December 31, 2015 – 7:16 pm
Here comes 2016. Buckle up! Thanks again to all of you for reading and commenting.
December 30, 2015 – 2:34 pm
This intercalary week is always a good time for a change of pace, and with all that’s been going on in the local physical world, I’ve hardly glanced at the computer for the past few days. (It’s been nice.) Even better, I’ve managed to pay almost no attention at all to the news. Finding myself […]
December 27, 2015 – 10:42 am
On a little holiday break with family. Back soon. Also, sorry about the outage yesterday (if any of you noticed).
December 24, 2015 – 11:33 pm
It being Christmas Eve, earlier this evening I found myself humming the “Christmastime Is Here” song from the old Charlie Brown Christmas special. (The show originally aired in 1965, when I was nine, and Vince Guaraldi’s beautiful score has stayed with me ever since.) The tune got me thinking about the show itself, which is […]
December 23, 2015 – 11:59 pm
I’ve written before about the transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom. His work is concerned with the long-term prospects of the human race, with particular interest in the future of artificial intelligence, and its perils. In these pages we’ve mentioned his suggestion that we might already be living in a computer simulation (see here and here), as […]
December 22, 2015 – 11:59 am
Here is “The Khaleesi“, a proposed skyscraper for West 57th Street in Manhattan. A tower for our times, I think.
December 22, 2015 – 10:49 am
Headline at Salon today: White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it Salon is not a “fringe” publication. (Would that it were.) Apparently it has no qualms about declaring race war. As Saul Alinsky said in his Rule 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.’ Comparisons […]
December 21, 2015 – 11:20 pm
Today we learned that six U.S. soldiers were killed by a Taliban suicide bomber in Afghanistan. In today’s NightWatch newsletter, analyst John McCreary wrote: Afghanistan: The deputy governor of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan said that the Taliban seized the police headquarters in Sangin District center, with fighting continuing. Deputy governor Mohammad Jan Rasoulyar warned […]
December 20, 2015 – 5:21 pm
Tomorrow we come to the solstice again, where the great wheel of the seasons pauses, for an instant, at top dead center. I went for a walk at sunset this evening. It was very still. I’ll be sixty in the spring. How strange it is to be a line, in a circular world.
December 19, 2015 – 3:36 pm
With a hat-tip to our friend Jeffery Hodges, here is a reminder that if Islam is a “religion of peace”, it is only the peace of submission, of surrender, of captivity.
December 19, 2015 – 2:40 pm
Writing for the Gatestone Institute, Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist describes the situation in her homeland — which for most of my lifetime was the holotype and exemplar of the advanced, peacable modern Western nation — as it sinks into darkness and disorder, thanks to its mass importation of wholly alien, mostly Muslim, immigrants. Swedish citizens, […]
December 18, 2015 – 7:33 pm
Self-driving cars, like 3-D printing, are a promising technology with quite a way to go before achieving their transformative potential. (See our post on one of the ethical questions they raise, here.) An item published yesterday at Bloomberg Business describes a hard problem the people designing them must face: how fast should the cars go? […]
December 18, 2015 – 12:29 am
It’s amazing how hard it is to proofread your own stuff. I just saw a glaring typo in the first line of a recent post; it sat there for more than a day before I spotted it. (If you didn’t see it, too late; it’s fixed.) It ruined the whole flow of the line, and […]
December 18, 2015 – 12:15 am
I know I’ve mentioned it before, but this stuff is going to be big. Call your broker.
December 16, 2015 – 11:43 pm
During last night’s debate Carly Fiorina, whose chances are roughly equal for the Republican nomination and Prva HNL Player of the Year, suggested that we ought to make her President because she’s a woman. Let’s leave aside the reaction were a male candidate to try such a thing, and try to get the gist of […]
December 15, 2015 – 6:56 pm
Here’s an interesting item: a novel gait identified in Russian officials. Learn more here.
December 15, 2015 – 12:42 pm
Done with the weekend’s sessions, but still swamped with work. All I’ve managed to post over the past few days has been a few comments over at Maverick Philosopher, where a discussion of “tribalism” continues, here. Back soon.
December 11, 2015 – 11:49 pm
Recording sessions all weekend. Talk amongst yourselves.
