December 21, 2022 – 9:46 pm
It’s been a very long time since I posted anything here – or anywhere. I’m hoping to be “fit for purpose” again soon, but until then, I’ll just wish you all a happy Christmas, and good health and fortune in the New Year.
September 14, 2022 – 7:58 pm
The lovely Nina’s mother Lily died a couple weeks ago, at 101. Her obituary is here.
I’ve been enjoying a respite from online engagement this summer, for reasons given in the previous post. Our daughter, her husband, and their three young sons (one is three-and-a-half, one turned six yesterday, and one is five months old) are staying with us, and the days are a noisy, happy chaos that leaves a bloke […]
I’m writing to acknowledge the sorry state of this blog of late. I keep thinking I’m going to snap out of this slump and start writing regularly again, but it just doesn’t seem to be happening. It’s partly that I’m getting on a bit (though I’m only sixty-six, and can easily manage my daily mile […]
The lovely Nina and I celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversay today!
We on the reactionary Right like to study history, and theorize about the cycles and mechanisms of power — and of course we denizens of “FrogTwitter” joke around about helicopter rides — but real power is that which, if you get on the wrong side of it, you die. With that in mind, here are […]
The news-cycle today is dominated, once again, by an eruption of evil. This time the limb of Satan was one Salvador Ramos, who, being pursued for shooting his own grandmother, entered an elementary school and massacred everyone he could until he was shot dead himself. (Nobody, as far as I can tell, has commented yet […]
As we detach morality from a transcendent source — that is, a source that has an intrinsic moral authority that stands higher than our own subjective opinion — we necessarily diminish morality’s normative force.
Sorry for the scanty content – the lovely Nina and I are in Minnesota until the weekend (and I’ve nothing new or interesting to say at the moment anyway).
Now and then I post things on Twitter, and tonight’s experience – in which I simply tried to make the point that the abortion question is a terribly difficult and complex one, about which decent and reasonable people can have different moral intuitions – reminds me why the chances of this nation’s persisting much longer […]
Here’s an interesting tool, if you’re young and looking for a place to raise a family: the Opportunity Atlas. It tells you what your income (and other) prospects are in different places, with filters for various categories of people.
The extinction of God creates a vacancy in that position.
Reuters reports that California will be having problems with its energy supply this summer: California says it needs more power to keep the lights on May 6 (Reuters) – California energy officials on Friday issued a sober forecast for the state’s electrical grid, saying it lacks sufficient capacity to keep the lights on this summer […]
Well, this SCOTUS leak about Roe v. Wade has really livened things up. I think we might even have a new Current Thing on our hands, and will now be moving on from Ukraine, which of course became the Current Thing right after … well, I can’t quite recall … but it was very important. […]
The Russian Embassy in Ottawa just posted this on Twitter: Wheels within wheels…
I’ve got something entertaining for you: the thoroughly based Hans-Herman Hoppe (author of Democracy: The God That Failed) in a panel discussion on the merits (or in Hoppe’s view, the pestilential demerits), of the E.U. Among other things, Hoppe argues the case for subsidiarianism and decentralization (which, as readers of this blog will know, I […]
Here’s one of the best essays Moldbug has published in a long time: The Cathedral or the Bizarre. In it he revisits the foundations of what, way back in Chapter 4 of his Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives (2008), he first called “the Cathedral”: the curiously coordinated institutions of journalism and academia that seem to […]
April 17, 2022 – 12:15 pm
We’re back from Savannah. It really is a beautiful place, and I’m sure we will visit again. The gracious architecture, the charming little squares that break up the urban density, and the fragrant, luxurious flora all provide the unforgettable aesthetic effect of a high civilization in a kind of sated languor. It was perfect for […]
April 10, 2022 – 11:04 pm
Ah, this world… I’d hoped I might have had something original, or at least interesting, to say in the few days since my last, rather apologetic post — but it’s Spring, and the lovely Nina and I haven’t gone anywhere since March of 2020, so on an impulse we are heading South for just a […]
Jeepers, where does the time go? I had no idea it had been so long since I’ve written anything here; I’ve been distracted with what’s known as “IRL” stuff (which, I suppose, is not altogether unhealthy). Among the things I’ve been doing has been reading a lot. Right now I’m re-reading a book called The […]
March 26, 2022 – 12:35 pm
I’ve referred on several occasions to the old Chinese story about “calling a deer a horse”, which describes the scheming courtier Zhao Gao’s stratagem (this was way back in the third century BC) for testing the loyalty of potential political allies by seeing what lies they would assent to. I first read about this over […]
March 21, 2022 – 11:41 pm
Here’s a brief item of mine, just posted at American Greatness.
