Great. Eric Holder in a dress. Way to go, GOP-controlled Senate. Really, these guys should just go home.
April 23, 2015 – 12:36 pm
In the comment thread to a post published back in February, I made a little wager with our erstwhile liberal gadfly ‘The One Eyed Man’ that Hillary Clinton would not only not be the next President of the United States, but that she would not even end up being the Democratic nominee. The stakes: a […]
Here’s an interesting idea from Charles Murray: a way for the beleaguered citizen to stand up to a bullying Leviathan.
It’s Earth Day, so President Obama took a Boeing 747*, helicopters, and an SUV to the Florida Everglades, there to scold us about global warming. We learned that the Everglades are threatened — which indeed they are, by aquifer depletion, land subsidence, residential and agricultural overdevelopment, and invasive species. The President, however, restricted his focus […]
Seventy years ago, our military forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, on their way to the liberation of Europe. That was then. This is now.
In preparing the previous post, I ran across a blog I’d never seen before — a neoreactionary organ called Let A Thousand Nations Bloom. (I had originally been about to use Mao’s line, “Let a thousand flowers bloom!”) I rather liked the look of the website, so I gave it a link at the bottom […]
Here is some splendid clarity from John Derbyshire on the oft-maligned idea of nationalism: I’m a nationalist: which is to say, I believe in the idea of a nation as the political expression of a particular people, of mostly-common broad ancestry, speaking a common language and cleaving to a common culture within well-defended borders. Here’s […]
April 17, 2015 – 10:52 pm
John Stuart Mill: “It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, […]
April 17, 2015 – 10:35 am
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at Hillary’s spontaneous Chipotle stopover.
April 17, 2015 – 10:27 am
Charles Murray comments on a recent Washington Post article on IQ. Here.
This should worry you: The Shaming of Cheryl Rios Because the world has got so small, everything collides with everything else. Attention from all parts of this flattened, shrunken system can swivel to focus on any node at any time — and attention can exalt or destroy. In this case, it is like stereotactic radiosurgery: […]
Recently the Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau criticized Charlie Hebdo’s anti-Islamic cartoons. He accused the magazine of using satire to “punch down” — that is, of abusing one’s own position of safety and privilege in order to harass the “disenfranchised”. The blogger and columnist Daniel Greenfield has offered a tart response. Excerpt: The left has adopted […]
April 14, 2015 – 11:16 am
Here’s a little logic puzzle that’s been making the rounds. There’s a ‘spoiler’ video at the bottom of the page, if you’re stumped.
April 12, 2015 – 10:01 pm
Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy today. Everybody knew it was coming. The anticipatory mood was like waiting for a sagging roof to collapse. I have to say that I think the Democrats ought to be just a little worried to have all their eggs in this basket. Mrs. Clinton has an awful lot of liabilities […]
April 11, 2015 – 11:41 am
Charles Cooke of NRO catches the New York Times in a tendentious lie. Here. P.S. The Times has since updated its post.
I’m not happy about this. Not at all.
Following on those recently linked posts by Victor Davis Hanson and Heather Mac Donald, which limned in dispiriting detail the total collapse of the rule of law as applied to illegal immigrants and the crimes, petty and otherwise, that they commit (see, for example, the corrosive vandalism and petty theft described by Mr. Hanson), we […]
Victor Davis Hanson is one of our pre-eminent gloominaries. This isn’t surprising, given that he is a scholar of history, and that his family has been farming California’s Central valley for generations. Both of these things give him an objective baseline against which to measure our civilization’s, and in particular California’s, accelerating decline and decay. […]
The latest edition of Hillsdale College’s newsletter Imprimis features a strong essay by Heather Mac Donald on the nation’s descent into lawlessness with regard to immigration policy. A great deal of the blame belongs to the Obama administration — which has all but completely abandoned deportation as a response to illegal entry, even by repeat […]
When I was young, I used to read a lot of science fiction. I remember the Hugo Awards being the Oscars of the genre, and it generally seemed to me that they were given to deserving recipients — Dune, the Foundation series, Stranger in a Strange Land, Ringworld, Rendezvous With Rama, Stand on Zanzibar, Neuromancer, […]
Singapore’s long-time leader Lee Kuan Yew died a couple of weeks ago. His death brought a surprising outpouring of praise from all quarters: even Barack Obama praised the man, and John Kerry, in a characteristically infelicitous phrase, said Mr. Lee ‘exuded wisdom’. You should find this acclamation puzzling, because Mr. Lee was the polar opposite […]
One of the more spirited characters in our politically-oriented online media is the blogger who goes by the name ‘Ace of Spades’. Here’s a fine rant by Ace on this shameful Indiana business. (Warning: intemperate language.)
