I am deeply saddened to hear of the death of the great Sly Stone, who left this world yesterday at the age of 82. If you know his music, and what it was to our generation, no words are necessary. If you don’t, no words will suffice.
Most of you out here on the civilized Right will be familiar with the author, columnist, and podcaster John Derbyshire, a British expat who celebrated his 80th birthday last week, and with whom I am happy to say I have had a slight personal acquaintance for many years (from a small monthly dinner club we […]
Away for a couple days of recording with the band. Back soon. P.S. Here’s a tweet from last November:
Yesterday, June 4th, would have been my mother’s 90th birthday. Miss you, Mom.
It’s June 1st, which means it’s the beginning of Pride Month. Again. As wonderful as that is, I can’t help thinking that it’s a little unfair that the other Deadly Sins don’t each get a month of their own as well. (Just think what Gluttony Month, for example, would do for the restaurant business.)
I am saddened to hear of the death of jazz drummer Al Foster, who died on May 28th at the age of 82. He was one of the all-time greats. I only did a few sessions with Al, so I can’t say I really knew him well, but my impression of him was that he […]
Here’s something worth noting: Harrison Ruffin Tyler, who was the grandson of America’s 10th president, John Tyler, has died in Virginia at the age of 98. Harrison’s grandfather John was born in 1790, and ascended to the presidency in 1841 upon the death, after only 31 days in office, of William Henry Harrison (who, I […]
Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella has posted an essay examining some of the most difficult questions we are about to face as artificial intelligence advances, in particular the question of whether the AI systems we develop (or which, as may happen in the very near future, develop themselves) will qualify for moral and legal […]
Here’s a brief item about college English majors trying to read and comprehend Dickens. (Spoiler: they can’t.) Here’s an example of what they were trying to read: LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had […]
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Latin expression “de mortuis nil nisi bonum”, which exhorts us not to speak ill of the dead. Given the news we’ve just had about Joe Biden (carefully timed, of course, to pre-empt both the forthcoming book by the astonishingly hypocritical Jake Tapper and the damning release of the […]
I’ve been reading a lot of Chesterton lately. Here’s a treat for you, from chapter 3 of his book Heretics: I remember a long time ago a sensible sub-editor coming up to me with a book in his hand, called “Mr. Smith,” or “The Smith Family,” or some such thing. He said, “Well, you won’t […]
This weekend, the Trump administration produced: an American hostage released by Hamas; a provisional trade agreement with China that sent the Dow soaring over 1,000 points today; renewed negotiations between Russian and Ukraine; a cease-fire agreement between India and Pakistan; and an executive order that promises to reduce prescription-drug prices. Today, Mr. Trump fielded questions […]
Here’s a story to keep an eye on: Those of you who follow current events (and I can hardly blame you if you don’t) will know that President Trump has been leaning on state governments to stop allowing men to compete in women’s sports. The state of Maine has been particularly recalcitrant: the governor, Janet […]
Over at The Orthosphere, Kristor has been putting Grok through its paces, most recently by asking it to write an essay in Kristor’s own style. The result is impressive — really quite extraordinarily so, especially for a technology that is still in its infancy, and accelerating exponentially. Kristor is “spooked”. I think we all should […]
This is getting some attention today, and rightly so: conservative commentator and gadfly Jack Posobiec attended a Jamie Raskin rally and shouted out a couple of pointed questions, and Raskin sicced a bunch of union goons on Posobiec to assault and beat him. Tim Pool has video here. This Jamie Raskin critter is one of […]
April 28, 2025 – 11:56 am
An editorial in my local paper laments, as an “assault on truth”, the cancellation of federal funding for research into “disinformation”. We read: The National Science Foundation last week canceled hundreds of grants to researchers studying the spread of disinformation online. This was the explanation: “NSF will not support research with the goal of combating […]
I haven’t had a chance yet to resume the examination of Christian Wüthrich’s philosophical paper on presentism and special relativity that I began in this recent post, but the discussion continues in a new post over at Bill Vallicella’s place, here. This is one of those topics that resemble digging in sand: the hole gets […]
April 27, 2025 – 12:49 pm
C.S. Lewis once wrote: “We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to […]
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, recently posted an item critiquing a defense of “presentism” by the Canadian philosopher John Bigelow. Philosophical presentism is the view that only presently existing things have any sort of existence at all. It stands in contrast to “eternalism”, which maintains that all points in time — past, present, and future […]
I’ve been continuing to test-drive the AI known as Grok. Today I thought I’d ask it about consciousness. Me: Are you conscious? I’m Grok 3, built by xAI. I don’t have consciousness like humans do—no subjective experience or self-awareness. I process inputs, generate outputs, and mimic understanding using complex patterns, but it’s all computation, not […]
April 19, 2025 – 10:14 am
Sorry it’s been slow again here; we’ve been traveling for a few days. Back shortly, and meanwhile: happy Easter to you all.
