This time it’s Javascript inventor Brendan Eich, who failed to pull his neck in quickly enough as the Overton Window sped leftward. He was defenestrated today as head of Mozilla, for supporting a rational ideological position that every society on earth — and even Barack Obama himself — defended until just a couple of years […]
Recently the Huffington Post took a big swipe at Charles Murray, with all the intellectual rigor we’ve come to expect from the blank-slate universalist Left. The argument appears to be that he’s a racist, sexist old white guy, so everything he says must, a priori, be false, and therefore beneath refutation. (When an idea is […]
— Zoomable panorama of the Milky Way. — “Wrong again, dear.” — What women want. — :-( — Privilege!. — How the blow-fly flies. — Biohazard. — Now that’s a rat. — Mate In 10! — Warning: major time-sink. — WWI as bar-fight. — How is this man alive? — Aesop updated. — Good clean […]
March 31, 2014 – 11:34 pm
Matt Ridley comments on the latest round of climate reports from the UN, here. I present this simply in the interest of balance, of course. I find it necessary to reiterate our own editorial position on global warming “climate change” from time to time, so here it is: 1) The Earth may indeed be warming; […]
I’ve written before (see here, here and here) about my mother-in-law, Lily Renée Willheim Phillips, who was born in Vienna, fled the Nazis in the Kindertransport, and made her way first to England and then to New York. Once she got here, she took up a job drawing comic books, working at a company called […]
It’s lousy out: chilly and raining. It occurred to me earlier, as I was taking note of this, that there are an awful lot of words for this sort of weather, all beginning with ‘d’: damp, dark, dispiriting, dreary, dull, dismal, disagreeable, drenching, dank, drab, doleful, dim, depressing, and probably some others I haven’t thought […]
Patrick Buchanan’s been on a bit of a roll lately. In his latest, he invites us to look at this Ukrainian ruction from the Russian point of view.
The political statistician Nate Silver recently predicted that the Democrats might lose the Senate this fall (insh’Allah). This has caused some consternation over on the Left. Mr. Silver also moved his blog, recently, from the New York Times to ESPN. In an item published earlier today, he notes that this seems to have ruffled a […]
In case you missed it, Venice has just voted to secede from Italy. It’s happening all over Europe: a backlash against centralization, a resurgence of identitarianism, and a yearning for local control. (It’s happening in America, too.) When I was in Venice and Florence in 2012, it seemed that almost any conversation with the locals […]
Back in February the New York Times Magazine published an article about the decline of eros in the modern-day marriage. The story noted what should be an entirely unsurprising fact: where there is less differentiation in gender roles, there tends to be less sex. We read: A study called “Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in […]
March 23, 2014 – 11:43 pm
— Learn a card trick from Penn and Teller. — Credit where credit’s due. — A survey of meteorologists on “climate change”. — Where the wild things are. — Unintended consequences of Britain’s welfare state. — Bead chains in action. — Why Intelligent Design retains its broad appeal. — Height and IQ. — The Museum […]
Boy, what a week. Not being a man of independent means, I still must toil for my daily crust, and this week that included a 24-hour-long workday spanning Tuesday and Wednesday (a software crisis in the Antipodes, now resolved). I used to do a lot of those as a youthful studio rat, but for a […]
Blessed is he who hath a soul, Blessed is he who hath none, Woe and sorrow to him who hath it in conception. – Gurdjieff
Well, it appears from yesterday’s referendum that the people of Crimea would rather be Russian. Vladimir Putin is glad to welcome them back to the Motherland. The Obama administration, which didn’t want to see the referendum happen at all, imposed some punitive measures on a few Russian big-shots, but nobody over there seems to mind […]
Our e-pal hbd*chick has just put up a fascinating post on the Hajnal Line. The what? The Hajnal Line marks a boundary between areas of Europe characterized by different marriage practices. Among hbd*chick’s primary areas of interest is the effect these differences have had on both culture and genome in historical time. Hie thee thither […]
Over at VDare, John Derbyshire reviews A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, a forthcoming book by chief New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade. The book is important — a watershed, really. For the first time (that I’m aware of, at least), a major writer with impeccable Cathedral credentials brings squarely into mainstream […]
March 13, 2014 – 11:52 pm
A while back I agreed to comment on a New York Times editorial advocating a rise in the minimum wage. (The editorial, entitled The Clear Benefits of a Higher Wage, is here.) The brief editorial’s main point is that a minimum-wage increase cannot be reliably expected to cause enough of an increase in unemployment to […]
