Enjoying the view from Limbo
The world as you know it is everything you have carefully observed. And much of what you carefully observe is of a nature to be noted and catalogued in a particular way by you alone. Careful observation, however, means examination in depth, the slow rumination that catches a nuance missed by every casual onlooker. Observing is the opposite of merely “looking around,” analogous...
Today’s winning headline from Business Insider: “New York City’s spring coronavirus outbreak was roughly as deadly as the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 50 million people.” The logic of that headline is clearly intended to suggest that the current pandemic is “roughly as deadly” as a pandemic that killed 50 million people, even though it hasn’t actually killed anywhere close to that number...
When the world is what we see.– Clouds dominate our horizon, block our view, obscure the light, and cast doubt on all our plans. In truth, however, the sky is immeasurably wider than the clouds — the clouds merely appear vast because they are so much closer to us than the sky. All one needs to correct this problem of perspective is to...
Joe Biden has renewed his call for a U.S.-wide mask mandate. This is paternalistic tyranny, without ever so much as a veneer of genuine concern for the public welfare. (Liberty used to be regarded as at least a factor in calculations of the public welfare.) Meanwhile, U.S. Today keeps the flame of progressive revolution burning bright with this increasingly typical, and thoroughly predictable,...
Defying all the skeptics who thought Joe Biden had actually forgotten to choose a running mate, he has brilliantly chosen the woman who stood on a primary debate stage and implied he was a racist old white man who tried to protect segregation. No surprise there, of course. Biden had to choose a black woman, because those are the rules today; and every...
I see that Madeleine Westerhout, an overgrown college party girl and gossipmonger — who, naturally, was one of Donald Trump’s brilliant “best people” until she humiliated him by flirting…er, I mean “speaking” about the Trump family off the record, with anti-Trump journalists — has, to apply a noble term loosely, “written a book.” Specifically, she has tried to save her political career by...
A shocking headline from CBS News informs us, or at least those few of us brave enough to face the hardest truths, that the “U.S. has more COVID cases than some countries have people.” Is this real, or some kind of sick joke? How is one supposed to sleep at night after being confronted with, let alone fully digesting, the sheer enormity of...
This morning, scrolling through my Microsoft News default homepage, I saw a large feature article photo and headline: “Hong Kong troublemakers colluding with external forces must face severe punishment: central gov’t office.” Finding this a peculiarly uncritical tone in which to be reciting the Chinese Communist Party’s bunk, I clicked the link to this story, which turned out to be an actual English...
The most disturbing and dangerous aspect of The Pandemic that Ate a Planet, according to our friends at Chicken Little News (the official information forum of foxywoxy.gov), is the fact that such a high proportion of its victims never get sick, as though it would somehow be better if a higher proportion of the infected required hospitalization. In this irrational End-Times climate of...
I prefer feeling anxiously alone to feeling safely swaddled within a crowd. I prefer ideas that leave me uncomfortable in my weakness to ideas that satisfy my weakest inclinations. I prefer looking at things squarely to rounding off the edges of my vision for the sake of stability. I prefer the constant hum of disquiet that comes of acknowledging the vast unknown to...
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