DA for nearby Orange County has correctly deduced that that is morally reprehensible, and is wresting the case back from the anthropomorphic sack of offal next door.

And Gascon's policies have created some fascinating-but-predictable incentives for already-incarcerated violent felons, but I will leave that to the reader to discover.

Year Zero comes to the Capitol.

I have been trying to collect the welter of thoughts in response to the mob attack on the Capitol yesterday.

The bottom line is that it was another act of iconoclasm, an assault on American history indistinguishable from the ones we saw over the summer and continue to see now.

Only this time, it came from a tribe of the Right.

The reality is there are a large number of people, including prominent ones in elected office, who do not love the Republic. At most, they love a hypothetical state, one which, like "true communism," will never exist no matter how many bodies are added to the foundations.

And yes, there were and are no shortage of cranks on the right--I remember talk radio during the Clinton years, the Michigan Militia and the like, up to the unlamented Steve King, as well as other cringe legislators in safe districts and cynical executives, government and private sector. But at least--or so I used to comfort myself--the average guy on the right was a patriot who loved America's history and respected her symbols. 

I have no love for the corrupt corporatist oligarchy which attempts to dictate what we say or do. I agree that many of them--the information-molding monstrosities of BigTech leap to mind--are corrosive to the institutions of the Republic and the civil society which undergirds it, and deserve to be smashed repeatedly with the anti-trust hammer.

Pour encourager le autres.

And there are additional social, economic and political reforms which need to be made to give the country a chance to survive intact into the second half of this century. 

Simply, the grim reality is this: America no longer generates a sufficient number of the kinds of virtuous citizens she needs to sustain herself. She is spending the capital built up by previous generations, and spending it quickly.

Yesterday demonstrated that with grim clarity: average right-leaning joes stormed the Capitol.

People who heretofore loved the symbols of this nation--and probably still do, not comprehending they are wounding that which they profess to love. Nevertheless, wound it they did. 

Yes, left-wing shit-stirrers were present, contributing to the chaos. Which only reinforces my point about America not generating virtuous citizens to sustain the Republic. But that point is easier to point out to folks in a right-wing tribe. It is, to quote a much-beloved formulation, a truth which is self-evident.

It's harder to accept it when an allied faction does it. Maybe even impossible, as this comment thread at The American Catholic suggests.

More to the point, the leftists were not the majority of the stormers, and the blame cannot be shifted to a convenient them.

Can America regenerate peacefully, reforming herself to endure and more broadly prosper, long-term? Sure--all the tools are there, awaiting the vision and spirit of self-sacrifice and compromise which would enable their use.

Are there massive forces arrayed against it? Absolutely: there are giant piles of money to be made from the current spiral, and cupidity is amply rewarded by selling out the long-term well-being of the citizenry and Republic. All the while spouting pieties about individual rights, justice, global cooperation, privilege and the sacrosanct nature of private enterprise, naturally.

Those are tough odds, but not impossible. It has happened before--survival cancels programming, and crises have a way of focusing the collective mind.

But peaceable regeneration becomes impossible when people sever themselves from their traditions, virtues and reason--and then act accordingly. 

God grants no nation a promise of enduring unity. And we appear to be much nearer the end of that unity than even my pessimistic estimation had feared.

Yeah--no, you can't do this.

Telling the Georgia Secretary of State to find votes is bonkers, full stop.

It's worse than a loopy mistake--it's wrong.

Georgia's results and the behavior of Fulton County voting officials warrant plenty of suspicion. But "finding" votes is not the response. 

And even if Georgia were flipped, the result is still President Joe "My Term Is Gonna Be Lid!" Biden. 

In one phone call, Trump demonstrates why voters recoiled from a second term.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party demonstrates why voters recoiled from giving them more Congressmen.

Anybody get their stimulus yet?

 

The "Great Reset": Brought to you by the same people who looted the planet back in 2008?

I can agree that technocratic neoliberal capitalism is past time for root and branch reform. It is well on the way to crafting an anti-religious--and thus anti-human--hell, where everyone reads from the same corporate human resources handbook. As explored recently on this page, said handbook stridently argues that women abort their children in the West and for unimpeded access to slave labor in the East. 

Fascism with a globalist face and slogans, in other words. But very much a tyranny, with those who are favored party members--and those who will follow directions.

And I hope you can forgive me if I am skeptical that the same financial titans who brought us the Great Recession and took countless billions from the public fisc without a shred of responsibility for their own conduct are the right leaders for "building back better."

And now the Roman pontiff is aping their language. 

As Steve says, "good to know." 

On the bright side, the thing that wears the skin of the Western world is literally bankrupt seven times over, and that's just financially. The balkanization of that world along identity politics lines will ensure its demise, so we have that going for us.

 

This one should be proverbial.

"When your core value is truth, you'll eventually find yourself defending your enemies to your friends."

--Dave Martens.

Road to Bamiyan!

 

The literal blockbuster of the season! 

And there probably will be singing.

