Pensées profondes

Can someone explain to me why some enterprising hip-hop entrepreneur has yet to take full advantage of The Rapture? Relatedly, if some enterprising hip-hop entrepreneur has taken full advantage, I would really like to know.

Quick Question

[W]ill we soldier on with the same empty decades-old rhetoric, now drained of any truth or meaning, because it protects established relationships of power?

-The Economnist

Um, yes.

Even Homer Sods

Lulz. This Catholic report is hysterical. Oh, god, we did not know how to cope with the increase in legal divorce in the late sixties, so, um, we had sex with schoolboys. Well, it is fun to make fun of Catholics and gall their gaudy cult a gang of child rapists, but the interesting point may yet be that pedophilia is, as before noted in these very pages, not exactly the right word, and what the Catholic clergy is really rife with are ephebophiles, a cult devoted to the beauty of male youth. This only adds to my theory that the Catholic Church, such as it is, is the last bastion of classical civilization, a pantsless remnant of our pagan antiquity in this age of dour monotheism.

Affaire DSK

So it strikes me as somehow ironic that raping an African maid makes a man unfit to be President of the French Republic but invading an African country is completely within your rights. For the record, I do think that insofar as we are cursed to be ruled, it would be better if our rulers were not trashy hotel-maid rapists, but at the same time, I want to point out that, for instance, while neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama has ever to the best of our knowledge raped a maid, they collectively ordered the deaths of thousands and thousands of people. Nicolas Sarkozy has not to the best of my knowledge ever raped a maid; he's just, you know, started a war in Africa and left a bunch of refugees to die in a boat in the Mediterranean. Recall the adage about how criminality is really a matter of scale: kill one man, you're a murderer; kill one thousand, you're a hero. That sort of thing. You know who else never raped a maid? Hitler, that's who. I probably should have posted a "trigger warning" on this one, huh? I just . . . I mean, can we all stop pretending that we are shocked and stupefied that a powerful Western politician is a violent predatory psychopath? It sorta, like, goes with the territory.