Bill Porter

IP Law Attorney, husband, father, grandfather

[Pope Respecter @poperespecter1]

One of the most mind blowing 10 minutes of video Christianity has ever produced.

[Kyle Smith @rkylesmith]

"I just wanna say, in 1975 the best picture nominees were Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Jaws, Nashville and Barry Lyndon....and man, did this year's crop suck compared to them!"

[Nathan Brand @nathanbrand]

“Redeem the time”

This whole @BenSasse interview is well worth the time, but this 2 minutes about taking stock of what matters most is powerful.

[Ben Sasse @BenSasse]

Friends-

This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.

Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.

I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, “Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.” Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all.

Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer. This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad. I can’t begin to describe how great my people are. During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have. Seven months ago, Corrie was commissioned into the Air Force and she’s off at instrument and multi-engine rounds of flight school. Last week, Alex kicked butt graduating from college a semester early even while teaching gen chem, organic, and physics (she’s a freak). This summer, 14-year-old Breck started learning to drive. (Okay, we’ve been driving off-book for six years — but now we’ve got paper to make it street-legal.) I couldn’t be more grateful to constantly get to bear-hug this motley crew of sinners and saints.

There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.

Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son.

A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears.

Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet.

Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective:
“When we've been there 10,000 years…We've no less days to sing God's praise.”

I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.

But for now, as our family faces the reality of treatments, but more importantly as we celebrate Christmas, we wish you peace: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned….For to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9).

With great gratitude, and with gravelly-but-hopeful voices,
Ben — and the Sasses

[pipermcq @pipermcq]

Consider this my point of view on the “Tucker/Fuentes” issue:

I’ve stood at the railhead in Auschwitz/Birkenau, on the exact point where the SS “separated” Jews off the trains. Some 80%, men, women, and especially children, never made it to the barracks, as they were marched straight to the gas chambers, and then the ovens. The others were condemned to work until they died.

I’ve stood in those barracks. Originally designed as cavalry stables to hold 52 horses. The Nazis crammed a thousand prisoners into them. Each.

I stood in front of the ovens. Each had a sliding metal plate used to slide the bodies in, and chutes from which the ashes would be shoveled. By prisoners. Some of the ash remained. But the Nazis were careful to force the prisoners to separate the gold from the fillings of incinerated Jews from the ash. Used the hair from the shaved heads of exterminated women for wigs, socks for submarine crews, or upholstery stuffing.

I’ve stood in Mauthausen Prison, in Austria. Walked the “Todesteige,” the stairs of death, down which Nazi prisoners (both Jews and POW’s) walked to work in quarries until they died. Stood in KL Natzwiller-Struthof in Eastern France, where the ovens ran night and day to keep up with the flow of Jews and other prisoners.

I have spoken to concentration camp survivors. I have seen their arm tattoos. I have heard their stories, as they recounted the industrial-grade horrors the Nazis inflicted in them. I have walked the streets in Krakow, a city that still has virtually no Jews, because of their near extermination.

So, I have a pretty bright line. If someone (like Fuentes has done) compares the Holocaust to “baking cookies?”He needs to be removed from the dialogue altogether, and shunned from civilized society altogether. At a minimum.

Not out of some abstract “censorship.” But because he is evil, and his malignant viewpoints not only add no value, they poison the minds of gullible young people who don’t know what I know, and haven’t seen what I have seen. I don’t want “government” to censor him. I want you all to ignore and shun him.

He is not to be given two hours on a popular podcast to spout this poison as if he is relevant or powerful. He is especially not to be casually “tongue-bathed,” as Tucker Carlson did in his repugnant “interview.” Fuentes is a phony. Nothing more than a dangerous, malignant, pest.

He is to be ignored.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[Marc Porter Magee 🎓 @marcportermagee]

https://t.co/6Gk0pOHObK

[Peter J Travers @pjtray]

The most consequential journalist in American history - George Will

[Buitengebieden @buitengebieden]

Legend says they’re still looking for the ball.. 😂

[Robert P. George @McCormickProf]

I'm reposting this comment because Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute is among the sharpest, most well-informed, and most dedicated higher education reformers in the country. If he's concerned about the forced removal of the UVA president, then I'm concerned.

[Ross Douthat @DouthatNYT]

My opening statement in the great @TheFP religion debate:

[Sarah Isgur @whignewtons]

If you read nothing else today, please read this.

[Joanne Mason @JoanneMason11]

What watching the Grammys at my age sounds like:
"And now, Flrzzy will jerv up the stage with Mondroppio's remix of the bloat noize Jobblexyz with aaabcoda on tambourine!"

[Matthew Ladner @matthewladner]

The academic advantage for Catholic school students has been growing over the last decade, and approximately equals two grade levels (!!) in both 8th grade Math and Reading in 2024 @JebBush @DougDucey @marcportermagee @HeritageOnEd @NextSteps_Edu

[Katherine Boyle @KTmBoyle]

I don’t think I’ve watched a video of these fires that has captured the meaning of home so completely.

Pray for these people. 💙

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Possibly the most incredible Beethoven Ode to Joy flashmob by the Philharmonic Orchestra of Nuremberg and the Hans-Sachs-Choir in front of the St. Lorenz Church in Nuremberg, Germany.

[📹 Evenord-Bank eG-KG]

[Richard Brookhiser @RBrookhiser]

Bill Bulger’s definition of Irish cuisine:
We put the food in boiling water. Then we take it out.

[Tod Worner @ThinkerCatholic]

William F. Buckley, Jr. concluding a 65 page interview with Playboy.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

"The stunning success of vaccines in America, in one chart" https://t.co/jCFjzwXmIV

[John Berlau @jberlau]

Great story, & I would love to know the brand of the chocolate bars. if that brand is still around, it should use this story in its ads with some slogan like, “the real energy bar!“