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 […]
September 28, 2016 – 2:46 pm
It’s September, and the lovely fall weather is here. Feeling refreshed and optimistic? Well, snap out of it. Need some help with that? This jeremiad, by the distinguished scholar Angelo Codevilla, ought to do the trick.
September 28, 2016 – 1:20 pm
If you are able to achieve the detachment necessary to view politics as a spectator sport (no easy trick, when the existential stakes are so high), then one of its most entertaining features, for those of us up here in the cheap seats, is what has come to be called “narrative collapse”. It affects the […]
September 27, 2016 – 1:45 pm
Here’s a fine animation showing the expansions and contractions of religions and empires over the past two thousand years.
September 26, 2016 – 11:44 pm
I actually watched the debate tonight (my plans for a far more enjoyable evening, which included a body-cavity search by the TSA and stepping on a nail, having fallen through at the last moment). I’d give it to the team of Lester Holt and Hillary Clinton. They worked well together, and Mr. Trump was on […]
September 25, 2016 – 11:47 am
Just a couple of links to get the ball rolling on this busy Sunday: first, a pungent jeremaid by Lewis Amselem, a.k.a. Diplomad (nothing we haven’t all been saying, really, but a fine summary of where matters stand), and then John Schindler with a retrospective look at the F.B.I’s role in Mrs. Clinton’s email affair.
September 23, 2016 – 10:56 pm
The idea of an Article V convention — the remedy the Framers gave the States to rein in an out-of-control Federal government by amending the Constitution without the participation of Congress — is slowly gaining support, despite the fact that most people, were you to ask them about it, still don’t even know that such […]
September 22, 2016 – 11:35 am
Adam Walinsky, a career Democrat, has written a lucid and persuasive essay to explain why he will be voting for Donald Trump. It begins: I was a Democrat all my life. I came to Washington to serve President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. When the president was murdered and his brother struck off […]
September 21, 2016 – 4:28 pm
Tomorrow will be the first day of autumn, my favorite season. Here’s a musing on the topic from ten years ago.
September 21, 2016 – 4:24 pm
I do enjoy a good polemic every now and then, and Kevin D. Williamson has “the knack”. Here he is today on IRS commisioner John Koskinen: Every day this crime-enabling, justice-obstructing, lying, craven, tinpot totalitarian walks around in the sunshine is a day we should be ashamed to be Americans. More here.
September 21, 2016 – 12:03 pm
We’ve mentioned the mysterious “Antikythera Mechanism” before (see here and here). Now divers have found a human skeleton, probably containing intact DNA, at the shipwreck site. Story here. (See also this story, suggesting that the device was already old when it was lost at sea.)
September 21, 2016 – 11:37 am
Here’s NightWatch‘s John McCreary on the Syrian aid-convoy incident: Syria-UN: The UN suspended aid convoys in Syria after the air attacks against the aid convoy on the 19th. “As an immediate security measure, other convoy movements in Syria have been suspended for the time being, pending further assessment of the security situation,’ a UN spokesman […]
September 20, 2016 – 12:41 pm
Milo Yiannopoulos explains. (He’s happy to do so, because he knows the Left won’t take his advice.) An excerpt: As well as jokes, there’s something else that establishment elites need to stop demonizing as racism: national pride. During the 2015 election in England, a left-wing candidate for parliament called people who fly the English flag […]
September 19, 2016 – 1:16 pm
With a hat-tip to our e-pal Bill Keezer, here’s an old piece by the late Christopher Hitchens, in which he recounts his filing of an affidavit swearing that the Clintons had sought to smear and discredit Monica Lewinski. It’s a fine example of Hitchens’ style — how I miss him! — and is well worth […]
September 18, 2016 – 10:33 pm
The American author Lionel Shriver recently gave a keynote speech at a writers festival in Brisbane, Australia. Rather than give the talk she had advertised, she decided to say a few words about the victimological specialty known as “cultural appropriation”. She denounced and anathematized it root and branch, and said, very clearly and correctly, that […]
September 16, 2016 – 1:45 pm
I’m a bit of a stickler for language. One common locution that’s been bothering me, ever since I started noticing it a few years ago, is the habit of news reporters to use the word “after” when they mean “when”. (Now that I’ve pointed it out, you’ll start noticing it too, and you’ll see how […]
September 14, 2016 – 10:38 pm
Well, I’m back from Star Island. The musical weekend was a blast, even though a few of us — for example, our keyboard whiz Ray — had last-minute conflicts that kept them from coming. We carried on undaunted, nevertheless, and had a splendid time. I must say that after having had, what with our Vienna […]
September 8, 2016 – 9:09 pm
Last year about this time I spent a delightful weekend on Star Island, a rocky speck off the cost of New Hampshire, and this weekend I’m doing it again. Why leave the charming seaside village of Wellfleet, and all the comforts of home, for spartan accommodations on a remote, craggy islet? It’s because I have […]
September 7, 2016 – 2:41 pm
One thing that should be clear to all in this election cycle: either Hillary Clinton is going to win this election, or Donald Trump is. The chance of any other outcome is effectively zero. If you are any sort of conservative — and if you believe, as I and millions of others do, that the […]
September 5, 2016 – 3:20 pm
Here’s something interesting: Hyperbaton is when you put words in an odd order, which is very, very difficult to do in English. Given that almost everything else in the English language is slapdash, happy-go-lucky, care-may-the-Devil, word order is surprisingly strict. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a “green […]
September 1, 2016 – 6:28 pm
Our reader Robert, a.k.a. Whitewall, posted in the comment-thread to our previous post a link to an editorial piece from The New Criterion (by way of Instapundit; the original is here). It deserves promotion from comment to post. The piece, which is presumably by Roger Kimball, the editor of New Criterion, uses a beautiful phrase […]
August 30, 2016 – 5:27 pm
Here are some trenchant remarks on the Alternative Right from Paul Gottfried, the man who coined the name. I have spent the evening with Professor Gottfried on a couple of occasions, and I can assure you that he is the farthest thing imaginable from the sort of neo-Nazi hothead that the mainstream media would have […]
August 29, 2016 – 5:45 pm
We’ve been hearing for while — including in these pages — that even as gun sales rise and rise and rise, there are actually fewer households in which someone owns a firearm. Not so, according to Pew (via Breitbart): A Pew Research Center poll released on August 26 shows that 44 percent of all households […]
August 26, 2016 – 1:04 pm
The summer break is winding down, and soon it will be time to get back to whatever it is I ought to be doing here. Meanwhile, though, our friend Bill Vallicella is already back in harness, and has put up two brief items touching on the plight of the desaparecida Molly Norris, who was driven […]
August 24, 2016 – 9:56 pm
Well! It looks as if Hillary Clinton is, with a big speech tomorrow evening, about to put the “Alt-Right” front and center in national politics (and into the minds of millions of Americans who previously had no inkling of it). I wonder what she imagines is going to happen. Pass the popcorn!
