Insane. Sickening. Buckle up, folks. The earth is shaking. The rest of this year is going to be very lively indeed. Also: this is a carefully calculated provocation. They’ve done this flamboyantly, daringly, pugnaciously, right before our eyes, as if to say “well, what are you going to do about it?” Any jacquerie that results […]
The comment-thread to my recent post about Joe Biden’s fawning tribute to the deceased thug George Floyd turned in some interesting directions. Among them was the observation that Christianity was no longer able to serve as the scaffolding that once built, and braced up, Western civilization. Was this a failing of Christianity itself? I remarked […]
Here’s a splendid little video (found on X) on how energy moves through and around an electrical circuit. 5 minute clip explaining that energy does not flow through wires it flows around the wires through free space based on electric & magnetic fields How have I never known this?? pic.twitter.com/rgK5WjF8DI — JessicaGenetics (@JessicaGenetics) May 26, […]
Today the White House posted this audacious tweet: George Floyd should be alive. He deserved so much more. Today, I join all those who loved him and all those touched by the civil rights movement he inspired in remembering the tragedy and injustice of his death. He changed the world. Now, let's act in his […]
“And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment.” — John Locke, Second Treatise on […]
Today I learned that the Biden administration has been holding secret talks with Iran to discuss how to bring Israel to heel, starting with toppling Israel’s government. To my many left-leaning Jewish friends: have you seen enough yet? Are you still voting Democrat?
Bill Vallicella has just published a sharp, brief post about the confusion that atheists and many leftists (a Venn diagram with a large intersection) share about the nature of religion, and the nature of the human need for it — which ultimately cannot be satisfied by material or social goods. We read: Leftists, and atheists […]
Away in NYC for a couple of days. Back soon.
Having had, last night, a lively conversation over dinner with a woman who chid me (and sought to correct me) for insisting that sex is indeed binary, I think a clarifying post is in order. Before I begin, I’ll pause to express surprise and dismay at how stubbornly fashionable, and how prevalent, denial of the […]
About that pier we built in Gaza: don’t be surprised if it later turns out to have been built not to bring supplies to Gaza, but to evacuate Gazans to the West.
I note with deep sadness the death of saxophonist David Sanborn, who died on Sunday at the age of 78. I’d known Dave for decades, and worked with him often (including having engineered much of his Grammy-winning 1999 album Inside). David was a towering musician — one of the most influential players of his era […]
I missed it, somehow, when it happened back in April, but I’ve heard it now (h/t to Radio Derb): the Dutch political activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s rousing speech at CPAC’s convention in Budapest. Her message to the ancient peoples of the West? “Our elites have declared a war on us, and now it is time for […]
To live more consciously begins with reversing the direction of the arrow of attention between awareness and the senses.
The State of Georgia’s Election Board is grilling Fulton County over missing 2020 ballot records, in particular ballot images and .SHA files (these are digital fingerprints more generally known as hash-files, which are widely used in information security). We’ve known since the night of the “election” that things were awfully fishy; the stink is now […]
In my previous post I commented on the spectacle of pampered students and faculty at our elite colleges and universities cutting class, donning keffiyehs, LARPing as oppressed Palestinians (at the top of their lungs, and as disruptively as possible, which is always fun and exciting), and calling for the extinction of the Jewish state. (As […]
The spectacle unfolding at elite universities these in these last weeks has dominated the news. On one hand, it’s been gratifying to watch the coalition of the Left coming apart, and to see factions that used to march in step now turning against each other. Writing seven years ago, I compared the tensions that would […]
Oh, yes, readers: it can happen anywhere. Wake up.
I must apologize for not writing much these past few weeks; we’ve had personal matters to attend to, and have had to travel back and forth between home (the far end of Cape Cod) and New York several times (300 miles of driving each way). There’s a lot I want to write about when I […]
With a hat-tip to Charles Murray on X: The Seven Tribes of Intellect. (One has to wonder: what must it have been like to be John von Neumann?)
… and rightly so. We should be pushing back as forcefully as we can against this: we should be creating a climate in which whatever demonic influence corrupted this poor woman into such hideous self-mutilation can no longer gain a foothold on weak minds and vulnerable souls. I have no idea why she is unable […]
I note with sadness the death of Daniel Dennett — who, whether you agreed with him or not (I did some of each over the years), was a brilliant thinker, a tremendously gifted writer, and a man of insatiable curiosity and outsized personality. In five different areas — philosophy of mind, free will, scientific materialism, […]
April 18, 2024 – 11:10 pm
Well, actually there’s rather a lot happening — among other things, Israel attacking Iran (on Ali Khameni’s birthday), jurors seated in the unbelievably outrageous show-trial against Donald Trump, the death of Dickey Betts, and the impending arrival of trillions of zombie cicadas. But I thought I’d just post this instead: Do you think he slept […]
April 16, 2024 – 12:08 pm
We’re in NYC for a couple of days, where my lovely wife is having surgery for one of those damned basal-cell carcinomas that seem to afflict so many people these days. Back soon.
In a development that has medical and longevity experts scratching their heads, the recording/mixing engineer, former martial-arts instructor, acidulous opinionator, and bibulous curmudgeon Malcolm Pollack celebrated his 68th birthday on April 13th. Asked to comment, one leading expert said that the news has “made us wonder if we have to re-examine some of our most […]
Fifty years ago, I lived with some friends in a rented farmhouse on Cider Mill Road, in East Amwell Township, New Jersey. It’s still mostly farmland out there. I was looking at the old place on Google Earth just now and saw this, just a mile or so away. (Click to enlarge.) Warmed my heart.
