Francis W. Porretto
Mount Sinai, NY USA
Author's posts
Aug 27 2024
The Best Possible Argument For An Armed Society…
… is the long train of abuses and usurpations committed by the governing elite: Joe and Jill Biden took a taxpayer-funded weeklong vacation in Santa Ynez, California last week. Secret Service agents violently pushed peasants out of the way so Jill Biden could go on a shopping spree on Friday afternoon. …
Aug 27 2024
Untoward But Predictable
How many times have I denounced envy in these pages? Let me count the ways… what? Only twelve? I must be losing my stuff. Envy has become the force most likely to destroy Mankind. Have a fresh and juicy sample: Over the weekend, NASA finally made the decision to return Boeing’s plagued Starliner …
Aug 27 2024
“It’s Not Fair!”
If you’ve ever had responsibility for preschool children, you’ve heard that phrase. Likely you heard it enunciated in one of those inimitable juvenile shrieks that no adult throat can reproduce. It’s the juvenile plaint. Nothing else comes close. Fairness, of course, is one of those words. There are as many definitions as there …
Aug 26 2024
Hypocrisy In Politics
Surely there’s a lot of it. Our usual impulse is to dismiss most of it with a plaintive “What can you do?” John Hinderaker reminds us that it’s electorally relevant: The Democrats are the party of the nomenklatura, including the most petty of the nomenklatura–Americans who have managed to graduate from college. Beyond …
Aug 26 2024
The Rhyme And Meter Of History
I must draw my readers’ attention to this brilliant column at American Tribune, a site of which I was unaware until yesterday. The pseudonymous commentator tells a terrible tale, a narration of how what we once justifiably called Great Britain ruined itself with a foolish policy. It’s a story that is: Meticulously accurate in …
Aug 26 2024
Damnation With Faint Praise
Applause to Diogenes Sarcastica for catching and posting this: He really is a Kennedy, isn’t he? That crap about “darker shadows,” “injustice in its past and present,” and “inconsistently applied” ideals gives the game away. I’m sick to death of it – and for the record, and at the top of my voice: …
Aug 25 2024
Maintain The Tension!
There are a lot of people out there hawking ways to reduce the stress in our lives. “Are you stressed? Are you tense?” the self-help gurus ask in unctuous tones. (Or in unctuous font, when their pitch comes in a printed form.) The relief they offer has immense appeal… though in practice it’s seldom …
Aug 25 2024
A Straw Tossed To The Wind
They tried it with COVID-19 and got away with it. I can’t help thinking that they’re getting ready to try it again: Four Massachusetts towns — Douglas, Oxford, Sutton and Webster — have enacted a voluntary evening lockdown in an attempt to curb the spread of a potentially deadly mosquito-borne disease. The …
Aug 24 2024
The Last Thing I Expected
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is coming back to Earth… without its crew: NASA officials announced on Saturday that the troubled Boeing Starliner spacecraft that shuttled two astronauts to space in June will return to earth without them. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stuck in space after engineers discovered helium leaks …
Aug 24 2024
The Unchanging Nature Of Wealth
I know, I know: the title “gives the game away.” And it does. But perhaps not in its entirety, Gentle Reader. I restrained myself from applying the title I really wanted to use. Breck Dumas of Fox News tells us: It takes more to be viewed as rich in the U.S. this …
Aug 23 2024
Pie In The Sky By And By
Given how many of us Baby Boomers there are, there’s always someone whose 50th anniversary of something has come around. And there are quite a few old rockers and folkies available to reminisce about their golden years. The combination can be cloying, if not worse. For example, not everyone’s memory of certain musical …
Aug 22 2024
Conversations
Breathes there a man who isn’t instantly and near-terminally irritated by cold-call salesmen? If anything it’s worse when the caller is selling something you don’t need, never have needed, and never will need barring an act of Congress or God. The impulse to shriek something obscene and slam the phone down can be close …
Aug 22 2024
The Credibility Is No Longer There
Via AoSHQ, we have this from the Washington Post: In retrospect, Mr. Biden should not have sought reelection. The June 27 debate was worse than just a bad night, as the president maintained afterward. The 81-year-old had shown signs of slipping for a long time, but his inner circle worked to conceal his …
Aug 21 2024
The End Of The Totalitarian Road
Power is a drug that doesn’t sate. – Me. It’s frustrating, having to make the same point over and over. Still, needs must. When Clarence Carson wrote: [W]e are told that there is no need to fear the concentration of power in government so long as that power is checked by …
Aug 21 2024
Viciouser And Viciouser
This has been a hot topic these last two days: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear punctuates a DNC speech singularly focused on protecting abortion/child sacrifice with…”love your neighbor as yourself.” Loving neighbors don’t k*ll each other with drugs or dismemberment. pic.twitter.com/rTOWbMREya — Woke Preacher Clips (@WokePreacherTV) August 20, 2024 That’s the Left for you. …
Aug 20 2024
Miscellaneous Jottings
I haven’t done one of these lately, and the “FUT COL” folder is beginning to bulge. Therefore… *** 1. Today’s Telescreen. Stephen Green comments: The deal was a simple one: free TV included ads, and pay TV didn’t. Not only are streaming services altering the deal, but your TV manufacturer is also …
Aug 20 2024
When They Eat Their Own
It can be glorious to watch: Vice President Kamala Harris, hoping to distance herself from President Biden’s unpopularity on the economy, plans a new focus on middle-class worries and woes. Why it matters: Beginning in North Carolina later this week with her first policy speech, and continuing next week with the Democratic …
Aug 19 2024
Diseases Part 2: The Corporate Oligopoly
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. – Henry David Thoreau The previous piece called for an examination of what have unfortunately become called “root causes.” Our social, economic, and political maladies didn’t spring from the brow of Zeus; they grew slowly …
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