August 22, 2016 – 1:17 pm
From NightWatch: Syria-Syria Kurds-US: On 19 August, the Syrian air force conducted the first air attacks and Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militiamen in Hasakah Governate. Ground fighting intensified late on the 19th when Kurdish YPG fighters battled Syrian forces. “The clashes continue in areas inside the city today (20 August). There were military […]
August 16, 2016 – 5:08 pm
With the increasingly documented genetic reality of human biodiversity washing over the gunwales of Utopian universalism, there’s a word on the rise in liberal circles: essentialism. It’s used to make a retreat from discredited Lewontinian denial of genetic differences, without really ceding any ideological ground. In effect it says: “OK, OK — we’ll admit that […]
August 13, 2016 – 12:48 pm
We’re still on summer break for a few more weeks, and I’ve been paying little attention to the news. One thing that did catch my eye, though, was the emerging story of the Obama administration’s $400-million ransom payment to Iran a while back — paid in a great pile of foreign currency, and brought in […]
Over the transom today from our commenter Henry: an article about the failure of nature to deliver the heavy particles that physicists have been predicting for decades. One possible explanation: perhaps the world is simply odder than we can imagine.
Well, it’s nice to be back home, except for the fact that this grotesque presidential campaign is still going on. Donald Trump finds new ways every day to let the Democrats and the press distract the nation’s attention from the oozing, Lovecraftian horror that is Hillary Clinton; today, apparently, was no exception. How easily she […]
August 6, 2016 – 10:00 am
We’re on our way back to the States — between flights at the moment, in Dusseldorf. I’ve been almost completely out of touch, but even over here the coming U.S. election seems to be attracting a lot of attention. With that in mind, then, here are a couple of interesting links that have come my […]
We’re still in Vienna; heading back to the States on Saturday. What a calm and orderly place this is! It may be otherwise in corners of the city we haven’t visited, but so far as I can tell Vienna, and the other little Austrian towns we’ve been to, are everything you’d imagine: polite, law-abiding, efficient, […]
Now that all the fuss is over, it’s time to relax a little. The lovely Nina and I will be here in the heart of Europe for another week or so, and may do a little touring around. After that is August, when this blog traditionally goes mostly silent for a summer break. I’m sure […]
With his mother, our daughter Chloe, about an hour ago. A very happy day for us all.
We’re still in Austria (and will be until the 6th). It’s hot over here, but from what I gather it’s much worse back home. It’s nice to be here — Vienna is, as everyone knows, a gracious and beautiful city. One of the first things you notice, though, is how unhurried it feels. In New […]
The lovely Nina and I are off to Vienna this evening, where our daughter is due to give birth to our first grandson. Things may be a little quiet around here until we get back, in early August — though I expect I’ll put up a post or two from over there. If my tone […]
Over the transom today from our reader Henry is this piece by Thomas Sowell. The points it makes are utterly simple and obvious — and utterly at odds not only with our prevailing social orthodoxy, but with the stated policies of the Obama administration, and even the recent jurisprudence of our Supreme Court. How long […]
I’m off to Vienna later this week; it seems timely. After the Turks were driven back from the heart of Europe, progressive modernism gradually expanded its range. The Sublime Porte’s senescence deepened — the shrinking Ottoman Empire began to be known as “the sick man of Europe” — and finally the unthinkable happened: the last […]
The coup in Turkey has failed. Naturally, Mr. Erdogan is consolidating his power, and is rounding up his enemies. The fog is still thick, though. Was it a false-flag job? Erdogan is blaming the exiled dawa jihadist Fethullah GÁ¼len — who, from his compound in Pennsylvania, leads a large and subversive faction in Turkey. Some […]
By now you have heard that there has been a coup attempt in Turkey. The situation is still chaotic, but it appears that in Istanbul at least, the coup is failing, with soldiers surrendering their weapons to police. President Erdogan was reported earlier to have left the country, but now we hear he is in […]
Yet another jihadi massacre in France last night. Eighty-four are dead as I write; the number will rise. What can I say that I haven’t said before? Not to worry, though — the Huffington Post has the answer: Yup, we’ve got ’em right where we want ’em. Some prayers, a hashtag or two, lots […]
Some science items for today: With race front and center in every news cycle, it’s good to be prepared for encounters with those who insist that race is “only a social construct” (many of whom also spend all their waking hours totting up accounts of how one race is doing compared to another). Readers of […]