December 18, 2012 – 10:06 pm
Here’s a new one: a spider that builds decoy spiders.
December 18, 2012 – 12:09 am
I just realized I had neglected to note the passing of the great Ravi Shankar, who died last week at the ripe old age of 92. He was for me, of course, as for everyone else who was young in those days, the one who opened the door to the treasure-house of Indian music. I […]
December 16, 2012 – 9:56 pm
With a hat tip to our friend Jeffery Hodges, here’s an excellent survey of the moribund and incoherent state of American conservatism. It is not a cheery picture.
December 16, 2012 – 2:04 pm
From a fascinating interview with physicist David Deutsch: There’s a notorious problem with defining information within physics, namely that on the one hand information is purely abstract, and the original theory of computation as developed by Alan Turing and others regarded computers and the information they manipulate purely abstractly as mathematical objects. Many mathematicians to […]
December 15, 2012 – 5:56 pm
In the wake of the Newtown shootings, the usual voices on the Left have resumed their call for the nation to “do something” about guns. In a longish post, here are some contrarian opinions from around the blogosphere, and a few observations of my own.
December 14, 2012 – 1:47 pm
There was an eruption of unspeakable horror, of pure Evil, today in Newtown, Connecticut. From what I understand many small children — 18, according to the latest report — have been shot to death. There will be bitter political debate in the days to come — such as we have never seen before, I think […]
December 14, 2012 – 12:50 pm
Laura Wood, the Thinking Housewife, brings to our attention France’s newest public institution: the National Observatory of Secularism. Its function is to train the State’s benevolent and watchful Eye upon “religious pathology”. Whether secular pathology will be detected as well is left to the reader’s intuition.
December 13, 2012 – 11:27 pm
“Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter. A democratic state may profess to venerate the name, and even pass laws making it officially sacred, but it simply cannot tolerate the thing.” – H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore Evening Sun (13 April 1925) […]
December 13, 2012 – 10:37 pm
If you’re like me, you’ve been asking yourself lately: when did people first make cheese? Here’s your answer.
December 13, 2012 – 11:43 am
Today Dennis Mangan comments on the actor Jamie Foxx’s recent opening monologue on Saturday Night Live, which I hadn’t seen until just now. It is startlingly frank (I realize I shouldn’t be startled by this sort of thing any more, but I’ll admit I was) in its triumphalist antipathy toward white people. At one point […]
December 12, 2012 – 11:09 am
Townhall.com has published a fascinating article about household income inequality in America, based on a novel analysis of historical income data. Applying the mathematics of log-normal distributions to census data for the incomes of working and non-working individuals of both sexes, the authors found a way of simulating various household combinations that allows them to […]
December 11, 2012 – 11:39 pm
Get thee post-haste to the Maverick Philosopher‘s website, where our friend Bill Vallicella has inked a splendid meditation on how very much we have to be humble about. The best turn of phrase: “…an early weaponization of the space between chucker and effer.” Too much the gentleman, he, to make it rhyme.
December 11, 2012 – 3:30 pm
Here’s something I didn’t know until just now: squids have doughnut-shaped brains, with the esophagus going right through the hole. See for yourself.
December 11, 2012 – 2:13 pm
Writing at The Thinking Housewife, Laura Wood examines an article, by one Alice Dreger, about the sexuality of two African tribes, the Aka and the Ngandu, in which both masturbation and homosexuality are absent. Mrs. Wood writes: Dreger says that the absence of homosexuality does not conflict with the prevailing belief in the West that […]
December 11, 2012 – 12:18 pm
In an item that’s been making the rounds since its publication a few days ago, Mark Steyn examines the modest lifestyle of America’s populist champion. Here.
December 10, 2012 – 11:45 pm
Not long ago we posted links to an important series of essays by Nick Land on what is now being called the “Dark Enlightenment”. The essays were published at the website www.thatsmags.com/shanghai. They are now gone.
December 10, 2012 – 10:12 pm
Forgive me, readers, but I have to make a brief technical digression: for some time now I’ve been grappling with a common but perplexing computer problem, one that appears to have vexed and confounded an awful lot of people. I’ve just found the solution, and I must share it here so that others Googling the […]
December 9, 2012 – 1:05 am
Just got back from the VFR dinner on Manhattan’s West Side. The mood was a tad somber, given our discouraging circumstances, but it was encouraging to break bread with so many clear-eyed and highly intelligent people, and to meet in person many whose comments and essays I’ve been reading for years.
December 7, 2012 – 11:42 am
I meant to post this yesterday (and I see Kevin Kim’s on it today): the impertinent global-warmism gadfly Lord Monckton (featured previously in these pages here and here) is taking heavy fire for having pointed out, at a United Nations climate summit, the stupendously inconvenient finding that there has apparently been no global warming for […]
December 7, 2012 – 11:23 am
Blogger Ellison calls our attention to a potable that might be better left in the pot. Here.
December 6, 2012 – 4:53 pm
Here’s a website that will appeal, I think, to at least a few of our readers, for various reasons: Retraction Watch.
