February 18, 2021 – 3:42 pm
Sorry to have gone all quiet here again. We are getting our house ready to sell, and having lived here since 1982, it’s a huge task. By the time we get to the end of each day — which is when I usually have some time to write — we’re whipped. I’ll post up interesting […]
February 17, 2021 – 6:09 pm
How terribly sad this is. I really don’t know what to say… perhaps later. For now I’ll just quote Charles de Gaulle: “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”
February 14, 2021 – 1:50 pm
I was deeply saddened to hear that the great jazz/Latin keyboardist and composer Chick Corea has died, at the age of 79. He was one of the towering musical artists of our time, and I’ve been a huge fan for more than fifty years (I first heard him play on Miles Davis’s groundbreaking album Bitches […]
February 6, 2021 – 3:43 pm
This post was just reprinted at American Greatness, so I’ve taken it down from here for a little while. Please read it over at their website.
February 1, 2021 – 5:22 pm
All healthy organisms, societies included, stabilize in a dynamic equilibrium by managing energy throughput (which of course means that they depend on increasing the entropy of the larger system that supports them). “Rightism” acknowledges that there are natural principles that determine sustainable configurations and hierarchies, and incorporates that knowledge into societies as traditions. This vast, […]
January 27, 2021 – 3:40 pm
A while back the New York Times mounted a direct assault on American patriotism called “The 1619 Project”, which sought to promote the idea that the founding of the American nation was nothing more than an act of organized evil, with its only basis and purpose the subjugation of other races by white, male, Europeans. […]
January 20, 2021 – 7:40 pm
Here we are. It’s been a long twelve months: from sailing along at the beginning of 2020 with a booming economy and gathering momentum for a second Trump administration, and for holding terminal decline at bay for a precious few more years, to COVID, St. George Floyd, a long hot summer of government-sanctioned rioting for […]
January 17, 2021 – 7:37 pm
For a couple of years now, radio host John Batchelor has had historian Michael Vlahos drop by on Friday evenings to discuss whether America is embroiled in a civil war. (Gee, what do you think, readers?) The segments are short, and Professor Vlahos always has something interesting to say. This past Friday he used a […]
January 14, 2021 – 6:10 pm
From our e-pal Bill Keezer comes a handy checklist:
January 13, 2021 – 8:44 pm
The fog of war is abroad in the land, and in every direction sturdy, familiar realities dissolve into grotesque phantasms and chimeras. Trumpets and bullhorns blare in the smoke and chaos. The ground trembles and shifts under our feet. One thing seems clear, I think: this Republic, as we have known it in our lifetimes […]
January 13, 2021 – 12:35 pm
Here’s Michael Yon — who knows more about this sort of thing than anyone — about the role of Antifa in the Capitol riot.
January 7, 2021 – 7:01 pm
Curtis Yarvin, the former Moldbug, commented at once on yesterday’s big fizzle. In a post written late yesterday, he offered a quote from Twitter: The Internet impresario Kantbot, who has become one of the most obnoxious literary talents since Marx or possibly Wyndham Lewis, still captured the day perfectly: Imagine storming the Capital of the […]
January 6, 2021 – 11:41 pm
As I have been saying for a long time now: “Gradually, then suddenly”.
January 5, 2021 – 4:38 pm
OK, so the polls are open in Georgia today. At stake in the two runoff elections is control of the United States Senate. Is everyone feeling as optimistic as I am?
January 1, 2021 – 4:11 pm
Well, here we are. Happy New Year. I thank all of you who’ve visited in recent weeks; there hasn’t been a whole lot to see here for some time now. My shoulder injury kept me off the keyboard for a while, but that’s not a problem any longer. Mainly it’s been that we have entered […]
December 25, 2020 – 2:03 pm
Merry Christmas, everybody! Sorry to have been so shtum lately; I seem to be in a kind of limbo, just busying myself with reading and musical work. I’m sure I’ll perk up soon.
