January 10, 2025 – 11:47 am
I haven’t had much time for writing in these last few days, but, like the rest of you I’m sure, my attention has been riveted to the conflagrations that have utterly destroyed parts of Los Angeles, and are still, in many places, raging uncontrolled. I won’t make a detailed repetition here of the accusations being […]
January 7, 2025 – 2:21 pm
I note with sadness the death of Peter Yarrow, who was known to everyone of my generation as part of the enormously popular folk-music trio Peter, Paul and Mary. I mixed two Peter, Paul and Mary albums — Flowers and Stones (1986), and No Easy Walk To Freedom (1990) — and I remember Peter as […]
January 1, 2025 – 11:11 am
To all of you. Thanks as always for visiting and commenting. (The blog’s 20 years old now!) 2025 is going to be an interesting year. Some change is on the way, I think.
December 30, 2024 – 7:39 pm
Bernstein on Beethoven: Mencken: It is almost a literal fact that there is no trace of cheapness in the whole body of his music. He is never sweet and romantic; he never sheds conventional tears; he never strikes orthodox attitudes. In his lightest moods there is the immense and inescapable dignity of ancient prophets. He […]
December 27, 2024 – 6:18 pm
The social-media site formerly known as Twitter was aflame, over the past couple of days, with a squabble among various factions of the new Right about the importation, by H-1B visas, of tech workers from other countries. One one side were Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who argue that in order for the U.S. to […]
December 24, 2024 – 10:30 pm
Merry Christmas to you all!
December 20, 2024 – 5:38 pm
By now you will have heard about the murderous attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, by a Saudi doctor who had been living in the country for years. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: allowing mass Muslim immigration is the stupidest and most irreversibly self-destructive thing that any Western nation […]
December 16, 2024 – 12:38 pm
To argue productively requires some agreement on fundamentals. All theorems must rest on axioms. Oscar Wilde famously said “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” To harangue others about first principles can never be anything but tedious. (It will certainly never be productive, because arguments, to […]
December 13, 2024 – 10:44 am
Do you feel life flowing back into America’s veins? What we are seeing everywhere, both abroad and at home, is the relief of a world that has suffered terribly over the past four years from from the vacuum created by a feeble United States. This doesn’t mean that the road just ahead isn’t rocky and […]
December 10, 2024 – 11:19 pm
“There are three kinds of people: those who see; those who see when they are shown; and those who cannot see.” – Leonardo
December 10, 2024 – 6:49 pm
From time to time I get email alerts from Quora, a website where users post questions and others answer them. Occasionally the answers are of excellent quality. Here’s an example of a good one. The question, which vexed me all my adult life (though less so lately), was this: Does mathematics actually exist in the […]
December 9, 2024 – 7:16 pm
I was happily surprised to hear this afternoon that Daniel Penny has been acquitted of charges related to the death of Jordan Neely, the homeless madman whom Penny bravely subdued as Neely was menacing riders on the F train in New York last year. It is a sign of our degraded times that Penny was […]
December 6, 2024 – 5:38 pm
It’s official: the most common name for baby boys born in England and Wales is now Muhammad. The fertility rate among Muslims in Blighty is close to 3 children per woman, while the rate for actual Brits is below 2. (Replacement-level fertility is 2.1 children per woman.) For centuries — and most recently, in the […]
December 3, 2024 – 5:50 pm
Anybody who’s been paying attention will have noticed the increasing normalization of what used to be called “prostitution”. In these sophisticated times we are expected to regard it simply as “sex work”, a career like any other, whose practitioners we should consider every bit as respectable as secretaries, waitresses, cashiers, cab drivers, hotel clerks, or […]
December 2, 2024 – 6:35 pm
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has just released its 557-page final report. The whole thing is here, but virologist Robert Malone has provided a summary at his Substack website. Hint: it’s bad. This is a story not only of massive government incompetence — although there was plenty of that — but also […]
November 30, 2024 – 6:29 pm
How many of you think we are going to get all the way to January 20th without some kind of radically disruptive “black swan” event? (The obvious candidate right now seems to be war with Russia — which our Imperial Court and its European vassals seem hell-bent on bringing about — but there are all […]
November 27, 2024 – 11:47 am
Enjoy the holiday, everybody. We have much to be thankful for this year.
November 25, 2024 – 11:10 am
Former General Mike Flynn — who knows a thing or two about what the entrenched Washington oligarchy is capable of, and willing to do — has posted a threat-assessment of the risks we face between now and Inauguration Day. Read it here.
