February 29, 2024 – 6:09 pm
I’ve been nursing a surprisingly debilitating cold (or flu, or something) for the past few days. It makes it difficult to summon up the energy to do much of anything, and I’ve been unable to concentrate the little grey cells enough to write anything worth reading. (I did manage another comment or two in that […]
February 29, 2024 – 6:04 pm
“One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.” – Eric Hoffer With that observation in mind, have a look at this item from Michael Lind.
February 28, 2024 – 2:05 pm
American media consumers have been soaking for years in a poisonous marinade of lies about our role in Ukraine. With a hat-tip to Dave Benner at Twitter, here is RFK Jr with an antidote: a history lesson that is brief, concise, and accurate. For a decade, US involvement in Ukraine has been based on a […]
February 25, 2024 – 9:29 am
On the road. Back Tuesday. Update, Tuesday evening: I’m back home, but after dropping the lovely Nina at JFK last night for a 1:35 a.m. flight to Hong Kong (to visit our grandkids), and then driving five hours back to Wellfleet, getting to bed just before sunup, and sleeping fitfully for a few hours, I’m […]
February 23, 2024 – 6:47 pm
Bill Vallicella has a fine post up at Substack today, in which he responds to the complaint that for an American president to speak of “America First” is, as Bill Kristol put it a few years back, “depressing and vulgar”. My only quibble with the piece is that Bill didn’t unpack, for those who might […]
February 23, 2024 – 5:11 pm
At this point it hardly seems worth mentioning, but the Daily Mail reminds us today, in painful detail, of what a frail and feeble dotard our President is. What times we live in!
February 22, 2024 – 10:34 pm
My friend “Spandrell” has a new version of his blog up and running. I’ve linked to several of his posts over the years, in particular his 2017 three-part essay on what he calls “Bioleninism”. (You can read that here.) Span is a very smart guy, and he’s one of the OGs of what used to […]
February 22, 2024 – 5:13 pm
Cellphone outage hits AT&T customers nationwide; Verizon and T-Mobile users also affected Don’t look at me, Feds; I assure you all I’m just a humble blogger.
February 21, 2024 – 12:15 pm
A Lowell, MA High-school girl’s basketball team had to forfeit their game yesterday after three of their players were injured by a mentally ill young man playing on the opposing team. The male player, who is over six feet tall and has facial hair, says he’s female. The triumph of subjective fantasy over objective reality […]
February 20, 2024 – 5:30 pm
Here’s a news story. I’d say it was “shocking”, or “amazing”, but at this point it really isn’t. It’s bad, though. In brief: New York City has signed a no-bid contract with a “W/MBE” company (i.e., not run by white men) to make debit cards to be issued to “migrants”. The cards will have no […]
February 20, 2024 – 2:35 pm
I’ve had nothing, so far, to say about Donald Trump’s show-trial for “fraud” in New York, which the other day resulted in a guilty judgment, and a fine of $355,000,000. I’m still having difficulty. The process was a sham, of course, from start to finish. There was never any crime, any complainant, or any victim. […]
February 17, 2024 – 6:17 pm
It’s remarkable how complex any topic — especially anything to do with society and law — can be when you examine it closely. Take, for example, drunk-driving, which on the face of it seems simple enough. We know that driving drunk is dangerous — I’ve had friends who have died from it, and I nearly […]
February 14, 2024 – 9:35 pm
I’ve just watched this guided tour of the new Apple Vision Pro, a new VR headset. These are still early days, and the thing is, for most ordinary people, prohibitively expensive so far — but there is no way, in my opinion, that this will not be as addictive, and disruptive, as cell-phones, or perhaps […]
February 13, 2024 – 10:03 pm
As I write, the House has impeached Homeland Security secretary Mayorkas: a pointless gesture, a little kayfabe for the fans. Yes, he’s lied to us, and to Congress. Yes, he’s an enemy who hates us. But he’s an underling, a myrmidon, a stooge, an infantryman, a dogsbody. His impeachment will die in the Senate, like […]
February 12, 2024 – 6:12 pm
On Saturday the lovely Nina and I found ourselves in Woods Hole, at the far end of the Cape from where we live, where we had been invited to attend a living-room performance by two extraordinary musicians: violinist Darol Anger and mandolinist/guitarist Mike Marshall. (Their websites are here and here, respectively.) It was music the […]
February 12, 2024 – 2:31 pm
Well, the site’s all fixed up; I just spent hours recreating all the old linked-series entries in a new plugin (fortunately I was able to pull all the info I needed from the backend database, though it’s been six years since I’ve had to write any SQL, so it took me a minute to remember […]
February 9, 2024 – 5:08 pm
I’ve been having some backend issues with the website: page links, comments, etc. aren’t working, and for a while today the site was completely inaccessible. I’m trying to get it all fixed, but until I do things won’t be working properly, and the site may be down from time to time. Update, 2/11: I’ve had […]
February 9, 2024 – 12:00 pm
Special Counsel Robert Hur has released his report on Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. I don’t say “alleged” mishandling, because the second paragraph of the report states the following: Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen. These materials […]
February 7, 2024 – 11:44 pm
Imagine for a moment what a collapse of the modern communication grid would be like. All of a sudden, you can no longer make or receive phone calls, emails, or text messages. You try to go to the Internet — news services, social media, etc. — to find out what’s happening, but you can’t. You […]
February 6, 2024 – 6:34 pm
Here’s some good news, for a change: clever application of advanced technology is now making it possible to read ancient Roman scrolls that were carbonized in the devastating first-century eruption of Vesuvius, making them too fragile to unroll. Learn more here.
