September 24, 2014 – 12:24 pm
Here’s a video clip that’s been making the rounds: President Obama ‘saluting’ his military honor guards with a disposable coffee cup in his right hand. It has sparked enormous anger among conservatives and patriots. Here’s why. It’s a small thing, I realize — a perfunctory, narcissistic non-salute pales in comparison to the truly grievous harm […]
September 23, 2014 – 10:35 pm
‣ A volcanic blast. ‣ Cyberattacks, worldwide, in real time. ‣ Twitter trends, likewise. ‣ “97%”? Hogwash. ‣ Coming soon to a pizza near you. ‣ The iPhone 6: sexist. ‣ How good are you at recognizing faces? ‣ Fantastic rides. ‣ A disturbing trend in scientific […]
September 22, 2014 – 10:07 pm
We are now active participants in Syria’s civil war. (The poll results must have been irresistible.) I’m sure everything will go as planned.
September 21, 2014 – 9:44 pm
In private correspondence today, I’ve been discussing with an old friend the subject of what practitioners of Chinese martial arts call ‘chi’. It’s a puzzling topic — and so, having no time to write a substantial post tonight, I’m posting a link to something I wrote on this subject about five-and-a-half years ago. You can […]
September 18, 2014 – 10:07 pm
Here’s a report of a remarkable comment from Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg: People seeking clues about how soon the Supreme Court might weigh in on states’ gay marriage bans should pay close attention to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told a Minnesota audience Tuesday. Ginsburg […]
September 17, 2014 – 8:48 pm
Tomorrow’s the big vote in Scotland. I’m all for independence. Nick Land has argued, and I think rightly, that because Scotland pulls farther to the Left than the UK as a whole, its separation would immediately snap the rump UK rightward, while at the same time separation from London’s flowing teat would accelerate the failure […]
September 17, 2014 – 3:34 pm
Here’s a piece from Jay Nordlinger on how hard it is to keep up with what we’re allowed to call things from one day to the next. (I’m old enough now that I’m simply refusing to play along anymore.) To find out what this has in common with the geology of the Hawaiian Islands, you’ll […]
September 15, 2014 – 1:36 pm
Speaking of the New York Times: still no mention in our “newspaper of record” about the murder of young, white Brendan Tevlin by a black jihadist. Just a local crime story, I guess. Not fit to print.
September 15, 2014 – 12:01 pm
There’s a fine, gloomy piece by Roger Cohen in the Times today: The Great Unraveling. The fabric of society frayed. Democracy looked quaint or outmoded beside new authoritarianisms. …Nobody connected the dots or read Kipling on life’s few certainties: “The Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire / And the […]
September 15, 2014 – 11:15 am
This from Jerry Coyne: If ISIS Is Not Islamic, then the Inquisition Was Not Catholic.
September 14, 2014 – 10:38 pm
This just in: Antarctic sea ice is at its greatest extent ever recorded.
September 13, 2014 – 5:29 pm
can someone give this man an advil? pic.twitter.com/fvwOsoOzV0 — The Friendly Asshole (@FriendlyAssh0le) April 9, 2014
September 12, 2014 – 2:44 pm
In trying to catch up on all the stories we missed during our August break, I’d be remiss not to comment on the malevolent Muslim entity calling itself the Islamic State, and what we should do about it. My view is not, in many respects, a mainstream one. That said, I’ll hasten to align myself […]
September 11, 2014 – 9:25 pm
Among the topics I passed by during our August hiatus was the story about Rotherham, England, in which it was revealed that groups of Muslim men had been using young white girls as sex slaves. This had been going on for many years, over which time there had been at least 1,400 victims, some of […]
September 11, 2014 – 9:16 pm
What’s up with Takimag? The site’s been down all day. It’s worrisome.
September 9, 2014 – 7:08 pm
Today we present a fine piece by Steven Pinker on the state of our elite universities. Pinker’s essay is a response to a New Republic article, by William Deresiewicz, entitled Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League. Pinker, writing with his usual clarity and brio, defends the Ivies, and makes the case for standardized […]
September 8, 2014 – 9:42 am
Over at Outside In, Nick Land offers a neoreactionary’s perspective on the coming ‘exit’ referendum in Scotland. My Scottish mum would have approved.