March 12, 2014 – 10:49 pm
WSJ columnist James Taranto has a regular feature in his Best of the Web newlsetter, in which he posts news items where obvious cause-and-effect relationships are presented as baffling paradoxes. A typical such item might be a headline that says “Despite Historically Low Crime Rate, Incarcerations Are At All-Time High”. He had a good one […]
I’m working late tonight, as I often do on Tuesdays. To ease my toil, I generally listen to classical music on Pandora; one of today’s highlights was the pyrotechnic allegro ma non troppo from the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for Violin and Orchestra in A Minor, by Camille Saint-SaÁ«ns, as played by the incomparable, and […]
It was a sad day today: the lovely Nina and I drove to Philadelphia to attend a memorial service for the twenty-eight-year-old son of some dear friends. The young man, who died suddenly and unexpectedly, had made a very deep and very positive impression on a great many people’s lives, and hundreds were in attendance. […]
While all eyes are on Ukraine, it would be easy to lose sight of an earlier U.S. foreign-policy triumph: Libya. Has it really been a year and a half since we stopped having to worry about how to spell ‘Khadaffy’? How time flies. Anyway, in case you were wondering, it’s going straight to hell — […]
OK, one more on the events in Ukraine, this time from DiploMad. (h/t to Bill Keezer.) Key excerpt: “Putin is a patriot; Obama is not.”
Here’s another good article about Putin’s play in the Ukraine (or just “Ukraine”; I can’t keep track).
From the Times: WASHINGTON ”” The Obama administration, struggling with continued political fallout over its troubled health care law, said Wednesday that it would allow consumers to renew health insurance policies that do not comply with the law for two more years. The action is a reflection of the difficulties the president has faced as […]
XKCD is always clever, and often brilliant. I like this one in particular.
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about Vladimir Putin’s being behind the curve, history-wise. The reader who sent me that Ceylan Ozbudak article yesterday, for example, said in his email to me that “territorial gain is an atavistic idea”, as well as saying that “I really question how strong supposed ethnic/historical affiliations are at this […]
Here’s a depressing commentary on, among other things, the quality of the modern American male (my emphasis): Woman Going Into Labor Robbed in Anne Arundel County — A woman reported to be in labor and her boyfriend were robbed in Annapolis as they headed to a hospital, police said. The couple was confronted by three […]
I haven’t said much here about the situation in Ukraine; it would be like shooting fish in a barrel to use this latest ruction as an opportunity to highlight the incompetence of this administration’s foreign-policy team, and anyway, others have beaten me to it. (I will, however, recall that during the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt […]
Given the popularity in recent years of books like Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and the ready availability of reference material on the internet — and given also the accumulated wisdom of the ages, the testimony of our own eyes, and simple common sense — it always comes as a bit of a shock to […]
February 27, 2014 – 1:30 pm
There’s been a lot of argument lately about whether to raise the minimum wage, and I haven’t had much to say about it in these pages. But a comment in a recent thread got me digging into the topic more deeply than I had before, and so it’s time for a post about it, I […]
February 27, 2014 – 12:16 pm
In a Takimag article called Useless Mouths, John Derbyshire looks at the road ahead, as technology displaces more and more workers. I recall that this sort of gloomy forecast was common when I was a boy, but I think this time round it’s more on the mark. (Barring a Butlerian Jihad, that is.) Things have […]
February 25, 2014 – 12:56 am
We’ll probably be offline for a few days. Meanwhile, here’s something interesting to read. Update: this is a good one too: with a hat tip to Bill K., a fine rant from VDH.
February 22, 2014 – 2:01 pm
Our previous post touched once again on how liberal orthodoxy habituates its adherents to deny reality and suppress the expression of truth. One such truth is the near-total hegemony of liberal orthodoxy itself in the social sciences, and of course our leading liberal commenter has wasted no time in denying it. (As I said in […]
February 21, 2014 – 10:49 pm
Last year I wrote this about liberal orthodoxy’s unavoidable antagonism to truth: A sine qua non for the modern liberal ideologue is a flair for living comfortably in a state of cognitive dissonance. This is made necessary by the internal contradictions of his worldview, and by its frequent, and calamitous, collisions with the social, political, […]
February 19, 2014 – 8:23 pm
I’m working late, so all I have for you tonight is this little quiz. Give it a go.