February 5, 2024 – 11:12 pm
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has just posted an excellent essay at Substack on why he is inclined toward theism. Longtime readers of this blog will know that this is a topic I’ve been wrestling with for ages, so I’m always glad to find essays like this latest offering from Bill. Bill asks: why are […]
February 5, 2024 – 5:16 pm
I know that many of you may have been worrying lately about the possibility of some sort of national, or even civilizational, decline. But you should always remember that, as bad as things may seem economically and politically, our popular culture continues to raise the bar for excellence in the fine arts. So, to lift […]
February 2, 2024 – 2:26 pm
I’ve just read Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It, by James Kalb. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name, Jim was the original proprietor of the influential blog View From The Right (archived here), which he then handed off to […]
January 31, 2024 – 11:46 pm
In America, we hear a great deal about the “rule of law”. We flatter ourselves that we have managed, by the genius of the Founding, to find a way to be ruled, not merely by the vector-sum of the will of powerful men, but by a set of abstract principles. We imagine that in this […]
January 31, 2024 – 12:08 am
With a hat-tip to our reader and commenter, the indefatigable JK, I offer you a detailed essay by Dr. Roy Spencer about climate modeling. (Dr. Spencer’s CV is here. Keep it in mind next time somebody tells you the scientific consensus among Actual Climate Scientists is “settled”.) One of the key ideas in this article […]
January 28, 2024 – 1:12 pm
I’m saddened today by some bad news: the death of guitarist Dean Brown, who was a beautiful, gifted musician and a hell of a nice guy. He had for several months been battling a mysterious form of cancer, and on January 26th he lost the fight. My deepest sympathies to his wife Ruth, and his […]
January 27, 2024 – 8:02 pm
Making the rounds today is a graph taken from the Financial Times, showing that there is a widening gap in political outlook, across the developed world, between males and females aged 18-29. The source article is here, but it’s paywalled, so I’ll sum it up for you: women are moving sharply to the left, while […]
January 25, 2024 – 5:40 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here is a sickening dispatch, posted in a Disqus comment-thread at Powerline, by “Diego Palma“, who says he lives in Arizona at the Mexican border. Is this real? I have no way of knowing. The place Mr. Palma describes certainly is; it’s at 31°20’3.81″N, 110° 8’53.86″W, and if look […]
January 24, 2024 – 1:42 pm
In yesterday’s post about the looming showdown between Texas and Washington over securing the border, I wrote: The so-called “rule of law”, and obedience to the formal structures of government, are all that stand, in a vast and divided nation, between order and chaos; they are the load-bearing walls that support the great (and trembling) […]
January 23, 2024 – 8:07 pm
Yesterday, five justices of the Supreme Court (the obvious ones, plus Barrett and Roberts) decided to lift an injunction against the Biden administration’s attempt to force open the portions of the national border in Texas that Texas had unilaterally decided to seal off with razor wire and other barriers. Think about that; the administration appealed […]
January 22, 2024 – 7:43 pm
Look at this sickening video: At the speed society evolves, so too does warfare. pic.twitter.com/qU9lP5WAGT — Joshua Hartley (@JHartley2) January 22, 2024 This is a technology still in its infancy. The drone you see pursuing and killing this terrified man was guided by someone sitting comfortably in perfect safety far away. It’s possible that the […]
January 21, 2024 – 1:08 pm
OK, folks, we are heading into a year that will likely make the last few seem like “the good old days”. I have put together a bluntly and unsentimental list of some of the direst possibilities. Which of these seem likely? 1) 9/11-level terror attack 2) New and far deadlier pandemic 3) Trump jailed 4) […]
January 20, 2024 – 11:25 pm
One of the reasons that I laid off blogging for a while was that it had become just too dispiriting to try to speak the truth while living in a world of lies. Among the worst of these webs of falsehood (and outright stupidity) was the Narrative about our relationship with Russia in the post-Soviet […]
January 19, 2024 – 7:17 pm
Here’s something refreshing: James Hankins, a senior professor of history at Harvard, having been pestered by the harridans of the university’s Diversity Office to provide a personal statement of his commitment to the Cause, has penned a tart reply (cf. the Reply of the Zhaporozhian Cossacks to Mehmed IV). We read: Dear Members of Harvard’s […]