September 5, 2014 – 10:19 pm
For the first time, a woman has been awarded the coveted Fields Medal, which is generally regarded as the the mathematician’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Her name is Maryam Mirzakhani, and you can read about her here. This is of course a proud day for female mathematicians. Congratulations to Dr. Mirzakhani. Maryam Mirzakhani […]
September 5, 2014 – 9:27 pm
Once again, Vladimir Putin has snaffled the U.S. and her quondam allies: the acceptance by Ukraine of a proffered cease-fire on what, for Russia, are very comfortable terms, will douse any ardor in the West for aggressive confrontation. In last night’s NightWatch bulletin, John McCreary wrote: While NATO plans to fight Russia, Putin’s peace plan […]
September 4, 2014 – 9:38 pm
Here’s a real find: what purports to be the only extant recording of the Sage of Baltimore. It’s a long interview, with good audio quality.
September 4, 2014 – 9:33 pm
We note with sadness the deaths of Joan Rivers and Glenn Cornick. Gather those rosebuds, folks…
September 3, 2014 – 11:47 am
Let’s review the results of our adventure in Libya, for which President Obama and the presumptive Democratic heir, Hillary Clinton, can fairly be assigned complete responsibility. ‣ After a successful, decades-long effort to bring Muammar Qaddafi to heel, and after feting our new North African ally at the highest levels of government, we betrayed […]
September 2, 2014 – 11:18 pm
It’s been a refreshing break, beginning with a splendid mountaintop wedding in New Hampshire back in late July. I don’t often post such things, but here is a shot of your humble correspondent at that happy occasion: After that it was just a lot of this sort of thing: Anyway, that’s done: […]
September 2, 2014 – 1:25 pm
All right, then. August is over. Did I miss anything? Just kidding. Back soon, with a spleenful.
August 15, 2014 – 1:28 pm
It’s August once again, and things will be quieter than usual here for the next couple of weeks — maybe a post or two here and there, but nothing much, probably, till after Labor Day. As always, please feel free to browse our ever-expanding archives, and to try the “Random Post’ link at upper right.
August 10, 2014 – 8:47 pm
In a recent column, Thomas Sowell asked: Is thinking now obsolete? Perhaps it is. Read this label: This is the sort of blithe and cheery obliviousness that carries me to the brink of despair.
August 8, 2014 – 12:20 pm
There’s a lot of buzz lately about self-driving cars. They were the focus of a couple of sessions when I was at Singularity University a couple of years ago, and while I was there Google sent one over so we could get a look at it. The consensus at SU was that they confer so […]
With a hat-tip to Bryce Laliberte, here’s an excellent photographic essay on the appeal of “traditional cities”: cities that are built not for cars or transit systems, but for people.
This bill just passed in Missouri: SCS/SJR 36 – This proposed constitutional amendment, if approved by voters, modifies provisions regarding the right to keep and bear arms. This amendment provides that a citizen has the right to keep and bear arms, ammunition, and accessories typical to the normal function of such arms, in defense of […]
Ukrainian lawmakers: a renaissance masterpiece (Cloth is pure Veronese, but for subject matter id go with Caravaggio) pic.twitter.com/yFEKTJw4VV — Sam Jones (@samgadjones) August 6, 2014
This just in: $619 billion missing from federal transparency site That’s billion with a B. Don’t forget, folks: tax day is April 15th. File early to make sure you avoid penalties and late fees.
