En el año 1865, San Juan Bosco soñó que había un hombre alto, de color negro y con cuernos, que tenía en su mano "una linterna mágica" con la cual entretenía a los jóvenes A través de esa "linterna mágica", los jóvenes podían ver cosas divertidas, partidos de fútbol que se habían perdido, pueblos lejanos, libros, familiares, amigos, vacaciones que habían tenido, dinero que les debían, y hasta "escenas pecaminosas", entre otras cosas Don Bosco relató que este dispositivo los entretenía tanto que alejaba a estos jóvenes de los sacramentos, especialmente de la comunión Este texto se encuentra bien documentado y disponible para el que quiera leerlo, en G. B. Lemoyne, Memorie Biografiche di San Giovanni Bosco, vol. VIII, p. 110.

LO CRIARON COMO UN GATO DOMÉSTICO, CAZABA GALLINAS Y MAULLABA DISTINTO: EL ADN CONFIRMÓ QUE ERA UNA ESPECIE SILVESTRE DESCONOCIDA Durante más de un año, una familia de Bolivia creyó que cuidaba a un gato doméstico. El animal comía huevos y pastas, pero acechaba gallinas, emitía maullidos distintos y tenía conductas propias de un depredador. Esta historia derivó en el descubrimiento de Leopardus tilcayo, la primera nueva especie de felino silvestre descrita formalmente en más de un siglo. El ejemplar, conocido en las comunidades locales como Tilcayo, fue hallado cuando era una cría cerca de un bosque de los Yungas de Bolivia. 🔗 Leé la nota completa: infob.ae/4yE8YXq

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Adventure through Hyrule and become the Hero of Time when The Legend of #Zelda: Ocarina of Time releases Nov 5 on Nintendo Switch 2. #NintendoDirect

Word of the Day is a reminder of ‘tsundoku’: the pile of unread books you can’t help but add to at every opportunity.

This is what I look like according to Grok!

It’s Friday. You know what that means.

I know I’ve been posting a lot recently, but as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus used to say, “it’s a target-rich environment” right now. The governor of Massachusetts just signed into law a statute that permits abortion up until the moment of birth, as long as mother and doctor give the go-ahead. Please understand what this means. A fully-formed child, moments before exiting the birth canal, can be eviscerated, chopped into pieces, have its head crushed or skin burned off—all under the full protection of Massachusetts law. What I found particularly gross was the reaction of the entirely female crowd around the female governor of Massachusetts as she signed this barbaric provision into law. They were clapping and cackling with delight because what can only be called infanticide can now be practiced with impunity in their state. I’m old enough to remember when Mario Cuomo, the devoutly Catholic governor of New York, admitted that, though he found abortion personally repugnant, he was, after tortured wrestling with his conscience, willing to give it limited protection of law. How far we have fallen from agonized and conflicted Cuomo to the present governor of Massachusetts and her entourage gleefully applauding the murder of children.

Apparently, the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts has determined not to count letter grades toward its freshmen’s GPAs during their first semester, starting in 2027. The reason given is that this move will address the growing mental health crisis among young people. Nothing could be further from the truth. It will, in fact, exacerbate the crisis. Across cultures, one can discern a common pattern in the initiation rituals of primal peoples. The elders of the tribe rip a young person from the comfort of his home during the night. He is then scarified or otherwise physically marked in some way—a tooth is knocked out or his face is cut—in order to impress upon him that life is difficult. Then he is introduced to the lore and history of his people, and finally he is taken to the edge of the wilderness, given a few simple provisions, and told to make his way for an extended period of time. The entire purpose of the exercise is to break him free from the dominance of his self-regarding feelings and to orient him to the achievement of objective goods. Plato famously compared the soul to a horse-drawn chariot. The animals represent the passions, which provide energy for the vehicle, and the driver represents intelligence and refined moral consciousness. As long as the charioteer is in place, the chariot makes its way purposefully. But if the charioteer is kicked out, the horses will run amok. Our “suicidally empathetic” culture, which consistently privileges feeling over objective value, has produced armies of dangerously uninitiated young people. In terms of Plato’s metaphor, it has given rise to lots and lots of chariots with no sense of direction, crashing into one another. Electing not to count first-semester grades toward students’ GPAs in order to spare the delicate emotions of eighteen-year-olds is, spiritually speaking, about as dumb a move as a university could make.

