Wild Geese + Phetasy Digest
Place Your Bets on the Apocalypse | Based Francis Spills Tea on Venezuela | The Left Takes "Men = Women" to the Supreme Court, Goes Badly | Remember 1989? :(
Since this week only continued the intensity, I thought I’d share a poem, one that matches especially well with Lara’s painting. It’s by Mary Oliver, who is, in my opinion, one of the greatest American poets of all time. The poem is titled “Wild Geese,” and I hope it brings a little nature to your day.
Stay safe out there, Pham.
WILD GEESE
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #279
Does Polymarket Engineer the Future?
Americans are literally betting on everything these days. Polymarket pioneers girl gambling, and would you take a bet against Jesus?
WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #273
Socialism Always Fails
Triggernometry co-host and comedian, Francis Foster, returns to the podcast to unpack Nicolás Maduro’s dramatic downfall. Foster’s familiarity with the country stems from his Venezuelan mother, and he references on-the-ground stories from friends and family in the wake of Maduro’s arrest. He and Bridget discuss chilling stories of a friend robbed at gunpoint by police officers, teen protesters gunned down, and a regime so corrupt it turned the world’s richest oil nation into a country so economically crippled it barely ranks higher than Gaza.
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #280
Democrats Still Don’t Know What A Woman Is
The Supreme Court has been hearing arguments about whether boys and girls are different from each other. A very important question that no one thought to ask for 300,000 years of human history. BECAUSE IT’S STUPID!
THE SPECTATOR
I want 1989 for Christmas
Here is my list of things I’ve been fantasizing about getting for Christmas, in no particular order: encyclopedia set, piano, record player, landline. In other words, I want 1989 for Christmas.
Mary Oliver is amazing. One of my fave poets.
Phetasy: The Supreme Court has been hearing arguments about whether boys and girls are different from each other. A very important question that no one thought to ask for 300,000 years of human history. BECAUSE IT’S STUPID!
👍 "STUPID", indeed. Even the birds & the bees know the difference, though there are, apparently, some gay birds, of one sex or another, floating about so it's hardly universal.
But that is maybe an artifact of "civilization" -- such as it is in the year of our lord 2026; how time flies ... -- and the fact that civilizations are more or less based on laws -- Hamurabi and Moses' Ten Commandments going back at least 3 to 5 thousand years.
But laws require precise definitions for the categories they rely on to be able to adjudicate competing claims based on supposed membership in them. Whence Matt Walsh's infamous documentary on that age-old question -- one that has confounded philosophers, pundits, politicians, and philanderers from time immemorial -- "What is a woman?" My own kick at that particular kitty:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman
But the problem is compounded by the many feminists -- zealots in many cases -- who refuse or are congenitaly incapable of offering any sort of a definition for the category that holds water and that is of any use at all in the practical matters that are the bailiwick of lawyers, at least those worth their salt. The upshot of which is the many feminists and transgender ideologues who insist that men and women are any who say they "identify as" such. Which has to qualify as "barking (mad)" as UK feminist philosopher Kathleen Stock -- author of "Material Girls", highly recommended -- once succinctly put it.