October 24, 2017 – 12:02 pm
Here is David Bowie, in a 1999 interview, predicting in considerable detail the transformative, revolutionary effect of the Internet on media and culture.
October 23, 2017 – 2:27 pm
Here is former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy’s detailed summary of the reeking DOJ/Clinton/Rosatom affair. (The Hill has also been covering the story, for example here.) Corruption and obfuscation at this level should be front-page news, every day. If it had happened under a Republican administration, it would be.
October 22, 2017 – 11:10 pm
Here’s Twitter’s most interesting and unusual feed, @ThomasWictor, on Niger and Benghazi.
October 21, 2017 – 11:45 pm
A group of concerned thinkers, including Roger Scruton, have written a rousing manifesto calling for the defense of Europe against its accelerating cultural suicide. The document is called The Paris Statement, and it is good strong stuff. (I learned about it from this article at Reaction, where you can find additional commentary.) You can read […]
October 17, 2017 – 11:51 pm
Ah, Diversity. How its worship enriches us! It doesn’t, of course. But it does, at least, make for some last-minute entertainment, here on the deck of the Titanic. There are some areas of human activity that lie forever beyond the reach of heartfelt wishes and fond imaginings: places where reality is still there even after […]
October 15, 2017 – 10:23 pm
From Albion’s Seed, page 896: There is a cultural equivalent of the iron law of oligarchy: small groups dominate every cultural system. They tend to do so by controlling institutions and processes, so that they tend to become the “governors” of a culture in both a political and a mechanical sense. The “iron law of […]
October 12, 2017 – 9:29 pm
Everywhere you look, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea is out, and Indigenous Peoples are in. (Well, the indigenous peoples of Europe, not so much…) Those of us who don’t get all our history from Howard Zinn, however, know that the Noble Savage was a good deal more savage than noble. Some details here.
October 11, 2017 – 7:00 pm
Here’s an interesting Twitter thread, from Thomas Wictor: the world’s leading authority on WWI flamethrowers, and a most unusual fellow.
October 10, 2017 – 4:02 pm
The volcanic island of La Palma (one of the Canary Islands) is in the news after an earthquake swarm. Why “yikes”? See here.
October 10, 2017 – 3:12 pm
I’ve finally been reading David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. (I’ve known for years that this book was essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural history of the United States, but late is better than never.) The book is delightfully engaging. I just came across this, in a chapter on […]
October 8, 2017 – 11:54 pm
After the Las Vegas shooting, I noted that when I was a boy guns were a common and unremarkable part of normal American life: I grew up in a rural area of west-central New Jersey. When I was a boy, all the households around me had a gun or two. We boys used to stack […]
October 8, 2017 – 1:04 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s a long and detailed assessment of the claim that Donald Trump’s voter-base — middle- and working-class Americans — made an irrational choice that was contrary to their own interests. The author demonstrates that this view is unsupportable, and that those who make it are usually applying a standard […]
October 7, 2017 – 11:26 pm
Sorry for the lack of substantial content around here lately. From time to time I become so weary of the passing scene that I hardly know what to say about it. I’ll be back to normal soon, I expect. Meanwhile: Diplomad is kissing California goodbye. Can’t say I blame him.
October 4, 2017 – 7:24 pm
As the gun-ban furor continues, here are two more items you should read: I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise. Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence
October 4, 2017 – 1:21 pm
Just after the slaughter in Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton (remember her?) took to Twitter to offer this tendentious and ignorant comment: The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get. In Ms. Clinton’s moated and wholly self-referential mind, […]
October 3, 2017 – 8:56 pm
In the wake of the LV massacre we hear the usual outcry from gun-rights opponents. It’s just another instance of the great and widening chasm separating the two Americas, and as always the hue and cry will simply push the two sides farther apart. In confronting this act of evil, the “progressive” mind leaps reflexively, […]
October 2, 2017 – 4:20 pm
Sorrow is everywhere today: following on the sickening atrocity in Las Vegas is the news that Tom Petty — one of the greatest rockers and songwriters of my generation — has died.
October 2, 2017 – 11:18 am
I’m still waiting for the Muse to return from vacation. Meanwhile, here’s a fine post on disagreement by our friend Bill Vallicella. Note the link in Bill’s post to the acerbic NRx blogger ‘Porter’. I’d earlier called Bill’s attention to Porter’s post on the NFL brouhaha, which you might enjoy also.
