In a response to our recent post on the entropic influence of the political Left, commenter ‘Epicaric’ wrote: It is my impression … that these forces have accelerated of late, shedding its once linear progression for a pace far more geometric in nature. This is entirely ‘lawful’, and is exactly what we should expect. All […]
In our last Open Thread, our resident liberal gadfly Peter, a.k.a. ‘The One Eyed Man’, left a comment citing the late Richard Hofstadter to the effect that the political Right (in particular, the “dissident” Right whose views are often summarized in these pages), exhibits a “paranoid style”. Several of us responded in the ensuing discussion. […]
John Derbyshire give Bill Nye’s nose a tweak, here.
Yesterday President Obama gave a commencement address to the Coast Guard Academy. He devoted much of it to brazen propaganda about “climate change”, including even going so far as to make it a scapegoat for Islamic violence and political chaos in the Mideast and Africa. We’re all well-accustomed (perhaps “inured” would be a better word) […]
I’m very busy with work today, so for the nonce I’m afraid I must redirect you elsewhere. You’re in luck, though: here’s a fascinating post on human nature by the always-interesting hbd*chick. Also: don’t miss this tart post from Thomas Sowell. (Nothing we haven’t heard before, but very nicely said.)
Speaking of Hillary Clinton: something you hear often from her supporters (not to mention Mrs. Clinton herself) is that “we need a woman in the White House”. The assumption seems to be (indeed, can only be) that a woman would somehow do the job differently than a man, simply by virtue of being a woman. […]
Here’s a strange item that’s been making the rounds. (Charles Fort, call your office.)
This from Judicial Watch, yesterday: Documents Reveal Obama Administration Knew that al Qaeda Terrorists Had Planned Benghazi Attack 10 Days in Advance Yes, folks, that’s right: the story we were given, again and again, by this administration — that the attack in Benghazi was just an impromptu reaction to an inflammatory video — was, as […]
As I enter the autumn of my years, I’m trying to shed some lingering bad habits — both to be rid of the habits themselves, and as an exercise in self-mastery. One of these is talking back to the radio. I suffered a breakdown of discipline on that one today, though, I will confess. I […]
It escaped my attention at the time, but April 22nd, 2015 marked the tenth anniversary of the present incarnation of this blog. (It actually had begun a few months earlier, in late 2004, but I had chosen a fly-by-night hosting service that soon went belly-up, taking all my content with it.) Since then we have […]
Perhaps once a week is too often for this. We’ll see.
Having mentioned secular religion in our previous post, this seems an apt moment to catch up with the latest heresies on the global-warming front (environmentalism being the most transparently religious liberal piety of them all). Here we have a wide-ranging roundup of “damned facts” from the Arch-Vile himself, Christopher Monckton. Here, too, is Steve Goddard, […]
Today I read a good piece by one of my favorite political writers, Mollie Hemingway. In the wake of the Amtrak derailment, and the Left’s immediate rush to blame the disaster on inadequate government spending (which is to say, on fiscal conservatives), she raises the concept of ‘theodicy’ — that is, “attempts to defend God’s […]
With a hat tip to reader Bill K., here’s a dark post from Richard Fernandez on the modern world’s growing “compassion fatigue” in the face of spreading chaos. I’ll excerpt the post’s closing lines: The first rule of civilization is to preserve it. Once enough of it is conceded to barbarism, when a sufficient quantity […]
Rather an odd coincidence today: an old friend called, with whom I hadn’t spoken in quite a while. He asked how I was; I said that while I was well, generally, I had had a bit of a rough time the past few weeks with my knee-replacement surgery, and now with the prospect that it […]
In the aftermath of the Baltimore riots, there was a great deal of partisan debate about the root causes of the many woes of the urban black underclass. Many on the Right went no further than to blame black “thugs” and “race-hustlers”, and to call for militaristic crowd-control, while the Left settled in comfortably to […]
For a man who campaigned on promises of unprecedented executive transparency, President Obama seems inordinately fond of making laws in secret. A couple of months ago he kept his Net Neutrality plan hidden from public view until after the FCC commissioners had enacted it (by a single vote), and now he’s doing the same thing […]
In this outstanding post, Bill Vallicella brings his trademark clarity of thought and exposition to the question of free speech in the dar al-Harb. His brief essay is the best response I’ve seen to the shootings in Garland and the ructions that ensued in the media. Required reading.
