John C. Wright's Journal

From Rob Eaglesfield

He says:

12 steel balls each travel along a straight line in a sine wave motion. This gives the illusion that they are forming a rotating circle. Not real, its animated in Blender.

My comment:

Watch with “loop” turned on. The end and start frames line up nicely.

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From Instapundit:

ON THIS LEXINGTON AND CONCORD ANNIVERSARY, LET’S RAISE A GLASS TO SAMUEL WHITTEMORE:

On April 19, 1775, British forces were returning to Boston from the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the opening engagements of the war. On their march they were continually shot at by American militiamen.

Whittemore was in his fields when he spotted an approaching British relief brigade under Earl Percy, sent to assist the retreat. Whittemore loaded his musket and ambushed the British grenadiers of the 47th Regiment of Foot from behind a nearby stone wall, killing one soldier. He then drew his dueling pistols, killed a second grenadier and mortally wounded a third. By the time Whittemore had fired his third shot, a British detachment had reached his position; Whittemore drew his sword and attacked. He was subsequently shot in the face, bayoneted numerous times, and left for dead in a pool of blood. He was found by colonial forces, trying to load his musket to resume the fight. He was taken to Dr. Cotton Tufts of Medford, who perceived no hope for his survival. However, Whittemore recovered and lived another 18 years until dying of natural causes at the age of 98.

A comment by Scott Adams on Twitter, which I pass along without comment:

Next week, Trump could make over $4 billion when his media company goes public, removing all doubt about his billionaire status.

And you can stop asking if he would have been better off putting his inheritance in a savings account in the 70s.

I expect Trump to leave a 15% tip for Leticia James and the Democrats because they made his windfall possible by hunting him and censoring him for years. You can call it a bond, not a tip, if you prefer.

When the Supreme Court tosses out the unconstitutional fine, Trump gets most of his “tip” back.

The Democrats planned to cripple Trump financially so he couldn’t spend as much on the campaign. Trump turned Leticia James into his best fundraiser.

Lots of interesting developments lately on the topic of the 2020 election. The Simulation wants at least one of those fresh allegations to be a Kraken.

Trump’s legal maneuvering is likely to keep him eligible for the election.

You can fantasize about a heroic Democrat such as Newsom swooping in and replacing Biden, but it’s looking less likely every day. If it had always been the plan, it would have happened by now. Looks like Biden has to stay on the job to keep the Biden Crime Family out of jail.

The predictable Democrat Summer Hoax will add some excitement, but it will be forgotten and debunked by November.

Trump’s upcoming victory is looking like it will be, as Trump says, “too big to rig.” And by that I mean Democrats will try to rig it anyway and get caught. That will be fun.

The gears of the machine have become visible. We can all see the FBI is rotten and the DOJ is weaponized. We know the border is open intentionally. We know the cartels are working with our government. We know our elections are DESIGNED to not be auditable and there’s only one reason for it. We can see Biden is not in charge. We know the Ukraine war was always about its energy resources and who gets to own them. We know our rising debt is ruinous. We know our experts are liars. We know our pharma and food industries are poisoning us. We know our government is racist. We know the corporate media is essentially owned by Democrats who are controlled by intelligence entities and they are actively brainwashing the population. We know the 1st and 2nd amendments, and X, are under sustained government attack because they are the public’s last defense against the government.

But we are not quitters.

And the odds do not apply to us.

From Newsbusters:

What’s the most upsetting thing about the sentence, “An illegal alien violently murdered a 22-year old nursing student?” If you work in the corporate news media, the answer is the word “illegal.” When President Biden referred to the illegal alien who allegedly murdered Laken Riley in cold blood as “an illegal,” the news media sprang into action and rushed to the violent felon’s defense.

No comment necessary. Media delenda est.

Shakespeare vs. the Transhumanists

One of the most insightful essays I have ever encountered on the topic of transhumanism, oddly enough, as seen through the eyes of King Lear and Prospero the Magician.

Mr. Klavan begins:

I find these days that even friends with no religion have begun to speak in religious terms. Recently, within a single week, I heard the word “demonic” used five times, four times by people who don’t believe in demons. Stranger still, and not long after, I found myself in two separate conversations in which the sort of men who would never speculate upon the coming of the “end of days” began, with some embarrassment, to do exactly that.

