Her immediate response was that she was probably related to some slave-owning rapist, and my immediate response to this was that we're all related to lots of rapists, and if we didn't think we were related to rapists we’re about to be embarrassed — probably by a grandkid who's a rapist in-the-making. A rosy picture of humanity, this lady’s. Imagine being in the most crime-ridden race in America and finding out you're 4% Irish and then deciding you're related to a rapist. It's like finding out you're 4% Chinese and finally deciding somebody in your family tree could throw a kick and do math.

Still, the court is in her favor. The chance that that 4% isn't specifically from a scoundrel is low — and in the historical sense, the fact that he's Irish doesn't help. In fact, aside from the legendary Saint Patrick, Edmund Burke is the earliest Irishman of any note I've ever heard of, and he existed sometime around the American Revolution. Pretty late for a hero, if you ask me. Before that it's pitch blackness; and Ben Franklin says in one of his letters that the Irish were worse off, in general, in his day, than Native American “savages” — a hell of a thing to say from someone who thought Native Americans were a train wreck*.

Regarding the Irish, this train wreck was of course a courtesy of the English. The Irish were practically animals because they were treated worse than dogs. Kicked off their land, they were taxed and land-lorded to death. They were barred from holding government positions and good jobs. They were Catholic at a time when the pope was essentially an enemy king, so they were considered untrustworthy, and to probably be traitors. Rights were as few as foodstuffs, and banditry, the type of people who had no other way to keep the kids from starving, roamed the Irish countryside looking for prey. Murder was rampant, especially against the English colonists — and thus considered to be socially acceptable.

It's a miracle the Irish turned out as good as they did. I mean Ireland in general, but also the Irish in America. Somehow they were able to make it after centuries of colonization and oppression and abject poverty — a combination very close in some ways to our slavery and Jim Crow. They came here, dirt poor and hated and freckled and ignorant, no affirmative action programs in sight, somehow hacked a living out of the earth, and aside from the red-heads (poor bastards!) get mistaken for the other whites.

Today it's not even embarrassing to tell people you're Irish — unless of course you're an ignoramus like the lady above. Even then it makes you just as much the rapist as the raped. And so what if you're related to a king? For every king in a family line we're each related to a thousand slaves. For every great man in your ancestry you're descended from a hundred dunces. We don't need to have an ancestry to have self-esteem. Our vanity causes us to look for ancestry — and even more than this, it causes us to ignore most of it.

Yours,
-J
May 17th, 2019

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*Ben Franklin was once sent on a peace-mission to the Indians. His account in his autobiography, with slight modifications to punctuation and spelling, is as follows:

As those people are extremely apt to get drunk, and, when so, are very quarrelsome and disorderly, we strictly forbade the selling any liquor to them; and when they complained of this restriction, we told them that if they would continue sober during the treaty, we would give them plenty of rum when business was over. They promised this, and they kept their promise because they could get no liquor, and the treaty was conducted very orderly, and concluded to mutual satisfaction. They then claimed and received the rum. This was in the afternoon: they were near one hundred men, women, and children, and were lodged in temporary cabins, built in the form of a square, just without the town. In the evening, hearing a great noise among them, the commissioners walked out to see what was the matter. We found they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square; they were all drunk, men and women, quarreling and fighting. Their dark-coloured bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, formed a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could well be imagined. There was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum, of which we took no notice.

The next day, sensible they had misbehaved in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their old counselors to make their apology. The orator acknowledged the fault, but laid it upon the rum; and then endeavoured to excuse the rum by saying, "The Great Spirit, who made all things, made everything for some use, and whatever use he designed anything for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum, he said, 'Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with,' and it must be so." And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast.

And we're told the Irish are alcoholics.

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Wyatt Mason says, in his introduction to the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud, that there are two theories on the art of translation, and picking the wrong one at the wrong time can get somebody killed.

The first camp says you can be too loose. This camp believes that if somebody wrote something magical, messing with it too much means you commit slander. Nabokov put it best, I think:

What is translation? On a platter

A poet’s pale and glaring head,

A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,

And profanation of the dead.

Or as my own Swahili translation goes,

Who is a translator? In a bowl

A bald writer winks

And says “The N Word” like a parrot at the pet store

An affront to Martin Luther King Jr.

Some people take these offenses so seriously that they won’t let you translate something at all. This was at one point the position of the Catholic Church: partly because they had immense respect for God’s original speeches to Moses in Latin, partly because they were worried people would find out what God actually said about idol worship and rich people and Pharisees. But mostly because they had an immense disrespect for the intelligence of their constituents. Unfortunately they lost, and now we have to deal with Aunt Linda’s interpretation of “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” A doctrine she refuses to prove, to this day, by doing a backflip.

So far as I can tell, nobody paid worse for the “anti-translation” stance than William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into quality English, was condemned by trial, and promptly strangled and burned by a hangman. In the hangman’s defense, though, how else are you supposed to treat the word of God? Surely God is a master of communication, isn’t He? And surely, if this is the case, every syllable was arranged to perfection? Confusion between eros and philia and agape, a missing modifier here or there, and you're not just dealing with a degradation of majesty. Suddenly you’ve got things like “the love of money is the root of all evil” — an objectively stupid saying which destroys the Bible’s credibility to the intelligent, and lends credibility, if you’re a dumbass, to failures, layabouts, and communists.

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On the other hand, go too strict and you also lose meaning. An unpalatable syntax, a few foreign and outdated phrases, and suddenly God sounds like a dork or a fossil — and nobody wants to read Him. Or worse, the uptight start trying to talk like Him*. Sometimes translators forget that when the prophets spoke they were speaking to specific people (with specific cultures) naturally, beautifully, and poignantly; conveying an idea not just in the symbols we know as words, but in the arrangement of the words themselves. And it's not an easy thing to bottle the lightning.

A good translation has to be somewhere in between. There's a sense in which too much license becomes libel, of course; but there's also a point where too much fidelity becomes infidelity. And if we don’t make translation a work of art in itself — an attempt to get the vibe, the gist, the beauty and the emphasis of the original into another language — then I would argue we’ve missed the point of translating.

Language is about way more than facts. It's about tone and imagery and implications and cultural associations and virtue signaling — conveying a meaning not just by what you say, but usually by how you say it. Thus there's no way to completely replicate any brilliant, nuanced work of art from one language to another. The translation itself is a new work of art — and if the translation fails to capture either the message or the magic, then I would argue the translator is a failure. (I would still stop short, in most cases, from strangling and burning him).

This being said, I have no idea what to make of Coleman Barks’ translation of Rumi. Not just because I can’t really compare it with 12th century Persian, but because of passages like this:

Some word combinations, like skin-and-bone arrangements, have sublime qualities.

These three people talking in the street are ordinary young men,

but Alif, Lam, and Mim have an exchange more like Larry, Curly, and Moe.

This isn't just a sharp commentary on how delivery says more than you intend. In a situation like this, how was Coleman Barks to deliver? You need the names of three easily recognizable boobs and none of them quite translate. So you make something up that an American will understand, and immediately ruin good faith in your whole project. Is this the right thing to do? Or is it a mistake? Do you take the bullet? Or do you let Rumi take it for you?

I would argue that getting deep into the book makes the whole question irrelevant. There is so much magic scattered haphazardly between TikTok girl-bossery and total gibberish that you almost don’t care.

Consider this musing on a man passing into the nothing:

A candle is made to become entirely flame.

In that annihilating moment it has no shadow.

It is nothing but a tongue of light describing a refuge.

Look at this just-finishing candle stub as someone who is finally safe from virtue and vice, the pride and the shame we claim from those.

At that point I don’t really care whether it’s accurate or not. What Barks captured here is something vivid and deep and true — and almost impossible to put into words. In other words, real poetry**. Rumi shines bright when he talks about dying, in passages like:

Be quiet and clear now like the final touchpoints of calligraphy.

Your name has been erased from the roaring volume of speech.

You can almost hear the quill lifting gently off the paper, and the trail of ink thinning into oblivion — a fine metaphor for a man passing away if there ever was one.

And what about this?

Every object, every being, is a jar full of delight. Be a connoisseur, and taste with caution.

— a reminder that the world is more dangerous because of beauty, not because of ugliness; and that your happiness depends on whether you choose to see it, when you taste it, and how you touch it. Almost like going to the grocer or the hardware store. And I like this passage, about how it feels when you’re overwhelmed with an existence too beautiful for words.

Excuse my wandering. How can one be orderly with this?

It’s like counting leaves in a garden, along with the song-notes of partridges, and crows.

Sometimes organization and computation become absurd.

Did Rumi say it better? Maybe he did; but the ancient germ remains whole and palatable — like the honey we found in the tomb of Tutankhamen.

Because Rumi wrote in a state of ecstasy, many of his poems are half-lucid, half-dreamy — the ramblings of a man who can’t stand still and doesn’t quite know where to move.

Lo, I am with you always means when you look for God,

God is in the look of your eyes, in the thought of looking,

nearer to you than your self, or things that have happened to you.

There’s no need to go outside.

Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself.

Which really captures the essence of being “a mystic.” Many of us glide through life chasing things, planning things, wanting things, dreading things — separating and pretending things. The mystic is caught up in the wonder of being things. To the common man, life is mundane: a task, a checklist. The mystic frames his entire consciousness, when possible, in the ecstasy of being and communion, and the result is like putting a plug into a socket.

Once you recognize that God running the universe also means he's running you, you begin to wonder things. Such as where the line between you and Him is drawn, and how little you actually control: not just of the universe, but of your own life — and you begin learning to go with it.

Do you think I know what I’m doing? That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself? As much as a pen knows what it’s writing, or the ball can guess where it’s going next.

And there's the joy of losing yourself in this process: a letting go of pride and ego, receiving thankfully what God has given you, and floating gently down the stream:

Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it. Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing, where something might be planted, a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.

— a reminder that sometimes we can't receive things because we’re so busy with our own plans that we accidentally refuse them.

Solomon says delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. Rumi echoes this in a different way, noting that chasing the divine always leaves you tasting — but never full, and never bored.

Every thirst gets satisfied except that of these fish, the mystics, who swim a vast ocean of grace still somehow longing for it!

And the world around us is full of meaning and design and soul if we look for it — an I, Pencil in a single sentence:

The beauty of careful sewing on a shirt is the patience it contains.

And this description of the sunny days and storms of the soul, and how we are a reflection of the divine as much as the universe around us:

We weep God’s rain. We laugh God’s lightning.

Rumi, so far from sitting on wealth like a miser, reminds us that the pleasure of wanting and loving lies as much in the longing as in the having.

A lover’s food is the love of bread, not the bread. No one who really loves, loves existence. Lovers have nothing to do with existence. They collect the interest without the capital.

What I love about Rumi is his insistence that every man is a universe so large it will never be discovered by anyone else but God.

Every spoken word is a covering for the inner self. A little curtain-flick no wider than a slice of roast meat can reveal hundreds of exploding suns. Even if what is being said is trivial and wrong, the listener hears the source. One breeze comes from across a garden. Another from across the ash-heap. Think how different the voices of the fox and the lion, and what they tell you!

We catch glimpses of men — vivid and revealing, but never the men in themselves. Rumi sees this because he doesn’t count the riches of the universe with a telescope: he counts the cells with a microscope and multiplies his riches exponentially. And to those who value the hoarding of book-wisdom so much they forget it's for living:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do.

And what about this passage, about the tunnel-vision of true lovers?

Come to the orchard in Spring. There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers. If you do not come, these do not matter. If you do come, these do not matter.

and that in the matter of relationships, 1 + 1 = 3:

Your associations bear progeny. Be careful, therefore. Wait, and be conscious, before you go to meet anyone. Remember there are children to consider!

Children you must live with and tend to, born of your emotions with another, entities with a form, and speech, and a place to live. They are crying to you even now. You have forgotten us. Come back. Be aware of this. A man and a woman together always have a spiritual result.

Speaking of which, there’s a section featuring a fight between a man and his wife, and barbs are thrown that are more likely to hit the reader harder than the spouses:

You’re not as satisfied as you pretend! You’re the snake and the snake charmer at the same time, but you don’t know it.

and

You were young once, and content. Now you think about money all the time. You used to be that money. You were a healthy vine. Now you’re a rotten fruit. You ought to be growing sweeter and sweeter, but you’ve gone bad.

And even this random musing on taking a hot bath:

Steam fills the bath, and frozen figures on the wall open their eyes, wet and round, Narcissus eyes that see enormous distances, and new ears that love the details of any story. The figures dance like friends diving and coming up and diving again.

— a portrait of steam collecting on the wall that’s hundreds of years old and feels so immediate, so alive.

The Essential Rumi and The Soul of Rumi are so full of quotes like these, little flashes of light mixed in pages of nonsense, that I’m never really sure whether to give him my full recommendation. But I can say I approve of these passages, and whether or not Coleman Barks was true to Rumi, or whether it was possible to be really true to Rumi, or if it was even desirable to be true to Rumi, is up for debate — because I don’t really know Rumi. But I can see Rumi through the lens of Coleman Barks, and I thank God: for now that seems to be enough.

Yours,

-J

October 12th, 2026

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*In a parody magazine, I once heard an American fundamentalist say If the King James Bible was good enough for the apostles, it’s good enough for me.

