Francis W. Porretto
Mount Sinai, NY USA
Author's posts
Mar 06 2025
A Question That Must Be Asked
Longtime stalwart of the Dextrosphere Maura Dowling has posted a highly informative graphic: Reading the color-coding can be a bit challenging, but the upshot of the thing is best condensed by noting which countries were added to the NATO alliance after the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw …
Mar 06 2025
Quote Of The Day
Stephen Kruiser is on fire! The dregs of humanity populate the upper tiers of the Democratic Party and its propaganda wing in the mainstream media. Mother Teresa would have struggled to like the bitter, confrontational idiots in the Dem upper echelon. “Mother Teresa?” What about Will Rogers? But more to the point: …
Mar 05 2025
Ash Wednesday
You’ve heard me say, on other occasions and in other places, that I don’t much like contemporary poetry. Nearly all of it strikes me as worthless. Among other things, the disdain contemporary poets show for rhyme and meter suggests that they don’t actually have the chops to write poetry. Someone once compared rhymeless, meterless …
Mar 05 2025
Watch The Curate, He’s Up To Something!
The C.S.O. just forwarded me this, which had me in stitches. My favorite bit: You’d Rather Go Skydiving Than Take Your Chances at A Village Fete. Sure, skydiving has risks, but at least the odds of murder are low. Village fetes, on the other hand, are absolute death traps. Someone will be …
Mar 05 2025
A Failure Of National Memory
Once again, 90 Miles From Tyranny provides the graphic: Does no one on the Ninth Circuit remember that President Gerald Ford pardoned his Oval Office predecessor Richard M. Nixon without Nixon ever having been charged with a crime? Or does that pardon somehow “not count?” Sheesh!
Mar 04 2025
Someone Else Gets It
Hearken to Toni Williams: The Left has been a cult of death for years. Open borders for rapes, murders, child trafficking and deadly drugs. Abortion up to birth. War, war and more war. The Sacraments of Liberal Ideology all involve death. Watching people I know and love cheering the feeding of the Russia-Ukraine …
Mar 04 2025
The Last Refuge Of The Elected Scoundrel
A friend was known to ask what contemporary conservatives are determined to conserve. As Robert Conquest has noted, everyone is conservative about something – usually, the thing that provides them with their living. In that sense, all elected officials are “conservative.” Every one of them wants to remain in office. They’ll do whatever they …
Mar 03 2025
Convergences And Closures
Among the reasons for my faith is my conviction that the universe was constructed to make sense. That conviction began long ago as an annoying suspicion. Over time, as I learned more about physics, economics, history, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, game and information theory, it became steel-hard. It informed one of my favorite passages from …
Mar 03 2025
Observation Of The Day
I’m increasingly impressed by the contributions to geopolitical understanding offered by comedians and humorists. Today’s example comes from the celebrated Stephen Kruiser, whom I’ve long admired: If ever a world leader needed an upbraiding from the leader of the free world, it’s this guy and his bad Gap chic wardrobe. I can’t shake …
Mar 02 2025
When The Object Is Beyond Victory
In his novel Isle Of The Dead, the late Roger Zelazny sketched a piercing depiction of a quest for vengeance that seeks, beyond simple justice, the humiliation and destruction of the enemy. It arises from the hatred evoked by a sense of mortal insult. Zelazny’s term for it was pai’badra. The novel’s plot concerns …
Mar 02 2025
On Approaching The Lenten Season
This coming Wednesday, March 5, is Ash Wednesday for the Year of Our Lord 2025. The Lenten season begins on that day and extends through Good Friday: April 18 of this year. It’s supposed to be a season of penitence and reflection, during which Catholics strive to deepen our appreciation and gratitude for Jesus’s …
Mar 02 2025
Did Trump Have This In Mind?
Consider well: [T]here will likely be a renewed push for the formation of a new European military alliance: One that’s of Europe, for Europe, and specifically excludes the United States. And that’s both good and bad. I don’t see the downside to which commentator Scott Pinsker alludes. While it’s true that Twentieth …
Mar 02 2025
Would That It Were So
Once again, shamelessly stolen from Mike Miles: Can you imagine how that would work out in a nation where every other citizen is well armed? I ask because something very like it was the case in colonial America, at the birth of government “police:” …constables, sheriffs, and citizen-based watch groups were responsible …
Mar 01 2025
The Motive That Dare Not Speak Its Name
I’m terribly tired, so this will be a short piece. The big news is, of course, the falling-out yesterday between Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelensky and President Trump. Trump is determined to find a way to negotiate an end to the war between Ukraine and Russia; Zelensky wants to keep the war going. The Ukrainian …
Feb 28 2025
As Insightful As It Gets
This is a jewel among jewels: I've had a change of heart on federal income tax. On the surface, it's just a way for the government to generate revenue—it has to get its funding from somewhere. But I now see that the method of taxation itself fundamentally alters the relationship between the government and …
Feb 28 2025
Censorship Transnationalized
As I mentioned yesterday, Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference was highly disturbing to the assembled European ministers – not because Vance told them anything they didn’t already know, but because that speech was destined to be internationally famous. In European politics, there are “unspeakable truths:” things generally known …
Feb 28 2025
Reminder Of The Day
There are important bits of strategic and tactical wisdom that anyone involved in the fight for freedom should have in mind at all times. Today’s reminder of one of the central ones comes from PJ Media’s Lincoln Brown: [T]he Left is smarter and craftier than you think and far more patient than the …
Feb 27 2025
The Demise Of Europe
J. D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference set the European attendees agog. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were unhappy with it. Vance had held up a mirror to them, and the reflection was disturbingly accurate – so much so that they feared to allow their citizens to …
Feb 27 2025
Politics Is Everything To Them…
…therefore, everything must be politicized: Washington Post opinion editor David Shipley resigned Tuesday after the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced that, going forward, on the opinion pages, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” […] Of …
Feb 27 2025
The State Of Federalism
A lot could be said about this: …but foremost in my thoughts is this nagging question: Were there so many Tren de Aragua in Aurora, Colorado that the Aurora municipal police were unable to cope with them? If so, what about the Colorado State Police? Were they outnumbered as well? What made federal …
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