January 29, 2019 – 12:53 pm
News from North Korea: North Koreans ordered to produce impossible amount of human manure every day to help save agriculture: report How much is that “impossible amount” of poop that each North Korean is supposed to provide? A hundred kilograms — far more than the average North Korean’s total body weight. Per day. At first […]
January 28, 2019 – 2:05 pm
With yet another hat-tip to Bill Keezer, here’s a therapeutic video.
January 26, 2019 – 11:56 pm
Former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has a new item at NRO on the Roger Stone indictment. He makes an obvious but worth-repeating point about the “process crimes” Stone is charged with, which have to to an investigation into his efforts to find out what Wikileaks might have on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. Mr. […]
January 24, 2019 – 4:00 pm
New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has just signed into law a bill called the Reproductive Health Act. (You can read it here.) The principal effects of the bill are a) to remove all mention of abortion from the New York State penal code; b) to permit licensed heath-care practitioners to conduct abortions; and c) to […]
January 23, 2019 – 11:10 pm
I don’t often link to The Atlantic, but this is worth your time: everything you need to know about the hagfish.
January 23, 2019 – 10:33 pm
I’ve just learned that Russell Baker, the longtime reporter and columnist for the New York Times, has died at the age of 93. I was a fan. I read his Observer column without fail, and have several of his books. He was a wonderful writer — graceful, witty, and piercingly but unostentatiously intelligent — and […]
January 21, 2019 – 9:57 pm
Tucker Carlson rang in the New Year with a controversial monologue on the failure of American government to address a fundamental problem of modernity: the breakdown of families, and the growing hopelessness of those who are neither intractably poor nor insouciantly rich. Unlike nearly every other “conservative” today, however, he spread the blame around, heaping […]
January 18, 2019 – 6:35 pm
Here’s the perfect gift for Mom: a vibrator on a necklace. An ad for the product says “Created by a woman to spark both conversations and feelings of empowerment”, while the online blurb refers to the object’s “forward-looking approach”. How, exactly, are these conversations supposed to go? HE: “Hi, nice to meet you. I see […]
January 17, 2019 – 9:54 pm
Magnificent. (Thanks to the indefatigable JK for the link.)
January 13, 2019 – 11:32 pm
Please forgive me for the scanty output here of late — I am deeply distracted with work and family matters, so much so that I have had very little to say. But I will direct you to two sharp posts at The Orthosphere, by J.M. Smith and Thomas Bertonneau, on the nature of the frustrated […]
January 11, 2019 – 3:08 pm
Mr. Trump, don’t give in.
January 10, 2019 – 11:19 am
Netflix has a new hit movie: Birdbox. The idea is a simple one: there are things in the world that, if clearly seen, are so radically discomfiting that those who see them are driven to suicide. So everyone puts on a blindfold. It’s a smashing success. I wonder why?
January 9, 2019 – 7:11 pm
I’m back in the States now, and catching up on backlogs of both news and work. (The latter isn’t going to leave me much opportunity for brooding and writing for a while, I’m afraid.) The new Democrat House is in charge. Among the most depressing consequences of that gloomy fact is that the ongoing investigations […]
January 4, 2019 – 5:36 pm
This weekend, after a month in Vienna, the lovely Nina and I are heading home. We’ll be back in the States by Sunday evening. It’s been a fine time — Vienna is always a nice place to be, and we welcomed a new grandchild into our expanding extended family — but it’s time to get […]
January 1, 2019 – 10:28 am
And away we go, friends. I have no idea what 2019 will bring, but I doubt it will be boring. Keep your powder dry! I wish you all good health and good fortune, and I thank you all again for reading and commenting.
December 30, 2018 – 4:36 pm
I met a charming and intelligent young Austrian man in a social setting this afternoon. I’d say he’s in his early thirties. He runs a small business, and lives in a very nice apartment here in Vienna with his wife and two small children. His wife’s American parents are here visiting, and we were invited […]
December 29, 2018 – 5:25 pm
I am sorry to report that This Week In Reaction, the weekly digest of writings from around the Dissident Right blogosphere that has been published at Social Matter for the last few years, has gone on what will likely be a permanent hiatus. My friend Nick Steves, the editor of TWIR, simply can’t keep up […]
December 27, 2018 – 3:18 pm
We’re still in Vienna (for another ten days or so), spending time with our daughter and her young family, and enjoying a year-end break from our usual cares and concerns. I’ve scarcely paid any attention to the news, and I’ll confess that, as happens sometimes, I’ve had very little inclination to take up the pen. […]
December 25, 2018 – 5:53 am
…to each and every one of you. May we all put the world and its cares aside for a day to enjoy the sweet blessings of home and hearth and family, and love.
