With a hat-tip to our reader and commenter “Whitewall”, here’s a depressing item: German Defense Minister Seeks ”˜Reconciliation’ with Taliban It is difficult to read this without thinking that such a story simply cannot be true: that it is completely beyond all credibility that anyone not a child or an imbecile could possibly imagine that […]
In the news today: Al Sharpton’s half-brother charged in murder after marching against guns I have to admire Rev. Glasgow for going the “extra mile” to demonstrate how dangerous guns are, but I do think he and his pal might have asked Breunia Jennings for her permission before drafting her to participate in such a […]
Here’s a response, by Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer [cue ad-hominem attack in comment thread in 3…2…1…], to Hillary Clinton’s insulting remarks the other day about winning the “dynamic” states, and losing the backward ones. I will confess that I hesitated before mentioning That Woman’s name in print. As Richard Wagner is said to have […]
March 26, 2018 – 11:38 am
With a hat-tip to our e-pal Bill K., here’s Richard Fernandez on our psychotic media environment: With misinformation as with miseducation the public sees, but not in due proportion. Its calculations are put all out of reckoning. The image of world is presented like a reflection in a fun house mirror, with certain aspects greatly […]
March 25, 2018 – 11:26 pm
A great way to prevent mass shootings is by avoiding civil war.
I’ve been unable to turn on the news over the past 24 hours without immediately hearing about yesterday’s protests against “gun violence”. The news agencies have clearly learned a trick or two from their show-biz colleagues who call themselves “illusionists”: if these protests were about “violence”, the marchers would surely have something to say about […]
March 24, 2018 – 11:13 pm
As occasional leavening for the steady diet of politics and reaction I’ve been posting up here for years now, I think I’ll begin revisiting my other life: decades spent recording and mixing music. (Because so many of the recordings I’ve worked on are now on YouTube, it’s easy posting.) I’d say about three-quarters of the […]
“Continental breakfast” is to breakfast what Continental philosophy is to philosophy: something to chew on, but devoid of nourishment.
March 23, 2018 – 12:48 pm
In a comment to my previous post, reader Asher says that Leftism, rather than rejecting the supernatural, locates it in Man himself. I think this is almost right. But it is subject to an important objection: if Darwinian Man is nothing more than a part and product of Nature, then locating the “supernatural” in Man […]
Our friend Bill Vallicella has posted an interesting essay on the Left’s attempt to maintain a doctrine of transcendent egalitarianism while scraping away the transcendent. He describes the problem as follows (after noting that our academic institutions have become “Leftist seminaries”): What explains the fervor and fanaticism with which the Left’s equality dogma is upheld? […]
We’ve been hearing a lot about the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data-mining story, in which personal information about Facebook users was scooped up by a firm working for the Trump campaign. The media have been all over it. It’s been terrible PR for Facebook, and the company’s stock has dropped sharply. The media response was not, however, […]
March 20, 2018 – 12:00 pm
An addendum to yesterday’s “reactionary roundup“: In the Radio Derb podcast linked to in the post, Mr. Derbyshire reported on the detention and deportation of several identitarian dissidents who had come to England to express their views at Hyde Park’s famous Speakers Corner. One was a young Austrian by the name of Martin Sellner. Mr. […]
March 19, 2018 – 10:19 pm
For tonight, something to listen to and some things to read. To listen to, we have John Derbyshire’s latest Radio Derb. This week’s 43-minute installment is dedicated to the cultural and demographic death of his ancestral homeland, the British Isles. It is a melancholy survey of the ruin of a great nation, but some things […]
Nobody has brought more clarity to reporting on the tempest of scandals and investigations flooding the political landscape than National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy. As the federal prosecutor who handled the case against the “Blind Sheik” Omar Adbel Rahman for the 1993 Word Trade center bombing, he brings expertise and authority to a topic that would […]
Writing at the Federalist, Molly Hemingway gives us the latest on the DOJ’s skulduggery in the Trump investigation: a personal relationship between FBI agent Peter Strzok and the FISA-court judge Rudy Contreras, who mysteriously recused himself was recused after taking Mike Flynn’s guilty plea. Ms. Hemingway’s story, which is based on newly obtained text messages […]
In the comment-thread to our previous post, we see in microcosm the tremendous fissure in American culture and politics. It goes far deeper than mere disagreements about policy; it has reached the point in which the two sides have entirely different conceptions of moral, political, cultural, social, historical, and even human reality — views that […]
March 15, 2018 – 10:10 pm
We’ve been treated in recent days to the spectacle of schoolchildren marching in the streets to demand legislative restrictions on gun acquisition and ownership. This sort of thing is nothing new; I remember my own adolescence, in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and the student protests of that era. When you’re that age, it’s […]
Well, I’m back up, it seems. The technical problems on the backend appear to have been due to some gummed-up WordPress plugins and an old version of PHP. I’ll confess that I had begun to suspect that something darker was happening. My recent exclusion from Google search results (while Bing and DuckDuckGo results were unaffected) […]
With a hat-tip to our friend Bill K., here’s a good, short video (just over four minutes) on the realities of evil, guns, progressive hoplophobia, and protecting our schools.
