Have You Ever Met Nicolas Cage?/Do You Ever Add an Untrue Component to a Story to Make it More Interesting Than it Actually Is? (Nick Cave/The Red Hand Files):
Suddenly, a security guy in a dark suit with an earpiece and shades steps out of nowhere and asks me if I’m Nick Cave. I say, ‘Well, yeah.’ He says, ‘Could you follow me, please.‘ So I follow the security guy into a small private room, adjacent to the main bar. Sitting there is Nicolas Cage. He is wearing a pork-pie hat and holding a didgeridoo. Nicolas Cage shouts, ‘Only one letter separates us!’ and leaps from his seat and eagerly pumps my hand.
Good thread on Siberia
Father John Ricardo — the Three Most Important Questions in Life (Catholic Way Home):
Father Riccardo restores the understanding of the first Christians, explaining how Jesus “will enter into Death and, from the inside, destroy its power. Jesus on the cross is not the poor, helpless victim, and He is not the hunted. Jesus on the cross is the aggressor and the hunter.”
The Different Game and the Path to Imperceptible Victory (The Outpost):
…disruption and unrelenting rebellion against the playbook are the real motor of Victory. And History is made of winning…This logic is not exclusive to warfare and can be applied to all kinds of confrontation. For example, the widespread adoption of Bitcoin by regular people may be considered by some anti-government anarchists as a victory but, what if Bitcoin had been, since its inception, a tool for establishing a global currency, the first stone in a road to global governance? This is just a speculation, and not an especially wild one.
The Red-Pill Prince (Tablet):
At one and the same time, the Cathedral is simply a name for the uncanny degree of agreement between the media, universities, and other organs of elite culture, and a theory explaining how the aggregate effect of that agreement is a system of Orwellian mind-control that projects an illusion of freedom so powerful it blinds people to reality.
The question many people have, of course, is whether such a structure actually exists. After two years of COVID, following the disintegration of the liberal state, and the emergence of evermore eccentric ideological impositions, coordinated on what seems like an hourly basis by an invisible yet apparently all-powerful hand, which has no need to account for its nakedly visible contradictions and failures, the answer seems obvious: Either you see it, or you don’t.
The Cathedral or the Bizarre (Tablet):
2020 tested both oligarchy and democracy—or if we prefer euphemisms, liberalism and populism. Did either work well? The definition of insanity is repeating a mistake. Bizarre as it seems, human history’s most common form of government by far is still out there—waiting for us to get tired of living the way we live now.
On Difficult Beauty (Covidian Aesthetics):
In his Three Lessons on Æsthetics, Bosanquet distinguishes between “facile or easy and simple victorious beauty” —the sort you ‘like’ to see— and “difficult beauty and difficult triumphant beauty” (the one you may not ‘like’ or won’t, without some effort).
Within the aesthetically excellent, he qualifies the latter as being distinguished by at least one of three characteristics (though not limited to them, either): “intricacy, tension” and —the most surprising one— “width”…
…our generation’s undisputed masterpiece of width:
