My friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has a new post up on what I consider the most difficult challenge to belief in God: the arbitrary suffering that is such a conspicuous feature of the world that He created and sustains. How could a God that combines the triple perfections of omniscience, omnipotence, and absolute […]
It’s Mother’s Day, so I will take a moment to remember my own mother Alison, now thirteen years gone. Here’s what I wrote about her just after she died.
We’re back in the States after our whirlwind trip to Vienna. The expedition was a success: Lily, who turned ninety-eight today, bore up well, though it was exhausting for her. She was glad to visit her hometown one last time, and although she is almost completely blind, she enjoyed being taken around to some old […]
The lovely Nina and I will be away for a week. The Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna has mounted an exhibit featuring three artists who fled Vienna as the Nazis took over, and one of the three — the only one surviving — is my mother-in-law Lily, who has lived in New York […]
In the news today is a scathing letter from Emmett Flood, the Special Counsel to the President, to Attorney General William Barr. It was written on April 19th, shortly after the lightly redacted Mueller Report was released to the public. The Mueller Report may have produced no indictments, but this letter charges the Mueller team […]
April 30, 2019 – 10:13 pm
One thing that you may have noticed is that where science conflicts with hegemonic ideology, science takes a beating. (You shouldn’t have much difficulty thinking of both historical and contemporary examples, from Galileo to E.O. Wilson, and I’m sure Judith Curry would agree.) Nowhere is this more apparent in our own time than in the […]
April 29, 2019 – 11:23 pm
In his Notes On Democracy, H. L. Mencken said of the American politician the following thing: He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders from his superiors in […]
April 25, 2019 – 10:53 pm
Michael Anton, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute who is currently a lecturer and researcher at Hillsdale College, wrote what became the most influential political essay of the 2016 presidential campaign: The Flight 93 Election. (If you haven’t read it, I’m surprised — but you can do so here. Readers may also recall our […]
April 25, 2019 – 10:49 pm
Here’s the story of the day: BOSTON ”“ A Massachusetts judge was indicted Thursday on charges that she helped a man who was living in the U.S. illegally sneak out a back door of the courthouse to evade a waiting immigration enforcement agent. Newton District Court Judge Shelley M. Richmond Joseph and former court officer […]
April 22, 2019 – 11:44 pm
Following on the spiritual dissatisfaction I expressed in my April 5th post, I’ve been reading On Faith, a newly released collection of the late Justice’s speeches and essays on his Catholic religion. In one of his speeches, Justice Scalia considered how a Christian should think about socialism: The allure of socialism for the Christian, I […]
Sunset tonight at Rock Harbor on Cape Cod:
Over at the American Conservative, Rod Dreher comments on a blog-post by one Sofia Leung, who is “The Teaching And Learning Program Manager at MIT Libraries”. Ms. Jeung writes: If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) […]
April 16, 2019 – 12:46 pm
We all saw the horrifying news of the fire at Notre Dame yesterday. It was unspeakably sad. It was also, as others have also noted, perhaps the most powerful metaphor imaginable for the death of Christian Europe. (Can you think of a more iconic symbol of high Western civilization anywhere on the Continent? I can’t.) […]
Thirteen years ago I wrote a post entitled Fall Guy, in which I noted that, whereas the summer and winter are seasons of stagnation, balanced upon the solstices and ending more or less as they begin, the spring and fall are times of movement and change: The seasons move in a cycle, and one might […]
April 10, 2019 – 12:31 pm
Here. (See also this, from, of all places, Vox).
The House held a hearing on “white nationalism” today. One of the speakers was the conservative black woman Candace Owens, who gave a rousing opening statement. You can watch it here. The focus on “white nationalism” by the Left has been a clever and effective tactic, one that exploits the essence of the conservative disposition. […]
It occurred to me just now that July 20th of this year will be the 50th anniversary of the first time that men walked on the Moon. There should be Dunkin Donuts on the Moon by now. What the hell happened to us?
As I get older (I will be sixty-three in a week or so) it becomes harder and harder for me to accept the Universe as a “brute fact”: a thing that just is, and that cannot, even in principle, be accounted for. It’s difficult for everyone, of course, not just me, and so people who […]
Here’s the distinguished Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen on what he calls the “myth” behind Russiagate: the idea that Russia “attacked” the United States during the last presidential election.
