They got him. Now it will be interesting to see about political orientation, motive, and such.
Finished Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness. 📚 Glad I read it for more reasons than I’ve sorted out just yet.
Context matters.
Wife from next room: Who is Charlie Kirk?
Me: (Formulating just the right withering put-down …)
Wife: He’s been shot and killed.
Me: (Mute, with thoughts I shouldn’t oughta been thinking, not even for a few seconds …)
He won’t be the last. We really are a mess.
Apple status update
- Since introducing the M-series chips, Apple had done nothing to make me want to replace my early M1 Airbook.
- Until Apple introduces a phone whose battery will support 12 hours of walking around foreign countries with GPS on, I’m content with my iPhone 15 and external portable batteries.
- iPads are fine. I wish I’d gotten more memory on the big one, and I wish the battery life were better on the little one, but I’ll manage.
- I treated myself to an Apple Watch for our Golden Anniversary. 40 months later, as the battery fades slowly in the West, I’m looking forward to not getting notifications on my wrist. I don’t expect to get another Watch.
This indifference to owning the very latest tech is a novel experience for me.
I’ve been discounting the theory that Trump is avoiding l’affaire Epstein when he wags dog after dog after dog. Today, I won’t discount it.
[Proper noun], [Pronoun] [verb] ….
Is this a new, cretinous stylesheet for local television news?
Examples:
The students, they say …
Caitlyn, she says …
I must have heard it a dozen times in ten minutes just now.
The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is.
René Guénon Guénon , The Crisis of the Modern World
The uncomfortable truth about watching (American) football. Boxing, too. MMA, too-to-the-Nth-power.
I don’t have to think through it. Somewhere along life’s way, I just ceased enjoying most “contact sports” (legitimate wrestling excepted, as it’s not especially injurious).
Damon Linker has a longish, and I think fair, critical analysis of Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, which rumor has it is being bought for a very handsome price. Bari Weiss Conquers the World.
He’s not enthusiastic at the thought of Bari, with her biases, getting a high sinecure at CBS.
I ran across this dystopian sentence in the New York Times: “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”
Even if you are not what you should be, you should not despair. It is bad enough that you have sinned; why in addition do you wrong God by regarding Him in your ignorance as powerless. He will receive your repentance.
Saint Peter of Damascus, Philokalia vol. 3, p. 160
Pay no heed to the Ezra Klein show today. If it is as billed, it’s mostly wrong.
Trump has been winning in SCOTUS because he only appeals those losses where his legal team advises “I think we could actually win this one in SCOTUS.’
Otherwise he takes the loss, defames the judge, and moves on.
Reading Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness. 📚 I had no idea this existed and was almost as iconic as Merton’s Seven-Story Mountain.
Finished James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room. 📚 My first Baldwin fiction, I think, so I decided to jump in the deep end.
The nation’s capital has become so lawless that you can actually get away with throwing a sandwich at obnoxious federal agents! Grand Jury Nullification in the District of Columbia? - Reason.com
Nobody should take literal lessons from fairy tales: If you come across an unconscious young woman in a forest and your first instinct is to kiss her, you’re a creep.
My wife tells me that Travis Kelce is not a quarterback. Who knew? I replied that he still makes enough to pay for that engagement ring, and Taylor can reimburse him if he falls behind on the payments.
A little tragedy playing out
A new family in my parish, the oldest daughter in which is gravely disabled physically and mentally, went home after Vespers Saturday night and later found this gravely disabled pubescent daughter unresponsive in her room.
She eventually was airlifted to Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, where she has been declared brain dead (by an Orthodox Christian neurologist, coincidentally).
The prayers for the departure of the soul from the body have been served. And now the real heartbreak - from my perspective.
Her grieving parents are keeping a sort of vigil over tubes and machines and the body of their daughter while transplant donor paperwork is completed and a recipient is found.
The agony of the scene in the preceding sentence has never before occurred to me. It has always been “they decided to donate her organs,” without appreciation of what that means emotionally for the family.
It looks as if the handmaiden of God, Annalise, will be the first person interred in our parish cemetery. I’ll be singing my first funeral in years in this young parish.
They told me that if I voted for Kamala Harris we’d end up with a command-and-control economy. And they were right.
Nick Catoggio, Socialism without Socialism.