September 11, 2019 – 2:38 pm
I see that the Kakistocracy blog, which Bill Vallicella had linked to just yesterday, is gone. That’s bad: the author, Porter (who used to comment here occasionally), had exceptional sharpness of mind, wit, and pen. Porter, if you should see this: what happened? Drop me a line.
September 10, 2019 – 8:31 pm
I’m back from my annual musical get-together on Star Island, but am in no shape for writing just yet. It was a fantastic weekend — we spent the days working out the more difficult material, and hosted performances/parties for all the other guests on the island every night into the wee hours — but after […]
September 4, 2019 – 9:31 pm
I’m off to my annual musical retreat in the far-flung Isles of Shoals. Back on Tuesday, if we aren’t all washed out to sea by climate change.
September 3, 2019 – 7:07 pm
Engineering firms have a difficult problem to solve: the laws of the actually existing world upon which their products operate are unsentimental and unforgiving. The judges of an engineer’s work are not feelings or opinions, but the simple and ruthlessly objective criteria of success or failure, and the stakes are high. If a bridge is […]
August 31, 2019 – 3:44 pm
We hear all the time — it’s a favorite trope of our current crop of Democratic candidates — that the United States has a shamefully high percentage of people living in poverty. Not so fast, say the authors of a new study. Where these accusations go wrong is that they measure only paychecks, and not […]
August 27, 2019 – 10:45 am
From Richard Epstein. Here. See also his discussion of this essay with John Batchelor, in two parts, here and here.
August 25, 2019 – 11:58 am
Our friend and commenter, the indefatigable JK, sent along a link to a story that’s attracting lots of attention today: climate “scientist” and rent-seeking fearmonger Michael Mann has lost his libel suit against the Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball. Dr. Ball had expressed in public his belief that Dr. Mann’s infamous “Hockey Stick” graph — […]
August 24, 2019 – 10:08 pm
Back in 2009, Mencius Moldbug, in Part 1 of his seminal Gentle Introduction essay, took up the question of the curious ideological synchronization (he used the heavily freighted word Gleichschaltung) of our universities and other cultural institutions. [W]e can see easily that Harvard is attached to something, because the perspective of Harvard in 2009, while […]
August 22, 2019 – 8:37 pm
The New York Times has a spot of bother in the PR department today: its chief political editor is in hot water for blatant anti-Semitism. There isn’t a peep about this at the paper’s website (not surprising, I suppose, given that this is the same rag that bent over backwards to cover up the Holocaust) […]
August 22, 2019 – 12:36 pm
President Trump made an encouraging remark yesterday about the possibility of ending the nation’s lunatic policy of granting U.S. citizenship to any child whose mother managed to get her uterus onto American soil, by any means whatever, before giving birth. “We’re looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship,” the president said. It seems he is […]
August 21, 2019 – 8:19 pm
A young man by the name of Joshua Lawson, who is a graduate student at Hillsdale College, has written a vigorous response to the New York Times’s Orwellian project of “reframing” all of American history as a Marxist narrative of racial oppression. The essay is published at The Federalist. Mr. Lawson provides moral and historical […]
August 20, 2019 – 11:03 am
Problems continue with the site: apparently my hosting service recently migrated the website to a new database, and in doing so corrupted thousands of pages (punctuation symbols have been replaced little strings of gibberish). It appears that the company’s tech support has been outsourced to India (this is what happens when tech companies get too […]
August 19, 2019 – 1:34 pm
If any of you had any lingering illusions about the New York Times being any sort of impartial “news” agency, you can put them to rest. In an all-hands staff meeting last week, executive editor Dean Baquet announced in explicit terms that, the paper’s propaganda war against Donald Trump having suffered a defeat in the […]
August 16, 2019 – 8:07 pm
Still having problems here: all my old posts with block-quotes (thousands of them) now have broken character-encoding for various punctuation marks. I believe this is due to a database migration that Bluehost did recently (though I could be mistaken). They are looking into it.