November 23, 2024 – 3:50 pm
Following on my previous — and alarmist — post about AI, I think I should add some further remarks about what may or may not be possible. Back in 2014 I wrote a post, as part of a linked series on free will and determinism, about the idea of what the English scientist Stephen Wolfram […]
November 21, 2024 – 5:18 pm
Here is a link to a detailed survey of the current status of AI research, including a clear-eyed assessment of what we should expect in the near future. I won’t lie: I find this extremely alarming. The linked report makes it very clear that we are just a few years away from creating entities that […]
November 20, 2024 – 2:59 pm
RFK on Ukraine: Robert F. Kennedy Jr EXPOSES the TRUTH about Ukraine in 3 minutes. Make the World Safe again pic.twitter.com/T8Vpeyw2Io — Marjorie Taylor Greene Press Release (Parody) (@MTGrepp) November 20, 2024
November 19, 2024 – 1:22 pm
In the runup to the election I said how worried I was about rising conflict between the two warring American social and political factions once the winner had been determined. I thought it likely, barring massive fraud, that Trump would win, and I thought that if that happened the seething Left would stage massive chimpouts […]
November 17, 2024 – 11:57 am
Elon Musk has made no secret, over the past several years, of his ambition to colonize Mars (and if anyone can pull it off, he can). With that in mind, here’s something remarkable that I just learned today: Those of you of a “certain age” will remember the name Werner von Braun — a former […]
November 16, 2024 – 4:54 pm
In a comment to our previous post, our friend “Whitewall” observed that in the wake of the recent election, the Dems “currently overcome with a case of raging hormones, like before … just worse now.” Indeed they are. On the bright side, though, we can be thankful for X: I’m crying pic.twitter.com/JtG3ldaumh — Not Jerome […]
November 16, 2024 – 10:42 am
We’re back from our eight-day visit to Rome. Glad to see the U.S. still standing. Did I miss anything?
November 8, 2024 – 10:44 am
Dear Democrats, Four years ago, you took the keys to the family car. Did you drive it with care and respect? No. You got high as a kite and took it for a crazy, reckless joyride, without any consideration for the damage you were causing. From bumper to bumper – border security, immigration, foreign policy, […]
November 5, 2024 – 5:46 pm
Tomorrow, just as the reverberations of today’s election begin to ripple around the globe, the lovely Nina and I are heading off to the Eternal City for a long-postponed visit. I might find time to post something or other, but if not, I should be back in harness here in about ten days. (As for […]
November 3, 2024 – 6:41 pm
By now you’ve probably heard about the sad end of P’Nut the Squirrel, who, during his brief time on Earth, lived in happy and playful companionship with a fellow named Mark Longo (who had rescued the wee rodent after its mother had been squashed by a car). As their relationship blossomed, Mr. Longo had made […]
October 31, 2024 – 12:04 pm
I have been presenting for years, in these pages, a charge against the Enlightenment: namely that it enshrined, with religious fervor, a radical skepticism that acted as a kind of “universal acid” that no tradition or social order could contain. In 2022, for example, I referred to: …the radical skepsis of the Enlightenment, which simultaneously […]
October 30, 2024 – 2:06 pm
“As a child, learn good manners, As a young man, control the passions, In middle age, be just, In old age, give good advice, Then die, without regret.” – Inscription found in the Bactrian city of Ai-Khanoum in Afghanistan. Attributed to Clearchus of Soli, a student of Aristotle
October 30, 2024 – 1:04 pm
Over the past few years, prominent members of our ruling Democrat oligarchy have declared those of us not aligned with “progressivism” to be racists, sexists, white supremacists, bitter clingers to guns and religion, deplorables, irredeemables, Nazis, and Fascists. Last night, we learned, also, that our sitting President thinks of us as “garbage”. That’s at least […]
October 27, 2024 – 1:20 pm
The problem with the way our era looks at history is that all it wants is to barge in and speak to the manager.
