December 14, 2019 – 4:49 pm
Wellfleet Harbor this afternoon:
December 12, 2019 – 10:10 pm
Outstanding news: it looks like the Right has won a major victory in Britain’s national elections today.
December 11, 2019 – 12:02 am
Here’s an interview given Tuesday by Attorney General Barr. He discusses the Inspector General’s report, and reminds us that it was limited in scope and power, and that the full investigation is the one being conducted by John Durham. (Mr. Barr tells us not to expect anything from that until mid-2020.) Eighteen minutes in, Mr. […]
December 8, 2019 – 5:17 pm
Unless you’re au fait with the musical genre known as “progresssive rock”, you’ve probably never heard of the British musician and producer Steven Wilson. He’s best known as the leader of the now-defunct band Porcupine Tree, but he’s also made quite a few records on his own. I admire his work, which is always good […]
December 7, 2019 – 2:18 pm
Last spring I wrote a post in which I described my dissatisfaction with the atheist, fully materialistic world-model I had inhabited (and defended with vigor, sometimes even cruelty) all my life. I’d come to see that there were essential questions to which it provided no good answers — and that the “scientism” it was built […]
December 4, 2019 – 1:37 pm
In a recent item at American Greatness, Angelo Codevilla acknowledges that America is divided beyond the possibility of reconciliation. [R]estoring anything like the Founders’ United States of America is out of the question. Constitutional conservatism on behalf of a country a large part of which is absorbed in revolutionary identity; that rejects the dictionary definition […]
December 1, 2019 – 9:11 pm
With the Democratic slate of candidates looking weaker by the day, a lot of people are whispering about Michelle Obama entering the race. She would be a much stronger opponent, I think, than any of the current crop of hopefuls, and the idea of her getting in has some on the Right worried. I don’t […]
November 30, 2019 – 7:03 pm
In the comment-thread of our previous post, J.M. Smith discusses status in academia: I’m a professor of human geography, a discipline that lurched left en masse. The movement was just starting when I was a graduate student in the 1980s, and was all but completed within twenty years. One reason human geography shifted is that […]
November 29, 2019 – 8:50 pm
I’ve been thinking some more about the Curtis Yarvin essay we looked at a couple of days ago. There were good comments on the previous post. A couple of readers pointed out that, despite Mr. Yarvin’s assertion of the scarcity of sociopaths in the general population, many political systems (and in particular ours, I think) […]
November 29, 2019 – 1:52 pm
The other day I was out for a walk in Prospect Park and ran across this: I was reminded of this, which is 39,000 years old: Some things never change, I guess.
November 28, 2019 – 11:42 am
We all have a lot to be thankful for, even in these uncertain times (and when were the times ever not uncertain?). I’m grateful to all of you for reading and commenting. Enjoy this special day — my favorite holiday of the year.
November 27, 2019 – 3:51 pm
Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. “Mencius Moldbug”, has published the second installment of his five-part “Clear Pill” essay series over at The American Mind. The new essay is about how coordinated, pervasive error enters the national culture in distributed, democratic societies — i.e., without the top-down influence of centralized, authoritarian control. The essay is long — in […]
November 24, 2019 – 8:43 pm
Sorry for the thin content here lately. Now and then I just don’t have much to say: I’ve written 5,030 posts over the past 14 years, and sometimes I feel as if anything I’d write would, at this point, just be repeating myself. (And then the muse grants me her favor once again, and I’m […]
November 20, 2019 – 10:38 pm
Staying on message from our Bowie post of a few days ago, here’s a story about Life On Mars — and not just lichens or something, but bugs.
November 19, 2019 – 12:20 am
Steve Sailer famously said that “political correctness is a war on noticing”. There are patterns to reality so stubborn and prevalent that they enable us to make more or less reliable predictions. This is “induction”: reasoning, from accretion of the particular, to general rules that we believe in with increasing confidence as the data accumulate. […]
November 17, 2019 – 12:33 am
A little while back I had David Bowie’s 1977 song Heroes — probably my favorite of all his songs, and that’s saying something — stuck in my head. I thought it might be fun to go downstairs to the studio and see if I could knock it off on my own. Here’s a rough mix […]
November 14, 2019 – 11:23 pm
I see that Pete Buttigieg is now leading the pack of Democratic candidates in polls for the Iowa caucus. I don’t think Mr. Buttigieg, should he win the nomination, will do very well at all against Donald Trump in the general election. It should go without saying that we would not even know his name […]
November 13, 2019 – 10:08 pm
Commenting on our previous item about immigrant gangs in Sweden, and the wave of bombings and shootings they have brought to that previously peaceful nation, reader “Whitewall” offered up this link, from the BBC: Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: What’s going on? The first subheading asks: Who is to blame? If you thought they might […]
November 12, 2019 – 9:46 pm
Denmark has now instituted border checks with Sweden in response to Sweden’s inability to control its tide of violent crime. According to The Guardian: Denmark has temporarily reinstated checks at its border crossings with Sweden after a spate of bombings and shootings in the Copenhagen area that authorities say were carried out by members of […]
November 12, 2019 – 8:42 pm
I’m back in Wellfleet, after an interesting weekend in Baltimore. It’s snowing here — on November 12th. The temperature is supposed to drop well down into the twenties overnight. I have a feeling, on no particular authority, that it’s going to be a long, cold winter.
