Here are some things I really don't like

I don't mean to go all Andy Rooney on my readers (ah, the conceit that I have readers!), but it's a lot easier and more entertaining to write about things you don't like than those you do. (Right, Miriam?). Nobody wants to hear about how pretty the sunrise was, or that great dessert you had at Elaine's. (Elaine's is closed now anyway).


Nope-people want to hear why you hate Trump, or the Democrats, or kids driving around with bass blasters in their cars, or those little nasty yapper dogs, or people using their cell phones on speaker, or Jehovah's Witnesses (just tell them you didn't see the accident, as my late friend Rob used to say), or people who've had too much nip and tuck work, or people smoking pot at SEPTA stops that you're forced to ingest (the smoke, not the people, which would be even worse), or people on paleo diets, or vegans, or male white wine drinkers, or beer snobs (Can you imagine anything dumber to be a snob about? "I drink craft beer". Who cares? Beer ain't exactly upscale).....


No, I don't actually hate these people. I hope I don't literally hate anyone. But most of the people above really, really annoy me. I'm a conservative, so I believe in minimal government, but legislation directed at all of the above would have my full support.


Get cracking, McConnell.

A few thoughts on Charlie Rose

You know, you can't really accuse people like Charlie Rose of hypocrisy. Yes, he mouthed the "pro-woman" platitudes of the Left. But as a progressive he doesn't really believe anything. A thoroughly secularized progressivism inevitably reduces everything to, "Whose opinion is fashionable right now"? . The debased sexual culture Bill Clinton and such helped create was fashionable for a while. Unfortunately for Rose, it's somewhat less so at the moment.

Of course, people need to believe something, so everybody grasps at some motivator, even if it's just empty money- and power- seeking. It's all "eat and drink, for tomorrow we die".

So you can't accuse the Left of hypocrisy. They do stick to their script. A plush Manhattan high-rise is a pretty obvious token of success, whatever the price might've been to get it.


But progressives can, with justification, accuse conservatives of instances of hypocrisy, since we claim loyalty to the eternal verities liberals laugh at. The violations are often glaring.

In any case, I always thought Rose was a pretty engaging guy, though he was an obvious partisan-only conservatives got tough questions. But Charlie wasn't quite as engaging as he thought young women found him.

So-men with power often exploit women. Should they then be deprived of power, or is The Pence Rule a good idea?

Hitler or Hefner

This quote from Malcolm Muggeridge seems apt:

"If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner".

RIP Hugh Hefner.

I haven't read what you wrote, but I know you're an idiot

The New Atheists aren't, shall we say, a group of intellectual heavyweights.

Edward Feser is, by any reckoning, a heavyweight, and here he decries the NA's who assail his book Five Proofs of the Existence of God without, of course, having read it.

Good God.

Links-mostly controversial

It looks like Obama spied on Trump and his campaign, as he also apparently did on reporters like Sharyl Attkisson. There should be outrage from all sides on this, but we're past the point where anything but results matters to the Left.

A fun little plaything-CodePen chord progression arpeggio generator. I've wasted hours with this.

Ray Fair, an economist famous for his election models, shows you here how fast you'll decline in chess and sports as you age. It's not pretty.


Buying the iPhone X-an exercise in irrationality. 

Want to know exactly what Bob Dylan played on his XM Satellite and Sirius XM radio shows? Now you can, or at least "the Best of".


Cardinal Dolan wants liberals to like him a little too much. Bending over backwards to avoid the dreaded label of "Islamophobia" doesn't show much spiritual leadership, but then again most of our American bishops act more like administrators than spiritual leaders.

The power of positive salesmanship, bigotry, and Sen. Feinstein

I ridiculed the Norman Vincent Peale "Power of Positive Thinking" way of thinking in my recent post on the value of "negative" emotions. Peale more than deserved deserved it-not only is it a silly worldview, if you could call it that, he was rather an anti-Catholic bigot, as evidenced by his comments in the 1960 election campaign.

But having mentioned Peale, Amazon's marketing bot keeps putting that book, which apparently is still a big-seller, in the ads you see here. I have no control over that, of course.


