January 26, 2016 – 7:55 pm
Here’s another clarifying and informative piece by Sean Davis on firearms: 14 Things Everyone Should Understand About Guns. (I say “another” above because we’ve linked to Mr. Davis’s articles, such as this one, before.)
January 23, 2016 – 11:22 pm
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes wrote the following about why humans fight: ”˜So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second for safety; and the third for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters […]
January 22, 2016 – 10:20 pm
My boy Nick just sent me a link to a YouTube channel that you might find interesting. (I did.) Here.
January 22, 2016 – 8:00 pm
I have to say: it would be hard to imagine a livelier political season, or one more fitting for these times. Over on the left, Hillary Clinton is watching it all slip away all over again — this time to a pallid, septuagenarian Marxist from Vermont. (I’ve had many wonderful blessings in my life, but […]
January 20, 2016 – 9:47 pm
I’m still way too fuzzy to write, so just a couple of links: First, an amusing little allegory posted at Gates of Vienna (with a h/t to Bill Keezer; I’ve been offline a lot this week, and hadn’t visited GoV in a few days). Second, I think a recent podcast by John D. on the […]
January 19, 2016 – 3:19 pm
You just might have to watch this more than once.
January 18, 2016 – 6:00 pm
The big story over the past week has been the news from Iran: the ransoming of our hostages, the fat payoff for the nuclear deal (but I repeat myself), and the humiliating capture by Iran of riverine patrol boats allegedly adrift in the Gulf. Normally I’d really be digging in on this one, but it’s […]
January 15, 2016 – 2:25 pm
Just got a package from Amazon containing a CD by the rock band Clutch. I have no idea who sent it to me, but I do get the occasional item in the mail from readers (mostly books). Anyway, thanks, whoever you are. This is not exactly the sort of thing I usually listen to, but […]
January 11, 2016 – 12:27 pm
OK, off for knee-revision surgery at 4:30. Back in harness before too long, I expect. At the very least I’ll post something, just as “proof of life”, as soon as I am able. If not, carry on! The barbarians are at the gates. Update, January 13th: I’m back home, but completely knackered. It was a […]
January 11, 2016 – 12:12 pm
I was shocked and saddened to read this morning that David Bowie has died of cancer at age 69. He was one of the greatest artists of my age. He touched nothing that he did not adorn. I consider myself enormously fortunate to have had a slight personal acquaintance with Mr. Bowie. (I met him […]
January 10, 2016 – 1:35 pm
I don’t know if you’ve been following this crazy Sean-Penn-El-Chapo story, but what an incredible dope Sean Penn is: The Man Who Got El Chapo Arrested. He will now have every neck-tattooed La Santa Muerte gang-banger south of the Rio Grande hunting him down until the end of his days. I reckon that at this […]
January 10, 2016 – 12:46 pm
In a post a few months ago, while developing a metaphor involving collapsing stars, I commented on the vulnerabilities of the load-bearing structures that support a civilization’s weight: Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially ‘memetic’ — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared […]
January 10, 2016 – 1:04 am
Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella has taken on the question, raised by a disciplinary action at Wheaton College, of whether Christians and Muslims worship the “same God”. I’m not a religious believer myself, but over the past decade or so the naive atheism of my earlier years has withered away to a sympathetic agnosticism, […]
January 8, 2016 – 5:51 pm
Sorry for another grab-bag post, but even with all that’s going on in the U.S. and abroad I just don’t have the “bandwidth” to do much writing at the moment. (It may not be until I’ve recovered a bit from Monday’s surgery that things will get back to normal around here.) I’m also so fatigued […]
January 5, 2016 – 12:45 am
Sorry about the quiet spell here, readers. Our lovely daughter (newly betrothed!) has been visiting us from Vienna over the “hols”, and it’s been good to disconnect from the wider world for a couple of weeks. I’m sorry to say, also, that another hiatus is coming up soon. Some of you may remember that I […]
December 31, 2015 – 7:16 pm
Here comes 2016. Buckle up! Thanks again to all of you for reading and commenting.