September 29, 2017 – 10:36 am
With a tip of the hat to our pal Bill Keezer, here’s a good item by Mark Steyn on the “progressive disease” I’ve called C.I.V. It’s all been said before, but it needs saying again and again. Best line: “When you demolish your own inheritance, the lot does not stay empty. Something arises in its […]
September 28, 2017 – 8:02 pm
Here’s an essay by William Voegeli on immigration, published at Claremont Review of Books back in August. It is outstandingly clear and comprehensive. I’ll offer a brief excerpt, in which Voegli makes what I think is the most important point of all about immigration policy (I have bolded the relevant passage): Given the stakes, the […]
September 26, 2017 – 10:51 am
Well, the lovely Nina and I are on our way back. We’re traveling a day later than we meant to: we’d flown from Boston to Vienna (and had left our car at Logan Airport), but while we were overseas the carrier, Air Berlin, having declared bankruptcy, canceled all flights to Boston forever. So now we […]
September 19, 2017 – 4:08 pm
Vienna, September 19th — As it was last time we were here, Vienna — unlike so many other European cities — still manages to maintain its European character, at least in its more affluent districts (I should note that we have not moved around the city much this trip, and have only been inside the […]
September 13, 2017 – 5:21 pm
File this under “Diversity and its Blessings”. I’m off to Vienna and Prague tomorrow; I’ll let you know how things seem there.
September 12, 2017 – 10:15 pm
Well, I’m back home in Wellfleet after a splendid three-day weekend on Star Island. (The high point of the weekend was a tribute performance we gave on Saturday night in honor of the late Walter Becker, consisting of a baker’s dozen of Steely Dan’s greatest hits. (It would have been impossible to get that together […]
September 7, 2017 – 9:24 pm
I’ll be away this weekend (as I was last year at this time) for our annual musical retreat on Star Island. Back early next week. The comment-box is open, if anyone would like to broach any topics for consideration.
September 6, 2017 – 1:15 pm
Mencius Moldbug on fascist-hunting: Unfortunately no central statistics are kept, but I wouldn’t be surprised if every day in America, more racists, fascists and sexists are detected, purged and destroyed, than all the screenwriters who had to prosper under pseudonyms in the ’50s. Indeed it’s not an exaggeration to say that hundreds of thousands of […]
September 5, 2017 – 8:49 pm
Here’s the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, quoted in New York Magazine (my emphasis): Q: …Where has it been hardest to make progress? Wages, housing, schools? A: What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property. I think people all over this city, of every background, […]
September 5, 2017 – 11:11 am
A happy item in the New York Times today: Power Station Studios, where I was a staff engineer from 1978 to 1987, has been bought by Berklee College of music and will be re-opening after a long-overdue renovation. Power Station, Studio A: my alma mater. This is the second time this magnificent facility, which in […]
September 3, 2017 – 1:28 pm
I didn’t see this coming: Walter Becker is dead at 67. If you’re a musician of my generation, or a fan, that’s a heavy blow.
September 1, 2017 – 2:05 pm
Many of you will have read Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-decorated book Guns, Germs, and Steel. It makes what has seemed to many (even to me, when I first read it) an overwhelmingly persuasive case that the persistent inequalities in power, influence, and prosperity among the world’s population groups — why, for example, did Europeans colonize the […]
August 30, 2017 – 11:44 am
Here’s Hanson again, with some comparative analysis.
August 29, 2017 – 11:01 pm
Sorry it’s been so slow around here. It’s August, when I always take it easy a bit — but I’ll confess that I’m also getting a little spooked by the extent to which we are all (and I’m no exception) living more and more of our lives online. Our attention, which is more precious than […]
August 23, 2017 – 4:40 pm
Victor Davis Hanson (my emphasis): For the last decade, we were lectured that the arc of history always bends toward our own perceptions of moral justice. More likely, human advancement tends to be circular and should not to be confused with technological progress. Just as often, history is ethically circular. No Roman province produced anyone […]
August 23, 2017 – 2:40 pm
Our discussion of “white supremacy” continues, over at Bill Vallicella’s place.
