Och aye. (Full screen recommended.)
I haven’t commented much on this Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. Clearly it is a serious issue, but it is just as clear that it is being whipped up as much as possible by our domestic media to create fear and chaos, in the interest of hanging a millstone around Donald Trump’s neck. When the swine flu […]
Making the rounds today: These imbeciles are our cultural overlords. Perhaps this will serve as a reminder that they only have what power we give them.
The billionaire Michael Bloomberg is a world-famous former three-term mayor (and wealthiest resident) of America’s principal city. He also commands a global media empire. He just spent half a billion dollars in an attempt to win the coming election, and accomplished nothing more than to win a primary in American Samoa. So: next time you […]
I don’t know how Victor Davis Hanson manages to produce essays and articles at the rate he does; it’s awfully impressive in terms of volume alone. It’s even more impressive when they are as meaty as the one he published yesterday at American Greatness: a blistering recap of the Obama administration’s eight-year spree of executive […]
February 29, 2020 – 10:05 pm
We must note the passing of Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest minds of our era. He died yesterday, at 96, after a fall. Read about the life of this extraordinary man here.
February 27, 2020 – 10:34 pm
As the world sinks deeper into panic over the coronavirus outbreak, I’ll remind you again to have a look at Curtis Yarvin’s paean to global decoupling, published last month at The American Mind. (I’ll drop a link also to a far briefer item of my own, from 2018.) Not long ago — in my own […]
February 24, 2020 – 11:29 pm
Here’s a chilling item from Rod Dreher about the green shoots of totalitarianism now rising in our academies. How we arrived at this place — how this became possible, and what led to its becoming actual at our specific point in history — is an important question about the great cycles of human societies. But […]
February 22, 2020 – 5:36 pm
John Batchelor’s series of conversations with historian Michael Vlahos about civil war continues this week with a discussion of regicide. Readers may recall a post here last June describing a tripartite taxonomy of civil war. Professor Vlahos suggests a similar classification of regicides: those that seek to replace not just the nation’s leader, but also […]
February 21, 2020 – 6:31 pm
Naturalism asks us to believe that we are just a pile of protons, electrons, etc., pushed and pulled willy-nilly by mindless attractions and repulsions — or even that we are, at bottom, nothing more than a set of solutions to some fundamental equations. Yet we think and dream; we feel love and grief. We taste […]
February 17, 2020 – 5:51 pm
I haven’t written much about it lately, but I really do think the Democrats are in for a historic ass-whipping this fall. (In case you missed it, this lifelong Democrat thinks so too.) More than anything else, it’s because they seem to have lost sight of what most people want most: stability. They want the […]
February 14, 2020 – 11:22 pm
I’ll ask your forgiveness once again for the lack of substantial posts here over the past few weeks. Regarding the political scene, I’m finding it awfully difficult right at the moment to summon up the will to comment on any of it — not that there isn’t plenty I could say, but at this point […]
February 11, 2020 – 10:21 pm
There are times when it seems more important to me to read and think than to write, and these past weeks have been one of those times. I do apologize to those of you who come by here regularly, and I promise that these lulls are always temporary. But I hate to send you away […]
February 10, 2020 – 1:03 pm
Climate activism. “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.”
February 8, 2020 – 5:43 pm
John Batchelor is in Baku again this week — I don’t know how he does it, at his age — but he managed to continue his weekly conversation with historian Michael Vlahos on the question of American civil war. This week, Mr. Batchelor comments on an obvious metaphor from this week’s news that I (somehow!) […]
February 6, 2020 – 1:23 pm
Growing older has its consolations. Among them are a blessed respite from the tumultuous urgencies of youth, and the time and perspective for contemplation and deeper understanding. That perspective and understanding can, however, leave the contemplative geezer feeling at times downright disconsolate, when he looks around himself and sees how much there is in our […]
February 4, 2020 – 6:45 pm
The Iowa Caucuses. (I guess they’re too “Caucasian”.)