December 30, 2015 – 2:34 pm
This intercalary week is always a good time for a change of pace, and with all that’s been going on in the local physical world, I’ve hardly glanced at the computer for the past few days. (It’s been nice.) Even better, I’ve managed to pay almost no attention at all to the news. Finding myself […]
December 27, 2015 – 10:42 am
On a little holiday break with family. Back soon. Also, sorry about the outage yesterday (if any of you noticed).
December 24, 2015 – 11:33 pm
It being Christmas Eve, earlier this evening I found myself humming the “Christmastime Is Here” song from the old Charlie Brown Christmas special. (The show originally aired in 1965, when I was nine, and Vince Guaraldi’s beautiful score has stayed with me ever since.) The tune got me thinking about the show itself, which is […]
December 23, 2015 – 11:59 pm
I’ve written before about the transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom. His work is concerned with the long-term prospects of the human race, with particular interest in the future of artificial intelligence, and its perils. In these pages we’ve mentioned his suggestion that we might already be living in a computer simulation (see here and here), as […]
December 22, 2015 – 11:59 am
Here is “The Khaleesi“, a proposed skyscraper for West 57th Street in Manhattan. A tower for our times, I think.
December 22, 2015 – 10:49 am
Headline at Salon today: White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it Salon is not a “fringe” publication. (Would that it were.) Apparently it has no qualms about declaring race war. As Saul Alinsky said in his Rule 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.’ Comparisons […]
December 21, 2015 – 11:20 pm
Today we learned that six U.S. soldiers were killed by a Taliban suicide bomber in Afghanistan. In today’s NightWatch newsletter, analyst John McCreary wrote: Afghanistan: The deputy governor of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan said that the Taliban seized the police headquarters in Sangin District center, with fighting continuing. Deputy governor Mohammad Jan Rasoulyar warned […]
December 20, 2015 – 5:21 pm
Tomorrow we come to the solstice again, where the great wheel of the seasons pauses, for an instant, at top dead center. I went for a walk at sunset this evening. It was very still. I’ll be sixty in the spring. How strange it is to be a line, in a circular world.
December 19, 2015 – 3:36 pm
With a hat-tip to our friend Jeffery Hodges, here is a reminder that if Islam is a “religion of peace”, it is only the peace of submission, of surrender, of captivity.
December 19, 2015 – 2:40 pm
Writing for the Gatestone Institute, Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist describes the situation in her homeland — which for most of my lifetime was the holotype and exemplar of the advanced, peacable modern Western nation — as it sinks into darkness and disorder, thanks to its mass importation of wholly alien, mostly Muslim, immigrants. Swedish citizens, […]
December 18, 2015 – 7:33 pm
Self-driving cars, like 3-D printing, are a promising technology with quite a way to go before achieving their transformative potential. (See our post on one of the ethical questions they raise, here.) An item published yesterday at Bloomberg Business describes a hard problem the people designing them must face: how fast should the cars go? […]
December 18, 2015 – 12:29 am
It’s amazing how hard it is to proofread your own stuff. I just saw a glaring typo in the first line of a recent post; it sat there for more than a day before I spotted it. (If you didn’t see it, too late; it’s fixed.) It ruined the whole flow of the line, and […]
December 18, 2015 – 12:15 am
I know I’ve mentioned it before, but this stuff is going to be big. Call your broker.
December 16, 2015 – 11:43 pm
During last night’s debate Carly Fiorina, whose chances are roughly equal for the Republican nomination and Prva HNL Player of the Year, suggested that we ought to make her President because she’s a woman. Let’s leave aside the reaction were a male candidate to try such a thing, and try to get the gist of […]
December 15, 2015 – 6:56 pm
Here’s an interesting item: a novel gait identified in Russian officials. Learn more here.
December 15, 2015 – 12:42 pm
Done with the weekend’s sessions, but still swamped with work. All I’ve managed to post over the past few days has been a few comments over at Maverick Philosopher, where a discussion of “tribalism” continues, here. Back soon.
December 11, 2015 – 11:49 pm
Recording sessions all weekend. Talk amongst yourselves.
