November 21, 2021 – 11:00 pm
People are starting to peel away from the Democratic Party as it falls deeper into the gravity well of the Left Singularity. (Tulsi Gabbard is a prominent and recent example, but there are many others.) If readers will forgive me for saying “I told you so”, in a post four years ago I used an […]
November 19, 2021 – 7:36 pm
A splendid result in Kenosha today: Kyle Rittenhouse fully exonerated. The Left is writhing in fury, of course — which is yet another example of the fundamental, axiomatic incommensurability of the competing worldviews fighting for supremacy here in the tottering West. Our side sees a brave young man with a virile and virtuous impulse to […]
November 18, 2021 – 7:39 pm
Following on last week’s post, here’s an essay by the Archbishop of Los Angeles, José H. Gomez, called Reflections on the Church and America’s New Religions. The essay begins: An elite leadership class has risen in our countries that has little interest in religion and no real attachments to the nations they live in or […]
November 11, 2021 – 11:06 pm
I’ve been saying for a long time that what we are up against is a religion. (In 2017 I made the case contra Bill Vallicella, who was reluctant to apply the term.) At the very least, I think it’s helpful to borrow a technique from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who coined the term “the intentional […]
November 10, 2021 – 10:43 pm
Ann Coulter reads the Build Back Better bill. Here.
November 8, 2021 – 1:34 pm
Way back in 2006, I noted that when there’s a concept out there that’s socially uncomfortable, whatever word we use to refer to it soon becomes freighted with the underlying awkwardness of the thing itself, so we have to discard that word and replace it with a new one. Before long the new word becomes […]
November 3, 2021 – 10:41 pm
Well, that was fun. Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, and various other Democrats around the country, and Democrat propositions, were defeated. It was nice to see all those folks on the other side wailing and gnashing their teeth, and blaming the whole thing on ‘racism’ (which is pretty funny, given, say, the victory […]
October 29, 2021 – 6:38 pm
The lights are back on here on our little dirt road in Wellfleet, where the power had been out ever since the thrashing we got from that nor’easter on Tuesday night. We get a lot of these storms out here, but this was a pretty nasty one, and it knocked down an awful lot of […]
October 27, 2021 – 4:33 pm
We took quite a wallop from last night’s nor’easter here on the Outer Cape, with lots of trees down and widespread power outages. (I’m posting this with my phone.) We have no electricity, which means no heat, water, or internet. (I just got back from filling buckets at Long Pond.) Back when the lights come […]
October 27, 2021 – 12:00 am
As things fall apart in America, and talk of secession, “national divorce”, and civil war becomes more common, I’ve seen some people saying that the Sixties were just as bad, or worse — and that as bad as things were then, we got through it nevertheless, and hung together as a nation. There’s something to […]
October 25, 2021 – 11:09 pm
I mentioned in the previous post that I’ve just made some improvements to my mixing studio. I haven’t written very often about music and recording lately, so here’s a post about some of that. For most of my recording career (I got my start as a staff member at Power Station Studios back in the […]
October 20, 2021 – 10:32 pm
Well, we are slowly recuperating and establishing order. We are going through the daunting process of consolidating decades’ worth of accumulated possessions from two households into our modest dwelling here in Wellfleet, and it’s a slow go for the two of us, but we’re gradually getting there. There’s a lot going on in the world, […]
October 9, 2021 – 10:52 pm
Mission accomplished: we completed the move. It was a marathon on Thursday. The movers came at 7:30 a.m., loading the truck as Nina and I scrambled to make the place presentable for a final walk-through with the buyers at 1:30. We got on the road for Massachusetts about 2, with a plan to get to […]
October 6, 2021 – 12:33 pm
Well, this is it. Movers come at three today to pack, and early tomorrow we ship out. The lovely Nina and I have lived in this three-story house, on the park block of Ninth Street in Brooklyn, since March of 1982. We started out as tenants, then gradually took over the place. When the aging […]
October 3, 2021 – 12:58 pm
The “Spartacus Letter” mentioned in last Wednesday’s post discussed the use of graphene nanoparticles as a transducer for brain-computer interfaces, and expressed concerns that the vaccines now being forced on everyone — which are said to contain these particles — might in fact be an insidious step toward mass behavioral control. I said this seemed […]
September 29, 2021 – 7:14 pm
Sorry for the thin content here – we have one week here in Brooklyn till the movers come, and plowing through 40 years’ accumulated detritus, sorting what is to be moved, stored, sold, donated, and jettisoned, while taking care of last-minute medical stuff before we move 300 miles away from where all our doctors are, […]
September 26, 2021 – 10:28 pm
I lost a friend last Monday. His name was Alan Chevat. He was 72. I met Alan about twenty years ago when he came to study at the Yee’s Hung Ga kwoon in Brooklyn, where I was an instructor. We became friends right away. Alan was a very interesting man. He was Chief Attorney in […]
September 21, 2021 – 10:00 pm
Absolutely sickening news today: one of civilization’s great defenders, Angelo Codevilla, has died at the age of 78: struck and killed by a drunk driver as he walked home from church. Here is his author page at the Claremont Review of Books, and here is one of his most recent items, published at The American […]
September 14, 2021 – 4:47 pm
I wish Norm McDonald hadn’t died.
