I’ve read so many cringeworthy obituaries that I decided I should write my own (no, I have no known terminal illness).
At my age, it’s an interesting retrospective and a map for what I should do with however much time I have left.
Whoa! USC and UCLA are leaving the Pac-12 and joining B1G (a/k/a Big Ten)! I think my college basketball-watching is getting an upgrade.
Currently (finally!) reading Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations. It’s mind-expanding (Orthodoxy as its own civilization? Who knew?) if nothing else (I’m withholding final judgment). It has been in my Kindle library for almost six years. Why did I wait so long? 📚
Paydirt! Dobbs is decided!
How pathetic am I? Sitting here with my iPad as a second monitor so I can keep up with the SCOTUS decisions coming down right now. First is a Medicare reimbursement case.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but Trump’s pressure on the Department of Justice is the first January 6 Committee hearing testimony that apparently revealed an outrage to my wife that she had not yet noticed. That incensed the wife and mother of lawyers mightily.
B1G (f/k/a Big 10) had two players in the top 5 of the NBA draft. So when are we going to bring home an NCAA Championship again?
SCOTUS strikes down New York’s gun-licensing law, it appears, in the last opinion handed down today.
Y’all may have noticed that I care a lot about religious freedom. I’m also near 100% on calling religious freedom cases in the Supreme Court.
But I admit that I don’t know how Kennedy v. Bremerton School District will come out. Maybe that’s because I’m not sure how I want it to come out.
We should know very soon. If I say anything to the contrary when the decision comes down, you have permission to call me on it and to suggest that it may be time to get a mini-mental exam.
Pro tip: when tagging “Nietzsche,” you really don’t need a first name. Orville Nietzsche never did anything notable.
If you have access to the New York Times and detest our immediate past POTUS (as do I), do yourself a favor and read Prosecute Trump? Put Yourself in Merrick Garland’s Shoes. I think I’d call it a day at step two of the analysis.
If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.
Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes
N.S. Lyons: when he/she is good, he/she is very, very good. (A long read.)
This reached me through the grapevine. It’s an almost-verbatim version of insurrection theorist John Eastman’s own words. As they say, “It reads better in the original Russian.”
The air conditioner just stopped. That cannot last long. 94/109 temperature/heat index.
Excerpt
Locked in a cycle of Slack callouts and healing retreats, left-wing groups — from reproductive rights to climate to racial and economic justice — have brought themselves to a grinding halt.
How can a conservative not feel schadenfreude reading that?
A Psalm for anxiety over “cancel culture” and “soft tyranny.”
I had an RSS feed that gave me 32 Far Side cartoon re-runs each week. It appears recently to have died. I miss it sorely.
That is all.
Be it noted that pro-life pregnancy centers are being vandalized and even firebombed with minimal mainstream coverage. Note that these are not the political “Right to Life” offices that help elect the Senators and President who populate the Supreme Court; they are non-political.
87 degrees Farenheit, 102 degree heat index. Hooboy, we’re in for it!
Purdue University president Mitch Daniels is retiring at the end of the year. Consistent with his maverick ways over the last 10 years, his successor was announced concurrently with his retirement announcement. There was no public Presidential search, and we will doubtless be treated to days of complaints, petty and serious, about that.
His successor will be the professor and Dean, Dr. Mung Chiang, who served as his Executive Vice President for Strategic Initiatives, of which Purdue has formed a great many over the last 10 years, with some of the biggest corporate names in the world.
I’m very proud of Purdue, my neighbor just across the Wabash, but I would prefer that my loved ones not attend there.
First, like most major universities today, the streets of the campus flow with alcohol, which endangers students of both sexes with the ambiguities of sexual interactions between drunks.
Second, I prefer undergraduate liberal arts education to enlisting in the Technocracy fresh out of high school.
But it seems to me that Mitch Daniels has been a tremendously successful Ginormous Research University President, and I wish him well.
I read too much news about the January 6 Committee prime-time “hearings” (they’re not hearings; those happened earlier). Silver lining: I’m reminded of the secondary culprits, who voted to reject slates of Electors, including my own Congressman and Greg Pence, Mike’s brother.
Absolutely true and worth remembering: “There’s often more bias in which stories are deemed to be salient than how they’re written about.” (Nate Silver)
Blast from the distant past: When I told my dad I read Playboy for the articles, he said “You don’t have to dig through the garbage to get food.”
I, older now than Dad was then, kind of feel that way about a lot of online news sources these days, including … Oh, never mind.