January 18, 2024 – 5:10 pm
Making the rounds today: the newly elected president of Argentina, Javier Milei, just spoke at the World Economic Forum’s conference in Davos — and having taken the stage, used the platform to denounce everything that the malevolent WEF seeks to accomplish, and to warn the world of the danger these people present to human flourishing. […]
January 17, 2024 – 3:05 pm
Well, here we are: mid-January 2024, with the first round of electoral winnowing behind us, and another a few days away. Already we are down to three still in the running for the GOP nomination, but it doesn’t look like much of a contest. Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill V. has put up two posts […]
January 16, 2024 – 11:42 am
“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.” – Conan the Cimmerian, on the Iowa Caucuses
January 16, 2024 – 12:21 am
Our reader “mharko” has sent along a link to an article by “N.S. Lyons”, a fine writer whose work I’ve mentioned before in these pages (see here and here). The article, published at Substack, is called The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives, and it is in response to a techno-futurist manifesto recently published by Marc […]
January 13, 2024 – 3:50 pm
I’ve just run across a Twitter (okay, “X”) thread so remarkable that I’m going to unroll it for you right here. The principals are Emmett Shear, a serial Internet entrepreneur who has just been selected as CEO of OpenAI, and a science-fiction author by the name of Devon Eriksen. How did I come across this? […]
January 13, 2024 – 12:35 pm
We’re back home — my lovely wife Nina had some surgery on Thursday, and is now resting and recovering. Back to posting shortly.
January 10, 2024 – 1:06 pm
I’m not likely to be able to post for a couple of days. Back by the weekend.
January 8, 2024 – 2:55 pm
Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella links to two contrasting articles. The first, by Binyamin Applebaum, an editor at the New York Times, is a panegyric on the presidency of Joe Biden. The second, by Peter van Buren at American Conservative, is a jeremiad called “Evening in America”. It’s a stark and fascinating juxtaposition. In […]
January 7, 2024 – 1:15 pm
Before we wade, in our teeming millions, into the riotous disorder that 2024 is sure to bring, I thought it might be nice to “cleanse our timelines” for a moment in the clear air of a serene and ancient vastness where the vital spirit of remote antiquity still touches the living. Here, then, is Batzorig […]
January 5, 2024 – 11:18 pm
Have you heard of “superheating”? If you haven’t, Wikipedia describes it as: “the phenomenon in which a liquid is heated to a temperature higher than its boiling point, without boiling. This is a so-called metastable state or metastate, where boiling might occur at any time, induced by external or internal effects… This may occur by […]
January 4, 2024 – 10:27 pm
The cataract of aliens pouring over our southern border has risen, in December of last year, to a rate of about three-and-a-half million a year. (Can anyone, at this point, doubt for a moment that this an intentional feature of government policy?) Meanwhile, as our efforts in Ukraine slump toward failure — as has been […]
January 2, 2024 – 8:09 pm
I am very sorry to tell you that our longtime friend and commenter here at this blog, Robert (a.k.a. “Whitewall”) has very suddenly and unexpectedly lost his wife. I can only imagine the terrible shock and sorrow he must be going through, and I ask you all to think of him and to keep him […]
January 2, 2024 – 7:07 pm
Well, Claudine Gay has stepped down as president of Harvard. She was already listing badly after her embarrassing testimony before Congress about antisemitism at Harvard, and Christopher Rufo’s withering barrage of examples of her chronic plagiarism finally holed her below the waterline. Needless to say, in her resignation letter she made no apology for her […]
January 1, 2024 – 9:52 pm
To kick off 2024 — a year in which I think we all will be tested — here is an important reminder from David Bowie (PBUH): Great advice from David Bowie pic.twitter.com/CheUp389ow — Darrell Craig Harris Pro Bassist (@DarrellCBassist) January 2, 2024
December 31, 2023 – 6:09 pm
Happy New Year, everybody! Take a deep breath. 2024 is going to be “interesting”.
December 30, 2023 – 6:25 pm
I realize the tone’s been kind of gloomy over here since I started posting again. As Woody Allen once put it: More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Yep, we’re in a bit of a pickle, and no […]