We’re away in NYC for a few days. Back soon. (Will be glad to get home.)
A man has just been fatally shot on a crowded A train in Brooklyn, during rush hour. The videos I’ve been seeing (I’m not posting them here, but you can find them in seconds on Twitter) show people cowering afterwards in the train, which was stopped at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn. (I can’t count […]
I haven’t been able to do any substantial writing for a bit – I’m still foggy from this virus I’ve had (though I’m recovering now, it was a nasty bug, with fatigue and cognitive wooziness to rival the Wuhan Red Death itself). I also had to make around trip from Wellfleet to JFK on Monday […]
“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.” – Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs
Commenter “Landroll” asks, in response to my previous post about the incremental militarization of the New York City subway system: Like the line from the song says, “Whatcha gonna do about it?” I don’t know what song that is, but: So far, what I’ve done about it has been to move out of New York, […]
Our reader and commenter ‘mharko’ has left some excellent remarks on a thread at Bill V.’s place about our worsening political situation. Go and have a look, here. (Sorry not to have responded myself, mharko. I’m still quite foggy and unwell with this damned respiratory virus I’ve been battling, and it’s been all I can […]
In response to an extraordinary rise in subterranean crime over the past few years, New York Governess Kathy Hochul has announced that she will be deploying National Guard troops and State Police in the NYC subways in an attempt to make the system safer, or at least to seem safer. They will apparently be conducting […]
I note with grim satisfaction the retirement of the maleficent Victoria Nuland, the meddlesome witch whose machinations in Ukraine gave us the Maidan revolution in 2014, and everything that has happened since. In my opinion she has the blood of hundreds of thousands, the collapse of the Ukrainian nation, and the useless expense of many […]
Get ready for a shock: men and women have different brains.
Imagine a large-scale mathematical society whose aim is to work together to broaden the scope of demonstrated mathematical truths. The way they would go about this is by building upon the theorems that have already been proven: finding new relations and isomorphisms between existing theorems, and proving new ones. They wouldn’t all work on the […]
In the course of the ongoing conversation about America’s prospects over at Bill Vallicella’s website, Bill mentioned two of the various types of civil wars (in my view, there are at least three). Having written an article about exactly that at American Greatness four years ago, in the runup to the last election, I posted […]
Today in the small town of Woodstock, Georgia, there will be a funeral for Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student who was brutally murdered by a Venezuelan man here in the country illegally. Four years ago the nation tore itself to pieces in a summer of violent rioting over the death of George Floyd, […]
February 29, 2024 – 6:09 pm
I’ve been nursing a surprisingly debilitating cold (or flu, or something) for the past few days. It makes it difficult to summon up the energy to do much of anything, and I’ve been unable to concentrate the little grey cells enough to write anything worth reading. (I did manage another comment or two in that […]
February 29, 2024 – 6:04 pm
“One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.” – Eric Hoffer With that observation in mind, have a look at this item from Michael Lind.
February 28, 2024 – 2:05 pm
American media consumers have been soaking for years in a poisonous marinade of lies about our role in Ukraine. With a hat-tip to Dave Benner at Twitter, here is RFK Jr with an antidote: a history lesson that is brief, concise, and accurate. For a decade, US involvement in Ukraine has been based on a […]
February 25, 2024 – 9:29 am
On the road. Back Tuesday. Update, Tuesday evening: I’m back home, but after dropping the lovely Nina at JFK last night for a 1:35 a.m. flight to Hong Kong (to visit our grandkids), and then driving five hours back to Wellfleet, getting to bed just before sunup, and sleeping fitfully for a few hours, I’m […]
February 23, 2024 – 6:47 pm
Bill Vallicella has a fine post up at Substack today, in which he responds to the complaint that for an American president to speak of “America First” is, as Bill Kristol put it a few years back, “depressing and vulgar”. My only quibble with the piece is that Bill didn’t unpack, for those who might […]
February 23, 2024 – 5:11 pm
At this point it hardly seems worth mentioning, but the Daily Mail reminds us today, in painful detail, of what a frail and feeble dotard our President is. What times we live in!
February 22, 2024 – 10:34 pm
My friend “Spandrell” has a new version of his blog up and running. I’ve linked to several of his posts over the years, in particular his 2017 three-part essay on what he calls “Bioleninism”. (You can read that here.) Span is a very smart guy, and he’s one of the OGs of what used to […]
February 22, 2024 – 5:13 pm
Cellphone outage hits AT&T customers nationwide; Verizon and T-Mobile users also affected Don’t look at me, Feds; I assure you all I’m just a humble blogger.
February 21, 2024 – 12:15 pm
A Lowell, MA High-school girl’s basketball team had to forfeit their game yesterday after three of their players were injured by a mentally ill young man playing on the opposing team. The male player, who is over six feet tall and has facial hair, says he’s female. The triumph of subjective fantasy over objective reality […]
February 20, 2024 – 5:30 pm
Here’s a news story. I’d say it was “shocking”, or “amazing”, but at this point it really isn’t. It’s bad, though. In brief: New York City has signed a no-bid contract with a “W/MBE” company (i.e., not run by white men) to make debit cards to be issued to “migrants”. The cards will have no […]
February 20, 2024 – 2:35 pm
I’ve had nothing, so far, to say about Donald Trump’s show-trial for “fraud” in New York, which the other day resulted in a guilty judgment, and a fine of $355,000,000. I’m still having difficulty. The process was a sham, of course, from start to finish. There was never any crime, any complainant, or any victim. […]
February 17, 2024 – 6:17 pm
It’s remarkable how complex any topic — especially anything to do with society and law — can be when you examine it closely. Take, for example, drunk-driving, which on the face of it seems simple enough. We know that driving drunk is dangerous — I’ve had friends who have died from it, and I nearly […]
February 14, 2024 – 9:35 pm
I’ve just watched this guided tour of the new Apple Vision Pro, a new VR headset. These are still early days, and the thing is, for most ordinary people, prohibitively expensive so far — but there is no way, in my opinion, that this will not be as addictive, and disruptive, as cell-phones, or perhaps […]
February 13, 2024 – 10:03 pm
As I write, the House has impeached Homeland Security secretary Mayorkas: a pointless gesture, a little kayfabe for the fans. Yes, he’s lied to us, and to Congress. Yes, he’s an enemy who hates us. But he’s an underling, a myrmidon, a stooge, an infantryman, a dogsbody. His impeachment will die in the Senate, like […]
February 12, 2024 – 6:12 pm
On Saturday the lovely Nina and I found ourselves in Woods Hole, at the far end of the Cape from where we live, where we had been invited to attend a living-room performance by two extraordinary musicians: violinist Darol Anger and mandolinist/guitarist Mike Marshall. (Their websites are here and here, respectively.) It was music the […]
February 12, 2024 – 2:31 pm
Well, the site’s all fixed up; I just spent hours recreating all the old linked-series entries in a new plugin (fortunately I was able to pull all the info I needed from the backend database, though it’s been six years since I’ve had to write any SQL, so it took me a minute to remember […]
February 9, 2024 – 5:08 pm
I’ve been having some backend issues with the website: page links, comments, etc. aren’t working, and for a while today the site was completely inaccessible. I’m trying to get it all fixed, but until I do things won’t be working properly, and the site may be down from time to time. Update, 2/11: I’ve had […]
February 9, 2024 – 12:00 pm
Special Counsel Robert Hur has released his report on Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. I don’t say “alleged” mishandling, because the second paragraph of the report states the following: Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen. These materials […]
February 7, 2024 – 11:44 pm
Imagine for a moment what a collapse of the modern communication grid would be like. All of a sudden, you can no longer make or receive phone calls, emails, or text messages. You try to go to the Internet — news services, social media, etc. — to find out what’s happening, but you can’t. You […]
February 6, 2024 – 6:34 pm
Here’s some good news, for a change: clever application of advanced technology is now making it possible to read ancient Roman scrolls that were carbonized in the devastating first-century eruption of Vesuvius, making them too fragile to unroll. Learn more here.
February 5, 2024 – 11:12 pm
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has just posted an excellent essay at Substack on why he is inclined toward theism. Longtime readers of this blog will know that this is a topic I’ve been wrestling with for ages, so I’m always glad to find essays like this latest offering from Bill. Bill asks: why are […]
February 5, 2024 – 5:16 pm
I know that many of you may have been worrying lately about the possibility of some sort of national, or even civilizational, decline. But you should always remember that, as bad as things may seem economically and politically, our popular culture continues to raise the bar for excellence in the fine arts. So, to lift […]
February 2, 2024 – 2:26 pm
I’ve just read Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It, by James Kalb. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name, Jim was the original proprietor of the influential blog View From The Right (archived here), which he then handed off to […]
January 31, 2024 – 11:46 pm
In America, we hear a great deal about the “rule of law”. We flatter ourselves that we have managed, by the genius of the Founding, to find a way to be ruled, not merely by the vector-sum of the will of powerful men, but by a set of abstract principles. We imagine that in this […]
January 31, 2024 – 12:08 am
With a hat-tip to our reader and commenter, the indefatigable JK, I offer you a detailed essay by Dr. Roy Spencer about climate modeling. (Dr. Spencer’s CV is here. Keep it in mind next time somebody tells you the scientific consensus among Actual Climate Scientists is “settled”.) One of the key ideas in this article […]
January 28, 2024 – 1:12 pm
I’m saddened today by some bad news: the death of guitarist Dean Brown, who was a beautiful, gifted musician and a hell of a nice guy. He had for several months been battling a mysterious form of cancer, and on January 26th he lost the fight. My deepest sympathies to his wife Ruth, and his […]
January 27, 2024 – 8:02 pm
Making the rounds today is a graph taken from the Financial Times, showing that there is a widening gap in political outlook, across the developed world, between males and females aged 18-29. The source article is here, but it’s paywalled, so I’ll sum it up for you: women are moving sharply to the left, while […]
January 25, 2024 – 5:40 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here is a sickening dispatch, posted in a Disqus comment-thread at Powerline, by “Diego Palma“, who says he lives in Arizona at the Mexican border. Is this real? I have no way of knowing. The place Mr. Palma describes certainly is; it’s at 31°20’3.81″N, 110° 8’53.86″W, and if look […]
January 24, 2024 – 1:42 pm
In yesterday’s post about the looming showdown between Texas and Washington over securing the border, I wrote: The so-called “rule of law”, and obedience to the formal structures of government, are all that stand, in a vast and divided nation, between order and chaos; they are the load-bearing walls that support the great (and trembling) […]
January 23, 2024 – 8:07 pm
Yesterday, five justices of the Supreme Court (the obvious ones, plus Barrett and Roberts) decided to lift an injunction against the Biden administration’s attempt to force open the portions of the national border in Texas that Texas had unilaterally decided to seal off with razor wire and other barriers. Think about that; the administration appealed […]
January 22, 2024 – 7:43 pm
Look at this sickening video: At the speed society evolves, so too does warfare. pic.twitter.com/qU9lP5WAGT — Joshua Hartley (@JHartley2) January 22, 2024 This is a technology still in its infancy. The drone you see pursuing and killing this terrified man was guided by someone sitting comfortably in perfect safety far away. It’s possible that the […]
January 21, 2024 – 1:08 pm
OK, folks, we are heading into a year that will likely make the last few seem like “the good old days”. I have put together a bluntly and unsentimental list of some of the direst possibilities. Which of these seem likely? 1) 9/11-level terror attack 2) New and far deadlier pandemic 3) Trump jailed 4) […]
January 20, 2024 – 11:25 pm
One of the reasons that I laid off blogging for a while was that it had become just too dispiriting to try to speak the truth while living in a world of lies. Among the worst of these webs of falsehood (and outright stupidity) was the Narrative about our relationship with Russia in the post-Soviet […]
January 19, 2024 – 7:17 pm
Here’s something refreshing: James Hankins, a senior professor of history at Harvard, having been pestered by the harridans of the university’s Diversity Office to provide a personal statement of his commitment to the Cause, has penned a tart reply (cf. the Reply of the Zhaporozhian Cossacks to Mehmed IV). We read: Dear Members of Harvard’s […]
January 18, 2024 – 5:10 pm
Making the rounds today: the newly elected president of Argentina, Javier Milei, just spoke at the World Economic Forum’s conference in Davos — and having taken the stage, used the platform to denounce everything that the malevolent WEF seeks to accomplish, and to warn the world of the danger these people present to human flourishing. […]
January 17, 2024 – 3:05 pm
Well, here we are: mid-January 2024, with the first round of electoral winnowing behind us, and another a few days away. Already we are down to three still in the running for the GOP nomination, but it doesn’t look like much of a contest. Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill V. has put up two posts […]
January 16, 2024 – 11:42 am
“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.” – Conan the Cimmerian, on the Iowa Caucuses
January 16, 2024 – 12:21 am
Our reader “mharko” has sent along a link to an article by “N.S. Lyons”, a fine writer whose work I’ve mentioned before in these pages (see here and here). The article, published at Substack, is called The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives, and it is in response to a techno-futurist manifesto recently published by Marc […]