Monthly Archives: October 2014

Last Light

Here’s Wellfleet Harbor, just after sunset Sunday.  

Tweet Of The Day

Is this: Barack Obama couldn’t lift Bibi Netanyahu’s balls off the ground. Just so we’re all clear. — Narrative O'Failure (@MetricButtload) October 28, 2014 It was posted in response to this item, which explains that behind closed doors president Obama and his staff refer to Mr. Netanyahu as a “chickenshit”. It’s easy, of course, to […]

Into The Tumbrel

The comedian Bill Maher has, throughout his career, been a darling of the Left. His smug and odious schtick has for years consisted of taunting and ridiculing conservatives, Republicans, Christians, and pretty much anyone who represents American traditional values. (That he chooses to do so in the coarsest and most vulgar terms imaginable only serves […]

On Introversion

Last week at Maverick Philosopher, Bill V. put up a post comparing the introvert with the extrovert: The extrovert is like a mirror: being nothing in himself, he is only what he reflects. A caricature, no doubt, but useful in delineation of an ideal type. This is why the extrovert needs others. Without them, he […]

Pix

I love autumn in the Outer Cape. Here are a few photos I’ve snapped around Wellfleet lately: Here’s the sky in tatters over Wellfleet Harbor after last week’s storm:     And some fall color along Commercial Street:     A leaden sky over Cape Cod Bay, looking southwest from Bound Brook Island:     […]

What A Bringdown

It is with deep sadness that I must report the death of the great Jack Bruce, who died today in England at age 71. He was a giant to me, and my heart is heavy tonight. You can read about his life, and his long musical career, here.

Hillary On The Hustings

This from Hillary Clinton today: “Don’t let anybody tell you that, you know, that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” I kid you not.

Filming A Hole

On my bookshelf at home is a massive tome called Gravitation, by the great astrophysicists Charles Misner, John Wheeler and Kip Thorne. I picked it up at a used-book sale about twenty years ago, at a time when I was reading everything I could get my hands on about cosmology and relativistic physics. It was […]

Just Random, Senseless Tragedies

This just in: RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson says there’s no evidence of a link between Parliament Hill gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau and Martin Couture-Rouleau, who ran down two Canadian soldiers in Quebec on Monday. No, nothing linking these two. Can’t seem to turn up anything they might have had in common. Well, here’s one thing: they […]

The Main Drawback

More and more over the past decade or so I’ve become convinced that modern, secular, post-Enlightenment civilization — perhaps high civilization in any form, but especially the sort we live in today — operates in such a way as inexorably to extinguish itself. Writing in the early 20th century, the prominent Progressive intellectual and author […]

Potpourri

I’ve been neglectful of the blog this past week — it’s been five days since the last post. I’ve been busy, but that’s not all of it; there are times when the well just runs dry, and this has been one of them. It certainly isn’t as if there isn’t a lot going on that’s […]

Why Is The Left So Willfully Blind To The Reality of Islam?

As is usually the case on Tuesdays, I’m working late, so “hie thee hence” to the Maverick Philosopher’s website, where our man Bill has put together an excellent post on this vexatious question. Better yet, Bill has opened the post to comments — a rarity these days — so if any of our liberal readers […]

“Greenhouse” Warming In Pacific Northwest? Just Hot Air

The Pacific Northwest has been getting a little warmer over the past century or so. As reported by the New York Times, however, a new (“and”, the Times hastens to add, “most likely controversial”) study shows that this appears not to have been due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Story here.

You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone

In middle age, after a youth of unreflective atheism, I began to have a serious interest in the role of religion in human affairs, and in the doctrine and philosophy of the great religions. I determined to educate myself, with a particular focus on the history and teachings of Christianity and Islam. I’m still an […]

One By One

I’m sorry to see this: Paul Revere, of the 60’s band Paul Revere and the Raiders, has died. Geoffrey Holder, too. Man, I’m starting to feel old.

The Great Filter

Most of you have likely heard of the ‘Fermi Paradox’: the puzzling fact that, despite the uncountable multitudes of stars in the sky, and the overwhelming likelihood that myriads of them have habitable planets, we have never seen any conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial life. Why is this? Given the immense age of the Universe, and […]

Merga

If the U.S. is going to be involved at all in the Mideast snake-pit — and it appears that it is — then there is one party that stands out as being worthy of our trust and support, namely the Kurds. They are currently being exterminated, while we shift from foot to foot, inspect our […]

It’s Here Someplace

Given that global surface temperatures haven’t warmed for the past twenty years or so, our minders have been telling us for a while now that the reason is that all that excess heat’s been going into the deep oceans. (Nobody predicted that, but never mind.) Whoops! Not so, according to NASA. More here.

The Organizing Principle Is Control

Here’s withering essay on homeschooling from NRO’s Kevin Williamson. I have to say that Mr. Williamson is anomalously forthright and frank for an NRO staffer (see, for instance, this item from a week or two ago). Sooner or later (sooner, by the look of things), he’s going to earn himself a Derb-fenestration, methinks.

This And That

I’m working late tonight — so for now, here’s some Q&A about that “impossible” spaceship drive I mentioned a while back. Also, here’s one person’s attempt to model the cultural manifold that will provide the context for the next civil war. I’ll say also, just in passing, how surprised I am that the Supreme Court […]

Polyphonic Singing

Here.

The Wire-puller

Sir Henry Sumner Maine on the locus of power in democracies: Political liberty, said Hobbes, is political power. When a man burns to be free, he is not longing for the “desolate freedom of the wild ass”; what he wants is a share of political government. But, in wide democracies, political power is minced into […]

Welcome To Wal*Mart!

We heard some crowing today about the latest jobs report. What you didn’t hear is who got those jobs. It turns out that all of the gain went to people aged 55 and older, who picked up 230,000 jobs. (You can imagine what sort of jobs those are.) Meanwhile, those in the prime earning years […]

Scoop!

I see that the Times is laying off another hundred newsroom workers. Take heart, though: good journalism will live on.