Peale's comments put me in mind of the recent controversy started by CA Senator Dianne Feinstein, who bashed Federal court nominee Amy Barrett for her unconcealed Catholicism. Peale and Feinstein would likely agree on little, but both seem to think a good Catholic is one who should, well, shut up in public if he is serious about his faith. Peale would censor Catholics; Feinstein both Catholics and Peale.

The Left now endorses a narrow "freedom of  worship", rather than our long-established "freedom of religion", in which you may attend any religious service you like, but had better not bring those views to the public square.

Feinstein and many of her Democratic colleagues advocate the notion that secular politics is "neutral" politics, that early 21st century deism is the default, unbiased view of thinking folks. But, to state the glaringly obvious, it is not a neutral view, any more than a Catholic, evangelical, Muslin, or any other more explicitly worldview would be.


It is not, to be sure, really a secular view. It is more of a seemingly unreflected-upon Moral Therapeutic Deism-it doesn't exactly deny God, since few Americans are atheists. Rather, MTD reduces Him to a figure on the periphery, a vaguely benevolent figure who wants us to be happy but is little involved in human affairs, and certainly not politics.

Emotions, good and "bad"

We tend to think of certain emotions-fear, anger, sadness-as bad. We are told to "think positive", or "Don't be so negative!". One particular quasi-religious empire was built around "positive thinking". Another, more contemporary one, tells us that a different sort of positive thinking combined with meditation will "attract" wonderful things to us, somewhere from the deep recesses of a universe that somehow is both personal and impersonal at the same time.

In any case, the so-called negative emotions are so described because they are unpleasant. No one likes to feel them, unless, I suppose, you're a pain glutton, patterning yourself on Jack Nicholson in The Little Shop of Horrors, but as an emotional, rather than physical, pain junkie.


For the rest of us, though, emotions act as signals. And so they cannot be bad in themselves. They tell us, remind us, to "Avoid this", or that "I'm sorry I lost this". We could no more lose our unpleasant emotions and be fully functioning humans than we could do the same if we lost our pleasant ones, or our reason.

But when we experience that signal, that pain, we want to turn away. We want to shut it down, now. Often this is a perfectly reasonable. So much of what we see on the Internet is designed to work us up to a strong emotional reaction, get a click, drive numbers.


But much of the time, in "real life", that strong reaction indicates there's something here that we need to think about. This is especially true if the reaction is particularly powerful. If someone says something I react to strongly, I must ask myself why this is. Am I really inconsiderate, or too slow to ponder why a given viewpoint angers me? What am I walling myself off from?

In a age of using electronic devices to, in effect, alienate ourselves from what we truly feel and think, it strikes me that these are worthwhile questions.

A few good links

Some worthwhile reads:

Lynn on enjoying the eclipse, and also enjoying things that we see every day. Which makes me think of this: click it! (TY Dustbury.)

Ann Althouse on the outrageous Trump. 


Terry Teachout names his favorite big band tracks. Well, there are no tracks by Maynard Ferguson, Don Ellis, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Buddy Rich, or Thad Jones-Mel Lewis, but it's still a nice grouping.

Edward Feser and Joe Bessette present the Catholic case for capital punishment. It's impossible to argue, from a Catholic perspective, that CP is intrinsically wrong, like abortion or euthanasia.


Megan McArdle-"As a woman in tech, I realized these are not my people". Reflections on the Google memo.

Cartoons can be useful. 

"God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another"-Hamlet. The Bard might wonder at some current lunacies, like presto-chango sexes.


Father Mitch Pacwa, no longer SJ, is tossed out of the Jesuits after being caught with a Catechism.



538 has the Dodgers getting to 114 wins, two shy of the record.

In a strange land

I called this blog "I'm Just a Visitor Here" because I've always felt I was looking at people from a distance, like someone dropped on the wrong planet early in life who's then been compelled to spend his time trying to figure out his strange new neighbors. As a child I was told by "helpful" siblings I'd been purchased at the supermarket (and so I imagined babies of various hues lined up along the back wall at the A & P, available that week only for just $2.99 a pound), but I was never told where I'd been shipped from.

Not that I really believed the supermarket story, but I might as well have-I've always felt like I didn't really belong "here".  