September 11, 2021 – 1:50 pm
The blank-slatist axiom at the heart of contemporary racialist Leftism is beginning — as was always inevitable, barring complete governmental suppression of all relevant research — to crumble under the patient advance of genetic and cognitive science. Here’s Steve Sailer, writing about this at Taki’s Magazine. Prediction: as this motte becomes indefensible, “luck egalitarianism” will […]
September 8, 2021 – 11:19 pm
Tucker Carlson interviewed Curtis Yarvin, AKA “Mencius Moldbug”, for an hour today. That’s quite a development, I think. Back at the end of July, I noted in a Twitter thread that a new and influential troika had taken shape: “Moldbug, [Michael] Anton, and BAP [“Bronze Age Pervert”] have emerged as the three corners of the […]
September 8, 2021 – 11:23 am
The lovely Nina and I, having sold the house in Brooklyn that we’ve lived in for almost 40 years, now have about three weeks to clear out of the place before closing with the buyers on or around September 30th. After a fantastic weekend of music in Maine, we are driving down to NY today […]
September 2, 2021 – 2:06 pm
I’m off to Maine for my annual musical retreat. (Used to be on Star Island, but now Maine for logistical reasons.) It’ll be good to push the world away for a minute and just make music with old friends. (These are the same folks I’ve been making those collaborative “lockdown’ videos with, for example this […]
August 31, 2021 – 1:45 pm
I’m not much of a consumer of popular culture these days, but I think it’s worth pointing out that, aside from some news items, you almost never see anyone wearing masks in visual media — in movies, TV shows, etc. — despite the ubiquity of masks in this new era of the actually existing world. […]
August 28, 2021 – 3:09 pm
New York has a new governor, Kathy Hochul. Obviously, she’s a Democrat, but what kind? Old-school centrist? Moonbat radical? If you aren’t sure yet, read this brief item by Betsey McCaughey.
August 28, 2021 – 12:05 pm
It appears that Arctic sea-ice coverage is, shall we say, heading North: SHARP UPTICK IN ARCTIC SEA ICE: EXTENT ON COURSE TO BE THE HIGHEST IN 15 YEARS I’m sure this will be all over the nightly news.
August 26, 2021 – 1:28 pm
I’d hate to seem cynical here, but it’s hard, sometimes, not to imagine that there is some sort of powerful and malevolent agency at work behind the scenes that has, in the past two years: 1) Unleashed the Wuhan Red Death upon the world; 2) Usurped the primary-election process to install Joe Biden as the […]
August 25, 2021 – 10:54 pm
You may have heard of Abigail Shrier, who recently wrote a book, called Irreversible Damage, about the “transgender” mind-virus that has lately infected so many young girls. Her book has aroused a fierce reaction from the clerisy of our new official religion, who have brought intense pressure to censor and bury it. Ms. Shrier has […]
August 24, 2021 – 8:07 pm
How sad to learn today that Charlie Watts has died. The Rolling Stones have died with him, as far as I’m concerned: it was Charlie, not Mick Jagger, who was really the heart of that band. I was fortunate enough to meet the legend in person long ago, when I was an assistant engineer on […]
August 23, 2021 – 4:17 pm
Australia, which started out as a prison colony, is returning to form under the shadow of the Wuhan Red Death. Despite massive protests, the government has imposed brutal restrictions in the name of “safety”, and nothing is off the table: censorship, forced confinement, criminal charges, social intimidation, propaganda, and all the other too-familiar tools of […]
August 22, 2021 – 1:38 pm
Well, Henri has come ashore well west of the Outer Cape, and while I’m sure there are some pretty nasty conditions in Connecticut, we’ve got nothing more out here than stiff breezes, perspiration-inducing warmth and humidity, and some rough surf. The sun is even shining, sort of.