November 7, 2019 – 10:40 pm
I’ll be in Baltimore this weekend at the annual conference of the H. L. Mencken Club, and driving back to Cape Cod on Monday. Should get back to business here after that.
November 5, 2019 – 7:06 pm
Michael Vlahos, who for years now has been discussing with John Batchelor the possibility and growing likelihood of a third American civil war, now has a new article up at The American Conservative. He writes about the steps that lead to a crisis of constitutional legitimacy, at which point the outcome is determined by a […]
November 4, 2019 – 5:42 pm
I’ve been reading Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton. Reading in the Kindle makes it possible to highlight passages, and pick them up online (which saves a lot of copying by hand). Here are some of the ones I’ve selected so far: ‣ If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will […]
November 1, 2019 – 10:23 pm
The Bronze Age Mindset discussion at The American Mind has become a symposium. Of particular interest to me at the moment is Dan DeCarlo’s entry, An Epic Pervert, because it takes on, albeit in passing, something that I’ve been stewing over for some time now: is the natural-law/natural-rights theory of the American Founding sustainable without […]
October 30, 2019 – 4:44 pm
Heather Mac Donald has an article up at The New Criterion about racial preferences in college admissions, with particular attention to a case making its way to the Supreme Court that cites Harvard’s discrimination against Asians. Ms. Mac Donald argues that current SCOTUS jurisprudence on racial preferences is an incoherent mess, and that when the […]
October 29, 2019 – 12:05 am
Curtis Yarvin is back again at The American Mind. This time he is offering his own review, pace Michael Anton, of Bronze Age Mindset. (Have you read this book yet?) Yarvin is aflame here. In this essay he argues that what truly drives culture — and downstream from culture, politics — is art: that cultural […]
October 27, 2019 – 3:24 pm
With a hat-tip to the indefatigable “JK”: Michael Flynn’s new attorney, the formidable Sidney Powell, has filed a devastating motion-to-dismiss in the distinguished general’s defense. It lays bare the disgraceful chicanery that the government engaged in to set him up — a sickening and abusive conspiracy, for political ends, by rogue agents in the Justice […]
October 25, 2019 – 11:36 am
Last night I noted that the DOJ’s investigation of the Russian-collusion hit-job had become a criminal investigation. The story was originally reported by the New York Times, which still pretends to be a “news” outlet. It is, of course, nothing of the sort. Were the Times in the business of impartial reporting, it would have […]
October 24, 2019 – 9:31 pm
It appears that the DOJ’s investigation of the origins of the Russia hoax has now become a criminal investigation. Thank you, AG Barr. And about bloody time.