December 24, 2018 – 8:09 am
I’ve been out of the country, and not paying much attention to the news, but I did hear about Michael Flynn’s sentencing hearing last week. And what did I hear? I heard what the mainstream media wanted me to hear: that the judge at the hearing, Emmet Sullivan, had rebuked General Flynn — whom I […]
December 23, 2018 – 4:44 pm
The S.O.B. is, of course, the Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken. I’ve just re-read his Notes on Democracy, after many years, and it is as astringent as I remembered it. For example: It remains impossible, as it was in the eighteenth century, to separate the democratic idea from the theory that there is a mystical […]
December 21, 2018 – 1:27 pm
It has for many years been a tenet of the Progressive religion that solar and wind power must replace fossil fuels as the source of supply for our energy-hungry civilization. Critics of the idea have said all along that this is an impossible dream, a colossal waste of resources, is destructive to the environment in […]
December 20, 2018 – 9:04 am
There’s been a ruction, unsurprisingly, about President Trump’s announcement that we’ll be pulling U.S. troops out of Syria. I have no objection whatsoever to this decision: Mr. Trump’s promise to disentangle ourselves from pointless and costly wars in far-off snakepits was an important part of why he was elected, and Syria, a viper’s nest if […]
December 17, 2018 – 10:25 am
I’ve written for years (as have many others on the dissident Right, most notably and influentially Mencius Moldbug) that modern-day Progressivism is in fact a secularized religion. This diagnosis is plainly evident not only in its form and content, but is also confirmed by its genealogy, which reveals a lineage extending back (at least) to […]
December 16, 2018 – 6:24 am
The lovely Nina and I have just welcomed into the world our second grandchild, Declan Calder Wright, born to our daughter Chloe and her husband Christopher (who is as fine a young man as ever there was) here in Vienna, Austria, at 2:40 p.m. on Saturday, December 15th, 2018. (His middle name, Calder, was my […]
December 12, 2018 – 3:33 pm
Here’s an illustrative point from Theodore Dalrymple: Curiously, liberals who have long denied that punishment deters crime””or indeed serves any purpose, except to take vengeance on the weak and vulnerable, driven to crime by their wretched circumstances””are generally avid for strong penalties for hate crime. The way to make people like one another is to […]
December 11, 2018 – 10:06 am
As a staunch subsidiarianist, I’ve been pointing out for a while now the perils of centralization and interdependency in global and regional affairs. Just over two years ago I wrote: It is well-known in the engineering disciplines that too-tight “coupling” is at the root of many, if not most, failures of complex systems. Far more […]
December 10, 2018 – 5:09 pm
The lovely Nina and I are settled in now in Vienna, and our daughter is due to bring forth our second grandson on Wednesday (though he may arrive sooner). We are quartered in a little apartment in the 3rd District, just around the corner from the Hundertwasserhaus, and we are waiting, well, expectantly. Paris may […]
December 6, 2018 – 1:38 pm
Sorry it’s been slow here. We’ve been getting my 97-year-old mother-in-law‘s life in order after her fall last month, and today the lovely Nina and I are off to Vienna, where our daughter is expecting her second child — a baby boy — on the 12th. I’ll be back online once we get settled in […]
December 5, 2018 – 11:45 am
Over at West Hunter, Greg Cochran imagines a counterfactual world in which everything we on the Dissident Right know to be true is false, and everything we are told to believe by our cultural overlords is true. I reproduce this vision below, in full: Since I just found out that someone already wrote the story […]
December 2, 2018 – 2:08 pm
While all the attention has been on Robert Mueller’s abusive inquisition into factitious allegations about Donald Trump’s “collusion” with Russia, there’s been another, far more serious, investigation moling away in the background: DOJ Inspector General Horowitz’s inquiry into the Clinton Foundation and Obama administration’s shady dealings with Rosatom and Uranium One. Wiring at National Review, […]
November 29, 2018 – 10:42 pm
Actual Climate Scientist Dr. Judith Curry has spent eighteen months reviewing the issue of sea-level rise. Her report is here. Briefly, her conclusions are: Is the recent sea level rise (since 1993) of magnitude 3 mm/year unusual? No, although this conclusion is conditional on the quality of the global sea level data. The available evidence […]
November 27, 2018 – 11:10 pm
I’m getting awfully tired of powerful and successful people who, upon receiving some award or other, take care to inform us how “humbled” they are by it. Hogwash. Nobody is ever “humbled” by this sort of thing. In truth it makes any normal man purr in happy assurance of his own excellence, and causes his […]
November 27, 2018 – 1:19 pm
This over the transom during the wee hours, from John McCreary’s NightWatch: A brief living systems analysis of the caravan that trekked from Honduras to Tijuana provides insights about the phenomenon of the caravan. The caravan emerged as a living system when it left San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras. There is a history of […]
November 24, 2018 – 6:06 pm
Recording technology has undergone a fundamental change over the past couple of decades, and what has changed the most, and has caused the most controversy, is the move to “mixing in the box”. I’ll give some background for those of you who aren’t familiar with what this means: In multi-track recording, individual instruments and vocals […]
November 23, 2018 – 5:37 pm
Thirty-two years ago this week, I spent a fortnight or so behind the console in Studio C at Power Station Studios, recording overdubs for David Bowie’s album Never Let Me Down. The record is generally looked back on as one of his weaker and more time-bound efforts: it’s a fossil of 1980s record-production, preserved in […]
November 22, 2018 – 12:35 pm
… to all of you. We have much indeed to be thankful for.
