December 19, 2011 – 4:33 pm
An article in the current New Yorker begins: On the night of October 16, 1590, a palace apartment near Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, in Naples, was the scene of a double murder so extravagantly vicious that people are still sifting through the evidence, more than four centuries later. The most reliable account of the crime [...]
December 18, 2011 – 10:30 pm
Kim Jong Il has died. This is going to be interesting.
December 18, 2011 – 12:40 pm
Horrifying images and video from Egypt, here. One of the consistent lessons of history, from Aristagoras to Gorbachev, is that authoritarian systems place themselves at great risk when they attempt to liberalize. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is learning this lesson today; they have unleashed forces that they have no idea how to [...]
December 17, 2011 – 10:31 pm
You know who I feel sorry for? Flightless birds. Jesus, what a crappy deal.
December 17, 2011 – 8:16 pm
There’s been a huge outpouring of opinion about Christopher Hitchens from both Right and Left, most of it encomiastic, but mixed in with some harsh reviews as well. That isn’t surprising; obviously a polemicist like Hitchens — especially one who crossed the aisle as publicly as he — is going to have his fair share [...]
December 17, 2011 – 5:56 pm
The Senate has passed their stopgap spending bill, which included a rider that annuls, temporarily at least, what would effectively have been a ban on incandescent bulbs beginning this year. The intrusive legislation had made an awful lot of people hopping mad — but looking on the bright side (especially now that it has been [...]
December 17, 2011 – 12:25 am
The death of Christopher Hitchens has hit me hard today; he was something of a hero of mine. Mr. Hitchens was everything I admire in a writer: a master of language, with incomparable style and wit, and a restless and erudite scholar — but unlike so many in possession of similar (but almost invariably lesser) [...]
December 16, 2011 – 1:14 am
Christopher Hitchens has died. Read this remembrance, by Christopher Buckley.
December 15, 2011 – 7:25 pm
In an excellent little essay at NRO, Michael Knox Beran reminds us that human suffering is, to borrow a word from the natural sciences, conserved: it can be transformed but not eliminated — and that the modern liberal obsession with its eradication at any cost is futile, and in the end destructive. We read: The [...]
December 15, 2011 – 7:05 pm
Here are a couple of recent items on the dawa-jihad front: First: you may have heard about the kerfuffle that arose recently when the home-improvement chain Lowe’s decided to yank its sponsorship of the “anti-Islamophobic” television series All-American-Muslim. (Dozens of other sponsors soon joined them; all are now predictably being tarred as “racists” by the [...]
December 14, 2011 – 8:42 pm
The British New York Times columnist Roger Cohen has registered, in this recent item, his condescending disapproval of David Cameron’s rejection of the EU’s fiscal-union proposal. It is regrettable, opines Mr. Cohen, that the “pinstriped effluence” of the ancient British nation should wax so mawkishly sentimental over its silly old sovereignty, which is at this [...]
December 13, 2011 – 4:31 pm
A few months ago I started noticing a particular female announcer’s voice on radio and television commercials. She had a pleasant enough voice, but I thought it exhibited a peculiar weakness — in her falling inflections she would routinely drop below the bottom of her tonal register, and her sonorous voice would break momentarily into [...]
December 12, 2011 – 9:08 pm
Not having much to say tonight, I thought I’d just put up a few pictures I snapped around Wellfleet yesterday and today. I apologize for the mediocre quality: I’d left my camera behind in New York this time around, and so they were taken with my phone. Yesterday I decided to explore the path leading [...]
December 11, 2011 – 6:50 pm
We have coyotes out here in the Wellfleet woods, though we hear them oftener than see them. They like to socialize on moonlit nights, and last night they had a pretty good jamboree going not far from our little hilltop. The sound of it isn’t exactly musical, to my ear at least, but you can [...]
December 10, 2011 – 5:25 pm
Okay, forget Solyndra. If the Obama administration really is serious about “investing” in “innovation”, they should have a look here.
December 9, 2011 – 11:44 pm
David Cameron is getting plenty of heat from the EU for standing up for his people, for once. Well, good for him, I say, for refusing to surrender England’s ancient sovereignty to a lot of unelected Eurocrats as their doomed continent falls under the all-too familiar shadow of coalescing German dominance. To quote Winston Churchill: [...]