The subject, in each case, was transhumanism: transgenderism, artificial intelligence, artificial wombs, the melding of man and medication, man and machine. There was a sense that we were arriving at a moment of choosing—choosing, each of us, whether we would continue to be what we were originally made, male and female, mortal, fallible, passionate, irrational, seemingly random in our individual qualities and yet recognizable, even if only in metaphor, as the image of God. Or would we, through medication, surgery, implants, and the like, become whatever it is we would: happier presumably, smarter in some sense, maybe even eternal in some sense, free in form, no mere image of God, but electric gods ourselves?

He goes on to examine two Shakespeare plays in which a king shouts commands at a storm, and, unlike the Messiah, is unheeded by deaf and roaring nature.

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Let me draw your attention to this conversation. I found it insightful to the point of vertigo.

Andrew Jones in this forces me to reconsider my zeal for the Enlightenment project of individualism, individual rights, and a franchise extended to all and sundry — the idea that big government and big business, historically speaking, are coconspirators, nor competitors, makes a mockery of the Right-to-Left political spectrum I have used my whole life as the lens to view the world.

Left and Right agree on an axiom of individualist collectivism (ironic as that sounds) which the Catholic Church denies.
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At times, the enemy of my enemy is indeed my enemy.

Here is a non-controversial topic impossible to discuss without sparking acrimonious controversy. Which books did the National Socialist German Workers’ Party actually burn and censor?

The somewhat heterodox historian here, a man who (in other vide0s) argues the Second World War to be one America should have not fought,  attempts to be nonpolitical, but I note he does not tell both sides of the story, nor need he. We have heard the other side and nothing but all our lives.

We see in Weimar Germany, as today, the play of a nearly perfect hellish tactic: Namely, set two antichrist factions directly against each other, Socialist and National Socialist, both of whom advocate totalitarian antics such as book burning, both of whom accuse the other side of its own sin, so that any opposition to the one is seen as advocacy of the other. That way, any Christian absolutely opposed to both is condemned by both sides as advocating or appeasing, the opposite.

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One of the best essays I have heard on the topic:

In his fascinating book on moral intuition, The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt tells the fictional story of what he calls a “harmless taboo violation.” A sister and brother, Julie and Mark, are traveling together. While staying at a beach cabin in France, they decide it would be a fun new experience to have sex with one another. They take strict precautions to avoid pregnancy. They make love and enjoy it. It makes them feel closer. They then decide never to do it again. They keep the incident a secret between them.

When test subjects were presented with this story, they reacted strongly at first: “It’s totally wrong.” But when questioned about why it was wrong, they were stumped. There’s no danger of pregnancy. The relationship isn’t damaged. No one else knows. The subjects began to hem and haw — but even so, they stuck to their position that the act of incest was wrong.

“People were making a moral judgment immediately and emotionally,” Haidt observes. “Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.” In other words, our moral intuitions are not based on reason, and some may be mere evolutionary remnants, no longer legitimate.

My own reaction to the story, however, was very different.

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Two of my favorite Catholics talking about my favorite Catholic:
Dale Ahlquist and Matt Fradd on G.K. Chesterton

I came to know of GK Chesterton through the writings of CS Lewis, back when I was an atheist and eager to read the battleplans of my enemies, finding their strongest arguments so that I could vanquish them. However, like a comic book mad scientist working with radioactive materials, studying the arts of the enemy may transmogrify into you to the enemy.

And the scales will fall from your eyes. Such is the danger of reading Chesterton.

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This is a tale of two ads. One ran during the Superbowl, a venue enjoying the largest viewership in television history. The other ran on Twitter.

One of the ads was dishonest, asking the faithful to betray the faith.

One of the faithful made an honest ad in reply.

One ad was Antichristian. The other, Christian. Alert viewers will spot the difference.

“Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” – 1 Corinthians 6:11

A Yammerhead on Twitter remarks:

Slavery is white history. How we survived it is black history.

Matt Walsh answers:

Slavery is world history. White people did not invent it, and were not the first to practice it, but were the first to abolish it. The last place in the world to still have legal slavery was Africa. It wasn’t fully legally abolished on the continent until 1981.