When the Manchu Empire fell apart, it just dissolved. There was one rebellion, and the provincial governors mostly said "OK, we're out." The Soviet Union fell apart the same way. This happened after sustained governmental failure. It happened without civil war. What has happened can happen.

AuADHD turns out not to be gold ADHD, alas. I had hoped someone was giving out awards.

The notion that punching uphill is OK usually amounts to thinking that making unfounded generalizations about more powerful people is OK. But power has nothing to do with reasons for not making unfounded generalizations. One doesn't make unfounded generalizations because they are unfounded.

Probably cats are incarnate damned souls who can only communicate in screams. It would explain so much.

Religion is LARPing carried out to make the cyclic rhythms of birth, love, sorrow, aging, death, and the seasons into participative drama rather than the same damned thing over and over again. (Yes, I know, not only wrong, grossly oversimplified and wrong. Shut up. I am on a mission from God here.)

There is precise science to becoming an aged lunatic. You need to be just crazy enough to be happy working furiously as your body and mind fall to pieces under you, but sane enough to work effectively.

Temperate climates with hot summers, brisk falls, and cold winters build character. Great knotty, twisted, tumorous masses of character. I hate character.

Ghosts get high off exhaled marijuana, opium, and crack. You can use this to bring them flocking to you, but different drugs call different kinds of ghosts.

God made Adam by putting googly eyes on a clay sculpture. Galatea and the golem both had googly eyes. Frankenstein's monster, too.

I am about to geek out all over the place again. It can't be helped. 1/

T. Kingfisher's latest is set in a coal mine and mentions that there is a whole damp family: firedamp, black damp, white damp, and stinkdamp. That's got me thinking about "damp," "vapor," "spirit," and other terms from before the molecular theory of gases. 1/

The ancient yet still pressing moral question of whether the ancient cat sleeping under the sofa warrants not vacuuming under the sofa, or whether this would be making excuses for shirking.

I want engravings of floriform, fungal, arachnid, crystalline, cephalopod, crustacean, and electronic angels tempting wayward youths with art, scientific instruments, learned works, and their own fascinating selves. Good is as varied as evil.

I like this new Taylor Swift album. I had her down as talented but too cool and controlled for my taste. Here she is more passionate but more artificial. I think she figured out that all anyone can see is her artifice and their own projections, and that she can therefore show whatever she pleases.

The will of the people is best conceived of as the wildepeeple, an ungainly herd animal given to drowning in rivers and stampeding off cliffs, that is nevertheless best able, though little able, to figure out what it needs to live.

Every so often someone pulls off a triumph.

I read that squirrels are not clever enough to remember where they hide nuts, but have good enough senses of smell that they can find buried nuts. It would be better to say that squirrels are natural communists donating to a common nut hoard.

"Begging the question" is a lost cause. It just means "raises the question" now. "Petitio principi" works just as well, and is good practice for prissing up the lips.

@tkingfisher.com's strength as a horror story writer is that she, without in any way being on the side of evil, is secretly on the monsters' side. Her "Origin Story" is about someone who builds and releases monsters. That's her. As best I can tell, she gets interested while building them, and

OK, I'm a dope who should read more before posting. He wants to get rid of gifted and talented programs for kindergarteners, because even really bright kindergartners need mostly to play, not extra stimulation or acceleration. My bad.

Summer collapses to its knees like James Brown at the end of "Please, Please, Please." Summer is comforted, swaddled, and led weeping and raving from the stage. Summer wrests itself loose and rushes back for one more beautiful day. Summer collapses to its knees again. And so on.

Overheard in passing: "I don't say nothing, but I'm just tellin' ya . . . "

Mamdani says he will get rid of gifted and talented programs because there are disproportionately few black people in them. This strikes me as like getting rid of high school basketball teams because there are disproportionately few white people on them, but it probably won't matter very much. 1/

This site is full of people obsessively dissecting things that should have been dismissed as tedious noise the second they touched the threshold of consciousness.

October. Suddenly clothing seems like a clever invention rather than an odious social duty. Ooh, all the women will be out strutting fall fashions. Time to find errands to run. It is a dirty old town, but the spontaneous public art is good.

"All that exists exists to an end that is good." As philosophy, that is given meaning only within a system of interlocking definitions, some referring to things that are intrinsically unknowable. As a lyrical expression of a mood it is perfectly satisfactory.

