February 21, 2015 – 1:02 am
From the indefatigable JK: video of a U.S. air-to-ground attack. Here. – Erratum: I had originally referred this as a “drone team”. Thanks to commenter El Gringo for the correction.
February 20, 2015 – 12:11 am
I understand President Obama said some things today about ‘extremism’. I haven’t read what he said, so I won’t comment for now. I’m sure I’m going to love it. I did, however, get not one, but two nice little notes from Mr. Obama’s ministry of propaganda today, telling me that it was time to “beat […]
February 17, 2015 – 4:35 pm
My God, we are ruled by children. If this weren’t bad enough (and it is), we have now put forward a feather-headed teenage girl by the name of Marie Harf as the public face of America’s foreign policy. Yesterday, as noted at Twitchy.com, she explained to Chris Matthews that the real answer to defeating ISIS […]
February 16, 2015 – 11:33 pm
On February 26th, a five-member panel of FCC commissioners will vote on adopting a plan to apply government regulation to various aspects of the operation of the Internet. This will undoubtedly have far-reaching effects — and given the scale of the Federal government, of the Internet, and of the conflicting interests that will be affected, […]
February 15, 2015 – 11:37 pm
Every January or February (depending on when I remember to do it) I present a sampling of the search keyphrases that brought visitors to this site during the previous year. Here’s the 2014 selection. This year’s winner was the mysterious phrase “lwica lwica”, which occurred 318 times. You may also notice some perennial favorites. compelling […]
February 14, 2015 – 9:56 pm
On an end-table next to where I do most of my reading there is a lamp with a ‘three-way’ bulb. Last night one of its filaments burned out, and I found that I had no more of these bulbs in the house. I’ll go looking for another tomorrow. I know that these ‘three-way’ bulbs were […]
February 13, 2015 – 5:23 pm
“When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.” – Lord Kelvin “Yes, and when you can express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.” – Jacob Viner
February 11, 2015 – 1:24 pm
In a recent nerf-ball interview with Vox, President Obama gloated at the disintegration of the American nation into a dissociated congeries of human particles. In his remarks, Mr. Obama said the following thing: …I’m pretty optimistic, and the reason is because this country just becomes more and more of a hodgepodge of folks… So people […]
February 10, 2015 – 5:18 pm
Well, whaddya know: after decades of scaremongering about dietary cholesterol, it looks like the U.S. government is about to tell us we don’t need to worry about it after all. This from the Washington Post: The nation’s top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food, a move that could […]
February 9, 2015 – 8:17 pm
Yet another round of painful periodontal surgery today. I’m too out-of-it to write much, or well. Some links, then: ‣ I’m going to have to get myself some of this, I think. ‣ 42 hours of Buckminster Fuller lectures. ‣ The St. Augustine Monster. ‣ Medieval Metallica. ‣ Charles Cooke […]
February 8, 2015 – 12:03 am
Well, we’re back from our little trip to Banderas Bay. It’s bracing to be back home again in the frigid North. Balmy breezes in February are nice enough in small doses, I suppose, but frankly the whole tropical-paradise thing has a limited and transitory appeal to Ice People like me. If history hasn’t already made […]
January 30, 2015 – 10:39 am
Leaving the country for a week. Probably no posts till we get back.
January 29, 2015 – 12:03 am
Well, here’s a heartwarming item. I may be wrong, but I am increasingly confident that Hillary Clinton will never be the President of these United States. She’s too old, too obviously incompetent, too ruthless, too unprincipled, too insincere, and she has too much baggage. Some combination of these things will bring her down, once the […]
January 28, 2015 – 8:40 pm
President Obama has proposed that we make community college ‘free’. Leaving aside the obvious, inviolable, but apparently unmentionable truth that no public service is ‘free’ (and passing up as well the opportunity to razz the President for his cockamamie scheme, since ridiculed out of existence, to start taxing college-saving plans to help foot the bill), […]
January 27, 2015 – 1:36 pm
In a post written earlier this month, after a conversation about global warming with an intelligent and well-educated friend, I remarked on the similarity between secular environmentalism and religion: I was struck once again by the clarity with which global-warmism reveals itself as a secular repurposing of the religious impulse — a deep and universal […]
January 26, 2015 – 8:50 pm
For some reason I find this story oddly dispiriting.
