Essays in Idleness

Please, no one read the aphorisms (or should I call them epigrams?) that I transcribe, below. They are not fit for publication. One contains some dirty words, and there are other examples of gratuitous rudeness. I have copied them from recent pages of a defunct pocket notebook (“bloc-notes” as we say in Urdu). They are “politically incorrect.” The whole notebook ought to be shredded, or burnt, before the Thought Police arrive.

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“If only one life can be saved!” … The gull-cry of a charlatan.

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“Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies.” [George Orwell?] … “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”

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The replacement, everywhere, of evidence-based science with theory-based scientism, and with this, the triumph of charlatanry.

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Fidentia. “Confidence.” But not in the sense of an insurance policy.

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The slapped tomato. The slices should be violently slapped against a paper towel, when making bacon sandwiches for the picnic. Slight, thin lettuce-leaf “endpapers,” also to fight wetness & mush.

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The Church ought to provide Catholic Speakeasies, where her members can speak openly about things, and those who “have a problem with that” can be openly rebuked. While drinking & smoking, of course.

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The Whiskey Rebellion, 1791–94; during the regime of that slaveholder, George Washington. The rebels failed. They should have made the Income Tax unthinkable, for the next three hundred years.

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Perhaps half of the electorate (or is it nine-tenths?) are no longer capable of grasping that a governor who closes churches, & keeps abortuaries open as an “essential service,” is an emissary from Hell.

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Nothing is as much fun as causing excruciating pain in the part of a liberal that is most sensitive — his ego.

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Valerie, Lady Meux. I don’t own a car, but it hardly matters, as I would rather ride about in a zebra carriage.

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Horse trot, 10 mph. Canter, 15 mph. At the racecourse, around 50 mph. But what is the trotting speed of a zebra?

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Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat. [“Whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad.”] … Dementia: loss of memory, history, & therefore of a future. That is our difficulty: we are all demented now.

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Stalin sincerely believed in his ideals. So did Hitler. Each had other foibles, to be sure; but if our standards will be sincerity & idealism, then Stalin & Hitler will be making a comeback.

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I’m not saying Liberal voters are stupid. I’m just saying that the Party specializes in policies that can only appeal to the ignorant, & terminally misinformed.

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Le Corbusier called the house, “a machine for living,” & by the same reasoning we might call the human being, “a machine for shitting.”

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I am trying to paddle my little canoe as fast as I can, in the direction opposite to the waterfall.

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Francis’s “developments” are in continuity with Tradition, “as a giraffe is in continuity with a sandwich.”

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Well, for his next act of idolatry, he can [the rest of this sentence has been redacted].

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Remedies for Growth. The human thing is gardening, pruning. Nature is shameless & profligate, our job is editorial.

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Lechery is easily mistaken for love.

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Small yappy dogs encourage sin, by tempting bystanders to kill them.

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I am not a Commie, a Nazi, or a Fascist. (Falangist would be getting warmer.) But keep turning the dial until you get to Distributist. It is Reaction, but in a positive form.

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Beware geeks bearing GIFs.

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Buy books by authors, not books about them. The latter are all out-of-date already; and they remain so, indefinitely.

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“Consolidation” is a dirty word. … Three more vile, filthy expressions: “relevant,” “meaningful,” & “accessible.”

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Sign at the staff entrance to an abandoned coal mine, at Glace Bay: “Your wife & children expect you home this evening. Don’t disappoint them.”

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“Gradgrinds & Teufelsdröckhs.” [Maureen Mullarkey]

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Hagamos una Iglesia tan hermosa y tan grandiosa que los que la vieren labrada nos tengan por locos. … A Spanish architect to his patron: “Let us build a church so beautiful & so grand that those who see it finished will take us for mad.”

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“As some Roman said, debauchery isn’t going into a whorehouse, it’s never coming out.” [Louis-Ferdinand Céline]

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“It is not the punishment but the cause that makes the martyr.” [Augustine]

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“The ugly claws & bared teeth of the pelvic left.” [Austin Ruse]

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The kind of drooling, slathering, chronological bigotry that modern education efficiently instils.

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William Baumol, the economist, discoverer of “cost disease.” Why worthless things become more and more expensive.

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Rapid onset gender dysphoria versus pre-digital folkways.

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Aristotle tells us that the Megarians make no distinction between potentiality & actuality. This is equivalent to the Eleatic denial, of motion or change of any kind. But that is mere idealism.

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Memoir of a pre-feminist. My sex life, as a wild atheist youth turned out among loose women, was constrained by a persistent thought. I could not get out of my head the relationship between copulation & pregnancy. I did not think of it as a statistical relationship, or something to be “fixed” by pharmaceuticals or gadgets. I did not look upon women as pleasure machines, or sex toys, inconveniently endowed with legal rights. I just sinned co-operatively.

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Totalitarianism begins with liberal parenting.

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The only objection to some theories, is that they are insane. Consider the death of the algebraist, George Boole — slain by his wife on the theory that pneumonia could be cured by wrapping in wet blankets.

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CO2 emissions: China is double USA, triple Europe, quadruple India, octuple Japan. Japan must be at least triple Canada. We’ve got to catch up.

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We have a growth economy, based on gambling & self-administered confidence tricks. No wonder we’re lagging.

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Bidh maighdeannan-mara nas spòrsail, as they say, in Scots Gaelic. Or, according to Google Translate: “Mermaids have more fun.”

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Exit strategies. Believe me, I empathize. The prospect of having to fix them later, takes so much of the fun out of busting things.

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Jojoba Oil. Something I must avoid learning about.

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“Inspired malevolence, or criminal stupidity?” … It’s not always an either/or.