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.
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 […]