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.
February 16, 2018 – 3:19 pm
It’s happened again: a massacre at a school, a shock of grief and horror and powerlessness in the face of evil, and a spasm of reaction on the part of hoplophobes, sheltered liberals, mainstream media, and Democrat opportunists (a Venn diagram with extensive overlap) to demonize gun-rights advocates and to call for government to “do […]
February 14, 2018 – 1:06 pm
By now you may have heard of a movie called Black Panther. It’s a Marvel Comics offering about a fictional, technologically advanced African Utopia called Wakanda. I haven’t seen the movie (I don’t think it’s even out yet), but I can certainly understand all the buzz, and why America’s black community would be happy to […]
February 13, 2018 – 8:55 pm
Most Tuesday nights at 10 p.m., the radio host John Batchelor (whose program, as I have mentioned before, is one of the most interesting and penetrating news sources in all of media) has an hour-long discussion with the Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen about the new Cold War. If you take any interest at all […]
February 12, 2018 – 4:34 pm
I’ll confess that I find this a little creepy. You?
February 11, 2018 – 7:40 pm
I think perhaps I’m turning the corner, now: no more fever, at least, though I’m still shockingly depleted. I say “shockingly”, but I suppose I should face facts: I’ll be sixty-two in April, and although I’ve always had the constitution of a lion, and have almost always managed to fight off whatever virus or bug […]
February 9, 2018 – 7:53 pm
As someone who is very rarely unwell, it’s always a jolt to be reminded how debilitating a nasty cold can be, especially as I get a bit older. Writing seems to be quite out of the question this evening (indeed I stared at the page for a good two or three minutes just now just […]
February 8, 2018 – 7:14 pm
Back in late November of 2016, the New York Times lamented, in its smugly named “Interpreter” column, that democracy was suddenly in danger around the world. (What might have happened around then that would have put them is such a frame of mind? I feel as if I’m forgetting something…) They called upon two boyish […]
February 8, 2018 – 3:42 pm
Patriotism makes concrete the joining of the self to something that is external, larger than oneself, and abstract enough not to get too bogged down in details, but also immanent in one’s immediate surroundings, in the world one actually lives in. (Religion does this too.) Globalist universalism is too remote. The individual makes his commitment […]
February 7, 2018 – 2:37 pm
OK, logophiles: below the fold is a list of the words that, according to this item at Slate, David Foster Wallace had circled in his dictionary. (I would link each word to its definition, but it would take me hours, and I can’t be bothered. Looking them up should help you pass these long evenings […]
February 7, 2018 – 2:09 pm
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has just released an interim report on its investigation into the skulduggery surrounding the Clinton email server. For your convenience, I’ve saved a copy here.
February 6, 2018 – 1:15 pm
Yesterday’s post was a look at the tension and strife afflicting present-day America. In a comment, reader ‘Magus’ said: Obligatory libertarian quote: if the Constitution/US political framework set up by founders was unable to prevent the current state of affairs it was either complicit in it or failed to stop it. Either way, it was […]
February 5, 2018 – 3:56 pm
It is hardly possible to be a sentient being in the United States without observing that we are engaged an a great struggle for power. Politics always involves such wrangling, and of course our system of government was designed with that in mind, but in these last decades several trends, moving in one direction only, […]
February 4, 2018 – 2:57 pm
As I wrote in the previous post, it’s time for this blog to have a new name. I chose the old one, waka waka waka, rather impulsively; its meaning was not obvious, and over the years many people assumed it had something to do with Fozzie Bear. The original title came from a Fela Kuti […]
February 3, 2018 – 3:01 pm
I am going to stop capitalizing every word in my titles. I’m weary of the effort. I might change the name of the blog, too. It’s out of date, and I’m tired of it.
February 2, 2018 – 10:39 pm
So, the Memo’s been published. “The mountain has labored, and brought forth a mouse.” Sure, there are damning things in it — notably that the FISA petitioners at the FBI and DOJ knew the Steele dossier to have been a highly questionable political hack-job, paid for by the DNC and the Clinton campaign (pardon the […]
February 1, 2018 – 11:00 pm
Tonight, all eyes are on the Nunes memo, which seems likely to be released tomorrow. But amid all the smoke and noise, various parties around the Internet have noticed that there may be other things afoot: It was reported today that the Mueller team has announced that the sentencing of Mike Flynn has been “postponed”, […]
January 31, 2018 – 11:21 pm
Everyone’s abuzz about last night’s State of the Union address, and I’ll say that I enjoyed it quite a bit myself: it was an hour-and-a-half long trolling of the Democrats in a way that was at least eight years overdue. Their discomfiture was so acute that they lost all concern for the political optics of […]