Here’s a significant item: a new study from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology has found that that anthropogenic aerosols have been causing much less cooling than prior models had assumed. This means that these aerosols are doing less to offset putative warming caused by carbon dioxide, which means in turn that temperature sensitivity to […]
This ruction about Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act is deplorable for many reasons — not least of which is the fact that Indiana’s law is nothing unusual, and resembles very closely similar laws in other states (including, for example, Connecticut, whose governor has ostentatiously called for a state-spending boycott of Indiana, and Illinois, where young […]
I’m much improved this week. I’m still full of powerful narcotics, but I’m getting around a lot better, and my “little grey cells” are starting to come back to life. It’s hard to know where to pick up the thread of current and recent events; an awful lot has been going on. There’s the Iran […]
March 25, 2015 – 12:09 pm
Sorry to have been down so long… this post-operative experience is everything they warned me it would be, and then some. The deep pain, and the meds one has to take to manage it, are so disorienting and exhausting that any sort of serious thinking, reading, or writing are just impossible. (Even typing is affected […]
March 21, 2015 – 10:38 am
We hear this expression all the time lately. As a lover of language, I’ve done a little research, and it turns out that in archaic usage it could refer to actual injuries, too, and not just to somebody, somewhere, having said something uncomplimentary. Good to know! I’m home again, but too exhausted and doped up […]
Knee replaced without incident. In hospital till later this week. Thanks again all. – MP
Thanks all for the well-wishes in comments and emails, folks. I’ll leave you all on this cheery note.
March 15, 2015 – 12:39 am
Back in January of 1996, I had a little mishap down at the kwoon. We had a cocky student who needed taking down a peg, and in the course of doing so I smote him with a jumping double kick — showboating on my part, really, because such things are hardly necessary for effective Hung […]
March 13, 2015 – 11:02 pm
Jonah Goldberg wrote an amusing item today about the Hillary Clinton email flap. I’ve had too much on my mind this week to write anything substantial, so for tonight I’ll just pass along an excerpt of Mr. Goldberg’s commentary: As Bill Clinton said when the harem girls on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane finally announced they were […]
March 12, 2015 – 10:53 pm
Here’s an interesting item from across the pond: We were wrong to try to ban racism out of existence, says former equality chief The modern order (there’s an oxymoron for you!) is all about careless destruction.
Republicans in the Senate have sent a letter to Iran’s leadership informing them of the Constitutional limitations of any deal the President may make without the approval of Congress. This is in response to Mr. Obama’s apparent intention to make such a deal as an ‘executive agreement’ that he can conclude without seeking Congress’s consent. […]
Rumors are going round that Ayatollah Khamenei’s cancer has now killed him. That would certainly complicate any pending deals, unless there’s a successor and an agreement that have just been waiting in the wings. Hard to see how things could coalesce that fast, or that reliably, though.
Overheard in a checkout line yesterday: Shopper #1: “Tomorrow night’s Daylight Savings Time.” Shopper #2: “Yeah. ‘Spring Ahead’, right? So we lose an hour of sleep.” Shopper #1: “Yeah… but maybe the extra hour of sunlight will help melt all this snow!”
