With a hat-tip to Charles Murray on X: The Seven Tribes of Intellect. (One has to wonder: what must it have been like to be John von Neumann?)
… and rightly so. We should be pushing back as forcefully as we can against this: we should be creating a climate in which whatever demonic influence corrupted this poor woman into such hideous self-mutilation can no longer gain a foothold on weak minds and vulnerable souls. I have no idea why she is unable […]
I note with sadness the death of Daniel Dennett — who, whether you agreed with him or not (I did some of each over the years), was a brilliant thinker, a tremendously gifted writer, and a man of insatiable curiosity and outsized personality. In five different areas — philosophy of mind, free will, scientific materialism, […]
April 18, 2024 – 11:10 pm
Well, actually there’s rather a lot happening — among other things, Israel attacking Iran (on Ali Khameni’s birthday), jurors seated in the unbelievably outrageous show-trial against Donald Trump, the death of Dickey Betts, and the impending arrival of trillions of zombie cicadas. But I thought I’d just post this instead: Do you think he slept […]
April 16, 2024 – 12:08 pm
We’re in NYC for a couple of days, where my lovely wife is having surgery for one of those damned basal-cell carcinomas that seem to afflict so many people these days. Back soon.
In a development that has medical and longevity experts scratching their heads, the recording/mixing engineer, former martial-arts instructor, acidulous opinionator, and bibulous curmudgeon Malcolm Pollack celebrated his 68th birthday on April 13th. Asked to comment, one leading expert said that the news has “made us wonder if we have to re-examine some of our most […]
Fifty years ago, I lived with some friends in a rented farmhouse on Cider Mill Road, in East Amwell Township, New Jersey. It’s still mostly farmland out there. I was looking at the old place on Google Earth just now and saw this, just a mile or so away. (Click to enlarge.) Warmed my heart.
Well, the Eclipse has come and gone, and as far as I can make out, there’s no sign of either the Rapture or the Apocalypse. (I realize such things might take some extra time to reach us here in the Outer Cape, but even on social media things just seem to be blaring away as […]
The political philosopher Carl Schmitt wrote: Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and […]
This is all over social media today: Richard Dawkins, one of the “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism (along with Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens) and author, in 2006, of The God Delusion has now admitted that he likes Christendom, and suddenly sees it as a thing to be promoted and defended. […]
Writing about Ukraine at the Asia Times, David Goldman — the analyst formerly known as “Spengler” — commented last week on the desperate strategic fantasy that continues to hold the GAE and NATO (but I repeat myself) under its spell. Goldman is a very smart guy, one of the few global-strategic-assessment pundits actually worth paying […]
March 31, 2024 – 10:27 pm
Over American Greatness, Jeremy Carl discusses Steve Sailer’s new book, and the man himself. (If you don’t know who Steve Sailer is, you should; he is arguably the sharpest and most influential American thinker and writer of the last quarter-century, and were it not for the suffocating taboos enforced by our cultural commissars, he would […]
The White House has decided to dedicate this Sunday to its malevolent, Gnostic project of obliterating every sacred thing, every natural category, and every stone in the foundation of the American nation. “But wait,” you say, “this Sunday’s Easter!! Couldn’t they at least have picked some other day?” Gosh, you’re right. I’m sure they’d just […]
March 27, 2024 – 11:03 pm
“Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems […]
What we used to call the “reactosphere” has added some fine younger contributors over the last few years. One of the best is Auron Macintyre, who does podcasts (both on his own and with guests), YouTube videos, and a column at Substack (you can also follow him on X). I give him my highest recommendation: […]
March 24, 2024 – 11:52 pm
Victor Davis Hanson, move over. It doesn’t get any more concise than this: This woman KNOCKS IT OUT OF THE PARK?! I double dare you to give her a listen.? pic.twitter.com/dP1A9EgZ3g — ?? Pismo ?? (@Pismo_B) February 24, 2024 Looking back over the past decade or two, I’m reminded of Churchill’s remarks in 1938: I […]
Something I ran across online earlier today reminded me of a project I worked on long ago (late 1985), when I was a staff engineer at Power Station. It was a record by the great Japanese pianist and singer Akiko Yano, and I hadn’t heard it, I think, since the album came out in early […]
I love the Outer Cape, where I live, but the prevailing ideology out here is as “blue” as it gets. (Aside from the occasional reactionary like me, there is also a subclass of people around here who build and fish and dig and pave and fix things — in other words, who earn a crust […]
The great Roger Scruton would have been 80 this past February 27th, and to commemorate the event, Jash Dolani, a poster on X, put up a list of 11 Scruton quotes, which I repost below: 1. Scruton on the fundamental right-wing impulse: “Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not […]
Hunter Biden’s former business associate Tony Bobulinski testified today for the House Oversight Committee’s impeachment inquiry. I haven’t had a chance to review the testimony itself — but hoo-boy, his opening statement is a corker. (Some clips from the hearing are here.) (Don’t get too excited, though, or start imagining there will be actual consequences. […]
We’re away in NYC for a few days. Back soon. (Will be glad to get home.)
