Michael Perkins > Recent Status Updates

The Second World War, Volume II: Their Finest Hour

Just hit the milestone of 800 positive reviews of "Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup' on Goodreads

about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Cormac McCarthy RIP

https://apnews.com/article/obit-corma...

In his 1941 State of the Union Address, FDR called for “four essential human freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear."

“Every day, every year, and for every graduating class, there is a choice to be made. It’s the same option for all grown-ups, who have to decide to be one of three types of Americans: those who embrace liberty and freedom for all, those who won’t, or those who are indifferent.”

-Tom Hanks, Harvard commencement, 2023

It may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.

-MLK

“It is not necessary that people be wicked, but only that they be spineless.”

― James Baldwin

HOW DEMOCRATS LOST THE WORKING CLASS

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

Now is the golden era of books

https://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...

I think my generation — including Bill and Hillary, George W, Trump (sic), Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Biden – have f*cked it up royally. The world will probably be better without us.

-Robert Reich

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official....it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else."

-Theodore Roosevelt

in case anyone missed this....

https://twitter.com/NewsNation/status...

in case anyone missed this....

https://twitter.com/NewsNation/status...

The faster the world becomes and the less time we have to stop to reflect, the more we are amnesiacs, sleepwalking towards a destination that we did not choose. Because, eventually, all this technology and science, as wonderful as it is, will strip us of everything we are.

-Michael C. Perkins

A famous female author once quipped....

"At my funeral, take the bouquet off my coffin and throw it into the crowd to see who is next."

“There are plenty of young people who are appalled by the behaviour of the older generation, rightly, and are dedicated to trying to stop this madness before it consumes us all. Well, that’s the hope for the future.”

-Norm Chomsky, 2022

Decided to go with Dan Carlin instead. Duncan was too soporific.

https://www.dancarlin.com

Next up, Mike Duncan's podcast of ancient Rome

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=...

“I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language,”

― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

In “The Free World,” Louis Menand paraphrased Hannah Arendt to describe the early 20th-century proponents of totalitarianism as “the refuse of every class: disempowered aristocrats, disillusioned intellectuals, gangsters, denizens of the underworld. They were people who believed that the respectable world was a conspiracy to deny them what they were owed; they were the embodiments of the politics of resentment.”

In 2006, 23 percent of Americans were white evangelical Protestants, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. By 2020, that share was down to 14.5 percent. In 2020, 22 percent of Americans 65 and older were white evangelical Protestants. Among adults 18 to 29, only 7 percent were.

-NYT

2/4/20211

“Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.”

― Aldous Huxley

I have to share with you a response to this David Brooks tweet:

I fell in love with conservatism as a young man. What the hell happened to it?

Ooh, I know this one! Your mythical Conservatism is a niche brand of elite narcissism incapable of winning national elections. So you used evangelicals/racists/gun nuts as electoral foot soldiers. But then--whoops!--they became self-aware and realized they don't need you.

Strong Supreme Court Precedent Supporting Vaccine Mandates (Politico)

Justice John Marshall Harlan in this case wrote for a clear majority of the court. He concluded:

“Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”

new announcenent from Tucker Carlson....

I am honored to announce I will be speaking next week at the Mordor Summit in Barad-dur at the invitation of Dark Lord Sauron! This is the future of conservatism, and I’m excited to throw open the Overton Window and let in the nazguls.

-Washington Post

Just finished a poignant passage about the mother reading aloud to young Proust from a novel by George Sand, which soothed him and allowed him to drift off to sleep.

Reading it is like eating candy.

WOW!

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/op...

“Everything will be all right. And, even if it isn’t, we’ll have the consolation of having lived honest lives.”


― Alexei Navalny, imprisoned Russian dissident and critic of Putin