Caldwell double dip, this time on Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez.
Strong analysis as always from Caldwell. One line stands out as an excellent example of his style of plainspoken stingers: “You can do a lot if you know where to look.”
Out of context, it’s a string of monosyllabic words making an anodyne point. In context, it’s a truly killer kicker.
Read Joe Mangina on Robert Jenson. And welcome, Joe, to micro blogging!
The tenth Osten Ard book is due this October from Tad Williams.
As is his wont, he’s already working on a sequel.
Netflix, drugs, and delivery services have turned the twenty-first-century home into a self-enclosed repository of creature comforts.
—Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics (2026), pp. 28-29
The latest issue of The New Atlantis has an excellent review of Jacob Siegel’s The Information State by Nicholas Carr. Regarding the failure of the “whiz kids” in Vietnam, Carr writes:
rather than triggering an honest assessment of the flaws of large-scale data mining, the fiasco had the opposite effect. The problem wasn’t that computer-based decisionmaking had limits, the technocrats concluded. The problem was that the computers weren’t supplied with enough data.
This conclusion would, as Siegel shows with example after example, turn into a perverse tenet of the information age: Every failure of automated data processing becomes an excuse to collect even more data.
This summary and analysis of Byung-Chul Han’s intellectual development, philosophical vision, and mature project by Matt Elmore is outstanding.
The only question is left for me is where Han stands in relation to Christian faith. It became popular, after Covid and this short 2021 piece by Han about attending Mass in lockdown, to describe him as a Roman Catholic. Is he? I’ve never seen definitive evidence either way besides vague anecdotes that may be mere hearsay, projection, or wishful thinking.
From Richard Beck: “Disenchantment Death Spiral” and “Immanence Feedback Loop” are very helpful terms of art.
Every third link this month has gone to Alan’s blog … but so be it. Here’s his pledge not to go to Substack, prefaced by his rationale.
It would be silly of me to make the same pledge, but I feel the exact same way. I’m so glad I didn’t get sucked in early. Life outside the Substack-verse—just like life outside the Twitter-sphere—is quiet, peaceful, happy, and free.