June 2010
7 posts
Dictating the Friendships of Little Children
The End of the Best Friend The tag-line of this New York Times article reads: School officials intent on discouraging any exclusivity are seeking to sever traditional best-friend bonds. The more normal something is, the more it must be destroyed by the modern liberal managerial complex. “Educators” and other people entrusted with the day-to-day care of children (the role that used to...
The Knights of Chicago
The Brian DePalma movie, The Untouchables, is a story of knighthood. It’s an old-fashioned story of good and evil that you don’t see much anymore. Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner) is loved by his wife and daughter; and he will stop at nothing to protect them. But he creates their protection himself, with his own weapons and his own orders and actions. Because he is a man of the law, and a...
mhsteger:
Mondnacht, the fifth song of the...
“The traditional view is that true art is moral: it seeks to improve life, not...”
– John Gardner
May 2010
11 posts
Listen
Awareness of the Evils of Carbohydrates in Ancient...
The typical Ancient Egyptian presumably had a very high carbohydrate diet. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia — as far as we can tell — were the very beginning of widespread, organized agriculture, and hence the very beginning of the diseases of carbohydrate-eating.
But here’s an intriguing hint that even though the Egyptians needed the carbs for pure calorie value, they also knew that such a...
The second movement, Adagio, of the Sonata for...
Our Intelligible Universe
Larry Auster at View from the Right had the following post, yesterday:
Our intelligible universe
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw plainly. —John Ruskin, Modern Painters
While I would qualify the phrase “the greatest thing,” what Ruskin speaks of is the ideal that animates me, it’s what I always strive...
“Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do...”
– Mark Twain (via reluctantbuddha) (via quote-book) (via shelbyandrews)
“Now the first fact is that the most simple people have the most subtle ideas....”
– G. K. Chesterton
April 2010
4 posts
What Is the Most Basic Thing?
When people write wikipedia entries, they never point out the painfully obvious. And, generally, one shouldn’t expect them to. For instance, if the entry is about Peter the Great, one shouldn’t expect the entry to mention that “Peter the Great had pale skin. Peter the Great had testicles.” Of course, these things are true. But they are so true that they don’t need...
February 2010
12 posts
What is Transcendence?
The quality of being objectively real yet beyond immediate sensory experience applies to all human values and institutions. It could be described as the quality of any whole that is larger than the sum of its parts.
A marriage, for example, is not simply constituted of the man and woman who make it up; it is something larger in which the partners participate and which provides the very meaning of...
Getz
... and your gloom be like the noonday
Look, you serve your own interst on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high. Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day...
Capons Wage No War
Between two sailors on a man-of-war in the British Navy in the early 19th century, looking at a beautiful specimen of full-feathered male bird (and “Jack“‘s first reply is sarcastic, if you don’t catch it):
Stephen said, “Have you ever contemplated upon sex, my dear?” “Never,” said Jack, “Sex has never entered my mind, at any time.”...
“A man should look as if he had bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on...”
– Hardy Amies
New Days
Rising fresh in the early morning is a subtle miracle. In good health, with a bed to lay my head down, food I did nothing to create: all these things come to me when I open my eyes. That small act of rising from slumber, creates a whole world of wonder and possibilities in an instant. Of course, I did not create that world really. It is a gift. But the true miracle is how easily I am given the...
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“The standpoint of irony as such is nil admirari, but when it kills itself irony...”
– Søren Kierkegaard, Papirer
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