August 15, 2019 – 8:27 pm
Michael Anton has published an outstanding essay at Claremont’s American Mind — his best, I think, since his influential “Flight 93 Election” piece back in 2016. The essay begins with a discussion of the mainstream-media narrative surrounding mass shootings, and of the collaboration of the pseudoconservative pundits he calls the “Vichycons” in support of that […]
August 14, 2019 – 8:06 pm
The site’s having problems: comments are not working. I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong. Update: There seems to be a problem with this WordPress theme. I may have to switch to another one. Update: Fixed. Back soon.
August 14, 2019 – 11:44 am
…there’s no place like home. The lovely Nina and I are back from our little trip abroad. We visited Slovenia and Croatia with our daughter and her young family, who had driven down from their home in Vienna to meet us, and we had a fine time getting to know these beautiful places a bit […]
Sorry about the near-total lack of content here. We’ve had a steady stream of houseguests, and I’ve hardly been online at all. I’ve paid as little attention to the news as possible, and have spent my scanty solitary time reading (Bruce Catton, Thomas West, and Forrest McDonald), working on a couple of mixes in the […]
In response to a recent shooting spree, New Zealand decided it would disarm its citizens. The citizens, however, like their fellow Antipodeans in Australia following a similar attempt at confiscation some years ago, have generally refused to comply. Good for them. Good for them. All that such policies accomplish is to make criminals of decent […]
I’ve paid little attention to the news over the past few days, but two related stories have percolated through. The first is the decision by the city of Charlottesville, VA, to put an end to its annual celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. Older readers, who received their education prior to the Ministry of Truth having […]
This morning’s assortment of email alerts included a fine short essay by Anthony Esolen, writing at American Greatness on the subject of “toxic masculinity”. You should read the whole thing, but here’s a longish excerpt: We’ve all been hearing plenty about “toxic masculinity’ these days, and never from people who trouble to tell us what […]
From Richard Fernandez: what happened in Portland this weekend — an unholy merger of self-imagined virtue with willingness to inflict terror — is nothing new. (Just ask Robespierre.)
Things might be a little slow around here for a bit; we have our children and grandchildren visiting, and the strife-torn world seems far away. Which is nice.
In last night’s post, I wrote that, based on what I’d just seen, I believed that Donald Trump will be re-elected in 2020. The impression, however, that the ten people on stage last night had made on me was so strong — the craziness so palpable — that I had, in the moment, forgotten to […]
Just watched the first hour or so of the second round of the Democrats’ debates. Donald Trump will be re-elected in 2020.
The New York Times has published an article, with lovely graphics, explaining that the GOP is now an extreme right-wing party, while the Democrats — whose presidential candidates were on stage tonight calling for, among other things, abolishing private healthcare, stripping and redistributing legally earned wealth that they believe to be “in the wrong hands”, […]
Jefferson: Final cause Madison: Formal cause Washington: Efficient cause America’s British colonists: Material cause
Yesterday’s post, in which I attempted a taxonomy of civil war, brought out a long and sorrowful reply from a reader by the name of Casey. I began to respond in the comment-thread, but the concern Casey expressed seems to me so prevalent in traditionalist and conservative circles lately that I thought that I should […]
In David Armistead’s fascinating and insightful book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, the author distinguishes three kinds of civil war: “successionist”, “supersessionist”, and “secessionist”. Successionist civil wars are those that are fought over which individual shall sit atop a nation’s institutional hierarchy. The king dies. Who will succeed him? In this sort of war […]
Like animals and plants, humans, too, create complex organic ecosystems that vary according to population, evolutionary history, and environment. Ours are social, cultural, and political. How sensitive we are to tampering with the ecoystems of animals and plants! How careless with our own!
My friend Bill Vallicella has posted another interesting item on the idea of America as a “proposition nation”. Bill, who is quite rightly trying to find a middle way between open-borders multiculturalism and blood-and-soil ethnonationalism, begins by citing with approval a quote from Patrick Buchanan: But the greatest risk we are taking, based on utopianism, […]
Here’s a scathing summary, by the indispensable Kimberly Strassel, of the government’s abuse of power in what has come to be known as Spygate. Please watch. It would be all too easy for an increasingly childlike and easily distracted polis to let all of this slip out of mind. (I’ve started the embedded video about […]
Do you still read the papers? Do you send a letter to the editor now and then, or leave a comment at the online version? Enjoy it while it lasts, warns John Derbyshire. Here.