February 4, 2020 – 12:19 pm
The Democratic Caucuses in Iowa (or, as the ailing Rush Limbaugh calls them, the “Hawkeye Cauci”) are in embarrassing disarray, with a new report-resulting “app” (reportedly designed by Hillary Clinton campaign bigwig Robbie Mook) having apparently failed to work. Multiple candidates are claiming victory, but nobody knows. (Remember the rollout of the Obamacare website?) Meanwhile, […]
February 3, 2020 – 5:03 pm
I was shocked and saddened just now to learn that Rush Limbaugh has been diagnosed with “advanced” lung cancer. Mr. Limbaugh, a brilliant analyst of the American political scene, has most importantly been, for decades now, a vital brake (to the extent that such a thing is possible) on the entropic forces of the American […]
February 1, 2020 – 12:18 pm
Charles Murray has a new book out: Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. From the blurb at Amazon: The thesis of Human Diversity is that advances in genetics and neuroscience are overthrowing an intellectual orthodoxy that has ruled the social sciences for decades. The core of the orthodoxy consists of three dogmas: […]
January 31, 2020 – 9:36 pm
Here’s a research paper, from a team of scientists in India, about the now-pandemic coronavirus. They are puzzled by an “uncanny similarity” of portions of its molecular structure to other dangerous viruses, including HIV, and say that the insertion of these novel sequences is “unlikely to be fortuitous in nature”. Perhaps we will be hearing […]
January 31, 2020 – 9:21 pm
The Senate has voted to shut down the Democrats’ impeachment stunt, and the U.K. has officially left the E.U. It’s nice to see things work out now and then.
January 31, 2020 – 1:12 pm
The Coronavirus Task Force.
January 29, 2020 – 8:03 pm
I haven’t commented on this impeachment show — in part because I have nothing original to say about it, but also because I don’t want to dignify it with serious commentary. Eventually it will come to an end; Mr. Trump will not be removed from office, and then we can all wait a few days […]
January 26, 2020 – 1:07 pm
I’ve been a little preoccupied this week with family matters and other offline distractions. Back soon.
January 22, 2020 – 10:55 pm
“Impatience and ignorance are characteristic of democratic ages; coarsely ambitious men generally are at the helm of state; dignity is wanting in the conduct of affairs, although arrogance is not lacking; the decay of the family, especially in America, to the status of a mere household, removes one of the ancient supports of social tranquillity; […]
January 20, 2020 – 4:51 pm
Martin Luther King — or, at least, the man as publicly imagined — would be aghast if he saw how the politics of collectivist grievance-bloc identitarianism — ‘Bioleninism’, to give a nod to the subject of our previous post — has come to dominate American life in the decades since he died. People should be […]
January 20, 2020 – 3:05 pm
Spandrell’s blog, Bloody Shovel, has been moved from WordPress.com to its own domain. This was a wise move – Spandrell has been an influential writer on the reactionary Right for years now — see, for example, his important essays on ‘Bioleninism‘ — and a host like WordPress might have shut him down at any time. […]
January 18, 2020 – 12:32 pm
In a comment on our previous post, Professor J.M. Smith said: Our society is shot through with an incredible amount of intelligence, but a great deal of it seems to work in service of things that are low and stupid. Think of someone snap-chatting selfies using a smartphone and the internet. The end of their […]
January 16, 2020 – 5:59 pm
Ross Douthat published a wistful column at the New York Times the other day, lamenting the death in academia of the Western canon of literature. At the heart of the problem — and the problem itself is, as Chiang Kai-shek once said in an analogous context, a “disease of the heart” — is the death […]
January 14, 2020 – 11:47 pm
Over at Unz Review, Steve Sailer comments on Baltimore’s homicide statistics, in which 303 murders were committed with handguns, and only 9 with long guns (the stats lump together rifles and shotguns, so the number of rifles used was almost certainly fewer than 9). Blunt objects and knives each were used in more murders than […]
January 13, 2020 – 4:51 pm
As they all said, in bone-chilling unison: this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
January 12, 2020 – 1:50 pm
It was with terrible sadness that I learned today that Sir Roger Scruton has fallen from the ramparts at age 75. He was a man of incomparable culture, erudition, discrimination, and integrity. Not only has Western civilization lost one of its greatest defenders; it is also as if a magnificent library has just been burnt […]
January 10, 2020 – 11:08 pm
Women and demographic minorities living in the modern West inhabit the least racist, least sexist society that has ever existed. They have greater liberty, and a broader scope of opportunity, than they have ever had anywhere on earth. Yet to listen to public discourse, or to look over any university’s curriculum, would give a newcomer […]
January 9, 2020 – 10:04 pm
“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen […]
January 8, 2020 – 1:45 pm
In a recent poll, men were almost twice as likely as women to be able to locate Iran on an unlableled map. The overall success rate was a dismal 28%. By sex: 38% of men got it right, and 20% of women.