A friend of mine wrote me yesterday to send me an item linked by Tyler Durden over at Zero Hedge. The original is a post by one James Howard Kunstler, and it begins as follows: The tides are shifting. Something’s in the wind. And it’s not just the fecund vapors of spring. The political soap […]
Food. This one’s a twofer: “climate change” and racism.
March 28, 2019 – 12:15 am
In yesterday’s post I quibbled with Andrew McCarthy’s call, in an article he’d published at Fox News, for full disclosure of the Mueller report and everything else associated with the Russiagate witch-hunt. Today I listened to an interview he gave with John Batchelor on Tuesday, and I see that I had missed his point. As […]
In the previous post, I linked to a podcast by Andrew McCarthy. Do you recall the origin of the word “podcast”? It is a moment of tech history preserved in amber: a reference to the Apple iPod, a now-obsolete music player introduced in 2001. There are still many of them out there, but they will […]
March 26, 2019 – 12:28 am
Podcast here. Article here. One quibble: the Democrats and the media are bawling for the public release of the full text of the report, and Mr. McCarthy seems to think that would be OK — as long as we get everything else as well: You want disclosure? Me too. But let’s see all of it. […]
March 25, 2019 – 12:26 am
Well! The Mueller report’s in, and has confirmed that this whole Russia business was nothing but a frame-up all along. Thanks so very much, news media and Democrat saboteurs (but I repeat myself) for hijacking the nation’s public affairs for two long years of round-the-clock bile, slander, and lies. This will end nothing, of course: […]
Nine years ago, in a post about the Eyjafjallajokul volcano in Iceland, I wrote the following thing: Meanwhile, if you’re starting up an End Of Days seismic-catastrophe pool at the office, I think the smart money is on the Cascadia Subduction Zone up in the Pacific Northwest. Admittedly, that was nine years ago, and nothing’s […]
March 19, 2019 – 11:46 pm
Having read Rachel Fulton Brown’s commentary on the New Zealand massacre, you should now go and read Peter Brimelow’s. His point is a simple one: when nations are deliberately destroyed, and all peaceful means of preventing the calamity are suppressed, what remains will be evil reactions by violent men.
March 19, 2019 – 11:34 pm
I’ve just read an item at American Greatness about the Christchurch massacre. The article is by Rachel Fulton Brown, a professor of medieval history who keeps an excellent blog called Fencing Bear At Prayer. I am an admirer of Ms Brown’s — there are many reasons for me to be — and her essay rightly […]
With a hat-tip to Nick Land, here is a densely mathematical paper that purports to model the world economy in terms of the degree of restriction of migration policy. I have looked it over, but I cannot say that I have followed its argument in detail. (If any of my readers would like to do […]
March 17, 2019 – 11:22 pm
A couple of months ago I posted an item about Germany’s ostentatious effort to rely on solar and wind power: a flamboyant exercise in virtue-signalling that has become a spectacular, and costly, failure. (I should add that I also consider those giant windmills we now see everywhere — someone has aptly called them “eco-crucifixes” — […]
The world is aghast today at the news of a massacre in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. The shooter was a white Australian; the victims were Muslims. As I write the death-toll stands at forty-nine. This is a horror, a sickening atrocity. It is important to try to understand what happened here, especially as […]
March 14, 2019 – 10:01 pm
The immensely profitable and influential hate-propaganda racket known as the Southern Policy Law Center is in the news today for firing its 82-year-old founder, Morris Dees, for unspecified “personnel violations”. I’m glad to hear it, of course: the SPLC is a “social-justice” flim-flam in the business of organized slander against everyone to its right, and […]
March 12, 2019 – 11:46 pm
Michael Anton comments on the seige of Tucker Carlson, here. The gist is in the final paragraph: The ruling Left cannot defeat Carlson and so must silence him. As it will attempt to silence anyone who carries his message or anything like it. Every “conservative’ who joins the ritual denunciation of Carlson wishing to be […]
March 12, 2019 – 12:10 am
So good to see someone refusing to grovel for once. Give ’em hell, Tucker.
