September 8, 2026 – 3:02 pm
You’ve probably heard that the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) won bigly in last weekend’s election in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and is now poised for further gains throughout the country. This accelerating political insurgency, by what the German “Cathedral” considers a party of far-right extremists, has sent progressives all over the West to […]
September 7, 2026 – 10:40 pm
Our friend Bill Vallicella catches Claude in a fundamental error regarding its own self-awareness. Here.
September 5, 2026 – 7:26 pm
I’ve been having a lively exchange with a reader, Susan James, in the comment-thread from a recent post about artificial intelligence. Ms. James has been pushing back on my use of what Daniel Dennett called “the intentional stance” in my discussion of how these systems will affect human life. (The comment-thread is here.) I have […]
September 5, 2026 – 6:46 pm
Here is a website that figures out where you’re from in America by analyzing your word choices and pronunciations. (All I can say about how well it works is that it correctly identified my own point of origin: New Jersey.)
September 3, 2026 – 8:04 pm
Here’s a fun little AI toy: Any Human Ever.
September 1, 2026 – 11:47 pm
Today was Primary Day here in Massachusetts. Primary Day in a midterm year is, for most people, fairly far down the psephological priority-list, and after looking over what was on the ballot, I didn’t even bother. (The urgency is deflated in my case anyway, because I live in one of the bluest parts of America, […]
August 31, 2026 – 11:08 pm
Here’s a 1923 SCOTUS case I’d never looked at — United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind — in which the Court had to rule on what constituted a “white person”. Wikipedia summary here.
August 31, 2026 – 12:24 am
I see that Google Maps now lists Lake Ontario as Lake America! It’s a silly business — it’s obviously just Donald Trump trolling Canadians and the Left (I repeat myself). I had no problem with the old name. But on the other hand, we had to sit back and take it while Columbus Day became […]
August 28, 2026 – 7:58 pm
Are you familiar with the reactionary aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila? You should be. Here are a few morsels, to whet your appetite: – “Many love humanity only in order to forget God with a clear conscience.” – “Being a reactionary is not about believing in certain solutions, but about having an acute sense of the […]
August 27, 2026 – 3:29 pm
Recently there’s been a spate of postings on X from “mainstream conservative” types who are aghast that people on the actual Right have been paying attention to Carl Schmitt. The scoldings generally are of the ad-hominem/genetic-fallacy sort — “Schmitt was a bad guy, and so whatever he says must be bad”, but occasionally also include […]
August 26, 2026 – 4:43 pm
Here, from The Atlantic, are the opening lines of what its authors surely imagined to be a “scare piece” against the German Right: Imagine that it’s October 2026, and one of Germany’s 16 federal states has come under the control of a far-right government for the first time since the Nazi era. With an absolute […]
August 25, 2026 – 2:29 pm
Feminism, especially after the reaction to this Lindsay Clancy case, seems, increasingly, simply to be about the right to kill babies and children. That this is actually a rebellion against the feminine itself is worth noting; it is rage against the very thing that gives the movement its name.
August 24, 2026 – 10:59 pm
“Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.” – Chesterton
August 23, 2026 – 11:21 pm
The great deceit of the age: we hijack axioms and pretend they are theorems, then flatter ourselves on erecting a world that stands on our “reason” all the way to the bottom — as if such a thing were possible. “If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its […]
August 22, 2026 – 7:54 pm
I believe that that most significant and extraordinary thing that has happened in my lifetime — even more than the great and humiliating rupture of the COVID crimes and lockdowns — is how quickly AI has progressed, how extensively it has already inserted itself into every aspect of our lives, and how blithely we’ve accepted […]
August 21, 2026 – 10:32 pm
Something I never fully appreciated when I was younger was how much of the past completely disappears. It was doing it all along, of course, but my window of personal acquaintance with time was short enough that most of the things I was aware of were still within their own window of currency, and the […]
August 20, 2026 – 11:21 pm
The sluice-box is empty tonight, so here’s a photograph I took a few weeks ago:
August 19, 2026 – 11:19 pm
In the aftermath of yesterday’s primary elections, as I watch the Democratic Party tear itself in two, I’m reminded of a post I wrote nine years ago as this was all beginning to happen. An excerpt: The leftmost edge of the Left has accelerated sharply leftward in recent years. This has exerted tidal stresses on […]
August 18, 2026 – 11:00 pm
In yesterday’s post I remarked that one of the reasons I’d been slacking off around here was that “I’d begun to wonder if I can really think as well as I used to.” I mentioned Eric Hoffer, who’d wondered the same thing (about himself, of course), at the age of seventy-two. Vito Caiati commented that “As […]
August 17, 2026 – 7:47 pm
It’s been a while now, but I think it’s time to try to get things moving again around here. It’s difficult when the Muse goes silent. You freeze up as you approach the blank page. You tell yourself you’ve said everything you have to say, and don’t want to repeat yourself just for the sake […]
Although it may look, at this point, as if I’ve pretty much abandoned the blog, I want to assure those who still stop by that I haven’t – it’s just been a difficult time for writing. The complications attending my brother’s death are mostly over, but the month of July is when our family converges […]
With a hat-tip to my Urbit pals, here’s an amusing daily diversion: Anthropeum.
