“The Zuckerberg admission has much larger implications than anyone has yet admitted. It provides a first official and confirmed peek into the greatest scandal of our times, the global silencing of critics at all levels of society, resulting in manipulating election outcomes, a distorted public culture, the marginalization of dissent, the overriding of all free speech protections, and gaslighting as a way of life of government in our times.”
Archive for the ‘Nonfiction’ Category
Tuesday, July 30th, 2024
“The evidence was in plain sight. The question for historians is ‘Who knew the fix was in?’ And equally importantly, how could these powers behind the throne unseat Joe Biden the candidate and still leave the nation in the hands of Joe Biden the president for another six months?
That dangerous proposition is why we can’t wait for history’s verdict, and why it is imperative for journalists to dig down immediately and unravel the plot that sought to undermine not just Biden but America’s democracy and left us weaker and wounded on the international stage.
You can bet the mainstream media won’t take up the challenge. They have bought wholeheartedly into the narrative that Biden is an American hero for resigning his campaign, so it will depend on a fearless outsider like Sy Hersh or Bari Weiss to get to the truth. Let’s hope they get to it before Election Day.”— Frank Miele
Thursday, July 11th, 2024
“So, for multiple reasons, Murthy is probably the worst speech decision in American history. In the face of the most sweeping censorship in American history, the decision fails to recognize either the realities of the censorship or the constitutional barriers to it. In practical terms, the decision invites continuing federal censorship on social media platforms. It thereby nearly guarantees that yet another election cycle will be compromised by government censorship and condemns a hitherto free society to the specter of mental servitude.”
— Philip Hamburger
Monday, April 29th, 2024
“For each thorn, there’s a rosebud… For each twilight – a dawn… For each trial – the strength to carry on, For each storm cloud — a rainbow… For each shadow — the sun… For each parting — sweet memories when sorrow is done.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wednesday, December 13th, 2023
“Indeed, it is perhaps the notion of possessiveness that characterizes the fundamental problem of the human being. True freedom involves a kind of self-dispossession, and a letting go of the attachment to the ‘mine-ness’ of one’s actions… We need to be ‘still,’ to empty ourselves of worldly distractions and illusory attachments, to be able to ‘hear’ and come to understand the Word that is eternally communicated by the Father in the ground. In this sense, it is not as though God is absent in us and then becomes present due to some action of ours that we undertake of our own initiative. Rather, for Eckhart, our task as human beings is to come to be able to listen to — and thereby apprehend — the Word that is eternally and always poured out into us.”
— Amber Griffioen, on Meister Eckhart, 5/1/23
Saturday, August 12th, 2023
“We know that for most healthy people, Omicron is nothing more than a cold and for the young is usually a very mild cold and often asymptomatic. To use a gene-therapy-technology-based vaccine with a high-risk profile and uncharacterized long-term effects against a mild variant is the height of scientific ignorance and arrogance. It is time to stop.”
— Robert W Malone MD MS, Lies My Gov’t Told Me: And the Better Future Coming (Children’s Health Defense)
Tuesday, March 28th, 2023
“Many people (and physicians) rely on the CDC and NIH to guide them in healthcare and wellness decisions. It is way past time that these organizations step up to the plate and do their job and stop relying on the unscientific biases of highly influential bureaucrats. That job being to protect the health of the public. Not advancing the interests of the pharmaceutical industry and its shareholders.”
— Robert W Malone MD
Lies My Gov’t Told Me: And the Better Future Coming
Sunday, August 21st, 2022
“The buffoonish January 6 riot at the Capitol is often cited as proof of the insurrectionary right-wing movement. But the one-day riotous embarrassment never turned up any armed revolutionaries or plots to overthrow the government. In contrast, Antifa and BLM rioters were no one-day buffoons. They systematically organized a series of destructive and deadly riots across the country for over four months in the summer of 2020. The lethal toll of their work was over 35 dead, $2 billion in property losses, and hundreds of police officers injured.”
— Victor Davis Hanson, 8/19/22
March Ex(clusion) — twelfth day
Saturday, March 12th, 2022“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”
– James Madison, Federalist Papers
It’s getting more difficult to navigate a course of balanced influences, now that everything is so charged with persuasion, hyper-slant, duplicitous rhetoric, or outright psychological manipulation. I’m reading the Pulitzer-Prize-winning book by Thomas E. Ricks about the educational context of four key Framers (not inaccurately sized up as a somewhat revisionist take on how literary writings of the classical world shaped the men who invented the American Republic). I’m monitoring the daily editorial media of populist partisans, as well as alternative analysis (from Tyler Durden to Jimmy Dore). I skim the top stories put out by the Corporate Media. I partake of regular Peterson and Rogan doses. I follow The Marginalian. I watched Oliver Stone’s informative documentary called Ukraine on Fire. Trying to avoid becoming part of somebody’s self-serving agenda can feel like a full-time job!
Today’s sight bite— n o n e
March Ex(clusion) — third day
Thursday, March 3rd, 2022“A man is never such an egoist as at moments of spiritual exaltation, when it seems to him that there is nothing in the world more splendid and fascinating than himself.”
– Leo Tolstoy, The Cossacks
Last night’s documentary provides a burst of self assurance for today’s outlook. I decided to create a miniature for the local Tiny Art fundraiser — a “prime-the-pumper” that fits my current momentum in the studio, with no lasting significance intended. On the other hand, after having seen my show in Lexington, Danny handed a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing to me, out the window of his truck. “This is going to sound over the top, but it’s just the way it is,” he said, a whiff of diesel exhaust hanging in the unseasonably warm air. “I’m loaning this book to you for ten years.” Something suggests that it may be one of the most important things to happen during this interval of my life.
Today’s sight bite— Luminous, high-altitude popcorn clouds sailing above vessels of deep purple-gray, —c-l-i-c-k— as Apollo’s blazing chariot plunges beyond the edge of the world.
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
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
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