January 31, 2024 – 11:46 pm
In America, we hear a great deal about the “rule of law”. We flatter ourselves that we have managed, by the genius of the Founding, to find a way to be ruled, not merely by the vector-sum of the will of powerful men, but by a set of abstract principles. We imagine that in this […]
January 31, 2024 – 12:08 am
With a hat-tip to our reader and commenter, the indefatigable JK, I offer you a detailed essay by Dr. Roy Spencer about climate modeling. (Dr. Spencer’s CV is here. Keep it in mind next time somebody tells you the scientific consensus among Actual Climate Scientists is “settled”.) One of the key ideas in this article […]
January 28, 2024 – 1:12 pm
I’m saddened today by some bad news: the death of guitarist Dean Brown, who was a beautiful, gifted musician and a hell of a nice guy. He had for several months been battling a mysterious form of cancer, and on January 26th he lost the fight. My deepest sympathies to his wife Ruth, and his […]
January 27, 2024 – 8:02 pm
Making the rounds today is a graph taken from the Financial Times, showing that there is a widening gap in political outlook, across the developed world, between males and females aged 18-29. The source article is here, but it’s paywalled, so I’ll sum it up for you: women are moving sharply to the left, while […]
January 25, 2024 – 5:40 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here is a sickening dispatch, posted in a Disqus comment-thread at Powerline, by “Diego Palma“, who says he lives in Arizona at the Mexican border. Is this real? I have no way of knowing. The place Mr. Palma describes certainly is; it’s at 31°20’3.81″N, 110° 8’53.86″W, and if look […]
January 24, 2024 – 1:42 pm
In yesterday’s post about the looming showdown between Texas and Washington over securing the border, I wrote: The so-called “rule of law”, and obedience to the formal structures of government, are all that stand, in a vast and divided nation, between order and chaos; they are the load-bearing walls that support the great (and trembling) […]
January 23, 2024 – 8:07 pm
Yesterday, five justices of the Supreme Court (the obvious ones, plus Barrett and Roberts) decided to lift an injunction against the Biden administration’s attempt to force open the portions of the national border in Texas that Texas had unilaterally decided to seal off with razor wire and other barriers. Think about that; the administration appealed […]
January 22, 2024 – 7:43 pm
Look at this sickening video: At the speed society evolves, so too does warfare. pic.twitter.com/qU9lP5WAGT — Joshua Hartley (@JHartley2) January 22, 2024 This is a technology still in its infancy. The drone you see pursuing and killing this terrified man was guided by someone sitting comfortably in perfect safety far away. It’s possible that the […]
January 21, 2024 – 1:08 pm
OK, folks, we are heading into a year that will likely make the last few seem like “the good old days”. I have put together a bluntly and unsentimental list of some of the direst possibilities. Which of these seem likely? 1) 9/11-level terror attack 2) New and far deadlier pandemic 3) Trump jailed 4) […]
January 20, 2024 – 11:25 pm
One of the reasons that I laid off blogging for a while was that it had become just too dispiriting to try to speak the truth while living in a world of lies. Among the worst of these webs of falsehood (and outright stupidity) was the Narrative about our relationship with Russia in the post-Soviet […]
January 19, 2024 – 7:17 pm
Here’s something refreshing: James Hankins, a senior professor of history at Harvard, having been pestered by the harridans of the university’s Diversity Office to provide a personal statement of his commitment to the Cause, has penned a tart reply (cf. the Reply of the Zhaporozhian Cossacks to Mehmed IV). We read: Dear Members of Harvard’s […]
January 18, 2024 – 5:10 pm
Making the rounds today: the newly elected president of Argentina, Javier Milei, just spoke at the World Economic Forum’s conference in Davos — and having taken the stage, used the platform to denounce everything that the malevolent WEF seeks to accomplish, and to warn the world of the danger these people present to human flourishing. […]
January 17, 2024 – 3:05 pm
Well, here we are: mid-January 2024, with the first round of electoral winnowing behind us, and another a few days away. Already we are down to three still in the running for the GOP nomination, but it doesn’t look like much of a contest. Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill V. has put up two posts […]
January 16, 2024 – 11:42 am
“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.” – Conan the Cimmerian, on the Iowa Caucuses
January 16, 2024 – 12:21 am
Our reader “mharko” has sent along a link to an article by “N.S. Lyons”, a fine writer whose work I’ve mentioned before in these pages (see here and here). The article, published at Substack, is called The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives, and it is in response to a techno-futurist manifesto recently published by Marc […]
January 13, 2024 – 3:50 pm
I’ve just run across a Twitter (okay, “X”) thread so remarkable that I’m going to unroll it for you right here. The principals are Emmett Shear, a serial Internet entrepreneur who has just been selected as CEO of OpenAI, and a science-fiction author by the name of Devon Eriksen. How did I come across this? […]
January 13, 2024 – 12:35 pm
We’re back home — my lovely wife Nina had some surgery on Thursday, and is now resting and recovering. Back to posting shortly.
January 10, 2024 – 1:06 pm
I’m not likely to be able to post for a couple of days. Back by the weekend.
January 8, 2024 – 2:55 pm
Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella links to two contrasting articles. The first, by Binyamin Applebaum, an editor at the New York Times, is a panegyric on the presidency of Joe Biden. The second, by Peter van Buren at American Conservative, is a jeremiad called “Evening in America”. It’s a stark and fascinating juxtaposition. In […]
January 7, 2024 – 1:15 pm
Before we wade, in our teeming millions, into the riotous disorder that 2024 is sure to bring, I thought it might be nice to “cleanse our timelines” for a moment in the clear air of a serene and ancient vastness where the vital spirit of remote antiquity still touches the living. Here, then, is Batzorig […]
January 5, 2024 – 11:18 pm
Have you heard of “superheating”? If you haven’t, Wikipedia describes it as: “the phenomenon in which a liquid is heated to a temperature higher than its boiling point, without boiling. This is a so-called metastable state or metastate, where boiling might occur at any time, induced by external or internal effects… This may occur by […]
January 4, 2024 – 10:27 pm
The cataract of aliens pouring over our southern border has risen, in December of last year, to a rate of about three-and-a-half million a year. (Can anyone, at this point, doubt for a moment that this an intentional feature of government policy?) Meanwhile, as our efforts in Ukraine slump toward failure — as has been […]
January 2, 2024 – 8:09 pm
I am very sorry to tell you that our longtime friend and commenter here at this blog, Robert (a.k.a. “Whitewall”) has very suddenly and unexpectedly lost his wife. I can only imagine the terrible shock and sorrow he must be going through, and I ask you all to think of him and to keep him […]
January 2, 2024 – 7:07 pm
Well, Claudine Gay has stepped down as president of Harvard. She was already listing badly after her embarrassing testimony before Congress about antisemitism at Harvard, and Christopher Rufo’s withering barrage of examples of her chronic plagiarism finally holed her below the waterline. Needless to say, in her resignation letter she made no apology for her […]
January 1, 2024 – 9:52 pm
To kick off 2024 — a year in which I think we all will be tested — here is an important reminder from David Bowie (PBUH): Great advice from David Bowie pic.twitter.com/CheUp389ow — Darrell Craig Harris Pro Bassist (@DarrellCBassist) January 2, 2024