Mayor Muriel Bowser of our Nation's capital offers us a committee-vetted woke brainstorm:

Let's remove the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial!

My recommendation to her and her fellow Maoists is to just wait a bit: no doubt both will be obliterated during our bleak and edgy continental reboot of the Spanish Civil War. 

Meanwhile, spend the cash on a training seminar in Vegas or something like that.

You can noodle the ideas on a relaxing trip to your favorite salon.

Sufficient unto the day.

Thanks to Binks for the find. 

One of the finest souls I have met via the internet, not so by the way.

Posting it here again because Blogger has picture format issues...frequently.

Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world,  but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

One of the great features of living in the Information Age is that what have so much at our fingertips. 

One of the great features of being an American is the belief that you can strive to meaningfully improve your lot and that of your family.

These threads merge in the notion that information--be it a job opening, a sale, education or news of some opportunity or right-able injustice--is a tool to fix things.

While these things are all true to some extent or another--varying by time, place, and clashing or incompatible forces--each can also lead to the loss of a sense of proportion.

The reality is, we have far too much information. Our human minds aren't built to process all of that data flowing into it--much less to act upon it. 

One of the many things the pandemic has shown us is how little control we actually have. But that loss of control has not dampened our demand for information. To the contrary, it has intensified it, even as our ability to do anything with the reams of data has shrunk by the same margin.

So we have overflowing heads and locked-down--to one degree or another--bodies. There's so much we want to do something about, yet our ability to act is corralled.

If that isn't a toxic cocktail, I don't know what is. To be honest, I think most of us are a bit out of sorts, and depression/anxiety are soaring. And despite (more likely because of) the endless roar of online voices, we feel alone. 

No wonder we see rents in the social fabric. 

And that's before you throw in the deliberate trolling and disinformation efforts. 

The answer is Tolkien's. 

We can't right every outrage, seize every opportunity, work up every solution or run every evil to ground. And that's without being plugged into a global network of truth and falsity which churns out new data of indeterminate quality by the gigabyte.

But we can till our own patch. We can shore up the shelters we have built for ourselves and others. We can look out for each other without being busybodies and scolds. We can keep an eye on the horizon without trying to puzzle out by-the-minute forecasts. And if--when--trouble comes looking for us, we can deal with it when it comes. And we'll probably have a clearer head when it does.

Or you can let your emotional buttons be endlessly mashed by things you cannot do a thing about, distracting you from those you can.

And yes, "Physician, heal thyself!" is definitely in play here.

Some pushback against the Epsilons.

The blameless owners of the Nordic Pineapple in Saint John's, Michigan, have decided that Norway will not be cancelled after all.

People reached out from their own community and across the world but it was a reader from Norway who first suggested what the Offenbeckers viewed as the right solution — a vimpel.

A vimpel is a Swedish term referring to a long, pennant-shaped flag in the colors of a national flag used in Scandinavia. 

While vimpels aren't official national flags, Kjersten Offenbecker said they are often displayed by residents in Norway, an alternative to the country's flag, which can only be displayed there during certain times of day.

It is also worth noting that they quickly put the American flag back up, instead of keeping them both down. I sympathize with the poor folks, and am glad to see that they will run up the full flag of Norway on occasion, too.

But I have no sympathy for the title: "confusion" isn't a synonym for willful ignorance.

The protests have revealed that some people have big plans.

Plans that go far beyond reforming policing.

Truly transformative plans. 

Audacious, even.

Positively gulag-y.

And the studied silence about behavior like this from so-called responsible voices on the left speaks eloquent volumes--not a clause of it good.

Using the logic deployed throughout Days of Rage 2.0, your silence is violence.

You either support it or are too afraid to speak against it.

Regardless, those targeted by these displays have long memories and are keeping track.

Three thoughts.

First:

What you've just said is one of the most insanely-idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Second:

Do not bother trying to reason a half-wit out of a position she didn't reason herself into in the first place.

Third:

The coming disintegration of huge segments of "higher education" will, on balance, be a good thing.

One of the more worthwhile responses to Cancelmania! I have read.

Professor Agnes Callard provides a strong defense of continuing to read Aristotle despite his views on natural inferiority, slavery, and women.

I admit that my mordant first response was "Oh--they're still reading Aristotle in American universities? Wow! Win for sanity!"

I would add that other philosophers have been read just as reductively, with Plato being cast as the father of totalitarianism and Duns Scotus being claimed as the father of postmodernism.

But while the article doesn't do justice to the breadth of Aristotle's thought (editors likely intervened), Professor Callard broadens her argument to make a plea for listening to everyone on their own terms without assigning political motives.

One that will fall mostly on deaf (or deafened) ears, but still worth considering:

In fact, I can imagine circumstances under which an alien could say women are inferior to men without arousing offense in me. Suppose this alien had no gender on their planet, and drew the conclusion of female inferiority from time spent observing ours. As long as the alien spoke to me respectfully, I would not only be willing to hear them out but even interested to learn their argument.

