Monthly Archives: November 2018

Judith Curry On Sea Level Rise

Actual Climate Scientist Dr. Judith Curry has spent eighteen months reviewing the issue of sea-level rise. Her report is here. Briefly, her conclusions are: Is the recent sea level rise (since 1993) of magnitude 3 mm/year unusual? No, although this conclusion is conditional on the quality of the global sea level data. The available evidence […]

Oh, Lay Off It Already

I’m getting awfully tired of powerful and successful people who, upon receiving some award or other, take care to inform us how “humbled” they are by it. Hogwash. Nobody is ever “humbled” by this sort of thing. In truth it makes any normal man purr in happy assurance of his own excellence, and causes his […]

The Caravan: A NightWatch Special Comment

This over the transom during the wee hours, from John McCreary’s NightWatch: A brief living systems analysis of the caravan that trekked from Honduras to Tijuana provides insights about the phenomenon of the caravan. The caravan emerged as a living system when it left San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras. There is a history of […]

Thinking Inside The Box

Recording technology has undergone a fundamental change over the past couple of decades, and what has changed the most, and has caused the most controversy, is the move to “mixing in the box”. I’ll give some background for those of you who aren’t familiar with what this means: In multi-track recording, individual instruments and vocals […]

Never Let Me Down

Thirty-two years ago this week, I spent a fortnight or so behind the console in Studio C at Power Station Studios, recording overdubs for David Bowie’s album Never Let Me Down. The record is generally looked back on as one of his weaker and more time-bound efforts: it’s a fossil of 1980s record-production, preserved in […]

Happy Thanksgiving…

… to all of you. We have much indeed to be thankful for.

When The Baby Gets Hold Of A Hammer

A couple of weeks ago the voters of New York’s 14th Congressional district, in a spasm of petulant unwisdom, elected to the House of Representatives one Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a garrulous, bug-eyed Jacobin ignoramus not even out of her twenties. Today I learned that the United Nations has appointed Millie Bobbie Brown, a television actress only […]

Eric Swalwell vs. The Second Amendment: A Fool Rushes In

In a recent USA Today opinion piece, the East Bay Democrat congressman Eric Swalwell proposed a mandatory government “buyback” of what he calls “military-style semiautomatic assault weapons” — i.e., ordinary semiautomatic rifles with scary-looking external features. (A gun “buyback” is when the government takes money from you in taxes, then gives you a little of […]

Why I Am Not A Libertarian

Traditional culture joins and harnesses the energies of individual lives to a great common structure, in order to lift it into the sky. Not all such programs succeed in getting into orbit; some even explode on the launch-pad. A few, though, may achieve escape velocity. Libertarianism, by comparison, is just a profusion of bottle-rockets.

Some Good News, For A Change

I’m very happy to report that John Batchelor, whose three-hour program every weeknight is the best thing on all of radio, is back on the air after a sudden two-week departure. Three days ago he tweeted this, which I’d missed at the time: Hi The good news is that after a 7 hour surgery and […]

Just Another Day In Mouse Utopia

A while back, as further evidence that grievance is fractal, I offered a little post about “TERF War“: the bitter Top-Victim rivalry between radical feminists and men identifying as women. The battle rages on, with a defeat for the biological females in the latest skirmish: apparently a midwestern university has now banned The Vagina Monologues. […]

Turn, Turn, Turn

Over at The Orthoshpere, J.M. Smith, who has just turned sixty-one, has posted a piercing essay on the stages of life: not just the lives of men, but of civilizations. They have a great deal in common. We read: It is not only the lives of men that can be seen as passing through a […]

Burning It All To The Ground

The persecution of heretics that has become the chief feature of our age continues: the latest occupant of the ducking-stool is no less than the great cultural and intellectual eminence Sir Roger Scruton. Learn more here.

Drums Along The Potomac

I’ve written before about the ongoing series of conversations between radio host John Batchelor and war historian Michael Vlahos about America’s present-day run-up to a third civil war. Mr. Batchelor is convalescing at the moment (get well soon, sir!), and has been running archived material for the last couple of weeks. Professor Vlahos, though, has […]

Freeman Dyson On Scientific Tribalism, Jordan Peterson On the Idiocy Of Climatism, And NASA on Cooling

Not long ago the great physicist Freeman Dyson wrote an introduction to a report on the beneficial aspects of higher carbon dioxide levels. In it he asked: The people who are supposed to be the experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the people who are blind to the evidence. That to […]

Service Notice

My (very) elderly mother-in-law is in an ICU after a fall. I doubt I’ll be writing anything here for at least a few days.

Glad THAT’s Over

Well, here we are, on the morrow of the midterms. We’ve picked up seats in the Senate and narrowly lost the House. The unspeakably loathsome Andrew Cuomo will harass and insult conservative New Yorkers for another four years, while Elizabeth Warren today is heap happy squaw. Bug-eyed Communist ignoramus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will have her chance […]

What Was Oumuamua?

You may recall the curious object Oumuamua, a visitor from beyond the solar system that passed by the Sun on a hyperbolic orbit late last year. It was no ordinary asteroid: it had a strange pattern of reflection that suggested it was a long, skinny cylinder, and as it left our solar system it appeared […]

Europe To Move Out Of Daddy’s Basement?

Well, this is interesting: 73 years after the end of World War II, and 26 years after the Maastricht Treaty, French president Emmanuel Macron is calling on the European Union to begin taking responsibility for its own strategic security. This is another of the issues that Donald Trump campaigned on. The generous public benefits offered […]

Here We Go

OK – it’s Election Day. Republicans: the polls are open. You know what to do. Democrats: it looks like rain, and your guys are probably going to win anyway. I think you’re off the hook.

Service Notice

In Baltimore for a conference this weekend. Back next week.

Northern Exposure

The next skirmish in the war for religious rights and freedom of association might be the case of the Hope Center, of Anchorage Alaska, a Christian charitable organization that provides succor for the poor and downtrodden. Among the services it provides is a women’s shelter. The shelter’s clients are typically victims of domestic and sexual […]