In Monday’s post about Angela Saini’s race-denialist polemic, I should have added a few words about the deep moral and philosophical errors that lead so many people to fear, and to seek to suppress, the stubborn realities of human biodiversity. (“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”) For Americans […]
Attracting considerable attention is Superior: The Return of Race Science, a new book about race by Angela Saini. It makes the usual case: that beyond mere superficialities, race is a meaningless concept, a “social construct”. In the face of mounting evidence, this is a claim that is becoming more and more difficult to defend; indeed […]
I note with real sorrow the death of Mac Rebennack, AKA “Dr. John”, who died yesterday of a heart attack. He was 77. In my opinion he was a national treasure — a first-tier master of an indigenous hybrid American musical style. I worked with Mac on a couple of projects a long time ago. […]
I haven’t paid much attention to baseball this year (although if you do, I’ll make a shameless plug for my son Nick’s outstanding baseball-analysis website, Pitcher List). But I have just noticed that what used to be called the “disabled list” is now the “injured list”. Why? It’s because the word “disabled” might offend someone. […]
Everywhere around us, “progressivism” is getting more and more frantic. The latest round of freshmen elected to Congress, the delirious fantasies now put forward as actual policy proposals by legislators and presidential candidates, and the hysteria that has overwhelmed higher education may, quite understandably, strike your heart cold with fear. What can be done? we […]
Here is a fantastic visual illusion.
Here’s an item for you: an advocacy group called “Super Happy Fun America” says it has been granted a permit for a Straight Pride Parade to be held in Boston this August. Their motto: “It’s great to be straight!” (Also, apparently, “Please don’t hate me — I was born this way.”) They even have a […]
The novelist and podcaster Andrew Klavan has published an essay at City Journal making an eloquent defense of the position that, contra Steven Pinker and others, the hyper-rationalism of the Enlightenment is insufficient to sustain our civilization against moral, spiritual and philosophical exhaustion — and so he calls us back to the faith that built […]
Attorney General William Barr sat down for an interview on CBS a couple of days ago. Mr. Barr was, as usual, sensible and forthright, and made clear once again that he is interested in the truth about the Russia investigation, and that what he’s seen so far gives him reason to have serious concerns about […]
In a brief, fork-tongued statement yesterday, the august Robert Mueller got a lot done: he let slip his naked partisanship, jettisoned the bedrock principle of American jurisprudence, ensured that the U.S. government will for the rest of Donald Trump’s first term be paralyzed by bitter factional conflict, and fanned the coals of a smoldering civil […]
The ground is shifting in Europe: nationalist parties, including Nigel Farage’s nascent Brexit Party, gained a lot of ground in the recent EU elections. Meanwhile, though, the Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz — who is routinely described as “far right”, despite being nothing more than a patriot who takes seriously any government’s duty to act as […]
Yesterday our friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, commented on a 2018 column by Mackubin Thomas Owens about kinds of nationalism. Mr. Owens says that American nationalism is good and necessary because it is of the right sort: an allegiance only to a set of philosophical principles. Bill singled out this passage: Much of today’s […]
Here’s European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s opinion of the little people: June 6th will mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day.
Is it possible to balance order and entropy in complex societies while maintaining vitality and avoiding sclerosis and stasis? If we look at societies as living systems, they must maintain a dynamic, not static, equilibrium: to sustain life, energy must flow through them without disturbing the complex balance of internal parts and subsystems. They must […]
I note two related items in the media today: one is this story, about introducing a new “adversity score” to the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and the other is this essay, by Heather Mac Donald, about the poor performance of “diversity hires” in elite law-firms. The link between them, is, of course, an unfortunate truth, previously […]
It’s a truism that older people always think things are going to hell — but it’s only older people that actually have something to compare the present to.