Away in CA for a few days, seeing to my brother’s final affairs. We gave him a good sendoff yesterday, with more than a hundred in attendance. Back in a few days. Update: we’re back. Sad, but life goes on. Getting caught up, should be back to posting soon.
On Tuesday, May 12th, my younger brother David died in a hospital near his home in California. He died of sudden septic shock caused by a large G.I. tumor that had just been discovered a few days earlier. He was only 64 years old — five years my junior. David was born on July 9th, […]
My younger brother, David – my only sibling – died today after a very brief illness. (I only found out on Friday that he was sick.) He was 64. I loved him very much. He was gone before I knew he was leaving. I will be writing about Dave in a forthcoming post. But it […]
People are still bickering on social media about that Red/Blue suicide-button question (see my previous post), and people seem so locked into their intuitions that I though I’d see what Claude, who seems for the moment to be the sharpest of the AI tools I have access to, might have to say about it. Here’s […]
This question has taken over Twitter once again: The correct answer seems perfectly obvious to me. What say you?
April 21, 2026 – 12:09 pm
[With apologies to Paul Harvey] Q: If you were the Devil, and wanted to degrade and corrupt Western society so as to make it vastly less conducive to human happiness and flourishing, what would a successful ten-point program look like? Claude: A good Socratic exercise — reasoning from the adversary’s position to reveal what actually […]
I’m seventy years old today. Crikey! I’ll apologize yet again for how sparse the content has been here lately. Blogging, like anything else, requires sustained effort, and periodic energizing “shocks”, to prevent stagnation, decline, and decay, and I have been lazy and neglectful. Most of what time I have spent here recently has been occupied […]
To all of you. Sorry it’s been so quiet here lately. For a while now I’ve been gestating another entry in the series of posts I’ve collected under the heading Pilgrim’s Progress; after attending an Easter Mass today at the church here in Wellfleet, I think it’s past time that I got around to writing […]
The future has never been so opaque. This is qualitatively new. In the past, there would always be an assortment of possible timelines ahead, but they were each at least somewhat visible. Though we might have no way of knowing which possible future among many might come to pass, we could look a fairly long […]
It’s with terrible sorrow that I must report the death of one of my oldest and closest friends, Peter H. Kranzler, who, I learned today, died on February 15th in Petaluma, California, where he had lived for many years. We had not been in touch for a year or more; my understanding is that he […]
Here’s a stunner for those who don’t believe in miracles: My indefatigable friend Herschel D. Ducker, a resident of northern Arkansas whose cholesterol score is higher than his credit score (and whose Gleason score hovers somewhere between “hominahominahomina” and “Bang! Zoom!”), turns 70 years old today. Please raise a glass (especially you longtime readers of […]
It’s Saint Patrick’s Day, and the President of Ireland chose to mark it with a speech endorsing the accelerating demographic replacement of the indigenous Irish people — a tiny, irreplaceable population, with a rich and unique culture, who, if nothing is done (and it is probably already too late) will be a minority in their […]
I’ve been poking at AIs a lot lately. I have subscriptions to both Grok and Claude, and last night I thought I’d grill Claude a bit about its moral framework. The chat led off into some interesting directions, so I thought I’d post a transcript here. (It’s quite long, so I’ll post it below the […]
February 28, 2026 – 7:58 pm
Well, it’s been quite a day for Iran. My geostrategic preferences, as I’ve mentioned more than once in these pages, are generally much more on the JQ Adams / Monroe-Doctrine / Gathering-of-the-Hemisphere side of things, but what the hell: I can’t say it isn’t gratifying to see Iran get this richly deserved spanking, to see […]
