November 12, 2015 – 4:29 pm
Here’s an excerpt from a post I wrote five years ago. It still seems current, so I thought I’d repost it here today. The expanded modern liberal Western mind, stripped of reverence for its cultural heritage ”” and having shed, as a snake sheds an outgrown skin, the scaffolding and buttresses of traditional standards and […]
November 12, 2015 – 11:20 am
Commenting on the chaos on college campuses in recent weeks, our reader ‘Whitewall’ asks: “…may [there] be cracks forming in one of the supports of The Cathedral?” I don’t see it that way. Keep in mind that what we call the “Cathedral” is a large complex of distinct components: thousands of academic, media and political […]
November 11, 2015 – 5:59 pm
From the ridiculous — see yesterday’s posts — to the sublime: The Lark Ascending, by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
November 10, 2015 – 11:26 pm
Just watched some of the GOP debate. Best moment of the evening: George Will quoted on Twitter as calling John Kasich “a Roman candle of undiagrammable sentences.” Carly Fiorina did well tonight, except I think she wants to start World War III. (Rand Paul noticed that too.) Jeb Bush, who really should, at this point, […]
November 10, 2015 – 8:35 pm
Heather Mac Donald — whom, I am happy to say, I had the pleasure of meeting last night — weighs in here on the Left’s newest weapon in its “long march” through the institutions of our civilization. It’s a doozie, too: college athletics.
November 9, 2015 – 3:27 pm
Here’s a headline from today’s Washington Post: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just 1 is online The cost? So far, a billion dollars, of your money and mine. By the time the project is completed, in oh, three more years, we’re told, it should be over three billion. (Unless, of […]
November 8, 2015 – 12:21 am
The other day I spotted a few headlines that I thought bore some connection to one another. They were: Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds …and: Small Towns Face Rising Suicide Rates. …and: Americans becoming less religious, especially young adults. There was also this: Illinois District Violated Transgender Student’s Rights, U.S. Says. […]
November 7, 2015 – 11:50 am
In the comment-thread to a recent post on hoplophobes, our reader ‘libertybelle’ put up a link to an excellent essay defining three human types. It deserves promotion to the front page. We read: If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for […]
November 6, 2015 – 12:18 am
I don’t write about music much these days (though it’s starting to seem so pointless to write about the things I have been writing about that I should probably do so more often). But if any of you are fans of the musical genre known as “progressive rock”, I have something for you, something that […]
November 5, 2015 – 2:47 pm
I grew up in rural western New Jersey, where guns, and hunting, were ubiquitous. There was no mystique about them, and no agenda; they were just another thing. I learned to shoot as a little boy, and used to love plinking with a .22 at the farm down the road where my best friend lived. […]
November 5, 2015 – 2:20 pm
NASA has just released a painstakingly crafted, half-hour high-resolution video of the Sun. It is fantastic. See it here, and make sure to watch it full-screen.
November 5, 2015 – 2:14 pm
Conception collapses the biological Eigenfunktion: from an infinite probability-cloud of sperm and ova is instantiated a particular actuality.
November 4, 2015 – 11:45 pm
“Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.” — Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
November 4, 2015 – 5:41 pm
Where we’ve got to with humanoid robots, here.
November 4, 2015 – 1:47 pm
There was a lot of push-back in yesterday’s elections: a new, conservative governor in Kentucky, a “gun-control” defeat in Virginia, a restroom reaction in Houston, a “sanctuary sheriff” defeated in San Francisco, and a pot-legalization defeat in Ohio, to name a few. Longtime readers will know that “I never metaphor I didn’t like”, so here’s […]
November 4, 2015 – 12:09 pm
From a review, by Roger Scruton, of Russell Kirk’s America’s British Culture (1993): Kirk identifies a culture in anthropological fashion, as a set of “folkways’””inherited forms, procedures, expectations, and customs, which together define a communal way of life. Four principal folkways define America’s British inheritance: the English language and its literature, the rule of law, […]
November 3, 2015 – 8:57 pm
In a completely off-topic comment to a recent post, our resident Leftist gadfly mentioned the Higgs boson. By a strange coincidence, John Derbyshire just mentioned it too! Here.
November 3, 2015 – 1:50 pm
A central theme of “neoreaction”, which draws a direct line from 17th-century New England to post-modern liberalism, is that modern Leftism, and therefore the cultural, ideological, academic and political framework of the 21st-century West, is a religion in search of a God. (As someone once said, the easiest way to understand the state of affairs […]
November 3, 2015 – 12:12 pm
Following on our previous post, I”d be remiss not to bring to your attention a white-paper from the French-based Société de Calcul Mathématique, which specializes in complex mathematical modeling, on the “climate change” cryptoreligion. In the paper’s summary, we read: All public policies, in France, Europe and throughout the world, find their origin and inspiration […]
November 2, 2015 – 1:08 pm
If you’ve been reading the news carefully, you may have noticed some stories about something that used to be called “global warming”, and is now, I think, referred to as “climate change”. The idea, if I understand it correctly, is that the Earth is getting warmer — which of course it has done often in […]
November 1, 2015 – 2:22 pm
When a society comes to believe that nothing should have consequences, it soon will face very serious consequences indeed.
November 1, 2015 – 1:27 pm
In a fine rant, Fred Reed examines the national character, and finds it wanting. We read: The United States has become a nation of weak, pampered, easily frightened, helpless milquetoasts who have never caught a fish, fired a gun, chopped a log, hitchhiked across the country, or been in a schoolyard fight. If their cat […]
October 30, 2015 – 10:01 pm
Tonight, a story about another black-white “gap”. This time it’s a “sleep gap”: “an unexpected challenge in the quest for racial justice”. We read: In 2005, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, began an experiment that would last five years. One by one, they brought 164 study participants to a sleep lab at […]
October 28, 2015 – 3:56 pm
Under development: the pinniped space-program. Here.
October 28, 2015 – 11:49 am
Here’s Marcus Aurelius, writing about the Clintons: “To my mentor Fronto I owe the realization that malice, craftiness, and duplicity are the concomitants of absolute power; and that our patrician families tend for the most part to be lacking in the feelings of ordinary humanity.” – Meditations, Book 1
October 27, 2015 – 8:57 pm
Making the rounds today (hat-tips to, among others, Bill Vallicella and our commenter Whitewall) is a jeremiad by Victor Davis Hanson, who has made these lamentations his métier in recent years. In this one, he mourns in particular the lost virtues of the West: the qualities that made our civilization shine so brightly, that gave […]
October 26, 2015 – 10:44 pm
Montesquieu: “It is in the nature of a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise, it can scarcely continue to exist… In a large republic, the common good is sacrificed to a thousand considerations; it is subordinated to exceptions, it depends upon accidents. In a small one, the public good is better felt, better […]
October 26, 2015 – 10:20 pm
The modern attitude places the burden of proof upon every aspect of traditional life. All is disposable unless proven necessary, including even the axioms upon which such proof depends. What vessel could contain this universal acid?
October 24, 2015 – 12:48 pm
A culture, a civilization, is a memetic ecosystem. If one species — a ritual, a tradition, a way of modeling some aspect of the world — goes extinct, the effect may reverberate through the entire habitat.
October 22, 2015 – 10:22 pm
Well, there’s plenty to talk about tonight, in particular the lurid Benghazi hearings and Barack Obama’s pugnacious veto of a military-funding bill, but I just can’t summon up the will. Pick your team and join the shouting. This has all gone so far beyond any possibility of comity or reconciliation that anything I might say […]
October 21, 2015 – 10:39 pm
Back in 2007, psychologist Roy F. Baumeister gave a talk on why men and women are not the same. It’s lucid and thoughtful, and well worth your time. Read it here.
October 20, 2015 – 8:26 pm
In our recent post on neoreactionary bloggers, we noted again, as we have often done before, the applicability of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to social decay. Our reader ‘antiquarian’, in the comment thread, pointed out that the late Robert Conquest’s (p.b.u.h.) Second Law of Politics also describes an entropic rule. For those of you […]
October 20, 2015 – 11:27 am
Here’s a tart item from XX Committee‘s John Schindler on our military bureaucracy’s largely unsuccessful attempt to come to grips with the Islamic State. It’s not encouraging. There may also be another problem Mr. Schindler doesn’t mention. Recently I attended a talk by a former Navy intelligence analyst on the doctrinal underpinnings of Sunni jihad. […]
October 19, 2015 – 2:03 pm
In his daily Best of the Web newsletter, James Taranto comments (behind the WSJ paywall, unfortunately) on how openly the Democrats are now sharpening their knives, licking their lips, and fixing their gaze on the assets of the wealthy. He refers in particular to an item in the New York Times by Patricia Cohen that […]
October 17, 2015 – 10:40 pm
A pretty sunset today in Wellfleet today, looking northwest from Duck Harbor:
October 16, 2015 – 12:14 pm
“Neoreactionaries” are a wordy bunch, and it’s hard to keep up with the volume of blogorrhea they produce every week. If you’re interested, Nick B. Steves, who appears these days to be NRx’s General Secretary, posts his own gleanings from the “reactosphere” in a weekly, somewhat Catholic-leaning summary, here, and he’s also put together a […]
October 15, 2015 – 2:23 pm
In a recent post, Cassandra’s Blues, I mentioned that some of my friends, relatives, and correspondents find my take on current events, and my outlook for our future, a little “dour”. (Okay, all of them do, and looking back over the last few entries here, I can see why they might feel that way.) I’ll […]
October 14, 2015 – 12:48 pm
Here’s another strong and detailed post from M. G. at Those Who Can See, this time on the “refugee” crisis in Europe. Take the time to read it all.
October 13, 2015 – 7:56 pm
In the comment-thread to our previous post, our resident left-wing gadfly and Obama-administration cheerleader — resplendent as always in saddle shoes, pleated skirt, class sweater and pom-poms — tried to make the case that the resurgent forces of genuine conservatism on the Right had sinned against America by exerting their influence in opposition to current […]
October 10, 2015 – 1:17 pm
The Cold Civil War is heating up, and if the Left has its way, among the casualties will be the Constitutional order in which co-equal branches of government check and balance each other’s power. This being the bedrock of the American system, and our penultimate bulwark against tyranny, the times may soon become “interesting”, and […]
October 7, 2015 – 1:54 pm
You may read a lot of academic papers, but I doubt you’ve seen a better abstract than this.
October 7, 2015 – 11:44 am
For years we’ve been told that dietary fat is bad for us, and that we should avoid it. Of course not everyone was saying this, but it was one of those “consensus” things, where dissenters were hectored and sneered at by those in the mainstream, and the government applied what pressure it could to enforce […]
October 6, 2015 – 4:36 pm
For you blue-state dwellers, here’s some ammo for those cocktail-party ambushes.
October 6, 2015 – 2:37 pm
A passage from Henry F. Pringle’s excellent 1931 biography of Theodore Roosevelt describes a piece of legislation known as the Raines Law (passed in Albany in 1896, when Roosevelt was president of the New York City Police Commission). It gives us a lovely example of another, higher Law, having to do with unintended consequences: Ostensibly […]
October 5, 2015 – 5:07 pm
In the mail today came a link to an excellent, informative, and even-handed article on inequality, social mobility, and the heritability of advantageous traits. The author is an Englishman named Toby Young, and he zeroes in nicely on the question one comes to once one has hacked through the thorny ideological thicket surrounding these topics. […]
October 4, 2015 – 9:15 pm
The indefatigable JK has posted a link, in one of our recent comment threads, to an outstanding article that deserves promotion to the front page: an in-depth look at high- and low-trust societies and how they got that way. Read it here.
October 4, 2015 – 11:57 am
In the New York public-transportation system there’s an ad campaign that features the slogan “If you see something, say something!” Its motive is unabashedly conservative: it seeks to make the community sensitive, and responsive, to existential threats. The problem is that such threats can take familiar forms that are easy to overlook, especially in a […]
October 3, 2015 – 10:36 am
In today’s Physorg.com newsletter (which I recommend again to you all), we find a link to the following story: Incident of drunk man kicking humanoid robot raises legal questions We read: A few weeks ago, a drunk man in Japan was arrested for kicking a humanoid robot that was stationed as a greeter at a […]
October 2, 2015 – 2:11 pm
Well, it looks like Hurricane Joaquin is going to give the mainland a miss. That means a remarkable streak will continue: it’s been almost ten years since a major hurricane last struck the continental United States, higher levels of CO2 notwithstanding. Just sayin’.
October 2, 2015 – 12:22 pm
We’ve all been hearing about the scandal at Volkswagen, in which the company installed “cheater” software that restricted emissions only during testing. The CEO, Martin Winterkorn, has resigned in disgrace, reviled by all goodthinkful people. The software cheat was a crazy move, because it was bound to be discovered sooner or later. Why would the […]