The irony is that we all—secular or religious people alike—make our biggest life-shaping decisions on faith. Life is too short to learn what you need to know to live well.
Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God. I don’t recommend the book, but he nailed this one thing.
Finished reading Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier. 📚H/T to The Great Books podcast for turning me onto its excellence.
Reading Dante’s Inferno (Anthony Esolen translation). 📚 Started on someone else’s translation a few years ago but didn’t finish. Esolen has the Italian original on the left page.
There are websites for “weld porn,” and the mere fact that this is so should be of urgent interest to educators. Education requires a certain capacity for asceticism, but more fundamentally it is erotic. Only beautiful things lead us out to join the world beyond our heads.
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
Kari Jenson Gold muses under the somewhat-misleading rubric Jesus the Carpenter. Anyone who liked Shop Class As Soulcraft should take a few minutes for it.
Discovering your true preferences requires maximizing the number of choices you face: precisely the condition that makes for maximum dissipation of one’s energies.
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
(Posted 6.5 hours ago but never appeared).
…we are social and biographical beings, not digital cameras or recorders.
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
I reminder that should make me squirm guiltily.
We have an adversarial legal system because there are often two plausible sides to a case.
Did the Oath Keepers commit seditious conspiracy? I thought so, and so did a law prof. An ex-prosecutor who has actually tried seditious conspiracy says “not so fast.” I’m with him now.
Neglected television: Home, on Apple TV. A sort of documentary series about unique, thoughtful homes around the world.
I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me. But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself—a zone of relevance—by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular.
Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
What I learned today: Yes, epigenetics is (almost by definition) real, and no, it is not resurrected Lysenkoism.
I remain a retired lawyer, not a scientist, and that tidbit scratches my immediate itch.
We can know more than we can tell.
Michael Polanyi
Hard words for an imagination formed in our era.
Pssst! Omicron spreads through shared Wordle scores! Pass it on!
(H/T Damon Linker)
Ironic: Coffee never did it, but I now find that one nice adult nightcap is likely to have me tossing and turning at 3 am. I knew they said it, but hadn’t felt it personally. Now two nights sleeping blissfully through w/o nightcap.
Must explore work-arounds.
Very interesting: New data published by New York’s Department of Health show that … 43 percent of COVID-positive patients currently hospitalized were admitted for another reason, and only tested positive for COVID-19 incidentally.
It’s going to be a busy month.
Our daughter-in-law in a few days is flying with her mother to Russia (first time since they immigrated) because of an ill mother/grandmother. As the most flexible branch of the family, it falls to us to take up some slack with the grandchildren as our son works at least some days past school dismissal — and they live an hour away.
Russian grandma, with no diagnosis of diabetes, nevertheless fell into a diabetic coma the day after her second (Russia-made) Covid jab. She’s out of the coma, but it’s hard from so far away to tell whether she’s “out of the woods.”
“All hands on deck!” as my late father used to say.
I’m not even going to speculate about cause and effect on the vaccine/diabetes puzzle. There’s just too much we don’t know, and I at least am willing to admit it.
[Augusto] Del Noce’s real genius was his prophetic insight into the rise of Western irreligion. He saw that Marxism “won” the war of ideas, even as it collapsed as a theory, by establishing the economic dimension of man as humanity’s defining reality. For Del Noce, the West “defeated” Marxism not by reaffirming biblical morality or Christian anthropology but by quietly shedding both. Western countries won by outproducing Marxist systems on their own terms, with material results—superior science, superior technology, more and better consumer goods. The dark side of technology, Del Noce argued, is a passion for “total revolution”—permanent revolution against the past doing business as innovation. The byproducts of its success have been religious agnosticism, sexual liberation and radical secularism. By the time of his death, Del Noce viewed much of Western society, despite its Christian residue, as the most thoroughly atheist in history, a feat achieved not by persecuting God, but by ignoring and rendering him irrelevant.
Francis X. Maier, How Marxism ‘Won’ the War of Ideas.
Bari Weiss invited her Substack readers to tell a bit about themselves in comments. So far, about 1271 have responded (including me).
Fascinating and oddly encouraging. The sane party is larger than I realized.
Read it, re-read it, tagged it in Obsidian. The Opposite of War Is Not Peace: Healing Trauma in the Iliad and in Orthodox Tradition (PDF) shifts some of my paradigms.
On a more positive note, my rather musical fair city has a quiet little “Children’s Music Foundation” to fund private lessons for talented but poor children. Pretty sure I’ll begin giving annually.
Motley Fool update: went from “let’s give this a one-month trial; it’s only $39” to “Keep your $39 and DON’T EVER SEND ME ANYTHING AGAIN. EVER.” in less than a week.
Your mileage may vary, but only if you’ve got a 6-hour hole in your daily schedule and are desperate to fill it.
I hadn’t paid much attention to the venues where sportsball is played, except for things like “really big” or “kinda small.”
But I just noticed that the Rose Bowl is a beautiful, symmetrical oval.
Oh yeah: and kinda small.
Google Street View provides panoramic street-level pictures from across the world, which it obtained from special camera cars. Google: Whoops, our cars also took substantive info, like passwords, photos, and documents, transmitted over unencrypted Wi-Fi. Much litigation ensues. A class action covering 60 million people settles for $13 mil, with the money going to attorneys’ fees, various costs, and an assortment of nonprofits that promise to use the money “to promote the protection of Internet privacy”—and not a penny to the people whose privacy was violated. Ninth Circuit: That’s fine. Concurrence: It’s time for us to reconsider our precedent okaying monetary awards to third parties instead of damages for class members.
Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions.
Personal note: I stopped filling out class action claim forms decades ago. I have better things to do with my time than spend 30 minutes (guesstimate — may be high or low) on the off-chance of a scrap of carcass after the jackals have gotten the lion’s share (to mix a metaphor).
Malcolm Guite embeds a lovely New Years song, in folk style.
Happy New Year, y’all.