View 469 June 4 - 10, 2007 (original) (raw)
This week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Friday, June 8, 2007
At noon yesterday I started a course of erythromycin, so I had taken three of the tablets before I went to bed at midnight. It seems to be helping. I still am not thinking very well, but I do think I detect some improvements.
Roberta has been reading Inferno II and is impressed. I will be incorporating her comments into the final manuscript. Perhaps it is because I have been thinking about the subject that I find the latest news thought provoking.
The newspapers are full of the Paris Hilton story. She has served about as long in actual confinement in jail as any other female convicted of a non-violent crime (the system is over crowded and the sheriff has been ordered by the Feds to clear out as many people as possible to home arrest or probation), but that's not enough for the judge, or for Rocky and the other publicity hungry LA politicians as well as all the other people who have nothing better to think about. Rampant egalitarianism is a national religion. Jacobinism is taught in every university in the land.
I can only wish that the judge gets his wish: unrelenting justice without mercy. For himself and his family as well as for Paris Hilton. Precisely why the people of California are better off with all the money spent keeping her in jail as opposed to confined under house arrest is not clear to me, but I am sure there are Jacobins who can explain it all to me. I wish them fulfillment of their wishes too. Unrelenting justice, justice without temperance or mercy.
I note that the wag who has replaced Rush Limbaugh today continues to make fun of Paris Hilton. I am sure it's amusing to do that. May he have unrelenting justice too.
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Now kids are praying in school. Horrors!! What is this country coming to? Send in the Army, quickly, to suppress this monstrous behavior.
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On Immigration:
"he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States."
I thought that was in the Constitution. It took me a while to find it, and apparently no one else believes that it's there. Otherwise why do we need a new immigration bill? We got one last year. It closes the border. Illegal immigrants are illegally here. The law is very clear.
Why do we need a new bill?
"he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed"
Sure. Real Soon Now.
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I had a call from a National Review writer about an article he is doing on Mr. Heinlein. I suppose I am the last of Robert's old friends. I tried to tell something about him. We'll see how the article comes out. I also got a call from National Public Radio. I wonder what they will do with what I said. At this point I guess I don't care any more. Spell my name right. It may sell some books.
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The radio is full of Paris Hilton and the media carnival. Ye flipping gods. O J Simpson, Reggie the Alligator, and Paris Hilton. Ye flipping gods. John and Ken can not contain themselves. The media are going mad.
I wish them all fulfillment of their desires. Unremitting justice without compassion or mercy. May they have what they ask for.
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Is there any truth to the rumor that some illegal immigrants go into emergency rooms and come out as donor parts? I am sure it is not true. It would be terrible if that rumor got out, wouldn't it?
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It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy. 0, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.
But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
Edmund Burke - 1793
Paris Hilton is no Marie Antoinette, but watching the spectacle on TV this morning I would not be surprised to see a guillotine in Macarthur Park, and to hear the howls of the mob for blood of an aristocrat. As if this Republic had not worse ills to contemplate. This is what seizes the attention of the masses and their minions of the media. Humiliating a silly spoiled girl is enough for the moment; but what if they've got the taste?