March 20, 2022 – 11:49 pm
Currently underway in Iceland:
Writing at City Journal, my friend Jim Meigs (who is also, by the way, a hell of a good musician) discusses the folly of U.S. biofuel policy. In brief: it’s a disaster already, and it’s about to make things much, much worse. Here.
James Kalb stopped by to comment on yesterday’s post, and his remarks deserve a post of their own in reply. (I’ve known Jim for quite a few years now, and for those of you who don’t recognize his name, he is a lawyer and scholar who has written extensively on politics, religion, and culture, and […]
March 18, 2022 – 11:53 am
If you’re like most people — and most people are! — you’re probably looking at the news, and the fantastic things you are asked to believe, with a deepening feeling that either everyone’s gone completely mad, or that you have. If it’s any comfort, let me reassure that you haven’t gone insane, and neither has […]
Hat-tip to our commenter Jake for this one.
March 13, 2022 – 12:24 pm
I haven’t had much to say — Ukraine is all smoke and fog and lies and propaganda, and I’ve been focused on personal matters. Now we are off to NY and NJ for a few days (Nina’s having surgery on her hand), and I don’t expect to be posting anything till we get back. A […]
Curtis Yarvin. a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug, has posted a pungent item about Ukraine today at Substack. In it, he had this to say: A foreign policy conducted solely in the interest of Americans would not involve intervening in a civil war against a nuclear power on the banks of the Dnieper, for the reason that there […]
Here is a caustically sarcastic item by Michael Anton that I encourage you all to read and share.
It’s good to see that Lewis Anselm, AKA “Diplomad”, is blogging again. Anselm, having spent his professional career working for the State Department all over the world, is always especially good on international affairs, and he’s just posted an excellent item on Ukraine. You should read the whole thing, but I’ll quote one longish passage […]
We are hearing, once again, a lot of incoherent prattle about “the right side of history”. It’s no surprise, given current events, but as time goes by, I find it increasingly annoying. It’s a vain and silly expression, full of swollen and virtuous self-pride; all it really refers to, in most people’s mouths, is whether […]
February 27, 2022 – 2:25 pm
Lee Smith has posted an essay at Tablet summarizing the decades-long runup to this war in Ukraine. It’s an excellent synopsis — brief, clear, and insightful — and I highly recommend it to you all. Greed, bluster, folly, and hubris — this story has it all. Read it here.
February 23, 2022 – 11:52 pm
That great rumbling sound you’re hearing is history resuming. Reports of its death, or that it has “sides”, were greatly exaggerated. We see tonight, as we have seen again and again and again, century after century, that imaginary “order” based on political and diplomatic abstractions — or on anything but a vector-sum of power, fear, […]
February 23, 2022 – 10:49 pm
Sad news yesterday: Gary Brooker, the singer, composer, and pianist of the English band Procol Harum, has died of cancer at the age of 76. This was a particularly poignant passing for me; I’ve been haunted by his masterpiece A Salty Dog since the first time I heard it, more than half a century ago, […]
February 21, 2022 – 10:05 pm
It is with great joy that the lovely Nina and I welcome to the world little Cooper Joseph Wright, our third grandchild, born today in Hong Kong. Mother (our daughter) and son are happy and well.