新幹線にて むすめ｢見て、トイレで落ち込んでる人｣ それにしか見えなくなった どうしてくれるんだ

Charlotte Iserbyt argued that U.S. education reforms were intentionally designed to reduce critical thinking and parental influence, shaping children for a globalist, collectivist future. Overview of Charlotte Iserbyt Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (1930–2022) was an American writer and former senior policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Education under President Ronald Reagan 📷Wikipedia. She also served in the U.S. Department of State and as a school board member in Camden, Maine, and co-founded the Maine Conservative Union and Guardians of Education for Maine 📷Wikipedia+1. Her work focused on exposing what she viewed as deliberate manipulation of the American education system to produce compliant citizens. "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" First published in 1999, Iserbyt’s book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, documents her research and experiences in the Department of Education 📷deliberatedumbingdown.com+1. She claims that educational reforms, including programs like Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and School-to-Work, were part of a coordinated effort to undermine parental control and intellectual development, steering children toward a socialist-collectivist, globalist agenda 📷deliberatedumbingdown.com+1. The book includes extensive documentation, timelines, and analysis of policies dating back to the 1930s, highlighting agreements between the U.S. government and foreign entities, including Soviet-style educational influences 📷deliberatedumbingdown.com+1. Key Themes and Claims Intentional Reduction of Critical Thinking: Iserbyt argued that reforms were designed to replace traditional academic rigor with behavioral and social engineering, producing students who are compliant rather than independent thinkers 📷deliberatedumbingdown.com+1. Globalist Influence: She suggested that regionalism and international agreements were used to centralize control over education, aligning curricula with globalist objectives 📷deliberatedumbingdown.com. Historical Documentation: Her work traces educational changes over decades, including the influence of psychology, skills-based learning, and international agreements, asserting that these shifts systematically eroded intellectual freedom 📷deliberatedumbingdown.com+1. Critique of Federal Funding: Iserbyt highlighted that U.S. taxpayers were financing programs that, in her view, undermined national sovereignty and individual freedom 📷deliberatedumbingdown.com. Additional Resources Iserbyt also produced an 8-DVD/CD set titled Exposing the Global Road to Ruin Through Education, which features speeches and roundtable discussions with education researchers, expanding on the themes of her book 📷deliberatedumbingdown.com. Earlier works, such as Back to Basics Reform (1985) and Soviets in the Classroom (1989), further document her concerns about international influence on U.S. education 📷Wikipedia+1. Legacy Iserbyt’s work remains influential among critics of modern educational policy, particularly those concerned with federal overreach, standardized curricula, and the role of globalist agendas in shaping education 📷deliberatedumbingdown.com+1. Her research continues to be cited by grassroots organizations and educational reform advocates.

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琴櫻関カド番脱出！やったーー😭🌸 #sumo

I’ve just finished reading Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy. It ranks, along with Chris Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories, as the best take-down of the lunacy at the heart of the wokeist philosophy. For Saad, empathy—in itself a perfectly decent trait—has become so grossly exaggerated that it threatens truth, reality, and justice. Cases in point abound: so they won’t feel bad about themselves, we’ll allow biological men to compete in women’s sports and crush the dreams of thousands of young women; so as not to undermine the self-esteem of minorities, we will permit unqualified candidates to have positions in universities and the corporate world; so that everyone might feel included, we will characterize the meritocracy as “white privilege,” etc. As I was making my way through Saad’s book, I kept remarking the sharp distinction between empathy and love. To empathize is to enter profoundly into the experience of another and to endeavor not to hurt that person’s feelings. But to love is, as Thomas Aquinas taught, “to will the good of the other.” As I said, in itself and all things being equal, empathy is a good thing. But it is not the same as love, which, depending on circumstances, can very much involve hurting someone’s feelings. When a professor gives a student a “C” as an honest reflection of his work, he might well be insulting him, but he’s also telling him the truth and perhaps even urging him to try harder. When, in the Confessional, a priest tells a murderer to turn himself in to the police, he’s undoubtedly making that person’s life more uncomfortable, but he’s also willing the man’s good. Any decent parent knows that showing real love for her children means engendering all kinds of bad feelings in them. In light of this distinction, we can understand why Jesus didn’t say, “have empathy for one another,” but rather “love one another.” And why St. John the Evangelist didn’t say, “God is empathy,” but rather “God is love.” It occurred to me as I was reading Saad’s book that one reason Wokeism has seized the consciousness of so many in the West is that Christianity has faded as a cultural force and Christians themselves have forgotten what stands at the heart of their faith.

One of the simplest ways to corrupt a person is to subvert his perception of beauty. C.S. Lewis demonstrates this in That Hideous Strength, the final book of his Space Trilogy. Protagonist Mark Studdock is subjected to "training" by the sinister institute "N.I.C.E." to remove his emotional responses and his ability to recognize right from wrong. Mark is made to get used to a windowless room filled with nonsensical architecture and ugly art designed to disorient him. It is lit strangely and has unsettling proportions: too tall and narrow, a subtly wonky arched door, and dots on the ceiling positioned with such irregularity that it would be impossible to count them. On the walls are grotesque and creepy pictures, but just verging on normal. There is a hyper-real portrait of a young woman, but her mouth is filled with hair. One is a giant mantis playing a fiddle while being eaten by another mantis. Some are distortions of Bible scenes, like a painting of the Last Supper with hundreds of beetles under the table. This is Mark's first step toward "objectivity": "the process whereby all specifically human reactions were killed in a man so that he might become fit for the fastidious society of the Macrobes." Later, Mark is forced to do simple, deliberately pointless or mildly offensive acts repeatedly. The kinds of things most people would find stupid or rude. For Mark, they are meant to gradually erode his sense of anything being important. Our ability to recognize good from bad, virtue from vice, or beautiful from ugly is precisely what makes us human — our ability to make value judgments. When we spend too much time surrounded by ugliness, it has a dulling effect on this especially human part of us. Even worse is when we are forced to call these ugly things beautiful, or bad things good. If we are not careful, it will ruin our ability to properly recognize anything of value in our lives. Interestingly, Mark is ultimately won over against N.I.C.E. when he refuses to trample on a crucifix — not because he is a Christian (he isn't yet), but because it is inherently ugly and evil nonetheless. When someone intentionally creates ugly art, Lewis calls on us to call it out as such. The beauty we include in our lives is not neutral, nor is it trivial.

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas