Category Archives: General

Whatever doesn’t obviously go anywhere else.

Ouch!

Slipped on a puddle in the kitchen last night, caught my right elbow on the counter as I was falling, and tore my right shoulder to pieces. Back from the ER at Cape Cod Hospital — lovely people there! — but will need MRI and orthopaedic consultation. Judging by the tearing and crunching sounds as […]

Service Notice

Sorry it’s been so slow around here — summer doldrums, mostly, and lack of anything interesting to say. (We also have our son Nick, whom we haven’t seen for months due to the Wuhan Red Death, paying us a brief visit.) Should be back with something soon. Thanks all for coming by, and please feel […]

How’s It Going?

Haven’t looked at the news much for a week or so. Did I miss anything?

A Fate Worse Than Death

From John Hirschauer at National Review: “More Men Die, But Women Bear The Brunt“.

Scary Vs. Dangerous, And The Madness Of Crowds

Here’s a sharp little item on the miscalculation of risk.

Tied Off

The apt metaphor, I think, for what we have done to ourselves in response to this virus is the tourniquet. Leave it on too long and gangrene sets in. You can watch your own body begin to die and rot and stink. “Ah, but it’s just a limb,” you say. “It’s worth losing a limb […]

Gone, But Not Forgotten

It’s Mothers’ Day. Here was mine. I miss her.

Service Notice

Longtime readers will have noticed the lack of substantial content here recently – just little odds and ends, mostly. It’s mostly the Groundhog-Day monotony of this new life: the days, and the news they bring, never vary much. There is very little vitality or energy in the air, or on the air — just the […]

Sez Who?

Here’s the question that interviewers should be putting to governors: “If, in normal times, you were to announce as a matter of executive fiat that people must close their businesses, could not assemble in groups over a certain size, and must stay home except for travel you deem essential, it would seem an absurdity. People […]

PSA

In times of crisis, it’s important to do what we can. One of the ways good citizens have responded to our current health emergency has been by sewing their own protective face-masks. Given that many of you, I’m sure, would find it easier to shove a camel through the eye of a needle than to […]

When I’m 64

When I get older, losing my hair Many years from now… Or, as it happens, today. My, how time does fly when you’re having fun. As always: natal salutations to Guy Fawkes, Thomas Jefferson, F.W. Woolworth, James Ensor, Butch Cassidy, Sir Arthur “Bomber’ Harris, Robert Watson-Watt, Samuel Beckett, Harold Stassen, Stanislaw Ulam, Eudora Welty, Howard […]

Sign Of The Times

Just to remind you, readers, as you contemplate the millenarian tableau unfolding before us: yes, there is also a comet. (Of course.)

Rashomon, Redux

In response to Friday’s post about the different emotional reactions of Democrats and Republicans to the Wuhan-virus pandemic, our longtime commenter, the indefatigable JK, posted a link to a thoughtful essay on the topic. I though it worth promoting to a post of its own, so here it is.

Rashomon

Make of this what you will:

Common Sense In A Time Of Hysteria

Here’s a brief video from an infectious-disease specialist. Well worth watching.

Back

Having survived our trip to Charleston (a beautiful place, as we expected), we are now hunkered down in the remote precincts of our little peninsula in the North Atlantic. Self-isolation comes naturally to me. Confining myself to the basement music studio, a comfy chair with a book to read, and contemplative hikes in the nearby […]

Service Notice

The lovely Nina and I are off to Charleston, SC for a few days. (We’d heard it’s nice, so we thought we’d go and see for ourselves.) Back next week.

Scotland

Och aye. (Full screen recommended.)

Going Viral

I haven’t commented much on this Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. Clearly it is a serious issue, but it is just as clear that it is being whipped up as much as possible by our domestic media to create fear and chaos, in the interest of hanging a millstone around Donald Trump’s neck. When the swine flu […]

A Remarkable Man

We must note the passing of Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest minds of our era. He died yesterday, at 96, after a fall. Read about the life of this extraordinary man here.

On A Personal Note

I’ll ask your forgiveness once again for the lack of substantial posts here over the past few weeks. Regarding the political scene, I’m finding it awfully difficult right at the moment to summon up the will to comment on any of it — not that there isn’t plenty I could say, but at this point […]

Two And One

There are times when it seems more important to me to read and think than to write, and these past weeks have been one of those times. I do apologize to those of you who come by here regularly, and I promise that these lulls are always temporary. But I hate to send you away […]

Bad News

I was shocked and saddened just now to learn that Rush Limbaugh has been diagnosed with “advanced” lung cancer. Mr. Limbaugh, a brilliant analyst of the American political scene, has most importantly been, for decades now, a vital brake (to the extent that such a thing is possible) on the entropic forces of the American […]

Good Friday

The Senate has voted to shut down the Democrats’ impeachment stunt, and the U.K. has officially left the E.U. It’s nice to see things work out now and then.

Service Notice

I’ve been a little preoccupied this week with family matters and other offline distractions. Back soon.