**What is poetry, anyway? H.L. Mencken writes, in his Chrestomathy:

Poetry can never be concocted by any purely intellectual process. It has nothing to do with the intellect: it is, in fact, a violent and irreconcilable enemy to the intellect. Its purpose is not to establish facts, but to evade and deny them. What it essays to do is to make life more bearable in an intolerable world by concealing and obliterating all the harsher realities. Its message is that all will be well tomorrow, or, at the latest, next Tuesday; that the grave is not cold and damp but steamheated and lined with roses; that a girl is not a viviparous mammal, full of pathogenic organisms and enlightened self-interest, but an angel with bobbed wings and a heart of gold. Take this denial of the bald and dreadful facts out of poetry—make it scientific and sensible—and it simply ceases to be what it pretends to be. It may remain good prose; it may even remain beautiful prose. But it cannot stir the blood as true poetry does; it cannot offer that soothing consolation, that escape from reality, that sovereign balm for every spiritual itch and twinge which is the great gift of poetry to man.

But this is only half true. Rumi — or maybe Barks — comes closer to the meaning and purpose of poetry when he says,

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.

“Where the two worlds touch” is something instantly recognizable to anyone who dreams: the lights flickering in the halls of consciousness and fantasy, each preparing to receive us into the other. And that’s where we find the real meaning of poetry. It is the putting of ideas into pictures, of fusing truth with a feeling, a sight, a sound, a scene — not merely stating truth, but giving it color. Not merely painting with color, but filling it with truth. And the irony is that, like we have to go insane every night in our dreams to stay sane when we’re awake, the true poet makes us understand what we know with our minds by connecting it with something we felt with our senses. He thus stands with one foot on the concrete and the other on the clouds — straddling two dimensions to make us feel complete.

What does real poetry look like, then? Aside from real giants like David, Solomon and Shakespeare, consider these lines from Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

Be near me when my light is low,

When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick

And tingle; and the heart is sick,

And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame

Is racked with pangs that conquer trust;

And Time, a maniac scattering dust,

And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,

And men the flies of latter spring,

That lay their eggs, and sting and sing

And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,

To point the term of human strife,

And on the low dark verge of life

The twilight of eternal day.

And this, dear S, is poetry.

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Chamfort once wrote, in the beginning to his Maxims and Thoughts,

Maxims and axioms, like abridgments, are the work of clever men who seem to have labored for the use of mediocre or lazy minds. The lazy man is content with a maxim that spares him from making for himself the observations that led its author to the conclusion he now shares.

With all due respect, I disagree. The whole fun of reading an essay is compressing its truth into a maxim. The whole fun of reading a maxim is turning its truth into an essay.

There is a sense in which he’s right, however. The boob who reads a maxim may stop only for a second and move on; but a thinker just gets a light tapping of the spurs: the maxim goads him on where he would have stood still, and leads to a train of thoughts he probably wouldn’t have had. (At least not right then). He begins thinking of points and counterpoints, rules and exceptions, anecdotes, old fights, old failures, old flings. Either way he isn’t a bum; he's a hitch-hiker. He’s just here to catch a free ride from the writer. And isn’t that the point of reading? To think something you wouldn't have thought? To feel something you wouldn't have felt?

Below I wrote a series of maxims that anyone can take seriously or unseriously — a shot to the heart or a ricochet off cold stone. They were fun for me to write and I hope they’re fun for you to read. Either way, they’re meant to chew; and whether they can be savored will be determined not just by the tongue, but by the jaw — in other words, not just by whether your taste is delicate enough, but by whether or not you can swallow them.

Yours,

-J

October 6th, 2026

Head of the household.

All the arguing about equality in marriage ignores personality and is thus almost completely irrelevant. If a woman is the dominant personality in the relationship, she doesn’t need it. If she’s the submissive, she doesn’t want it.

Goal and byproduct.

Mark Twain once said in a letter to William Howells,

Every great invention takes a livelihood away from 50,000 men--& within ten years creates a livelihood for half a million. But you can’t make Labor appreciate that: he is laboring for himself, not the breadless half million that are issuing from his loins. They are somebody else’s children; he fails to reflect that his own are among them.

It’s said that Milton Friedman, when told that a canal project was a jobs program, once replied, then why not use spoons?

The problem of capitalism is, how do I get something done as easily and cheaply as possible? Making sure most men are fed and kept busy is the big concern of government.

The miracle is that capitalism has gained without trying what government has tried without gaining.

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Heresy.

In the Age of Faith, we were more likely to believe a victim was a sinner.

In the Modern Age, we are more likely to believe a sinner is a victim.

Gist.

The essence of life isn’t just being or doing or having: it is longing. You are what you want.

Promise and delivery.

The Psalmist says delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.

The universe is fundamentally good — if you want the greatest thing it has to offer.

A dangerous game.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo says to Gandalf,

I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.

We all know that what the Shire needs is something perilous to straighten it out. The problem is, the thing we need to straighten us out is very likely to be something that ruins us. We never know whether real growth ends in a death or a rebirth. And we can never be sure whether our hatred for the Shire’s follies is just love in disguise.

We can’t stand our spiritual weakness — and we are afraid of what makes for spiritual greatness.

Experience and jurisprudence.

Why does Paul say the saints will judge the angels?

I can only think of one reason — that we have been through more shit and, occasionally, have even overcome it.

Let there be life.

David Foster Wallace writes about tennis in Both Flesh and Not,

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war. The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty, or grace, or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive stats and technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s.

What Wallace did here is to make tennis interesting: something not too unlike what God did when he breathed life into the dirt. Proof that writing isn't life itself — it is to make life more colorful, to give us new perspectives, to help us untangle knots, to take a deep breath of fresh air.

To read bad books is to miss a part of yourself; to ignore a great writer, same thing.

A house divided.

I am legion is only for demons. This implies a common direction, a nefarious purpose, a strength in numbers.

For a man’s many moods and drives, it’s more like I am Congress.

Failure or Niche?

Black and Christian movies have one thing in common: that nobody wants to watch either of them except (respectively) Black people and Christians.

Species and genus.

It’s said that oranges and reds don’t stand out to deer: hence the bright orange vests on hunters.

The difference between humans and animals here is less stark than the difference between one man and another. One sees folly and another sees wisdom; one sees fun and another sees danger. Between one man and another is a chasm wider than between an lion and a rat.

Ego.

It’s easier for a man to admit he’s a sinner than to admit he’s a boob.

Cat in a bath.

Homes and medical care and education have gotten drastically more expensive — during the same generations in which the government tried to make them affordable.

What this proves is that people will read anything, from war to history to theology, before they touch economics. Americans will understand God before they understand the market.

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Sometime during the 14th century people began wondering if the Black Plague was our fault and started whipping themselves. Of course the Black Plague was our fault, but not for the reason they thought. It wasn’t so much that we were filthy on the inside, but that we were filthy on the outside.

The Black Plague needed antibiotics, hand washing, and public sanitation — things we weren’t quite ready for yet. What we were actually responsible for, the sloth and envy, rapes and murders, pride and gluttony, ungratefulness and ungodliness — these things we have always needed to repent of and never quite did. We had been deserving worse than the Black Plague forever and we finally got it; and when we got it we blamed things that had nothing to do with it.

The problem with the people who whipped themselves — they were called the Flagellants, I think — is that there wasn’t really any way to atone for your sins by beating yourself up physically. What we needed was to just quit sinning. And there isn’t any way to whip yourself and “share in the sufferings of Christ.” That would mean living for other people and getting yourself killed. Combined, these two things were unpalatable and impossible: and that’s the whole reason Christ had to die for us. Simply put, the best most of us could do was walk around punching ourselves, and all that did was make us look worse. Instead of cleaning up something nasty we put a clown nose on something beautiful — and made both repentance and the cross themselves look stupid.

But there are some times when something like the Flagellants are really genuinely helpful, and I think one of those cases is when you’re proving you’re not Woke anymore. Because being Woke is not a political position: it is a spiritual condition. And repenting of it isn’t just necessary to salvation: it is necessary to partake in civilization. Like Communism, Wokeness is so backward, so destructive, so tasteless, so joyless, so artless, so lacking in reason, so Satanically deranged, that what we need to hear from leftists isn’t “Woke 1.0 was crazy.” We need such an irrefutable one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turnaround that nobody could possibly mistake them as infected. I mean kissing pictures of C.S. Lewis and Teddy Roosevelt and Steve Jobs and Ingrid Bergman: proof that they love real religion, discipline and masculinity, innovation and capitalism, and real white beauty. Hell, at this point I would even take a sincere conversion to Prosperity Gospel, or even weightlifting.

Why? Because I have photo evidence that what they put us through requires either a baptism in water or a baptism by fire: that they are unfit for friendship, parties, weddings, countries, companies, schooling, parenting, publishing, modeling, filmmaking, engineering, gatekeeping, burger-flipping and quinceañeras — bad for love and a worse fit for life; and, barring repentance, should pretty much be locked out of everywhere but church. There we could possibly accept them, but only if they’re there to learn, and only if they say “sorry” before they get baptized. Otherwise we’ll just have to kick them out. (In times like The Age of Faith, they would probably have been exorcised or burned as witches).

As such, here is the evidence: a garbage-fire far bigger than Gehenna; a sewage stream more odious and toxic than the Cloaca Maxima; a monument of irrefutable cruelty and perversity and insanity, which I will forgive (when apologized to) but never forget, and which deserves our deep-seated, full-throated, fire-and-brimstone contempt.

What I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, is an album, almost a thousand pictures large, of The Woke Era.

The Woke Era: A history in pictures.

Yours,

-J

September 22nd, 2026

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P.S. One thing I noted after such a gross and disturbing archive is that the women on the extreme left in the US mirror, in some key aspects, the women of the extreme right in the Middle East. In each you see them in horrible clothes, terrible shape, screaming in the streets, eyes full of rage. The crazies in the US have no shame; the crazies in Iran have no teeth. Both have a messianic complex, and neither have brains.

Whether you set them too free or cover them up and beat them, the extreme ends of women are ugly and hysterical.

Trump’s promise that, if Republicans win the midterms, he’ll send $5,000 to every adult citizen, is a novel idea in only one area — that we call it a bribe. So far it is just like all the other checks he’s promised to send us: a $2000 tariff dividend, and a DOGE dividend, and $9000 for stay-at-home moms. But is this materially different from promising to extend Medicaid, or to cut taxes while increasing the debt, or to lower the price of gas? I would say no — except insofar as it pretends to benefit all Americans, which we say is crazy and unaffordable. Americans will only go bankrupt, we say, if it pays the poorest of us, the richest of us, or the most of everyone else. We can promise free aid to around 175 countries (go ahead, look it up!), but if we promise to send aid to all Americans, it presents “significant moral and legal hurdles.”

This is, of course, beyond the significant economic hurdles. The idea that the government can pay everyone is hampered by the idea that someone out there can be squeezed for it — an illusion that vanishes once the people getting paid are the same people getting looted. But this of course was always an illusion too. And so was the idea that most of politics these days isn’t bribing anyway. The real issue isn’t that somebody (or everybody) is getting paid: it’s the illusion that everyone isn’t going broke, and that Americans haven’t been morally bankrupt for decades and easily bought. We have lost the moral high ground that voting is “in the best interests of the country” — and the pissing contest that is election season is now happening right onto our feet.

Below I had some other thoughts — equally uncomfortable, but equally pressing.

Yours,

-J

September 22nd, 2026

1. Liberality and cowardice.

In Singapore, a country without a serious drug problem, the penalty for smuggling serious drugs into the country is death. Over the past five years they have executed around 35 people, mostly for drug offenses.

In the United States, the penalty for smuggling drugs into the country, at absolute worst, is life. Over the past five years, roughly 470,000 people have died from drug overdoses — not to exclude the millions who crash under the influence, who blow up their families and careers, or end up in jail, or on the streets, or fall prey to pimps.

The difference in policy is clear. Singapore has chosen to kill the dealers. We have chosen to let the dealers kill off our friends and family.

2. In Memoriam

An old man is someone who carries a dead universe inside his head — and he holds it more tightly than the universe in front of him.

3. Salt and pepper.

A handsome young buck and a silver fox.

With the first, women want him to make their baby. The second has an additional advantage: men are more likely to listen to what he says, and they want him to run their company. Both are forms of falling in love.

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4. Mixed feelings.

In Genesis 8:21, God is reported to say that every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood.

We are unsure here whether to cry because we’re a mess or cheer because nobody is clean. We never stood a chance in hell, so God decided to give our hell a chance.

Here we see ourselves drowning — and we can breathe easier. The impossibility of swimming means the necessity of a rescue.

5. Outlast and Endure.

You can’t expect a dog to mature, but as it gets older you can at least expect it to get tired.

The same goes for many people. We never outgrew some of our vices. Many times they simply outlasted us.

6. Return of the Shaman.

Therapy is a profession because most people’s theories about themselves are either nonexistent or false. Does therapy correct these? Not necessarily — many times it merely invents new ones.

The ancient man told tales about the beginnings of the world. The modern man needs myths about the origins of his own feelings. We have charted the whole planet only to find the biggest mystery was always us.

7. Good Company.

What is fellowship? A journey in company that feels like home.

It can’t be fellowship if “company” means tiptoeing around the interesting and the serious. If a tent is too big, it loses the feeling of home and feels more like a circus.

8. Somebody’s devil.

A wise man can get along with many kinds of people, but only a coward can be a saint in everyone’s eyes. A really good and effective man is a villain to somebody.

9. The great dilemma.

If you say cut that shit out your kids think you’re a brute.

If you say cut that crud out your kids think you’re a weenie.

10. Commandment or riddle?

In Matthew 22, Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is and proceeds to give an answer everybody pretends to like. He tells us to Love the Lord with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

In other words, 1) that in a universe of constant change, we are to live with an overriding singularity of purpose. And 2) to stop acting self-centered, subjective, and desperately clawing at the universe for life and happiness — in other words, to stop acting like a biological organism.

