November 30, 2012 – 12:48 pm
Another thunderbolt from the frontiers of science: men like sports more than women. This will require an intervention, I think.
November 30, 2012 – 11:08 am
For those of you with any lingering interest in the pestilential viper’s-nest we like to call the “Mideast” — that blasted, slippery-edged sinkhole of human misery that manages always to be going straight to Hell without ever actually getting there and leaving the rest of us in peace — I reprint below two items from […]
November 29, 2012 – 7:08 pm
The title of this post is a term that is taking root in a certain corner of the intellectual blogosphere. Dennis Mangan has written about it just today; I first saw it in a post by John Derbyshire about a month ago. That post led me to a four-part series by Nick Land, in which […]
November 29, 2012 – 5:34 pm
Here’s an item that’s making the rounds today: it’s the abstract of a paper published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly. The topic is something called “benevolent sexism”, which refers to all those “chivalrous” things gentlemen do for ladies: holding the door for them, seating them at table, offering them your arm during a stroll, […]
November 29, 2012 – 1:24 pm
This is either some top-notch street magic, or some clever video jiggery-pokery. Worth a look, in any event.
November 28, 2012 – 7:22 pm
Here. It’s all fun and games, until someone loses a leg.
November 28, 2012 – 7:01 pm
Here’s Stanford’s Peter Robinson, interviewing Antonin Scalia for the Federalist Society (in five parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Well worth your time, I think, and you might be surprised by some of what Justice Scalia has to say.
November 28, 2012 – 4:55 pm
I used to run. I never liked it much, but I did it anyway. I was never fleet of foot, and I never ran very far — two or three miles, usually, with the longest effort ever being only about six miles or so. I did it mainly because I found running to be good […]
November 28, 2012 – 11:24 am
From an article entitled When Work Is Punished: The Tragedy Of America’s Welfare State: We realize that this is a painful topic in a country in which the issue of welfare benefits, and cutting (or not) the spending side of the fiscal cliff, have become the two most sensitive social topics. Alas, none of that […]
November 28, 2012 – 10:54 am
Here’s a light-heartedly macabre Australian train-safety video.
November 27, 2012 – 4:32 pm
Here’s something: Germany is planning to ban sex with animals. This is not, mind you, because humans having sex with animals is something that a goodthinkful liberal society might wish to prohibit on any moral grounds. That would be discriminatory — and now that the universal acid of secular nihilism has dissolved away any foundation […]
November 26, 2012 – 5:03 pm
A great sage once hoisted a glass and made the following toast: “Here’s to Alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” With thanks to the indefatigable JK, here are some further details.
November 25, 2012 – 11:57 pm
Like a great many people my age, I was bowled over in my adolescence by the books of J.R.R. Tolkien. I was smitten, transformed. Not only was I transported by the great story itself, but as the immigrant son of British expats, I was also awakened for the first time to the great depth of […]
November 25, 2012 – 5:38 pm
With a hat tip to Kevin Kim, here’s one physician’s comments on Obamacare (which of course we have now lost any hope of repealing).
November 24, 2012 – 11:06 pm
Forgive me, readers, for the paucity of output here lately. A concatenation of upheavals and disruptions in my personal life, combined with a deepening gloom as regards our position on the great arc of history, have together knocked some of the stuffing out of me, and I find myself slow to recover. Much on my […]
November 22, 2012 – 1:17 pm
To you all. Yes, we’ve just taken an awful beating, and must now come to terms with the grim fact that the great Republic born with such promise in 1789 is now a tottering corpse, beyond hope of resurrection, and that its future now holds only decomposition and decay. But if you have family and […]
November 21, 2012 – 1:53 am
My father’s situation having stabilized, I’ve just got back home. Thanks to you all for your kind comments and emails. Old age is a terrible thing. Each crisis leaves you a little lower, a little weaker, a little frailer than the last. It’s hard to see aging as anything but a terrible, progressive, wasting disease, […]
November 18, 2012 – 7:22 pm
Things will likely be quiet here for a few days — my elderly father’s health has taken a sudden turn for the worse, and I’ve flown out to California to help look after him.