November 21, 2018 – 10:01 pm
A couple of weeks ago the voters of New York’s 14th Congressional district, in a spasm of petulant unwisdom, elected to the House of Representatives one Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a garrulous, bug-eyed Jacobin ignoramus not even out of her twenties. Today I learned that the United Nations has appointed Millie Bobbie Brown, a television actress only […]
November 21, 2018 – 1:34 pm
In a recent USA Today opinion piece, the East Bay Democrat congressman Eric Swalwell proposed a mandatory government “buyback” of what he calls “military-style semiautomatic assault weapons” — i.e., ordinary semiautomatic rifles with scary-looking external features. (A gun “buyback” is when the government takes money from you in taxes, then gives you a little of […]
November 20, 2018 – 11:58 pm
Traditional culture joins and harnesses the energies of individual lives to a great common structure, in order to lift it into the sky. Not all such programs succeed in getting into orbit; some even explode on the launch-pad. A few, though, may achieve escape velocity. Libertarianism, by comparison, is just a profusion of bottle-rockets.
November 19, 2018 – 11:15 pm
I’m very happy to report that John Batchelor, whose three-hour program every weeknight is the best thing on all of radio, is back on the air after a sudden two-week departure. Three days ago he tweeted this, which I’d missed at the time: Hi The good news is that after a 7 hour surgery and […]
November 17, 2018 – 1:22 pm
A while back, as further evidence that grievance is fractal, I offered a little post about “TERF War“: the bitter Top-Victim rivalry between radical feminists and men identifying as women. The battle rages on, with a defeat for the biological females in the latest skirmish: apparently a midwestern university has now banned The Vagina Monologues. […]
November 16, 2018 – 10:43 pm
Over at The Orthoshpere, J.M. Smith, who has just turned sixty-one, has posted a piercing essay on the stages of life: not just the lives of men, but of civilizations. They have a great deal in common. We read: It is not only the lives of men that can be seen as passing through a […]
November 16, 2018 – 5:01 pm
The persecution of heretics that has become the chief feature of our age continues: the latest occupant of the ducking-stool is no less than the great cultural and intellectual eminence Sir Roger Scruton. Learn more here.
November 15, 2018 – 10:36 pm
I’ve written before about the ongoing series of conversations between radio host John Batchelor and war historian Michael Vlahos about America’s present-day run-up to a third civil war. Mr. Batchelor is convalescing at the moment (get well soon, sir!), and has been running archived material for the last couple of weeks. Professor Vlahos, though, has […]
November 13, 2018 – 2:43 pm
Not long ago the great physicist Freeman Dyson wrote an introduction to a report on the beneficial aspects of higher carbon dioxide levels. In it he asked: The people who are supposed to be the experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the people who are blind to the evidence. That to […]
November 10, 2018 – 5:15 pm
My (very) elderly mother-in-law is in an ICU after a fall. I doubt I’ll be writing anything here for at least a few days.
November 7, 2018 – 6:21 pm
Well, here we are, on the morrow of the midterms. We’ve picked up seats in the Senate and narrowly lost the House. The unspeakably loathsome Andrew Cuomo will harass and insult conservative New Yorkers for another four years, while Elizabeth Warren today is heap happy squaw. Bug-eyed Communist ignoramus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will have her chance […]
November 6, 2018 – 6:23 pm
You may recall the curious object Oumuamua, a visitor from beyond the solar system that passed by the Sun on a hyperbolic orbit late last year. It was no ordinary asteroid: it had a strange pattern of reflection that suggested it was a long, skinny cylinder, and as it left our solar system it appeared […]
November 6, 2018 – 2:32 pm
Well, this is interesting: 73 years after the end of World War II, and 26 years after the Maastricht Treaty, French president Emmanuel Macron is calling on the European Union to begin taking responsibility for its own strategic security. This is another of the issues that Donald Trump campaigned on. The generous public benefits offered […]