January 7, 2020 – 5:24 pm
Sanitation. (Hat-tip: Twitter follower @BirddogJones.)
January 6, 2020 – 7:57 pm
Here’s a thing Donald Trump and I have in common: we both had Scottish mothers — mine from Glasgow, and his from the Hebrides. Here too is a thing that the Scots and many of the peoples of the Middle East have in common: they are tribal societies from remote places. In such circumstances — […]
January 6, 2020 – 12:34 pm
Lewis Amselem, a.k.a. “Diplomad”, has put up a rousing post on the Soleimani hit. Best of all, I think, was the bit at the end: Now is the time openly to tell the Iranians that we do not want war, but they should want it much less. We should openly tell them that we will […]
January 5, 2020 – 11:45 pm
I hate awards shows, and never watch them (full disclosure, though: when I was nominated for an engineering Grammy in 2004, I did go) — but I rather have to hand it to Ricky Gervais for tonight’s monologue at the Golden Globes, which was splashed at once all over social media. You can watch it […]
January 4, 2020 – 8:13 pm
In a recent post, I wrote about my dissatisfaction with the answers that scientific materialism has offered for some difficult questions. One of these questions is about the astonishing fine-tuning of the physical constants of the natural world: To understand this it’s important to keep in mind what’s called the “Anthropic Principle”. This is the […]
January 3, 2020 – 9:43 pm
Everybody’s abuzz about this Qassem Soleimani business. I don’t have much to say about it, but I’ll say this: First, it’s amusing that some parties seem so persnickety about the legality of striking down a man who made his career in terrorism and assassinations all over the globe. Second, I’m having a hard time seeing […]
January 1, 2020 – 12:37 pm
Buckle up, everybody – I have a feeling 2020 is going to be an eventful year. “Interesting”, even.
December 28, 2019 – 9:33 am
Taking a little holiday break. Back soon.
December 23, 2019 – 6:13 pm
I’ve just read a fine paper by Nathan Cofnas, a doctoral student in philosophy at Oxford, on the censorship. suppression, and misrepresentation of scientific and philosophical inquiry into the heritability of intelligence and the statistical distribution of intelligence in different human populations. The gist is this: that a great deal of evidence has already been […]
December 20, 2019 – 6:34 pm
Some good news: a major MS-13 bust in Long Island.
December 19, 2019 – 6:39 pm
Looking out over the rubble of our political system today, I’m reminded of a post from 2015, in which I argued that the political struggle of Right versus Left is not a contest of different policy preferences, but something far more basic, and more universal, even than human existence itself: the struggle against entropy, against […]
December 17, 2019 – 2:30 pm
A theme of some recent posts here has been the limitations of reason. Reason is a machine: if properly maintained and frequently inspected, it does what it does well enough, but like any machine it can only do some things and not others. Moreover, it is in the nature of this machine not to deal […]
December 14, 2019 – 11:50 pm
I’ve just read Propaganda (1928), by Edward Bernays. Bernays, who died in 1995 at the uncommonly advanced age of 103, was the founder of the modern era of marketing and public relations. (Some would call this a “science”, as it does have an empirical and experimental side.) Bernays makes clear his opinion that the great […]