December 6, 2012 – 12:29 pm
It’s been known for a while that extraversion — one of the “Big Five” personality traits — is positively correlated with longevity in humans. (Pessimism, on the other hand, is negatively correlated, so I’ll take this opportunity to say that it’s been nice knowing you, readers.) It now appears, perhaps unsurprisingly, that this extraversion-longevity relation […]
December 5, 2012 – 11:44 pm
No time for writing tonight. So here are two video clips: First, here’s the late Christopher Hitchens letting that cad Bill Clinton have it with both barrels. (Why Clinton remains so popular eludes me; the man is a knave and a blackguard.) Second, here’s the one and only Stevie Wonder working his magic, and stealing […]
December 3, 2012 – 10:55 pm
If I asked you to name the holiest of America’s founding documents, there’s a good chance you’d pick the Declaration of Independence. (The only other one even remotely in the running would be the Constitution.) How well do you know the Declaration? We all remember those reverberant passages about self-evident truths (despite their being, if […]
December 3, 2012 – 12:46 pm
I haven’t much time for writing today, so for now, here’s Steven Pinker on the genetic basis of the high IQ of Ashkenazi Jews. Pinker is one academic who, despite being a fairly high-echelon member of the Cathedral staff, apparently has an office with a window, and flirts openly with apostasy. Among the apostatic asseverations […]
December 2, 2012 – 12:24 pm
We’ve added some new links to our Dark Enlightenment post. See also this essay on the tension between democracy and liberty.
December 1, 2012 – 9:40 pm
This is magnificent. Look at the flow, the coordination: right rear, left rear, left front, right front. Look at the power. Most amazing of all: see how steady the cat’s head remains throughout, and the unblinking gaze.
December 1, 2012 – 12:17 am
The irrepressible Pat Condell wishes us all a happy Islamophobia Awareness Month. Here.
November 30, 2012 – 12:48 pm
Another thunderbolt from the frontiers of science: men like sports more than women. This will require an intervention, I think.
November 30, 2012 – 11:08 am
For those of you with any lingering interest in the pestilential viper’s-nest we like to call the “Mideast” — that blasted, slippery-edged sinkhole of human misery that manages always to be going straight to Hell without ever actually getting there and leaving the rest of us in peace — I reprint below two items from […]
November 29, 2012 – 7:08 pm
The title of this post is a term that is taking root in a certain corner of the intellectual blogosphere. Dennis Mangan has written about it just today; I first saw it in a post by John Derbyshire about a month ago. That post led me to a four-part series by Nick Land, in which […]
November 29, 2012 – 5:34 pm
Here’s an item that’s making the rounds today: it’s the abstract of a paper published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly. The topic is something called “benevolent sexism”, which refers to all those “chivalrous” things gentlemen do for ladies: holding the door for them, seating them at table, offering them your arm during a stroll, […]
November 29, 2012 – 1:24 pm
This is either some top-notch street magic, or some clever video jiggery-pokery. Worth a look, in any event.
November 28, 2012 – 7:22 pm
Here. It’s all fun and games, until someone loses a leg.
November 28, 2012 – 7:01 pm
Here’s Stanford’s Peter Robinson, interviewing Antonin Scalia for the Federalist Society (in five parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Well worth your time, I think, and you might be surprised by some of what Justice Scalia has to say.
November 28, 2012 – 4:55 pm
I used to run. I never liked it much, but I did it anyway. I was never fleet of foot, and I never ran very far — two or three miles, usually, with the longest effort ever being only about six miles or so. I did it mainly because I found running to be good […]
November 28, 2012 – 11:24 am
From an article entitled When Work Is Punished: The Tragedy Of America’s Welfare State: We realize that this is a painful topic in a country in which the issue of welfare benefits, and cutting (or not) the spending side of the fiscal cliff, have become the two most sensitive social topics. Alas, none of that […]
November 28, 2012 – 10:54 am
Here’s a light-heartedly macabre Australian train-safety video.
November 27, 2012 – 4:32 pm
Here’s something: Germany is planning to ban sex with animals. This is not, mind you, because humans having sex with animals is something that a goodthinkful liberal society might wish to prohibit on any moral grounds. That would be discriminatory — and now that the universal acid of secular nihilism has dissolved away any foundation […]
November 26, 2012 – 5:03 pm
A great sage once hoisted a glass and made the following toast: “Here’s to Alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” With thanks to the indefatigable JK, here are some further details.
November 25, 2012 – 11:57 pm
Like a great many people my age, I was bowled over in my adolescence by the books of J.R.R. Tolkien. I was smitten, transformed. Not only was I transported by the great story itself, but as the immigrant son of British expats, I was also awakened for the first time to the great depth of […]
November 25, 2012 – 5:38 pm
With a hat tip to Kevin Kim, here’s one physician’s comments on Obamacare (which of course we have now lost any hope of repealing).
November 24, 2012 – 11:06 pm
Forgive me, readers, for the paucity of output here lately. A concatenation of upheavals and disruptions in my personal life, combined with a deepening gloom as regards our position on the great arc of history, have together knocked some of the stuffing out of me, and I find myself slow to recover. Much on my […]
November 22, 2012 – 1:17 pm
To you all. Yes, we’ve just taken an awful beating, and must now come to terms with the grim fact that the great Republic born with such promise in 1789 is now a tottering corpse, beyond hope of resurrection, and that its future now holds only decomposition and decay. But if you have family and […]
November 21, 2012 – 1:53 am
My father’s situation having stabilized, I’ve just got back home. Thanks to you all for your kind comments and emails. Old age is a terrible thing. Each crisis leaves you a little lower, a little weaker, a little frailer than the last. It’s hard to see aging as anything but a terrible, progressive, wasting disease, […]
November 18, 2012 – 7:22 pm
Things will likely be quiet here for a few days — my elderly father’s health has taken a sudden turn for the worse, and I’ve flown out to California to help look after him.
November 16, 2012 – 5:59 pm
With a hat tip to Laura Wood, here’s Clark Whelton on the recent descent of English into content-free moosh. An excerpt: This deliberate descent into verbal bedlam first came to my attention when I was interviewing intern candidates for Mayor Edward I. Koch’s speechwriting office in New York City. Until the mid-’80s I had no […]
November 15, 2012 – 11:33 pm
The central inconsistency of multiculturalism: the belief that a culture that believes all cultures are of equal value is a superior culture.
November 13, 2012 – 10:34 pm
Courtesy of David Duff: 23 brushes with death.