Francis W. Porretto
Mount Sinai, NY USA
Author's posts
Jun 20 2021
New Fiction
Pope Clement XV, the first American to be raised to the papacy, is under attack from within the Vatican. Powerful cardinals, averse to his efforts to reform the Catholic clergy, are trying to force him to resign his office. To undermine him, they spread rumors of his involvement in financial and sexual improprieties. To …
Jun 20 2021
Behold The Chronic Version Of The Disease
What disease, you ask? Trump hatred, of course: The breaching of the Capitol happened because of a conspiracy theory: that the election was actually won by Mr. Trump but stolen from him by bad people. That theory hasn’t gone away, it’s growing and spreading. What might be called the Trump Underworld—the operatives, grifters …
Jun 19 2021
The Secret To Happiness
[I first posted the story below in August 2015. It seems to me to deserve a repetition, especially given how many people I’ve encountered recently who talk about nothing but their woes. It comes in many variations, so you might have heard it somewhat differently on another occasion. – FWP] *** They were …
Jun 19 2021
“On Conditions”
Way, way back at the dawn of history, when I was a wee lad and IBM still ruled the computer industry, I was briefly focused on learning a language that has since passed into obscurity. It was IBM’s “everything” language: PL/I. The computer giant had dedicated serious resources to develop a language that would …
Jun 18 2021
A Critical Inversion
Forgive me, Gentle Reader. I’m barely awake, but I had to get this down before it could slip away. Near the end of the 1978 movie made from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, when Inspector Javert finally has Jean Valjean at his mercy, he asks Valjean why Valjean set him free of the rebels …
Jun 17 2021
A Profile In Courage
Facts that are not frankly faced have a habit of stabbing us in the back. – Sir Harold Bowden I resist the impulse to call any living person a saint. As Simon Templar, played by Val Kilmer in The Saint, put it, “You have to be a very good, and usually very dead …
Jun 16 2021
A Harbinger No One Should Miss
In truth, it’s hard to believe that anyone who pays even modest attention to the news could miss it: The highest honor a lay Catholic could possibly hope for is to go to Mass with the head of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Mind you, in truth Joe Biden is about …
Jun 15 2021
Communities And Community
One of the most dramatic yet widely unrecognized changes in American society, over the decades since 1950, has been the diminution and disappearance of communities as Americans knew them in the pre-World War II years. The neighborhoods are still there, but the neighborliness – the sense of community — is largely gone. Consider what …
Jun 14 2021
If You Like A Nice, Informative Diagram…
…and data-flow diagrams, use-case diagrams, state-transition diagrams, and the like haven’t yet made you turn into a rabid wolf at the merest mention of such things, have one, courtesy of Gateway Pundit, developed by three Oregon scholars to decloud what the SJWs mean when they invoke various of their cant phrases: Open in a …
Jun 13 2021
Christian Courage
This has already been a “big day” for me. I’m just back from Mass, which I attended in person for the first time in a year. I wasn’t absent from the pews out of fear, or laziness, but because my parish was enforcing a mask rule and was not distributing the Eucharist. But the …
Jun 11 2021
Another Novel Looms
I’ve just completed the first draft of In Vino, a sequel to The Wise and the Mad. And it was one hell of a tough slog. Blood everywhere. But failing a scathing report from my “alpha reader,” it will soon be available at Amazon. Anyway, I’m too exhausted to write something pithy and …
Jun 09 2021
Misplaced Pride And Its Consequences
Pride is one of the more controversial elements in the human psyche. Excessive pride, a.k.a. vanity, is one of the seven capital sins. However, just pride – i.e., a proportionate pride in one’s own accomplishments, is all right. In fact, it’s damned near impossible to suppress. But there’s also a foolish variety of …
Jun 08 2021
Thoughts After Rereading An Old Book
Uncle Frank never let that word “citizens” pass without a tirade. “We are not a government!” he always yelled. “We are not a government! We must not think like a government! We must not think in terms of duties and receipts and disbursements. We must think in terms of the old loyalties that bound …
Jun 07 2021
Dedication To Reality
Reality, it was once said, is all the stuff that, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. That’s as good a definition as any, considering that defining reality is essentially impossible. To define is to limit: to say that “an X is this and not that.” It is inherently exclusionary…but what can …
Jun 07 2021
Conversations
If you’re over the age of six, you’ve almost certainly heard someone use the phrase, “They say,” or “That’s what they say,” or “You know what they say.” (There may be other variants, but I think those will suffice.) Just this morning, the C.S.O. used one of those, which gave rise to the following …
Jun 06 2021
Corpus Christi
Today is Corpus Christi Sunday, the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. It’s a day most significant to me, for reasons I delineated in this baseline essay. If you haven’t read it before this, I urge it upon you. And please, reflect upon the goodness of a God who, in contrast to …
Jun 05 2021
A Saturday Smorgasbord
I haven’t done a “grab-bag” piece in a while, and I have quite a few browser tabs to close, so here goes. *** 1. What’s The First Rule Of Holes? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t seem to know: “It is not acceptable for us to use jails as garbage bins for human beings. We …
Jun 04 2021
Everyday Humor
My friends (that’s what I call them; never mind what they call me) say I have “a weird sense of humor.” They may be right; at any rate, I laugh at things other people find puzzling…or even repellent. But I have a good time, so I try not to let their opinion of my …
Jun 04 2021
Asides: The Unwittingly Self-Undermining Extra Argument
(Yeah, yeah, I got tired of calling them “quickies.”) Via Weird Dave at AosHQ, we have this citation by Bari Weiss: Just ask Norman Wang. Last year, the University of Pittsburgh cardiologist was demoted by his department after he published a paper in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) analyzing …
Jun 04 2021
The Tactics Of Tyrants
They’re remarkably consistent – and the failure of common folk to notice the patterns is incredibly tragic. Good morning, Gentle Readers. No, I haven’t been posting much lately. I’m 90% finished with Novel #17 (soon to be ignored at an ebook vendor near you!) and have been flogging myself to stay focused on …
Fran’s Recent Novels
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