August 21, 2021 – 12:59 pm
Here in New England we’re awaiting the arrival of Hurricane Henri. The original projections showed the center of the tracking cone passing right over us in Wellfleet, but now it looks as though the storm will make landfall somewhere in central Long Island. What we’ll get out here will be storm surge and wind, but […]
August 17, 2021 – 10:29 pm
It’s important to keep in mind just who, or what, was just defeated in Afghanistan. It wasn’t the traditional American nation (and military), but rather those who have stunned it into helplessness and have been wearing its senseless body as a skin-suit. If there is any silver lining to all of this, it is the […]
August 15, 2021 – 11:27 am
I’m reposting this item about Afghanistan from December 2009, eleven years ago. * * * I watched the President’s speech last night. It was not encouraging. It had something for everyone: escalation for the hawks; an exit date for the doves; the usual rot about “distorting and defiling a great religion”, to keep the Muslims off […]
August 14, 2021 – 5:44 pm
We’ll get back to the previous topic in a bit — for now, yes, I think we’ll all agree that the best course has to be some sort of pushback on the part of ordinary Americans, and there are now some heartening signs that more and more of us are starting to realize this. Perhaps […]
August 12, 2021 – 4:09 pm
My previous post was, I have to admit, pretty gloomy even for me. It’s been difficult to watch events unfold over the last year or so without getting the feeling that the USA as it has existed for the past two-and-a-half centuries has reached a point of fatal exhaustion. (Looking at the familiar cycle that […]
August 10, 2021 – 1:04 pm
As I mentioned in the previous post, one of the reasons I hadn’t been writing much was that I thought things had got, gradually then quite suddenly, to such a state that further diagnosis and analysis had begun to seem pointless. Trump had been ousted. The shenanigans that tainted the elections were so swaggeringly, pugnaciously, […]
I’m glad to be able to start getting back to normal operations here. I haven’t really written much since the election. At first it was because I was, quite frankly, just too dispirited: the nasty shoulder injury I’d had back in the summer had made it difficult to type, and the forced discontinuation of my […]
August 5, 2021 – 12:38 pm
Still here. I’m anticipating, any day now, a long-awaited conclusion to a stressful process that has caused me, as a matter of prudence and caution, to keep a low online profile for the past several months. (I will explain later, but at this point I don’t want to jinx anything.) Lord knows there’s plenty to […]
I’m getting ready to put things back to normal here, but I probably won’t be posting anything new just yet. Thank you all for your patience.
I’ve reopened the site for now, but may soon have to take it offline again for a bit. Sorry about the weird situation here.
April 13, 2021 – 12:34 pm
We’re still on a break here. I do hope to be back in another weeks or two. Thanks as always for coming by – and do feel free to browse our archive, or try the “Random Post” link at top right.
I know it’s been awfully slow around here lately. It will likely be that way for another few weeks, I’m sorry to say, and I may even take the blog offline for a brief interval. (If that happens, feel free to write me and I’ll explain; my email is still the same old obvious one.) […]
March 15, 2021 – 12:07 pm
From last night’s Grammy Awards: here is the state of American “culture”. A while ago I wrote that it is a sign of an ascending civilization that what is lower aspires to what is higher, while the reverse is true of a civilization in decline. In the golden age of Hollywood, eros was Fred Astaire […]
March 11, 2021 – 11:40 am
Off to the White House it goes. It will be signed into law by Friday, if Mr. Biden can still lift a pen. (The full text of the thing is here, if you have a strong stomach, low blood pressure, and a month or two to read it.) “When the people find that they can […]
“The worst pain a man can suffer: to have insight into much and power over nothing.” – Herodotus
February 22, 2021 – 1:26 pm
Here’s Michael Anton (with whom, in 2018, we had a brief exchange in the linked series of posts starting here), writing recently at Claremont Review of Books: The vast majority of those who went to the Capitol did so without a plan, but they did have a goal: to be heard. Which was also the […]