February 19, 2014 – 12:49 am
Julius Evola, from the opening pages of Men Among The Ruins: Recently, various forces have attempted to set up a defense and a resistance in the sociopolitical domain against the extreme forms in which the disorder of our age manifests itself. It is necessary to realize that this is a useless effort, even for the […]
February 17, 2014 – 11:05 pm
From Australia’s News.com.au: New forms of discrimination, known as “neoracism”, are taking hold in scientific research, spreading the belief that races exist and are different in terms of biology, behaviour and culture, according to anthropologists who spoke at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago. This would be bad enough […]
February 15, 2014 – 3:33 pm
Yep, they’ve been piling up again. (Just like the snow is supposed to do, again, here in the Outer Cape tonight.) — Life, and love, in Russia. — The GDP of American states and foreign nations. — Theodore Dalrymple on the suppression of dissent. — See above. — More from Russia. — The most beautiful […]
February 13, 2014 – 10:11 pm
In which blogger Mark Shea is shamelessly pwned by a spectacularly imaginative troll. Here.
February 13, 2014 – 10:01 pm
Some heartening news on the Second Amendment front: First, the good people of Connecticut are defying that state’s new registration laws with some old-fashioned civil disobedience. This is what you get when you pass bad laws: people will not respect them, and will not obey them. Second, the Ninth Circuit (!) has tossed out, as […]
February 11, 2014 – 8:11 pm
Got two items in the mail today from Barack Obama’s Ministry of Truth, shortly after learning that He had decided, on a whim, to change an explicitly articulated (and politically damaging) proviso of the healthcare law until after the upcoming elections. Make sure you read the letter from ‘Cathi’, which I’ve pasted in below the […]
February 10, 2014 – 11:47 pm
If any of you happen to be baseball fans, my son Nick has just launched a new website: Pitcher GIFS. Go have a look. .
February 10, 2014 – 11:18 pm
Here’s your antidote for those Monday blues: two stories to warm your heart. First you’ll be glad to see that New York State residents can own an AR-15 after all, and at the same time show just how foolish these hysterical “assault-rifle” bans — which prohibit, on the basis of superficial appearance, weapons that are […]
February 10, 2014 – 1:28 am
The CBS program 60 Minutes reported tonight, to everyone’s astonishment and dismay, on a recent, and heretofore completely unsuspected, scientific discovery. The context was specific — differences in the effect of the sleeping pill Ambien on men and women — but it appears, shockingly, that the scope of the problem might be far more general, […]
February 8, 2014 – 12:06 am
A while back, the comment-thread of a post about the government shutdown turned into a discussion about the obesity of the American poor. A commenter remarked: The reason why many poor people are obese, of course, is that the cheapest foods tend to be high in carbs and low in nutrients, which often leads to […]
February 6, 2014 – 5:41 pm
Some good reads from the Web today: Matt Ridley on inequality. Kevin Williamson on feminism. From the Statistics Lab at Cambridge University, a look at some climate-alarmist buncombe.
February 3, 2014 – 11:23 pm
The Second Amendment notwithstanding, it appears that some pretty serious infringement is under consideration in Massachusetts, right-to-bear-arms-wise. Boston.com reports (my emphasis): More than a year after the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., a panel of academic experts today released a long-awaited report recommending that Massachusetts tighten its gun laws, which are already considered among the […]
February 2, 2014 – 11:43 pm
This entry is part 14 of 15 in the series
Free WillI used to spill a lot of ink here about the question of free will. In the most recent of a series of thirteen related posts on the topic, I mentioned a disagreement on this topic between two writers whose names are often linked: the philosopher Daniel Dennett and the neuroscientist Sam Harris. Both are, […]
February 1, 2014 – 10:59 pm
Over the years readers have mentioned to me that too much of the discussion here takes place in the comment-threads, which are often far longer than the posts themselves. The days go by, the posts roll away down the screen, and exchanges that happen days after the original post are, effectively, hidden. I’ve been trying […]