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 […]
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 […]