Thursday, December 31, 2015
NEW YEAR'S EVE
A thought from the late and very great Neptunus Lex:
“I’ve often wished that you could split at each important choice in life. Go both ways, each time a fork in the road came up. Compare notes at the end, those of us that made it to the clearing at the end of the path. Tell it all over a tumbler of smokey, single malt.”
3:50 PM
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
ARE WE LIVING AT THE INTERSECTION OF THESE TWO STORIES?
The stories are:
Robert Heinlein's The Year of the Jackpot
and
Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros
Read the post at Chicago Boyz
9:42 AM
Thursday, December 24, 2015
CHRISTMAS 2015
Numerous links at my Chicago Boyz post
1:27 PM
Monday, December 21, 2015
WORTHWHILE READING & VIEWING
…the increasing number of voters who do not make their decisions on who will create the most jobs, build the most infrastructure, save the environment, strengthen the economy or even keep citizens most safe. These people don’t care about that. And while they do vote based on what they think is in their own self-interest, their regard is not for what they view as the path most likely to improve society’s lot. It is, curiously, motivated entirely by their sense of what is most socially fashionable – in other words, the fundamental high school desire to be one of the cool kids.
7:08 AM
Saturday, December 19, 2015
SONGS OF 2015
I’ve heard quite a few good new songs this year…not all “new” in the sense of being just-released, but at least new to me. Some of them…
Reflections from the beyond of an Irish immigrant who fought in both the American Civil War and at Little Big Horn: Mick Ryan’s Lament, sung here by John Sheahan, Jane, & Shane.
I heard this sequence of songs on the radio while driving home one foggy night:
8:45 AM
Friday, December 11, 2015
WORTHWHILE READING
7:12 AM
Sunday, December 06, 2015
THE PHOBIA(S) THAT MAY DESTROY AMERICA (rerun)
(originally posted in 2012–a rerun seems appropriate under current circumstances)
I am continually amazed by the level of fear, contempt, and anger that many educated/urban/upper-middle-class people demonstrate toward Christians and rural people (especially southerners.) This complex of negative emotions often greatly exceeds anything that these same people feel toward radical Islamists or dangerous rogue-state governments. I’m not a Christian myself, or really a religious person at all, but I’d think that one would be a lot more worried about people who want to cut your head off, blow you up, or at a bare minimum shut down your freedom of speech than about people who want to talk to you about Jesus (or Nascar!)
It seems that there are quite a few people who vote Democratic, even when their domestic and foreign-policy views are not closely aligned with those of the Democratic Party, because they view the Republican Party and its candidates as being dominated by Christians and “rednecks.”
What is the origin of this anti-Christian anti-“redneck” feeling? Some have suggested that it’s a matter of oikophobia…the aversion to the familiar, or “”the repudiation of inheritance and home,” as philosopher Roger Scruton uses the term. I think this is doubtless true in some cases: the kid who grew up in a rural Christian home and wants to make a clean break with his family heritage, or the individual who grew up in an oppressively-conformist Bible Belt community. But I think such cases represent a relatively small part of the category of people I’m talking about here. A fervently anti-Christian, anti-Southern individual who grew up in New York or Boston or San Francisco is unlikely to be motivated by oikophobia–indeed, far from being excessively familiar, Christians and Southern people are likely as exotic to him as the most remote tribes of New Guinea.
7:38 AM
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