By now you have all heard of the DOJ’s effort to force Apple to unlock a phone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terror attack. Here again we have an example of technology advancing far too quickly for our sluggish political institutions to keep up. Codes and ciphers are as old […]
March 13, 2016 – 11:35 am
The Washington Post asks: Trump has lit a fire. Can it be contained? This isn’t arson. It is the inevitable combustion of an oil-soaked pyre exposed to a continuous shower of sparks. The Post should be asking: who built that pyre? It’s been long in the making, and its existence is due neither to accident […]
March 12, 2016 – 10:49 am
I was remiss not to have noted here the death of the great George Martin, who left us, earlier this week, at the age of 90. He was a visionary artist, and by all accounts a gentleman. The Beatles would not have been what they were without him. Now he is joined in death by […]
March 11, 2016 – 11:04 pm
With a hat-tip to our e-pal hbd*chick (whose blog you should be reading), here’s an article called The Bermuda Triangle of Science. It’s about a dangerous place where careers go to vanish.
Nick Steves has posted this week’s reactionary roundup. He gave ‘Best of the Week’ to this essay by Mark Christensen, and it seems a good choice. In the essay, Mr. Christensen quotes Mencius Moldbug: All schools of libertarianism, whether Rothbardian or Randian or (nearly-stillborn) Nozickian, rest on the idea of limited government. Note the intrinsic […]
Questions for mind-body dualists: 1) What features of mental life, if any, are instantiated in the physical body? Memory? Intelligence? Learned cognitive skills? To put this another way, what aspects of mind besides pure conscious awareness require a metaphysical explanation? 2) If any aspects of mind beyond pure awareness have do a non-physical basis, then […]
There’s a good article by Mark Yuray, over at Social Matter, on making a career out of secular holiness. A longish excerpt: More than 1 million illegal Middle Eastern and African migrants entered Germany in 2015, with the invitation of the German government. This year, hundreds of thousands have already arrived and a 1-2 million […]
Hot Air reports on a little wrinkle in the Iran deal. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Islamic Republic might even be about to walk out on the thing altogether. Well, on the bright side, at least they got all that money they’ve been wanting for so long before the whole thing fell apart. […]
Feminist glaciology. Not a parody. Here.
Gates of Vienna has posted two video clips taken from a discussion panel at the latest CPAC conference. The subject was the fate of Europe. (At this point it might well be a post-mortem; Europe has already gone far beyond the “tipping point”, and is now, barring a full-on revolt by its indigenous peoples, nothing […]
The evidence that most human traits are highly heritable — not just obvious physical traits, mind you, but cognitive and behavioral qualities and dispositions as well — is accumulating rapidly, and will soon be overwhelming. (In scientific terms it already is, but what is about to be overwhelmed is the nurturist and culturist dogma that […]
A recent post by our friend Bill Vallicella exposes the philosophical ineptitude of militant atheists such as, in this case, Richard Dawkins. Here his target is the hidden axiom scientists (and I use the term in the sense of “those who practice scientism”) must rely on in order to deny the possible role of a […]
I’ve lived in the same brownstone building in Park Slope, Brooklyn, since March of 1982. (Geological notes about the area here.) When the lovely Nina and I first moved here, it was a sketchy neighborhood, having fallen into serious decline during the city’s general depression of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The neighborhood’s gracious architecture was […]
You’ve heard all about Donald Trump’s shocking notion to secure our borders, I’m sure. Have you heard about the recent chicanery by the Justice Department regarding voter-ID laws in four American states? In brief, here’s what happened: the good people of Kansas, Georgia, Arizona, and Alabama, exercising their states’ right under the Constitution, decided to […]
Here is something I had not heard about until today: it appears that water infused with tiny bubbles (and I mean really tiny, with diameters near the wavelength of visible light), has many useful properties. My first glimpse of this was here. I’m curious to learn more. Here’s a remarkable statement (my emphasis): Some studies […]
February 29, 2016 – 1:45 pm
In a 2013 post, Culture and Metaculture, I quoted a lengthy passage from the late Leszek Kolakowski’s Modernity on Endless Trial, in which he explains the way radical multiculturalism causes what I will call a kind of historical “stenosis”. As more cultures are added to the mix, all of which must be given equal weight, […]
February 28, 2016 – 10:29 pm
Our previous post argued that because the world is now changing faster than it ever has, with even the pace of change itself accelerating sharply, any conservative or reactionary ideology that seeks simply to roll back the clock is doomed to fail. What I said was that any hope for an effective New Right depended […]
February 27, 2016 – 11:47 pm
Conservatives, and especially reactionaries, are often criticized as grumpy old geezers, yearning for a bygone world that is never coming back, and that was never, in fact, nearly as nice as they’d like to think it was. This is a fair point. It’s only older folks who have the perspective to see what’s really changed, […]
February 26, 2016 – 3:26 pm
Recently we noted a major scientific event: the detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO experiment. The other day, the physicist and cosmologist Brian Greene visited Stephen Colbert (yes, I’m linking to Stephen Colbert) to give an explanation and demonstration of the experiment. Watch it here. The big payoff: the actual “sound” of two black […]
February 25, 2016 – 12:26 am
I had occasion today to pay a visit to one of the websites on our sidebar: The Fallacy Files. It’s one-stop shopping for examples of logical fallacies; I hadn’t visited for a while, and I’m glad to see it’s still in business. Even more comprehensive than our political comment-threads, I think.