Some time ago I commented on a tiny, emaciated female police officer I had seen in Prospect Park. Now we learn that a 33-year-old woman, Rebecca Wax, is to be made a New York City firefighter despite having failed the physical exam. Fighting fires is not a political or ideological abstraction. Actual fires take place […]
Still too busy to post. So have some Moldbug. Key passage: Alexander sees that his government has made a bad, stupid, irrational and really downright evil decision. But he does not go out and try to convince his readers (all 10,000 of them, perhaps) to vote differently. In his actions, he reveals that he’s perfectly […]
Forgive the apostrophe-trolling in the title, but the blogger known as Ace of Spades has been in fine fettle lately. See here and here. In the second linked piece, Ace mentions the “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect” (named for physicist Murray Gell-Mann), which the late Michael Crichton described as follows: Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is […]
I’m swamped with work tonight, so I’ll just pass along two interesting articles. First, here’s a good piece by Frank Miniter: How To Win a Debate With an Anti-Gunner. Gun owners and Second Amendment defenders living, as I do, in the belly of the liberal beast are all too familiar with the reflexive scorn that […]
Here’s a roundup of recent climate science from the Cato Institute. (One quibble: although the article correctly notes that there has been no “major hurricane” strike on the U.S. mainland since 2005, I think it might at least have mentioned Hurricane Sandy. Although Sandy was not officially a hurricane when it made landfall in New […]
We’ve all heard of the “law of unintended consequences”. It’s worth noting, though, that unintended consequences fall into two types: those that are unforeseen because the complexity of a large, dynamic, and possibly chaotic system obscures them even from the most searching analysis, and those that are patently obvious to some observers, but are unseen […]
In the same-sex marriage arguments at the Supreme Court the other day (see the Washington Post’s coverage, here), the discussion naturally touched upon the wisdom, or folly, of discarding by government fiat a sacred tradition that is at least as old as civilization itself, and universal to every society that has ever existed. Left and […]
As our regular comment-threads seem to meander far off-topic from time to time (and because I am generally too warm-hearted and lazy to moderate comments), I am introducing this new feature, in the hope of keeping our other comment-threads pithy and focused: an occasional (perhaps weekly) placeholder for for free association, idle chat, bibulous logorrhea, […]
In today’s Best of the Web, James Taranto focuses on a question asked by John Roberts: “I’m not sure it’s necessary to get into sexual orientation to resolve the case. I mean, if Sue loves Joe and Tom loves Joe, Sue can marry him and Tom can’t. And the difference is based upon their different […]
Well, golly gee whillickers. Whoever could have imagined such a thing?
The Supreme Court heard arguments today in Obergefell v. Hodges, which, as you may know, concerns itself with whether or not same-sex couples have a right to redefine what marriage is, and to compel every state to accept the new definition. Good coverage of the arguments here. Haven’t even had time to go over it […]
As I write, the civil society is breaking down again, this time in Baltimore. (I don’t have much to say about it, or perhaps I should say that I am not yet prepared to say, in this forum at least, some of the things I might say about it.) Nobody who has been paying attention […]
The lovely Nina and I went to the Cherry Lane Theatre this afternoon to see a one-woman performance by Deb Margolin called ‘8 Stops‘. Nina and I knew Deb many years ago — as it happens, she is a good friend of this website’s erstwhile comment-thread gadfly ‘The One Eyed Man’, and it was he […]
April 25, 2015 – 11:21 am
Want to provoke a race war in America? This sneering video is probably as good a way as any. Just keep pushing, Eloi. Keep pushing.
Here is a thing Hillary Clinton said in 2004: “I believe that marriage is not just a bond but a sacred bond between a man and a woman. I have had occasion in my life to defend marriage, to stand up for marriage, to believe in the hard work and challenge of marriage. So I […]
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.