A busy couple of days. Back shortly. I’ve noticed also that there have been a lot of backend errors recently that have been affecting connectivity here. I’m investigating and hope to have a resolution shortly. Thanks for your patience. Update, 3/12: The backend problem persists. (Just posting this update took me half an hour.) Support […]
“Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry? Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy intoxication extravagance Vice and folly?” – John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, December 21st 1819
Big news tonight about a meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un. Most commentators, including many I respect, are suggesting that Mr. Trump is being played, just as previous presidents were. I’m not so sure. Here’s why. What’s different this time around is that Trump is using a different lever, and he isn’t using […]
Yesterday the 9th Circuit Court Of Appeals allowed a children’s climate-advocacy group to proceed with a lawsuit against the Trump administration for not preventing global warming. The suit argues, with a straight face, that inaction by the Federal government to produce what the plaintiffs believe to be necessary carbon-reduction policy violates the children’s Constitutional rights […]
Walter Williams: “We must own up to the fact that laws and regulations alone cannot produce a civilized society.”
If you didn’t listen to the John Batchelor show last night, you missed an informative (and worrisome) conversation between the host and Professor Stephen F. Cohen about the new U.S. – Russian arms race. The issue is this: since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has abandoned the commitment to parity that prevented […]
Here’s an interesting item: politics and geology. It’s a reminder also of how much warmer the Earth once was, long before your SUV ruined everything.
If you’re familiar with Patrick Buchanan, you won’t be surprised to know that his latest column is a ringing defense of tariffs. An excerpt: “Trade wars are not won, only lost,’ warns Sen. Jeff Flake. But this is ahistorical nonsense. The U.S. relied on tariffs to convert from an agricultural economy in 1800 to the […]
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s Rod Dreher commenting on this year’s Best Picture, The Shape of Water. (If you aren’t familiar with the story — due, perhaps, to your having been in a coma for several months — it is about a woman who enters into a romantic and sexual relationship with an […]
Around the Outer Cape in the off-season I’m reminded of how many people here are capable of subduing, commanding, and profitably plying the proximate physical world, and how stark the contrast is with the cosmopolitan, soft-handed symbol-manipulators who spend their time and money here in the summer. A great many of the people who live […]
In a recent post I declined to comment on the proposed imposition of new tariffs, pleading ignorance of the subject. The uncommonly astute blogger calling himself “ZMan”, however, has a definite opinion. An excerpt: The fact is, the current trade regime ushered in after the Cold War, has proven to be the boondoggle critics like […]
Planned Parenthood tweeted this the other day: Some men have a uterus. Some men have a uterus. Some men have a uterus. Some men have a uterus. Some men have a uterus. Some men have a uterus. Some men have a uterus. Some men have a uterus. Some men have a uterus. Some men have […]
While responding to a comment to a recent post just now, I wanted to add a link to an earlier item of mine: Can Progressivism Really Be A Kind Of Religion? I thought the quickest way to find it might be to look it up in Google. I typed in the title, and … nothing. […]
A foreground item in the news in these last days has been President Trump’s announcement of tariffs on various goods. As with everything else he says or does, (or, for that matter, anything that any prominent person says or does these days), there has been pugnacious disagreement. I’m not going to comment on this one. […]
It’s a dreary day here, and I find myself at a loss for anything interesting to say. Instead, then, I give you Russian politician Valentina Petrenko. And her hair.
I was back at my old alma mater, Power Station Studios, earlier today. It’s on West 53rd Street in Manhattan. Nearby, some expensive apartment buildings have gone up. If you’re lucky enough to afford one of these tony residences, here’s your front door: Is it me, or did we miss a turn somewhere?
