“He does not care for women, but for Votes for Women; he does not care for children, but for education; he does not care for animals, but for anti-vivisection; he does not care for Nature, but for ’open spaces. He does not care for anything unless he can do something to it.”—GKC
Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
[Now with restored images.]
No, TikTok Is Not Entirely the Work of the Devil – Bill Quick @ Daily Pundit
The creator is a significant TikTok influencer with nearly two million followers, so it’s not as if his POV is unrepresented among today’s kids.
And, once again, I don’t give a ratfark about the “Deadly Threat of ChiCom Owned TikTok,” which is mostly bullshit, especially given the panopticon characteristics of American-owned social media platforms which are entirely ignored in the phony passion play being conjured up by our purported highers and betters around the matter.
HT:Venlet
A friend told me about this, but I thought I’d go see it for myself. It’s a bench above a grave in Seattle’s Lakeview Cemetary. It’s just about 20 yards above the graves of Bruce Lee and Brandon Lee. In this vapid age of celebrity uber-alles, those graves still receive a constant flow of visitors immersed in the vanity of their fandom. The remains of these celluloid heroes, these men whose life’s work was mere pretending, still have tokens, incense, flowers, and other offerings heaped upon them. It’s as if the people who come, not knowing these men in life, seek a deeper unknowing of them in death. It’s not about who they were but who their mourners were not.
It seems to me that the hundreds of millions now addicted to “celebrity” are addicted to heroin of the soul. Like heroin, “celebrity” must be taken in ever-increasing doses to fill a hole in the user’s soul. And just like heroin, “celebrity” doesn’t fill anything but only increases the emptiness. Which, of course, only increases the need and requires ever larger doses of the illusion; of the shrieking unquiet voices.
Standing above the Lee graves you can watch their worshipers come and go. They leave their tokens and then pose in groups beside the stones for one last photograph of their brush with a dead celebrity.
This other grave, on a rise above and looking down upon the Lees’, is quieter but bears a simple poem on the sides of the bench as you walk around it. There’s no name on the bench itself. That marker is small and off to the side a yard or two. The bench itself is not a monument to vanity, but a simple gift left behind for any who may chance upon it.
If you like you can sit down and rest for a while on the poem cut into the stone. It’s in sun and shade; a pleasant spot to watch the clouds scud across the Puget Sound and shred themselves into rain and vapor on peaks of the Cascades to the east.
You might even bring a book and, opening it to a remembered passage, read,
…. For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
An elaborate thought and true enough. But somehow, in this place, the simpler poem on which you rest seems better and more apt even as, below you, the still-living fans of Bruce and Brandon Lee pull up in their cars, leave their offerings, and drive away.
It goes like this:
“West lies the Sound. South a great tree.
North is the university.
East the mighty Cascades run free.
All these places were loved by me.”
As Derb put it way back when: The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust.
The upshot of this is: Facts don’t matter.
People have been destroying Leftist arguments with facts for 200 years, even as the Left rampages from victory to victory. So either learn to fight like the Left does, or don’t fight at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcEZlDJHVq8
If I were the Propaganda Chief of the Official Dissident Movement ™, I’d have a battalion of social media shitposters on retainer… but they’d be under strict orders to never, ever engage. Find The Current Thing, find a nasty meme to mock The Current Thing, blast it out there, then walk away. Four words: Shit post, mic drop.
https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1596674557599166464
The Sneaky Way China Could Win a War Against America Kill the Logistics Fleet: The U.S. armed forces can accomplish little in the Western Pacific without ample and regular supplies of all types, from fuel to ammunition to foodstuffs. China knows this. They will go after the logistics fleet hauling materiel to the fighting forces, making it a priority target set.
This is how France deals with it https://t.co/9iaRtbZyqG
— Russian Market (@runews) December 1, 2022
Stephen King Estate Reveals He Died Years Ago And His Twitter Account Is Being Run By A Mentally Ill, Glue-Sniffing Parrot With Tourette’s “We wanted King’s voice to remain relevant in the political sphere,” said Hank Herbert, one of King’s estate managers. “And Penny is just the gal for the job. She’s annoying, she squawks all the time, and she pretty much acts exactly like an angry toddler, making her tweets perfect for King to go viral on lefty Twitter.”
The Ukraine is committing “suicide by cop” | Oh, I get it. USA! USA! USA! And all that crap. And how dare Russia not become just another degenerate globohomo vassal of Western degeneracy. And how dare Russia sell its oil and gas to willing buyers of other countries. How dare Russia reject Western globohomo multiple flavors of gender-bending mentally ill freaks. How dare Russia, despite all its flaws of the past, keep its rich cultural traditions. How dare Russia’s Orthodox Church rejects Western degeneracy. How dare Russia not become a servant of Satan. [continue reading…]
Bad to the Bone – TV Tropes You’re watching a movie and abruptly you hear a familiar song. From the cue you know that shit is going to go down and it is going to go down hard. This trope is humbly dedicated to any song that has been used in so many movies that playing it in a new movie tells the audience exactly what’s going to happen in the scene (and often draws groans of “Not that one again!”).
Similar in spirit to Ominous Latin Chanting, but using modern songs. Can overlap with Standard Snippet. Compare Suspiciously Apropos Music. May also sometimes involve Orchestral Bombing.
Not to be confused with Bad with the Bone.
The Trope Namer is George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone”, a traditional badass blues-rock song commonly used to underscore a “cool” outlaw character. The best-known instance of this is as the Terminator emerges Hell-Bent for Leather in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Not a good look for the billionaire leader of the wealthiest corporation on earth that manufactures its products with slaves.(**)
(**) Brief news Backgrounder: Trapped by Apple—a Tale of the ‘Great Reset’ I had been watching the mass demonstrations across China, Iran, and Brazil. My heart went out to these people fighting oppression—as I assume yours has been—not to mention my admiration for their extraordinary courage against brutal dictatorships that do literally anything to preserve power.
Where was Apple, with its “progressive” CEO Tim Cook, in all this? Part of the solution or part of the problem?
Like our government—remember “Obama, Obama, are you with us or are you with them?” during a previous round of Iran demonstrations—they are clearly part of the problem.
Apparently, they are more upset with Elon Musk for trying to bring a modicum of transparency to Twitter, pulling their ads from his newly purchased platform and, according to Musk, threatening to remove the Twitter app from their app store.
Yet worse, in China, Apple has restricted AirDrop file sharing, the very method the demonstrators have been using to communicate privately out of earshot of their totalitarian masters. Was this on advice from the communist regime or did Apple just figure out for themselves what was in their best interest to do? It wouldn’t have been hard.
My email this morning brings this example of prescience from Kids in the Hall. You can’t say we weren’t warned about woke we just took it as a joke. Which it was. On us.
He no longer watches television… doesn’t read newspapers or magazines. He really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now… and that everything that you hear contributes to turning you into a robot.
Once upon a time in New York City, it was very au courant to see the quirky Wallace Shawn flick, My Dinner with Andre. It was the kind of movie those in the In Crowd (or those yearning to be seen as the In Crowd) flock to. It was a sleepy slice of cinema; just two men sitting at a dinner table in a restaurant eating and talking for two hours.). It was low budget but well-lit and photographed. And it was, for once, a very well-written film, award-winning in fact. There were a couple of months in Manhattan when My Dinner was “The Talk of the Town” and as such was featured more than a few times in The New Yorker’s “The Talk of the Town.” Simply put, it was a must-see movie for real New Yorkers and those that hoped to become by dint of running from this thing to that up and down the island, like some Velveteen Rabbits on cocaine suppositories, real New Yorkers.
Of course, I saw it. In 1981.
At that time I ate somewhat frequently at Café des Artistes on the expense account and even carried on a brief affair in the art deco artists’ studio apartments above. In a way, I sort of lived the typical real New Yorker’s life where the issues of the film and the subjects of the conversation were normal at the time. This made for a very enjoyable film since it both confirmed my yearning for “Real New Yorker” status and confirmed my sense of belonging to that benighted Gotham. My Dinner was a film custom-made for that time in that place.
But as that time and place faded I just let “My Dinner with Andre” dissolve in the waters of oblivion for forty years.
Then, mysteriously, I discovered this 3-minute clip from the film had somehow found its way to my desktop last week. Listening to it I found that My Dinner had accurately described, forty years ago, much of the degraded culture we must either exist within or glide to the side of these days.
The film itself is simplicity itself:
My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 American comedy-drama film directed by Louis Malle, and written by and starring André Gregory (Andre) and Wallace Shawn (Wally). The actors play fictionalized versions of themselves sharing a conversation at Café des Artistes in Manhattan. The film’s dialogue covers topics such as experimental theatre, the nature of theatre, and the nature of life, and contrasts Wally’s modest humanism with Andre’s spiritual experiences.
That’s the gist of it but it leaves out the luminous brilliance of the script. My Dinner With Andre is a pocket masterpiece of film writing. It’s probably the least-cliched script in existence. That alone makes it worth listening to. What makes it better, in a bittersweet way, is its brilliant script describing our increasingly constrained existence in the present.
