An Open Letter to the London Review of Books
I did write this as a more “normal” letter to the editor, but evidently they were more interested in using their page space to let Emily Wilson nuke her own credibility for no good reason, so I'm putting it here instead. It's about Afghanistan.
An Open Letter to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the Impending Return to Power of Donald Trump
“…I ask that the USCCB not become régime stooges like the bishops did with people like Franco in Spain and Duplessis in Québec…”
Another Autoflorilegium
The foregoing is a collection of my further thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, and mostly from recent months. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or multiblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.
Public Figures with the Word “Courtney” in Their Names and Why They Are or Were Deep State Plants
John Courtney Murray, theologian: Allegedly a Cold Warrior, in fact subordinated the Church to DEEP STATE THREE-LETTER-AGENCY WOKE COMMUNISM by doing (((religious liberty))) at Vatican II.
Things That God Created to Train the Faithful: A Partial List
I write this from a more or less okay hotel lobby computer in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, dashed off in a slapdash fashion. It is my second Dune-inspired not-quite-essay, after the wildly successful (in some, extremely narrow, circles, which I suppose robs the expression “wildly successful” of most or all of its force) “Who Said It: God-Emperor Leto II or Greta Thunberg?” The original saying, attributed by noted pro-life femcel Irulan Corrino to (who else?) Muad’dib, is, of course, “God created Arrakis to train the faithful.” To Irulan’s immortalization of her husband’s observation, I add:
An Autoflorilegium
The foregoing is a collection of my thoughts on a variety of topics, mostly having to do with what gets broadly termed pop culture, over the past five or so years. Some are gleaned from other platforms like fora or microblogging websites, others from my personal notes about things that I watched or read or listened to or experienced. It is arranged by topic.
Some Aphorisms
Massachusetts politics from the beginning has drunk deep of the belief that an objective moral law exists and that Massachusetts voters, perhaps only Massachusetts voters, can be trusted consistently to know what it is. It is only the contents of that moral law that, to the minds of the state’s body politic, have changed.
A Prose Poem Every Word of Which Is True
It's the witching hour on a July night, or morning.
Affronts to English Usage
This list is to be thought of in the context of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book (枕草子Makura no sōshi). Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists (La vertigine della lista) and Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (“El idioma analítico de John Wilkins”) might also guide some readers to an understanding that this isn’t to be taken too literally, and yet, at the same time, is to be taken utterly seriously.
Who Said It: God-Emperor Leto II or Greta Thunberg?
One is a visionary who thinks in the long term about the future of the humanity but often stakes out incendiary or extreme-seeming positions on here-and-now issues that some argue damage the credibility of the overall cause. The other is a climate activist. Can you tell who said what?