People talk about the “second childhood” of old age. What relates the second childhood to the first is high “time preference”: that it cares more about the present than the future. The edges of our lives are unlike the middle. The child is unaware of its future; the old man has none.
Well, it seems as if this story about Hillary Clinton’s emails has caused quite a commotion. (As it should.) From Jim Geraghty’s morning newsletter (my emphasis): The primary feature of Hillary’s “home-brewed’ system was that it could destroy e-mails completely and permanently — no backups or third-party records that you get with Yahoo or Gmail. […]
Heard on the radio today: “There are three coequal branches of government in the United States: the Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch, and Anthony Kennedy.”
Benjamin Netanyahu just gave a magnificent, and in my opinion historic, address to Congress on the dangers of the pending deal with Iran. He was interrupted 43 times by thunderous applause. The shade of Winston Churchill, who was the only other foreign leader to have addressed Congress three times, hovered approvingly over the proceedings. Mr. […]
I won’t comment on Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress tomorrow, other than to note that President Obama has nothing on his public schedule at 11 a.m., and that the boycott of the address by the Congressional Black Caucus and other Democrats is not something they ought to be particularly proud of. (My own representative, Yvette […]
February 27, 2015 – 2:45 pm
It’s getting hard to keep up with the engulfment of every aspect of our lives by the government, and of every aspect of government by the Executive branch. Most worrisome of all is the extent to which regulatory control of the nation’s affairs, and the disbursement of the nation’s wealth, have fallen under the supremacy […]
February 27, 2015 – 11:25 am
An interesting item over the transom this morning from our reader and commenter The Big Henry: Data Mining Indian Recipes Reveals New Food Pairing Phenomenon I’d never even heard of this ‘food pairing’ business. It uses chemical analysis to determine which foods have shared ‘flavor components’, and should go well together.
February 26, 2015 – 4:08 pm
A little while ago we remarked on the government’s disingenuous account of the ‘root causes’ of ‘violent extremism’. Both President Obama and the State Department’s spokespigeon Marie Harf have painstakingly refused to identify Islamic jihad as Islamic jihad, and have tried to persuade us instead that the real problem is a lack of business opportunities. […]
February 26, 2015 – 12:01 am
…is ‘TATO’. It stands for ‘TATO And TATO Only’. (hat-tip: D.R.H.)
February 24, 2015 – 11:33 pm
A few weeks back I noted that global warmism was, in many cases, a secular repurposing of the religious impulse, and that its narrative is a near-perfect parallel of the Christian Fall-and-Redemption mythos: In the beginning, there was only God. From God arose Man. Before his Fall, Man lived simply, and in perfect harmony with […]
February 23, 2015 – 10:07 pm
Those of us of a “certain age” will note with sorrow the loss of Sam Houston Andrew III, the guitarist and co-founder of the psychedelic-era band Big Brother and the Holding Company. He died last week at 73, of complications following a heart attack.
February 22, 2015 – 1:50 pm
It’s nice to see Rudy Giuliani standing firm on his remarks about Barack Obama. Mr. Giuliani has obviously reached the point where he is answerable to nobody: he is independently wealthy, and has no voters to appease. The Cathedral’s levers therefore having (for now at least) no point of purchase on him, he is free […]
February 21, 2015 – 6:44 pm
I was out doing errands just now, and stopped in at the local Asian fruit-and-vegetable shop. I had grabbed several things that were three for a dollar, five for a dollar, etc., and the young woman behind the counter quickly summed up the total in her head. I complimented her on her calculating skill. She […]
February 21, 2015 – 2:23 pm
Our reader and commenter Whitewall has brought to our attention an excellent article, by the blogger and columnist Daniel Greenfield, on the modern West’s dreamy image of Islam. The gist is this: Islam never became enlightened. It never stopped being ”˜medieval’. Whatever enlightenment it received was imposed on it by European colonialism. It’s a second-hand […]