SelfAdoration.com

My second-favorite laugh line from Atlas Shrugged is the reporter who effuses, “I know what I’d like to be: I wish I could be a man who covers news.”

I bring it up in light of the lamentation in The Hill about the blatant ‘progressive’ bias in virtually all ‘news’ reporting. What seemed funny to me when I first read Rand’s vast dystopian tableau is by now virtually inescapable: The media is propaganda, and everything in it must be deemed a lie of some form. But the bias is not simply ‘progressive’ but, more critically, is pervasively anegoistic and anti-individual-rights – and it is not just a phenomenon of the so-called left.

When you look aghast upon our once-just society, now all-but-gone full-looter, remind yourself that it was William F. Buckley who published the worst denunciation of Atlas Shrugged in the pages of the National Review, a hateful screed written by an allegedly-repentant Soviet spy.

My favorite laugh line in the book? #BrotherYouAskedForIt!

From May of 2012, a free-wheeling anthropological history of the idea of conservatism – the fanatical preservation of the status quo – illustrating why you will not be released from your self-imposed bondage by anyone but your self.

In other words, a typically light-hearted exploration of existential egoism.

Do you want more ideas like this? Help me spread them with your effort, your enthusiasm and your deeply appreciated contributions to The Church of Splendor.

From church yesterday: How does romance turn into storgic love? How does that become a family.

At Youtube, The Cul de Sac Hero offered this: “Yours is the correct attitude towards life on this planet.”

I’ll take more-correct, anyway, with what I hope is a better map to flourishing for others to improve upon and perfect.

My stand: Just because we humans can quibble about our nature doesn’t mean we don’t have one. I am exploring how we can make our choices more perfectly correspondent to that nature.

Mary Eberstadt in National Review:

Beneath the swagger and snarl of jailhouse feminism is something pathetic: a search for attention (including, obviously, male attention) on any terms at all.

If that means being trussed up like a turkey, so be it. If loping about on TV in your birthday suit does the trick, so be that, too. And if getting smacked around from time to time is part of the package — if violence is what it takes to keep an interested fellow in the room — that is a price that some desperate women today will pay.

Feminism… is instead a terribly deformed but profoundly felt protective reaction to the sexual revolution itself.

Feminism has become something very different from what it understands itself to be, and indeed from what its adversaries understand it to be. It is not a juggernaut of defiant liberationists successfully playing offense. It is instead a terribly deformed but profoundly felt protective reaction to the sexual revolution itself. In a world where fewer women can rely on men, some will themselves take on the protective coloration of exaggerated male characteristics — blustering, cursing, belligerence, defiance, and also, as needed, promiscuity.

After all, the revolution reduced the number of men who could be counted on to serve as protectors from time to time, and in several ways. Broken homes put father figures at arm’s length, at times severing that parental bond for good. The ethos of recreational sex blurred the line between protector and predator, making it harder for many women to tell the difference. Meanwhile, the decline of the family has reduced the number of potentially protective men — fewer brothers, cousins, uncles, and others who could once have been counted on to push back against other men treating mothers or sisters or daughters badly. In some worse-off neighborhoods, the number of available men has been further reduced by dramatic rates of incarceration. And (more…)

Robert Tracinski at The Federalist:

If we strip away the ideological claims and go back to the evidence (also see Cathy Young’s report on the case at Brown University), it fits a pattern. These are cases where two young people have an existing sexual relationship, usually one that’s “casual” or on-again, off-again. They sleep together and the young woman acts, for a while, as if everything is fine and they’re still friends. But later she comes to decide that she was raped.

The key is the dubious notion that the young woman somehow figured out, some time after the fact, that she was assaulted. We get lines like: “Natalie did not come to see her relationship with Nungesser as abusive, or their sexual relations as non-consensual, until ‘months after their breakup.’” Or: “some women do not even realize they have been abused.” Coercion is physical force. It is blunt, it is physical, it is perceptual. Would you know it if you were being mugged? But what is being described here is having negative feelings about something in retrospect, and there’s a very different word for that: regret. What these women are really expressing is regret for sexual encounters they wish they had not engaged in.

This, too:

As for the defense that “there is no such thing as the perfect victim”—well, could we at least have a halfway decent victim, one who acts in any way as if she has been victimized? The mantra that “there is no perfect victim” is used, not to explain away a few discrepancies in the alleged victim’s account, but to explain away all of them. Its actual meaning is: there is no such thing as exculpatory evidence for (more…)

There is a true playground in marriage, instead of the mutual boredom or mutual hostility — real or pantomimed — you’ve been taught to expect. What’s it called? Romantic love. Get some for Saint Valentine’s Day.

I’ve written before about the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon (more than once). My ‘Cliff’s Notes’ advice for women: Stop putting out.

I’ve written, too, about the self-destruction entailed by so-called ‘sex-positive’ sex, and, more importantly, about the incredibly enthralling experience that is fully-committed marital love-making.

From church yesterday, what does playful romantic love look like?

If you’re not supporting The Church of Splendor, you should be. There is no one anywhere who talks like this. This is news to be shared. Make your contribution today.

The path to truth within your mind should be well-defined with stout barriers to error. We depend on each other for every fact we cannot directly apprehend, yet all human testimony must be held at some level of doubt. Stories always improve. Moreover, everything on television is a lie.

