Enjoying the view from Limbo
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...
If the mind — consciousness, thought, will — is an illusion of the brain, as our modern scientific religion insists, then whose illusion is it? After all, the brain itself, as a recognizable and definable entity, would, on this view, have to be nothing but another facet of the illusion. In other words, the brain itself is an object of conscious thought, and...
A student recently sent me a short e-mail consisting almost entirely of this thought: “Desire for recognition from others, including co-workers, family, friends…I really hate this.” The topic is worthy of serious consideration. Let us take a moment to examine this strange but all-too-common tendency in humans, the “desire for recognition.” It is unlikely that human beings could ever completely numb themselves to...
Jumping on the Civilizational Suicide Express, NASA has announced that it will cease using nicknames for planets and other cosmic objects that might be considered “offensive.” The prime examples of “offensive” names offered by the space agency: “Eskimo Nebula” and “Siamese Twins Galaxy.” Yes, really. The first example has gone by that nickname due to a feature well-represented in a spectacular NASA photo...
Twitter recently limited the user privileges of Donald Trump Jr., for the peculiar “offense” of citing a popular video (which I have not seen) in which a group of Houston doctors claim to have used hydroxychloroquine successfully in treating COVID-19. The social media company — which in my opinion ought to have every legal right to make such a decision — defended its...
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