What He gave was an impossible answer to an impossible question. As if the demands and sallies of life — coming at us from all directions, each demanding their own unique blocks and dodges and parries — could be whittled down to two thoughts. As if the concept of being separate from everything else could be reversed.

Is this really a commandment? Or is it a riddle?

11. Crowns and ballot boxes.

The Buddhist guru Alan Watts once said that God was a king because He was invented in the age of monarchy. He said we needed a new concept of God because now we live in an age of democracy.

The problem with the age of democracy is an overvaluing of the common man and the undervaluing of our superiors: you don’t know that sometimes someone is so far above you in every way that you ought to make Him your king.

12. A warning.

To be “too wise” is to throw away the rules. To become “too good” is to throw away your brains. One disregards the bridle and gets the spurs. The other is riderless and wearing blinders and doesn’t know when to turn. Real wisdom is holding the rules tight — and in the strange and occasional moments, knowing when to throw them away

13. Problem/solution.

When a man hurts physically, he knows what hurts, and many times why.

When a man hurts spiritually, all he knows is that he hurts — and he may hide even that. What he needs to throw away, he wants to keep. What he needs for a cure, he thinks he hates. He confuses poison for medicine, and medicine for poison.

14. Elephant in the room.

A question for Christians.

If Moses’ Law is good, why don’t you implement it?

If Moses’ Law is bad, why do you follow God?

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Chesterton writes, in the 1920 edition of the Illustrated London News,

Every man ought to have read enough good literature to know when he is reading bad literature, and to go on reading it. He ought to have had what is rightly called a liberal education, that he may know the largest purposes to which human language has been put. But the object of a liberal education is to make him liberal, not merely to make him fastidious. He should be able to recognise the ideas that have been clarified and codified by the utterances of great men, when they appear in a more fragmentary fashion in the utterances of ordinary men. But if he has lost all interest in the utterances of ordinary men, he had far better not have been educated at all. He might as well say that he had been so carefully taught to waltz that he was quite unable to walk; or that he had been so perfectly trained to sing that he no longer knew how to speak. The highest outcome of an interest in literature is a finer interest in life; and bad literature as well as good may throw a light on life, if we have learnt to know light from darkness. And there are a great many other reasons for reading books besides the fact that they happen to be good books. It is a good thing to suffer fools gladly; and an even better thing to enjoy fools uproariously.

What’s remarkable about this paragraph is that, unless you own the Ignatius Press edition — which is out of print, extremely expensive, and impossible to find — these words have been buried, and thus almost totally unread, for somewhere over 100 years.

The question is, why? Chesterton, like George Orwell and CS Lewis, has such a dedicated fan club that burying such an essay seems almost impossible — either an extraordinary oversight, or part of a conspiracy. But a few weeks ago I found this was exactly the case. 998 authentic, original, and extremely interesting essays were sitting in public domain scans and waiting for someone to dig them out. So I started digging.

I put the word out to some of my friends, they threw some money at me for a ChatGPT upgrade, and I immediately went to work in excavation. To these friends — J, K, E, P, and R, I owe my sincere thanks. And if you like my writing, so do you. If I spent any more money on books this month, there was a pretty good chance my wife was going to shoot me.

As such, I present to you GK Chesterton’s writings for the Illustrated London News. There will be punctuational errors here, few and far between, because the goal was to keep what I found — to preserve Chesterton’s writing as much as possible; and when you tell a robot to do that, sometimes it keeps a printing error. Oh well. You can get over this. The essays are free. Read them, love them, quote them, share them. I don’t just want these on my Kindle or a few of my friends’ Kindles. I want them on everyone’s Kindles. I want the whole world to enjoy one of the most original, prolific, sensible, and humane authors any country ever produced.

This being said, here are the essays. I have done my part for humanity. Now I beg of you, please do yours and share them with everyone you can.

GK Chesterton: Our Notebook, Vol 1

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GK Chesterton: Our Notebook, Vol 2

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GK Chesterton: Our Notebook, Vol 3

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GK Chesterton: Our Notebook, Vol 4

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Yours,

-J

September 14th, 2026

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P.S. Because I figured out how to do stylish translations with ChatGPT, there are a LOT of great books coming your way, for free, over the next few years. To new readers, I strongly recommend hitting the subscribe button if you don’t want to miss out.

And if you haven’t got them already, here are Chesterton’s previously published works on Kindle. These are also free — and absolutely gigantic. Feel free to pass them around.

GK Chesterton: Nonfiction

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There’s only one thing standing in the way now: how would we go about doing this? How could you convince more than a third of the American public that they don’t know anything about government, and that this genuine ignorance, the kind that doesn’t only not know or not want to know, but that believes it already knows as much as it needs to know, to throw away their so-called “unalienable rights”** — the mechanics of which they can’t even explain?

The answer is simple. Tell them that surgeons don’t have to go to medical school anymore and drivers don't have to take any tests — and when they bitch about their lives being on the line, insist that people who never studied the US Constitution are incapable of running the government well too. If we require everyone to pass a test before they’re allowed to drive a car, why, in some places, do you not even have to show an ID to drive the country? You can’t even have sex with most strangers until you’re 18, but the second you turn 18 you can screw over the whole nation. And half the country already thinks we shouldn't own guns. Should we let those same people decide whether or not to drop nukes?

Contrary to the suggestions I’d given about property and taxation, my dream is that all Americans could apply for this higher level of citizenship. All of them could take a standardized test, written in plain language, about The Federalist, The Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution, and in an almost-perfect world maybe even Second Treatise of Government. It wouldn’t even be written, but multiple choice, taken every four years, with a $40 fee and courses online and testing in every county. You can retake it if you fail it, and the second time you take it the fees are cut in half.

The argument against this, of course, will be that everyone, completely regardless of his ignorance or stupidity, should be allowed to literally direct the future of this country. If this is the case we’ll agree with them. We should take them at their word, open the vote to our three-year-olds, and let their parents sign for them. A fight we’ll win, since we're the only ones making the babies.

Yours,
-J

December 17, 2017

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PS: One other reform I’d make has to do with the election of senators. Back when the average American citizen had common sense they agreed that the average American citizen was a boob**; and out of this admission came the idea that if the eligible members of this nation were to elect their representatives — representatives who were theoretically better informed than the eligible citizens themselves — that these representatives ought to compile their knowledge of men and the mechanics of government and pick their own representatives: in this case meaning the US Senate, supposedly the cream of the crop.

This system worked well until some genius — completely averse to the idea that the people we elected to government, and who thus had experience in government, knew more about government than the people who elected them — decided to scrap it and had the public vote directly for our senators. The results couldn’t have been more stupid. Instead of having a body of men trusted by the lawmakers we trusted, we have another body of men who are trusted by the rabble; a congress as disreputable, demagogical, ignorant and bumbling as any embarrassing city council; certainly no better than our House of Representatives, and only underperformed by the President-you’d-like-to-have-a-beer-with. Which leads me to a point about the president.

My position on the presidency is that Americans have no idea what the president is for, which is why we keep ending up with terrible presidents. He’s not there to attend all the funerals of your favorite victims, or to chastise football players from the bully pulpit, or to express his disapproval of whatever his constituents currently hate on Twitter. That’s our job if we take it. He’s not there to decide whether we should patrol the border, or whether we should fund Obamacare. We have a border and he has to patrol it. We made Obamacare and he has to fund it. We elected people to the federal legislature, they made the federal laws for us, and his job is to make sure our federal laws are executed. That’s it. Anything less than this is traitorous. Anything too much more than this is tyrannical.

The president is supposed to be a kind of glorified errand boy and Americans are trying to make him a hero, or a saint, or (what’s worse than both of these) the distillation and hallmark of what it means to be American. We’ve lost the idea that we can personally be glorious, and so we spend our time looking for someone to be glorious for us in proxy. And big surprise: it isn’t working.Since I’ve been alive two and (maybe three) of our presidents have technically been draft dodgers, one of them was a frat boy known more for his connections and pranks than his prowess, and one of them was so effeminate he thought our male soldiers ought to be able to dress up as women — and, if this wasn’t ridiculous enough, that women ought to be leading our battle charges. There is almost nothing less soldierly than the glorified civilian in charge of our soldiers, and the reason we leave him in charge has less to do with any military competence on his part, and more to do with the fact that if he wasn’t in charge of our generals, one of our generals — usually men of confidence and charisma and actual talent, could potentially stage a coup after seeing the bumbling, incompetent ass we’ve elected for our president. This is the idea that our Founding Fathers had, they got it from the English ancestors they worshiped, and we have forgotten it because we worship ourselves.

*America is the only country in the world dumb enough to say Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, put said wretched refuse on welfare, and then be shocked to find that our educational system is lagging and our politics are a circus and the world thinks of us as yokels.

Of course the idea that any immigration system is going to bring in the best and the brightest is pure hogwash. The people who are doing well in any country, the successful doctors, lawyers, scientists, academics, and professional soldiers, are likely to remain put because they have too much invested wherever they are. As such you’re likely to get the people who are too poor and unexceptional to be happy and just rich enough to take off. The best chance of getting the best men is in a refugee crisis. It’s also the best chance of getting the worst.

**There’s an idea gaining popularity right now that voter registration ought to be automatic — in other words that the people who either couldn’t figure out how to register themselves or who didn’t have the initiative to register themselves can be trusted and ought to be trusted with directing our destiny. Is this really a solution? Yes — if looting is high on the agenda: the only politics our underclasses are capable of understanding.

***One of the signs of an active and honest mind is self-doubt; also an abundant and sometimes excessive use of italics.

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Solomon says that life and death are in the power of the tongue. Montaigne, expanding on the idea, says, in his essay On Names,

It is said that the church of Notre-Dame-la-Grande at Poitiers had the following origin. A dissolute young man who lived on that spot brought a prostitute to his house. As soon as she arrived, he asked her name. When she answered that it was Mary, he was struck so powerfully by religious awe and reverence for that sacred name of the Virgin Mother of our Savior that he not only sent the woman away at once but reformed the whole remainder of his life. In memory of this miracle, a chapel dedicated to Our Lady was built where the young man’s house had stood, and afterward the church we see there today.

He continues,

That devout correction entered directly into the soul through the voice and the ear. Another of the same kind entered through the bodily senses. Pythagoras was once among a group of young men who, heated by a feast, were conspiring to go and violate a respectable household. He ordered the musician to change her tune; and by means of solemn, grave, spondaic music, he gently enchanted their passion and lulled it to sleep.

So I’m leaving these here, and who knows? They probably won't stop a rapist, but maybe they’ll turn a brothel into a cathedral.

Yours,

-J

August 25th, 2026

Sharing dreams.

We talk more about the temptation to do evil than the temptation to do good. Probably because the temptation to do evil makes us look good, and the temptation to do good makes us look bad.

With one we look powerful but restrained; with the other we look derelict and weak.

Uncharitable?

The question of whether to help the poor is always secondary. The first question is, "are they poor because they're shitty? Or are they shitty because they’re poor?”

One definition of magnanimity.

Those who apologize because they need to and those who apologize because they want to.

The things we do for money.

“Ladies and gentlemen” was flattery at its most shameless: the pretense that the peasants in front of you were nobility and landholders.

Love and marriage.

What we need in a good marriage is someone to balance us out — in certain regards an opposite. This means the impulsive needs the planner, the dynamic needs an anchor, and the leader needs a follower.

What we want in a romance on the other hand is oftentimes what’s similar. We fall hardest for those who exhibit what we love most about ourselves.

Jerks and dupes.

The conflict between racists and anti-racists revolves around one thing: the fact that nature has never turned out two of the same people, and our whole social existence involves categorizing people and their behaviors.

Nature works in recognizable patterns — never in duplicates. The racists recognize the patterns. The anti-racists point out the inconsistencies. Both pick sides and pretend to be comfortable, but it gnaws on them both; and neither party, unless totally stupid, feels his position is unassailable. The man we call “racist” worries that by judging obvious trends he’s hurting a good man of another race. The anti-racist hides facts and worries he’ll be known as either a dupe or a liar.

Another reason racial controversies are so hot: they not only involve power, justice, and tribal psychology. They involve people defending positions they know are riddled with holes — and that their own side, at some point or another, could look either foolish or cruel.

Charisma matters.

Regarding Thomas Sowell and F.A. Hayek:

The public needs to know what they said. But they’re such bad writers that you can’t stick around long enough to hear them say all of it.

Like Solomon's saying, a man who is slack in his work is brother to him who destroys, to bore somebody with a good thing is tantamount to supporting a bad thing.

Cocksure.

Confidence has two parents: ignorance and experience.

To be sure of yourself means you never asked or you no longer have to. Between these two fringes lies uncertainty.

The meaning of taste.

All culture is prejudice. The first step to being cultured was the belief that some other way of doing something was inferior.

Equality ad infinitum.

“All men are created equal” is the polar opposite gist of “governments are instituted among men.” The first pretends to be a reason for government; the real reason for government immediately ruins it.

Our natural inequality creates injustice. And the government exists not only to upend this injustice, but to separate our people from the others — who result in different kinds of society and government, which we fear and often hate.

Aside from this, once someone takes the first saying seriously, he wonders, what about the man on the other side of the border? A question which ruins the very basis of rights. What each country makes for itself is exclusive — and each defends it with violence against everyone who remains “other.”

My personal goal.

Never tell someone to calm down. Use your manner and words to calm them down.

Never tell someone beneath you to smile. Instead be the reason they feel like smiling.

Never tell anyone to believe. Instead, give them something to believe in.

Fun and pain.

To really enjoy food, starve yourself.

To really enjoy sleep, work yourself to the bone.

