Monthly Archives: March 2011

Sign Of The Times

On Wednesday’s Today show, Matt Lauer interviewed Michele Bachmann. He is clearly of the opinion that our joining Libya’s civil war on behalf of the rebels was the right thing to do; she disagrees. In the course of their brief conversation came the following exchange: BACHMANN: …We don’t know how much al Qaeda is involved […]

Spin

In a recent study of psychological “priming”, boffins at two universities have turned up an unsurprising result: anxiety about death can incline people more favorably toward belief in supernatural agency and purpose, in particular “intelligent design”. (The study might have been somewhat slanted, however; one of the metrics used for confidence in naturalism was “liking […]

Join Or Die

Readers, if this doesn’t get a rise out of you, I don’t know what will:

Make It Stop

President Obama’s in town, and in a spirit of hospitality I won’t have anything to say about last night’s speech. (Anyway, everybody’s already said it, for example here and here.) Instead, then: a grab from the Shameless Filler bag. Tonight it’s one of the damnedest eyetwisters I’ve ever seen. The squares in the image below […]

Bah!

This past Saturday was the occasion, once again, of “Earth Hour“, an annual smug-fest in which progressive ideologues the world over come together to thumb their noses en masse at the advanced civilization that feeds and shelters them, that allows them to take for granted a level of wealth and comfort unexampled in all of […]

B.C.

My old friend Peter Kranzler, known to readers as the One-Eyed Man, tipped me off to an article in the WSJ about Bob Clearmountain, who is in my opinion the most gifted mixer ever to raise a fader. I was lucky enough to be Clearmountain’s regular assistant for a couple of years, back when I […]

Enough Already

OK, time to take a break from Mideast news. Here’s a beautiful fractal animation.

Flash: Mideast Still Going To Hell, Western Leaders Confused

It looks like there’s going to be a little sectarian “disaggregation” happening in the Gulf States following that little Saudi/Iran Sunni/Shia proxy dust-up in Bahrain. Story here. In Yemen, it seems Saleh is on the way out. Meanwhile, it now appears that NATO either will or will not be taking over the Libya operation, and […]

Here We Go Again

Here’s a long and sobering article by Adam Garfinkle about our incoherent campaign in Libya. Well worth your time.

Public School

This is brilliant, just wonderful. I don’t know how I hadn’t heard about it until just now.

Steady As She Goes

OK, readers: let’s all stop bickering for just a moment to wish the great William Shatner a very happy 80th (yes, 80th!!) birthday.

History By Committee

David Brooks, with whom I agree sporadically, published a pretty good item about multilateralism in today’s Times. Throughout history strong nations, ruled by confident men, reckoned their interests, and having weighed them, acted. No longer. As a modern Western democracy, America — despite having achieved in recent decades a supremacy of power without historical precedent […]

Got It

The Times explains why it supports military intervention in Libya: Libya is a specific case: Muammar el-Qaddafi is erratic, widely reviled, armed with mustard gas and has a history of supporting terrorism. Right, that’s clear enough: he’s a one-off, sui generis, something the like of which we’ve never seen before. …unless I’m forgetting something… No, […]

Was The Truce-a Just A Ruse-a?

Well, that cease-fire in Libya might not have involved all that much actual ceasing of fire after all. According to STRATFOR it’s looking more like a race to control Benghazi before the curtain falls. Here. Update: more strategic analysis from George Friedman at STRATFOR, here. Qaddafi would have been wiser to make the cease-fire real, […]

Moussa Koussa Calls A Truce(-a)

In the wake of the UN no-fly resolution, Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa has called an immediate cease-fire. This is by far the wisest move for Qaddafi, because with the government’s reconquest of all but Benghazi and eastern Cyrenaica complete, there will now be a consolidation period during which, with far greater resources, Qaddafi’s strength […]

Big Schtick

Should we intervene in Libya? This is the subject of a fierce debate at National Review. The editors say yes; Andrew McCarthy and Victor Davis Hanson say no. (As do I.) Meanwhile, the havering continues at Foggy Bottom. Regarding the escalating Iran vs. Sunni Arab proxy war in Bahrain, Hillary Clinton said yesterday in Egypt […]

Convergence And Divergence

I’ve mentioned the outstanding strategic security summary NightWatch before (see here for a bio of its author, John McCreary): it is the best of its kind, I think, and certainly the most condensed. Last night’s entry included an analysis of the situation in the Middle East that was so informative I thought I’d reproduce it […]

Words Fail Me

It’s hard to know what to say on a day like today; the world just seems to be falling apart everywhere you look. Japan is barely breathing after a Trifecta of staggering catastrophes. The Mideast is in flames. Western civilization is slowly throttling itself. The once-great American nation, its citizens having learned that they can […]

Come, Thou Mortal Wretch

Well, we’ve spent far too much time lately dwelling on trivialities. Time for some serious news: Snake Dies of Silicone Poisoning After Biting Model’s Fake Breast With video! Here. (Have to file this one under “Shameless Filler”, I think…)

Tauism

Today, 3/14, is Pi Day. What we really ought to celebrate, however, is Tau Day. The delightfully engaging vlogress and “recreational mathemusician” Vi Hart explains why, here. And for all the details, have a look here.

Addendum

A reader has emailed me to take me to task for the title of my previous post. The note began: To me, G_d is synonymous with the Explanation for Everything; for you, He is an angry, immature old man. I responded: Just to set the record straight, to me God is not “an angry, immature […]

God’s Love, Delivered

I’ve wanted to post something about the horror in Japan, but everything I’ve begun to write has seemed so trivial, so trite, next to the awful reality. Nothing I can say, or even imagine, from the safety and comfort of my home here in New York can gain any traction on what that reality must […]

Divin’ For Perals

With a tip of the hat to David Duff — nay, for this one a low, sweeping bow, with a scrape and a fawning obeisance — I introduce you to Private Frazer, whose acquaintance I had not made myself until just the other day. Here. High point: the auld empty barn.

Schwingtime For Hitler

Just discovered in the National Archives: a forgotten collection of photos of Eva Braun. Here.

Why Can’t You Just Leave Us Alone?

This is good: Rand Paul confronts Kathleen Hogan, the Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary for Efficiency, on light bulbs, toilets, and bureaucratic busybodies.

Curious, And Curiouser

Well, here’s an odd little story: it seems that in the little town of Ilulissat, Greenland (69° 13′ N) the Sun, which rises exactly once a year, did so two days early this time around. This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen; if there’s one thing you are supposed to be able to count […]

Confusion And Profit

As you may have heard, things are changing rapidly in the Middle East. Libya is in flames, Egypt staggers uneasily under military rule, and throughout the region political structures of enduring stability now creak and totter as the ground trembles beneath them. Meanwhile, the U.S. position is shifting too: we are soon to withdraw from […]

Well, Strike Me Pink

I’m working late tonight, with no time for writing. So I’ll just pass along this shocking item: Racial Identity Tied to Happiness, Study Finds Here.

I Have To Ask

On the commercial street near my house, there’s a comic-book store, and as I walked by it today they had a big picture of Superman on display. It looked something like this: It seemed to me that the Man of Steel was looking even more buff than ever, certainly way more so than when I […]

No Fluke

In the hugely popular sci-fi video game Halo, humans do battle with something called the Flood — a disgusting parasitic fungus that takes over the bodies of its victims, converting them into mutilated zombie soldiers. When that happens to one of our boys, the result looks like this: According to Wikipedia’s account of the Halo […]

Give Me Your Tired, Your Mpffff…

As long as we’re on the subject, here’s a little mission statement that’s been making the rounds today.

Blowback

Lawrence Auster brings to our attention an article, published by the National Association of Scholars, about a Christian student’s experiences in the Islamic Studies department at the Hartford Seminary (which is, by the way, the oldest Islamic Studies department in America). The Seminary represents itself as a secular institution dedicated to interfaith dialogue and comparative […]

Hot Spot

With a tip of the hat to Norman Geras, here are some amazing photographs of an expedition to the lava lake in Africa’s Nyiragongo Crater.

A Mighty Wind

All over the Middle East and the Maghreb, freedom-loving people are shrugging off the yoke of tyranny. Soon the world will be a far better place, as the entire region emerges from a tenebrous netherworld of medieval despotism into the broad, sunlit uplands of representative government and post-Enlightenment liberal society. Everywhere you look, the yearning […]

Tale Of The Tape

I’ve been reading Here, There, and Everywhere, a memoir by the Beatles’ recording engineer Geoff Emerick, and enjoying it no end. Though Mr. Emerick’s name may not be familiar to the public at large, it’s a very different matter for those of us in the recording studio’s hermetic brotherhood; in our little pantheon, he is […]