February 17, 2022 – 1:37 pm
You may have had some concerns about gathering tensions on the Russian frontier. (There’s much I could say about what it all means, and about our decades of folly regarding Russia, but I’ll leave that for another time.) Well, I’m happy to say you can put your mind at ease, and get on with your […]
February 17, 2022 – 12:00 pm
Rush Limbaugh died a year ago today. Over at American Greatness, Christopher Flannery has published a remembrance. Read it here.
February 16, 2022 – 11:48 pm
I’m 65, soon to be 66. My lovely wife Nina is about a year-and-a-half older. (She “robbed the cradle”!) We are already both eligible for Social Security. Neither of us had been planning to file for it yet, though, because for each year you wait (until you’re 70), the benefit rate that you lock in […]
February 15, 2022 – 12:30 am
Watching those truckers standing up for their liberties against Justin Castreau has me in a feisty temper tonight, and so here’s a post that fits my mood. I have a friend who, back in the heady days before everything became so grim and tedious, used to be a leading light, with a large following, of […]
February 13, 2022 – 10:31 pm
Richard Hanania has just published an excellent piece at Substack on the enfeebling and corrosive effect of the feminization of public affairs. The problem, as he describes it, is that the natural asymmetry between men and women gives women a pass when they respond emotionally to the rough-and-tumble that is an inevitable part of every […]
February 7, 2022 – 3:10 pm
Yes, Justin “Trudeau” is Fidel Castro’s son. This is about as obvious as it could be, and if you are wondering why those in power keep lying about this, I advise you to look up “Point deer, make horse”. If this is actually news to you, read this. (And as current events amply confirm, the […]
February 6, 2022 – 12:12 am
Readers who have been coming around here for a while will know that in recent years I have felt the need to re-examine all that I once believed about scientism, philosophical materialism, and the existence of God. It began as a grudging acceptance, even as an unbeliever myself, that atheism and secularism might have a […]
January 29, 2022 – 5:42 pm
We’ve had quite a storm today here on the far end of Cape Cod, and it’s still raging as I write (5:26 PM Saturday). All day long the northeast wind off the Atlantic has been ferocious, and the snow’s been falling (or more accurately, blowing sideways) at two to three inches per hour. I’m writing […]
January 28, 2022 – 11:26 pm
It appears we are about to be blasted by the first serious winter storm of the season here in the Outer Cape – a potent nor’easter that’s undergoing “bombogenesis” as I write. The current predictions have us getting about two feet of snow between now and Sunday morning, with howling winds. I hope the power […]
January 23, 2022 – 11:19 pm
I’ve just read an article at Substack, written by one N.S. Lyons (whose bio tells us only that he or she is an “analyst and writer working in Washington, D.C.”), listing twenty reasons why none of us should harbor any hope that we might at last be emerging from the collective insanity of Wokeness that […]
January 21, 2022 – 11:11 pm
Following on that essay on “mass formations” at American Greatness, Bill Valicella’s reply to it at his place, and my own follow-up post from a few days ago, JM Smith has posted a substantial contribution to the discussion over at The Orthosphere. Professor Smith’s post brings to the conversation Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 study of […]
January 18, 2022 – 11:15 pm
The chattering classes are atip at the titillating prospect of a Russian operation into Ukraine. The appeal is obvious: above all, they can imagine a surge of patriotic cohesion, a nation united against a familiar external foe — the Russkies — that much of our colossal Deep State still misses with a poignancy that is […]
January 15, 2022 – 5:43 pm
Recently I published an essay at American Greatness about the idea of “mass-formation psychosis”, a concept that has gone “viral” after being discussed by Dr. Robert Malone in a widely viewed interview with Joe Rogan. (The interview was, within days, widely censored on media platforms — which is, we should note, relevant in itself.) The […]
January 12, 2022 – 6:38 pm
I saw this online today. I think it’s brilliant.