A man has just been fatally shot on a crowded A train in Brooklyn, during rush hour. The videos I’ve been seeing (I’m not posting them here, but you can find them in seconds on Twitter) show people cowering afterwards in the train, which was stopped at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn. (I can’t count […]
I haven’t been able to do any substantial writing for a bit – I’m still foggy from this virus I’ve had (though I’m recovering now, it was a nasty bug, with fatigue and cognitive wooziness to rival the Wuhan Red Death itself). I also had to make around trip from Wellfleet to JFK on Monday […]
“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.” – Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs
Commenter “Landroll” asks, in response to my previous post about the incremental militarization of the New York City subway system: Like the line from the song says, “Whatcha gonna do about it?” I don’t know what song that is, but: So far, what I’ve done about it has been to move out of New York, […]
Our reader and commenter ‘mharko’ has left some excellent remarks on a thread at Bill V.’s place about our worsening political situation. Go and have a look, here. (Sorry not to have responded myself, mharko. I’m still quite foggy and unwell with this damned respiratory virus I’ve been battling, and it’s been all I can […]
In response to an extraordinary rise in subterranean crime over the past few years, New York Governess Kathy Hochul has announced that she will be deploying National Guard troops and State Police in the NYC subways in an attempt to make the system safer, or at least to seem safer. They will apparently be conducting […]
I note with grim satisfaction the retirement of the maleficent Victoria Nuland, the meddlesome witch whose machinations in Ukraine gave us the Maidan revolution in 2014, and everything that has happened since. In my opinion she has the blood of hundreds of thousands, the collapse of the Ukrainian nation, and the useless expense of many […]
Get ready for a shock: men and women have different brains.
Imagine a large-scale mathematical society whose aim is to work together to broaden the scope of demonstrated mathematical truths. The way they would go about this is by building upon the theorems that have already been proven: finding new relations and isomorphisms between existing theorems, and proving new ones. They wouldn’t all work on the […]
In the course of the ongoing conversation about America’s prospects over at Bill Vallicella’s website, Bill mentioned two of the various types of civil wars (in my view, there are at least three). Having written an article about exactly that at American Greatness four years ago, in the runup to the last election, I posted […]
Today in the small town of Woodstock, Georgia, there will be a funeral for Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student who was brutally murdered by a Venezuelan man here in the country illegally. Four years ago the nation tore itself to pieces in a summer of violent rioting over the death of George Floyd, […]
February 29, 2024 – 6:09 pm
I’ve been nursing a surprisingly debilitating cold (or flu, or something) for the past few days. It makes it difficult to summon up the energy to do much of anything, and I’ve been unable to concentrate the little grey cells enough to write anything worth reading. (I did manage another comment or two in that […]
February 29, 2024 – 6:04 pm
“One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.” – Eric Hoffer With that observation in mind, have a look at this item from Michael Lind.