To really enjoy water, let yourself be thirsty.

To really enjoy women, rarely touch one — and in the modern age of wankery, try to avoid touching yourself.

Those who inundate themselves with pleasure will never feel it. If you want to get high, lay low. If you want to have fun, let yourself feel bad. Longing, craving, and hurting are the gateways through which God delivers joy — the coinage paid for having fun.

When you get sick, rejoice: you are about to experience the ecstasy of feeling well. The best views come after the longest climbs.

Saintly or selfish.

The difference between the martyr and the suicide is smaller than we think. In the end neither of them were willing to live if they couldn’t have something they want. The difference between them is that one of them benefits us by their suicide and the other one hurts.

We call the “suicide” selfish because he thought it was too painful to live. But who is more selfish than the person who celebrates martyrs?

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Nobody needs to read 800 pages on anybody. This is the conclusion I came to after reading Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton and the first volume of The Last Lion. They’re really just too big to be useful.

Do I need to know, in the span of 200 pages, how Winston Churchill felt about his mom, or about how badly he did in school, or how poorly he wrote in first grade? Sure — maybe in 200 words. In a good study Bible Jesus gets around 300 pages, about half of them are notes, and another quarter — maybe more — is just bald repetition. Yet according to Christians, God decided that was all we needed on Him.

The fact that we remember so little about modern biographies is probably a result of their size. Plutarch’s Lives run anywhere from 30-60 pages per figure and what we take away from them is far more useful — especially from a good translation. We get a short childhood, a slew of great quips, some moral triumphs and failures, some background history, a solid battle or two, and then somebody dies.

Likewise, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s bios on great Englishmen run anywhere from 50-80 pages, are packed full of big theories and moral instruction, and die off before hearing what anyone ate for dinner. What about Macaulay’s biography? Not written by Macaulay, unfortunately, and thus almost a thousand pages long. Will anybody read it? Despite an almost fanatical love for the man, I almost certainly won’t.

For this reason I have directed and edited the following version of Plutarch’s Lives — a new edition, faithful to the Greek, in flowing, modern, high-school English. Too many books about ancient Greeks and Romans have been written by “modern” Americans and Brits, which defeats the whole purpose. The main value of reading about Greeks and Romans is to get away from modernity. It’s to see the great and ancient up close, and get a real whiff of their character: the things “modern” men usually lack — and, in consequence, things many writers today don’t even have a nose for.

Plutarch writes, in his Life of Aemelius Paulus,

I first took up the writing of these Lives for the sake of others, but I have continued and grown fond of the work for my own sake as well. History serves me like a mirror: I try, as best I can, to shape my life and bring it into harmony with the virtues of the men I describe. The experience is really a kind of daily companionship. Through history I receive each of them in turn as a guest, welcome him into my home, and study, in Homer’s words, “how great he was, and what kind of man.” Then I select from his actions the most important and finest qualities for us to know. […]

By studying history and writing about it, I train myself to keep the best and most respected men always present in my memory. If daily contact with other people brings anything mean, malicious, or degrading into my thoughts, I can push it back and clear it away by calmly turning my mind toward the finest of these examples.

Proof that reading Plutarch's Lives — like all the other books we read, for better and for worse — isn’t about somebody else. In the end, it’s really about you, and what kind of person you want to be. Plutarch knew this and lived by it. Most modern biographers don’t.

A good dose of Plutarch reminds us that virtue is eternal. The real possession of it, especially in leadership and academia, is more likely to be ephemeral. And if this is the case, it's best to soak in these oases of goodness when we find them — if not always in person, then at the very least in Plutarch.

This edition gets the job done, without a hefty investment into a good translation, or going “public domain” and slogging through a bad one. It has been my honor to get to know Plutarch — and an even greater one to share him. I only hope that after reading him, you feel the same way.

Yours,

-J

August 10th, 2026

Plutarch's Parallel Lives: A Fresh Modern Translation

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P..S. I talked a lot about virtue above, but one thing that Plutarch is an expert on writing about is vice. And I don't think you can be truly good at the first without being a maestro at the second. In the end they’re two sides of the same coin.

As such, although I made this for my boys, they won't be getting the Lives until later, and even then with a warning. In these biographical essays you’ll find acts of lust both straight and homosexual. There will be murders and tortures and, in one life in particular, almost-unspeakable acts of serial-killer execution. There is incest, prostitution, rape, and polygamy. Drunks and degenerates exist side-by-side (and sometimes even in the same person) as saviors and sages. If you’re looking for the purely wholesome and kind, go watch Bluey. Plutarch’s Lives is a character examination of real-life pagans who got to the top — not Lives of the Saints, or William Bennett’s Book of Virtues.

What I’m trying to say is that Plutarch's Lives is a little nicer than Game of Thrones and about on par with the Old and New Testaments. As such, some discretion, especially when handing this to somebody under 16, is strongly advised. If your kid already knows exactly how Jesus was murdered, or about Lot and his daughters, or about Amnon and Tamar, or what Absalom did to David’s concubines, he’s probably good to go — or already ruined, depending on your perspective. Plutarch is about making judgments; and I advise you, before getting started, to exercise some good judgment about Plutarch.

P.P.S. When I was ready to finish the ebook and handed this preface to ChatGPT, it was kind enough to offer some unsolicited advice. It said it smoothed over some rough sentences, fixed some grammatical errors, and even patched a bad spelling of Aemelius. About the last one I was grateful, but upon further review I noticed one glaring error: the preface just didn’t sound quite like me.

So I kindly told ChatGPT to disregard all changes except the spelling. And then I had an epiphany. I realized that Mick Jagger, Joey Ramone, Jello Biafra, Tom Waits, David Lee Roth, Louis Armstrong, John Lennon, Brian Johnson, Bob Dylan, and Dave Mustaine are all technically “bad” singers — people whose virtuosity may be called into question, and who could have “benefited” greatly from some kind of vocal coaching. And I doubt the coaching would have improved anything. In certain cases, especially for Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong and Jello Biafra, it might have actually ruined them.

What I’m trying to say here is that, maybe for what you’re trying to do, there isn’t a “perfect” voice. Maybe a voice brings something to the show that can’t be measured with a tuning fork. You might have a swagger, a rhythm — a sneer — that carries more than the right pitch ever could. We know that in conversation, the way you say something conveys more, most times, than the words do themselves. I believe the same is true for singing, and I believe the same is true for writing. The modern age has raised the standard of singing to pitch-perfect — and the result has been a slew of technically professional, entirely replaceable, totally plastic sluts. The process works well enough for a machine, but it fails to really carry a soul.

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Of course it isn’t civilized, but neither are the feminists. The transgenders are on the verge of saving us from our “morality,” and instead of recognizing this golden opportunity, our right-wingers are busy crying about it. We were on the verge of putting women on the front lines without seeing how they’d do first as linebackers. Now we have an opportunity to publicly trample, bulldoze, uppercut, choke-hold, and generally mangle our most obnoxious women into submission — and we’re throwing away the opportunity because some of us think this is less offensive than having them shot, captured, and most likely gang-raped by a foreign enemy.

The truth is I don’t care much for seeing grown men join girls’ sports. It discourages our sane women from being athletic, which is a tragedy from almost any angle. But at the very least, I say let the men’s teams compete against the women’s teams every year — and then we can decide what to do with the army.

Yours,
-J

December 8th, 2018

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Every once in a while I have the privilege to introduce, to my adoring fans, somebody who is extremely dead.

Usually, the aforementioned cadaver is just as much a surprise to me as to them. Up until last week (for instance) I had no idea S.J. Perelman existed. He had been buried, literally and figuratively, beneath a whole host of oncoming inferiors: a gaggle of second and third-rate comics who just happened to catch my eye because they had been born later, and had access to better marketers. (Or maybe, if the retailer can be summed up by his wares, we could say the marketers were worse. Not their fault, necessarily — everybody has to make a buck).

Fortunately, in the world of good literature, being dead has no affect on how you make people feel alive*. Unlike the famous skeleton at the feast, the value of communing with a great writer isn't to remind you of your own death, but to make you laugh, and gape, and wince, and cry. And in the introduction to The Best of S.J. Perelman, which was compiled in 1947, I found the following gem.

In any consideration of S. J. Perelman — and S. J. Perelman certainly deserves the same consideration one accords old ladies on street cars, babies traveling unescorted on planes, and the feeble-minded generally — it is important to remember the crushing, the well-nigh intolerable odds under which the man has struggled to produce what may well be, in the verdict of history, the most picayune prose ever produced in America.

Denied every advantage, beset and plagued by ill fortune and a disposition so crabbed as to make Alexander Pope and Dr. Johnson seem sunny by contrast, he has nevertheless managed to belt out a series of books each less distinguished than its predecessor, each a milestone of bombast, conceit, pedantry, and strutting pomposity. In his pages proliferate all the weird grammatical flora tabulated by H. W. Fowler in his Modern English Usage—the Elegant Variation, the Facetious Zeugma, the Cast-Iron Idiom, the Battered Ornament, the Bower’s-Bird Phrase, the Sturdy Indefensible, the Side-Slip, and the Unequal Yokefellow. His work is a museum of mediocrity, a monument to the truly banal. What Flaubert did to the French bourgeois in Bouvard and Pecuchet, what Pizarro did to the Incas, what Jack Dempsey did to Paolino Uzcudun, S. J. Perelman has done to American belles-lettres.

It is customary to palliate the shortcomings of certain eminent men by pleading their physical drawbacks. Dostoievsky’s epilepsy, Beethoven’s deafness and Milton’s blindness have all been served up on occasion to explain their vagaries. The same must be done for S. J. Perelman, except that he has labored under a far greater handicap. Extraordinary though it may seem, his entire output over the past two decades has been achieved without benefit of brain. The plain medical fact which cannot be blinked (and if we are to blink it, we must accept the consequences) is that his skull is little more than a hollow gourd, a mere bony knob on which reposes a battered Herbert Johnson hat. How he contrives to fulfil the ordinary obligations of everyday life — to get to his office, philander with his secretary, bedevil his wife, and terrorize his children — is one of those mysteries of science like the common cold or mixed bathing.

The rest of his physique is even less prepossessing. Under a forehead roughly comparable to that of the Javanese or the Piltdown Man are visible a pair of tiny pig eyes, lit up alternately by greed and concupiscence. His nose, broken in childhood by a self-inflicted blow with a hockey stick, has a prehensile tip, ever quick to smell out an insult; at the least suspicion of an affront, Perelman, who has the pride of a Spanish grandee, has been known to whip out his sword-cane and hide in the nearest closet.

He has a good figure, if not a spectacular one; above the hips, a barrel chest and a barrel belly form a single plastic unit which bobbles uncertainly on a pair of skinny shanks. In motion, the man’s body may best be likened to a New Bedford whaler in the teeth of an equinoctial gale; in repose, it is strongly reminiscent of a giant sloth. In point of fact, from what small exterior evidence we possess, it would appear that he has modeled himself closely on that luckless animal. A monstrous indolence, cheek by jowl with the kind of irascibility displayed by a Vermont postmaster while sorting the morning mail, is perhaps his chief characteristic. Small wonder that he should have chosen for his book-plate that significant Revolutionary emblem, a crouched rattlesnake above the terse injunction, “Don’t Tread on Me.”

With this, the funnest (and maybe finest) introduction I've ever seen to any man’s work, I read on, and was kept totally amused. In the following pages I found typos, formatting issues, racial slurs, cracks at oversized women, and, in some places, an almost-incomprehensible dialogue that was worth reading two, three, even four times over — simply because it was so fun. And why did I buy this gem? Because of an obscure comment made by Woody Allen, to the effect that “nobody was ever funnier than S.J. Perelman.” High words from a man who, as a screenwriter, not only "holds the most wins (3) and nominations (16) for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay,” but adopted a Korean girl and then proceeded to marry her. Republicans have yet to decide whether these facts are signs of Allen’s comedy or criminality. Democrats will let Jews get away with almost anything except The Holy Land.

Anywho, since picking the book up I have yet to be disappointed. The jokes land, even though he sometimes makes you consult a dictionary. And the words are strung together so well, and sparkle and shine with such style and wit, that he’s worth reading even when he’s being matter-of-fact. He penned screenplays for the Marx Brothers, and wrote side-by-side with E.B. White, over two decades, for The New Yorker. (If you don’t know why E.B. White matters, pick up his essays on Amazon).

I have no idea what to expect next — for instance, whether the following short stories will embarrass me for publicly sharing my hope in them. And who knows? Maybe I’ll just be embarrassed for sharing Perelman. Maybe his Wikipedia, like Woody Allen’s, will say he molested some of his relatives — possibly two uncles, and a grandma. But thus far Perelman is a reminder that like Oscar Wilde, The Princess Bride, “We are the World” and that poem on the Statue of Liberty, the best jokes never go stale.

You can buy The Best of S.J. Perelman for 99 cents on Kindle.

Yours,

-J

July 28th, 2026

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*Speaking of the dead giving us a new lease on life, Shakespeare writes, in his Sonnets,

THAT time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire

Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

—

BUT be contented: when that fell arrest

Without all bail shall carry me away,

My life hath in this line some interest,

Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.

When thou reviewest this, thou dost review

The very part was consecrate to thee:

The earth can have but earth, which is his due;

My spirit is thine, the better part of me:

So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,

The prey of worms, my body being dead;

The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,

Too base of thee to be remembered.

The worth of that is that which it contains,

And that is this, and this with thee remains.

— two stanzas I read four times to understand, and another four times to savor.

