Hidden Messages of Water

Masaru Emoto. The Hidden Messages of Water. Hillsboro, Oregon: Beyond Worlds Publishing, 2004. 157 p. Convinced that Hamlet was entirely correct that there is more in heaven and earth than philosophy (or theology) dreams, I am, out of principle, more credulous than most, but even I am a skeptic . . . . Continue Reading »

Orwell and English prose

In his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell cites this from Harold Laski: “I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter . . . . Continue Reading »

Turn of civilization

At the end of his wonderful essay on “Art and Sacrament,” the Welsh poet and painter David Jones included a fragment that he wrote and rewrote over several decades. Here is wisdom: I said, ah! what shall I write? I inquired up and down (he’s tricked before with his manifold . . . . Continue Reading »

Wise as serpents

From Francis Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientiarum , 7.1: “For as the fable goes of the basilisk, that if he sees you first, you die for it, but if you see him first, he dies; so itis with deceits, impostures, and evil arts, which, if they be first espied, they lose their life, but if they . . . . Continue Reading »

Me and the Holocaust

Dr. Sean M. Quinlan, an Asst. Prof. of History at the University of Idaho, has written an open letter to U of I President Timothy White in which he renews various charges lodged against Douglas Wilson, Steve Wilkins, George Grant, and me a few years back. It makes the insightful contribution of . . . . Continue Reading »

Domesticity

In an essay in What’s Wrong With the World , Chesterton challenges the complaint that home-making is narrow and demeaning for women. On the contrary: “woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there . . . . Continue Reading »

The non-revolution

In a statistically rich discussion of global trends in family life, Castells notes that in the US “The number of sex partners in the last 12 months shows a limited range of sexual partnerships for the overwhelming majority of the population: 66.7 percent of men and 74.7 percent of women had . . . . Continue Reading »

Abortion and crime

Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that various factors have contributed to the surprising decline in crime rates during and since the 1990s, but among these is the legalization of abortion. According to the reviewer in TNR, “After abortion was legalized, a . . . . Continue Reading »

LWA’s

Byron, a character in Arthur Phillips 2002 novel, Prague (set, of course, in Budapest), presents his theory of advertizing to “LWA’s” - Long Wolf Aspirants. Real Lone Wolfs, he explains, “don’t respond to advertising, but there aren’t more than a dozen of them on . . . . Continue Reading »