December 31, 2017 – 2:36 pm
To all of you. Thanks as always for reading and commenting. Buckle up! 2018 looks like it’s going to be an “interesting” year.
December 29, 2017 – 10:50 pm
Mass protests are underway in Iran against the totalitarian Islamic regime that has been in power since 1979. Something very significant happened yesterday: as reported by the AP, Tehran has announced that it will no longer enforce the dress code for women that has been in place since the revolution. This is a moment of […]
December 27, 2017 – 11:15 am
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, we have for you an essay in which Rod Dreher, citing Theodore Dalrymple, examines the expanding sinkhole at the foundation of Western civilization: the family. The causes are many — among them are secularism (which, I believe, belongs right at the top of the list), multiculturalist decohesion, the substitution […]
December 26, 2017 – 6:31 pm
Today the fashion magazine Vogue tweeted this photograph. The caption read: “Is your hair holiday party ready?” I found it more than a little disturbing (and no, it wasn’t because of the missing hyphen in the compound adjective “holiday party”, as bad as that is). To me the photograph leapt off the screen as […]
December 24, 2017 – 4:24 pm
(Noel!) Merry Christmas, everyone.
December 22, 2017 – 10:11 pm
The rightish television presenter Tucker Carlson today offered his Twitter followers one of the best “tweetstorms” I’ve ever seen: #100RacistThings. You can see the thread here, but it’s so good I’m going to preserve it for posterity in this post — because this is the sort of thing that gets people banned from Twitter these […]
December 21, 2017 – 6:26 pm
OK, here’s something really fantastic: a website that enables you to scroll around the globe and pick up radio broadcasts from pretty much everywhere. Here.
December 21, 2017 – 5:30 pm
Congress has a lot to do in the new year. I certainly hope ending obstetric tourism is somewhere near the top of the list.
December 20, 2017 – 4:10 pm
The tax-bill’s done. Not perfect, perhaps, but what is? Aside from its most important feature — lowering the corporate-tax rate — it repeals the Obamacare “individual mandate” (take that, Mr. Chief Justice!), and it makes room for further energy exploration in Alaska. Better still, it’s a major blow to Schumer, Pelosi, Warren, & Co. — […]
December 20, 2017 – 3:27 pm
With a hat-tip to the indefatigable ‘JK’, here’s a delightful video: Riccardo Muti on conducting.
December 18, 2017 – 10:58 pm
A reader (who is also an old friend) emailed me today, in response to yesterday’s post. That post contained this passage: In either of these cases ”” the origin of the stupefying complexity of living systems as either a self-organizing process across “deep time’, or as an act of God ”” if we turn and […]
December 18, 2017 – 10:49 am
I noticed that comments on old posts had been automatically closed. I’m not sure why; it may have been an anti-spam move on my part a while back, or just something that happened during a site update. Anyway, I’ve got better spam protection now, and they are open again.
December 17, 2017 – 8:55 pm
A few days ago I posted a brief item about the idea of “society” as something more than an aggregate of individuals. It began: How can anything benefit “society”? There is nothing we can call “society” that actually experiences anything at all — and what (and to whom) is the value of a benefit unexperienced? […]
December 17, 2017 – 7:41 pm
Here’s a story you might not have heard: about a years-long operation against Hezbollah’s global criminal-syndicate apparatus, and how it was smothered by the Obama administration in the runup to the Iran deal. (From Politico, no less.) It’s long, but it deserves your attention.
December 15, 2017 – 12:44 pm
I haven’t commented much about the unholy mess that is the “collusion” investigation, but it is as tainted with obvious conflicts of interest, ulterior motives, double standards, foul play, abuse of power, dirty tricks, partisan cronyism, and good-old-fashioned political corruption as anything I’ve ever heard of in the history of the United States, which is […]
December 14, 2017 – 1:55 pm
Well, the Apocalypse is upon us: the FCC has voted to repeal the Obama-era “Net Neutrality” regulations. This means that the Internet we’ve all come to know and love is finished, over, kaput. The services you love — Google, for example, or perhaps some crotchety old geezer’s curiously named and depressing blog — will henceforward […]
December 12, 2017 – 2:59 pm
How can anything benefit “society”? There is nothing we can call “society” that actually experiences anything at all — and what (and to whom) is the value of a benefit unexperienced? If “society” benefits, it is only experienced by individual persons, each of whom experiences any social benefit or blessing as an individual. There is […]
December 10, 2017 – 4:40 pm
Ladies, are you worried that by some unfortunate turn of fate, you might someday find yourself in a relationship with a man? Just keep this checklist handy, and you’ll make sure you and your cats will never have that to worry about.
December 9, 2017 – 12:03 pm
I’ll be on the road all day today. Here’s something beautiful for you to puzzle over. Black to move. (Solution here.)
December 8, 2017 – 11:55 pm
I have nothing prepared for publication tonight — I was too busy all day, and I went to the VDare Christmas party this evening — but I’d hate for you to go away empty-handed, so I’ll offer you this excerpt from Richard Weaver’s essay Up From Liberalism: The attempt to contemplate history in all its […]
December 7, 2017 – 7:15 pm
A reader from an Australian metropolis wrote me a little while back to describe the social and emotional difficulties of being a Right-thinking outlier in an overwhelmingly, and so often unreflectively and oppressively, Leftist culture. He needed some bucking up, I thought, and so I offered the following (slightly edited) reply. I don’t think he’ll […]
December 6, 2017 – 5:27 pm
I was gratified to see President Trump announce today that the United States will recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and will move its embassy there. Mr. Trump summed it up succinctly: Israel is a sovereign state, and a U.S. ally. If a state cannot even choose its own capital city, then it is not sovereign. […]
December 6, 2017 – 2:42 pm
This is no small thing: Google’s “Alpha Zero” AI, after taking just 4 hours to teach itself chess, played 100 games against the strongest dedicated chess engine, Stockfish, with decisive results: it won twenty-eight games, drew seventy-two, and lost… zero. We had a good run, humans.
December 6, 2017 – 11:26 am
From the Telegraph: Don’t call us snowflakes – it damages our mental health, say young people Sorry, kids. It’s just that “fragile, helpless, trembling little mice” seems such a mouthful by comparison. We’ll try to come up with something else. Maybe “towering, invincible colossi”, with a little wink.
December 5, 2017 – 6:15 pm
This just in, from the Daily Mail: Demand for anal bleaching soars by 23% as women follow in the footsteps of celebrities including Sophie Kasaei, Charlotte Crosby and Kourtney Kardashian I notice Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, and Queen Elizabeth didn’t make the cut there, for some reason. I guess times have changed. And after all, […]
December 5, 2017 – 12:16 pm
We’ve been having a server-side problem that caused commenters to see the comment-form populated with the name and email of whoever commented previously. Bluehost tells me the issue is now fixed. Please let me know if you’re still seeing this.
December 3, 2017 – 5:39 pm
Here’s an informative piece on the Flynn affair by Tyler Durden. Key point: the purpose of the interrogation of General Flynn by the FBI was never to determine the content of Flynn’s conversations with the Russians — because the FBI already had the transcripts. I will add: just how did the FBI have these transcripts […]
December 3, 2017 – 5:22 pm
Once again this site is bedeviled by a back-end problem that causes new commenters to see the previous commenter’s information in the comment box. When this last came up, in May, it was due to a server-side caching issue at Bluehost that took me a lot of time and effort on the phone to get […]
December 3, 2017 – 3:40 pm
Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella comments on the Kate Steinle verdict, in a post rightly titled A Struggle for the Soul of America. After quoting a passage from this essay by the indispensable Heather Mac Donald (an essay you must be sure to go and read in full), Bill adds: There you have it. […]
December 3, 2017 – 2:17 pm
By now you’ve all heard all about the suspension of ABC News reporter Brian Ross for his story on Friday claiming that General Mike Flynn had copped a plea for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia. Ross initially reported that, during the campaign, Donald Trump had told Flynn to arrange meetings with […]
December 2, 2017 – 10:28 pm
Ugh. Food poisoning. There were things I’d have liked to comment on today, but it will have to wait.