November 24, 2016 – 12:57 pm
…to all of you. Given recent events, I’m sure it will be a contentious gathering in millions of homes across the country. That’s a shame, because we ought, if we really want, to be able to put social and political externalities aside for one day. Thanksgiving is a beautiful holiday, and a necessary idea. All […]
November 23, 2016 – 2:39 pm
Chess fans: there’s a world-championship match underway, here in New York, between the current king of the hill, Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, and the Russian challenger Sergey Karjakin. It’s a 12-game match, and it was all draws until yesterday’s Game 8, in which Mr. Karjakin achieved a dramatic win. Game 9 is now underway — a […]
November 22, 2016 – 8:00 pm
I’ve been reading Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. Written in 1948, it is a profoundly reactionary book, a revolt against the modern world. And when I say “modern”, I mean something more than you might imagine: Mr Weaver traces the cracking open of the abyss all the way back to William of Ockham and the […]
November 21, 2016 – 12:41 am
Sorry for the lack of substantial content here recently. I’ve felt it possible to have a bit of a breather after the election, and apparently the Muse has felt the same. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been much worth commenting about — the Left is writhing like a wounded serpent, but it is […]
November 18, 2016 – 1:00 pm
Today’s offering, courtesy of War on the Rocks: an essay on the study of history, from MIT’s Francis J. Gavin. Here.
November 16, 2016 – 1:39 pm
In the Daniel Greenfield essay we linked to in our previous post, Mr. Greenfield wrote: Like the ordinary men chipping away at the Berlin Wall, they tore down an unnatural thing that had towered over them. And as they watched it fall, they marveled at how weak and fragile it had always been. And how […]
November 16, 2016 – 1:05 pm
With a hat-tip to our friend Bill Keezer, we give you a rousing essay by Daniel Greenfield on what has just happened in America. It begins: This wasn’t an election. It was a revolution. It’s midnight in America. The day before fifty million Americans got up and stood in front of the great iron wheel […]
November 15, 2016 – 12:00 pm
I (and many others) have written often about the obvious religiosity of Progressivism, and about its being, quite plainly and transparently, a secular continuation and direct descendant of the Puritan “mission into the wilderness”. A particularly instructive aspect of this atheistic quest for holiness and salvation is the patently crypto-religious “climate-change” crusade. Early last year, […]
November 15, 2016 – 10:19 am
My liberal Jewish friends are on the fainting couch after the Trump victory. One said to my wife that as a Jew he now felt very afraid of what might be coming. I think they should relax. Here’s the economist David P. Goldman, whom you may know as the pseudonymous Asia Times columnist “Spengler”, and […]
November 14, 2016 – 1:19 pm
My old e-pal Kevin Kim and I have just had an unpleasant falling-out, the result of what I thought was a spirited, but not unfriendly, back-and-forth on Twitter last night about flag-burning, the power of symbols, and the persistent truths of human nature. The topic is an interesting and important one, and one that is […]
November 13, 2016 – 12:30 am
Following the Trump victory in last week’s election, many on the losing side have been calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. To do this would be to remove yet another Constitutional bulwark against raw democracy, which the Framers rightly saw as a buttered slide to tyranny (beginning with the tyranny of the majority). […]
November 11, 2016 – 1:27 pm
From Patrick Buchanan yesterday: a call to action in the wake of victory. Here. This “magnanimity” business is certainly attracting a lot of attention. (More on that later.) Meanwhile, see the discussion at the Maverick Philosopher, here.
November 11, 2016 – 11:50 am
It’s awfully (though darkly) amusing to hear, in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election, all the cries from the streets denouncing his supporters as ‘Fascists’. The word, of course, has nearly been drained of all meaning, and like ‘racist’, is now little more than a cudgel for the faithful to use against anyone from whom […]
November 10, 2016 – 11:53 pm
I’m trying to hang on to that “magnanimous” feeling tonight. It’s not going so well.
November 9, 2016 – 8:28 pm
Hillary Clinton supporters: let’s not hear a lot of whingeing, please, about how your gal “won the popular vote”. Leaving aside the most obvious response — that in this federal republic it is, by careful design, the States that elect the President, and not the mob — your argument depends upon the assumption of an […]
November 9, 2016 – 12:30 pm
With the election of Donald Trump, many of us (count me in!) are hoping that the Clintons will at last be held to account for their criminality. One thing stands in the way: the power of the President to grant pardons. “But wait,” I hear you saying, “can President Obama pardon the Clintons in advance […]
November 9, 2016 – 10:54 am
Well! Here we stand, on the morrow of our victory. In this glorious dawn, let us survey the battlefield. The Clintons are finished, done. Their political careers are over, and the parasitic criminal syndicates they run, which draw their life’s-blood by selling access to power, have been expelled by the host. Each of them has […]
November 9, 2016 – 2:52 am
Donald Trump has won the election. This means that Hillary Clinton will never be President. She will be lucky to stay out of prison. We did it.
November 8, 2016 – 6:05 pm
If you haven’t seen this clip, I think you’ll enjoy it.
November 8, 2016 – 1:51 pm
I have noted often in these pages that in the absence of a natural and organic social framework, order must be imposed artificially from the “top down”. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a 2014 post, The Death of Culture: To create the new metaculture, muticulturalism cannot not add cultures together, due to the […]
November 7, 2016 – 11:40 am
It should be obvious to all at this point that a very great part of our nation’s political sickness is due to the ever-increasing concentration of power in the hands of the Federal leviathan in Washington, at the expense of local government. (That this is, even at this late stage of the disease, not obvious […]
November 6, 2016 – 6:26 pm
Well, here’s a fine state of affairs: the lovely Nina has thrown out her back here in Wellfleet, MA, and so we can’t make the long ride back to New York — which is where we are registered to vote. I very much doubt that Hillary Clinton will take New York’s electoral votes by a […]
November 5, 2016 – 2:58 pm
From the Podesta emails: “With friends like that…” See also this. Three days to go, folks. Choose wisely.
November 2, 2016 – 2:17 pm
From the Wall Street Journal today: Places Most Unsettled by Rapid Demographic Change Are Drawn to Donald Trump ARCADIA, Wis. — Small towns in the Midwest have diversified more quickly than almost any part of the U.S. since the start of an immigration wave at the beginning of this century. The resulting cultural changes appear […]
November 2, 2016 – 2:01 pm
Here’s a nifty visualization of the Clinton, etc. emails.
November 2, 2016 – 11:24 am
From the Express: A migrant turf war erupted into violence on the streets of one of Paris’ trendiest neighbourhoods early this morning as asylum seekers beat each other to a pulp with wooden clubs. Story and video here. A defining characteristic of a living organism is the maintenance of its internal order, and of its […]
November 1, 2016 – 11:57 pm
A dramatic clip from NASA Heliophysics. Here.
November 1, 2016 – 8:13 pm
Here is an amusing item: a secret report, ostensibly leaked by the hacker cartel “Anonymous”, outlining the extent of the Clinton disadvantage in the upcoming election, together with some highly imaginative ways to prevent a Trump victory. Fake, of course – but as I said, amusing. What times we live in! Read it here.
November 1, 2016 – 3:46 pm
Today we have an essay for you, from Francis Spufford, on how two prominent atheists — Sam Harris and Barbara Ehrenreich — have approached their profoundest subjective experiences. It begins: To say, as people do from time to time, that science is the only source of meaning available to human beings is to consign large […]
November 1, 2016 – 2:14 pm
In a post from 2013, we quoted Will and Ariel Durant on the persistent delusion of Equality. The pursuit of an unattainable equality has been a reliable political implement throughout the modern history of the West, despite the natural impossibility of its achievement. Since Nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read […]
November 1, 2016 – 12:48 pm
With seven days to go until the election, the walls of Festung Clinton are beginning to collapse. The FBI disclosure by James Comey has the campaign furiously denouncing the same man they praised so highly back in July. Clinton mole Donna Brazile is out at CNN for helping Mrs. Clinton cheat on the debates. The […]
October 28, 2016 – 11:59 pm
I’ve been on the road all day — eight hours battling traffic in a fully loaded car with wife, daughter, grandson, and mother-in-law — and only made it to the stormy Outer Cape late this evening. We hadn’t listened to the news during the trip — the A.M. radio in our old Volvo stopped working […]
October 25, 2016 – 10:41 pm
Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has been effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for four years. He is accused of rape in Sweden, and the U.K. has spent millions surrounding the embassy in the hope of swooping him up and extraditing him. I won’t comment on the merits of the charges, other […]
October 25, 2016 – 6:00 pm
Hardly a day goes by now without new evidence of Clintonian corruption. The latest has to do with the FBI’s curiously handled investigation of the Clintons’ email server, and the FBI director’s audacious decision not to recommend charges in the case. As the Wall Street Journal reports here, after the FBI began its investigation of […]
October 25, 2016 – 4:28 pm
The choleric president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte (the one, in case you’ve forgotten, who called Barack Obama “a son of a whore”), recently announced his “separation” from the United States, and a pivot to China. Why? Well, it obviously makes sense, in an era of spastic and ineffective American foreign policy, for a small […]
October 24, 2016 – 7:28 pm
You’ve probably heard of “quantum computing”, but you may not know what it is. Here is a piece by Peter Diamandis, of Singularity University, that gives a helpful introduction to the key idea: that the bizarre “superposition” of a particle’s unmeasured quantum states makes it possible for n quantum bits (or “qubits”) to do the […]
October 22, 2016 – 9:51 am
Our daughter’s visiting from Austria with our infant grandson, and we are all out of town for a wedding this weekend. Back soon. Chat amongst yourselves, if you like.