I’ve just run across (hat-tip to Nick Land) an excellent, and apparently oft-cited, essay by Scott Alexander on the unique terminological characteristics of the various “social-justice” movements. The essay describes a splendid metaphor: the “motte-and-bailey” style of argument. Here’s Section II of Mr. Alexander’s post: I started this post by saying I recently learned there […]
Following on our item the other day about cultlike birthday messages from the President, I should mention that just after publishing that post, I got this: Malcolm — I don’t want to make this awkward, but… It looks like you haven’t signed OFA’s birthday card for President Obama yet. Today’s the big day — I […]
August 5, 2014 – 10:17 am
In response to our quoting Chang Ch’ao the other day, our reader Alex Leibowitz, a scholar of Chinese literature, has kindly provided further translation of the piece from which our excerpt was taken. 少年读书，如隙ä¸çª¥æœˆï¼›ä¸å¹´è¯»ä¹¦ï¼Œå¦‚åºä¸æœ›æœˆï¼›è€å¹´è¯»ä¹¦ï¼Œå¦‚å°ä¸ŠçŽ©æœˆã€‚皆以阅 之浅深，为所得之浅深耳。 Shao3 nian2 du2 shu1, ru2 xi4 zhong1 kui1 yue4; zhong1 nian2 du2 shu1, ru2 ting2 zhong1 wang4 yue4; lao3 nian2 […]
August 4, 2014 – 11:05 pm
“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honour; duty; mercy; hope.” – Churchill
Saw this startling item this morning in last night’s NightWatch: Iraq: Fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) inflicted a significant defeat on Kurdish militia forces on Saturday. They killed 27 Kurds and routed them from three towns and claim to have taken control of the Mosul Dam, which supplies water […]
From the 2nd-3rd-century Chinese scholar Chang Ch’ao: Reading books in one’s youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in one’s middle age is like looking at the moon in one’s courtyard; and reading books in one’s old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. This is […]
August 1, 2014 – 10:51 pm
The world is aflame with war and pestilence. The nation’s borders are dissolving. Our ancient and implacable enemies are ascendant in every quarter. Yesterday I received this email from OFA, Barack Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda: Malcolm — Here’s something you might not know about President Obama: The man really loves pie. And for as long […]
I’ve just read an outstanding essay on the paucity of women in high-tech jobs, and the stubbornly persistent (and demonstrably counterfactual) belief that it is caused, not by natural differences between the sexes, but by an invisible fog of sexism. I’d sum up its arguments for you, but it’s so good you should go and […]
Ripples continue in the wake of the Halbig decision, over which Obamacare enthusiasts have been getting their knickers in a knot since the ruling came down. In today’s Washington Post, blogger Greg Sargent wrote a detailed item explaining, or so he thought, that the intent of the law was always to provide subsidies to people […]
In case you haven’t heard, the Ebola virus — the same one that gave readers the willies in the 1994 book The Hot Zone — is now out of control, and spreading rapidly, in West Africa. Ebola kills you in horrible ways, and there isn’t any cure. If you catch it, you will almost certainly […]
As I wrote some time ago, to observe the culture wars is to realize that grievance is fractal: There’s no limiting principle. And if you watch for a while, you begin to realize that “social injustice’ is not only infinite, but fractal. It’s a Julia set of grievances. Zoom in all you like; new affronts […]
Every so often one is asked: If you could assemble a dinner party with anyone who ever lived, whom would you invite? For me, the list would have to include Baltasar Gracián y Morales, a Jesuit writer, philosopher, and courtier who lived in seventeenth-century Spain. He’s hardly a household name, but he has always struck […]
As Michael Anissimov explains in an excellent essay about class and the history of labor, that endgame culminates in: 70 hours of work a week, no children, no family. We read: The capitalist system pushes us to work as hard as possible to increase our wealth and therefore our social status. In a world with […]
The Obamacare Federal-exchange-subsidies plot just thickened a bit, with the discovery online of video of one of the Affordable Care Act’s architects, Jonathan Gruber, explaining in 2012, that the exclusion of Federal health-care exchanges from eligibility for IRS subsidies was no bug, but a feature. Its purpose, Gruber explained, was to pressure the states to […]
My late sifu, William Chung, used to quote an old Chinese saying: “Where there is confusion, there is profit.” Here’s an example.
With a hat tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s a dark and piercing essay by Richard Fernandez. The gist: the Devil has the power to make you do evil yourself in order to defeat him — and so you cannot really defeat him at all.