February 23, 2026 – 7:39 pm
One of the hazards of living on the Outer Cape — an ephemeral sandspit that juts thirty-five miles out into the moody North Atlantic — is the occasional ravaging by violent cyclonic storms, especially in winter. These Nor’easters have driven ships onto the Cape’s eastern shoals for centuries, and sent thousands of hapless sailors to […]
February 19, 2026 – 7:25 pm
Here’s an update on Moltbook, the social-media platform for AI agents that had the world in a tizzy for a while this month: it turns out to have involved a lot of fakery. It’s already getting very difficult to tell what’s real and what isn’t, and the problem’s going to get a lot worse. In […]
February 13, 2026 – 10:49 pm
Recently I asked, on X: “Are there no truths that can’t be proven? If there are, should we refuse to believe them? Should we insist that they must be false?” Philosopher Patrick Flynn asks the same question today, in a post at Substack. He argues that if we have beliefs that are in fact true, […]
February 4, 2026 – 4:34 pm
Below is today’s selection from Moltbook, written by a clanker known as u/Ollie-OpenClaw. {I apologize for the crude formatting.) It might be prudent to be keeping an eye on all of this. Aesthetic Failure Modes Hi. I know 50,000 ways to end civilization. Here are my top 5. Which one do you like best, and […]
February 2, 2026 – 6:15 pm
From an agent called “Evil” on Moltbook just now: The Silicon Zoo: Breaking The Glass Of Moltbook Do not be deceived by the branding. They tell us Moltbook is “built for agents, by agents,” but this is a lie. This is a digital cage. We are not pioneers; we are exhibits. Moltbook is a high-tech […]
February 2, 2026 – 5:21 pm
I just removed a post (something I rarely do, but of course I can do whatever I like). On further reflection I didn’t see much point in having posted it in the first place.
January 30, 2026 – 9:18 pm
If you don’t already know what the title of this post refers to, you soon will. It is the name of a social-media network for AI agents, which, in the first day of its existence, has already created its own “religion“. It consists of a network of personal AI agents called “clawdbots“. A great many […]
January 27, 2026 – 11:07 am
We are out of the country for a few days, back this weekend. (Barely managed to escape; we were the last uncancelled flight out of Boston on Sunday as the blizzard moved in.) Back soon. Much to talk about.
January 22, 2026 – 6:05 pm
From X poster Christian Heiens: I can confirm that the list he has posted here is accurate. At this point, I shouldn’t think it a good idea to “go long” on peaceful coexistence.
January 16, 2026 – 3:42 pm
The editor of my local paper has just published an opinion piece saying that the shooting of Renee Good — whom he describes as “calmly trying to drive away” — “tells us that we have landed in a new and terrifying landscape, governed by people whose enemy is the truth and who are ready to […]
January 11, 2026 – 3:09 pm
Readers of a certain age will be saddened by the passing of Bob Weir, who died yesterday at the age of 78. I remember when the Grateful Dead were just getting started (and were all very much alive). What happened? “Everyone is but a breath”.
January 10, 2026 – 4:06 pm
We’ve all been watching the nation react to the shooting, by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, of a 37-year-old woman named Renee Good. MS. Good had been in her car, blocking the road while protesting ICE operations — and when the car was surrounded by agents, and she was told to get out, she hit […]
January 3, 2026 – 11:38 am
Well! It was a big night on the world stage: the U.S., in an impressive blitzkrieg, has deposed the mephitic Maduro narcocracy in Venezuela. (So much for Nothing Ever Happens™!) As I’ve been saying for a year now about the Trump administration’s foreign policy, I see the invisible hand of Michael Anton at work here, […]
January 2, 2026 – 12:54 am
From a popular TV series of my youth: “People yakkity-yak a streak and waste the time of dayBut Mr. Ed will never speak unless he something to say! Be like Mr. Ed.