October 19, 2016 – 8:31 pm
We’ve just had another intractable disagreement in our most recent comment-thread (with, of course, our resident Clintonian gadfly). The dispute is, in microcosm, the same that is pulling America, and indeed all of the West, to pieces. As I have said many times before, so much depends on axioms, and on what words mean. We […]
October 18, 2016 – 12:11 am
It’s been a busy few days, with little time for writing. But I won’t run off without offering a morsel to sustain you (and to reassure you that things are, indeed, as they seem).
October 14, 2016 – 12:36 am
Tonight’s reading assignment is an outstanding essay, Weaving the Basket of Deplorables, recently posted at the site The Dissenting Sociologist. Its epopseudonymous author (sorry, but I felt the need for a name that’s both an eponym and a pseudonym), whom I shall call DS, has done a masterful job of distilling and clarifying some core […]
October 12, 2016 – 12:29 pm
This is where we’ve got to.
October 11, 2016 – 9:41 pm
Bil Vallicella comments here on the selectivity of Democrat outrage over Donald Trump’s hot-mike remarks. The gist: The insight is that the Left uses our decency, which they don’t believe in, against us, mendaciously feigning moral outrage at what doesn’t outrage them at all. (Cf. Saul Alinsky’s RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to […]
October 9, 2016 – 8:54 pm
Tonight we have the second debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Before watching you might like to read Diplomad’s thoughts, which are generally the same as my own. In response to anyone who is on the fainting couch over the latest peek into Donald Trump’s character, and can’t imagine how anyone could vote for […]
October 7, 2016 – 4:35 pm
From this morning’s NightWatch: Russia-US-Syria: Russian relations with the US over Syria continue to worsen. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said on 6 October, “Let me remind the so-called US strategists that the air cover for the Russian military bases in Hmeimim and Tartus is provided by S-400 and S-300 surface-to-air missile […]
October 5, 2016 – 5:31 pm
Just now I put up a post linking to a Washington Post article about simulated violence in football. “Not parody”, I said, and mocked its author. I’ve changed my mind, and taken down the post. The article is parody — well done, and richly deserved. A good example of Poe’s Law, either way.
October 4, 2016 – 5:33 pm
In yesterday’s post, I wrote: It’s foolish to romanticize the past, to yearn for a Golden Age that in many ways was never so golden at all, and anyway can never return. But it is equally foolish ”” indeed, far more so ”” to revile and reject and discard it all, to imagine that in […]
October 3, 2016 – 1:41 pm
Late this morning our previous post attracted a sudden flurry of distasteful comments. I don’t usually moderate comments — life is too short — so I’ve just removed all comments from that post and shut it down. I’ve generally been very fortunate in this regard. I flirt with serious heresy here sometimes, and so far […]
October 2, 2016 – 2:26 pm
When the Rachel Dolezal story popped up in June of 2015 (if you’re fortunate enough to have forgotten this one, she was a “black” activist who turned out, embarrassingly, not to be black at all), I wrote a little post about real versus fictional privilege. An excerpt: Once upon a time, people of mixed race […]
September 30, 2016 – 1:56 pm
There’s a lively discussion on the “alt-right” underway over at The Maverick Philosopher, if you’d like to have a look.
September 29, 2016 – 12:15 pm
Given the, shall we say, somewhat imperfect blessing that mass Muslim settlement in the West has turned out to be, there’s been some ruction in certain “deplorable” quarters over the President’s unilateral action to admit unvettable Middle Eastern individuals to the U.S. in large and increasing numbers. “On what authority?“, some folks wonder. Well, with […]