October 26, 2024 – 4:40 pm
The following is a repost of an essay I published at American Greatness in October 2020. Four years on, I think it holds up fairly well, but its closing remarks about the Constitution need, I’m afraid, some further qualifications, which I have added at the bottom of the post. Not a day goes by lately […]
October 25, 2024 – 5:14 pm
I’ve just read an outstanding book: America’s Rise And Fall Among Nations: Lessons In Statecraft From John Quincy Adams, by the late Angelo Codevilla. I’ll have more to say about it later, but here’s the gist: Prior to the takeover of U.S. foreign policy by Progressive world-savers, American statecraft followed the wise course plotted by […]
October 24, 2024 – 9:50 pm
Eric Hoffer: A minority is in a precarious position, however protected it be by law or force. The frustration engendered by the unavoidable sense of insecurity is less intense in a minority intent on preserving its identity than in one bent upon dissolving in and blending with the majority. A minority which preserves its identity […]
October 20, 2024 – 12:08 am
In a pair of posts at Substack and his own website, Bill Vallicella revisits a conversation he and I had a couple of years ago about the shrinkage of circles of moral inclusion in periods of deep political strife. I had commented on this passage of his: …haven’t the barbarians forfeited their (normative) humanity to […]
October 18, 2024 – 6:28 pm
Yesterday I sat at a dinner event with some members of our ruling overclass, including a wealthy and powerful septuagenarian Washington lawyer and her husband, a D.C.-area doctor and hospital administrator. (I will not name names, but we are talking about the very highest levels of swamp creatures here. If I had been carrying an […]
October 14, 2024 – 5:12 pm
There was a time when human capabilities formed a continuous landscape. Rising from the plain were such towering prominences such as language, art, reason, literature, musical composition, science, mathematics, and so on. Now, however, artificial intelligence is like a rising tide, inundating the terrain. Even now, with AI only in its infancy, the lower elevations […]
October 13, 2024 – 12:00 pm
This is what we’re up against, folks. (You can almost smell the sulfur.) Raddatz: "The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes… A handful!"@JDVance: "Do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem and not Kamala Harris' open border?" ? […]
October 11, 2024 – 7:38 pm
I’ve just finished an excellent book by Auron MacIntyre, an up-and-coming voice on the Right. It’s called The Total State, and it is well worth your time. MacIntyre is emerging as an influential political analyst and public intellectual, with a job at The Blaze and a regular output of podcasts and videos. (His YouTube channel […]
October 3, 2024 – 12:56 pm
A quick review of my comment policy: WordPress, the software I use, provides a comment-moderation feature that blocks all incoming comments until they are approved by me. I’ve never switched it on; I’ve been fortunate, over the decades, never to have felt the need. After 6,766 posts, and 28,888 comments, I’ve only ever removed a […]
October 2, 2024 – 4:09 pm
Last weekend we went to Chicago for a wedding. We flew round-trip from Boston, on American Airlines. Our departing flight was scheduled for 2:13 p.m. on Friday. We checked a bag and went to the gate, but just before we were to board, we were told that our aircraft, a Boeing 737, was having some […]
September 26, 2024 – 7:01 pm
By now you have probably heard that Eric Adams, the glabrous black ex-cop who is (for now) Mayor of New York, is under multiple indictments for various acts of political corruption involving bribery and foreign influence, the culmination of a probe that has over the past couple of months swept up a number of his […]
September 23, 2024 – 12:16 am
As are all of our days. (Woody Allen once asked why they should be numbered, and not lettered.) Today, though, as it happens — on September 23rd, 2024 — the number of my days is a nice round one: exactly 25,000. It’s been a bit of a slog at times, and I’m well out of […]
September 19, 2024 – 1:33 pm
Here are the results of a recent survey conducted by Scott Rasmussen’s Napolitan News Service: Seventeen percent (17%) of voters believe America would have been better off if former President Trump had been killed in last week’s attempted assassination. That figure includes 28% of Democrats who say that America would have been better off if […]
September 15, 2024 – 8:19 pm
Another day, another insane violent leftist bent on partisan violence. (I refer, of course, to today’s foiled attempt to assassinate Donald Trump — the second in two months.) Say what you like about Carl Schmitt, but the man had a keen eye for the truths of human nature. I’ve posted this quote before, but it […]
September 13, 2024 – 1:44 pm
Steve Sailer’s latest over at Substack is a look at why Haiti is so stubbornly dysfunctional. Steve mentions in passing a thing that is surely an important factor, rarely mentioned over here in discussions of U.S. immigration policy: when a place falls below comfortable levels of safety and prosperity, those who are able to — […]
September 11, 2024 – 11:19 am
I have taken down yesterday’s item — a thing I’ve only ever done once or twice in the twenty-year history of this blog — about the effect of a rapid influx of Haitians to the small town of Springfield, Ohio. Although I stand by the gist of the post, which was that mass immigration from […]