February 24, 2016 – 12:45 am
The results are still coming in as I write, but it seems Donald Trump has scored another crushing victory, this time in Nevada. It is becoming increasingly apparent that his campaign is, if anything, gaining momentum, and that he will likely be the one to take the field against whichever champion the Democrats put up […]
February 22, 2016 – 10:33 pm
I want to thank everybody once again who emailed me in response to my previous post, and to all who commented. I had begun to have very serious doubts about whether I was really doing anything useful or helpful here, or just shouting up a drainpipe, and the many responses I received were enormously encouraging. […]
February 19, 2016 – 6:24 pm
Our commenter ‘Musey’, in response to our previous post about Special Relativity, wrote from Australia to tell me her husband Martin said I’d “explained that very well”. Readers, if you look at my early archives you’ll see that I used to explain a lot of things in here that had nothing at all to do […]
February 19, 2016 – 12:25 am
What we will explain is why, for objects moving uniformly in a straight line, time runs slower. We’ll use no mathematical symbols, and won’t even need any pictures! OK, here goes: Before we begin, you have to accept two facts. The first is that if you are in uniform motion, all the laws of physics […]
February 17, 2016 – 8:48 pm
His column begins: Amid the petty bickering, loud rhetoric and sordid attack ads in this year’s primary election campaigns, the death of a giant — Justice Antonin Scalia — suddenly overshadows all of that. The vacancy created on the Supreme Court makes painfully clear the huge stakes involved when we choose a President of the […]
February 16, 2016 – 8:35 pm
Time to look away, for a moment, from the gloomy downhill parade of current events. Instead, here’s a look at one of the most difficult systems of Chinese martial arts, as performed by Grandmaster Chan Sau Chung. (The quality of the video is poor, but the quality of the kung fu is exquisite.) I have […]
February 15, 2016 – 5:37 pm
Jonah Goldberg (with whom I agree about some things and not about others, as I do with pretty much everyone else on whatever we might very broadly call “the Right”) has posted some thoughtful remarks about the death of Antonin Scalia. You can read them here. This in particular stood out: The division of blame […]
February 13, 2016 – 11:49 pm
What does Antonin Scalia’s death mean for the action of the Court? In the broadest terms, there are four scenarios; three of which are unaffected, at least in purely numerical terms: The Supreme Court reviews lower-court decisions. Let us call decisions that would be upheld by conservative justices (Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and, generally speaking, Roberts) […]
February 13, 2016 – 9:31 pm
It was with the profoundest shock and sorrow that I learned, early this evening, of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. This is devastating news. I was an enormous admirer of this great jurist — not only as an irreplaceable defender of the Constitution, but as writer, a philosopher, a scholar, a humorist, a raconteur, […]
February 12, 2016 – 10:25 pm
Here’s your frisson du jour.