December 17, 2020 – 1:54 pm
Writing at American Greatness, Christopher Roach argues that the Left, after patiently mounting a well-organized assault on all institutions, and after a century of expansion of the managerial state, now has power that is “largely immune from elections.” (After what we’ve just seen in 2020, can anyone doubt this?) He advises us that henceforward “Any […]
December 14, 2020 – 11:20 am
From a just-released forensic report on the widely used Dominion voting system, as tested in Antrim County, Michigan (a red county where vote-tabulation errors were already known to have happened): We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system […]
December 12, 2020 – 12:55 pm
Aaaand… SCOTUS strikes again, refusing to take the Constitutional election-irregularity case brought by Texas and joined by many other states. Newcomers Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett all teamed up with Sotomayor, Kagan, and Roberts to stonewall the complaint. As Thomas and Alito pointed out in their dissent, this was an abrogation of their responsibility as original […]
December 8, 2020 – 10:30 am
… Mark Chapman took the band away. R.I.P. John Lennon, who transformed the world of music, and so the world.
December 2, 2020 – 10:13 pm
I haven’t written much lately — I’ve been too busy with work and with personal matters, and frankly I haven’t had much to say. I’ve been thinking a lot about where matters stand, here in the senescent West, as this pivotal year winds down, and have been doing a lot of interesting reading — but […]
November 28, 2020 – 8:16 pm
It’s possible to enjoy this world a whole lot more if you aren’t convinced it’s all there is.
November 26, 2020 – 11:42 am
Best wishes to all of you. This year has been a difficult test, and we will be tried even more severely in the months ahead, but we still have much to be thankful for. Take a breath, and focus on gratitude.
November 20, 2020 – 12:19 pm
A commenter on our previous post asks how any intelligent person could actually be suspicious about the result of the recent election. He also mentions, in support of his confidence that the results are legitimate, that Joe Biden won the popular vote by millions of votes. Here’s my reply: First of all, the point about […]
November 17, 2020 – 10:09 am
I’ll follow on my previous post by saying that, regardless of how persuasive the statistical, anecdotal, testimonial, technological, and other indicators of election fraud may be, none of it matters unless those litigating the claims produce a coherent and consistent case, with hard evidence sufficient to convince the courts and state legislatures to alter the […]
November 16, 2020 – 7:01 pm
I haven’t written for a few days, because I have nothing new to say; like all of you I am waiting to see how this election challenge plays out. We are up against titanic forces, not least of which is just the colossal, viscous mass of institutional inertia, media resistance, and partisan antipathy that stands […]
November 11, 2020 – 8:01 pm
David Harsanyi has posted a tart reply. An excerpt: When Democrats win the presidency, we are treated to solemn calls for national restoration and political harmony, and to the expectation that, for the good of the nation, the opposition will embrace decorum and pass legislation they oppose. When Republicans win elections, grown women put on […]
November 8, 2020 – 1:14 pm
Here’s another perspective on things: Curtis Yarvin, AKA “Mencius Moldbug”, has published an essay today about the 2020 election. In it he describes himself as being “so pro-Trump, I wrap all the way around to pro-Biden.” Yarvin makes an important point about the difference between traditional American conservatism and all forms of Leftism: subsidiarian, small-government […]
November 7, 2020 – 10:41 am
My last couple of posts have been, to put it mildly, a tad heated. It has been a bitter year in our cold civil war, and the counting of the votes in our recent election has been unlike anything we’ve ever seen before — in large part due to newly (and in many cases it […]
November 5, 2020 – 10:39 pm
Rage is building in America as the audacious manipulation of this election, and the naked complicity of the media, become more and more self-evident (the major networks cut away from the President of the United States today as he was making remarks at the White House). This cannot stand. The historic American nation has watched, […]
November 4, 2020 – 10:09 pm
And here we are: a closely contested election, which will now drag on for days or weeks and likely be resolved in the courts. (There appears to have been no shortage of electoral shenanigans and monkeyshines, exactly as we feared.) This certainly isn’t what we’d hoped for: if President Trump prevails by superior lawyering, the […]
November 2, 2020 – 12:40 pm
I am chastened by the discussion in the previous posts. (See here and here.) All I had sought to do in my original remarks was to point out the natural advantages of cohesion, compact unity, patriotism, faith, competence, and positive worldview that Red America has over Blue, and to suggest that whatever happens next, we […]
November 1, 2020 – 1:37 pm