December 9, 2015 – 10:59 pm
Yesterday the United States Senate held a hearing on the magnitude of human impact on climate change. Giving testimony were some Actual Climate Scientists. I would like very much for you to read and carefully digest their testimony. I will excerpt some of it here, in what will be a longish post — but please, […]
December 9, 2015 – 7:56 pm
From the Long War Journal: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released a new video featuring a former Guantanamo detainee, Ibrahim Qosi, who is also known as Sheikh Khubayb al Sudani. In July 2010, Qosi plead guilty to charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism before a military commission. His plea was part […]
December 8, 2015 – 1:18 pm
With a hat tip to our reader Henry, here’s a good piece from Thomas Sowell on Barack Obama’s recent speech from the Oval Office. Excerpt (my emphasis): The first responsibility of any government is to protect the people already in the country. Even in this age of an entitlement mentality, no one in a foreign […]
December 6, 2015 – 12:18 am
The New York Times today did something it had not done since the Harding administration: it published an editorial on the front page. It did so not because it had a rational argument to make, or a useful policy to advance — it had neither of those things. Why, then, would the Times make such […]
December 4, 2015 – 10:29 pm
In a recent post I remarked that, with bitterly opposing forces tearing at our rotting social framework, every public shock — in this case, the San Bernardino jihad assault — is a hammer-blow that “strains the joints and widens the cracks”. “Each time,” I remarked in a subsequent comment, “we split apart a little more.” […]
December 4, 2015 – 5:49 pm
Jim Geraghty continues to stay on top of the San Bernardino attack. In today’s newsletter he points out that the late Tashfeen Malik, the distaff member of the duo, had been passed a Homeland Security anti-terrorist screening during her application for a K-1 visa. (We haven’t heard any word yet on whether Ms. Malik was […]
December 3, 2015 – 1:04 pm
Jim Geraghty of NRO (yes, you folks in the NRx mutaween, I’m linking to NRO again) posted a good newsletter this morning about the San Bernardino shootings. (In case you’ve just emerged from a coma, or a two-day shift in a zinc mine, there was a mass shooting by two or more Muslims in California […]
December 2, 2015 – 9:34 pm
I’m working late tonight, and haven’t time to write. So here’s yet another placeholder for free association, idle chat, bibulous logorrhea, and confessions of the heart. (Or, perhaps, for the introduction of serious topics or questions.) You have the floor.
December 1, 2015 – 8:52 pm
When I was a boy, there was a mawkish and immensely popular television program called “Queen For A Day“. Each episode featured a panel of miserable women, who vied for the prize by telling a plangent tale of woe. (The poor things wept, sobbed, and wailed as they pleaded for money, appliances, etc.; it’s easy […]
November 30, 2015 – 6:52 pm
Here are two items from yesterday’s Washington Post email digest. They both mention, in passing, important things. First is this: Failure to stop Paris attacks reveals fatal flaws at heart of European security We read: Poor information-sharing among intelligence agencies, a threadbare system for tracking suspects across open borders and an unmanageably long list of […]
November 29, 2015 – 12:02 am
I’ve got nothing tonight — I’m weary of arguing, and the Muse is silent — so for now, an update to an old item from the early days of this blog. The original post was about a Victorian-era bust of Washington Irving that stands in Prospect Park. Have a look. Here’s another example of the […]
November 26, 2015 – 2:07 pm
To all of you. Among the many blessings I have to be thankful for is to have you all as readers and commenters.
November 25, 2015 – 3:29 pm
Wow, this is great: the Democratic National Committee has put out a list of officially approved talking points for denouncing thoughtcrime at Thanksgiving dinner. The site is called “Your Republican Uncle“. Leaving aside what fun this will make Thanksgiving for everyone, and the DNC’s presumption that Democrats young enough to have living uncles can’t defend […]
November 24, 2015 – 2:34 pm
Quite the firestorm of liberal outrage over that mass shooting in New Orleans, eh? (At a playground, no less.) We’ve hardly heard about anything else since it happened.
