“It may be difficult for many of you to embrace the disconcerting and possibly bewildering idea that the entire status quo is untenable and will disintegrate not from policy errors or poor leadership but simply as a consequence of its current structure.”
— Charles Hugh Smith, 2018
Archive for the ‘Words’ Category
Friday, January 8th, 2021
“What China actually is (and where the USA is headed or has already arrived) is a form of oligarchic fascism. The capitalist market’s fine as long as it’s my capitalistic market and you’re a member of my party. Communist Party, Democratic Party, what difference does it make? As long as it’s one party and we’re in charge.”
— Roger L Simon, The Epoch Times
Sunday, December 20th, 2020
“I of course am thoroughly convinced of the value of self-knowledge, but is there any use in recommending such insight, when the wisest of men throughout the ages have preached the need of it without success?”
— C G Jung, 1949
Thursday, December 10th, 2020
“Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.”
Wednesday, August 5th, 2020
“To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice — it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos… Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope, while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.”
— Jordan B Peterson — 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Glaser’s “Ten Things I Have Learned”
Sunday, June 28th, 2020You can only work for people whom you like.
If you have a choice, never have a job.
Some people are toxic.
Avoid them.
The good is the enemy
of the great.
Less is not necessarily more.
Style is not to be trusted.
How you live changes
your brain.
Doubt is better than
certainty.
On aging: It doesn’t matter.
Tell the truth.
Milton Glaser
1929 – 2020
Sunday, May 31st, 2020
“But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.”
— M L King, Jr — Stanford University, April 14, 1967
Tuesday, April 21st, 2020
“He had a strong sense of his life being upon the turn, between two seasons, as it were, with the certainties of the one no longer valid for the other. He was not a fanciful man, but for some time now he had had an indefinable sense of chaos following order, of impending disaster; and it oppressed his mind.”
— the thoughts of Captain J Aubrey
Treason’s Harbour by Patrick O’Brian
Friday, March 6th, 2020
“When we kill women in our stories, we aren’t just annihilating female gendered bodies. We are annihilating the feminine as a force wherever it resides — in women, in men, of the natural world. Because what we really mean when we say we want strong female leads is: ‘Give me a man but in the body of a woman I still want to see naked.’ … I don’t believe the feminine is sublime and the masculine is horrifying. I believe both are valuable, essential, powerful. But we have maligned one, venerated the other, and fallen into exaggerated performances of both that cause harm to all. How do we restore balance?”
— Brit Marling 2/7/20
Saturday, November 30th, 2019
“The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.”
— Wendell Berry — from The Hidden Wound
censorship of art
Friday, June 28th, 2019This is Wendell Berry’s must-read 2015 editorial about art censorship:
kia walaia
Tuesday, June 18th, 2019I’ve reached page 179 of In Search of Robinson Crusoe and Tim Severin finally brings tears to my eyes with his description of Marco’s farewell (kia walaia, which translates from Miskiti as “to smell, to understand”). An adequate substitute for O’Brian this summer, I discovered this writer and true-life adventurer while cutting up an old Outside magazine. When I finish this, I must find his book on the North Atlantic voyage of Saint Brendan, a feat which Severin dangerously re-enacted with an authentic skin-covered boat.
• When I thought, “What is the purpose of all this?” as I was taking care of a completely disoriented and feeble Mombo, the only possible answer is what John Paul II called “the law of the gift” — the giving of oneself as the path to true happiness. It aligns with the single greatest of commandments, to love. But it also requires the conscious awareness, consent, and acceptance of the giver, or the gift becomes something else, and can be perverted so readily into resentment, or the sense of injustice. And so, it is not just the doing. It must be the mindfulness behind it, too.
Wednesday, February 27th, 2019
“Individual freedom is the product of civilizational advancement. The division of labor, essential to the free market, and the division of meaning, essential to human liberty, are the result of society becoming more “complicated.” Fascism, like socialism, was reactionary, precisely because it sought to restore the ancient human impulses of tribalism and authoritarianism. The cult of unity is simple, freedom is complex. Mussolini was just one of thousands of intellectuals who thought that economic planning, nationalism, socialism, and collectivism generally were more sophisticated and advanced ideas. He was wrong, and so are the people who make the exact same claims today.”
— Jonah Goldberg 2/27/19
Monday, October 15th, 2018
“The modern doctrines of diversity and multiculturalism are a kind of homogenizing totalitarianism. Its acolytes want every institution to be filled with people who look different but think alike. What our society needs is not more ‘diversity’ of this sort but more variety.”
— Jonah Goldberg 10/14/18
Sunday, June 24th, 2018
“It’s great and good that people are praising Charles. But it would be nice if more people on the right thought for a moment about why his insights and contributions were so valued. Charles came to play. He brought facts with him and he never went beyond them. He never caved on principle, either. In short, he didn’t pander to his audience. He told them what he thought they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear. Moreover, Charles was never mean or conspiratorial or demagogic. There was not an ounce of cruelty in Charles Krauthammer, yet we live in a moment when too many people think cruelty is a form of strength.”
— Jonah Goldberg 6/22/15
Thursday, June 21st, 2018
“I made a promise to myself on day one [after my injury]. I was not going to allow it to alter my life. All it means is whatever I do is a little bit harder and probably a little bit slower. And that’s basically it. Everybody has their cross to bear — everybody.
— Charles Krauthammer
“I would think about Charles any time I started to feel sorry about myself for any reason, and that would pretty much snap me out of it.”
— Brit Hume
Charles Krauthammer
1 9 5 0 – 2 0 1 8
a giant among
conservative thinkers
R
I
P
Monday, May 14th, 2018
Tom Wolfe
1 9 3 0 – 2 0 1 8
a peerless observer
and communicator
R
I
P
Monday, October 23rd, 2017
“You think there will be fewer insecticides sprayed on farmlands around the globe in the years to come? Think again. It is the most uncomfortable of truths, but one which stares us in the face: that even the most successful organisms that have ever existed on earth are now being overwhelmed by the titanic scale of the human enterprise, as indeed, is the whole natural world.”
— Michael McCarthy 10/21/17
Sunday, August 13th, 2017
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”