A lively discussion has ensued in the comment-thread to our previous post. Commenter “vxxc” argues that my assessment of the natural assets of the Red coalition is too optimistic: that our lack, so far, of functional organization puts us at a lethal disadvantage in the gathering struggle. I, on the other hand, think this is […]
October 27, 2020 – 11:53 pm
The political situation is like nothing I have ever seen in my longish lifetime; as I wrote a little while ago, we are no longer a single community disagreeing about the difficulties of the world we share, but rather two bitterly antagonistic camps inhabiting utterly different realities of belief and perception, with nothing objective in […]
October 27, 2020 – 4:57 pm
Today I saw my shoulder surgeon, Dr. Laith Jazrawi of Langone Orthopaedics, for my six-week post-op followup. The result was gratifying: everything is fine, with impressive progress toward full range of motion, and I no longer have to wear that bloody sling. I am also cleared to drive again, which is enormously liberating. I’m able […]
October 23, 2020 – 1:27 pm
I’ve just read a pithy and sensible article at Quilette on the subject of psychological and behavioral sex differences. The essay was written by David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, and it disputes the social-sciences orthodoxy that sees all such differences as social constructions, remediable (as if remediation were actually […]
October 18, 2020 – 7:36 pm
It is notable that the Biden campaign hasn’t denied the veracity of the material taken from Hunter Biden’s laptop, even though it appears to be damning indeed. To the cynical observer this suggests what we’ve suspected all along: that the senescent and ineradicably tainted Biden is simply a Trojan horse intended to get the most […]
October 18, 2020 – 3:46 pm
What an extraordinary time in American history this is. We are bifurcated, not into opposing political camps as in normal times, but into opposing realities. The developing story of Biden-family corruption is, in one of these dimensions of reality, evidence of disgraceful, comprehensive political and moral malfeasance that should utterly, and obviously, disqualify the Democratic […]
October 16, 2020 – 6:42 pm
From a sharp new item by Andrew Sullivan: What antiracism brilliantly does is adopt all the instincts of racism and sexism — seeing someone and instantly judging them by the color of their skin, or sex — and drape them with a veil of virtue. Also this: Many moderns want the experience of religion without […]
October 11, 2020 – 7:32 pm
Here is a scorching critique of the New York Times’ calumnious “1619 Project”, from one of its own.
October 10, 2020 – 2:03 pm
My latest, about the modern-day sanctification of democracy as an end in itself, is up at American Greatness. Have a look.
October 6, 2020 – 1:10 pm
From the Perry Bible Fellowship, a timely and essential truth:
October 2, 2020 – 3:30 pm
Sorry to have been so neglectful here. I’m recovering normally, but am still supposed to keep use of my right arm to a minimum for another week or two, and am living in a sling. Typing is slow and uncomfortable. Meanwhile the lovely Nina had surgery yesterday to remove a basal-cell carcinoma from the bridge […]
September 13, 2020 – 12:00 pm
Shoulder surgery tomorrow, 9/14. I’m glad to be getting it done, but my right arm’s going to be in a sling for six weeks, so it’s going to be hard to write. Back when I can. Update, typed with left hand only, Monday 7 pm: All done. Supine and resting at home, generously medicated and […]
September 13, 2020 – 12:02 am
I want to apologize to all of you who have been coming here over the past few months only to find little or no new content. I’ve written three articles this summer for publication elsewhere, but since my excruciating shoulder injury in July I’ve badly neglected the blog. Since 2005 I’ve written over five thousand […]
September 10, 2020 – 7:50 pm
In an article a few weeks ago at American Greatness I wrote about the dark effect of mask-wearing: The face we present to the world is our “sigil,” our flag of individual distinctness. Our faces, and the richness of expression they make possible, are the primary medium of interpersonal communication. [The old expression “Smile when […]
September 6, 2020 – 12:23 pm
The election is two months away. I don’t get the sense, from most people, that they have any inkling of what a catastrophe it’s going to be. But if you think it’s been a crazy year so far, the period after Election Day is going to make the first ten months of 2020 look like […]
August 30, 2020 – 3:49 pm
I’ve just posted an adaptation of my old (2013) “Small World” essay at American Greatness. Here.
August 30, 2020 – 10:56 am
Essential reading: Michael Anton explains, more persuasively than I’ve read anywhere else, why we must have a Trump win in 2020. You may not fully understand the scope of the calamity that awaits us if the Democrats consolidate their power; read his essay and you will. Here.
August 28, 2020 – 8:39 pm
Here’s the latest collaborative video from my Star Island music team: a lighthearted cover of another Beatles classic. (You can see our others here.) Lead and background vocals, some bass guitar, and mixing: your humble correspondent.