Something is happening – it is in the water right now.  Sure, it’s August – the political “silly season” when there is no “genuine” news.  But the stories that are emerging – some of them non-stories in a busier time – are joined by a strand that is far more important than any normal news story.  Truth is winning – even if it has taken a while. Let’s dive in.. . .

Everybody knows that antisemitism is rising rapidly in the nation – it is truly frightening.  It is a prejudice that I thought, given the horrors of Nazism, was never to be seen again.  Its current rise is proof of mankind’s sinful state – confirming Chesterton’s thesis that our sinful nature is the only objectively provable contention of Christian theology.  The path it has taken to regain prominence is remarkable and terrifying at the same time.  There are two factors involved.. . .

We are, I think, going to take a very long time to truly understand just how harmful was the international response to covid.  I doubt anyone will every compile the statistics on lives lost due to medical treatments withheld because of covid-driven isolation – it would be too embarrassing.  How would you even go about measuring the learning loss due to the educational compromises?  And it will be some time before we truly feel the productivity loss created by that learning loss.  It is; however, the effects on character and spirit that frighten me most.. . .

Few bits of news have haunted me more than the revelation that Anthony Fauci used his position to lever cash prizes for himself.  Yes, it is government corruption, but when combined with his diaries, it is something worse.  The man’s quest for fame, and now revealed, fortune is almost the stuff of fiction.  Like the bad guy in a fable, it is as if he was concocted to be an object lesson in what not to do.  Something is so wrong in the man’s soul that I pity him as much as I condemn him as a government official.. . .

I spent the week in Los Angeles and I wish that the title for this post was entirely hyperbolic, but sadly, portions of LA are a hellscape and even when you are not in those portions, the place is still dingy and dull and worn out.  This post provides a nice perspective.  And this song, heard every ten minutes or so when I moved there in the mid-80’s, is now never, ever heard.  I was there calling on what few clients I have left, so I was talking and learning.  There are a couple of lessons from the visit that need recording.. . .

So yesterday I am “driving” around Southern California.  I put that word in scare quotes because traffic in SoCal is such that for the first time in my life I thought a self-driving car might be a useful thing as I crawled along at 10mph in bumper-to-bumper traffic.  Anyway, I hear a news report about the California Attorney General accusing Paramount of “blackmail” in its threat to leave California as the state attempts to block its merger with Warner Bros.  Let’s see, California business operates under a regulatory load, combined with heavy-handed enforcement, sufficient to invoke words like

Life finds me in Southern California as I write.  Been a here a couple of days now with a couple more to go and the place is as miserable as it was when I left, maybe even a bit more so.  Traffic’s worse, homelessness is still everywhere, but there is one thing that is notably different.. . .

Sometimes, geek world can be quite instructive.  I recently ran into a discussion of the new Spidey Flick, Spider-Man: Brand New Day that is chock full of spoilers, a full reading of which requires a very broad knowledge of both the movie based MCU and countless comic book series and loses itself in all this nerdy minutiae – hiding what is the very serious point.  The point is a moral one and it is vitally important.. . .