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 […]
November 6, 2018 – 10:28 am
OK – it’s Election Day. Republicans: the polls are open. You know what to do. Democrats: it looks like rain, and your guys are probably going to win anyway. I think you’re off the hook.
November 2, 2018 – 10:55 pm
In Baltimore for a conference this weekend. Back next week.
November 1, 2018 – 11:12 pm
The next skirmish in the war for religious rights and freedom of association might be the case of the Hope Center, of Anchorage Alaska, a Christian charitable organization that provides succor for the poor and downtrodden. Among the services it provides is a women’s shelter. The shelter’s clients are typically victims of domestic and sexual […]
October 31, 2018 – 12:46 pm
With the mid-term elections less than a week away, Angelo Codevilla surveys the social and political battlefield that the United States — now more disunited than at any time since our last Civil War — has become. His essay begins: Prior to the 2016 election I explained how America had already “stepped over the threshold […]
October 30, 2018 – 2:27 pm
This is promising: it appears that President Trump is going to declare, by executive order, an end to birthright citizenship for all but legal residents. The question of whether he has the power to do this, and whether birthright citizenship as currently understood is in accord with the Fourteenth Amendment, will then be taken up […]
October 28, 2018 – 12:02 am
Tonight I have for you a recent half-hour talk by Anthony Daniels (A.K.A. Theodore Dalrymple), on the corrosive combined effects of today’s expansive view of rights and the pernicious ideology of multiculturalism. I’ve transcribed some excerpts. Dr. Daniels mentions that he had asked a young patient, who had announced with the glow of religious inspiration […]
October 27, 2018 – 4:03 pm
It’s hard to know what to say in the wake of the sickening horror in Pittsburgh today. Evil is real, and it is always at large in the world. Eleven years ago, in the wake of the Virgina Tech massacre, I wrote this: When this sort of thing happens, the natural reaction here in the […]
October 27, 2018 – 12:13 am
Whelp, it appears that I got that one wrong. The “bomber” (to the extent that what he sent can be called “bombs”) now seems to be a Trump-loving loonie. (“With friends like that…”) I thought William of Ockham was on my side on this one, for all the reasons I laid out in my earlier […]
October 24, 2018 – 8:30 pm
Replying to our recent post about the “caravan” approaching our southern border, commenter Jason asks: From what I have read, there seems to be an honest albeit contentious difference of interpretation within the Trump administration over whether we can prevent South Americans from seeking asylum at the border, versus at various consulates throughout Mexico (and […]
October 24, 2018 – 3:51 pm
OK, by now we’ve all heard today’s top story: suspicious devices delivered to prominent Democrats. I’ll join the chorus of people saying this is a “false flag” operation. The whole thing is just so fishy, in so many ways: 1) Why would anyone bother sending bombs to Obama or the Clintons? They aren’t in power […]
October 23, 2018 – 12:12 pm
Judicial Watch reports on the “refugee” caravan snaking toward our border, and paints rather a different picture than our major news media: Besides gang members and mobs of young angry men, the Central American caravan making its way into the United States also consists of Africans, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Indians. Judicial Watch is covering […]
October 22, 2018 – 10:11 pm
Back in May I offered a post linking to Spandrell’s essays on what he calls “Bioleninism”: the enormous political power that becomes available to elites who are able to create durable coalitions of naturally low-status members of society. If you haven’t read these yet, you really must do so; it’s all going to be on […]
October 22, 2018 – 12:51 pm
As I write, a column of foreign invaders is marching toward our border, intent on breaching it to enter the sovereign territory of the United States. Given that our Republic has a government in place that controls the world’s most powerful military, this is a thing that we should have ample resources to prevent. (As […]
October 20, 2018 – 10:42 pm
“No man is always in a disposition to write, nor has any man at all times something to say.” – Dr. Johnson (Also, I have house-guests. Back soon.)
October 17, 2018 – 9:53 pm
If you’ve been trapped in rubble for the past couple of weeks, and have only just got back online, you might be puzzled to see ‘NPC’ everywhere you look. It stands for ‘non-player character”, and it’s a meme that has spread with amazing rapidity. It also seems to be particularly irritating to our new digital […]
October 17, 2018 – 2:20 pm
Attention, all you myrmidons toiling distractedly in your little cubes, or struggling to shut out the bustle of the ant-heap as you type with your thumbs in some noisy cyber-cafe: thanks to the ingenuity of the Japanese, you can now equip yourself with horse-blinkers. And it gets even better: they will deafen you as well. […]
October 17, 2018 – 2:02 pm
I so dislike Elizabeth Warren, and would so like to see her drummed out of public life, that I’ll pile on a bit here. Not only is she a race-hustling fraud, as she has in these last days kindly demonstrated for all to see, but she is also a plagiarist. Some time ago she contributed […]
October 16, 2018 – 7:59 pm
It’s been a gratifying few days for Mr. Trump: he swatted aside a hostile 60 Minutes interviewer on Sunday night, then had a judge throw out Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit (and award him court costs). But best of all has to have been Elizabeth Warren’s foolish broadcasting of a DNA result that shows that she might […]