December 8, 2011 – 11:40 pm
Let’s be careful out there, folks.
December 8, 2011 – 10:23 pm
In a recent STRATFOR article, George Friedman uses the example of the “Arab Spring” uprising in Egypt as a case study in what he calls “an inherent contradiction in Western ideology and, ultimately, of an attempt to create a coherent foreign policy.” At the root of this ideological confusion, says Friedman, is a tension between [...]
December 7, 2011 – 9:26 pm
There’s a buzz going round that the boffins at LHC may have found the Higgs boson.
December 7, 2011 – 5:55 pm
President Obama gave a rousing speech for his base yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas: a collectivist stem-winder in which he invoked the rough-riding spirit of Teddy Roosevelt to call for more leveling, more government regulation of everything, and more central planning — in general, more “tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro [...]
December 7, 2011 – 11:05 am
Christopher Hitchens has suffered the torments of the damned in the past eighteen months, and in this harrowing essay at Vanity Fair, he reflects skeptically on Nietzsche’s oft-repeated claim that “Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker“. What has not yet killed him, as he makes very clear indeed, has made him no stronger at [...]
December 6, 2011 – 11:30 am
Following on our recent post about race and intelligence: one question that often comes up is where brain size fits in. Brain size does seem to vary among human populations in the same way that the distribution of intelligence does — with East Asians, for example, having bigger brains on average than whites — so [...]
December 5, 2011 – 11:23 pm
Mulla Nasrudin was carrying home some liver which he had just bought. In the other hand he had a recipe for liver pie which a friend had given him. Suddenly a buzzard swooped down and carried off the liver. “You fool!” shouted Nasrudin, “the meat is all very well — but I still have the [...]
December 4, 2011 – 9:47 pm
Not really rising at all, according to sea-level expert Nils-Axel Mörner, who actually goes and measures it, all over the globe. David Duff has brought to our attention to a new article by Dr. Mörner in the Spectator, in which we read (my emphasis): It has now become traditional for climate change summits to open [...]
December 3, 2011 – 5:08 pm
Pure insanity in deep-blue Boston: First-grader accused of sexual harassment A Boston elementary school is investigating a 7-year-old first-grader for sexual harassment after he struck another boy his age in the groin. But the mother of the accused said her son was fending off the other child, who had choked him in an altercation on [...]
December 3, 2011 – 2:30 pm
The merry Christmas season is upon us once again, so in a joyous Yuletide spirit, let’s put aside all this partisan bickering and enjoy a little light-hearted holiday cheer. Why, I’ve got just the thing.
December 3, 2011 – 1:40 pm
The wall of ideological taboo around frank discussion of race and intelligence is beginning to crack. So far we’re used to hearing about it mostly from beyond-the-pale HBD bloggers, or rare damn-the-torpedoes authors like Charles Murray — but truth, when buried, has a way of patiently seeking daylight. (Or, as Churchill put it, “you must [...]
December 2, 2011 – 2:24 pm
Hot on the heels of Climategate II, Walter Russell Meade brings to our attention a peer-reviewed paper from the latest Science that calls into question “settled” wisdom about the sensitivity of global temperature to increases in atmospheric CO2. Here. Traffic’s up around here lately, and this might be a good moment to reiterate our position [...]
December 1, 2011 – 11:27 am
In the latest NightWatch, John McCreary makes some important points about recent developments in Iran, and about the West’s policy of economic sanctions: Iran: Comment: Several reputable analysts have suggested that the attacks against the British Embassy are symptoms of a fundamental political struggle in the Iranian leadership elite. The argument is not new, but [...]
December 1, 2011 – 10:20 am
Here’s some common sense from Thomas Sowell, in the context of an essay about Newt Gingrich’s position on immigration: Let’s go back to square one. The purpose of American immigration laws and policies is not to be either humane or inhumane to illegal immigrants. The purpose of immigration laws and policies is to serve the [...]
December 1, 2011 – 12:04 am
Here’s a stunning development, a real shocker: Early Results in Egypt Show a Mandate for Islamists Seems to me there was somebody who saw this coming almost a year ago, even before the Times started writing things like “We can think of no better rebuttal to Osama bin Laden and other extremists.” Back around January [...]