From Politico:

Alas, the human tendency to juice our stories is universal, and it’s a temptation that some journalists find impossible to resist. When we tell our personal stories, we tend to add dramatic pauses that will build suspense. In each retelling, we tend to incorporate into it the reactions of the last audience, escalating the drama that got a good reaction, tamping down the events that dragged, and making up stuff to further engage our audiences. We supplement and reshape our stories both subconsciously and deliberately, because there is no public shame like the public shame that follows the telling of a boring tale. If don’t think you don’t do the same with your favorite stories, ask your spouse or siblings. They’ll happily regale you with your entertaining exaggerations.

The map is not the territory, but every work of the mind is a map. Your trust in your own mind emerges not from your inherent trustworthiness, but rather from your being unable to escape the consequences of your errors. The farther removed the storyteller is from the consequences of any misrepresentation of fact, the less likely the story is to be reliable.

That’s a rule of thumb, alike unto avoiding shrubbery with red berries in the wilderness, but my solace is here:

I am not the least bit surprised to learn that Brian Williams is full of shit. Are you?

John Nolte is on a tear about Brian Williams, as are many.

Sucks to be him, but this disaster affords NBC News the perfect opportunity to change its ways for the good, forever, thus to restore its reputation and – who knows? – maybe even make a buck or two.

Bitter recriminations are yesterday’s news. Here’s what NBC should do right now to put its news division on a much better course:

1. Fire current division president Deborah Turness. MSNBC is the anchor, but the whole division is a sycophantic politician’s-butt-bussing sinking ship.

2. Scuttle and start over by hiring Roger Ailes’ hungriest protege.

3. As his first act, the new president of the news division will fire Brian Williams.

After that, his job is stealing the Fox News daytime audience, the just-the-facts folks who turned to Fox after NBC/ABC/CBS/PBS turned them off too many times. Serve that audience at all hours and no other: Verifiable facts about matters of true importance delivered impartially, with opinion identified as such an presented in a reasonable balance.

It sucks to be Brian Williams, and it sucks to be NBC News. But the news division can be fixed, in time coming to be better than it has ever been, better than any television news operation so far.

All the way broken is a lot to fix, but at least you can’t kid yourself about wishes and prayers. NBC can redeem itself completely. I’ve got the unders on that happening, but the opportunity is there.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” —Mahatma Gandhi

via The Hill:

The Federal Reserve is lashing out at Sen. Rand Paul’s plan to give Congress more oversight over the central bank, a proposal that could gain traction in the new Republican-led Congress.

The Kentucky Republican reintroduced his “Audit the Fed” legislation last month with 30 co-sponsors, including other potential 2016 GOP hopefuls, Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Marco Rubio (Fla.).

The proposal — once championed by his father, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) —would subject the central bank to an audit by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). 

Regional bank presidents from around the country are decrying the plan, which they argue could damage the economy. 

“Who in their right mind would ask the Congress of the United States — who can’t cobble together a fiscal policy — to assume control of monetary policy?” Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said during an interview with The Hill.

Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen has already vowed to fight the legislation, and President Obama would likely veto it.

Still, Fed watchers note that Paul has become emboldened by the new Republican majority in Congress. And he possesses an ever louder national microphone, as he moves closer to a 2016 presidential run.

I love the pots-’n’-kettles rationale: “They’re corrupt, but we’re the trustworthy counterfeiters!”

If the center cannot hold, what do you suppose will pop up in its place? From yesterday’s Church of Splendor, what to expect when you’re expecting everything to stay the same:

This is the first anniversary of the wedding of Anthony and Marilee Johnson, and we celebrate that, as well.

One purpose of public ‘debate’ is to confuse the issue with quibbles. The battle for free expression has nothing to do with the content of that expression – and everything to do with the freedom.

Cautious tyrannies – like Islam, like Marxism – must silence all speech – not as offensive treasonous blasphemy but simply as dyscompliance with the perfect order of everything. To say anything is intolerable since that implies a state of rebellion against heaven itself.

Human life is self expression. The purpose of tyranny is to prevent it.

Me from Church yesterday:

I skipped Church Sunday – I’m down with the ObamaCare Flu – but I did everything I needed to do in September of 2012, just after Benghazi and just before my first dance with Charlie Hebdo.

Published on Sep 16, 2012:

When Man Alive was first published, a number of people were distressed that I didn’t take a harder line on religion. My reason for doing as I did was pretty simple: Although I am a very strident atheist, and although I have nothing but contempt for theology and for all religious apocrypha, I like, respect and admire many people who say they are religious — including my own Best Beloved, my wife, Cathleen Collins.

I care a lot less about what you say you believe than I do about how you actually behave. If you are capable of leaving me alone to live my life as I choose, I don’t care what you say are your reasons for behaving as you do. By contrast, if you claim you are in agreement with my own ideas about the nature and structure of reality, and yet you cannot manage to keep your nose out of my business, then I care a great deal your actual behavior, regardless of your putative agreement with my philosophy.

This topic is of moment this week because our friends in the lands infested with Islam have put on another display of the impotent irrationality that is represented to be the substance of their religion. I don’t make fine distinctions about anegoistic doctrines: Whether your claims are based in religion, in politics or in some absurd academic dogma, if your behavior is atrocious, you are engaged in self-destruction in spite of your self.

We go through all this in the video, but the solution to every problem posed by anti-human dogmas is four-words simple: (more…)

Church from Sunday, how to plan your 2015 so that it comes to be the first in a long string of best-years-yet: