Latest musings, analyses, and general madness

Random Reflections In Vertigo

Sleep tight.– All this, so that seventy million frightened children may dream unto their graves, and finally unto their own private parcel of hell, in the warm cocoon of the most shameful mass delusion in world history. If their idol dies first, what will they do? I almost typed “frightened American children,” but decided not to sully the memory of a great country...

Passing Along A Word That Deaf Ears Will Never Hear

Since my website has essentially become a repository of judgments and reflections that almost no one currently alive on this planet will ever read, let alone care about, why not open it up today for the words of another man in a similar situation, though one whose voice speaks with considerably more practical urgency than mine? His pleas will fall on ears at...

From “The Buck Stops Here” to “Blame The Little Guy”

Elon Musk, the richest man ever to owe most of his fortune to government handouts and regulatory favors awarded to him to perform services utterly unjustified by the principles of limited government he now pretends to espouse, is trying to justify his random none-of-this-will-ever-affect-anyone-I-know torching of the federal bureaucracy in exactly the Trumpian way one would expect from an unprincipled businessman without a...

Depth Perception

Donald Trump says that Volodymyr Zelensky is the primary obstacle to peace in Ukraine. Elon Musk, in one of those pot-calling-kettle-black moments that have defined the Trump era of the Republican Party, has called Democratic Senator Mark Kelly “a traitor” for daring to disagree with the Trump-Vance-Musk deliverance of American foreign policy to the Kremlin, and in an ant-calling-lion-little moment, replied to doubts...

Mirror as Art, Mirror as Mask

Last May, I took a stab at translating Jorge Luis Borges’ excellent poem, “Mirrors,” the voice and ideas of which I believed had not quite been captured by the previous translations I had read. It does not follow from this that I succeeded in capturing the poem’s essence any better than my predecessors; I am merely explaining my reasons for trying. You may...

Time Isn’t Money, and Other Facts

I see a headline informing me that Donald Trump is giving a speech to Congress this evening (U.S. time), which I am told I can watch “live.” I am not even remotely tempted. First of all, I have a habit of not listening to Vladimir Putin’s official spokesmen, regardless of which language they happen to be butchering. Second, if you have endlessly mounting...

More Notes From The Rubble

Answers to a few of the near-universal talking points apropos the deliberate Vance-Trump ambush of Volodymyr Zelensky: This was not, not for one second, “a shouting match.” A shouting match is an argument in which both sides are shouting. Zelensky never shouted, never lost his cool, but merely expressed his points with a certain amount of exasperation and animation which were clearly and...

Notes From The Rubble

America is over now. That is sad, and I do not relish this tone of catastrophe, but I believe nothing can save it from here on out. Wealth exists there, and may continue to exist for a while, because the country has been reduced to little but wealth production, and the government is owned by people who, to put it mildly, will not...

Quick Comments On the Zelensky-Trump Meeting

Since there is nothing to say about this White House mafia act that cannot be seen and judged by the whole world now, thanks to Trump insisting that the meeting ought to be held on live television for the sake of entertainment, I will restrain myself from too much overarching condemnation of what the Trump administration is doing at this moment. God and...

When Does Appeasement Become Active Alliance?

The question that forms the title of this short post has been answered in one of the clearest ways possible: Appeasement of a tyrannical aggressor becomes open and active alliance with that aggressor when the appeaser explicitly sides with the aggressor in rejecting a simple UN resolution reiterating that body’s three-year-long condemnation of the tyrant’s ongoing war of annihilation against a sovereign nation,...