**The idea that every woman in Woody Allen’s vicinity was in danger is an overstep. He writes, in his memoir Apropos of Nothing,

In Mom’s defense I have to say [she] was a wonderful woman; bright, hardworking, sacrificing. She was faithful and loving and decent but not, let us say, physically prepossessing. When I said years later my mother looked like Groucho Marx, people thought I was kidding. […] Mom had five sisters, one homelier than the next, with Mom arguably the homeliest of the swarm. Let me put it this way: Freud’s Oedipal theory that all us men unconsciously want to kill our fathers and marry our mothers hits a brick wall when it comes to my mother.

After he married Soon-Yi, we owe him thanks for the clarification.

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The common belief about writers is that we’re a bunch of useless time-wasters: a horde of poverty-wallowing fruit-baskets who drink too much and don’t work enough and never have a chance to put our skills — supposing we actually have any — to good and practical use.

I don’t have a rebuttal to the drinking jab or the fruit-basket jab or even that we spend a lot of our time doing anything other than making money. But I did write this letter years ago — a short resume for a quiet, unassuming coworker who kept getting passed up for promotions even though he was the right man to move up. And my cohorts loved it so much, and they found it so true, so well-deserved, and so devoid of fudging or flattery that when I went around the business, asking people to sign it, they gave their emphatic thanks, gladly scribbled their John Hancocks, and he ended up getting called into the office. He’s now a part of the bourgeoisie (as I call them), and while I worked there, all of us were better for it.

The letter was such a glowing exposition of good character that reading it makes me warm to this day — not just because I wrote such an uplifting and solid piece, but because I had such a good subject to write about. Such paeans are usually reserved for drunk wedding speeches and funerals. It was my honor to launch this anonymous and invincible salvo while the subject was still living — and for him to find out about it not from the peons, but from his superiors.

So far as I’m aware, he has yet to find out it was written by me.

Yours,

-J

June 20th, 2026

P.S. The job itself may be described, by those who value income and glamour more than virtue and character, as necessary to society — but humble.

The status of the job here is almost beside the point. Lincoln once put it, whatever you are, be a good one. The Latter Day Saints (who have an affinity and a knack for folksy wisdom) would put it as “whate’re thou art, act well thy part.” To see a man perform a “working class” job with skill and grace almost always fills you with admiration. On the other hand, I have no idea what to do with men who claim a job is “beneath” them — and somehow fail to do it with finesse.

People want to raise the first man up, sometimes beyond his actual ability. The latter they just want to cut down. We have been enamored with girls running the lines at Chick-Fil-A. We’ve had doctors and professors who inspired us — to throw such “highly-trained professionals” right off a cliff.

P.P.S. Samuel Johnson once wrote, The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it. So far I find myself justly acquitted. But he also wrote No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money; so it’s a wash.

Dear R- (and other applicable management),

We know employee appreciation notices come from above, but we wanted to make today the first time you’ve ever seen one come from below.

The subject here is B-. Many of us have worked with him for years now, and have had a chance to see his character in action. This last week he was the one thing standing between the [X] department and total disaster. He stayed hours overtime to ensure things ran smoothly, and because of him they did. He worked both sides of the department, jumping back and forth with total fluidity. He was knowledgeable beyond anyone else working the [X] department and he operated under stressful conditions with absolute equanimity. And he designed even our schedule to complete satisfaction.

But this was just one week among many, and concerning only the [X] department. His general virtues and talents, in no particular order, are as follows.

1) As mentioned above, he has an absolute mastery of whatever he puts his mind to.

It’s commonly said that “B- knows everything” about how the business runs, and joked that if B- doesn’t know, it’s possible nobody does. He functions as a kind of walking [company] encyclopedia or manual.

2) He’s cool under fire.

When things get ugly, B- is as gentle and mild-mannered as when things are going smoothly.

3) He’s dedicated.

We can count on B- to be there when things go to hell. He works overtime when we need him to and nobody else can, does all jobs regardless of his rank, and he does it without complaining. Note his versatility, too: how he can jump between departments, and is frequently called to do so.

4) He’s well-liked by those who work for him.

Because B- has a cool head, he’s able to navigate even difficult departments with volatile mixes of people, steering clear of drama, and making himself popular with all cliques and factions. He’s a man you can approach with a problem, because his judgments are clear and impartial, and he’s the kind of man who will fix it for you if he can. He’s firm when he needs to be, but fair.

These virtues being noted, we know it’s not our business to tell you or anyone else in management who to pick for a promotion. But we ask you to consider B-, who didn’t put us up to this letter and doesn’t even know about it, for the next available shot at manager. We love working with him, and feel, on a deep level, that a man as humble as B-, who is good at everything except tooting his own horn, ought to have his horn tooted for him.

Thank you for your time and consideration, and for always fighting (and we would argue, succeeding) to keep [company] a great place to work.

Sincerely,

[This letter was signed by an overwhelming number of employees, and resulted in B’s promotion to management the following month]

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A “your” in the wrong place hints at all kinds of things — for instance, whether I’m sloppy, or hurried, or ignorant, or stupid. It makes you wonder if I ever passed the fourth grade and whether I learned anything after it. It's only fair to ask what kind of writer I am after that — and what kind of a thinker. If Jesus told us to “not judge” (whatever that means) He also said we can’t be trusted with much until we’ve been trusted with little. And I’ve intentionally shown you what happens when somebody can’t be trusted. Simply put, he gets judged — usually without mercy.

This is really the point of grammatical standards: not that we’ve had the same language forever, or that the English we’re speaking today is the English we’ll be speaking tomorrow, but that a single typo can ruin your whole message — like a single wart can ruin a nice smile. This is the point of the much-maligned English professor in the first place: the idea that somebody out there can teach us how to not completely screw up our delivery.

Some genius running the University of Washington’s Writing Center disagrees. He believes an English course should be inclusive, and we assert the opposite. It ought to be so exclusive that if you fail to make yourself included you fail. We believe a course ought to change a person, and that it ought to change him for the better — even if the “better” in this case means “the whiter.”

The liberals of course have some arguments in their defense. Everyone knows (except English professors) that English professors get pedantic; and nobody can deny that refusing to end a sentence in a preposition can be just as annoying as saying “literally” when what you really meant is “figuratively.” It’s literally one of the worst things I know of. There’s a being too “proper” in speech like there’s a being too “proper” with women*; and either of them ruins our chances at having great intercourse. Which brings us to a very important point. In every discussion about the “right” language, the question isn’t whether we’re annoying to everybody, but whether we’re annoying to the people we’re trying to win over.

Everyone has a dialect, after all. The most important thing for any English student to learn is how to write like the right ones. For instance, like the people who run our businesses and colleges and speak like our most inspiring leaders and theorists. We don't have time to learn how to speak like a sneaker-collecting baby-daddy or a trailer park Nazi because we don’t need them — or like them, or want to be around them. Our interest in Standard White English is fitting in with the best movers and thinkers today. This means writing like James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates — two of the whitest Black writers in history, and easily two of the best. What’s important is that whoever goes to an American school can learn to speak like somebody fit for American command. Anyone who teaches anything less sucks at her job. Figuratively.

The sounds we know as words are symbolic for ideas. The way we string those words together is a metaphor for how well we put ideas together. Obama never ran a business or joined the military or held an executive office, but he spoke like a responsible and educated white man, so Americans assumed he could act like one. Whether we were right or wrong is beside the point. He became the President, and he couldn’t have done it if he wrote or talked like Kanye West.

In this sense a good English class is only prejudicial as any other class is prejudicial. It sees somebody else who did well and wants us to be like them too. It takes no interest in our feelings about whether or not we’re the best. It makes us the best. And if we’re not all capable of being the best, a good English class should make us be able to fake it.

A person who has no interest in changing has no business enrolling. They have no business being in business — or in the business of making others trust us known as politics. In everything we do there’s an element of belonging. Whether we decide to belong with the best or not is entirely our decision. And a good school should give us the ability to choose at our leisure.

Yours,
-J

February 26^th, 2017

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P.S. If you want to know where we went wrong with English classes you would have to look to our other humanities departments. For years we’ve been celebrating science, technology, engineering and math, and everyone forgot what exactly makes a great man.

Psychology won’t do it. Sociology is a joke. Feminine studies has only gotten us to misunderstand women; the purpose of gender studies was to destroy the idea of genders; and black studies has only made black people worse. The humanities teach you what people feel and how to move them. It’s the art of knowing our emotional springs and how to press them. As such a dead humanities department isn’t just a dead humanities department. It’s a generation of people who don’t know what to do with people.

People complaining that promotions are unfair and politics is too full of politics and good English is racist are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. People who don’t believe in humanities rarely expect that the world is all politics. They have no idea that a hierarchy exists everywhere, and that who you know and how you manage them has everything to do with your success. The art of relating is every bit as crucial to your success as how well you work and how much you know.

The study of English is political by nature. It’s the art of putting your soul into somebody else's. The first question of English is how can I put my soul into words? The second question is how can I make them enjoy it? Anybody who ignores these two things isn’t just unfit to teach English. He’s destined to be managed by smarter people.

*Is there a being too proper with speech and women? Yes, nobody who ever confuses manners with formality is ever going to be a good closer.

Formality is the art of inspiring respect. It shows that you fit in with the high and mighty, and are supposed to be taken seriously. Manners is the art of making people feel easy, light, trustworthy, and comfortable. One of them aims at not screwing up. The other makes it really easy to screw.

Better manners means more fun. More formality means this is serious — and if you wear a tuxedo to the frat party, it had better be as a joke. Because you'll feel uncomfortable, and if people think you’re being serious, the butt of the jokes is going to be you.

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Baby names have always been a matter of difficulty. If you name him something that sounds great when he’s a baby it usually looks bad on him as a man. If you name him something great for a man, it probably fits badly when he’s a baby*.

No baby ever looked right as a Hunter or a Justice or a Steve. And likewise no man ever looked strong as a Percy or a Timmy or a Bud. Aim too cute and the man looks like a coward or a tard. Aim too high and the kid looks like a prick or a fraud.

Why bring this up? Because in the entirety of history, nobody’s parents ever aimed higher than Saint Jerome’s. His real name was Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius — or, The Devout and Holy-named Sage. When he was young it didn't fit him because he was too young to be wise or holy. When he was old it didn't fit him because he was a jerk.

He was born sometime around 340 and given an at-the-time world-class education in the classics. And his whole life he was so hot-headed for Christianity and believed so much in perfection that his own bishop told him to calm down. You've got to be patient with people, the bishop said. They’re just people.

Jerome disagreed. He called the bishop a rotten, ignorant brute and a good match for a bad flock; gathered up a few of his closest friends, and went off into the desert to starve two of them to death.

Jerome almost died himself from the “sinless” (read: homeless and bathless and foodless) lifestyle and the unhealthy climate, but he decided to press on. He left to another hermitage with his library in tow — Virgil and Cicero and other favorites — and became worried he loved them more than the Bible. It was then he had a dream, the account of which goes as follows.

[I was] dragged before the Judge’s judgment seat. I was asked to state my condition, and replied that I was a Christian. But He Who presided said, “Thou liest; thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.”

Straightway I became dumb, and I felt the strokes of the whip — for He had ordered me to be scourged. [...] At last the bystanders fell at the knees of Him Who presided, and prayed Him to pardon my youth and give me opportunity to repent of my error, on the understanding that the extreme of torture should be inflicted upon me if ever I read again the books of Gentile authors. […] This experience was no sweet or idle dream. [...] I profess that my shoulders were black and blue, and that I felt the bruises long after I awoke. […] Henceforth I read the books of God with greater zeal than I had ever given before to the books of men.

Proof that even in the Dark Ages, the only way to make Leviticus interesting is to threaten somebody with torture.

People swallowed his story, though, and in 379 the people of Antioch made him a priest. He was so smart and radical and sharp that by 382 he was in Rome — a secretary to Pope Damasus, who commissioned him to translate the New Testament into Latin. Despite being surrounded by luxury he ate sparsely, and kept the brown robe of an anchorite monk. He became really popular among the rich ladies, to the point where pagan critics started to raise eyebrows and make jokes about it.

An unfair accusation, I think, because Saint Jerome hated sex more than anyone else. He condemned priests for getting married. He advised women to run off to convents. And because Saint John was unmarried, he preferred him over Saint Peter. “I praise marriage,” he said — “but only because it makes more virgins.”

In a letter to a girl named Eustochium, he comes close to sounding like a feminist, or even a man-hating lesbian. He says he’s not against marriage, per se, but that if you stay single you avoid the pains of pregnancy, crying children, taking care of a household, and the tortures of jealousy — a narrow escape from Sodom itself, as he puts it. He writes,

Virginity can be lost even by a thought. […] Let your companions be those who are pale of face and thin with fasting. […] Let your fasts be of daily occurrence. Wash your bed and water your couch nightly with tears. [...] Let the seclusion of your own chamber ever guard you; ever let the Bridegroom sport with you within. […] When sleep falls upon you He will come behind the wall, and will put His hand through the door and will touch your womb. And you will awake and rise up and cry, “I am sick with love.” And you will hear Him answer: “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.”

— a letter which went public, made everybody throw up, and was greeted (in his words) “with showers of stones.” Proving that across all cultures and ages, “Jesus is my boyfriend” lyrics are gross.

A rich lady named Paula — Eustochium’s mom, it turns out — fell for this tomfoolery and brought her daughters along with her. Three months after doing Jerome's diets in a convent, one daughter, Blaesilla, got too sick to hold her own head up, and promptly died. The public was furious, and the pagans (as Jerome says in his letters) wanted to throw him into the river.