February 28, 2018 – 1:40 pm
South Africa is moving rapidly toward “expropriation without compensation”: the confiscation of white-owned farms and transfer of them to black owners. Displacement of white farmers in Africa has happened before, in places like Kenya and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Agricultural productivity plummeted. It will do so here as well. In his book Suicide of the West […]
February 28, 2018 – 11:02 am
Our e-pal Bill K. sends along this link to a mordant little item at Gates of Vienna. The gist: – Emmanuel Macron, the newly elected French President, has no children. – German Chancellor Angela Merkel has no children. – Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has no children – British Prime Minister Theresa May has no children. […]
February 27, 2018 – 3:29 pm
Our reader, the indefatigable JK, has sent along a column by David French about “gun-violence restraining orders”, or GVROs. Mr. French argues that they are a plausible compromise between the community’s collective interest and the individual right guaranteed (not “granted”, mind you!) by the Second Amendment. Mr. French outlines some limitations that would, in his […]
February 27, 2018 – 12:00 pm
Strength of will is the Second Amendment of the personal virtues: the one that secures all the others.
February 25, 2018 – 1:09 pm
Goodness: might there be hope for England after all? Meet the man who could be the next Prime Minister: here and here. Intelligent, educated, gentlemanly, articulate, and deeply reactionary, with an abiding love of his ancient nation, its people, and its culture: what’s not to like? May he prevail.
February 24, 2018 – 5:56 pm
Now and then it’s good to step back from the dumpster-fire of current events and media. A quiet rainy day in the Outer Cape, with my lovely wife off in Europe visiting our grandson, is such an occasion. I spent the day with my friend Alec, an avid outdoorsman, who has very generously been teaching […]
February 22, 2018 – 1:03 pm
Last night CNN put on a televised “Town Hall” meeting on guns. I didn’t watch it, but from what I’ve heard my impression was that it was neither civil nor productive. (Astonishing, I know.) Charles Cooke comments on it, here. He calls it a “disaster for our discourse”. All comity and presumption of goodwill is […]
February 21, 2018 – 9:25 pm
As the din of political combat intensifies all round us, and comity and goodwill vanish in the smoke and fires of battle, I thought it might be good to remind ourselves of what real statesmanship and patriotism look like, and to remember that even in the darkest times it is possible to rise, however briefly, […]
February 20, 2018 – 2:08 pm
Here’s a legal article with an “arresting” preamble: I hope to convince you in the next hour, some of you, that the greatest single threat to our freedoms, the freedoms set forth in the Bill of Rights, is not from Iraq or Iran. I don’t think it’s from North Korea. I don’t think it’s from […]
February 20, 2018 – 11:39 am
Here’s a article that asks the question: if Russian trolls are indictable for election-meddling as unregistered foreign agents, why not Christopher Steele? Why not, as criminal co-conspirators, Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, the DNC, and the Clinton campaign?
February 19, 2018 – 8:20 pm
For those who would ban all guns in private hands — and I know many of you personally — some Q & A: What are arms for? They are power multipliers. Who has arms has power over those who do not. What does it mean to be sovereign? What is it that distinguishes the sovereign […]
February 19, 2018 – 6:52 pm
Today I paid a visit to one of the Outer Cape’s old burial grounds: the Pine Grove cemetery in Truro. It’s a remote spot, some distance down a wooded dirt road off one of Truro’s smaller byways. The place has some notoriety: in 1969, a man named Tony Costa murdered, sexually violated and dismembered […]
February 18, 2018 – 9:32 pm
We hear ad nauseam that more-enlightened countries around the world have lower homicide rates than the US because they have fewer firearms in private hands. This is repeated so often that a great many people simply believe it to be true. The correlation, however, actually goes the other way, as I demonstrated in this post […]
February 18, 2018 – 7:42 pm
Nobody has written with more clarity on the web of intrigue surrounding Russia, the FISA court, the Mueller probe, election-tampering, possible abuses of power by the Obama-era FBI, DOJ, and IRS, and alleged “collusion” than the former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. His latest column explores, with lucidity and detail, the difference between a criminal investigation […]
February 18, 2018 – 6:34 pm
I’ve once again raised the comment-form caching issue with my hosting service, Bluehost. I’m hoping that this time they will get it sorted out, once and for all. Thank you for your patience.