Check it out. I’ve put in the pertinent excerpt from the script if you want to follow along.
Excerpt from the Script:
Wallace: I mean, is it just because people
are lazy today, or they’re bored?
I mean, are we just
like bored, spoiled children…
who’ve just been lying
in the bathtub all day…
just playing with their plastic duck…
and now they’re just thinking,
“Well, what can I do?”
Andre: Okay. Yes. We’re bored.
We’re all bored now.
But has it ever occurred to you, Wally,
that the process…
that creates this boredom
that we see in the world now…
may very well be a self-perpetuating,
unconscious form of brainwashing…
created by a world totalitarian government
based on money… [continue reading…]
As a presidential press secretary in 1962, Pierre Salinger ushered in the age of television journalism speaking off the cuff. “I don’t think we should be in the business of managing the news.”.
As a presidential press secretary in 2022, Karine Jean-Pierre ushered out the age of presidential press secretaries that know anything at all.
https://youtu.be/ayUasV156bE
(Remember, she’s reading “Nobel Prize” four times. )
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.” — Keats
How ‘Impression, Sunrise’ by Claude Monet Sparked Impressionism Having left such an important legacy, you may be wondering what could have set such a monumental movement in motion. Unlike most genres, which develop over time, Impressionism is believed to have to started in the 1870s with a single work: Impression, Sunrise, a light and airy landscape painting by none other than Claude Monet.
Grace Kelly on her wedding day.
The Quest to Revive the Bay Area’s Fabled Doggie Diners FOR NEARLY 40 YEARS, NOTHING in the San Francisco Bay Area meant “lunchtime” like the grinning, hulking, 10-foot-tall canine faces that urged passersby to pull over and grab a bite. These were the mascots for the Doggie Diner, a locally iconic chain that boasted more than 20 locations between 1948 and 1986. Today, not a single Doggie Diner remains open, and only one of the giant heads remains in place: on San Francisco’s Sloat Boulevard, near the city’s zoo. San Francisco declared the head a historic landmark in 2005.
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. Ecclesiastes 1
My readers of long-standing know of my mother, Lois Van der Leun, who lived for 104 years (1914 – 2018). I have written about her Mansions of Memory, of her cookies, and a dozen or so other inspiring or heart-warming things about this exceptional woman. Readers of long-standing will also know that in the fall of 2014 I moved from Seattle to Paradise, California, in order to be of some assistance to her after she turned 100. Of my mother’s three sons I was the only one who could comfortably do this. One brother was far away in North Carolina while the other lived some 90 miles away and the 180-mile commute a few times a week was wearing on him after 10 years. I was unencumbered.
My mother lived a highly independent life in Chico, California. At 100 she was still in the apartment that had been her home for forty years. Her life was filled with church, tennis, friends of all ages, lunches, travel, and generally holding up the side. She did it well. She was vital and played tennis until she was 96 and both her knees were shot. And at age 100 it was clear that although she could live independently she did need some sort of assistance from time to time. She would remind all three sons of this for years after we took away her car when she was 98.
So into the breech, because I could, I stepped up to get the coveted “Good Son Award.”
And for my trouble, I got the “Good Son Award” good and hard.
For four years I did whatever I could to make my mother’s lot easier. I ran errands, did the shopping, took her to church, and squired her to a seemingly endless round of lunches, morning coffee time, holiday parties, and the kind of generalized hoopla elderly women get up to when bored. Because I did these things without complaint or demure, I said “What a good boy am I” over and over to myself. I said it because I thought I was giving her the gift of an extended and easier life. It was my good fortune that I could give this gift and I gave it over and over again with an open heart. I did so out of love and because I was convinced that this “service” to my aged mother was the reason that God spared my life in 2011; the reason that I was returned to life was so I could do my mother this service.
Pride. I was very proud of myself. I was stinking proud of myself in that quiet, secretly smug way many of us congratulate ourselves for a good deed. We do so forgetting that “Pride” is the first of the Seven Deadly Sins and it often stems from our internal spiritual attitudes that are known as “vainglory.” We become vainglorious to inflate ourselves and to forget to remember that all, all, is vanity. And in this, I have recently been corrected in no uncertain terms by the Holy Spirit. [continue reading…]
This is must-watch material. This is laugh-out-loud funny. Trust me and give it three minutes. You won’t want them back. (Sound optional.)
https://twitter.com/WallStreetSilv/status/1597106643329687552
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I
reach my hands and play with pebbles of
destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs
reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe.
The Washington Monument Is Transforming Into a Full-Scale Saturn V Rocket for the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing 
Gerard Van der Leun
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