I read Aristotle as such an “alien.” His approach to ethics was empirical — that is, it was based on observation — and when he looked around him he saw a world of slavery and of the subjugation of women and manual laborers, a situation he then inscribed into his ethical theory.

When I read him, I see that view of the world — and that’s all. I do not read an evil intent or ulterior motive behind his words; I do not interpret them as a mark of his bad character, or as attempting to convey a dangerous message that I might need to combat or silence in order to protect the vulnerable. Of course in one sense it is hard to imagine a more dangerous idea than the one that he articulated and argued for — but dangerousness, I have been arguing, is less a matter of literal content than messaging context.

What makes speech truly free is the possibility of disagreement without enmity, and this is less a matter of what we can say, than how we can say it. “Cancel culture” is merely the logical extension of what we might call “messaging culture,” in which every speech act is classified as friend or foe, in which literal content can barely be communicated, and in which very little faith exists as to the rational faculties of those being spoken to. In such a context, even the cry for “free speech” invites a nonliteral interpretation, as being nothing but the most efficient way for its advocates to acquire or consolidate power.

I will admit that Aristotle’s vast temporal distance from us makes it artificially easy to treat him as an “alien.” One of the reasons I gravitate to the study of ancient ethics is precisely that it is difficult to entangle those authors in contemporary power struggles. When we turn to disagreement on highly charged contemporary ethical questions, such as debates about gender identity, we find suspicion, second-guessing of motives, petitioning — the hallmarks of messaging culture — even among philosophers.

I do not claim that the possibility of friendly disagreement with Aristotle offers any direct guidance on how to improve our much more difficult disagreements with our contemporaries, but I do think considering the case of Aristotle reveals something about what the target of such improvements would be. What we want, when we want free speech, is the freedom to speak literally.

Read it all.

To paraphrase the late Rick James: "Outrage is a helluva drug."

In fact, the buzz it gives the self-righteous is impossible to kick.

Twenty years ago, the West Michigan town of Allendale erected a set of statues in a local park.

One depicts the end of the Civil War, and features a crestfallen Confederate.

So of course the statue smashers have descended on the town in full force.

Outsiders continue to pour into the rural town west of Grand Rapids to enlist in a battle being waged at protests, meetings and social media.

“I’ve seen more division and anger in our community than at any other point in my entire life. It breaks my heart,” resident Christina Berna said.

The battle lines in the festering dispute are murky. Most of the statue’s critics are white. Some of its defenders are black.

Wait, why would black people be defending it? The article successfully avoids quoting such interesting people, but here's a hint why:

An interesting compositional choice from the artist, truly. What is sometimes lost in the great, horrific bloodshed between Union and Confederate is what the War meant to black people of the era, free and slave. Here, a former slave child picks up a Union leaflet stating that he is no longer chattel property.

So that helpfully explains why black residents would not be eager to see it pulled down by Woke Whites in another of their mindless iconoclastic frenzies.

I could quote the article's usual collection of Woke Whites and their so-called reasoning for It Will Come Down! but you've heard the emoting all before, and will again as they move on to the next target.

There's no reasoning with them, and it's not worth an effort. I'm certainly not going to waste any pixels on people who aren't interested in thinking.

The answer is No.

Dunning-Kruger Incarnate.

That would be Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo of the Airline Terminal News Network.

Yesterday, while they were agreeing with the Year Zero Statue Purge, the duo regaled those waiting in Boarding Zones 4-9 with this nugget of insight into the beliefs of 2 billion people across the globe:

“Jesus Christ, if that’s who you believe, if that’s who you believe in, admittedly was not perfect when he was here on this earth.”

The latter of the duo is allegedly a practicing Catholic, and nodded along amicably. Not so by the way, he resents being called "Fredo," so much so that he spectacularly beclowned himself in his initial objection to the moniker. But as yesterday shows, he confirms on a regular basis why the nickname fits. Truly, Cuomo's only qualification for his role is his surname, but like the poor, nepotism will always be with us.

The former is also a staggeringly-incompetent blowhard even by the low standards of television journalism, but he thus far lacks a compelling nickname. Then again, he doesn't rise to the level of one. He's a nonentity, gaining the notice of the public not trapped in transportation hubs only when he says things like the above. Were it not for his media perch, it is difficult to envision a job he could do outside of sales, where soothing customers with affirming bullshit is a useful skill.

If you have noticed a strain of anger in my posts on various topical matters, you are correct to do so. It stems from a constant low-grade despair. Right now, the two things I have been centered in for my adult life, faith in Almighty God and love of country, are punchlines for the ruling class of both church and nation. A coalition of venal bureaucrats, radical partisans and too-immature youths in the grip of a mob mindset are ascendant in both.

Well, active youths mobbing about aren't exactly a major problem in the Catholic Church--three generations of "it doesn't matter" have sunk in. But otherwise the problems are congruous.

And there is almost no resistance in either case. The center cannot hold because there is no center. All is an accelerating spiral downwards, growing more vertiginous and hallucinatory in its madness.

The lamps are going out all over the world, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

Maybe the despair isn't so low-grade after all.