Latest musings, analyses, and general madness

Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh had an excellent radio voice and manner. He spoke with a rare combination of mellifluousness, somewhat ironic pomposity, and down-home charm. He was the Johnny Carson of talk radio hosts — no one built a brand entirely around his own unique persona with more ease, humor, or confidence. At the peak of his rise to fame as a conservative talk radio...

The Body

Modern scientific materialists are inclined, we might even say predisposed, to ask, “What is this thing you call ‘the soul,’ and why do you believe that you still need this notion, or for that matter that you have any right to assume it?” But we might just as easily turn these questions around on the moderns, and ask what they mean by “the...

The Jester’s New Clothes

Donald Trump, in response to Mitch McConnell’s having dumped him in the alley after making a complete fool of him for five years — this being no great feat, given the man’s foolish essence — has “lashed out” at his old puppeteer in his typical twelve-year-old mean girl fashion. And in the process, Trump reveals, admittedly somewhat superfluously, what a pathetically craven shell...

Nietzsche’s Collapse Into Madness

This age has pushed its rational minority to the edge. It has become difficult to walk out amongst one’s fellow human beings today without being intermittently struck by the thought of how embarrassing it is to belong to the same species as these others — these bipedal sheep, these regressed pre-individuals. But there is a hint of madness in such a musing, of...

“Cult”? What cult?

Follow the blue link right here to read a handwritten letter written and deliberately distributed as a public statement by eleven relatives of Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, in response to his vote to impeach Donald Trump for inciting a violent attack against him, his colleagues, the coequal legislative branch as such, and Trump’s own vice president. Highlights from this one-way family squabble: “Oh...

Mission Accomplished, Order Restored, Long Live The King

Mitch McConnell, more than any other Washington establishmentarian, was personally supported by Donald Trump for years prior to 2016. And in 2016, no establishmentarian was more responsible than McConnell for Trump’s runaway domination of the GOP primary process. It is no exaggeration to say that McConnell personally cleared Trump’s presidential path, in exchange for which he scored his greatest, and most cunningly planned...

Random Rants: TDS, Impeachment, Valentine’s Day!

The first time I saw the phrase Trump Derangement Syndrome, during the 2016 Republican primaries, I honestly assumed it was a reference to the mental state of Trump’s more ardent supporters, the millions who had very obviously traded in all their old beliefs and principles to join a TV star’s personality cult. I probably first realized my error when I started getting swarmed...

Fear of Death, Fear of Life

The single most universal and inescapable necessity of all human life is death. In principle, though not in subjective experience, it is known from the very beginning of life that this outcome is inevitable. This awareness, to the extent that it is achieved, colors every aspect of life, and increasingly so over the years, until its certain, though temporally unpredictable, arrival. It would...

When Freedom is “Above My Pay Grade”

In my recent “Reflections On Independence,” I noted that modern man, as a mechanism of soft despotism, has gradually been convinced, or rather conveniently allowed himself to be convinced, to judge important decisions, particularly those regarding the wellbeing of society as a whole — the sort of decisions that once formed the very core of the republican idea of self-government — as being...

Stigmatizing Human Breath

I just read a new headline from The Washington Post that absolutely crystallizes the essence of our hysteria pandemic: “The coronavirus is airborne. Here’s how to know if you’re breathing other people’s breath.” The details of the article, urging the use of carbon dioxide monitors as a proxy gauge for determining whether the air in any given space has traces of human breath...