January 26, 2015 – 1:59 pm
You may recall that my son Nick, a baseball analyst and former college pitcher, launched a wildly popular website last year called PitcherGIFs. In it he presented animated GIFs of every pitcher in the majors throwing every pitch they had, along with Nick’s insightful analysis. The site was taking off like wildfire, until a dispute […]
January 24, 2015 – 3:46 pm
As you have no doubt heard, there has been a revolt in Yemen, where Shi’ite rebels known as the Houthis have seized control of the levers of power. About Yemen, President Obama — who, when it comes to foreign policy and a whole lot more, has been described of late as “King Midas in reverse” […]
January 24, 2015 – 1:06 am
Saw this on the supermarket shelf the other day: We are now twice removed from reality — not just ersatz pepperoni, but ersatz pepperoni made, in turn, of ersatz turkey. (And to add a frisson of horror: that awful, missing ‘e’.) But wait: is there such a thing as mock tofu? Nay, the […]
January 21, 2015 – 2:47 pm
I hope you will forgive me for a series of nested self-quotes in this post. Back in November, I posted a little item in which I quoted this, from an even earlier post: The universal acid of radical skepticism having nearly completed its work, all transcendent values have now been dissolved — and if all […]
January 20, 2015 – 11:10 am
My God, I actually agree with Piers Morgan — on a matter involving guns, no less. His thoughts on American Sniper, here. I think this might be a good time to visit Hell. Don’t forget your skates.
January 18, 2015 – 11:01 pm
You’d have had to have been trapped in a snowdrift somewhere not to have heard by now that NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has announced that 2014 was the warmest year in the history of Planet Earth (likely the whole solar system, if you’re an MSNBC viewer, though I’ll confess I haven’t tuned […]
January 17, 2015 – 11:21 pm
Sorry to bang on, post after post, on the same topic, but the Paris attacks continue to reverberate. Our e-pal and occasional commenter David Duff, with whom we see eye to eye about most things, has posted at his excellent blog an essay by one Qanta Ahmed, a self-described “opinion-maker” who is what Western multiculturalists […]
January 15, 2015 – 1:09 am
Just a few links for tonight, from two thoughtful observers. First, a couple of items from Bill Vallicella. The first is a meditation on the “No True Scotsman” fallacy; given how much rubbish we’ve been hearing about who is and isn’t a true Muslim lately, it is timely. In the second item Bill, citing the […]
January 12, 2015 – 11:42 pm
Much has been made, in recent days, of the fact that most Muslims are not terrorists. This is true: the percentage of the world’s Muslims who engage in the active slaughter of civilians is so small as to be a rounding error. But in an open and generally unarmed society, in which the default stance […]
January 12, 2015 – 1:01 am
I realized today that I had been remiss in failing to note in these pages the death of the guitarist Jeff Golub, who succumbed on January 1st, at the age of 59, to a rare and incurable brain disease. I worked with Jeff for many years. He was a charming and intelligent man, and an […]
January 10, 2015 – 11:21 pm
Well, some days, anyway. Today I heard for the first time about something called “Blaschko’s lines”. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about them: Blaschko’s lines, also called the Lines of Blaschko, named after Alfred Blaschko, are lines of normal cell development in the skin. These lines are invisible under normal conditions. They become apparent […]
January 10, 2015 – 12:57 am
“There is a deep reassurance for the frustrated in witnessing the downfall of the fortunate and the disgrace of the righteous. They see in a general downfall an approach to the brotherhood of all. Chaos, like the grave, is a haven of equality. Their burning conviction that there must be a new life and a […]
January 7, 2015 – 5:00 pm
By now we have all heard the awful news from Paris. Time prevents me from commenting at length just now, but my feeling is that this will be as pivotal an event as 9/11 was, if not more so. This horrific attack is not only an assault on the prevailing social philosophy of the West, […]
January 6, 2015 – 5:17 pm
Have you heard of Poe’s Law? Wikipedia defines it thus: Poe’s law, named after its author Nathan Poe, is an Internet adage reflecting the idea that, without a clear indication of the author’s intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism. Now […]
January 6, 2015 – 12:17 am
As far as the RSS data are concerned, the Great Pause continues. More here.
