Read Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own. 📚

An obituary in this morning’s New York Times reminds me: I’ve seen many scandals in my life, but I loved Bill Cosby so much that his probably hurt the worst.

Q: Why Can’t I Use What I Have? - Front Porch Republic

A: Because we own you.

After I’ve bought so many books from Amazon, and as many books as I’ve put on my Amazon Wishlist, it’s astonishing to see how utterly, bloody clueless their ‘Recommended for you” book emails are.

In reality, I’ve long believed that there is a weird market failure in American culture. There are a lot of shows on politics, business and technology, but there are not enough on the fundamental questions of life that get addressed as part of a great liberal arts education: How do you become a better person? How do you find meaning in retirement? Does America still have a unifying national narrative? How do great nations recover from tyranny?

I don’t know what he’s up to, but David Brooks’s hints about what he’ll do after departure from the New York Times are tantalizing.

Re: Smartphones

My silence about the smart-phone bashing should not be taken as agreement.

I have my reasons, and they’re pretty good ones.

When I open my Kindle, it gives me book recommendations.

Who needs book recommendations from Amazon?!?! I’m already overwhelmed with recommendations from people and publications I actually trust.

What’s really going on here?

(Kind of a rhetorical question, but if you have ideas ….)

Patriot! Here’s How to Identify a Domestic Terrorist - The Atlantic (Satire. Gift Link.)

(The devil…the prowde spirite…cannot endure to be mocked.)

If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence.

Wendell Berry (emphasis added)

I tend to be a fair-weather fan, but I’ve come to like this Purdue men’s basketball team so much that three straight losses won’t deter me.

No prognostication, either of comeback or collapse. But I suspect I’ll be there whatever may come - unless Braden Smith can’t play.

Thinking this morning about how casually some young people turn to some of the ugliest ideas in human history. Then it hit me: they must not have had Life’s Picture History of World War II lying on the coffee table as they grew up. (Found one on Ebay and ordered it.)

As Stephen Wormtongue Miller tutors us about the “real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

Please vote against funding for DHS and ICE.

President Trump is using ICE as his personal masked militia, murdering American Citizens in cold blood and terrorizing foreign-looking residents regardless of their citizenship.

You know in your heart that’s true.

The power of the pursestrings is Congress’s main check on this tyranny.

President Ozymandias is targeting state legislators who opposed his mid-decade redistricting demands. One of them very near me is getting primaried by a MAGA candidate. Former Governor and Purdue President Mitch Daniels is having none of it. (Substack, though others probably will pick up the story.)

Before he died when I was in my mid-30s, I realized that my sense of my own righteousness had callused into something cruel. I didn’t want him to change, because his poor behavior formed a central part of my identity.

Esau McCaulley, It’s So Hard Not to Be Consumed by Rage - The New York Times

Father/Professor McCaulley provided the homily I couldn’t get at Church today because of Indiana’s snow-and-cold emergency. I share the link with y’all because we can all stand to hear this message.

At first, we didn’t think much of it, the One Other Thing. When Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins suggested a meal of one corn tortilla, one piece of broccoli, one piece of chicken, and “one other thing”—all for a mere $3–we dwelled more on the other parts.

Alexandra Petri, Atlantic.

Once again, the Cambridge dictionary permits “dwelled,” but my ear wants “dwelt.”

(And my soul trembles that this is what we’re doing to anyone ICE wants to pick up and detain.)

I have a ticket to see the Yellowjackets at Purdue tonight. The forecast says the temperatures will be -1 with a windchill of nearly -20 about the time the concert will be letting out. It’s nearly a 5-minute walk venue-to-parking. Something tells me I’m going to wave goodbye to my $32 ticket.

Doing things by web browser is increasingly disfavored.

Examples:

1. Logged onto my Schwab app and handled some business all while the web browser was still trying in vain to log me onto the site.
2. Readwise problem I’m trying to work out with tech support. Finally, this: “The Readwise app is actually only optimized for mobile devices (this is mentioned in the App Store when downloading)” Of course, what I was trying to do then worked “perfectly” on my iPad - except that I had to transfer the result to my MacBook to work with it the way I prefer.

David Brooks: “… case studies strewed before them ….”

The Cambridge Dictionary vindicates him, but my ear clearly prefers “strewn.”

I’m so sorry. I knew he wouldn’t end well, so I never voted for him and have regularly and openly criticized him and his toxicity.

The best thing I can say about him is that gold mining shares are doing exceedingly well - cold comfort and an obverse of our failure.

I’ve hoped (not literally prayed) for the U.S. to become a “regular nation” somehow, but it has been hard for me to adjust to the realization of that hope. It seems we’ve overshot and become a pariah state.

Don’t blame Jesus. The Christian-ish heretics are taking His name in vain. I hope and pray I’m not.

Reader John

Local Judge Steve Meyer and his wife Kim were shot in their home Sunday afternoon. Both are recovering, though he had a lot of wood splinters in his arm from the shotgun blast through their front door.

I’d feel better were it not for this and this (one county away, which took five years to solve).

The dominant system today is built on analysis. And it’s worth remembering that the root meaning of analysis is the reduction of things into parts.

Holistic thinking, in contrast, is always inherently Romantic. You can also call this visionary thinking.

Ted Gioia’s Substack is consistently good. Sometimes it’s great, as in 25 Propositions about the New Romanticism, which he made a public post.

This is one of the best things I’ve read in a long while - an unironic analysis of our tendency to analyze everything to death (“we murder to dissect”).

Iain McGilchrist would approve.

Belated Christmas from far-away friends. I had no idea such a thing existed.

I seem to be on a crunchy streak here, which is ironic since I’m a klutzy intellectualoid. Anyhoo, one of the projects that excites me is the American College of Building Arts in Charleston. They have YouTube videos also if you want a kinetic portrayal.

Wish there were crunchy kids here.

VISION FOR A NEW CABINET: - Front Porch Republic

Very crunchy.