“Miley Cyrus said her ninth studio album, “Something Beautiful,” is her attempt to reimagine what “beautiful” means: her beloved grandmother’s death, for instance, or the emotion of rage.”
New York Times email teaser June 6, 2025, joining in transvaluing all values
“And then there are the really mega-freaky publications like Weekly World News that are so deranged parakeets will actually hold their shit in until something else is placed in the bottom of their cage.”
Dennis Miller The Rants [violating my normal rule against dirty words but they do have a place].
“NBA legend Jerry West… had become an advocate for mental health, openly speaking about his battles with depression that traced back to childhood with an abusive father in poor, rural West Virginia… West took great umbrage to the HBO series ‘Winning Time,’ which cast him as an out-of-control executive prone to fits of rage. While HBO did not apologize to West, the network said ‘Winning Time’ should be viewed more as a dramatization and less as a documentary.”
NBC obituary of West June 12, 2024 [what a greasy way of admitting you lied maliciously].
“one person with their mind made up can shove a lot of folks aroun!”
Tom Joad in John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
In my latest National Post column I argue that the strange juxtaposition of wokism and vicarious debauchery in the New York Times is actually a logical and coherent consequence of being “nonjudgemental”… without being a message well-tailored to me.
“Looming behind Kennedy’s report [British surgeon Richard Hartley Kennedy’s 1825 account of suttee] was a horror of idolatry that reached back unbroken through Christian history. Cortez, confronted by racks of skulls and Tenochtitlan, and Boniface, venturing deep into the forests of Saxony, and Origen, scorning the blood-caked altars of Alexandria, had all borne witness to it. The venerable conviction that idols were raised to demons, witness to ‘the extent and power of Satan’s empire’, exerted a firm grip on British evangelicals.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [a conviction he appears to have believed, at least at time of writing, was unreasonable… but was it?]
“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”
“William Blake, 1757-1827” quoted in Gravitas Vol. I #2 (Summer 1994) without further attribution.
“‘Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour’: these were Christian through and through. Nietzsche did not mean this is a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [though I have come to believe that Holland, like nearly everyone, misreads Nietzsche as celebrating what he was in fact trying desperately to warn about].