Monthly Archives: May 2014

Who Knew?

I haven’t written about martial arts in a while, but coming across a silly little article in Popular Mechanics prompts me to do so today. The article begins with some fawning hyperbole: Forget all those broken boards and crumbled concrete slabs. No feat of martial arts is more impressive than Bruce Lee’s famous strike, the […]

Uh-oh

Google’s just revealed its workplace demographics. The breakdown for tech workers: 60% white, 34% Asian, 2% Hispanic, 1% black. Pass the popcorn. Addendum, 5/29: I neglected to add above that the breakdown by sex is: women 17%, men 83%. Nobody should be surprised by any of this. To get through the multilevel Google tech interview, […]

Vox Clamantis

Our reader Henry has sent us a link to the latest crop of “Random Thoughts” from Thomas Sowell. Some excerpts: Some people act as if the answer to every problem is to put more money and power in the hands of politicians. * Republicans in Congress seem to be drawn toward the immigration issue like […]

We Can Dream, Can’t We?

Here’s George Will outlining the sort of presidential candidate he’s hoping for next time round. I have to say, I think that if someone actually presented himself to the voters as Mr. Will proposes, he’d win by a landslide. At the very least, he’d certainly get my vote.

Newton’s Third Law

Well! Good news from across the Big Ditch, as the “bunch of fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” known as UKIP did very well indeed in yesterday’s elections. Here’s a happy reaction from UK blogger ‘Anna Racoon’, in which she writes: So peace finally reigns in the old ‘Muppet show’ studio ‘D’ at Elstree, from where […]

Pedal To The Metal. Headlamps Off.

Writing at The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald reports on an item from the collection of classified material leaked by Edward Snowden: a report on the ways that “Western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction”. I can’t say that any of it should come as a […]

Stalk Show

Here’s something really beautiful: photographs of subtropical fungi by Australian photographer Steve Axford.

What STEM Shortage?

We’ve been hearing for years that the only way America can stay ‘competitive’ is to admit hordes of foreign engineers to supplement our inadequate supply of homegrown STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) workers. The constant influx of these workers on H-1B visas has kept wages in these fields from rising for many years now. But […]

Spurious Correlations

Just discovered a terrific online resource. Have a look.

Wade In The Balance

Reviews and reactions to Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History have been many, and varied. The book is as polarizing as we all expected: for some it is racist ‘pseudoscience’, while for others it is a social and scientific watershed. I linked last week to hbd*chick’s roundup of these reviews; Occam’s […]

Too Pooped To Post

After working long hours the past three days (including an all-nighter on Tuesday), and teaching class tonight, I am utterly flogged. All I have to offer you is this.

Pardon The Stench

We haven’t been covering political events very closely of late, so here are two items of interest. In the first, we learn that the Executive Branch has been short-circuiting deportation proceedings for thousands of criminal aliens, choosing instead just to let them go. Apparently this cohort, now at large within our borders again, have already […]

Wabbling Back To The Fire

From Eric Hoffer’s Before the Sabbath, 1975: It is disconcerting that present-day young who did not know Stalin and Hitler are displaying the old naiveté. After all that has happened they still do not know that you cannot build utopia without terror, and that before long terror is all that’s left.

Links

Sorry for the meager output over the past few days. The muse has been silent. Back soon. Here are a few items that have piled up: — Goodnight Dune. — An outstanding reactionary essay by Richard Weaver. (Worth a post of its own, when time permits.) — Tornado passing through. — A handy chart. — […]

The Incredible Shrinking Man

A few days ago we linked to a defiant essay by a young, Jewish college student in which, having been told once too often to ‘check his privilege’, he examined the ‘privileges’ his family had enjoyed in the Holocaust, and during the struggle of its surviving members to build a life in postwar America. Here’s […]

The Leidenfrost Effect

Courtesy of the indefatigable JK. Here.

Triple-Decker

Our pal Mangan directed us yesterday to an interesting item, from Britain’s Institute of Economic Affairs, on the idea of ‘political correctness’ as an expression, not of one’s actual beliefs, but as a ‘signaling’ mechanism employed to enhance status. (This is not a new idea, but this is a good treatment of it.) Inside the […]

Conservation Of Asymmetry

A sharp excerpt from a post by Bryce Laliberte: Equality is alien to nature… Democracy is opposed to order, for it is fundamentally a kind of disorder; order entails the accumulation of capital, material and social, which likewise entails a hierarchy and the attendant high asymmetries of power. Democracy precludes the accumulation of power by […]

Bring It On Home

Kevin Spacey: new face of the Dark Enlightenment. Here. (h/t: Nick Land.)