February 28, 2024 – 2:05 pm
American media consumers have been soaking for years in a poisonous marinade of lies about our role in Ukraine. With a hat-tip to Dave Benner at Twitter, here is RFK Jr with an antidote: a history lesson that is brief, concise, and accurate. For a decade, US involvement in Ukraine has been based on a […]
February 25, 2024 – 9:29 am
On the road. Back Tuesday. Update, Tuesday evening: I’m back home, but after dropping the lovely Nina at JFK last night for a 1:35 a.m. flight to Hong Kong (to visit our grandkids), and then driving five hours back to Wellfleet, getting to bed just before sunup, and sleeping fitfully for a few hours, I’m […]
February 23, 2024 – 6:47 pm
Bill Vallicella has a fine post up at Substack today, in which he responds to the complaint that for an American president to speak of “America First” is, as Bill Kristol put it a few years back, “depressing and vulgar”. My only quibble with the piece is that Bill didn’t unpack, for those who might […]
February 23, 2024 – 5:11 pm
At this point it hardly seems worth mentioning, but the Daily Mail reminds us today, in painful detail, of what a frail and feeble dotard our President is. What times we live in!
February 22, 2024 – 10:34 pm
My friend “Spandrell” has a new version of his blog up and running. I’ve linked to several of his posts over the years, in particular his 2017 three-part essay on what he calls “Bioleninism”. (You can read that here.) Span is a very smart guy, and he’s one of the OGs of what used to […]
February 22, 2024 – 5:13 pm
Cellphone outage hits AT&T customers nationwide; Verizon and T-Mobile users also affected Don’t look at me, Feds; I assure you all I’m just a humble blogger.
February 21, 2024 – 12:15 pm
A Lowell, MA High-school girl’s basketball team had to forfeit their game yesterday after three of their players were injured by a mentally ill young man playing on the opposing team. The male player, who is over six feet tall and has facial hair, says he’s female. The triumph of subjective fantasy over objective reality […]
February 20, 2024 – 5:30 pm
Here’s a news story. I’d say it was “shocking”, or “amazing”, but at this point it really isn’t. It’s bad, though. In brief: New York City has signed a no-bid contract with a “W/MBE” company (i.e., not run by white men) to make debit cards to be issued to “migrants”. The cards will have no […]
February 20, 2024 – 2:35 pm
I’ve had nothing, so far, to say about Donald Trump’s show-trial for “fraud” in New York, which the other day resulted in a guilty judgment, and a fine of $355,000,000. I’m still having difficulty. The process was a sham, of course, from start to finish. There was never any crime, any complainant, or any victim. […]
February 17, 2024 – 6:17 pm
It’s remarkable how complex any topic — especially anything to do with society and law — can be when you examine it closely. Take, for example, drunk-driving, which on the face of it seems simple enough. We know that driving drunk is dangerous — I’ve had friends who have died from it, and I nearly […]
February 14, 2024 – 9:35 pm
I’ve just watched this guided tour of the new Apple Vision Pro, a new VR headset. These are still early days, and the thing is, for most ordinary people, prohibitively expensive so far — but there is no way, in my opinion, that this will not be as addictive, and disruptive, as cell-phones, or perhaps […]
February 13, 2024 – 10:03 pm
As I write, the House has impeached Homeland Security secretary Mayorkas: a pointless gesture, a little kayfabe for the fans. Yes, he’s lied to us, and to Congress. Yes, he’s an enemy who hates us. But he’s an underling, a myrmidon, a stooge, an infantryman, a dogsbody. His impeachment will die in the Senate, like […]
February 12, 2024 – 6:12 pm
On Saturday the lovely Nina and I found ourselves in Woods Hole, at the far end of the Cape from where we live, where we had been invited to attend a living-room performance by two extraordinary musicians: violinist Darol Anger and mandolinist/guitarist Mike Marshall. (Their websites are here and here, respectively.) It was music the […]
February 12, 2024 – 2:31 pm
Well, the site’s all fixed up; I just spent hours recreating all the old linked-series entries in a new plugin (fortunately I was able to pull all the info I needed from the backend database, though it’s been six years since I’ve had to write any SQL, so it took me a minute to remember […]
February 9, 2024 – 5:08 pm
I’ve been having some backend issues with the website: page links, comments, etc. aren’t working, and for a while today the site was completely inaccessible. I’m trying to get it all fixed, but until I do things won’t be working properly, and the site may be down from time to time. Update, 2/11: I’ve had […]
February 9, 2024 – 12:00 pm
Special Counsel Robert Hur has released his report on Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. I don’t say “alleged” mishandling, because the second paragraph of the report states the following: Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen. These materials […]