Latest musings, analyses, and general madness

Man Versus Machine: A World Record Fallacy

The Chinese Communist Party propaganda machine — machine being a keyword here — is flooding the world of the weakminded (aka the internet, such as in this piece from Fox News) with the “news” that a humanoid robot has “shattered” Usain Bolt’s 100-metre dash world record at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. I saw the headlines, repeatedly, on my office computer’s...

That’ll Teach the Socialists!

Inevitably, the news comes that the Trump administration is deeply engaged in negotations aimed at establishing “a long-term stake in a vast share of Venezuela’s oil fields.” That is, a long-term U.S. Government ownership stake in Venezuela’s natural resources. So Trump invades a socialist country and deposes its leader, only to come to terms with the rest of the socialist regime at the...

Lake Trump

Donald Trump, in his typically infantile manner, has responded to not getting his way in trade bullying with Canada by signing an executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Of course no one in Canada will ever recognize or use this name. And of course the only Americans who will ever use it are the diehards still clinging to their Trump fantasy...

Of Loyalty, Fate, and Shame

To those U.S. military veterans who were once friendly readers of my writing but turned against me when they fell under the spell of the dumbest and most corrupt man ever to run for commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, and who pooh-poohed my criticisms of said dunderhead with refusals to accept his own frequent pro-despot words (and later policies) at face value,...

On America’s Death Pangs: Mitch McConnell Edition

Where is Mitch McConnell? As for where his body might be, I have no idea, although since all evidence points to his having suffered a massive heart attack, it is likely that he will never be what he was before his disappearance, and this is granting that what he was for the last couple of years before his disappearance was, if I may...

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Pandemics, and Boccaccio’s Human Comedy

Within the past few days, the illustrious Dr. Fauci, a man of no small vanity and no great humility, a man who never met a crisis he couldn’t exploit for his own aggrandizement and indeed never met a minor crisis he couldn’t magnify into a major one so as to inflate his own importance and career profile, has been met at last with...

A Little Odyssey Through Time

It seems that the vast majority of film critics, both the professional ones and the peculiar number of amateurs among the public chattering class who felt they just had to insert themselves into this particular discussion, are agreed that Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is an exceptionally good film, falling somewhere within a range from “epic masterpiece” (my combination of the two words...

Reflections on Modern Thinking

The laws of self-delusion.— When materialists reduce the soul to the body and its “laws,” they are merely admitting that they have no plausible explanation for that element of themselves without which their materialist reductionism could not exist. That is, they cannot account for their experience of themselves qua investigators of matter. They, qua investigators of matter, by definition lie outside the range...

The Sad Odyssey of Civilization

Morbid curiosity getting the better of me this morning, I made the momentous decision to give almost two minutes of my earthly life to popular movie director Christopher Nolan. I watched the trailer for his latest award-baiting film, The Odyssey. Well, to be honest, I should say that I gave about fifty seconds of my life to Nolan, after which the trailer continued...

Lindsey Graham

Lindsey Graham has been part of my personal political consciousness since he served as one of the House managers in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. I remember his portion of the prosecution’s presentation more clearly than anyone else’s, not because it was the most legalistic or the most rationally persuasive of the cases for removing Clinton from office, but because it was, in its...