Well, the Eclipse has come and gone, and as far as I can make out, there’s no sign of either the Rapture or the Apocalypse. (I realize such things might take some extra time to reach us here in the Outer Cape, but even on social media things just seem to be blaring away as […]
The political philosopher Carl Schmitt wrote: Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and […]
This is all over social media today: Richard Dawkins, one of the “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism (along with Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens) and author, in 2006, of The God Delusion has now admitted that he likes Christendom, and suddenly sees it as a thing to be promoted and defended. […]
Writing about Ukraine at the Asia Times, David Goldman — the analyst formerly known as “Spengler” — commented last week on the desperate strategic fantasy that continues to hold the GAE and NATO (but I repeat myself) under its spell. Goldman is a very smart guy, one of the few global-strategic-assessment pundits actually worth paying […]
March 31, 2024 – 10:27 pm
Over American Greatness, Jeremy Carl discusses Steve Sailer’s new book, and the man himself. (If you don’t know who Steve Sailer is, you should; he is arguably the sharpest and most influential American thinker and writer of the last quarter-century, and were it not for the suffocating taboos enforced by our cultural commissars, he would […]
The White House has decided to dedicate this Sunday to its malevolent, Gnostic project of obliterating every sacred thing, every natural category, and every stone in the foundation of the American nation. “But wait,” you say, “this Sunday’s Easter!! Couldn’t they at least have picked some other day?” Gosh, you’re right. I’m sure they’d just […]
March 27, 2024 – 11:03 pm
“Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems […]
What we used to call the “reactosphere” has added some fine younger contributors over the last few years. One of the best is Auron Macintyre, who does podcasts (both on his own and with guests), YouTube videos, and a column at Substack (you can also follow him on X). I give him my highest recommendation: […]
March 24, 2024 – 11:52 pm
Victor Davis Hanson, move over. It doesn’t get any more concise than this: This woman KNOCKS IT OUT OF THE PARK?! I double dare you to give her a listen.? pic.twitter.com/dP1A9EgZ3g — ?? Pismo ?? (@Pismo_B) February 24, 2024 Looking back over the past decade or two, I’m reminded of Churchill’s remarks in 1938: I […]
Something I ran across online earlier today reminded me of a project I worked on long ago (late 1985), when I was a staff engineer at Power Station. It was a record by the great Japanese pianist and singer Akiko Yano, and I hadn’t heard it, I think, since the album came out in early […]
I love the Outer Cape, where I live, but the prevailing ideology out here is as “blue” as it gets. (Aside from the occasional reactionary like me, there is also a subclass of people around here who build and fish and dig and pave and fix things — in other words, who earn a crust […]
The great Roger Scruton would have been 80 this past February 27th, and to commemorate the event, Jash Dolani, a poster on X, put up a list of 11 Scruton quotes, which I repost below: 1. Scruton on the fundamental right-wing impulse: “Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not […]
Hunter Biden’s former business associate Tony Bobulinski testified today for the House Oversight Committee’s impeachment inquiry. I haven’t had a chance to review the testimony itself — but hoo-boy, his opening statement is a corker. (Some clips from the hearing are here.) (Don’t get too excited, though, or start imagining there will be actual consequences. […]
We’re away in NYC for a few days. Back soon. (Will be glad to get home.)
A man has just been fatally shot on a crowded A train in Brooklyn, during rush hour. The videos I’ve been seeing (I’m not posting them here, but you can find them in seconds on Twitter) show people cowering afterwards in the train, which was stopped at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn. (I can’t count […]
I haven’t been able to do any substantial writing for a bit – I’m still foggy from this virus I’ve had (though I’m recovering now, it was a nasty bug, with fatigue and cognitive wooziness to rival the Wuhan Red Death itself). I also had to make around trip from Wellfleet to JFK on Monday […]
“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.” – Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs
Commenter “Landroll” asks, in response to my previous post about the incremental militarization of the New York City subway system: Like the line from the song says, “Whatcha gonna do about it?” I don’t know what song that is, but: So far, what I’ve done about it has been to move out of New York, […]
Our reader and commenter ‘mharko’ has left some excellent remarks on a thread at Bill V.’s place about our worsening political situation. Go and have a look, here. (Sorry not to have responded myself, mharko. I’m still quite foggy and unwell with this damned respiratory virus I’ve been battling, and it’s been all I can […]
In response to an extraordinary rise in subterranean crime over the past few years, New York Governess Kathy Hochul has announced that she will be deploying National Guard troops and State Police in the NYC subways in an attempt to make the system safer, or at least to seem safer. They will apparently be conducting […]
I note with grim satisfaction the retirement of the maleficent Victoria Nuland, the meddlesome witch whose machinations in Ukraine gave us the Maidan revolution in 2014, and everything that has happened since. In my opinion she has the blood of hundreds of thousands, the collapse of the Ukrainian nation, and the useless expense of many […]
Get ready for a shock: men and women have different brains.
Imagine a large-scale mathematical society whose aim is to work together to broaden the scope of demonstrated mathematical truths. The way they would go about this is by building upon the theorems that have already been proven: finding new relations and isomorphisms between existing theorems, and proving new ones. They wouldn’t all work on the […]
In the course of the ongoing conversation about America’s prospects over at Bill Vallicella’s website, Bill mentioned two of the various types of civil wars (in my view, there are at least three). Having written an article about exactly that at American Greatness four years ago, in the runup to the last election, I posted […]
Today in the small town of Woodstock, Georgia, there will be a funeral for Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student who was brutally murdered by a Venezuelan man here in the country illegally. Four years ago the nation tore itself to pieces in a summer of violent rioting over the death of George Floyd, […]