December 9, 2015 – 10:59 pm
Yesterday the United States Senate held a hearing on the magnitude of human impact on climate change. Giving testimony were some Actual Climate Scientists. I would like very much for you to read and carefully digest their testimony. I will excerpt some of it here, in what will be a longish post — but please, […]
December 9, 2015 – 7:56 pm
From the Long War Journal: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released a new video featuring a former Guantanamo detainee, Ibrahim Qosi, who is also known as Sheikh Khubayb al Sudani. In July 2010, Qosi plead guilty to charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism before a military commission. His plea was part […]
December 8, 2015 – 1:18 pm
With a hat tip to our reader Henry, here’s a good piece from Thomas Sowell on Barack Obama’s recent speech from the Oval Office. Excerpt (my emphasis): The first responsibility of any government is to protect the people already in the country. Even in this age of an entitlement mentality, no one in a foreign […]
December 6, 2015 – 12:18 am
The New York Times today did something it had not done since the Harding administration: it published an editorial on the front page. It did so not because it had a rational argument to make, or a useful policy to advance — it had neither of those things. Why, then, would the Times make such […]
December 4, 2015 – 10:29 pm
In a recent post I remarked that, with bitterly opposing forces tearing at our rotting social framework, every public shock — in this case, the San Bernardino jihad assault — is a hammer-blow that “strains the joints and widens the cracks”. “Each time,” I remarked in a subsequent comment, “we split apart a little more.” […]
December 4, 2015 – 5:49 pm
Jim Geraghty continues to stay on top of the San Bernardino attack. In today’s newsletter he points out that the late Tashfeen Malik, the distaff member of the duo, had been passed a Homeland Security anti-terrorist screening during her application for a K-1 visa. (We haven’t heard any word yet on whether Ms. Malik was […]
December 3, 2015 – 1:04 pm
Jim Geraghty of NRO (yes, you folks in the NRx mutaween, I’m linking to NRO again) posted a good newsletter this morning about the San Bernardino shootings. (In case you’ve just emerged from a coma, or a two-day shift in a zinc mine, there was a mass shooting by two or more Muslims in California […]
December 2, 2015 – 9:34 pm
I’m working late tonight, and haven’t time to write. So here’s yet another placeholder for free association, idle chat, bibulous logorrhea, and confessions of the heart. (Or, perhaps, for the introduction of serious topics or questions.) You have the floor.
December 1, 2015 – 8:52 pm
When I was a boy, there was a mawkish and immensely popular television program called “Queen For A Day“. Each episode featured a panel of miserable women, who vied for the prize by telling a plangent tale of woe. (The poor things wept, sobbed, and wailed as they pleaded for money, appliances, etc.; it’s easy […]
November 30, 2015 – 6:52 pm
Here are two items from yesterday’s Washington Post email digest. They both mention, in passing, important things. First is this: Failure to stop Paris attacks reveals fatal flaws at heart of European security We read: Poor information-sharing among intelligence agencies, a threadbare system for tracking suspects across open borders and an unmanageably long list of […]
November 29, 2015 – 12:02 am
I’ve got nothing tonight — I’m weary of arguing, and the Muse is silent — so for now, an update to an old item from the early days of this blog. The original post was about a Victorian-era bust of Washington Irving that stands in Prospect Park. Have a look. Here’s another example of the […]
November 26, 2015 – 2:07 pm
To all of you. Among the many blessings I have to be thankful for is to have you all as readers and commenters.
November 25, 2015 – 3:29 pm
Wow, this is great: the Democratic National Committee has put out a list of officially approved talking points for denouncing thoughtcrime at Thanksgiving dinner. The site is called “Your Republican Uncle“. Leaving aside what fun this will make Thanksgiving for everyone, and the DNC’s presumption that Democrats young enough to have living uncles can’t defend […]
November 24, 2015 – 2:34 pm
Quite the firestorm of liberal outrage over that mass shooting in New Orleans, eh? (At a playground, no less.) We’ve hardly heard about anything else since it happened.
November 24, 2015 – 10:50 am
Making the rounds yesterday was a stern item from Patrick Buchanan on terrorism and the modern West. An excerpt: What has happened to a West that once ruled the world? By any measure ”” military, economic, scientific ”” the Islamic State, compared to the West, is a joke. What the Islamists do have, however, is […]