Peter Wood gets stuck in a Vermont ditch for hours and ruminates on the essence of his 14,000-tome library: We are our imperfections

 

Here:

Read enough old ethnography, and the story of people victimizing one another is inescapable, but so is the deep knowledge of human commonality. As Pritchard grasped some 200 years ago, our cultural differences are myriad, but they aren’t everything, and the more we make of them, the worse our plight. Anthropology at its best taught us that our follies are as universal as our aspirations; and that grasping for ascendency in the name of justice is just another path to hardship and division. We are our imperfections. Best to get back on the road.

Because man is a political animal, and politics has been successful in the West, no raiding party happened by and scalped poor Mr. Wood. Instead he was rescued by a tow-truck, eventually.

The angels, once again, were mistaken

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. 

-- Luke 2:14

Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division:  

-- Luke 12:51

Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas!

 Doubtless the pleasure is as great

Of being cheated, as to cheat;

As lookers on feel most delight,

That least perceive the juggler's sleight.

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

On the priority of philology

 The multiplication and obstinacy of disputes, which have so laid waste the intellectual world, is owing to nothing more than to the ill use of words.

-- John Locke

Welcome to unsufferable winter

Instead of golden fruits,

By genial show'rs and solar heat supplied,

Unsufferable winter had defac'd

Earth's blooming charms, and made a barren waste.

-- Richard Blackmore

An Aristotelian critique of solitude

 Whosoever is delighted with solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.

-- Francis Bacon

Gender dysphoria in one lesson

 

LOL Slovakia and Hungary, you were doing just fine until the Pope decided to visit in September

 

LOL, very successful YouTuber who preaches off-grid self-reliance decries following false narratives, urges action now or society is doomed!

The doomsaying narrative is the oldest narrative of the Christian West, expressing as it does the core message of Jesus of Nazareth.

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.

-- Mark 1:15

From the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation.  

-- Luke 11:51

It has routinely erupted century upon century ever since in explicitly religious predictions of the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Yet here we are.

In our times it has taken on secularized elements, like WWI as "the war to end all wars", or warnings of global communist tyranny, a coming ice age, devastation by global thermonuclear war, the ozone hole, pandemic disease, the population bomb, man-made environmental and climate catastrophe, "the end of history", global warming, starvation, and now mass anxiety and depression!

Don't just sit there! Do something!

Preferably with your hands, outdoors.

That way you might catch a better glimpse of The Mother of All Asteroids before it blows us all to smithereens.

The way of truth is strewn with many errors, which must be censored

Wise men know, that arts and learning want expurgation; and if the course of truth be permitted to itself, it cannot escape many errours.

-- Thomas Browne

God is the Alpha and Omega of censorship

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

-- Genesis 3:24

As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

-- Matthew 13:40ff.

We are plagued by a plague of vaccine hysteria

People are stormed out of their reason, plagued into a compliance, and forced to yield in their own defence.

-- Jeremy Collier

Don't be a prick

 If God would have had men live like wild beasts, he would have armed them with horns, tusks, talons, or pricks.

-- John Bramhall (1594-1663)

We've gone from Bungle in the Jungle to simply unrepeatable in less than fifty years

Wit, as the chief of virtue's friends,

Disdains to serve ignoble ends:

Observe what loads of stupid rhimes

Oppress us in corrupted times.

 

-- Jonathan Swift

The superstition of bells and smells

 The causes of superstition are pleasing and sensual rites, excess of outward and pharisaical holiness, over-great reverence of traditions which cannot but load the church.

-- Francis Bacon