December 18, 2023 – 11:44 am
In Arlington National Cemetery stands a memorial, sculpted by a Jewish sculptor named Moses Ezekiel (who, by the way, was the first Jew to graduate from the Virgina Military Institute). It features a classical female figure wearing a laurel wreath, and bears the inscription “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into […]
December 17, 2023 – 11:59 pm
I’m just putting a placeholder here lest anyone think the blog is sinking back into desuetude (I’m not going to let that happen again). It’s Christmas season, and there’s a lot going on around here — for example, tonight we went to Chandler Travis’s annual Christmas Cavalcade charity show here on the Cape, which was […]
December 15, 2023 – 8:41 pm
I see that a jury has just ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay two Georgia election workers the stupendous sum of $148,000,000 for some things he said about them regarding the 2020 election. I will confess that I had known nothing whatsoever about this ongoing trial until hearing this news today, but I will say that […]
December 13, 2023 – 10:05 pm
I am very sorry to say that our longtime e-pal (and commenter) Bill Keezer has died. Our friend the Maverick Philosopher has written a remembrance of him, here. Rest in peace, Bill. It was a pleasure, and a gift, to have known you all these years.
December 12, 2023 – 8:12 pm
There’s a branch of science called “forensic entomology”. It’s used in criminal investigations to determine the time of death for corpses by examining them to see what species of insects have invaded the body. There are specific timelines for this, depending on where the body is found, and I understand that it provides a pretty […]
December 11, 2023 – 10:51 pm
A great deal has been going on in America and the world since I last updated this blog with any regularity, so there’s an awful lot of backlog for me to pick up and comment on. Let’s start with Ukraine. When I left off, the war in Ukraine was still, more or less, the Current […]
December 10, 2023 – 6:53 pm
I know I’ve said this before, but I really am going to get this blog going again now. (I may start with a post about what happened to me to make me lay off for as long as I did, or I may not; doing so might be just a bit too omphaloskeptic — and […]
October 7, 2023 – 3:26 pm
All eyes are on Israel today after Hamas launched a vicious assault from Gaza with widespread atrocities against civilians. This is one of those days where the tectonic plates suddenly slip, releasing destructive energy and reshaping the landscape. The scope and coordination of the operation make it clear that it has been carefully planned; it […]
October 2, 2023 – 11:42 pm
Published at City Journal today: a scathing article by my friend Jim Meigs on our shameful response to COVID-19, and how those in power at the highest levels of our public and private institutions (looking at you, Drs. Fauci and Collins) worked to suppress dissent and debate, interfere with legitimate inquiry into the disease’s origins, […]
September 30, 2023 – 2:13 pm
Yesterday’s deluge in New York City was a substantial and frightening event. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I lived for 40 years before selling up and moving out (thank goodness!), the flooding at the bottom of the moraine was up to the windows of stranded cars. As with every notable weather event these days, from […]
September 24, 2023 – 6:16 pm
Worm that jumps from rats to slugs to human brains has invaded Southeast US
September 12, 2023 – 12:16 am
Once again I must apologize for the spotty content here lately (aside from the item I popped up for discussion yesterday, which is really just me picking at a very old scab from a different direction). I’ve had enough of jeremiads about the state of our decline and misrule; it would be easy enough to […]
September 10, 2023 – 10:57 pm
(Spoiler: I can’t.) Found here.
August 24, 2023 – 12:27 pm
I hear there was some sort of political debate last night. How did it go?
August 23, 2023 – 5:20 pm
Although I no longer have to mix records to pay the bills, I still love to do what I do best, and so I enjoy doing a few projects a year in Hiram Hill Studio, the superbly equipped little mixing room I have here at home. This spring I mixed a five-song compositional-jazz EP for […]
August 22, 2023 – 6:13 pm
Here is a brief and almost impossibly concise rationalist apologia for Christian belief, given by the Oxford mathematician John Lennox. I’ll quote just two little gems from his speech. The first: “People are so desperate now to show that the universe created itself from nothing – which seems to me to be an immediate oxymoron: […]
August 19, 2023 – 11:36 am
Sorry — even though the kids and grandkids (who were here for more than a month) have gone, I still haven’t been writing much here at the blog. We’re still in that lazy summer mode, and have been fully occupied with, as they say, “touching grass” (and, in our case, sand and water as well). […]
Korean researchers are reporting that they have developed an easy-to-make room-temperature superconductor. If so — well, hang on to your hats, folks. Story here. Update, 8/10: Never mind.