This sounds like bragging, but trust me, I am just an earnest, dull nerd talking excitedly about his obsession. I went through Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals outlining the arguments, and am just stunned by how Kant grants that there are no empirical examples of moral behavior. 1/

Not having time or energy to meditate is like not having time or energy to stop pounding your toe with a hammer.

Starting to re-read The Red and the Black: "Jesus, this is brilliant. Why did I put this off so long?" Half an hour later: "Oh, right. Because I hate this guy." I guess it's morally sound. Seldom has being bad looked less fun.

In the first year after quitting his job as a mercenary captain, Offerus, later Saint Christopher, beat 7 travelers unconscious and hurled 2 others bodily across the river. It was only sometime in the second year that it occurred to him to ask people whether they would like to be carried across.

I have been chippying around with the end-of-summer blues, the feeling that if it is not going to be beautiful every single day, life is not even worth living.

Figured it out. We all got raptured. This is Heaven. God's mercy outweighed His justice, and He could see so little difference between the best and worst of us that He let us all in. This is what Heaven with open borders is like.

The problem of being an innately social animal in an innately bad society.

Discussing which cat litter brand is best with my wife, I pointed out that some contain Bentonite, which sounds like the invention that makes space travel possible in a 1930s science fiction novel, an advantage. She laughed for a long time. I'm not sure whether to feel misunderstood or understood.

Demonstrating your moral superiority to a dead writer is like demonstrating that you can do more pushups than them.

My memory has gotten weak enough and my imagination strong enough that I could probably revise all my childhood memories without much effort. Chances are, then, that I already have. To what end, I wonder? To make my current state seem natural, inevitable progress, perhaps?

Rapture, rapt, raptor, and rape share a common root: raptus, meaning seized and carried off. It follows, therefore, that when the Rapture comes, clawed, eagle-feathered angels will snatch up the chosen for violent, ecstatic, aerial sex. Any good Christian should be training to be ready for this.

The appropriate response to realizing you can't get any better in some respect is not despair, but rather planning how to stay out of situations where you need to be better in that respect.

There are eight more Margery Sharp books about the Mouse Prisoner's Aid Society. Has anyone read them? Are they any good?

The four or five really good people are snatched away by the Rapture. No one notices except the really pretty bad people who have to step up to take their places, and thereby become a little better.

Battle doomscrolling by posting 5 small pleasures in life: 1. Resting between sets, comfortably dumb 2. The dog's ears tracking and changing shape as she listens 3. Reading Sheila Burnford's Bel Ria: Dog of War 4. Squirrels standing up, little paws clutching invisible pearls

Woke up at 2 am to the sound of a man cursing his parents at length for conceiving him when he would have to sleep on the street, just because they were horny. No doubt he was at least as responsible as his parents, but as pure expression of emotion it was pretty good, though more punk than poetry.

Penny dropping 50 years later: the literary parts of the Platonic dialogues are structural, not ornamental or errors. The slave being called out of anonymity and sent back, Alcibiades's persuasive speech, everyone agreeing that death is a benefit and then weeping when Socrates drinks the poison,

When it behooves you to do something, you ought to get hooves for doing it. They promised.

Paladin who is an ecstatic contemplative, and wants only to fast, pray, live in poverty, and have beatific visions. He is also huge, strong, terrifying, and a good fighter, and his superiors keep him on the line. He hates hurting anything, and kills as quickly as possible, to cause less suffering.

Cops are often in the situation that Orwell describes in his essay "Shooting an Elephant." Orwell doesn't want to shoot the elephant, and the elephant doesn't need shooting. Everyone wants him to do something, and the gun is all he has.

Leafing through Kim Addonizio poems looking for one I remember, and realizing that each is better than the one I remember, or any I could remember, because too good to hold in my mind all at once.

Every nude goddess, nymph, and dryad you have seen sculpted or portrayed in ancient or Renaissance art is modeled on a prostitute. All the Eves, too. No one else took off their clothes for money back then. Your image of the divine is based on prostitutes. Show them due respect.

Drill sergeant who convinces literate, dreamy child soldiers that they have gone through a portal to a magic land to fight Chaos and Evil, and therefore can kill without compunction.

The runaway bunny in the Margaret Wise Brown story grows up to become the killer bunny in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.