March 10, 2019 – 12:51 pm
It’s time to panic, because the disastrous effects of climate change have now caused the cherry trees in Washington to blossom exactly when they usually do.
In Christianity and Culture (1949), T.S. Eliot wrote this about liberalism: “…it is something that tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. Our point of […]
Here’s a long and meaty interview with the Twitter commando who uses the name @WokeCapital. (You can view a sample WokeCapital thread here, in honor of International Women’s Day.) This is a heady sample of cask-strength NRx shitpoasting, as opposed to the sherry-in-crystal-stemware stuff you get from geezers like me. Go have a look.
Just before heading off to Ireland a couple of weeks ago, I linked to a discussion between John Batchelor and Stephen F. Cohen about the “Sovietization” of American political culture in recent years. By this term, Professor Cohen referred to the increasing use of social, political, economic, and legal pressure to cow and silence those […]
The lovely Nina and I are back in the States after a ten-day visit to Ireland. We spent time with family in Lucan (a western suburb of Dublin), and toured around a bit. Among the latter were a “black-taxi” tour of the troubled sections of Belfast (an area still deeply divided, in which the walls […]
February 22, 2019 – 11:12 am
The lovely Nina and I are off to Ireland for ten days, for a visit with our new extended family (and a little old-fashioned tourism). Things may be quiet here till we get back. Meantime, do listen to John Batchelor’s recent discussion with Professor Cohen on the Sovietization of America in recent years. Part 1 […]
February 22, 2019 – 12:10 am
Justin Smollett was arrested today. His story of having been attacked by Trumpist rednecks because he is black and gay was indeed a hoax, as I think most of us pretty much knew from the beginning. The story now is that he perpetrated this flim-flam because he was dissatisfied with what he was being paid […]
February 19, 2019 – 7:27 pm
As the Jussie Smollett “hate-crime” flim-flam falls apart, the Daily Caller has put together a list of some of the more sensational faux-racist hoaxes of the Trump era. You can read it here. It was obvious from the beginning that this Smollett business was a sham. First of all, it took place in the middle […]
February 16, 2019 – 1:38 pm
Here’s something really beautiful: a gorgeous global model of currents and temperatures in the air and sea. Click the ‘Earth’ button to change the view.
February 13, 2019 – 11:29 pm
I’d been getting worried again about John Batchelor — he’s been treated for cancer recently, took time off for surgery a while back, and has been away from the microphone again for the past couple of weeks. (The archival material he runs to fill in is always well worth listening to, but his latest absence […]
February 10, 2019 – 1:27 pm
Having pushed their doddering elders down the stairs, and finding among the corpses’ effects the keys to the family car, our newly crowned juvenocracy is wasting no time in taking it for a joyride. The leader pro tempore of this posse of hopped-up teens is a yakkity Chavista bird-brain by the name of Ocasio-Cortez — […]
February 8, 2019 – 9:52 pm
In my previous post I expressed qualified approval for Tuesday’s State of the Union address. Some commenters took me to task for this, because hey, we’re still doomed. They’re right, we probably are. And make no mistake, there’s plenty for a conservative, let alone a reactionary, not to like about Donald Trump, and about the […]
February 6, 2019 – 2:21 pm
I watched the speech last night. It was awfully good. Even for a cynic like me — who believes that this Republic, due to the inherent liabilities of democracy itself, is in the late stages of necrosis, and perhaps an early stage of civil war — Mr. Trump’s message of unity and greatness was rousing. […]
February 3, 2019 – 11:47 pm
There was a horrible story in the local news today: A young woman, pregnant, was stabbed to death in an apartment-building lobby. We read: The killer targeted the 35-year-old woman’s stomach, according to the building super, who said she watched surveillance-video footage that captured the murder. “He’s got a knife! He’s going to kill the […]
February 1, 2019 – 11:54 pm
Abortion’s been in the public eye lately: with the Democratic Party red-shifting leftward, legislators are seizing the opportunity to push the limits — both legal and moral — of the un-personing of the unborn. New York State just celebrated, with standing ovations and a festive light-show, a ghoulish dismantling of its moral obligations to its […]