April 14, 2025 – 12:25 pm
Today’s top story: Patriarchy hoists giggling all-female “crew” briefly into space in giant flying penis. Here.
As seems to happen with appalling regularity on April 13th, I find myself another year older (69, if you can believe it!) — and, quite astonishingly, still on the sunny side of the sod. As always: natal salutations to Guy Fawkes, Thomas Jefferson, F.W. Woolworth, James Ensor, Butch Cassidy, Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, Robert Watson-Watt, […]
The patriotic immigration-reform foundation VDare has for years now fallen under a withering “lawfare” attack by New York State’s maleficent Attorney General, Letitia James — who has never accused VDare of any crime, but despises the organization merely for its allegiances and opinions. Seeking to destroy VDare and its principals, Peter and Lydia Brimelow, and […]
On Saturday night I attended a performance, by our extraordinary Cape Symphony, of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture, Violin Concerto, and Symphony #5. Today I discovered 82-year-old Frank Watkinson: Is there any greater gift than music? Love, perhaps. But maybe that’s just a distinction without a difference.
This week should be a wild one, folks. It’s hard to find the perfect metaphor for what’s happening in the nation and the world right now, but it’s somewhere between radical battlefield surgery and an exorcism (probably much closer to the latter, and perhaps even literally so). The old world order is not going to […]
Happy birthday to the great Eric Clapton, who turned 80 today. I still recall when he burst on the scene, so long ago. It seems like an entirely different age of the Universe. What a player! Thank you, sir, for all that wonderful music.
March 29, 2025 – 10:15 pm
I’ve written here often about civil war; I even went so far as to publish an article about it at American Greatness a few years ago. We flatter ourselves, here in the West, that in our “progress” toward Utopia we’ve moved past such atavisms of barbarity, but the truth is that human nature never changes, […]
Last December the Shoal Survivors (the musical collective I’ve been a part of for many years now) got together for a day to record a few tunes, and I’m finally getting around to doing the mixes. This one’s an old favorite by the late, great Mose Allison. The personnel: our music director Carl Sturken, guitar; […]
A few days ago I posted an item about Tomas Bogardus’s philosophical paper attacking naturalism as an unacceptable foundation for scientific explanation. Seeking a professional critique, I wrote my friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, to ask what he thought of the argument, and he has now weighed in, over at his place. Discussion ensues […]
Nature abhors a vacuum, and human nature is no exception. Here.
Today in town I saw a Tesla drive by with one of these on the back: I suppose there’s always a tendency for people to resent their betters, but here’s a man who: a) builds the world’s best electric cars; b) is leading the way at the frontiers of manned space exploration; c) is developing […]
After watching President Trump’s lively and combative speech last night, I continue to be amazed (and delighted) at the sudden and complete reversal of the power balance in American politics; it is the greatest example I have seen in my lifetime of what the political theorist Vilfredo Pareto called the “circulation of elites“. On second […]
February 28, 2025 – 6:20 pm
We’ve finally returned from our six weeks in Hong Kong, after a 30-hour day of travel: a bus from Discovery Bay to the airport, a flight to Tokyo, a long flight to Boston, and a two-hour drive from Logan Airport back to Wellfleet. We’re pretty well whipped, but it’s good to be home. As always.