Jerome felt less enthusiastic about it. When Paula, Blesilla’s mother, couldn't eat food, and was seen crying at the funeral hysterically, Jerome wrote her a very impressive letter telling her to man up.

Have you no fear, then, lest the Saviour may say to you: Are you angry, Paula, that your daughter has become my daughter? Are you vexed at my decree, and do you, with rebellious tears, grudge me the possession of Blæsilla? [Note that Jerome is speaking for Jesus here] You ought to know what my purpose is both for you and for yours. You deny yourself food, not to fast but to gratify your grief; and such abstinence is displeasing to me. Such fasts are my enemies. I receive no soul which forsakes the body against my will. [...] My spirit rests only upon him ​that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and that trembles at my word.

Having thus outdone Jesus, who cried when Lazarus died, he ended the letter on a softer note:

[S]o long as breath animates my body, so long as I continue in the enjoyment of life, I engage, declare, and promise that Blæsilla’s name shall be forever on my tongue, that my labors shall be dedicated to her honor, and that my talents shall be devoted to her praise. No page will I write in which Blæsilla’s name shall not occur.

A beautiful tribute — except I bought a giant collection of Jerome’s letters, and Blaesilla’s name only shows up in seven of them.

Having pissed off enough people in Rome, Jerome high-tailed it to Bethlehem. It was there he took Paula and her other daughter Eustochium, and proceeded to live a life of diabolical virtue. Sequestered in a cave with his books, he spent the next 34 years of his life reading the classics the angel told him not to, writing the Latin Vulgate, and fighting with the other church fathers. He called the majestic St Ambrose** “a deformed little crow.” He quarreled sharply with both Chrysostom and Augustine. He called John, the patriarch of Jerusalem, a Judas and a Satan — “for whom Hell can never provide adequate punishment.” Christ said to the Apostles, “they will know you’re mine by the love you show for one another.” If this is the case, we have yet to know who St Jerome belongs to.

He was never officially confirmed a saint by the Catholic Church — a testament to the good sense of the Vatican. He earned the title by public acclaim after writing The Latin Vulgate — no small gift to mankind, as it made the Bible accessible to Europe — and his fifty-something works defending the church against “heretics.” Aside from this he set up a hospice for pilgrims in the Holy Land, and a school to teach children a variety of subjects.

These things being said, his personal letters show little-to-none of the Fruit of the Spirit. Instead we see pride, insolence, reckless tale-bearing, outright hatred, Scripture-twisting, and a lack of grace almost unparalleled in Patristic literature. Saint Jerome is what happens when you cross the arrogance of a Cicero with the intolerance of an Imam and the ignorance of a Southern Baptist.

May the grace of God be with him — and also with me, a man who either has the opposite flaws of Saint Jerome, or for every apparent mote, a log.

Yours,

-J

July 6th, 2026

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P.S. Why is Jerome such a pain in the ass? Why is he against good clothes, and food, and houses, and mourning, and sex? And probably more importantly, why did so many Christians find this inspiring?

The problem with the New Testament is that, if some passages are taken at face value, sometimes it feels morally, intellectually, and emotionally stifling. "The cares of this world" are seen as an obstacle to salvation (Matthew 13:18-23). How long would it be before somebody tried to throw them away? Suffering is seen as a badge of belonging (2 Timothy 3:12; 1 Peter 2:20-21). How long would it take for happiness to be considered a sign of perdition? In order to follow Jesus you have to “pick up your cross,” feeling lust for a neighbor is adultery, and hatred for any fellow man is murder. How long would it be for someone to confuse losing with winning — to cut off his balls like Origen, to try and mollycoddle a public enemy? The fact that St Jerome tried to do much of this and still live is impressive. The fact the he didn't know it’s impossible (and that expecting everyone else to do it is cruel) is more than just prideful. It’s Satanic. Nobody can love anyone else (or commit an act of charity) without wanting them to “do well.” And conversely, nobody can hate anyone else without wanting them to hit rock bottom like Saint Jerome.

The Old Testament on the other hand is liberating. The Psalms give you a license to feel — to curse, and yowl, and cry, and laugh. Lamentations gives you a license to mourn. The Song of Solomon gives you a license to lust. The Proverbs give you a license to think — to judge, and to get rich. Ecclesiastes gives you a license to doubt and question and despair. The Law gives you a right to have rights. By the New Testament almost all of this is either forbidden or in limbo; and “the saints” fight what they think is a war against sin nature, only to find themselves in a war against nature. It is technically impossible to be “a good Christian” and be a full person. Christianity touts the so-called “humane” virtues so hard that sometimes it becomes cruel to humanity.

Thus I thank God most of Christendom is half-assed. We have yet to see whether being human makes us frail or being frail makes us humane. Either way, the road to moral perfection has only two outcomes — one ending up like God, and the other ending up like St Jerome. And I think Jerome makes it clear that the “God outcome” is well beyond our ability. The end of the attempt is never loving. The byproduct of forcing the impossible is always loathing.

Do you want to be a good Christian? Be gracious and humble — examine yourself, beg for forgiveness, and then, if you’re trying to earn your salvation, give up.

*The ideal names for a boy are versatile — such as William, or Thomas. Baby Billy is a sure win. So is William for a politician or a professional, and Will or Bill for a strong man in general. And Thomas can fit a scholar well, or a doctor or a writer, as Tommy can fit a bike-riding scoundrel or a bare-knuckle boxer. A good name should be full and smart-sounding — easy to whittle down for pet names and parties; easy to puff back up when writing a resume.

**Of course St Jerome quarreled with St Ambrose. St Ambrose was a peacemaker and a statesman and that made them natural enemies. Will Durant, whose writings informed much of the essay above, writes in The Age of Faith,

The career of Ambrose (340?–398) illustrates the power of Christianity to draw into its service first-rate men who, a generation earlier, would have served the state. Born at Trier, son of the prefect of Gaul, he was by every precedent destined to a political career, and we are not surprised to hear of him next as provincial governor of northern Italy. Residing at Milan, he was in close touch with the emperor of the West, who found in him the old Roman qualities of solid judgment, executive ability, and quiet courage. Learning that rival factions were gathering at the cathedral to choose a bishop [PERSONAL NOTE: these “gatherings” of rival Christians were known to end in riots and murder], he hurried to the scene, and by his presence and his words quelled an incipient disturbance. When the factions could not agree on a candidate, someone suggested Ambrose; his name brought the people to an enthusiastic unanimity; and the governor, protesting and still unbaptized, was hurriedly christened, ordained to the diaconate, then to the priesthood, then to the episcopacy, all in one week (374).

He filled his new office with the dignity and mastery of a statesman. He abandoned the trappings of political position, and lived in exemplary simplicity. He gave his money and property to the poor, and sold the consecrated plate of his church to ransom captives of war. He was a theologian who powerfully defended the Nicene Creed, an orator whose sermons helped to convert Augustine, a poet who composed some of the Church’s earliest and noblest hymns, a judge whose learning and integrity shamed the corruption of secular courts, a diplomat entrusted with difficult missions by both Church and state, a good disciplinarian who upheld but overshadowed the pope, an ecclesiastic who brought the great Theodosius to penance, and dominated the policies of Valentinian III.

Little surprise that such a kindly, capable, and ultimately worldly saint would end up fighting with a blowhard, an ascetic, and a literary viper. One was made for building the world up. The other was made for tearing it down.

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Despite touting itself as the “least regulated state in the US,” you can’t just move to Idaho and do whatever you want. There are still rules, they say.

Chief among these are,

1. You can’t just “go hunting,” and, in fact, the state of Idaho requires you to have “a license.”

2. No matter how hard it is to find elk and shoot them, and despite the fact that everybody here eats beef, shooting cows is considered bad form — unmanly, even.

3. You have to make sure the cows you shoot aren’t somebody else’s. And finally,

4. This usually means hunting on “public property,” like some kind of communist.

These things combined ruin the whole experience of hunting, and, if not followed exactly, the thing that ends up being hunted is you.

All I wanted to say is that the Great American Experience is dead. Below you’ll find some other discoveries I made this week, and I hope they’re easier to swallow than what I already listed above.

Yours, in tears and coonskin cap,

-J

June 29th, 2026

Meliocentrists.

Atheists tend to worship Galileo — for telling the public that the universe doesn’t revolve around them.

Which is precisely the same reason atheists hate Christians — for telling them they aren’t the final authority; that the Light has some into the world and The World isn’t necessarily The Light; that their views are small and even contemptible in the face of eternity.

Breeding.

If you end up with one or two kids and think you’re “done,” just look at one of their faces. Is this somebody you’d get rid of? Or would you give everything you owned just to keep him alive?

If you have another baby, that’s exactly how you’d feel about him too.

Don’t be robbed by your lack of imagination. You’d pay any amount to have what you can’t yet see.

A double dose of incompetence.

Vows of poverty, chastity, silence — strange, but (historically) honorable.

Being dirt poor, being single at 30, getting tongue-tied — a disgrace.

We don’t measure a man by the state he’s currently in. We care more about what he can do.

The best move of the incapable and incompetent is to pretend they’re slumming on purpose — and thus that they prefer it. These are many times referred to as “monks” and “Stoics” — sometimes even saints.

But because they’re incapable and incompetent, they usually pretend somebody else caused them to fail — and that they hate it. Which adds another reason to hate them.

Whatever thy lot.

Whatever MY lot, it is well with my soul. — righteous.

Whatever THEIR lot, it is well with my soul — evil.

Now ask yourself a question. Aren’t these really the same thing? Why is it a good thing to accept the will of God for you and not to accept it for somebody else?

Christian ethics, at bottom, are the belief that everyone is important except yourself. Thus the comic genius of Joseph Heller,

Major Major’s father had a Calvinist’s faith in predestination and could perceive distinctly how everyone’s misfortunes but his own were expressions of God’s will.

— a case of Christianity inverted.

And splash with a hint of sin.

A man can’t be truly evil without some goodness. He requires some measure of trustworthiness, intelligence, charm, ability, and even some form of wisdom. Without these he goes nowhere. He might even be considered a victim.

Likewise, a man can’t be truly good without a little bit of badness. He requires some pugnacity, some craft, some guile, some sex, some fakery, some discontent with his own lot; some adherence to the here-and-now instead of eternity; some disrespect for the comfort and safety of somebody; some belief in his superiority to others, some preference for his family over others’; a willingness to occasionally break rules — an ability to let loose and have a good time while something else in the world is on fire. He doesn’t buy peace at any price. He will raise hell with those who threaten heaven. He knows who to cry for and who to laugh at, and hurt, and even kill.

If he lacks these things at certain times he’s less of a saint and more a liability. To be a really bad man, you must be a little bit good. To be a really good man, you must be a little bit bad.

Lightning never strikes twice.

Jesus says, in Matthew 23,

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’

And this highlights the most common mistake of the fake-righteous. Your prophet is almost never your father’s prophet.

What dad needed to hear isn’t necessarily what you need, because his sins aren’t necessarily the same sins as your sins. A prophet is as precise as a pin-prick and as electric as a bolt of lightning. He never strikes the same place twice because that would be missing the mark. Your prophet isn’t just right: he’s right on time — to be offensive to you, a moving target.

Those who pine for the old prophets, mimicking their dated messages and old styles, aren’t actually in favor of the new prophets.

They’re just librarians.

Two absurdities.

“We have to pass this bill to find out what’s in it.” — Nancy Pelosi.

“The Bible is the word of God” — from somebody who can’t tell you what’s in it.

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The psychology of her stance is both crazy and logical. The God of the heavens loved her while she was whoring around, fighting her husband, getting divorced, slitting her wrists and aborting her kid. She was given this deal so she cut one for others.

The uglier they were the more she had to love them. In fact she could only know she loved them when they were ugly. She read that parable of Christ’s where the ruler forgave his steward for big things and the steward didn’t forgive his servant for little things; and knowing what happened to that steward (he was tortured probably to death), and hearing Our Father was going to do the same to us (Christ’s words, not mine), she decided to not get tortured for eternity. She had no ground to stand on so she took others who were too drunk to stand up. They offered nothing and she offered everything. They made our world a worse place and she offered to make their world better. This is called the Catholic “preferential option for the poor.”

The people who take this stance always forget one thing. If the God of the Bible exists, He not only has the resources to do anything, but He is the resource. God not only knows the people to save, He knows which ones He can save. He has all the time in the world because He created the world before time. He begins things because He always knows the end of them. He can “throw Himself away” on hopeless causes because no cause to Him is hopeless.

Dorothy Day, on the other hand, is finite and mortal and can’t predict the future. Thus Dorothy Day can be wasted — and this process of wasting, according to the elect, is her “honor.” In fact the further she wastes herself the more honorable she is. What good is her mind for? Nothing — so long as she “has a heart.” I don’t know what everyone else thinks, but to me this makes her a giant dick.

To this brand of pathological do-gooders, the bum, the menace, the terror’s existence is simply what it is. The rest of us, to achieve sainthood, are told to live for him. We have everywhere to go and everything to do. The bum has simply to keep being a jackass. Does God throw him in hell? We aren’t told; but if we don’t do everything to make his life on earth a heaven, God will supposedly throw us there too. This is called a philosophy of uplift.

No mention is made of what we miss by being “saintly.” That instead of spending our time with a wretch we could be spending more time with our kids. That instead of paying for ugly things we could be buying art from Michaelangelo and thus keeping him in business. A man builds homes for us to live in and we’re supposed to ignore him. A man ruins a neighborhood and we’re supposed to give him a home. We turn the cold shoulder to our victims and heroes so we can uplift the villains.

