We’ve been hearing for years that the only way America can stay ‘competitive’ is to admit hordes of foreign engineers to supplement our inadequate supply of homegrown STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) workers. The constant influx of these workers on H-1B visas has kept wages in these fields from rising for many years now. But […]
Just discovered a terrific online resource. Have a look.
Reviews and reactions to Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History have been many, and varied. The book is as polarizing as we all expected: for some it is racist ‘pseudoscience’, while for others it is a social and scientific watershed. I linked last week to hbd*chick’s roundup of these reviews; Occam’s […]
After working long hours the past three days (including an all-nighter on Tuesday), and teaching class tonight, I am utterly flogged. All I have to offer you is this.
We haven’t been covering political events very closely of late, so here are two items of interest. In the first, we learn that the Executive Branch has been short-circuiting deportation proceedings for thousands of criminal aliens, choosing instead just to let them go. Apparently this cohort, now at large within our borders again, have already […]
From Eric Hoffer’s Before the Sabbath, 1975: It is disconcerting that present-day young who did not know Stalin and Hitler are displaying the old naiveté. After all that has happened they still do not know that you cannot build utopia without terror, and that before long terror is all that’s left.
Sorry for the meager output over the past few days. The muse has been silent. Back soon. Here are a few items that have piled up: — Goodnight Dune. — An outstanding reactionary essay by Richard Weaver. (Worth a post of its own, when time permits.) — Tornado passing through. — A handy chart. — […]
A few days ago we linked to a defiant essay by a young, Jewish college student in which, having been told once too often to ‘check his privilege’, he examined the ‘privileges’ his family had enjoyed in the Holocaust, and during the struggle of its surviving members to build a life in postwar America. Here’s […]
Courtesy of the indefatigable JK. Here.
Our pal Mangan directed us yesterday to an interesting item, from Britain’s Institute of Economic Affairs, on the idea of ‘political correctness’ as an expression, not of one’s actual beliefs, but as a ‘signaling’ mechanism employed to enhance status. (This is not a new idea, but this is a good treatment of it.) Inside the […]
A sharp excerpt from a post by Bryce Laliberte: Equality is alien to nature… Democracy is opposed to order, for it is fundamentally a kind of disorder; order entails the accumulation of capital, material and social, which likewise entails a hierarchy and the attendant high asymmetries of power. Democracy precludes the accumulation of power by […]
Kevin Spacey: new face of the Dark Enlightenment. Here. (h/t: Nick Land.)
April 30, 2014 – 11:01 pm
The best thing I’ve read all week. Here.
It appears as if reality may slowly be impinging upon the consciousness of David Brooks. In today’s column, he laments that the abstract world order he had hoped for seems to be slipping away, yielding to older and more organic forces. We read: “The ”˜category error’ of our experts is to tell us that our […]
Just in case, loyal Readers, you happen to be looking for a fat tax write-off; and supposing also that you’ve been troubled lately by how hard it is for aging, pallid reactionary male bloggers just to get around without being interfered with by resentful Progressive mobs, here’s the perfect way to kill two birds with […]
April 28, 2014 – 10:37 pm
One more from the UK: the Daily Mail reports that modern humans are weaklings compared to our early ancestors. They might be on to something.
April 28, 2014 – 10:27 pm
NRO’s Jim Geraghty attended the National Rifle Association’s annual convention last week in Indianapolis, and today he summed up his impressions in an excellent post. I had begun to cull some excerpts, but really you should go read the whole thing yourself. It’s here. Best line: “Hi, I’m here to change your culture!’
April 28, 2014 – 10:06 pm
After yesterday’s depressing post, here’s some good news from across the pond: the anti-EU party UKIP has surged to first place in the runup to to next month’s elections. Suddenly, all over Europe, the spell is breaking.
April 27, 2014 – 11:36 pm
Once, Winston Churchill was the voice of England, the defender of “the island race“. My parents, who grew up in Britain, remembered hearing him on the radio during the Blitz. They told me that, more than anything else, it was his lion’s heart (and his lion’s roar) that gave the sturdy people of that battered […]
April 24, 2014 – 11:00 am
This morning I dropped a post I had written late last night, something I rarely do. When I got up and reread it, it just seemed too morose. As news unfolded later in the morning, I was glad I had done it for another reason: it would have led to more bickering than I have […]
Hello, … well, something very different indeed. Here’s an article about what college “debate” has become.
In his latest column, Patrick Buchanan argues that what confounded the Soviet empire, and what will keep Vladimir Putin’s revanchist ambitions in check today, is not sanctions or military threats, but a rising tide of nationalism. We read: Before we start sending troops back to Europe, as we did 65 years ago under Harry Truman, […]
April 20, 2014 – 11:34 pm
In a splenetic comment to an earlier post, a reader presents us with a clinical example of what I have called Cultural Immunodeficiency Virus: an AIDS-like memetic infection that attacks the social organism’s immune system, rendering it incapable of making essential discriminations — in particular, exactly those self/other distinctions that any organism must make to […]
April 18, 2014 – 10:49 pm
Here’s a fine online edition of Philogelos, the world’s oldest joke book.
Megan McArdle comments on the Obama administration’s conveniently timed revamp of insurance-data collection: I’m speechless. Shocked. Stunned. Horrified. Befuddled. Aghast, appalled, thunderstruck, perplexed, baffled, bewildered and dumbfounded. It’s not that I am opposed to the changes: Everyone understands that the census reports probably overstate the true number of the uninsured, because the number they report […]
Here’s a calm and reasonable article about “climate change”. The author is Lennart Bengtsson, an impeccably credentialed climate researcher. We read: More CO2 in the atmosphere leads undoubtedly to a warming of the earth surface. However, the extent and speed of this warming are still uncertain, because we cannot yet separate well enough the greenhouse […]
April 15, 2014 – 12:08 pm
Here’s a good piece by Jon Hinderaker on the Bundy affair.
April 14, 2014 – 11:16 pm
It’s just spring here in Wellfleet, and suddenly there are daffodils everywhere. I love daffodils; they seem perfect to me. They sing of warm spring sunlight, and cool clear air, and dark fertile soil, and of beauty unvanquished. I’ve always thought that daffodils are pure joy. I’ve written in these pages, from time to time, […]
I just took an online survey called “How Stereotypically White Are You?” It offers a hundred criteria, and asks the respondent to check all that apply. Most of them were things like “Have you ever listened to John Mayer while hooking up with someone?” (The sort of questions I might have asked — “Have you […]
A simple explanation from Randall Munroe.
April 11, 2014 – 11:50 am
We’ve been hacked, it seems. Perhaps it’s that ‘Heartbleed’ business, although my understanding was that Bluehost, my hosting service, had not been affected. Thanks to Matt Walker for leaving a comment on one of the (now deleted) spam posts to tell us that our RSS feed is corrupted also. Our in-house team of cyberterrorism experts […]
Brandeis University has rescinded its decision to award Aayan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree at this year’s commencement. You might have thought that a Jewish liberal-arts institution that was sufficiently impressed by Ms. Ali’s advocacy of women’s rights to offer her this honor wouldn’t be put off by her outspoken criticism of a culture that […]
A story that’s making the rounds today concerns trending changes in the way people read. Here’s the lede, from today’s Washington Post: Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, […]
My Android phone just had a stroke, and I had to do a factory reset. I lost all my applications, which meant I had to go rummaging around to replace them. It’s turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I’ve found some nifty new ones, and after blasting away all the cruft that […]
Too much social/political stuff lately. Will lay off for a while.
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 […]