December 31, 2015 – 7:16 pm
Here comes 2016. Buckle up! Thanks again to all of you for reading and commenting.
December 30, 2015 – 2:34 pm
This intercalary week is always a good time for a change of pace, and with all that’s been going on in the local physical world, I’ve hardly glanced at the computer for the past few days. (It’s been nice.) Even better, I’ve managed to pay almost no attention at all to the news. Finding myself […]
December 27, 2015 – 10:42 am
On a little holiday break with family. Back soon. Also, sorry about the outage yesterday (if any of you noticed).
December 24, 2015 – 11:33 pm
It being Christmas Eve, earlier this evening I found myself humming the “Christmastime Is Here” song from the old Charlie Brown Christmas special. (The show originally aired in 1965, when I was nine, and Vince Guaraldi’s beautiful score has stayed with me ever since.) The tune got me thinking about the show itself, which is […]
December 23, 2015 – 11:59 pm
I’ve written before about the transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom. His work is concerned with the long-term prospects of the human race, with particular interest in the future of artificial intelligence, and its perils. In these pages we’ve mentioned his suggestion that we might already be living in a computer simulation (see here and here), as […]
December 22, 2015 – 11:59 am
Here is “The Khaleesi“, a proposed skyscraper for West 57th Street in Manhattan. A tower for our times, I think.
December 22, 2015 – 10:49 am
Headline at Salon today: White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it Salon is not a “fringe” publication. (Would that it were.) Apparently it has no qualms about declaring race war. As Saul Alinsky said in his Rule 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.’ Comparisons […]
December 21, 2015 – 11:20 pm
Today we learned that six U.S. soldiers were killed by a Taliban suicide bomber in Afghanistan. In today’s NightWatch newsletter, analyst John McCreary wrote: Afghanistan: The deputy governor of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan said that the Taliban seized the police headquarters in Sangin District center, with fighting continuing. Deputy governor Mohammad Jan Rasoulyar warned […]
December 20, 2015 – 5:21 pm
Tomorrow we come to the solstice again, where the great wheel of the seasons pauses, for an instant, at top dead center. I went for a walk at sunset this evening. It was very still. I’ll be sixty in the spring. How strange it is to be a line, in a circular world.
December 19, 2015 – 3:36 pm
With a hat-tip to our friend Jeffery Hodges, here is a reminder that if Islam is a “religion of peace”, it is only the peace of submission, of surrender, of captivity.
December 19, 2015 – 2:40 pm
Writing for the Gatestone Institute, Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist describes the situation in her homeland — which for most of my lifetime was the holotype and exemplar of the advanced, peacable modern Western nation — as it sinks into darkness and disorder, thanks to its mass importation of wholly alien, mostly Muslim, immigrants. Swedish citizens, […]
December 18, 2015 – 7:33 pm
Self-driving cars, like 3-D printing, are a promising technology with quite a way to go before achieving their transformative potential. (See our post on one of the ethical questions they raise, here.) An item published yesterday at Bloomberg Business describes a hard problem the people designing them must face: how fast should the cars go? […]
December 18, 2015 – 12:29 am
It’s amazing how hard it is to proofread your own stuff. I just saw a glaring typo in the first line of a recent post; it sat there for more than a day before I spotted it. (If you didn’t see it, too late; it’s fixed.) It ruined the whole flow of the line, and […]
December 18, 2015 – 12:15 am
I know I’ve mentioned it before, but this stuff is going to be big. Call your broker.
December 16, 2015 – 11:43 pm
During last night’s debate Carly Fiorina, whose chances are roughly equal for the Republican nomination and Prva HNL Player of the Year, suggested that we ought to make her President because she’s a woman. Let’s leave aside the reaction were a male candidate to try such a thing, and try to get the gist of […]
December 15, 2015 – 6:56 pm
Here’s an interesting item: a novel gait identified in Russian officials. Learn more here.
December 15, 2015 – 12:42 pm
Done with the weekend’s sessions, but still swamped with work. All I’ve managed to post over the past few days has been a few comments over at Maverick Philosopher, where a discussion of “tribalism” continues, here. Back soon.
December 11, 2015 – 11:49 pm
Recording sessions all weekend. Talk amongst yourselves.
December 9, 2015 – 10:59 pm
Yesterday the United States Senate held a hearing on the magnitude of human impact on climate change. Giving testimony were some Actual Climate Scientists. I would like very much for you to read and carefully digest their testimony. I will excerpt some of it here, in what will be a longish post — but please, […]
December 9, 2015 – 7:56 pm
From the Long War Journal: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released a new video featuring a former Guantanamo detainee, Ibrahim Qosi, who is also known as Sheikh Khubayb al Sudani. In July 2010, Qosi plead guilty to charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism before a military commission. His plea was part […]
December 8, 2015 – 1:18 pm
With a hat tip to our reader Henry, here’s a good piece from Thomas Sowell on Barack Obama’s recent speech from the Oval Office. Excerpt (my emphasis): The first responsibility of any government is to protect the people already in the country. Even in this age of an entitlement mentality, no one in a foreign […]
December 6, 2015 – 12:18 am
The New York Times today did something it had not done since the Harding administration: it published an editorial on the front page. It did so not because it had a rational argument to make, or a useful policy to advance — it had neither of those things. Why, then, would the Times make such […]
December 4, 2015 – 10:29 pm
In a recent post I remarked that, with bitterly opposing forces tearing at our rotting social framework, every public shock — in this case, the San Bernardino jihad assault — is a hammer-blow that “strains the joints and widens the cracks”. “Each time,” I remarked in a subsequent comment, “we split apart a little more.” […]
December 4, 2015 – 5:49 pm
Jim Geraghty continues to stay on top of the San Bernardino attack. In today’s newsletter he points out that the late Tashfeen Malik, the distaff member of the duo, had been passed a Homeland Security anti-terrorist screening during her application for a K-1 visa. (We haven’t heard any word yet on whether Ms. Malik was […]
December 3, 2015 – 1:04 pm
Jim Geraghty of NRO (yes, you folks in the NRx mutaween, I’m linking to NRO again) posted a good newsletter this morning about the San Bernardino shootings. (In case you’ve just emerged from a coma, or a two-day shift in a zinc mine, there was a mass shooting by two or more Muslims in California […]
December 2, 2015 – 9:34 pm
I’m working late tonight, and haven’t time to write. So here’s yet another placeholder for free association, idle chat, bibulous logorrhea, and confessions of the heart. (Or, perhaps, for the introduction of serious topics or questions.) You have the floor.
December 1, 2015 – 8:52 pm
When I was a boy, there was a mawkish and immensely popular television program called “Queen For A Day“. Each episode featured a panel of miserable women, who vied for the prize by telling a plangent tale of woe. (The poor things wept, sobbed, and wailed as they pleaded for money, appliances, etc.; it’s easy […]