Enjoying the view from Limbo
In response to the ongoing and increasingly unruly protests in Hong Kong, China is openly preparing paramilitary riot control troops on its border, thereby warning everyone of the inevitable. Given the pitch of brazenness from the protesters, it seems unlikely that they will be cowed by mere images of Chinese troops. There will almost certainly be an ugly outcome here, as the protesters...
Every page of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offers something profound, something personally challenging, something lovely, or something disputable in the most ennobling sense of the word, namely the sense of engaging the reader in thoughtful discussion with a deeply probing and relentlessly frank mind. Interestingly, the work — actually a collection of short observations written for himself, rather than for a public...
Last year, when Trump’s supporters, Trump’s skeptics, and many of Trump’s alleged Democratic opponents were chanting or at least conceding that a Nobel Peace Prize might be in the offing in light of his “new approach” to the North Korean threat, I was almost a lone voice calling the whole thing a typical Trump flim-flam show, and highlighting the essential surrender to communists...
Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy, well-connected financier who provided underage girls for the entertainment of many rich and powerful men in Washington and beyond, has died in prison of an alleged suicide. Everything about this story is so absurdly over the top in its exposure of the ugliest elements of the power elite that it seems fitting he should die this way, apparently taking...
As many of you know, I had surgery to repair a broken bone in my foot back at the end of January, an injury which severely curtailed one of my lifelong essential activities, walking. Well, August 9th here in Korea, I underwent Round 2 of this surgical adventure, removing the screw inserted during the first round. As a result of my current hospitalization,...
On the day of the recent mass shooting in Dayton Ohio, tired of beating my head against the wall of thinly-veiled bloodlust that protects contemporary man’s fascination with treating the ugliest local crimes as though they were major world news, I decided to address the matter somewhat antithetically, in verse. One stanza of my little ode to mock compassion was a simple prediction,...
Over the weekend in America, two insignificant nobodies imagined they could make their lives meaningful by shooting dozens of strangers and claiming, to aggrandize their emptiness, that their aimless spiritual suicide was some sort of quasi-political statement. In carrying out their self-damnation, the two insignificant nobodies used guns, much like the ones owned by millions of law-abiding citizens who, in accordance with the...
Pleasure enlivens the desire for more pleasure, filling the soul with an insatiable craving for perpetual repetition, a relentless rhythm of titillation and release as inescapably compulsive as an ever-quickening circle dance. Yesterday it was El Paso, Texas: X number dead, the more the better, for the greater the number, the more justifiable our obsessive staring, and the greater our access to round-the-clock...
Saturday morning in old El Paso (where it’s likely that you’ve never been),between what they call “Cielo Vista Mall”and some Walmart that you’ve never seen, Some worthless young man that you’d never know,killed some folks who were no one to you;But distant sad news fills the idling mind,With so many fun things to do! “Guns are the villain,” shout those on the left,“Don’t blame...
Lest anyone imagine that Trump’s boasting this week about his ability to bankrupt a nation even faster than he can bankrupt a business is limited to matters of mere economic survival, the Orange God himself has taken pains to remind Americans that he is just as brave and unprecedented in promoting moral bankruptcy. As Dana over at Patterico’s site observes: It speaks...
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