October 22, 2019 – 8:24 pm
A few weeks ago, as I recovered from a bad cold, I posted a review, by Michael Anton, of the book Bronze Age Mindset, by an unknown author writing as “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP). At the time I said: The book is essentially a Nietzschean manifesto — though it describes itself not as a work […]
October 21, 2019 – 3:58 pm
Back in June, after one of the Democratic debates, I mentioned Tulsi Gabbard in generally approving terms. It was the first time I’d ever seen here, and she made a favorable impression on me — especially in comparison to the gibbering lunatics occupying the rest of the stage. A commenter suggested that she had some […]
October 19, 2019 – 9:30 pm
Last week our Attorney General, William Barr, gave a speech at Notre Dame on the assault of “secularism” upon traditional religion. He touched on many of the themes I’ve been brooding over in these pages: the withering effect of the death of the transcendent, the natural-rights principles of the American Founding, and the question of […]
October 18, 2019 – 8:42 pm
Back in August, the New Yorker ran an interview with Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The interview was, of course, adversarial: Professor Wax, a woman of exceptional intelligence and courage, is an outspoken conservative and defender of traditional Western values and ideas. In this interview […]
October 17, 2019 – 12:26 pm
The lovely Nina and I are “stateside” once more after a two-week visit with our daughter’s young family in Vienna. It was wonderful to see them — in particular, to be with our three-year-old and ten-month-old grandsons Liam and Declan gives us great happiness — but as someone once said, the best part of traveling […]
October 6, 2019 – 4:50 pm
I note with sadness, if not surprise, the death of drummer Ginger Baker. As celebrity deaths go, this is for me a pretty big one: Ginger Baker was my first drum hero, and a big part of why, about fifty years ago, I took up the instrument myself. Mr. Baker was not, by any account, […]
October 2, 2019 – 1:49 pm
The lovely Nina and I are on the road again: back to Vienna to visit our daughter and the wee bairns, and to celebrate Nina’s birthday (it’s one of those “big ones”). We’ll back in about two weeks, though I may post a thing or two from abroad. Please feel free to browse our vast […]
October 1, 2019 – 5:07 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s the latest insanity from the Ministry of Truth: woke math. It’s easy to see why mathematical literacy has to go: numbers don’t lie.
September 28, 2019 – 10:57 pm
Curtis Yarvin, alias ‘Mencius Moldbug’, seems to be getting back in the game. He discontinued his enormously influential blog Unqualified Reservations years ago (it has now been archived and reorganized here, minus the comment-threads), and seemed for a while to have tried to keep his head down, concentrating on his (apparently quite successful) computer-science career. […]
September 27, 2019 – 11:15 pm
From Sean Davis, reporting at The Federalist: Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer […]
September 26, 2019 – 2:06 pm
Given the accusations leveled against Donald Trump for asking Ukraine to assist in corruption investigations, readers might like to have a look at this: The White House, November 10, 1999. To the Senate of the United States: With a view to receiving the advice and consent of the Senate to ratification, I transmit herewith the […]
September 26, 2019 – 1:52 pm
Mencius Moldbug: [W]hen we identify progressive secularism as one thing and Protestant Christianity as another, we have basically just walked up to one of the most dangerous intellectual pathogens in Western history, said “how ya doin,” invited it to a wild hot-tub party and promised to deactivate our immune system for the evening. Is this […]
September 25, 2019 – 9:57 pm
This seems timely: here are the two latest installments of John Batchelor’s ongoing conversation with historian Michael Vlahos about the darkening clouds of civil war. In these two segments (twenty minutes in all), the two discuss messianic and millenarian revolutionary movements, past and present. Things do seem to have ratcheted up a bit, even […]
September 20, 2019 – 11:37 pm
So: In 2014, the Obama administration backs a revolution in Ukraine, intended to turn that nation away from Russia. Joe Biden, then vice-president, becomes the administration’s go-between with Ukraine. That makes Biden a powerful guy, as far as Ukraine is concerned. Biden’s kid Hunter ends up being on the board of a corporation over there, […]
September 19, 2019 – 7:10 pm
The militant Islamist group Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, is also one of the world’s biggest organized-crime cartels, dealing in drugs, weapons, and money-laundering on a global scale to support its jihad. During the Obama administration, the DEA mounted a massive investigation, and was prepared to mount an enormous legal assault on the syndicate — […]
September 17, 2019 – 11:00 pm
The New York Times, fresh from beclowning itself over the weekend with a shameless (and journalistically indefensible) partisan attack on Brett Kavanaugh, gave further evidence today that the once-respected paper is truly in the toilet: a “woke” piece about the oppression of women by — I am not making this up — the “poo-triarchy”. Here’s […]
September 16, 2019 – 10:52 pm
Finding myself with nothing interesting to say tonight about the passing scene (I’m beginning to worry that, after almost five thousand posts, I may well have said it all already), I’ll take a moment to plug a YouTube channel I’m keen on. This will be of interest only to a small subset of readers: drummers […]
September 13, 2019 – 11:27 am
Here’s an amusing story: Ship With Climate Change Warriors Caught in Ice, Warriors Evacuated To quote Philip K. Dick once again: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” The problem with the modern Left’s new religion is that, having shot Heaven down from the sky, they are forced into […]
September 12, 2019 – 6:00 pm
I’m gradually getting better from that debilitating chest-cold I came down with on Monday, and thought I was well enough to take on the Blank Page once again. So I sat down to write, and … nothing. (Maybe in another day or so.) So, instead, I’ll direct you to a review, at CRB, of a […]