January 4, 2015 – 12:22 am
An old friend, who lives in California, writes: I spent hours on New Year’s Day attending online traffic school, and only passed by the skin of my teeth, as there was a serious language/grammar/thinking gap between me and the authors of the course. Here are just a few examples. I would have spent hours more […]
January 3, 2015 – 12:59 am
The New Yorker‘s essayist Adam Gopnik — whom I have always considered to be quite lavishly talented, despite his dainty and epicene style — beclowned himself one minute into this New Year with a stupendously mawkish item on gun control. It is so bad, in fact — so completely barren of fact, rational argument, or […]
December 31, 2014 – 6:09 pm
I’ll take a brief time-out from all the intercalary Saturnalia that’s been going on around here this week to wish all of you a merry turn of the dial — and a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2015. The world may be going to hell, but there’s no reason we can’t enjoy the ride! My warmest […]
December 27, 2014 – 11:54 pm
Coming soon, to a formerly vigorous republic near you: Hospitals cancel operations to cope with Government’s A&E crisis Over 300 long-planned operations are cancelled each day as England’s NHS hospitals need more beds for A&E departments under record-breaking strain. In the first two weeks of December, 3,113 elective operations were cancelled – many only hours […]
December 24, 2014 – 11:41 pm
To you all. Thank you, as always, for reading and commenting.
December 23, 2014 – 8:24 pm
We must note with deep sadness the death of the great Joe Cocker, who succumbed to cancer yesterday. He was only 70. I posthumously award Mr. Cocker a major distinction: his amazing version of the Beatles’ A Little Help From My Friends is, in my opinion, the only cover of a Beatles song that is […]
December 22, 2014 – 10:14 pm
Here’s Heather Mac Donald on our smoldering civil war.
December 21, 2014 – 11:40 pm
A reader writes to make an interesting point: not long ago the Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan made an inflammatory speech in Baltimore (to see just how inflammatory — indeed, quite literally so — have a look here). The NYPD shooter, Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, who was certainly black, and apparently a Muslim, was, perhaps, in […]
December 19, 2014 – 10:12 pm
Here’s something else that the Sony hacking story has me thinking about: the ‘arms race’ between hackers and cybersecurity. There have been a lot of high-profile cyberattacks lately, and if anything, they seem to be getting more frequent, and more damaging. What’s worse, more and more of every aspect of our lives, and of every […]
December 19, 2014 – 6:12 pm
The Sony affair has revealed, in many ways, just how appallingly far our culture’s wasting disease has progressed, but this is by far the direst symptom of all: Sharpton to have say over how Sony makes movies Excerpt: Hollywood ”‹came to the Rev. Al Thursday as embattled Sony exec Amy Pascal ”‹met ”‹privately with the […]
December 18, 2014 – 11:23 pm
I’ve recovered considerably from Monday’s little indignity, and although I haven’t had time or energy to comment on the big stories of the week, I should be back in fighting form soon enough. Just a couple of little items for tonight: At the conclusion of all the injecting and slicing and yanking and scraping and […]
December 15, 2014 – 10:48 pm
It might be a little quieter than usual here for the next couple of days. I’m recovering tonight from a fairly substantial round of reconstructive oral surgery, and the next few days will be as busy as my capacities, which are likely to be somewhat diminished by powerful medicaments, will allow. My thanks as always […]
December 12, 2014 – 11:41 pm
Perhaps the silliest response to the Ferguson incident is one I’ve heard at least a dozen times, both publicly and privately: “Why didn’t the officer just wound him?” The speaker is invariably an Eloi hoplophobe who wouldn’t know a Ruger from arugula. It’s fatiguing. With a hat tip to the indefatigable JK, here’s Michael Yon […]
December 12, 2014 – 12:46 am
Following on last spring’s item on the NYPD, here’s a story from yesterday’s Post: FDNY drops physical test requirement amid low female hiring rate The Fire Department has stopped requiring probationary firefighters to pass a job-related physical-skills test before getting hired… Fifty years ago, it would have been obvious to any rational person that this […]
December 11, 2014 – 9:02 pm
Recently I wrote: Have we reached the point where we want to forbid the police to use force, when necessary, to make arrests? Approach this idea with caution, for to grant a monopoly of physical force to the State, except in cases of immediate self-defense, is the very bedrock of the social contract that makes […]
December 10, 2014 – 3:31 pm
Some time ago I offered a peek at the way modern legislation ensures transparency and ease of understanding. Given that getting at the meaning of almost any Federal bill these days entails reading not only the bill itself, but also the plexus of other Acts that it refers to or modifies, thoroughly unraveling these monstrosities […]
December 10, 2014 – 11:55 am
Yesterday’s Senate report on the CIA has sparked a lot of talk, most of it on a very shallow and very binary level. (Post on that forthcoming, when time permits.) As noted yesterday, the report is far from impartial. Several former directors and deputy directors of the CIA, who were active during the period covered […]
December 9, 2014 – 2:42 pm
Today we will have the Senate’s report on the use of harsh interrogation methods by the CIA. There will be a great spasm of hand-wringing — indeed, there already has been — and no doubt the report will be further confirmation, for those who scarcely need it, of the fundamental vileness of the United States […]