I spent my first year after high school at a local community college where I took a drama class. I didn’t audition for the first fall production, Bus Stop, because getting a part would mean quitting my weekend job at the movie theater (and all those free movies and free popcorn and soda), but when there were auditions for Twelfth Night, I decided to go for it.

I’ll admit when I first tried to read through the script I found it fairly incomprehensible. Cliff Notes helped me figure it out. As in many Shakespeare comedies, mistaken identities are central to the plot and star-crossed lovers abound. 

An instructor at the school directed the play and cast himself in the plum role of Malvolio. I’m pretty sure that was the entire reason the play was chosen that season. I was cast as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, the greatest fool in a play full of fools. In the last century, Alec Guinness, Christopher Plummer, and Paul Scofield, all played the role on stage, and Richard E. Grant in a film adaptation. I, um, wasn’t as good as those gentlemen. I may have done as poorly in the part as anyone who has ever attempted the role.

From Delmiro Junior, Photo ID: 2253076737. Via Shutterstock

I was watching a football game with a friend some years ago, and a defensive lineman knocked Tom Brady down.  Well, he reached around the guy who was blocking him and shoved Brady from behind, who then fell down.  The referee called roughing the passer.  My friend and I both played football in our youth, and we were offended by the destruction of the game we love.  I pointed out that football is a game of risk and reward.  If you want to send out more receivers and keep fewer guys in to block, then you’re risking your QB getting hurt.  It’s the job of the offensive coordinator to protect the QB, not the refs.  That’s what makes football interesting.

I had a diverse career in medicine, as I have described before. I retired from full-time practice when I turned 50 at the end of 1999. (The artist known as Prince had nothing to do with choosing that date.) I spent several years trying to decide what to do going forward and none of those ideas panned out as I had hoped, but none of those ideas cost me much money.

Between 2008 and 2012 I worked as a traveling radiologist, working at hospitals that had fired their radiology group and then had to use guys like me to fill the void. I was very well paid and enjoyed all of it. I only worked one week out of two or three and had control of my schedule. I worked for most of those years in Joplin, MO, and would fly into Tulsa on Sunday night and then fly back the next Saturday morning. The airport in Tulsa had a large carport that contained the car rental companies. When I would pick up a car, there were strange noises broadcast through the garage. I told the attendant at the pickup point that it sounded like monkeys hollering. He said, yes indeed—it was the sound of monkeys and other jungle noises to try to keep the pigeons from crapping on all of the cars. I asked him if it worked. He just shrugged and asked, “What do you think?”

Several years ago, YouTube started placing PragerU videos on a “filter” list, meaning they’re treated like pornography; deemed unsuitable for children and other sensitive audiences, and are thus banned from viewing on YouTube.  They’ve done this to over 100 PragerU videos so far, including videos about Martin Luther King and The Ten Commandments.  This is not demonetizing.  This is censorship, from a supposedly public forum.  PragerU’s lead attorney has posted a typical PragerU five-minute video, explaining the lawsuit PragerU has filed against YouTube.  He calls it the most important lawsuit in the world.  And he may be right.  Required watching — worth five minutes of your time:

It is astonishing that the UK government is so committed to defending immigrants who rape and murder and “groom” and terrorize other people, that they are now threatening to arrest anyone in the world who so much as criticizes their current policy. The entire media has fallen in line, portraying Muslim gangs as “defenders,” those who stand for freedom and life as “racists and fascists.”

Even the centre-right Telegraph describes anyone who so much as identifies the religion of the latest murderer (who knifed three little girls to death) as “far-right.” They are arresting and imprisoning anyone who is so daring and revolutionary as to post an opinion on Facebook that does not agree with the Received Opinion.

It is worth noting that while Christians and Muslims generally desire that everyone should convert to their faith, Islam has a concept about Islamic lands that is inherently and necessarily expansionist. As per wiki:

In classical Islamic law, there are three major divisions of the world which are dar al-Islam (lit. territory of Islam), denoting regions where Islamic law prevails,^[1] dar al-sulh (lit. territory of treaty) denoting non-Islamic lands which are at peace or have an armistice with a Muslim government,^[2] and dar al-harb (lit. territory of war), denoting lands that share a border with dar al-Islam and have not concluded an armistice.^[3]

Patrick Bet-David did an interesting podcast recently with Neil Howe (see video at end of this post).  Lots of interesting stuff here, but one part really caught my attention.  Bet-David described a concept from a book by Lawrence Miller which went something like this:  Every company/corporation goes through a similar life cycle.  You have a founder, with a great idea.  A sort of prophet, who inspires others to follow his lead.  And this leads to a predictable chain of events:

That founder attracts ‘barbarians’ – people who get things done, regardless of the obstacles faced by a small young company in a competitive environment.  Those barbarians then attract builders and explorers, who expand the company, build infrastructure, and grow the company.  The company gets too big for the founder to manage.  He hires administrators.  Those administrators attract lawmakers and bureaucrats.  The resulting flow of money and power attracts aristocrats.  And then everything collapses.

Bet-David then compared that cascade of events to the life cycle of a country.  He points out that America is very wealthy, yet many people feel that America as a country is over.  He implies that he thinks that they may be right, if Mr. Miller’s description of the life cycle of a corporation really does apply to countries as well.

The astonishingly low quality of leadership in the Democratic party is the fault of the misnamed “mainstream” media and their wealthy elite enablers. There is a simple Darwinian explanation for this dismal outcome.

In an earlier incarnation, the press functioned like a predator to remove unfit, corrupt, dishonest, or incompetent elected officials of both parties.  But that genera of journalistic species approaches extinction because of the loss of the full range of its primary food sources: newspaper classified ads, a solid flow of ad revenue for broadcast networks (with no cable competition), and expensive, glossy, highly professional ads for other print media.

The late Joe Sobran once remarked that Ted Kennedy was so concerned about not imposing his religion on others that he did not impose it on himself.  That was a great line given the well-known antics of the late Massachusetts senator.  Sadly, it carries a broader applicability in that the elite culture in Western nations now bars the assertion of even the most obvious, uncontroversial civilizational values.  We can’t impose our own values.  We cannot celebrate the achievement of the most humanistic, most productive, most just legal culture in human history without being called xenophobic, bigoted, white supremacist, colonialist, etc.  Anti-western immigrants can flout basic values such as respect for women, fundamental property rights, and the rule of law without fear of pushback of any kind.  The institutional left in Britain, Canada, France, and the USA now deploy law enforcement power to crush those who sensibly call for exactly that needed pushback. We cannot assert, much less impose our values in our own countries.

There is a useful phrase found in The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, by Gad Saad (2020): “suicidal empathy.”  It sums up the mindset of those who need to refrain from adverse judgment of conspicuously bad behavior by designated “victim” groups.  The astonishing arrogance of upscale white women who believe that the cognitive transformation of white people offered in tripe like DiAngelo’s White Fragility would simultaneously eliminate self-destructive behavior, educational dysfunction, and family breakdown in the black underclass.  It is rampant narcissism metastasized into magical thinking.