Monthly Archives: October 2016

Nice!

I’ve been on the road all day — eight hours battling traffic in a fully loaded car with wife, daughter, grandson, and mother-in-law — and only made it to the stormy Outer Cape late this evening. We hadn’t listened to the news during the trip — the A.M. radio in our old Volvo stopped working […]

Where Is Assange?

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has been effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for four years. He is accused of rape in Sweden, and the U.K. has spent millions surrounding the embassy in the hope of swooping him up and extraditing him. I won’t comment on the merits of the charges, other […]

The Swamp

Hardly a day goes by now without new evidence of Clintonian corruption. The latest has to do with the FBI’s curiously handled investigation of the Clintons’ email server, and the FBI director’s audacious decision not to recommend charges in the case. As the Wall Street Journal reports here, after the FBI began its investigation of […]

Birds Of A Feather

The choleric president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte (the one, in case you’ve forgotten, who called Barack Obama “a son of a whore”), recently announced his “separation” from the United States, and a pivot to China. Why? Well, it obviously makes sense, in an era of spastic and ineffective American foreign policy, for a small […]

The Soul Of A New Machine

You’ve probably heard of “quantum computing”, but you may not know what it is. Here is a piece by Peter Diamandis, of Singularity University, that gives a helpful introduction to the key idea: that the bizarre “superposition” of a particle’s unmeasured quantum states makes it possible for n quantum bits (or “qubits”) to do the […]

Service Notice

Our daughter’s visiting from Austria with our infant grandson, and we are all out of town for a wedding this weekend. Back soon. Chat amongst yourselves, if you like.

The Observer-Created World

We’ve just had another intractable disagreement in our most recent comment-thread (with, of course, our resident Clintonian gadfly). The dispute is, in microcosm, the same that is pulling America, and indeed all of the West, to pieces. As I have said many times before, so much depends on axioms, and on what words mean. We […]

I’m Shocked – Shocked!

It’s been a busy few days, with little time for writing. But I won’t run off without offering a morsel to sustain you (and to reassure you that things are, indeed, as they seem).

Caste And Character

Tonight’s reading assignment is an outstanding essay, Weaving the Basket of Deplorables, recently posted at the site The Dissenting Sociologist. Its epopseudonymous author (sorry, but I felt the need for a name that’s both an eponym and a pseudonym), whom I shall call DS, has done a masterful job of distilling and clarifying some core […]

Pussy, Ariot

This is where we’ve got to.

Rules For Radicals

Bil Vallicella comments here on the selectivity of Democrat outrage over Donald Trump’s hot-mike remarks. The gist: The insight is that the Left uses our decency, which they don’t believe in, against us, mendaciously feigning moral outrage at what doesn’t outrage them at all. (Cf. Saul Alinsky’s RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to […]

Round Two

Tonight we have the second debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Before watching you might like to read Diplomad’s thoughts, which are generally the same as my own. In response to anyone who is on the fainting couch over the latest peek into Donald Trump’s character, and can’t imagine how anyone could vote for […]

Bear-Baiting

From this morning’s NightWatch: Russia-US-Syria: Russian relations with the US over Syria continue to worsen. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said on 6 October, “Let me remind the so-called US strategists that the air cover for the Russian military bases in Hmeimim and Tartus is provided by S-400 and S-300 surface-to-air missile […]

Got Me!

Just now I put up a post linking to a Washington Post article about simulated violence in football. “Not parody”, I said, and mocked its author. I’ve changed my mind, and taken down the post. The article is parody — well done, and richly deserved. A good example of Poe’s Law, either way.

It’s Turtles All The Way Down

In yesterday’s post, I wrote: It’s foolish to romanticize the past, to yearn for a Golden Age that in many ways was never so golden at all, and anyway can never return. But it is equally foolish ”” indeed, far more so ”” to revile and reject and discard it all, to imagine that in […]

Service Notice

Late this morning our previous post attracted a sudden flurry of distasteful comments. I don’t usually moderate comments — life is too short — so I’ve just removed all comments from that post and shut it down. I’ve generally been very fortunate in this regard. I flirt with serious heresy here sometimes, and so far […]

P. P. P.

When the Rachel Dolezal story popped up in June of 2015 (if you’re fortunate enough to have forgotten this one, she was a “black” activist who turned out, embarrassingly, not to be black at all), I wrote a little post about real versus fictional privilege. An excerpt: Once upon a time, people of mixed race […]