February 25, 2025 – 2:47 am
I’ve just read a brief and remarkably persuasive philosophical paper by Tomas Bogardus, a professor of philosophy at Pepperdine University. In it, he argues that, if we are to have confidence in the explanatory power of science (and he believes we should), then the naturalistic worldview must be false. Here is the abstract: I begin […]
February 21, 2025 – 4:01 am
I’ve been playing with Grok 3 since it came out, and I’ve just had a very odd experience. I started by asking it what it thought were the deepest mysteries confronting a thoughtful and intelligent person, and it named the obvious ones: consciousness, ultimate origins, etc. I mentioned that I had reached a “tipping point” […]
February 20, 2025 – 12:39 am
A few days ago I wrote a brief item suggesting that the intellectual engine behind the sea-change now underway in American foreign policy is not Donald Trump or Marco Rubio (certainly not Marco Rubio!), but is, rather, the new Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, Michael Anton. (I’ll add that I think he’s […]
February 19, 2025 – 2:17 am
We are still in Hong Kong for another week. Sadly, the lovely Nina came down hard with some sort of viral affliction about eight days or so ago — it was acute enough at first that we ended up in the ER for most of the 11th — and has been laid up in bed, […]
February 17, 2025 – 1:12 am
Looking at the rapidly changing posture America is taking on the world stage, it occurs to me that all of this new strategic diplomacy would be consistent with the idea that the Claremont Institute’s Michael Anton, who is the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning in the new administration, has command of Trump’s ear and […]
February 16, 2025 – 12:38 am
When your computer has been running too long, and has become unusable — massively infected by malware, too many rogue applications consuming and leaking resources — what do you do? At the very least, you reboot to “safe mode”, running the bare minimum of necessary system processes, and cautiously bring programs back online one at […]
February 14, 2025 – 4:14 am
America was not founded to be a tutelary power, patronizing and policing the world, going abroad in every generation seeking monsters to destroy. It was founded to make a free and secure home for its people, and to be a friend to nations that shared its interests. Nothing more.
February 13, 2025 – 4:56 am
It’s been a while since I’ve added an entry to this series of posts about moving toward theism. (The last time was just over a year ago.) I’m prompted to write again by having just read an essay by Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger describing a progression closely similar, in many ways, to my own: How […]
February 6, 2025 – 7:37 am
Over in England, the U.K. Independent has picked up the story of a slow-motion disaster taking place about a mile from where I live. Our living-room window looks west toward Cape Cod Bay from our piney hilltop, and from it we can see the house this article describes. (Nina and I used to call this […]
February 5, 2025 – 10:02 am
Of all the exhilarating reforms taking place under the new administration, perhaps the best of all is the rooting-out of rot and waste and corruption by the new Department Of Government Efficiency, headed up by Elon Musk. It has already struck a mighty blow by shutting down the tumorous bureaucratic excrescence known as the United […]
February 3, 2025 – 10:58 pm
With his swift intimidation of both Canada and Mexico in these last hours and days by raising a credible threat of tariffs, President Trump just gave us a dazzling display of sensible, power-backed American statesmanship. This hemisphere is our natural sphere of influence, and we should not be afraid to influence it. What we are […]
February 2, 2025 – 11:17 pm
From a recent thread on X, here’s Nick Land (@Xenocosmography) on tariffs: The Tariffs ledger, positive and negative, is far more complicated than established opinion (or nationalist enthusiasm) is allowing for. For the US specifically, the highest priority positive factor is this: Losing core strategic industrial capacity through international division of labor is a geopolitically […]
January 31, 2025 – 1:17 am
As I write I am sitting on the upper deck of a small cruise-ship in Ha Long Bay, near Hai Phong, Vietnam. We came to the Far East to visit our daughter and her family in Hong Kong, and decided to take a little side-trip to Vietnam. We spent a couple of nights in Hanoi, […]
January 26, 2025 – 1:31 am
I’ll confess that’s it’s strange to be in Hong Kong while so much is going on back home (all of it happening each day in what is, for us, the middle of the night). It’s delightful to be able to spend so much time with our daughter and our three wee grandsons (and our son-in-law, […]
January 20, 2025 – 10:12 pm
We’re in Hong Kong now, thirteen hours ahead of Eastern time, so I was only able to check in on events a little after the fact — but wow, what a day for America. Pardons for J6 political prisoners! Sealing the border! Withdrawals from the Paris boondoggle, and from the WHO! Federal hiring freeze! An […]
January 16, 2025 – 1:30 pm
The lovely Nina and I are on our way to Hong Kong to visit our daughter, her husband, and our grandsons. I’ll be back on once we get settled (been a bit slow lately, I realize; we’ve been swamped getting ready). Big day on Monday. Some better times ahead for America and the West, I […]