Gleichschaltung

As they all said, in bone-chilling unison: this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

Sir Roger Scruton, 1944-2020

It was with terrible sadness that I learned today that Sir Roger Scruton has fallen from the ramparts at age 75. He was a man of incomparable culture, erudition, discrimination, and integrity. Not only has Western civilization lost one of its greatest defenders; it is also as if a magnificent library has just been burnt […]

Many A True Word Hath Been Spoken In Jest

I hate awards shows, and never watch them (full disclosure, though: when I was nominated for an engineering Grammy in 2004, I did go) — but I rather have to hand it to Ricky Gervais for tonight’s monologue at the Golden Globes, which was splashed at once all over social media. You can watch it […]

Happy New Year!

Buckle up, everybody – I have a feeling 2020 is going to be an eventful year. “Interesting”, even.

Service Notice

Taking a little holiday break. Back soon.

Merry Christmas!

Over There

Outstanding news: it looks like the Right has won a major victory in Britain’s national elections today.

Beautiful Lies, Cont’d

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Beautiful Lies

I’ve been thinking some more about the Curtis Yarvin essay we looked at a couple of days ago. There were good comments on the previous post. A couple of readers pointed out that, despite Mr. Yarvin’s assertion of the scarcity of sociopaths in the general population, many political systems (and in particular ours, I think) […]

Happy Thanksgiving

We all have a lot to be thankful for, even in these uncertain times (and when were the times ever not uncertain?). I’m grateful to all of you for reading and commenting. Enjoy this special day — my favorite holiday of the year.

Service Notice

Sorry for the thin content here lately. Now and then I just don’t have much to say: I’ve written 5,030 posts over the past 14 years, and sometimes I feel as if anything I’d write would, at this point, just be repeating myself. (And then the muse grants me her favor once again, and I’m […]

Back

I’m back in Wellfleet, after an interesting weekend in Baltimore. It’s snowing here — on November 12th. The temperature is supposed to drop well down into the twenties overnight. I have a feeling, on no particular authority, that it’s going to be a long, cold winter.

Service Notice

I’ll be in Baltimore this weekend at the annual conference of the H. L. Mencken Club, and driving back to Cape Cod on Monday. Should get back to business here after that.

Home Again

The lovely Nina and I are “stateside” once more after a two-week visit with our daughter’s young family in Vienna. It was wonderful to see them — in particular, to be with our three-year-old and ten-month-old grandsons Liam and Declan gives us great happiness — but as someone once said, the best part of traveling […]

Service Notice

The lovely Nina and I are on the road again: back to Vienna to visit our daughter and the wee bairns, and to celebrate Nina’s birthday (it’s one of those “big ones”). We’ll back in about two weeks, though I may post a thing or two from abroad. Please feel free to browse our vast […]

He’s Back

Curtis Yarvin, alias ‘Mencius Moldbug’, seems to be getting back in the game. He discontinued his enormously influential blog Unqualified Reservations years ago (it has now been archived and reorganized here, minus the comment-threads), and seemed for a while to have tried to keep his head down, concentrating on his (apparently quite successful) computer-science career. […]

Beuller? Beuller?

I see that the Kakistocracy blog, which Bill Vallicella had linked to just yesterday, is gone. That’s bad: the author, Porter (who used to comment here occasionally), had exceptional sharpness of mind, wit, and pen. Porter, if you should see this: what happened? Drop me a line.

Knackered!

I’m back from my annual musical get-together on Star Island, but am in no shape for writing just yet. It was a fantastic weekend — we spent the days working out the more difficult material, and hosted performances/parties for all the other guests on the island every night into the wee hours — but after […]

Service Notice

I’m off to my annual musical retreat in the far-flung Isles of Shoals. Back on Tuesday, if we aren’t all washed out to sea by climate change.

Service Notice

Still having problems here: all my old posts with block-quotes (thousands of them) now have broken character-encoding for various punctuation marks. I believe this is due to a database migration that Bluehost did recently (though I could be mistaken). They are looking into it.

Service Notice

The site’s having problems: comments are not working. I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong. Update: There seems to be a problem with this WordPress theme. I may have to switch to another one. Update: Fixed. Back soon.

Be It Ever So Humble…

…there’s no place like home. The lovely Nina and I are back from our little trip abroad. We visited Slovenia and Croatia with our daughter and her young family, who had driven down from their home in Vienna to meet us, and we had a fine time getting to know these beautiful places a bit […]

Service Notice

Sorry about the near-total lack of content here. We’ve had a steady stream of houseguests, and I’ve hardly been online at all. I’ve paid as little attention to the news as possible, and have spent my scanty solitary time reading (Bruce Catton, Thomas West, and Forrest McDonald), working on a couple of mixes in the […]

Service Notice

Things might be a little slow around here for a bit; we have our children and grandchildren visiting, and the strife-torn world seems far away. Which is nice.

There And Back Again

We’re back in the States after our whirlwind trip to Vienna. The expedition was a success: Lily, who turned ninety-eight today, bore up well, though it was exhausting for her. She was glad to visit her hometown one last time, and although she is almost completely blind, she enjoyed being taken around to some old […]

Service Notice

The lovely Nina and I will be away for a week. The Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna has mounted an exhibit featuring three artists who fled Vienna as the Nazis took over, and one of the three — the only one surviving — is my mother-in-law Lily, who has lived in New York […]