November 24, 2015 – 10:50 am
Making the rounds yesterday was a stern item from Patrick Buchanan on terrorism and the modern West. An excerpt: What has happened to a West that once ruled the world? By any measure ”” military, economic, scientific ”” the Islamic State, compared to the West, is a joke. What the Islamists do have, however, is […]
November 23, 2015 – 1:06 pm
I note that Brussels, Belgium, is “locked down” for the third consecutive day in response to a threat of assault by Muslim fighters. Think of that! This great and gracious Western city, the capital of united Europe, is closed for business. Shops are shuttered, cafes and restaurants closed, public transportation suspended, and the streets, until […]
November 23, 2015 – 12:02 am
The Maverick Philosopher, William Vallicella, has responded to my own reply to his thoughts on the universality of Western values. I’ve just posted a longish comment over at his place. Read Bill’s post here.
November 22, 2015 – 7:59 pm
I’m beginning to find it a little tiresome being told what “ISIS wants”. My irritation is in large part because people keep telling me that “what ISIS wants” is for us to do those reasonable things that any sane polity would do to eliminate a problem that is at best a serious and continuous source […]
November 22, 2015 – 12:36 am
In the discussion thread under our previous post, a commenter directed our readers’ attention to an article by Megan McArdle on the question of settling “Syrian” “refugees” in the United States. Further discussion ensued. Ms. McArdle’s essay is helpful in that it identifies six low tactics that proponents of Syrian refugee resettlement have been using: […]
November 19, 2015 – 5:05 pm
The idea of settling myriads of Syrian “refugees” here in the U.S. is, I’m glad to see, meeting some heavy headwinds. Dozens of governors have refused to comply, and now the House has passed a bill that seeks to make the “vetting” process more rigorous. (That latter, though, is really just a gesture; “vetting” Muslim […]
November 19, 2015 – 3:35 pm
When I was a young man (and dinosaurs trod the earth), if a person found himself accidentally obstructing someone’s way, he said: “Excuse me.” This is no longer so. Now, everyone says: “Sorry”. Why is this? When I first noticed this change, a year or two a ago, I thought nothing much of it. Now […]
November 18, 2015 – 4:00 pm
From James Taranto’s Best of the Web, today: “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of””not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, OK, they’re […]
November 18, 2015 – 12:59 pm
Today’s NightWatch newsletter consisted mostly of a detailed report on Russian actions in the Middle East. I don’t do this often, as I do not want to violate fair use of their content, but I will reproduce this section of the newsletter in its entirety below the fold. (If you have an interest in international […]
November 17, 2015 – 10:23 pm
Writing at his blog The Maverick Philosopher, our friend Bill Vallicella gave our “What Now?” post a commendatory link. I thank him for that. Bill is a serious thinker — a highly trained expert in thinking itself, with a professional philosopher’s expertise in detecting and clearing away rubbish — and I’m always glad to have […]
November 17, 2015 – 12:26 pm
Commenting on a recent post, our reader “John” writes: …the urge to speak truth to leftist insanity is immense. But by doing so you expose yourself to tremendous risk”… Yes, I’ve thought about that a lot. Most bloggers who write from a contrarian position about these things seem to use noms de plume. In fact, […]
November 15, 2015 – 11:26 pm
In an essay about the Paris attacks, Richard Fernandez writes: The dilemma the West now faces is that it cannot survive on the basis of the platform which its elites have carefully constructed since WW2. They are being beaten to death with their own lofty statements. They must either continue to uphold the vision of […]
November 14, 2015 – 11:14 pm
I have said this before, and I will say it again: allowing mass Muslim immigration is the stupidest and most irreversibly self-destructive thing that any Western nation can do. So in the wake of the Paris attacks, is it reasonable to imagine that Western nations, reeling from yet another inevitable and predictable act of jihad, […]
November 13, 2015 – 5:58 pm
In a comment to a recent post, I expressed a dark sentiment that is as close as any sympathetic and historically literate observer of this late stage of Western civilization can realistically come to “hope”: namely that when the pathogen now ravaging our culture has assaulted enough of its tissues and vital organs, it will […]
November 13, 2015 – 1:20 pm
I’ve always loved this season. Here are a few of the snapshots that have piled up on my smart-phone this autumn. Turkeys in my front yard the other day (they should be more careful this time of year, especially keeping in mind that we grow a lot of cranberries out here): Cape Cod Bay from […]
November 12, 2015 – 5:02 pm
In what I think is called “must-see TV”, Neil Cavuto interviews one Keely Mullen, of the Million Student March, on the details of her plan. Here.