1. Dipping into box office news, I’m glad to see that the lingering waste product of a failed and canceled franchise starring a violent lunatic is failing hard at the box office, despite the desperate presence of an overpaid relic from the days of comparative cultural confidence. Likewise the latest offering of the studio that once was Pixar is dead on arrival. I’m pleased as punch about this; the starvation of mainstream Hollywood is something long overdue and much to be desired.

2. I enjoyed No Way Home quite a bit and thought they did a very good job with bringing in the earlier versions of the characters (in part because they took the time to treat them as characters and not just gimmicks), but I knew even then that this was going to be the next thing; tempting audiences back into cinemas by bribing aging actors to return to their fondly remembered roles so that viewers can imagine themselves back in a time where they could actually hope for something positive out of their movie going experience. Going to see The Flash for the sake of Michael Keaton is not even a matter of starving men rushing to a bakery; it’s starving men rushing for the chance to smell bread.

3. Pilgrim’s Pass made an astute observation in his latest video: that James Cameron, Paul Verhoeven, and many others of their generation are perpetually stuck in the 1970s. They may take on a few new causes here and there, but ultimately they see the world after the pattern they became familiar with in their early adult life and frame it according to those paradigms. You can see it in their work and interviews, and in the works that directly imitate them; it’s a subtle shift in perspective, an assumption of certain factors as permanent features of life, a preoccupation with certain ideas. Vietnam, socialism, late-20th-century-style consumerism, the Cold War, Kennedy, Nixon, Civil Rights movement, and so on. They keep dragging these sorts of things back and trying to apply them to the current world.

4. This isn’t unique to that generation, of course; it’s something that happens to just about everyone. We all tend to fixate on how the world was when we were a certain age and assume that it will always be so. Not explicitly, of course, but as an unseen filter on our minds. I suspect that this is most the case with people who have been more politically active and ‘radicalized’ in their youth, since in such cases they’ve invested a fair amount of personal identity into that framework. It takes a lot of awareness and open-mindedness to recognize when the pattern of the world has shifted and the relevant factors changed.

Of course, for most of human history this wasn’t much of an issue, since the world probably was much as it had been during your formative years. One of the consequences of the rapid pace of ‘progress’ is a generational lag wherein different age groups have radically different understandings of how things work.

5. Relevant Chesterton quote:

“The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservative is to prevent mistakes from being corrected… Each new blunder of the Progressive instantly becomes a legend of immemorial antiquity to the Conservative”.

6. I can’t remember where I read it, but somewhere I caught onto the following frame:

“The goal of education is to allow one to think clearly.”

Note that this summary applies equally well to high-level STEM and Classical education, as well as to what one might call a Samwise Gamgee education of local songs, traditions, and practical skills. The goal is to be able to think clearly, first in general and then, if necessary, with regards to particular sciences.

7. Just realized that tonight, June 23rd, is St. John’s Eve, so I’ll leave you with some fitting music: