March 29, 2025 – 10:15 pm
I’ve written here often about civil war; I even went so far as to publish an article about it at American Greatness a few years ago. We flatter ourselves, here in the West, that in our “progress” toward Utopia we’ve moved past such atavisms of barbarity, but the truth is that human nature never changes, […]
Last December the Shoal Survivors (the musical collective I’ve been a part of for many years now) got together for a day to record a few tunes, and I’m finally getting around to doing the mixes. This one’s an old favorite by the late, great Mose Allison. The personnel: our music director Carl Sturken, guitar; […]
A few days ago I posted an item about Tomas Bogardus’s philosophical paper attacking naturalism as an unacceptable foundation for scientific explanation. Seeking a professional critique, I wrote my friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, to ask what he thought of the argument, and he has now weighed in, over at his place. Discussion ensues […]
Nature abhors a vacuum, and human nature is no exception. Here.
Today in town I saw a Tesla drive by with one of these on the back: I suppose there’s always a tendency for people to resent their betters, but here’s a man who: a) builds the world’s best electric cars; b) is leading the way at the frontiers of manned space exploration; c) is developing […]
After watching President Trump’s lively and combative speech last night, I continue to be amazed (and delighted) at the sudden and complete reversal of the power balance in American politics; it is the greatest example I have seen in my lifetime of what the political theorist Vilfredo Pareto called the “circulation of elites“. On second […]
February 28, 2025 – 6:20 pm
We’ve finally returned from our six weeks in Hong Kong, after a 30-hour day of travel: a bus from Discovery Bay to the airport, a flight to Tokyo, a long flight to Boston, and a two-hour drive from Logan Airport back to Wellfleet. We’re pretty well whipped, but it’s good to be home. As always.
February 25, 2025 – 2:47 am
I’ve just read a brief and remarkably persuasive philosophical paper by Tomas Bogardus, a professor of philosophy at Pepperdine University. In it, he argues that, if we are to have confidence in the explanatory power of science (and he believes we should), then the naturalistic worldview must be false. Here is the abstract: I begin […]
February 21, 2025 – 4:01 am
I’ve been playing with Grok 3 since it came out, and I’ve just had a very odd experience. I started by asking it what it thought were the deepest mysteries confronting a thoughtful and intelligent person, and it named the obvious ones: consciousness, ultimate origins, etc. I mentioned that I had reached a “tipping point” […]
February 20, 2025 – 12:39 am
A few days ago I wrote a brief item suggesting that the intellectual engine behind the sea-change now underway in American foreign policy is not Donald Trump or Marco Rubio (certainly not Marco Rubio!), but is, rather, the new Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, Michael Anton. (I’ll add that I think he’s […]
February 19, 2025 – 2:17 am
We are still in Hong Kong for another week. Sadly, the lovely Nina came down hard with some sort of viral affliction about eight days or so ago — it was acute enough at first that we ended up in the ER for most of the 11th — and has been laid up in bed, […]
February 17, 2025 – 1:12 am
Looking at the rapidly changing posture America is taking on the world stage, it occurs to me that all of this new strategic diplomacy would be consistent with the idea that the Claremont Institute’s Michael Anton, who is the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning in the new administration, has command of Trump’s ear and […]
February 16, 2025 – 12:38 am
When your computer has been running too long, and has become unusable — massively infected by malware, too many rogue applications consuming and leaking resources — what do you do? At the very least, you reboot to “safe mode”, running the bare minimum of necessary system processes, and cautiously bring programs back online one at […]
February 14, 2025 – 4:14 am
America was not founded to be a tutelary power, patronizing and policing the world, going abroad in every generation seeking monsters to destroy. It was founded to make a free and secure home for its people, and to be a friend to nations that shared its interests. Nothing more.
February 13, 2025 – 4:56 am
It’s been a while since I’ve added an entry to this series of posts about moving toward theism. (The last time was just over a year ago.) I’m prompted to write again by having just read an essay by Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger describing a progression closely similar, in many ways, to my own: How […]
February 6, 2025 – 7:37 am
Over in England, the U.K. Independent has picked up the story of a slow-motion disaster taking place about a mile from where I live. Our living-room window looks west toward Cape Cod Bay from our piney hilltop, and from it we can see the house this article describes. (Nina and I used to call this […]
February 5, 2025 – 10:02 am
Of all the exhilarating reforms taking place under the new administration, perhaps the best of all is the rooting-out of rot and waste and corruption by the new Department Of Government Efficiency, headed up by Elon Musk. It has already struck a mighty blow by shutting down the tumorous bureaucratic excrescence known as the United […]
February 3, 2025 – 10:58 pm
With his swift intimidation of both Canada and Mexico in these last hours and days by raising a credible threat of tariffs, President Trump just gave us a dazzling display of sensible, power-backed American statesmanship. This hemisphere is our natural sphere of influence, and we should not be afraid to influence it. What we are […]
February 2, 2025 – 11:17 pm
From a recent thread on X, here’s Nick Land (@Xenocosmography) on tariffs: The Tariffs ledger, positive and negative, is far more complicated than established opinion (or nationalist enthusiasm) is allowing for. For the US specifically, the highest priority positive factor is this: Losing core strategic industrial capacity through international division of labor is a geopolitically […]
January 31, 2025 – 1:17 am
As I write I am sitting on the upper deck of a small cruise-ship in Ha Long Bay, near Hai Phong, Vietnam. We came to the Far East to visit our daughter and her family in Hong Kong, and decided to take a little side-trip to Vietnam. We spent a couple of nights in Hanoi, […]
January 26, 2025 – 1:31 am
I’ll confess that’s it’s strange to be in Hong Kong while so much is going on back home (all of it happening each day in what is, for us, the middle of the night). It’s delightful to be able to spend so much time with our daughter and our three wee grandsons (and our son-in-law, […]
January 20, 2025 – 10:12 pm
We’re in Hong Kong now, thirteen hours ahead of Eastern time, so I was only able to check in on events a little after the fact — but wow, what a day for America. Pardons for J6 political prisoners! Sealing the border! Withdrawals from the Paris boondoggle, and from the WHO! Federal hiring freeze! An […]
January 16, 2025 – 1:30 pm
The lovely Nina and I are on our way to Hong Kong to visit our daughter, her husband, and our grandsons. I’ll be back on once we get settled (been a bit slow lately, I realize; we’ve been swamped getting ready). Big day on Monday. Some better times ahead for America and the West, I […]
January 10, 2025 – 11:47 am
I haven’t had much time for writing in these last few days, but, like the rest of you I’m sure, my attention has been riveted to the conflagrations that have utterly destroyed parts of Los Angeles, and are still, in many places, raging uncontrolled. I won’t make a detailed repetition here of the accusations being […]
January 7, 2025 – 2:21 pm
I note with sadness the death of Peter Yarrow, who was known to everyone of my generation as part of the enormously popular folk-music trio Peter, Paul and Mary. I mixed two Peter, Paul and Mary albums — Flowers and Stones (1986), and No Easy Walk To Freedom (1990) — and I remember Peter as […]
January 1, 2025 – 11:11 am
To all of you. Thanks as always for visiting and commenting. (The blog’s 20 years old now!) 2025 is going to be an interesting year. Some change is on the way, I think.
December 30, 2024 – 7:39 pm
Bernstein on Beethoven: Mencken: It is almost a literal fact that there is no trace of cheapness in the whole body of his music. He is never sweet and romantic; he never sheds conventional tears; he never strikes orthodox attitudes. In his lightest moods there is the immense and inescapable dignity of ancient prophets. He […]
December 27, 2024 – 6:18 pm
The social-media site formerly known as Twitter was aflame, over the past couple of days, with a squabble among various factions of the new Right about the importation, by H-1B visas, of tech workers from other countries. One one side were Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who argue that in order for the U.S. to […]
December 24, 2024 – 10:30 pm
Merry Christmas to you all!
December 20, 2024 – 5:38 pm
By now you will have heard about the murderous attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, by a Saudi doctor who had been living in the country for years. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: allowing mass Muslim immigration is the stupidest and most irreversibly self-destructive thing that any Western nation […]
December 16, 2024 – 12:38 pm
To argue productively requires some agreement on fundamentals. All theorems must rest on axioms. Oscar Wilde famously said “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” To harangue others about first principles can never be anything but tedious. (It will certainly never be productive, because arguments, to […]
December 13, 2024 – 10:44 am
Do you feel life flowing back into America’s veins? What we are seeing everywhere, both abroad and at home, is the relief of a world that has suffered terribly over the past four years from from the vacuum created by a feeble United States. This doesn’t mean that the road just ahead isn’t rocky and […]
December 10, 2024 – 11:19 pm
“There are three kinds of people: those who see; those who see when they are shown; and those who cannot see.” – Leonardo
December 10, 2024 – 6:49 pm
From time to time I get email alerts from Quora, a website where users post questions and others answer them. Occasionally the answers are of excellent quality. Here’s an example of a good one. The question, which vexed me all my adult life (though less so lately), was this: Does mathematics actually exist in the […]
December 9, 2024 – 7:16 pm
I was happily surprised to hear this afternoon that Daniel Penny has been acquitted of charges related to the death of Jordan Neely, the homeless madman whom Penny bravely subdued as Neely was menacing riders on the F train in New York last year. It is a sign of our degraded times that Penny was […]
December 6, 2024 – 5:38 pm
It’s official: the most common name for baby boys born in England and Wales is now Muhammad. The fertility rate among Muslims in Blighty is close to 3 children per woman, while the rate for actual Brits is below 2. (Replacement-level fertility is 2.1 children per woman.) For centuries — and most recently, in the […]
December 3, 2024 – 5:50 pm
Anybody who’s been paying attention will have noticed the increasing normalization of what used to be called “prostitution”. In these sophisticated times we are expected to regard it simply as “sex work”, a career like any other, whose practitioners we should consider every bit as respectable as secretaries, waitresses, cashiers, cab drivers, hotel clerks, or […]
December 2, 2024 – 6:35 pm
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has just released its 557-page final report. The whole thing is here, but virologist Robert Malone has provided a summary at his Substack website. Hint: it’s bad. This is a story not only of massive government incompetence — although there was plenty of that — but also […]
November 30, 2024 – 6:29 pm
How many of you think we are going to get all the way to January 20th without some kind of radically disruptive “black swan” event? (The obvious candidate right now seems to be war with Russia — which our Imperial Court and its European vassals seem hell-bent on bringing about — but there are all […]
November 27, 2024 – 11:47 am
Enjoy the holiday, everybody. We have much to be thankful for this year.
November 25, 2024 – 11:10 am
Former General Mike Flynn — who knows a thing or two about what the entrenched Washington oligarchy is capable of, and willing to do — has posted a threat-assessment of the risks we face between now and Inauguration Day. Read it here.
November 23, 2024 – 3:50 pm
Following on my previous — and alarmist — post about AI, I think I should add some further remarks about what may or may not be possible. Back in 2014 I wrote a post, as part of a linked series on free will and determinism, about the idea of what the English scientist Stephen Wolfram […]
November 21, 2024 – 5:18 pm
Here is a link to a detailed survey of the current status of AI research, including a clear-eyed assessment of what we should expect in the near future. I won’t lie: I find this extremely alarming. The linked report makes it very clear that we are just a few years away from creating entities that […]
November 20, 2024 – 2:59 pm
RFK on Ukraine: Robert F. Kennedy Jr EXPOSES the TRUTH about Ukraine in 3 minutes. Make the World Safe again pic.twitter.com/T8Vpeyw2Io — Marjorie Taylor Greene Press Release (Parody) (@MTGrepp) November 20, 2024
November 19, 2024 – 1:22 pm
In the runup to the election I said how worried I was about rising conflict between the two warring American social and political factions once the winner had been determined. I thought it likely, barring massive fraud, that Trump would win, and I thought that if that happened the seething Left would stage massive chimpouts […]
November 17, 2024 – 11:57 am
Elon Musk has made no secret, over the past several years, of his ambition to colonize Mars (and if anyone can pull it off, he can). With that in mind, here’s something remarkable that I just learned today: Those of you of a “certain age” will remember the name Werner von Braun — a former […]
November 16, 2024 – 4:54 pm
In a comment to our previous post, our friend “Whitewall” observed that in the wake of the recent election, the Dems “currently overcome with a case of raging hormones, like before … just worse now.” Indeed they are. On the bright side, though, we can be thankful for X: I’m crying pic.twitter.com/JtG3ldaumh — Not Jerome […]
November 16, 2024 – 10:42 am
We’re back from our eight-day visit to Rome. Glad to see the U.S. still standing. Did I miss anything?
November 8, 2024 – 10:44 am
Dear Democrats, Four years ago, you took the keys to the family car. Did you drive it with care and respect? No. You got high as a kite and took it for a crazy, reckless joyride, without any consideration for the damage you were causing. From bumper to bumper – border security, immigration, foreign policy, […]
November 5, 2024 – 5:46 pm
Tomorrow, just as the reverberations of today’s election begin to ripple around the globe, the lovely Nina and I are heading off to the Eternal City for a long-postponed visit. I might find time to post something or other, but if not, I should be back in harness here in about ten days. (As for […]