That lack of a sense of "connectedness", of community-I guess I'm not so dissimilar to the masses now. People who ponder why depression is in epidemic mode in the US point to that loss of associations as a big reason why. It's just as true for other sorts of mental illness, most likely. Every ad for cell phones talks about "staying connected", and we seem desperate to avoid losing those few associations modern society affords us.

We have slice and dice marketing for products, and for votes. Seemingly nothing is offered to all. Everybody's assumed to have differing opinions and values. Elections no longer count because "the wrong person" won.


But of course, it really is true that we no longer have the same values. There is Christian America, in decline here as elsewhere in the West, and there is post-Christian America, eager to eliminate all vestiges of the old order. Not to be melodramatic, but our very own Cultural Revolution puts all at risk, for the sake of a "more just" society.

Lincoln spoke of both North and South reading the same Bible. Now, our two warring nations have radically different understandings of, well, everything. We cannot hold together like this. I am frightened.

Swingin' Yuletime

Have a swingin' Christmas!

Maynard Ferguson and band, Christmas for Moderns, 1960.

Some new reality shows on The Faith Network

I've been looking at the TV listings, and I see The Faith Network has some new reality shows running. Samples:

"Jim-Bob at Large"- Rev Jim-Bob Tucker of the Flountsville Baptist Church plans to perform a miracle with a couple chickens and some goats. (Animals not available at press time).

"Hello, Dalai!"-The Dalai Lama will cast demons out of some high-ranking Chinese leaders and reclaim his beleaguered nation. (Demons unfortunately will be available).

"The Shirley Show"- We see Episcopal Bishop the Reverend Shirley Williamson as she presides over a gay wedding and is then hit by lightning on the way to her car.

"You Can Call Me Al"- Rev. Al Sharpton gets a manicure and a pedicure, and maybe a perm too, as he pretties up before meeting with some corporate chieftains to raise a few million for his "foundation".

"Don't Call Me Darryl"- Richard Dawkins regretfully informs God that He probably doesn't exist.

"Jewish Jokers"- Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner re-create some of the best bits from their 2000 Year Old Man routine, including the time Ben-Hur got pulled over for speeding in his chariot.

"I Love My Mama!"- Here we see a tearful Al Gore hug a great big globe long enough to make viewers really uncomfortable.

"Objectively Speaking"- Pilgrims clutching copies of Ayn Rand's works such as The Fountainhead visit Rand's tomb and await her resurrection.

"The Lutheran Channel" -Students from The Evangelical Lutheran Church and The Lutheran Church (MIssouri Synod) face off on College Jeopardy.

"All Roads Lead to Mecca"- Abdul and Habib teach their kids about all the fun things you can do with plastic explosives.

"Father Brown's Adventures"- We watch as Father Brown, of St. Mark's Catholic Church in Steubenville, spills coffee on himself at breakfast, says morning Mass, visits old folks in the hospital, teaches RCIA class, and goes to bed by himself. Truly useful people usually are boring. First and last episode due to likely low ratings.

Oy vey, I'm Jewish!

Well, just a little-2%. Let's see-that's 1/50; one great-great-great grandparent would be 1/32; one great-great-great-great grandparent, 1/64. So, a tiny smidgen.


My sister did a DNA test and the results came back 50% Irish; 31% undifferentiated Western European; 17% Southern Italian/Greek; 2% Jewish. I believe the 31% is the non-Celtic part of my Irish ancestry. It gets confusing because I had two great-grandparents who came here from England, but likely were Welsh or Irish, judging by the surnames. Also, my maternal Grandfather was born in Italy. That should, of course, correspond to 25% not 17.


I won't make any speeches about how I've always found anti-Semitism to be abhorrent, or how I've never understood the pro-Palestinian crowd, although both are true. I'll just say it's nice to be related, however distantly, to various Biblical figures. People do say I look a lot like Jesus.

Chesterton on voting with your whole self

Apt thoughts from GK Chesterton in a year when the choices seem especially distasteful:

THE average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep into his vote. If he has ever heard splendid songs, they should be in his ears when he makes the mystical cross. But as it is, the difficulty with English democracy at all elections is that it is something less than itself. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.


'Tremendous Trifles.'