We had time — precious time, petering out every second and lost for eternity — to love someone beautiful, someone honorable, someone brilliant, or stylish, or just, or prudent, or admirable, or dependable, or funny, or brave. Real heroes, big and small —beautiful people*. But we spent our short lives on the gutter because we were worried we might end up in a fire pit. We were told Heaven was full of good things. Then some of them showed up on earth and we chased them, and we were told because we chased them we could never be saints**.

Yours,
-J

November 27, 2018

PS: Dorothy Day had some idea that what she was doing was stupid. She wrote in her memoir Loaves and Fishes,

“This turning the other cheek, this inviting someone else to be a potential thief or murderer, in order that we may grow in grace—how obnoxious. In that case, I believe I’d rather be the striker than the meek one struck.”

After reading many articles on her, this is the only intelligent thing I’m aware she said. You may compare it with this statement from the magazine she founded, The Catholic Worker:

“Houses of hospitality are centers for learning to do the acts of love, so that the poor can receive what is, in justice, theirs, [emphasis mine] the second coat in our closet, the spare room in our home, a place at our table. Anything beyond what we immediately need belongs to those who go without.”

If they had possessions, I would rob them out of principle.

*Every so often I renew my old Christian prayer that God make me into something beautiful. Not quite useful. I don’t even always ask to be good. Just beautiful. Something worth watching, or staring in awe at. A work of art. God’s Sistine Chapel. To me this encompasses everything else, and acts as a shortcut. I used to pray to be good, but I tried being righteous and quite frankly I’d rather have friends.

**I think we all know, by this point, that most horrible things happen because someone was chasing beautiful things. Even so, I have a hard time believing that the way to get really beautiful things is by chasing ugly things. I have no idea what Dorothy’s philosophy does for your soul, but I know what it does to a city.

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Bion was such a sharp and controversial philosopher that people got tired of arguing with him and started making fun of his parents. It got so bad that he had to release a statement about it.

“My father was a freed slave,” he said. “He sold salted fish, and was so unremarkable that his crowning features were the brands on his face — a keepsake from his old master’s severity. My mother was the kind of woman you’d expect to marry such a man: straight out of a brothel. Then my father, who cheated the tax collector, was sold with our whole family. I was bought by an orator because I was young and charming, and when he died, I inherited all he had. I burned his writings, scraped together everything I could, came here to Athens, and took up philosophy. This is the blood and pedigree I claim, so let Persaeus and Philonides quit talking about it. You can judge me by my own merits.”

With that out of the way, everyone was forced to judge him by his own merits. He took the lowest seat* as Jesus later commanded, and was able to get on with his career of harassing the other philosophers.

We don't have any of his books, but his one-liners were fun and useful enough to pass around for two millennia. When someone asked him who has the most anxiety, he said “whoever wants to be the most happy.” He used to call old age “the harbor of all evils” since all of them like to take refuge there. Noting who gets hit with gossip and slander the hardest, he called fame the mother of all accusations. He called beauty “someone else’s good” since everybody sees you except yourself; and, knowing it takes money to make money, he called wealth “the sinews of success.”

He said not being able to bear evil is itself a great evil. Both he and Antisthenes are credited with the famous line, when asked whether to marry, if she’s ugly you’ll have to bear her; if she’s pretty you’ll have to share her. And in an age of slavery, prostitution, and conquest, he stated that it is better to gratify someone else with your own beauty than to pluck that of another; for the latter hurts both your body and soul.

Predating Jesus, he said the path to Hades is easy to travel — at any rate, men set off on it with their eyes closed. He said of a rich old miser, this man doesn't own property — property owns him. And recognizing the importance of humility, he used to say that a big ego is a big obstacle to progress.

Mirroring today’s there are old soldiers and bold soldiers, but there are no old, bold soldiers, Bion said that in youth men are brave, but in old age they excel in wisdom. He said the downside of being a miser is that you think your property belongs to you, but you get no more benefit from it than if it belonged to somebody else. He said wisdom surpasses the other virtues like sight surpasses the other senses — true, since the other virtues, applied the wrong way, are just as bad as vices. And he used to say that nobody should disparage old age, since everybody is trying so hard to reach it.

One day he saw a slanderer scowling. He said, “I can’t tell whether something bad happened to you or something good happened to somebody else.” And another time, when he was a fellow passenger with some worthless scoundrels, his ship was overtaken by pirates. “We’re done for if they recognize us,” his fellow sailors said — referring to their bad records. Agreeing with them, he comically shot back, “and I too if they don’t recognize me” — a double play on the idea of ransom and the importance of keeping good company.

What exactly was his philosophy? Nobody's quite sure, since he switched schools too many times to say — the mark of either a true fool or a real maverick and a seeker. At first he followed Plato’s Academy. Then he went for the cynicism of Diogenes. Then he followed Theodorus the atheist — a man known for mocking the gods, and being versatile in all kinds of sophistry. Then he followed Theophrastus, a follower of Aristotle. We don’t know whether he was a believer in any of them or just trying them out or mining what he could from them. But we know he was a master of all the different styles and had a great time making fun of everything.

His own style was theatrical, and he liked to use common language to jab at big subjects. His tastes were extravagant, and he loved to move from one city to another — sometimes throwing himself a parade on the way there. He was a gay horndog both for fun and to make allies. An extremely selfish man, he was big on the idea that “friends share property in common.” For this reason, even though students crowded into his lectures, not a single person ever chose to be his disciple.

He loved making fun of “the gods” — which is half noble and half crazy. To make jokes about the false myths and doctrines of the plebs is a good time. To make light of the magic and mystery of the universe is a mistake. Confounding one with the other and being “an atheist” doesn’t make you smarter than everyone else. It makes you confuse the absurdities of everyone else with the real majesty of God.

Which he found out by the end of his life, because he got sick. At that point the people of Chalcis (the place where he died) maintain that he got superstitious. He started reaching out to the gods any way he could, buying amulets and repenting of his irreverence and misdeeds. Because he made fun of everyone and "shared” all their stuff, nobody cared for him when he got sick, and he was in a state of absolute ruin — until some other wiser philosopher sent him two servants. His greed burned all his bridges. His extravagance blew all his savings. His pride led him to all kinds of embarrassment. Proof (like with Solomon) that teaching wisdom and living it are two completely different art forms.

In the end, Bion’s life proved two things. First, that the middle years, when we're healthy and strong and successful, are fleeting — a mere season. And we need to save up money and raise children and good-will for the end of it**. As another “great philosopher” put it,

When I was younger, so much younger than today
I never needed anybody's help in any way
But now these days are gone and I'm not so self assured
Now I find I've changed my mind, I've opened up the doors

And second, that you can make fun of religion all you want; but you came from Someone and you’re going back to Him whether you like it or not. So before cracking too many jokes, make sure you distinguish between Him and the gullibility, the hypocrisy, and the misplaced zeal of His goofy-ass followers.

Yours,

-J

June 9th, 2026

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*Taking the lowest seat (as I’ve mentioned before) doesn’t just mean putting yourself in last place forever. The goal is always to finish in first.

What, after all, is a great businessman? Someone who knows how to deliver the goods. And what is a great leader? Somebody who can get you somewhere you want to go. What is a great doctor, a rock star, a lover, or a sage? Somebody who knows how to fix you, how to make you feel, how to make you shine. To “be somebody” you have to first do something. And the key is, it has to be for somebody else. The very neediness of man is the source of our greatness.

As the poet Rumi put it,

Every craftsman searches for what’s not there to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the hole where the roof caved in.

A water carrier chooses the empty pot.

A carpenter stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint of emptiness, which they then start to fill.

Their hope is for emptiness, so don’t think you must avoid it.

Emptiness contains what you need!

Dear soul, if you weren't friends with the vast nothing, why would you always be casting your net into it, and waiting so patiently? This invisible ocean has given you such abundance, but still you call it “death” — that which provides you sustenance and work.

Does this mindset of looking for needs and filling them make you a leader or a servant? The answer is both — but one has to come before the other. And if you get it backwards, you finish in last.

**Regarding being famous and dying alone, Samuel Johnson writes in The Rambler,

It is not possible to be regarded with tenderness except by a few. That merit which gives greatness and renown diffuses its influence to a wide compass, but acts weakly on every single breast. It is placed at a distance from common spectators, and shines like one of the remote stars, of which the light reaches us, but not the heat.

The wit, the hero, the philosopher, whom their tempers or their fortunes have hindered from intimate relations, die, without any other effect than that of adding a new topic to the conversation of the day. They impress none with any fresh conviction of the fragility of our nature, because none had any particular interest in their lives, or was united to them by a reciprocation of benefits and endearments.

This is really much simpler than it sounds. If you want to be great to somebody — to be adored, and idolized, and missed — don’t be the President. Just be a good dad.

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It’s said that when God created the earth, one third of the angels disapproved and went rogue. 67% is a solid D or a failing grade in school, but in presidential polls it counts as a solid win — certainly better than President Trump right now, who ranks far lower than God did at creation, but is nearly as good in his own opinion.

The highest approval rating any president ever got was 90% for George W. Bush in 2001, but we feel this is unfair since he hadn’t done anything, was about to botch everything, and technically he cheated. He had all the heavy lifting done for him by Osama Bin Laden. To prove this, right after Dubya we rank his dad, who got 89% for kicking ass instead of getting his ass kicked. But dad raised taxes, so we fired him.

Then there’s FDR in 1945, riding high at 84% right before Harry Truman got 87% for nuking Japan — another so-so president saved by a war crime. And JFK comes in at 72 in 1961 for doing God-knows-what. Proof that in America, cuteness will get you practically anywhere. We know he certainly ranked higher with every lady except his wife.

Lyndon B Johnson comes in at 78% in 1963, mainly for wrecking every bulwark of greatness in the whole country, from immigration to welfare to whether you can fire losers. God created the Milky Way and He gets only 67%; LBJ ruined it and he got 78.

(As an honorable mention, Bill Clinton gave China “special trade relations,” taking an angry, broken, treacherous and communist nation from rock-bottom to superpower, and making sure American jobs went overseas to slave labor. And how is he rated? Very well it turns out, ending with 65% — the highest exit poll for any post-war President. Mostly because the economy “did well” while falling apart).

And what about last place? Not willing to be outdone in anything, the worst rating is also George W. Bush at 19% in 2008 — mostly because he had done things by then. What goes up must come down, they say. Second we have Harry Truman at 22% in 1952, first because of the economy, and next that we had to fight the communists he’d spent the whole last war saving. And third we have Richard Nixon at 24% in 1974 because of the Watergate Scandal — due to the fact that Americans, at the time, had no idea how bad the scandals would be by 2015. And why would we behave so badly? Mostly because we were demoralized and replaced due to policies set by Lyndon B Johnson.

So far President Trump is doing horribly in the polls — mainly for trying to undo the worst things all the presidents did before him. This means manning the border, sending back third-world illegals, bringing jobs back from China, putting an end to riots and lawlessness, ending DEI as far as possible, prosecuting welfare fraudsters, letting people speak truth on Twitter, cleaning up the FBI and the military, trying to make voting fair again, taking on Big Food and Big Pharma, and beating the shit out of Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. For attempting these things he was ranked a measly 33%, mostly because of inflation. Combined with Bush 1’s tax hikes and Clinton's boomtown, this proves that American priorities aren’t always in the right place. But they’re certainly always in the same place.

All things considered, this puts God’s rating pretty high — especially since He was getting rated by angels, whose standards are (in this writer’s opinion) a little bit rigid. He would probably have done better if He'd lowered the price of gas. But we can thank God that at least He wasn’t ranked by Americans, who would have polled Him at 85 for flooding the world, 23 for nuking Sodom and Gomorrah*, and a 55 score on Rotten Tomatoes for the four Gospels, women, and the synapses we used to rank Him.

Yours,

-J

June 1st, 2026

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P.S. A glaring question might be asked here. Why is George W Bush first? And why is he joined at the top by a list of mediocrities, ne’er-do-wells, and nincompoops? Where are Washington, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson — the ones who built this place? Where are the ones who conquered all the way to Texas and California? The ones who wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? The ones who didn’t open the border to the third world, or bury us in debt, or ruin our schools, sell us to banks, mire us in wars, break our laws, tax us to death, and embarrass us overseas?

We’re left with one of two options. Either polls hadn’t been invented yet, or Americans are retarded. And depending on the subject and the year, my money is on both. (Maybe, counting my blessings, I should just be happy Americans did the reverse and put them on the money. But then again we put “In God We Trust” there too, and we know how much Americans actually take after Him).

We know why George W Bush was dead last. By the end of his term the money-men had robbed and wrecked the economy. They escaped with Golden Parachutes and George Bush bailed out their companies. We were mired in two unwinnable wars and we destabilized a good chunk of the Middle-East. Because of this, millions of “refugees” — single, military-aged Islamic men — were flooding our allies in Europe. Our border was flooded by illegals and the national debt was going sky-high. He started the trend of directly bribing the American people, in times of trouble, with cash deposits. He created a surveillance state which was used to spy on and prosecute innocent Americans. We saw pictures of Arabs getting tortured, sans-trial, in secret off-shore facilities. In practically every serious metric Bush was a failure. He was given the world and decided to screw the pooch.

*Why would God get 85 for flooding the world and 23 for nuking Sodom and Gomorrah? Because in America, that is currently both the public opinion and the law.

Right now it’s legal to burn the American flag (which represents all of us) and a “hate crime” to tire-burn a rainbow crosswalk (which represents maybe 5-10%). In America you can wish everyone fire and brimstone, but if you just wish it to blacks, you’re out of every job except food trucks and construction.

In this country it's okay to hate “your own people” or the whole country; but the act of putting art into your distaste — of thinking, of preference, when working in any sizable business — is verboten.

