Here’s the question that interviewers should be putting to governors: “If, in normal times, you were to announce as a matter of executive fiat that people must close their businesses, could not assemble in groups over a certain size, and must stay home except for travel you deem essential, it would seem an absurdity. People […]
In times of crisis, it’s important to do what we can. One of the ways good citizens have responded to our current health emergency has been by sewing their own protective face-masks. Given that many of you, I’m sure, would find it easier to shove a camel through the eye of a needle than to […]
April 27, 2020 – 10:29 pm
Like so many other musicians, during this enforced quarantine I’ve been collaborating online with my pals. In my case it’s the group of talented players and singers I get together with every September for a musical retreat out in the Isles of Shoals. I put up a mix a little while back of one of […]
April 25, 2020 – 12:39 pm
I’ve been a bit neglectful of the blog lately. Life is beginning to feel a bit like Groundhog Day, with few new impressions to think or write about (other than the books I’ve been reading in the evenings the past couple of weeks, which I’m still digesting). I’ve been spending a lot of time down […]
April 19, 2020 – 11:41 pm
Just to take our minds off the Wuhan Red Death for a moment, here’s some music you might enjoy. The piece is called Spirit Moves, and it’s the opening track from Vince Mendoza’s album Instructions Inside, which I recorded and mixed back in March of 1991. We did the sessions at Edison Recording in midtown […]
April 17, 2020 – 12:39 pm
Our reader the indefatigable JK has introduced me to a blogger I’d never heard of: B.J. Campbell, whose posts are collected under the title Handwaving Freakoutery. The post that JK sent me today is about the possible consequences for social order of this ongoing (and, increasingly, arguably unconstitutional) lockdown. It begins with an amusing roundup […]
Former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey published a brief item today about the cost, in human life, of this indiscriminate shutdown of the American economy. A key excerpt: Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase […]
The criticism of President Trump’s response to the Wuhan Red Death has been all over the map; in general whatever he does is wrong, regardless of whether Blue politicians have done the same or worse in their own bailiwicks, and whatever he doesn’t do is a crime of omission. He’s been faulted at every step […]
April 13, 2020 – 12:49 pm
I’ve previously mentioned the musical retreat I enjoy each September in the far-flung Isles of Shoals. I get together with an eclectic assortment of musicians (both pros and civilians), and we have a fine time as the house band for all the people enjoying Star Island‘s final conference of the year. With this global panic […]
April 13, 2020 – 11:57 am
When I get older, losing my hair Many years from now… Or, as it happens, today. My, how time does fly when you’re having fun. As always: natal salutations to Guy Fawkes, Thomas Jefferson, F.W. Woolworth, James Ensor, Butch Cassidy, Sir Arthur “Bomber’ Harris, Robert Watson-Watt, Samuel Beckett, Harold Stassen, Stanislaw Ulam, Eudora Welty, Howard […]
Yesterday was this year’s “Pink Moon”. Here’s a lovely song by that name, from the long-departed Nick Drake.
From the Babylon Bee: Bernie Sanders Drops Out As Campaign Goals Of Locking Everyone Up, Destroying Economy Already Achieved Full story here.
I was very sorry to learn this morning that John Prine has died of the Chinese coronavirus. He was a truly gifted songwriter, and made his gift a gift to us all. I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but I will never forget seeing him perform in Princeton’s Alexander Hall on April 1st, […]
Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of this Wuhan-virus emergency is how clearly it reveals the breadth and depth of the great fissure dividing the nation. In times of crisis, families set aside their internal squabbles: Me and my brother We fight with each other But woe betide The guy from outside. When the towers fell […]
Curtis Yarvin (whose erstwhile nom de plume “Mencius Moldbug” we will, for the time being, continue to mention), has posted a new essay calling for a temporary dictatorship to combat the Wuhan coronavirus. After a discussion of the many, many shortcomings, weaknesses, and debilities of our national government, and of democracy in general — which […]
Just to remind you, readers, as you contemplate the millenarian tableau unfolding before us: yes, there is also a comet. (Of course.)
March 30, 2020 – 12:31 pm
I’ll confess that all this self-isolation has hardly been difficult for me. I’m a homebody by nature anyway, and having an excuse not to go anywhere suits me fine. I’ve been reading a lot, walking in the woods, cooking, and spending a lot of time on various musical projects downstairs in the studio. One thing […]
In response to Friday’s post about the different emotional reactions of Democrats and Republicans to the Wuhan-virus pandemic, our longtime commenter, the indefatigable JK, posted a link to a thoughtful essay on the topic. I though it worth promoting to a post of its own, so here it is.
March 27, 2020 – 12:23 pm
Make of this what you will:
With a hat-tip to our pal Bill Keezer, here’s a rumination by Victor Davis Hanson on the challenge facing Donald Trump in the coming weeks and months.
March 25, 2020 – 11:09 pm
As a person with a long career in the music biz, I am often asked who I think is interesting, and worth giving a listen (keeping in mind that there is a lot of interesting music out there that most people simply wouldn’t “get”). I often mention King Crimson, because Fripp and company have maintained […]
March 23, 2020 – 11:22 pm
Kind of a slow news day today, but here are a couple of items: First, we’ve all heard that things seems to be getting better in China, with Wuhan-virus deaths tapering off. We’ve heard it, that is, but we also know that the Chinese government, which lies about everything, is almost certainly lying about this […]
March 22, 2020 – 11:18 pm
I’m coming increasingly to the conclusion that our reaction to this Wuhan virus, if it keeps the economy comatose for any appreciable length of time, will do more damage than anything the disease itself might have wrought. On the more benign end of the scale, we have at minimum a crisis that has already been […]
People have been likening the economic devastation caused by this health crisis to the effects of war. Here’s a thought that occurred to me today: in the aftermath of wars (or other great disasters), a major part of the economic recovery consists of rebuilding all the infrastructure that’s been destroyed. (After World War II, the […]
March 20, 2020 – 11:24 pm
The great Black Swan of our age has alighted upon our shores, and it catches us at the end of a great historical anomaly: an era of peace, safety and prosperity of such uncommon length that most of us have never known anything else. (This goes a long way, as I’ve argued elsewhere, to explaining […]
A young person, someone I am very fond of and have known for many years, wrote me today with a harsh assessment of Donald Trump, surprised and disappointed that I would defend such a man against some of the charges recently leveled against him in the press. Mr. Trump, in my correspondent’s opinion, is “a […]
Here’s a brief video from an infectious-disease specialist. Well worth watching.
Having survived our trip to Charleston (a beautiful place, as we expected), we are now hunkered down in the remote precincts of our little peninsula in the North Atlantic. Self-isolation comes naturally to me. Confining myself to the basement music studio, a comfy chair with a book to read, and contemplative hikes in the nearby […]
March 11, 2020 – 12:00 pm
The lovely Nina and I are off to Charleston, SC for a few days. (We’d heard it’s nice, so we thought we’d go and see for ourselves.) Back next week.
March 11, 2020 – 11:58 am
Over at American Greatness, Chris Buskirk discusses what Wuhan coronavirus should teach us about self-reliance. Here.
March 10, 2020 – 11:36 pm
How about that Joe Biden? Two weeks ago — just two weeks! — he was all washed up. Now he’s the last man standing. Amazing. The problem, though, is that nobody really thinks he is fit for purpose. His accelerating slide into a pitiable and disqualifying caducity is increasingly plain to see, every time he […]
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, […]