November 16, 2012 – 5:59 pm
With a hat tip to Laura Wood, here’s Clark Whelton on the recent descent of English into content-free moosh. An excerpt: This deliberate descent into verbal bedlam first came to my attention when I was interviewing intern candidates for Mayor Edward I. Koch’s speechwriting office in New York City. Until the mid-’80s I had no […]
November 15, 2012 – 11:33 pm
The central inconsistency of multiculturalism: the belief that a culture that believes all cultures are of equal value is a superior culture.
November 13, 2012 – 10:34 pm
Courtesy of David Duff: 23 brushes with death.
November 13, 2012 – 10:24 pm
My, what a lot of advice folks on the Left are giving the GOP all of a sudden! They seem truly concerned. It’s all very touching. Meanwhile, I’m encouraged by how eager so many on the Right seem to be to shape-shift into something more marketable to the tiny voting bloc they imagine they might […]
November 12, 2012 – 11:55 pm
Sorry – it’s quiet here at the moment, because the lovely Nina and I are moving house this week. I’m no longer as young as I was, and this sort of thing is exhausting. Please browse our archives, take our ‘View a Random Post’ link for a spin, or go read some of what Bill […]
November 11, 2012 – 11:08 pm
I haven’t written much about martial arts lately, but tonight I do have a brief and instructive item. As I sat catching a bite at a local saloon last night, I saw what has to be one of the most stupendous UFC knockouts ever. It was administered to 38-year-old Rich Franklin by the 40-year-old fighter […]
November 11, 2012 – 1:40 am
In 2009 I wondered if secularism was an evolutionary dead end, a self-terminating defect. It is a fascinating question. The expansion of modern secularizing culture — in particular its characteristic features of irreligion, prolongation of education and the expansion of the educational franchise to women, widely available contraception and abortion and the elimination of any […]
November 10, 2012 – 11:25 am
In times like these, when hopes are dashed and all seems lost, when the red tide of battle has sown the fields with the corpses of your brethren, when a dark night has fallen that dawn may never break, it’s time to consult the Stoics. One of the greatest of them was Epictetus (55-135), a […]
November 8, 2012 – 6:39 pm
In my previous post I mentioned that as this blog turned more toward the political, I had noticed that there were some interesting commenters that didn’t come around any more. Longtime readers will certainly recall one, in particular, who posted here frequently: an exceptionally intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate man by the name of Bob Koepp. […]
November 8, 2012 – 1:50 pm
Last night I sat up late, ruminating on Tuesday’s result, and weighing defiance against despair. I thought about how the tone and content of this blog (which are of course just a mirror of the tone and content of its author) had been taken over, more and more as years went by, by the need […]
November 7, 2012 – 12:44 pm
Peter Kirsanow posted this at the Corner today: Now that president Obama has been given more “flexibility,’ conservatives need to pause, recharge, assess, recalibrate. Then fight. Conservatives can’t be in denial. The country may very well be at a tipping point. Yes, millions fewer voted for Obama than in 2008, but it’s astonishing and disconcerting […]
November 7, 2012 – 12:10 am
We lost. I don’t know quite what to say about that just yet. I thought that just maybe this nation could pull the nose up before it was too late, but I guess it wasn’t to be. Brace for impact. Nothing to be ashamed of, though. We had a couple of pretty good centuries there. […]
November 6, 2012 – 11:56 am
Shortly after taking office in 2009, the newly minted President Barack Obama, speaking of his plan to re-energize America’s economy, told Matt Lauer: “If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.’ OK, folks! Today’s the day. Let’s get out there and assert the proposition.
November 5, 2012 – 3:23 pm
An interesting item from Dan Foster. Here.
November 4, 2012 – 11:21 pm
This over the transom from the Obama campaign tonight: Malcolm — This is cool: You can see exactly how many people named Malcolm have already voted. Take a look at that. Then share it with your friends so they can see how many people with their names have voted, too — and look up their […]
November 4, 2012 – 10:24 pm
Here’s a post by our pal Jeffery Hodges in which he excerpts some remarks by Salman Rushdie on the subject of free speech. There is also a comment, by someone called “Crude”, that triggered a knee-jerk reaction on my part — but which, as I began to respond, I realized deserved more careful consideration. I’m […]
November 3, 2012 – 12:48 am
I’ve been almost completely disconnected from the Internet for the past couple of days (I traveled back yesterday to storm-ravaged New York City, where I’m staying with friends, as our house here is still uninhabitable due to a construction project). So for tonight, just an item from the mailbag. The latest edition of Jonah Goldberg’s […]