Britain Must Go: “There is no justification for continuing to let this regime breathe. The United States has the means, and the duty, to end it, and a motive for doing so. The endpoint of the UK’s current trajectory is a nuclear-armed jihadi state in the heart of the American Atlantic lake. This outcome must be prevented before it materializes.”
David Lynch, 1946-2025: “It was a relief when Fire Walk With Me came out and drove away the lightweights. I remember Kim Newman pointing out in his Sight and Sound review that the Twin Peaks prequel was more of a genuine horror film than many films explicitly labelled as such. The same could be said of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.”
Fiery the Angels Fell — California Burning: “One family showed ingenuity when they used a generator, a pump, and two swimming pools worth of water to save their neighborhood: ‘We have to give all the credit to our father, about 3 to 4 months ago [he] was adamant about having one of these [pool pumps] for fire season.’ Sadly families had to resort to these measures because of the abject failure of public officials.”
Glug Glug…“Prepare for some heat and light. And then, the deluge.”
Los Angeles Burns: “The state of California emerged from geological extremity; the landmass was formed by a collision of the North American and Pacific tectonic plates, grinding and regrinding for millions of years along with the flow of lava, water and the depositing of alluvial soil. Historian Kevin Starr noted that this process ‘created a region almost abstract in its distinct arrangements of mountain, valley, canyon, coastline, plain, and desert.’ This abstract landscape yielded paradise in a place of peril. Its natural habitat was a near perfect canvas for organic modernist architecture, forms, signs, billboards; the beauty of this blankness fed a fixation with the image, with simulacrum, with beautiful people and celebrity. The extreme conditions were always there, but a collective intoxication with incessant spectacle and tabloid fables obscured our ability to seriously consider them.”
Lynch Dogs: “There’s a vast network, right? An ocean of possibilities. I like dogs. I used to raise rabbits. I’ve always loved animals. Their nature. How they think. I have seen dogs reason their way out of problems. Watched them think through the trickiest situations.”
Remembering David Lynch: “As a man and an artist, David Lynch is probably closest to one of my favorite writers and human beings of the 20th century: Flannery O’Connor. Both Lynch and O’Connor are essentially mystics: Lynch a follower of Transcendental Meditation, O’Connor a Roman Catholic. Both believe that good and evil are metaphysical forces. Both had a strong sense of finitude, which manifests in a sense of place: O’Connor’s South, Lynch’s logging towns and Los Angeles. This sense of finitude also issues in a deeply conservative skepticism about fundamental moral progress. Both reject the idea that we’ll simply progress our way out of evil. Both are lovers of mystery, and deploy the grotesque as a signature of both the secular ineradicability of evil and their hope for an ultimate triumph of the good.”
The Ark of the Covenant: “Practically, God used the Ark as an indicator of when he wanted the nation to travel, and when to stop. In the traveling formation in the desert, the Ark was carried 2000 cubits ahead of the nation (Num. R. 2:9). According to one midrash, it would clear the path for the nation by burning snakes, scorpions, and thorns with two jets of flame that shot from its underside (T. VaYakhel, 7); another midrash says that rather than being carried by its bearers, the Ark in fact carried its bearers inches above the ground (Sotah 35a). When the Israelites went to war in the desert and during the conquering of Canaan, the Ark accompanied them; whether its presence was symbolic, to provide motivation for the Jews, or whether it actually aided them in fighting, is debated by commentators.”
Trump — Caesar of the New Imperium: “Trump is no ordinary leader, no transient politician bound by the fickle whims of electoral cycles. He is a phenomenon, the fulfillment of Spengler’s vision of the Caesar who rises as democracy falters, who steps into the void left by the collapse of liberal institutions. Spengler saw the arc of history always heading towards inevitability, and Trump embodies that inevitability. He is the Western world’s response to its own decline, a force that does not seek to negotiate with decay but to master it, to wield it as a weapon against those who would challenge the empire’s authority.”