November 30, 2011 – 11:47 pm
Interesting item over at Jeffery Hodges’ place: Jeff comments on an interview with the prominent Egyptian Protestant Ramez Atallah. Atallah talks about the unique centrality of Islam in Arabic-speaking lands. He also has this to say about Western indignation over the ubiquitous persecution of Christians in Muslim territory: I need you to please understand that [...]
November 30, 2011 – 11:25 pm
This from the Telegraph: Olympic swimming records set to tumble at London 2012 as Speedo unveil Fastskin3 swimwear system I realize I’m just an old fossil, but this is a depressing trend. Next it’ll be quantum-tunneling suits, or something. I think the ancient Greeks had the right idea: make ‘em compete in the nude. It’d [...]
November 29, 2011 – 9:28 pm
Bonneville Salt Flats, 462 m.p.h. Here.
November 29, 2011 – 9:12 pm
As you already know, the Congressional deficit-reduction “supercommittee” failed to find a paltry $1.2 trillion dollars worth of trimmable fat in the Federal budget over the next ten years. Given that you could confiscate all corporate profits each year in America and still only cover six months of government spending, we’re obviously living way, way [...]
November 28, 2011 – 8:59 pm
There’s been another wave of leaked “Climategate” emails, if you’re interested in this sort of thing. Jim Lacey discusses them over at NRO, and Alana Goodman does the same at Commentary. See also this searchable database — and this item too, over at Duff and Nonsense.
November 28, 2011 – 5:19 pm
I stopped by Wellfleet Harbor shortly before sunset today to take in the view. Here’s the scene, looking southwest from the seawall at Kendrick Avenue (forgive the poor quality – I took these shots with the camera in my phone, which has a blurry lens): Wait a minute — what the hell is that thing [...]
November 27, 2011 – 4:36 pm
Here’s one that I missed on Tuesday (and thanks to our friend Peter for mentioning it) — Paul Motian, a jazz drummer of sublime artistry and one of the most versatile and influential players of all time, died last week at the age of 80. (The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, the same affliction that took [...]
November 26, 2011 – 5:06 pm
Tom Wicker, one of the leading journalists of his era, has died at 85. His New York Times obituary is here. Wicker was with JFK in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, and filed his report from a pay phone on the evening of that awful day. You can read it here.
November 25, 2011 – 10:54 pm
We’ve been on the road all day, so nothing substantial here tonight — just a few brief items. First: yesterday’s Thanksgiving prep presented a good example of why punctuation matters, with particular regard to the hyphenation of compound adjectives. When you string together a pair of adjectives so that the first modifies the second, as [...]
November 24, 2011 – 2:20 pm
To each and every one of you. Among the many blessings I am grateful for today is having you all as readers and correspondents. I’m too busy cooking to write an extended meditation, but for a perfect Thanksgiving homily it would be hard to do better than the one Dr. William Vallicella posts every year. [...]
November 23, 2011 – 7:20 pm
For centuries, Sikhs have been the warriors of choice for elite fighting units throughout South Asia. And here’s why.
November 23, 2011 – 4:49 pm
Matt Yglesias comments at Slate on the three realistic prospects for the Eurozone: disintegration, German domination, or… actual democracy. As Mr. Yglesias points out, creating a unified, pan-European democratic republic would be a very “tall order”. As for German domination, my memory’s not as good as it once was, but it does seem to me [...]
November 23, 2011 – 12:31 pm
A recent article in the Times took a look at Google X, Google’s hush-hush advanced-projects lab. It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the [...]
November 21, 2011 – 11:19 pm
Here’s something odd I just read in a tooltip at XKCD: Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”. I’ve spent the past fifteen minutes trying it. So far, it’s worked every [...]
November 21, 2011 – 10:35 pm
Here’s an unusual image, courtesy of Wish I Didn’t Know:
November 21, 2011 – 7:46 pm
Here’s an almost unbearably poignant tale of the Japanese tsunami.
November 21, 2011 – 6:24 pm
Here’s one that’s been making the rounds: it’s an Op-Ed from yesterday’s Times making a point that in a less Orwellian world would come as no surprise to anyone, namely that innate qualities make a significant difference in the statistical distribution of life outcomes. We read: Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious [...]