Reader John

As part of my self-improvement program, I’m watching Lacrosse for the first time. There’s no micro.blog icon, though I’m tempted to use a hockey-stick since they can go behind the goal in play.

[F]or a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious, and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost

Frederick Buechner via Alan Jacobs. Thanks, @ayjay!

Charles Barkley’s advice to Jussie Smollett: ‘If you’re going to break the law, do not write a check’

A daily potpourri of not-entirely-random news and commentary

Oh, joy! I’ve been waiting for Peggy Noonan to blog what first appeared last Friday behind a paywall. She’s very much on her game, and Peggy Noonan on her game is awfully good.

Mixed feelings: a beautiful hawk has decided that our well-patronized bird feeders are his happy hunting ground.

As I read, highlighted, and tagged Wesley Hill’s blog, I was surprised to learn that I’d never used the tag “common grace” before. I couldn’t not tag it that way.

Karl Rove writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes, he’s right.

Love Story had it wrong: it’s “buying your ink by the barrel” that means never having to say you’re sorry.

L’affaire Jussie Smollett is mostly about celebrities, politicians, media and other bien pensants yet again jumping on a dubious story just because it fits their preferred narrative. That’s almost a weekly scandal any more.

Just discovered that NordVPN has a pretty useful blog, recently focused on alternatives to GoogleFace’s Hydra heads.

Michael Gerson turns acute depression into a sermon, and much more. Potpourri, 2/20/19

I’m a pretty strong advocate of press freedom (I had a newspaper client for a while), as well as free expression more generally, but telling reckless lies about a 16-year-old kid, who didn’t thrust himself into the limelight, shifts my sympathies considerably.

SCOTUS accepts Indiana Supreme Court’s challenge (“the United States Supreme Court has not held that the Clause applies to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment”), holds that constitutional protection against excessive fines applies to state actions, not just federal.

Bernie Sanders is running for President in 2020 on a platform opposing age discrimination.

Apropos of the death of Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld, I’m reminded how very odd it is, and how it reflects on humanity (even purported adults), that “Fashion” is an industry.

I swore off Facebook today over its censorship of an image from the martyrdom of 21 Coptic Christians at the hands of ISIS terrorists. I hope I can make it stick. It’s harder than Twitter somehow.

Clippings and Comments, 2/19/19

There’s something touching and even uplifting about a widow of the Aurora, Illinois factory shooting being too emotional to talk to the press about her husband, and about her Facebook postings to which the press thus must resort.

This Day in History: Former Vice President Aaron Burr is arrested for treason. Quite good.

I despair for the state of literacy today:

America’s choice to embrace the blind rage of late-stage whiteness in decline is an explicit longing for this kind of crime.

GQ’s Joshua Rivera, quoted on l’affaire Jussie Smollett by Noah Rothman

I have thought this for a while but hadn’t uttered it yet: It’s surprising how many independent thinkers I think of as leaning left or even hard left are not buying what the Russiagatemongers are selling. Take James Howard Kunstler and Caitlin Johnstone, respectively.

I’ve just shared three snippets from the blog of Fr. Stephen Freeman, whose blogs are pretty profound much of the time.

That I am generally calm enough to catch up on his blog only every month or so, is a symptom of real imbalance in my life.

Well, Lent’s coming soon ….

[Myth haters’] religion … is flat and empty. What modernity labels as “fact” is insufficient for human existence … St. Porphyrios said that in order to become a Christian, one must first become a poet ….

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Mythic Character of Reality