Notes & topics
Another busy day. I wanted to write an Idlepost on the word “houselling,” inspired by an item sent by a good friend in Washington. (See here.) “Living in Parkdale or DC is either an example of or an obstacle to houselling,” he comments. But after considering the matter from several angles, I realized that I had nothing to say. Often I come to some like conclusion. There is no difficulty finding topics that bark, only in taking them for a walk, as it were. Why, here in a sheaf of papers on my table I find a list of them (topics), fairly recently scratched down. I stare. Darn’d if I can remember what I was intending to add to any of them. I transcribe it below, so gentle reader may pick any item that pleases her, and write her own Idlepost today.
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The crowd is only interested in the product. But the producer is more interested in the work. And the connoisseur is on the side of the producer.
You can read anything into Shakespeare, if you’re stupid enough.
To express my insolidarity with the partakers of mild North American food.
Vauxhall. In the 1970s they got into the competition to produce the most boring car the world had ever seen. I think they won. But no one can remember which model it was.
Trumpestuous. … If he’d only had a little more discretion, the world would never have heard of him.
Progressives in this age of mass media focus on “controlling the narrative.” There is a competition between “narratives,” after all. The winners must make their narrative heard, but just as important, they must suppress any alternative narrative. This is what all the “outrage” is for: to make a big noise whenever a rival storyteller is speaking. It doesn’t matter if people think the progressives are gauche, so long as they are unable to follow what Homer (the first Tory) is singing.
Google, Amazon, Tencent, Baidu, IBM, Alibaba, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft. Kill them all, God will know his own.
There is no such a thing as free lunch, and no such a thing as free speech, either. Someone must pay.
Curre ut vincas. (“Run that you may conquer.” I Cor ix.24) … Sublimiora spectemus. (“Let us regard loftier things.”) These are mottoes of the Clan of Warren, it says here. Someone should have told me.
“There are opinions and there is faith.” (Lustiger)
But we ARE Jews, for gawdsake — spiritual Semites to a man from the start — and to a woman, and unto the childers. That is what it is to be Catholic, or Orthodox Greekish for that matter, in our liturgies descending from the Sanctuary, beneath the Temple Mount. We lay claim to ALL of the Scriptures, or rather they lay claim to us, and if you will read your Summa of Rabbi Saint Thomas (the forgotten sections on the Old Law, 1a2ae, questions 98 to 105), we take our Tanakh whole, noting the hardest passages in Deuteronomy and Leviticus — all 46 books and not just the 39 that Mr Luther and Mr Stuart happened to like — and as with Rabbi Saint Augustine (passim) we read the New Testament concealed within the Old, and the Old unveiled in the New. …
“Jews don’t forget!”
Saint Paul: “But even if we ourselves or an angel from heaven should preach to you a Gospel other than the one that we preached to you, let him be anathema.” (Galatians i, 8)
“A prince void of prudence shall oppress many by calumny.” (Proverbs xxviii, 16)
“If fitting into this culture and society constitutes sanity, then please God, let me never be sane.” — Ann Barnhardt
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Oh look, there’s more!