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I don't consider watching sports a necessary prerequisite to being a man. Depending on the sport, playing them is more like it.

I consider knowing sports stats and knowing Pokemon stats to be exactly the same level of manly. So for those of you who keep calling my Man Card into question every time the draft comes up and I’d rather take a nap, here’s a list of things that make a man really manly — and sometimes even god-like. I fit a good chunk of these, but I'd like to fit as many as I can.

1. Diagnosing and fixing your own car, or building or remodeling a house.

2. Being the leader of an effective, ass-kicking, money-making team, or a military unit.

3. Having muscles.

4. Being an expert in philosophy, history, economics, theology, law, or politics.

5. Being able to take punches, literally and metaphorically, and give them.

6. Running into danger when people need your help.

7. Catching flying objects when they're coming at your face — without flinching.

8. Publicly admitting that 99% of the time the police are useless in an emergency, and opting to be your family's first armed line of defense.

9. Being well-versed in Moses’ laws and Solomon’s proverbs.

10. Keeping a cool head when the public is going hysterical for some cause, and even going against it.

11. Knowing the difference between telling the truth and running your mouth.

12. Admitting when you're wrong.*

An objection might be made here. Can’t a woman run a kick-ass business, or be familiar with Plutarch or Schopenhauer, or turn a robber into Swiss cheese? Yes, alongside some others listed here, and I would argue she’d be more of a woman. The people who misunderstand me here forget the opposite of a man isn’t a woman. A man who fails to be a man doesn’t become a woman. He just fails to distinguish himself from the boys.

The eternal fight of manhood isn’t to distinguish yourself from the does, but to make yourself visibly superior to the fawns and the other young bucks. This is how you get the best does — and also how you make the best fawns.

Yours,
-J

January 8th, 2020

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PS: The things listed above are mostly different, I think, from raw, physical masculinity. But raw and physical masculinity isn't something to be left out. Country music is in fact the last scene in these United States, barring some strains of Christian worship, where a baritone sounds right at home — and this I think is a great part of its appeal.

A woman who goes to a country show usually sees a man who sounds like he belongs with the fields or the rivers or the mountains — who has stubble, tight jeans, and makes you feel like he could walk off the stage and immediately get somebody pregnant. Or at the very least change a tire. This puts him in overt superiority to the gay and scrawny eunuch of pop music — usually left-wing men who look like they either smell, or have a disease, or came from the ghetto, or from outer space. Either way you know they can’t save you in a fight.

I theorize a good country singer is to modern, masculinity-starved women like catnip; and his voice and lyrics are so soothing they're willing to overlook the banality of the music. There's no famous drummer like Keith Moon in country, and no guitarist known for his fingerwork like Angus Young. In country there's the singer, the whole singer, and nothing but the singer.

At country shows you won’t see anything revolutionary, but because of this reliance on high testosterone and an overwhelmingly sturdy, almost obvious sound, the kinds of women country attracts are many times top-notch as far as biology is concerned. They tend to be warm and natural and have long hair. I've met plenty of other women who've liked other music and turned out alright; but the ones who love sad lyrics and chest hair are the ones you want on a warm summer night. (It could also be argued, on the other hand, according to country's lyrics, that these women will ruin you).

*One of the finest things about me, I think, is my ability to apologize. Because I have the spark of life in me I'm wrong often and embarrassingly; and when I am I take the initiative — and quickly**. I expect mistakes out of myself and from others. I'm ready to forgive and ready for forgiveness. I have yet to deny anyone who apologizes. My anger is swift and brutal but I can end it in an instant. I know of nobody, except the lost cause and the unrepentant, whom I've left behind for dead.

Thus one of the worst things to me about feminists is their insistence that women shouldn't have to apologize — “like a man doesn’t.” A man who screws up through his own fault and refuses to admit it might be a man, but he's bad at it. He takes no responsibility for himself and his actions, the crucial and obvious foundation of all manhood. He sees the bridge of all trust and progress and he burns it.

Thus a woman who refuses to apologize so she can be “equal with men” is much worse than a bad man. She's a halfwit modeling herself blindly after the worst men. She claims all men as her equals, and then makes the jackass her guru.

**A recent example is the other day when Kobe died. Someone at work said it was sad and I said that it wasn't. I made the argument that much better men had died this year, and we shouldn't waste our energy mourning another worthless baller.

The next day I was treated to a slew of evidence that Kobe wasn't just a rando who played sports, but a devout Catholic, a solid family man, and a hard-working, good-exampling all-star American. So I went back to this coworker and told him I'm an assclown. I had judged a great man because he played in the company of ne'er-do-wells and nincompoops and professional jugglers. I was right of course that we put too much stock in sports and sport players. But most of us were never good enough to rub shoulders with Kobe — or with Pat Tillman.

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Before any Republicans accuse me of being a hopeless idealist, a traitor, or another conservative milquetoast, I want to say one thing. And it’s that if anybody deserves to lose their vote, it’s Democrats.

A quick look at the cities they run proves they shouldn’t be allowed to run a dog park*. Detroit was called Motor City and The Paris of the Midwest. San Francisco was called The Golden City. Chicago was the Paris of the Prairie. Cincinnati was The Queen City of the West. Philadelphia and Boston were both called The Athens of America. Nobody calls them these names anymore — unless of course they’re being sarcastic.

Memphis, Portland, New York City, Seattle, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and even Washington DC were also known at one time as beacons of civilization — remarkable for culture, industry, and architecture. Now each of them is known for rape and murder, robberies and race riots, junkies, white and capital flight, bad schools, rotting factories, infrastructure on the fritz, and crazy people shitting on streets. And somehow, despite being full of third-worlders, white false Christs and killer clowns, they’re still some of the most unaffordable places to live in the US. A hell of a legacy for the left wing — or, more appropriately, a legacy from hell.

What this proves is that, if we require testing to drive a car, we ought to test people before letting them drive a city. This test should include basic economics, civics, and, in a city of 300,000 or more, a test about the structure of state and city governments. But this is almost beside the point. In any remotely democratic environment, stupid people have always been allowed to vote. And I remind you that people always think the person who votes against them is stupid anyway.

Thus the whole point of a republic isn’t to enforce all the most brilliant ideas. It’s to not let one arrogant and selfish group bulldoze all the others. It’s the belief that if any group oversteps its boundaries, the pain itself should lead the other people to fix it. In other words, the real question today in our republic is whether stupid people should be allowed to cheat.

Because gerrymandering is cheating. And our states have been gerrymandered badly for a long time — most usually to benefit Democrats. But when Texas accused Democrats of leaving the border open, thus flooding Texas with illegal immigrants and giving representatives and electoral votes to New York and California, Texas redistricted to “balance things out” — one obvious cheat for another.

California responded by nearly shutting Republicans out. Then Virginia tried to shut Republicans out, and their state Supreme Court, with great reason, said they broke constitutional law in the way they tried to do it. The court said you had to do the wrong thing in the right way — and the federal Supreme Court agreed. They said there’s no federal right to stop anyone from shutting out the other party in any state. Amazingly, according to federal law, it’s only illegal to shut out a race.

This made things even hairier, because the entire South had already been gerrymandered to favor blacks. Now the whole South is trying to undo it, and whether right or wrong, the Democrats are crying foul — primarily because they’re losing. Democrats say they had to gerrymander the South because the South had a history of shutting out black votes. Which, if you look at a district map, is the same case Republicans could make about being entirely shut out of New England**. (Currently, Republicans comprise about 40 percent of New Englanders, and get zero elected representatives in Congress. Black people make up around 20 percent of the South — and before 2026, due to race-based gerrymandering, they picked about 15 seats. All of which went to Democrats).

I’m not saying Democrats have a good case against the South. I’m also not saying Republicans are all right. Some of the redistricting Republicans are doing — such as splitting Memphis into three distinct districts — is clearly a power play. What I’m saying is that if we don’t quit all this cheating, we’ll quickly find ourselves in a race to the bottom. Once we’re convinced that votes are either fake or don’t count, there’s no peaceful resolution available. You either make voting fair or it’s “taxation without representation.” And nobody should know better about how that ends than Americans.

The big obstacle we have to get over to fix all this, other than cheaters, is psychological — and it's called “clock setting.” Clock setting is when you start your story when the other guy struck first. It doesn’t say why he hit you, and thus pretends you didn’t do anything to deserve it. It’s a cheap move designed to wipe away your sins and rob the enemy of all merit — like saying your husband punched you without saying you hit him over the head with a frying pan first. Or like saying Christians tried to steal The Holy Land without mentioning the Muslims already stole it from Christians. Or saying what Germany did to Jews without explaining what communist Jews were trying to do to Germany (hint: it already happened in Soviet Russia***). In this case Democrats and Republicans both say the other drew first blood. I’m here to tell you why that almost doesn't matter.

Gandhi said an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind because once you start looking at the paper trail, almost everyone can accuse their enemy of drawing first or clock-setting. And once you go too far back in the chain of events everything begins to get silly. One moment you’re fighting because somebody socked you in the nose. And the next you’re arguing because Charles VI took Naples from Spain.

So if you want to know where to really begin a conflict, a better question would be where does it end? Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. This is because any idiot can start a war; but it takes a certain kind of man to make peace. And heaven can only be filled with the latter.

Thus the best solution to cheating in elections isn’t to cheat back, but to remove all grounds for accusation. It would be to end birthright citizenship immediately for children of illegal aliens. It would be to count only citizens on the census, thus denying extra representatives and electoral votes to anyone who wouldn’t be allowed to vote anyway. It would be requiring an ID at voting booths, giving everyone a federal holiday to vote, and getting rid of electronic voting. It would also get rid of ballot harvesting and (aside from the military) voting-by-mail — two common causes of legitimate suspicion. And finally, we should force every state to have a bi-partisan commission for redistricting, to ensure nobody is allowed to do any gerrymandering.

The alternative to this is cheat or be cheated. And to be frank, in the long run, on this level, I think the Democrats have a history of winning***.

Yours,

-J

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*An important question might be asked here. If Republicans are so great, why do Democrats run all the biggest cities? Why, in the last 50 years, have they owned the most centers of industry and culture?

My answer is simple. You can’t turn a village into an industrial society with leftism. Leftism can only thrive where some other non-leftist has already built something great. Leftism is a taking of capital — not a making of capital. Unlike business, which creates products and services which didn't exist, leftism is a reimagining and repurposing of wealth that already exists. Thus leftists are strongest only where there is capital to take. By nature, leftism is parasitic.

A city can only get big because geniuses build big things. Then it attracts people who who can't dream stuff on their own, but need good jobs. Then, once the population swells, people show up who are allured by the anonymity, the opportunity, the novelty and sex of a big city, and can barely hold the worst jobs.

Once a city reaches this state, the geniuses usually get cocky and greedy and overstep their boundaries. The booming market drives home prices up, displacing the incapables and the natives, at which point the leftist shows up, calling attention to the crimes and/or indiscretions of the geniuses. And he woos the job-holders, the racial “minorities,” and the proletariat with promises of loot.

At which point the genius is either cut down to size, or he packs up his bags and high-tails it somewhere else.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that in 2023 alone, more firms migrated to red Florida and Texas than any place else — a relocation of HQs numbering in the hundreds. And by contrast, no state lost more firms than blue California, Illinois, and New York. Among these illustrious losses over the years are Chevron, Tesla, Oracle, Charles Schwab, Hewlett Packard, Citadel, McKesson, X (formerly known as Twitter), AECOM, FICO, Public Storage, Dutch Bros and SpaceX. Hollywood itself has fled to places like Canada and Georgia. JP Morgan has more employees in Texas than in New York now, and Goldman Sachs is building a giant campus in Dallas. Starbucks shifted thousands of jobs to Nashville. Boeing moved their 787 engineering and assembly teams to South Carolina. And Amazon is relocating thousands of jobs out of Seattle and Washington to avoid excruciating taxes.

According to Seattle's KOMO News, dozens of Washington’s major companies, including Alaska Airlines, Amazon, Costco, Microsoft, Nordstrom, PSE, Zillow, T-Mobile, Redfin, Virginia Mason, WaFd Bank, Weyerhaeuser, Puget Sound Energy, and the freaking Seattle Mariners, just sent a letter to the governor, begging him to revise the state’s new taxes and budget. They cited “the largest tax hikes in the state's history,” and “a threat to the state’s economic stability.” The response from Democrat leaders was that the big producers can suck it.

The Association of Washington Businesses now reports that one out of every four businesses is openly considering leaving Washington.

***Are leftists really better at cheating?

Leftism, at bottom, is the idea that the system is rotten and it has to be broken. Conservatism, at face value, is the idea that a system is worth keeping and has to be preserved. Thus one of us values process, decorum, and fair-play more than the other.

Leftists are made by definition to cheat. Conservatives are almost designed by God to be cheated.

****How involved were the Jews in the spread of communism? Orlando Figes notes, in his history of the Russian Revolution, that the chief rabbi of Moscow once joked The Trotsky's make the revolutions and the Bronsteins pay the bills.

**Because all this talk of districts and cheating is hard to picture, here are some pictures.

This is the map Virginia Democrats tried to use, which was shot down (thank God) by the state Supreme Court:

This is how rotten it was:

Below is the current shutout of Republicans in New England, which has been this way for a long time:

Below is a comparison between Republicans getting shut out in Massachusetts and Democrats getting shut out in Tennessee. Note: this is the Tennessee map before Republicans redrew it, splitting Memphis into three districts, and eliminating the last Democratic stronghold:

And finally, this is a map of what the South has looked like for a while, and what it could look like by the end of the year — right in time for midterms:

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