February 11, 2016 – 7:57 pm
I’ve been using the hosting service Bluehost for eleven years now, and until recently I’ve been thrilled with their service, and have recommended them often to other bloggers. Lately, though, they’ve been scaling up, and downtime’s increased. Worse, their tech support, which used to be prompt and helpful, has been all but unreachable lately. We’ve […]
February 11, 2016 – 3:27 pm
It’s a big day in physics: researchers using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) have confirmed the existence and propagation of ripples in spacetime caused by the movement of massive objects. The observation of such waves is a posthumous triumph for Albert Einstein, who first predicted their existence a century ago this year. While I’m […]
February 10, 2016 – 5:16 pm
With the presidential campaign now at cruising speed, I thought it might be helpful to offer some readings and reflections on the nature of democracy itself: what it really is, what it isn’t, and how it really works. Really, if you want to understand this contraption, what you ought to read is a book that […]
February 9, 2016 – 7:35 pm
Here’s a heartening item: Supreme Court freezes Obama plan to limit carbon emissions We read: The court granted a stay request from more than two dozen states, utilities and coal miners who said the Environmental Protection Agency was overstepping its powers… The stay means that questions about the legality of the program will remain after […]
February 9, 2016 – 7:16 pm
About three years ago I wrote a brief item about Toxoplasma gondii, which is a cat-borne parasite that causes behavioral aberrations in mice — and appears to do the same in humans too. The article I originally linked to is here, and today I’ll add a link to another article, here. At the time, however, […]
February 9, 2016 – 12:13 am
“Evidence is fact that discriminates between one theory and another. Facts do not “speak for themselves.’ They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.” — Thomas Sowell, A Conflict Of Visions
February 5, 2016 – 8:16 pm
The other day our President, Barack Hussein Obama, took time out of his busy schedule to visit a Baltimore mosque. There he delivered an obsequious panegyric about the glorious role of Islam in America’s history. (If there is a major, or even mid-tier, religion that has in fact played a lesser role in America’s founding, […]
February 5, 2016 – 5:46 pm
Snow in Wellfleet today. The view out our front door this afternoon:
February 4, 2016 – 10:41 pm
I’ve just read the testimony that Border Patrol agent Brandon Judd gave to the House Judiciary committee today. Some longish excerpts: In the late 1990s as a young Border Patrol Agent, I witnessed first-hand how adept these criminal cartels were at exploiting our policies. While I was working in the Buttercup Dunes in the remote […]
February 3, 2016 – 4:13 pm
Bob Elliott, the surviving member of the great comedy duo Bob & Ray, has died. He was 92. Nobody much younger than I am will even know who these people were. It’s the curse of the old that only they know, as the great mill of history grinds the past into dust, what has been […]
February 3, 2016 – 2:24 pm
Among the most entertaining accounts on Twitter over the past year or so has been the reactionary heckler known to his audience as “The Duck” (@jokeocracy). With Twitter apparently getting ready to crack down on dissident-right accounts, the Duck decided to go out in blazing style, and spent a recent Sunday trolling mainstream, in particular […]
February 2, 2016 – 3:10 pm
From CNN: The Department of Homeland Security said Monday that the acting administrator for the Transportation Security Administration would be reassigned, following a report that airport screeners failed to detect explosives and weapons in nearly every test that an undercover team conducted at dozens of airports. According to a report based on an internal investigation, […]
February 1, 2016 – 9:04 pm
Sorry — the little grey cells are resting tonight, so all I have is a few small items. ‣ The State Department recently announced that it would not be releasing some of the emails taken from the private, unsecured server Hillary Clinton kept in her bathroom in Chappaqua, because they are too secret. Former […]
January 31, 2016 – 11:55 pm
Readers will be aware that I’m recovering, slowly, from having my left knee replaced. (It’ll be three weeks tomorrow since the surgery.) The operation was actually a redo of the original job, last March, which turned out to have been botched. Total knee replacement is major surgery — it inflicts a grievous wound, and the […]
January 31, 2016 – 7:33 pm
We’ve written often (for example, here) about the unbroken ideological and doctrinal thread connecting the Puritanism of the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the modern, secular religion of the Left. The “mission into the wilderness” continues unabated, its outward forms unaltered. All that changes is the temporal object of the mission: the MacGuffin varies from picture […]
January 30, 2016 – 4:30 pm
I meant to comment on this when it happened a few days ago: Rome’s nude statues covered up ahead of Rouhani visit In further concession to Iranian president, official dinner with Italian PM does not include wine on the menu What a craven, flabby, neutered thing our civilization has become. This is what ACID syndrome […]
January 28, 2016 – 4:37 pm
It’s been almost a year — it was February 28th, 2015 — since I predicted that Hillary Clinton would not be the Democratic nominee. (Readers can find the historic vaticination — upon which I immediately staked a bottle of whisky in a wager with our commenter ‘The One Eyed Man’ — in the comment-thread here.) […]
January 27, 2016 – 2:39 pm
Here’s an extended meditation on that modern Sisyphus, Wile E. Coyote, and on the genius of his creator, Chuck Jones.