November 30, 2016 – 9:31 pm
Magnus Carlsen wrapped up his World Championship title defense against Sergey Karjakin today in a series of four rapid-play tiebreakers. It was a fantastic finish that featured some brilliant, beautiful chess. Each player had 25 minutes for the whole game, with a 10-second increment added for every move. The first game (you can play through […]
November 29, 2016 – 9:41 pm
We were treated to some grandmaster-level trolling at the Guardian yesterday, by one Godfrey Elfwick. Here.
November 28, 2016 – 11:26 pm
All over the Western world, ethno-nationalist sentiment is ascendant. In France, Marine Le Pen has a very good chance of taking the presidency in the next election. (Even if she doesn’t, the likely winner will be the conservative Catholic François Fillon, who is himself an immigration restrictionist.) In Austria, where my daughter lives, a presidential […]
November 25, 2016 – 2:49 pm
A scene from earlier today: This is what happens when all connections to anything beyond atomistic individualism, and mere presentist materiality, are severed. This is what it looks like when all of the horizontal ligatures, organic hierarchy, and embedding in past and future time that give a culture health, harmony and order are deliberately […]
November 25, 2016 – 1:31 pm
Here’s a treat for you music fans, and especially my old friends and colleagues in the recording biz: producer Tony Visconti in his studio doing a track-by track breakdown and analysis of what I’ve always considered David Bowie’s best song ever: his 1977 classic Heroes. Many thanks to my old friend (and former bandmate) Joe […]
November 24, 2016 – 12:57 pm
…to all of you. Given recent events, I’m sure it will be a contentious gathering in millions of homes across the country. That’s a shame, because we ought, if we really want, to be able to put social and political externalities aside for one day. Thanksgiving is a beautiful holiday, and a necessary idea. All […]
November 23, 2016 – 2:39 pm
Chess fans: there’s a world-championship match underway, here in New York, between the current king of the hill, Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, and the Russian challenger Sergey Karjakin. It’s a 12-game match, and it was all draws until yesterday’s Game 8, in which Mr. Karjakin achieved a dramatic win. Game 9 is now underway — a […]
November 22, 2016 – 8:00 pm
I’ve been reading Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. Written in 1948, it is a profoundly reactionary book, a revolt against the modern world. And when I say “modern”, I mean something more than you might imagine: Mr Weaver traces the cracking open of the abyss all the way back to William of Ockham and the […]
November 21, 2016 – 12:41 am
Sorry for the lack of substantial content here recently. I’ve felt it possible to have a bit of a breather after the election, and apparently the Muse has felt the same. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been much worth commenting about — the Left is writhing like a wounded serpent, but it is […]
November 18, 2016 – 1:00 pm
Today’s offering, courtesy of War on the Rocks: an essay on the study of history, from MIT’s Francis J. Gavin. Here.
November 16, 2016 – 1:39 pm
In the Daniel Greenfield essay we linked to in our previous post, Mr. Greenfield wrote: Like the ordinary men chipping away at the Berlin Wall, they tore down an unnatural thing that had towered over them. And as they watched it fall, they marveled at how weak and fragile it had always been. And how […]
November 16, 2016 – 1:05 pm
With a hat-tip to our friend Bill Keezer, we give you a rousing essay by Daniel Greenfield on what has just happened in America. It begins: This wasn’t an election. It was a revolution. It’s midnight in America. The day before fifty million Americans got up and stood in front of the great iron wheel […]
November 15, 2016 – 12:00 pm
I (and many others) have written often about the obvious religiosity of Progressivism, and about its being, quite plainly and transparently, a secular continuation and direct descendant of the Puritan “mission into the wilderness”. A particularly instructive aspect of this atheistic quest for holiness and salvation is the patently crypto-religious “climate-change” crusade. Early last year, […]
November 15, 2016 – 10:19 am
My liberal Jewish friends are on the fainting couch after the Trump victory. One said to my wife that as a Jew he now felt very afraid of what might be coming. I think they should relax. Here’s the economist David P. Goldman, whom you may know as the pseudonymous Asia Times columnist “Spengler”, and […]
November 14, 2016 – 1:19 pm
My old e-pal Kevin Kim and I have just had an unpleasant falling-out, the result of what I thought was a spirited, but not unfriendly, back-and-forth on Twitter last night about flag-burning, the power of symbols, and the persistent truths of human nature. The topic is an interesting and important one, and one that is […]
November 13, 2016 – 12:30 am
Following the Trump victory in last week’s election, many on the losing side have been calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. To do this would be to remove yet another Constitutional bulwark against raw democracy, which the Framers rightly saw as a buttered slide to tyranny (beginning with the tyranny of the majority). […]
November 11, 2016 – 1:27 pm
From Patrick Buchanan yesterday: a call to action in the wake of victory. Here. This “magnanimity” business is certainly attracting a lot of attention. (More on that later.) Meanwhile, see the discussion at the Maverick Philosopher, here.
November 11, 2016 – 11:50 am
It’s awfully (though darkly) amusing to hear, in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election, all the cries from the streets denouncing his supporters as ‘Fascists’. The word, of course, has nearly been drained of all meaning, and like ‘racist’, is now little more than a cudgel for the faithful to use against anyone from whom […]
November 10, 2016 – 11:53 pm
I’m trying to hang on to that “magnanimous” feeling tonight. It’s not going so well.
November 9, 2016 – 8:28 pm
Hillary Clinton supporters: let’s not hear a lot of whingeing, please, about how your gal “won the popular vote”. Leaving aside the most obvious response — that in this federal republic it is, by careful design, the States that elect the President, and not the mob — your argument depends upon the assumption of an […]
November 9, 2016 – 12:30 pm
With the election of Donald Trump, many of us (count me in!) are hoping that the Clintons will at last be held to account for their criminality. One thing stands in the way: the power of the President to grant pardons. “But wait,” I hear you saying, “can President Obama pardon the Clintons in advance […]
November 9, 2016 – 10:54 am
Well! Here we stand, on the morrow of our victory. In this glorious dawn, let us survey the battlefield. The Clintons are finished, done. Their political careers are over, and the parasitic criminal syndicates they run, which draw their life’s-blood by selling access to power, have been expelled by the host. Each of them has […]
November 9, 2016 – 2:52 am
Donald Trump has won the election. This means that Hillary Clinton will never be President. She will be lucky to stay out of prison. We did it.
November 8, 2016 – 6:05 pm
If you haven’t seen this clip, I think you’ll enjoy it.
November 8, 2016 – 1:51 pm
I have noted often in these pages that in the absence of a natural and organic social framework, order must be imposed artificially from the “top down”. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a 2014 post, The Death of Culture: To create the new metaculture, muticulturalism cannot not add cultures together, due to the […]
November 7, 2016 – 11:40 am
It should be obvious to all at this point that a very great part of our nation’s political sickness is due to the ever-increasing concentration of power in the hands of the Federal leviathan in Washington, at the expense of local government. (That this is, even at this late stage of the disease, not obvious […]
November 6, 2016 – 6:26 pm
Well, here’s a fine state of affairs: the lovely Nina has thrown out her back here in Wellfleet, MA, and so we can’t make the long ride back to New York — which is where we are registered to vote. I very much doubt that Hillary Clinton will take New York’s electoral votes by a […]
November 5, 2016 – 2:58 pm
From the Podesta emails: “With friends like that…” See also this. Three days to go, folks. Choose wisely.
November 2, 2016 – 2:17 pm
From the Wall Street Journal today: Places Most Unsettled by Rapid Demographic Change Are Drawn to Donald Trump ARCADIA, Wis. — Small towns in the Midwest have diversified more quickly than almost any part of the U.S. since the start of an immigration wave at the beginning of this century. The resulting cultural changes appear […]
November 2, 2016 – 2:01 pm
Here’s a nifty visualization of the Clinton, etc. emails.
November 2, 2016 – 11:24 am
From the Express: A migrant turf war erupted into violence on the streets of one of Paris’ trendiest neighbourhoods early this morning as asylum seekers beat each other to a pulp with wooden clubs. Story and video here. A defining characteristic of a living organism is the maintenance of its internal order, and of its […]
November 1, 2016 – 11:57 pm
A dramatic clip from NASA Heliophysics. Here.
November 1, 2016 – 8:13 pm
Here is an amusing item: a secret report, ostensibly leaked by the hacker cartel “Anonymous”, outlining the extent of the Clinton disadvantage in the upcoming election, together with some highly imaginative ways to prevent a Trump victory. Fake, of course – but as I said, amusing. What times we live in! Read it here.
November 1, 2016 – 3:46 pm
Today we have an essay for you, from Francis Spufford, on how two prominent atheists — Sam Harris and Barbara Ehrenreich — have approached their profoundest subjective experiences. It begins: To say, as people do from time to time, that science is the only source of meaning available to human beings is to consign large […]
November 1, 2016 – 2:14 pm
In a post from 2013, we quoted Will and Ariel Durant on the persistent delusion of Equality. The pursuit of an unattainable equality has been a reliable political implement throughout the modern history of the West, despite the natural impossibility of its achievement. Since Nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read […]
November 1, 2016 – 12:48 pm
With seven days to go until the election, the walls of Festung Clinton are beginning to collapse. The FBI disclosure by James Comey has the campaign furiously denouncing the same man they praised so highly back in July. Clinton mole Donna Brazile is out at CNN for helping Mrs. Clinton cheat on the debates. The […]