Now it’s Israel’s turn to fall apart. The country is engulfed in a constitutional crisis between its old-school Bolheveist left (cheered on, of course, by the usual organs of the Left, both there and here) and those in the center and on the Right (who, according to our mass media, are “authoritarian” “extremists” who want […]
The always-thoughtful Richard Fernandez posted the following thread recently on Twitter: The catastrophic loss of institutional trust has made it imperative for the establishment to roll out virtual reality, not through goggles and special chairs, but by manipulating the entire information environment so that we live inside a lie. One way to detect that you […]
I learned with great sadness the other day that my good friend of more than thirty years, Anthony V. Bouza, died late last month in his adopted hometown of Minneapolis. He was 94. In his long career as a policeman Tony rose from his humble origins, and the lowest rank, to the penultimate pinnacle of […]
Yesterday U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty gave us a fine Independence Day gift: a preliminary injunction against the government’s censorship of social-media content. The case built upon the government’s coercion of Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to suppress commentary on COVID, the 2020 election, the Hunter Biden laptop, and other matters we should have […]
Happy Independence Day, everybody. Attending the 4th-of-July parade in a small New England town — lots of smiling happy families, and Old Glory on display everywhere — is a reminder that wherever things are headed in America, it ain’t over yet. Our daughter, her husband, and our three young grandsons — Liam, almost seven, Declan, […]
Steve Sailer recently gave his first public speech in a decade or so at VDare’s summer conference (which was held a couple of weeks ago at the castle they now own, in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia). Here it is:
Here’s the latest assessment on the situation in Ukraine, from ~finnem capital: Our latest analysis on the “counteroffensive”: Despite claims that the counteroffensive “has not begun,” in fact, after the Armed Forces of Ukraine were stalled by highly effective strikes on brigade level depots of fuel and munitions, not to mention troop concentrations behind the […]
A couple of days ago I posted some commentary on Michael Anton’s recent article on “national divorce”. Asylum magazine has now made available online Michael Anton’s response to an anonymous reader’s critique of his dialogue on the topic of “national divorce”. (You can read it here.) Mr. Anton seems irritated; his rejoinder is titled “How […]
I’ve just read an engaging pair of articles at Asylum magazine: an item by Michael Anton on the possibility of “national divorce”, in which he makes the case for breaking up the United States, and a rebuttal to Anton’s position by an anonymous author. (You can read Michael Anton’s original post here, and the response […]
What the hell’s going on in Russia? From the breathless coverage, you’d think it was a straight-up Wagner mutiny against MoD, with Prigozhin playing the role of Caesar, and already well across the Rubicon. But my sources (and I have some good ones) say that is way too pat. Yes, this is Russia, so sometimes […]
When societies are cohesive enough to be in good health, they argue about means; when they become dangerously disintegrated, they argue about ends.
My local paper, the Provincetown Independent, recently featured an item about the construction of a wetu in Truro, the village next door to my own here in the Outer Cape. What is a “wetu”? It’s a small wood-framed structure, “built to withstand Cape Cod’s elements”, that was the traditional dwelling of Cape Cod’s indigenous Wampanoag […]
When “anything goes”, everything does.
I ought to have noted the death, last Saturday, of the mathematician and terrorist Theodore “Unabomber” Kaczynski, who died last Saturday at the age of 81. From Wikipedia: He was a mathematics prodigy, but abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a primitive lifestyle. Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski murdered three individuals and injured […]
For years now I’ve been writing, in these pages, about a few points that I think are central to understanding the decline of American — and, more broadly, Western — society and culture. (I might as well have been yelling up a drainpipe, for all the good it’s done, but at least I’ve been trying.) […]
Sorry for the scanty content; I’m away on one of my musical retreats with the Shoal Survivors. Back this week, with plenty to talk about.
I wonder where this story is headed. (Commenter “JK”, call your office…)
Here’s a pithy little item about uncertainties in climate-change modeling.
Someone in an Urbit chat group just posted a link to an article I’d never seen about vote fraud in the 2020 election. The essay was written in December of that year on a blog called The Adventures of Shylock Holmes, and it is probably the best analysis of the question that I have yet […]
Here’s an interesting item about New York State’s election system. (I’m sure you will be as shocked as I was.)
Yesterday marked the third anniversary of the death of America’s holiest martyr, the sainted George Floyd. His joining of the choir invisible, while hospitalized after resisting arrest, ignited — as readers may recall! — a national convulsion of rioting and chaos that resulted in widespread social and physical devastation. I’m a day late, but I […]
One of the greatest Roman citizens of the late Republican era was the statesman, lawyer, and orator Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). A little while ago, wanting to dig a little deeper into the man’s life and work, I ordered a book called The Complete Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero (now out of print, […]
We live in an age dominated by scientistic materialism. Ever since the Enlightenment, the explosive growth in our scientific understanding of nature has rocked religion back on its heels by providing mechanistic and mathematical explanations for phenomena that had previously been wholly mysterious. The great paradigm by which we understood the world was slowly inverted; […]
Over the past week or two I’ve been kicking around the idea of “accelerationism” — that the best way forward for this rotting society is to give its most destructive factions free rein, so as to make the disease progress so rapidly, and to such extremes, that it either provokes, at last, an “immune response” […]
Our commenter mharko has given us a link to a brief video making an argument, from a Christian perspective, against accelerationism. The presenter, Jonathan Pageau, calls it “dancing with death”. Here it is: There is an interesting “as above, so below” theme running through the argument. The idea is twofold: first, that there is an […]
“Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter.” — Mencken
I’m at the point where I don’t see much use in banging on endlessly about how broken things are, and about what a decadent position we’ve reached in the great cycle of civilizations — but every now and then I suppose we need a little reminding, just to keep the fire going, and today at […]
If, like me, you’ve been worrying about the threat of runaway artificial intelligence, well now you can relax: the government is here to help. The formidable polymath Kamala Harris, fresh from her successful remediation of our troubles at the southern border, is now the Biden administration’s AI czar. What a relief! It’s good to know […]
Over at Bill Vallicella’s place, commenter “mharko” (who also has things to say over here from time to time), left such a fine comment on Bill’s accelerationism post that I am going to repost it here: I had a thought mulling these things over while pulling weeds and cultivating soil that I wanted to risk […]
A couple of weeks ago, after a brief trip back to New York City (where I’d lived for more than forty years, and where my wife and children grew up), I wrote: I’m glad to be back on my little dirt road in the woods — NYC this time around seemed, in its accelerating degeneracy, […]