I often wonder if God recognizes his own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar crystal and saccharine.  -Ray Bradbury

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.  -Voltaire

A BLM activist has been shot in the head not by police or white people, but by a young black man.  Which is not a surprising culprit, except... why are we all supposed to pretend police and white people are the biggest threats to black lives?  I suggest the reason:  To disempower whites and police.  It's a fraud.

White privilege is real.  It's a thing and everything.  But I have two problems with it, as told by the left:

1) It ignores black privilege and asian privilege.  But every unchosen characteristic has some advantage and some disadvantage, depending on who's around.

2) It emphasizes race privilege over, and to the exclusion of, an infinite number of other similar privileges.  Why?  Because it, unlike counless others, taps into and amplifies feelings of white guilt and black victimhood.  It plays into the left's favorite moral melodrama.

“History is a record of "effects" the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.” -Joseph Schumpeter

“Imagine that a ship is sinking in the ocean with 300 passengers on board and only 200 life-preservers.  The only just solution is that everyone drown.”  -Thomas Sowell

Many death-penalty opponents say, "It's not going to bring your loved one back."  Google it -- tons of them say this.  To which I now respond, "WHAT?!  It doesn't reincarnate them like Lazarus?!"

Leftist-anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated William McKinley who died on September 14, 1901.  Czolgosz was convicted and was sitting in the electric chair on October 29, 1901.

And yet Nikolas Cruz, who murdered 17 at Parkland, has not even begun his trial 1,217 days later.  The search for perfect justice in our system has created terrific injustice elsewhere -- for the families who have to wait 30 years for the sentence to be meted out, for the taxpayers who have to pay millions to convict a man who OBVIOUSLY DID IT, and so on.

Most of us look back on the old days of shaming out-of-wedlock children and fat people with disgust.  But yet -- what if that did untold good?  It's a genuinely unresolved question for me.

It takes a great man to be a good listener.  -Calvin Coolidge

"Feminists have no idea that some women like to flirt with danger because there is a sizzle in it. You know what gets me sick and tired? The battered-woman motif. It’s so misrepresented, the way we have to constantly look at it in terms of male oppression and tyranny, and female victimization. When, in fact, everyone knows throughout the history of the world that many of these working-class relationships where women get beat up have hot sex. They ask why won’t she leave him? Maybe she won’t leave him because the sex is very hot."  –Camile Paglia

"It has been said by much wiser people than me that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, what I’ve seen during my time in Washington is that every party in power will always want to exercise absolute power, absolutely."  -Joe Manchin

“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”  -Milan Kundera

"Saying the ends of the political spectrum are Communism and Fascism is like saying the ends of the sex spectrum are dudes and Caitlyn Jenner."

I watched The Sands of Iwo Jima.  It was the best war movie I've ever seen:  It had a moral depth not found in more modern, essentially pacifist war movies.

"I'd like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living. I'd like to know why they make excuses for cowards who spit in the faces of the police and then run behind the judicial sob sisters. I can't understand these people who carry placards to save the life of some criminal, yet have no thought for the innocent victim.”  -John Wayne