August 22, 2017 – 12:49 pm
I don’t like the tropics; they’re too profuse. Anything goes, completely unchecked. Give me the North. Each winter Life’s follies, feints, and flourishes are weighed, measured and tested. The ones that make it back the following year need to show something serious: at best, ingenuity, but at the very least, genuine toughness. Everything in the […]
August 22, 2017 – 12:09 pm
For nearly all of us, a gravestone or other physical memorial is in any real sense as temporal, as evanescent, a thing as we ourselves are. For when such memorials no longer serve as a token, reminder, or feeble proxy for the deceased in the minds of those who knew them, they simply display a […]
August 20, 2017 – 8:39 pm
Here are two syllogisms about race. The first: (1) All human groups have identical statistical distributions of cognitive, behavioral and personality traits. (2) Human groups, when considered as groups, have measurably different life-outcomes and levels of success in our societies. (3) Given (1), these different outcomes can only be due to wholly exogenous factors, such […]
August 20, 2017 – 2:24 am
It would be an awfully suspicious coincidence if Truth turned out to be exactly what we think it ought to be.
August 18, 2017 – 9:36 pm
I had sad news today: my old friend and colleague Jason Corsaro died yesterday of cancer. I’m not sure of his age, but he must have been about my age, 61. Jason and I came up together as assistant engineers at Power Station Studios (now Avatar); he was promoted to full engineer just before I […]
August 18, 2017 – 5:03 pm
Last week a Google engineer expressed, in a perfectly reasonable memorandum about human diversity, the view that the company had become a left-wing monoculture in which dissenters actually might have to worry about being fired. For publishing this essay, he was fired. Now Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has announced that the company is giving a […]
August 18, 2017 – 2:15 pm
Our e-pal Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has a post up about “white supremacy”, a loosely defined term that is very much en vogue just now. Dr. Vallicella quotes Robert Paul Wolff: Hatred has fundamentally very little to do with White Supremacy. White Supremacy is a policy of domination and economic superiority of Whites in […]
August 16, 2017 – 10:26 pm
I’ve said quite enough about Diversity lately, so here’s statistician William Briggs to help shoulder the load.
August 16, 2017 – 4:03 pm
A comment on Charlottesville: this sort of chip-on-the-shoulder activism is a no-win for the Right. It attracts too many of the lowest, stupidest, and most undesirable elements, and as we have seen, it results in officially sanctioned violence. I remember a slogan from back in the Vietnam War era: Fighting For Peace Is Like Fucking […]
August 16, 2017 – 2:02 pm
What never seems to occur to those who anathematize and seek to bury the past is that they in turn prepare the future for their own erasure. The result is a sullen and solipsistic presentism in which, as Burke foresaw, men become nothing more than “the flies of a summer”.
August 16, 2017 – 10:12 am
It is a great temporal vanity to see, in the study of history, only the present struggling to be born. It is, quite literally, preposterous.
August 15, 2017 – 4:18 pm
Pax Dickinson gives his eyewitness account of what happened in Charlottesville on Saturday, here. [A quibble: Mr. Dickinson writes that the chaos created by the police stand-down (and the apparently deliberate throwing-together of the “Unite The Right” demonstrators with the hungry Antifa mob) “ultimately led directly to the vehicular incident that killed a woman […]
August 12, 2017 – 10:15 pm
Four years ago, I wrote the following thing: America’s ideological landscape is like the continent itself: transected by deep fault-lines at the irregular boundaries of rigid plates. Though crushed tightly together, these great masses seek to move in different directions, and so they strain relentlessly against one another. The pressure builds, and builds ”” until, […]
August 10, 2017 – 3:29 pm
Have a look at this time-looping defense of abortion, by Princeton professor Elizabeth Harman. Somewhere in the back of my mind I just can’t help forming a sneaking suspicion that Professor Harman arrived at her conclusion first, rather than being dragged to it by the irresistible force of her argument.
Every Tuesday evening, in the ten o’clock hour of his program, radio host John Batchelor discusses Russia with Stephen F. Cohen. Dr. Cohen is professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton and NYU, and is a rare voice of sanity in this time of anti-Russian hysteria. Mr. Batchelor’s show is always worth listening to — […]
More than a few readers have complained to me about the “Captcha” used to screen comments here. I’ve just installed a new one that, for most of you, shouldn’t be visible at all. I hope it works well enough that I can keep using it.