Standards, and our attempts – sincere or not – to meet them, have lately been much on my mind. Just a little while ago, an itinerant preacher proclaimed a standard that’s made him moderately famous: And behold one came and said to him: Good master, what good shall I do that I …
Category: morals and ethics
Jul 17 2024
Shame And Guilt
Last Saturday’s disastrous performance by the Secret Service detachment assigned to President Trump has evoked huge amounts of commentary. Some opinioneers are claiming that the evidence can’t point to anything but a Secret Service tasked to permit Trump’s assassination. Others are of the opinion that it was merely a demonstration of the low estate …
Apr 27 2024
Unspeakable Or Unthinkable Part 2: An Amoral Calculus
As my Gentle Readers might have expected, I received quite a lot of feedback on the previous piece. I wasn’t surprised by the tone of it. Disappointed, perhaps, but not surprised. The mass warfare of World War II, in which many thousands of noncombatants died, should have taught us something. The atomic bombings, …
Apr 26 2024
Unspeakable Or Unthinkable?
There are things that must be said. Some of those things are terrible to contemplate. Fortunately, there are a few people, at least, who are willing to say them. I aspire to be numbered among them. Just now, the premier speaker of the unspeakable is Tucker Carlson: For those who don’t watch …
Mar 18 2024
Shamelessness As A Political Weapon (UPDATED)
The key political asset of our time is the ability to tell any lie, however outrageous or absurd, with a perfectly straight face: eyes straight and flat, no lifting of either corner of the mouth, and no tightening of either nostril. Moreover, the liar must be able to maintain that solemn-as-a-judge expression through a …
Nov 28 2023
“That Can’t Be!”
Dave: Everybody cheats. I just didn’t know. Dad: Well, now you know. [From Breaking Away.] Have you become more skeptical as you’ve aged, or less? There’s an awful lot of utter nonsense being purveyed by the extended media, these days. By “extended,” I mean to subsume all providers of information, not just the …
Sep 24 2023
The Giveaway Headline
Sometimes, you really don’t need to read any further: Late-Term Abortion: A Complex Moral Debate in America Among the most regular of motifs one can find in the contest over abortion is the contention that it’s “complex.” “A complex subject.” “A complex debate.” “Legally complex.” And each of those formulations has at least …
Aug 23 2023
Moral Decisions
One of the philosophers vitally important to the development of Western thought, Immanuel Kant, propounded some theses that have gotten him lambasted by…let us say…persons with another agenda. The Randians dislike Kant for having criticized “pure reason:” i.e., reason divorced from longstanding postulates, empirical data, and the yearnings of the soul. Many Christian polemicists …
Jul 24 2023
The Chronicle of the DC: 13Jul09 Archives
John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet At that link is strong evidence that the Biden regime is clearly following through on what the Obama regime started. Not only that, but the Trump interim didn’t seem to slow them one bit as the excesses we’ve witnessed …
Jun 29 2023
They Call It Anarchy, But It’s Actually Hell
Heard the name of Gonzalo Lira lately? If you have, it’s probably because the Zelensky regime in Ukraine has thrown him into prison him for writing stuff Zelensky doesn’t like. But at one time, Lira was better known for this essay, which embeds this critical observation: When the backbone of a country starts …
Jun 25 2023
An Early-Sunday-Morning Thought
A huge portion of the popular reaction against “public” schools arises from clashes over values: i.e., moral and ethical principles for living that undergird all other decisions. All education of any kind must be founded upon some set of values, because literally everything involved in human life is founded thus. It’s literally impossible to …
Mar 12 2023
Important Truth
Good morning, Gentle Reader. I had a terrible night – a lot of pain and no sleep – so if what follows seems to come out of the Bizarro dimension, please bear with me. The subject on my mind strikes me as important enough to risk it. *** At The Catholic Thing today, …
Feb 12 2023
False Promises
“The way to control and direct a Mentat, Nefud, is through his information. False information—false results.” [Frank Herbert, Dune] The supposed “artificial intelligence” program ChatGPT made some news a couple of days ago. It seems that when someone offered the program a dilemma – utter a racial slur to prevent the deaths of …
Dec 29 2022
Awakenings
(Only tenuously related to the movie of that name, which, by the way, is extraordinarily touching and contains a marvelous non-comedic performance by Robin Williams.) “I will take my life into my hands, and I will use it.” – Jim Webb I’ve been in a contemplative mood these past…let’s see, now…hmm…well, for …
Jun 22 2022
A Trio Of Pic Grabs
In my current state of screaming, frothing fury, the following graphics speak more eloquently than I can manage: I may be back later, but don’t bet the rent money on it.
Feb 09 2022
Determined Not To Say The “Obvious”
This is a very short clip, yet critically important. Tucker Carlson asked why public officials ignore the significantly irregular rise in deaths in the last quarter of 2021. Adding “Why aren’t they screaming.” For some reason Charlie Kirk simply did not come up with one particular motivation even though he broke the story. It is …
Nov 29 2021
The Will To Disbelieve
The one thing of which there is no shortage in these United States is wishful thinking. It’s more pandemic than the WuFlu and orders of magnitude more destructive. Sadly, some of that wishful thinking is on the Right. The rioting and organized theft in the larger cities has revealed an ugly truth. Many …
Nov 23 2021
A Walking Corpse
This piece will be rather brutal, I fear. I have some ugly ground to cover, and it’s not easily compressed into a thousand exquisitely appropriate and entirely non-vulgar words. Someone once posited that the way to structure an exposition is to lead off by telling your audience what you will tell them. You …
Sep 27 2021
What We Need
Everybody is screaming a warning about something. Each of those everybodies is peddling a nostrum of some sort – usually something you can buy over the counter – he’ll tell you is essential to deal with the threat he hawks. And while it’s not perfectly uniform, a great many of the everybodies hope to …
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Fran’s Recent Novels
Margaret’s Recent Novels
