January 15, 2012 – 11:49 pm
I’m not at all well tonight — I seem to have caught a nasty sinus cold, a rarity for me — and it’s all I can manage to keep the conversation going in our “What Is A Nation Anyway?” thread. Back to normal soon, I hope.
January 13, 2012 – 10:09 pm
Pat Buchanan has now lost his TV gig for crimespeak, but he’s still got his website and newsletter. In his latest offering, he examines Ron Paul’s candidacy, and what Mr. Paul’s investment strategy says about his view of the near future. Here.
January 13, 2012 – 11:55 am
Well, here it is again: Friday the 13th. I consider them auspicious, but I’ve already written about that several times (such as here and here), so for today I’ll just note the event en passant, and get on with other things.
January 12, 2012 – 11:13 pm
With a hat tip to Dennis Mangan, here’s a provocative item: Israel Upholds Citizenship Bar for Palestinian Spouses Israel’s Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship. Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional. “Human rights do not prescribe national […]
January 12, 2012 – 4:17 pm
In Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, the magnum opus of the extraordinary Greek/Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, the central character, Beelzebub refers to the unfortunate inhabitants of Earth — us — as “three-brained beings”. This is in alignment with Gurdjieff’s division of the human organism into three parts: the intellectual center, emotional center, and ‘moving’ or […]
January 11, 2012 – 7:04 pm
Meet Mercedes-Benz’s new spokesman.
January 11, 2012 – 6:35 pm
BE IT KNOWN BY ALL that Hizzonner Michael Bloomberg, Lord Mayor of Manhattan, Imperator of The Five Boroughs, Slayer of Term Limits, and Guardian In Loco Parentis of the Well-Being and Moral Probity of the Gothamite Flock, has of Late turned His Attention to the licentious Consumption of Alcoholic Liquors, and other stimulating Potations, by […]
January 11, 2012 – 11:07 am
Here’s a dispatch from our senior White House correspondent, Milton Polchek: WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 – Michelle Obama, the first black woman to serve as First Lady, took to the airwaves recently to express her irritation at being characterized as an “angry black woman”. Mrs. Obama could not be reached for comment, but a close friend […]
January 11, 2012 – 12:25 am
Here’s a curious item for you: the only recorded capture, in the Tripiscum Plateau of the Circum-Caribbean region of Northern South America, of the exotic Piercing Devil.
January 10, 2012 – 9:12 pm
With thanks to our reader Pete K., here’s a heartening item from the frontiers of science. What’s more, the story introduces a new and important fundamental unit of measurement, which I think should be called the ‘marley’. And here’s a related video.
January 9, 2012 – 2:19 pm
With a hat tip to VFR, here’s the Jerusalem Post’s latest report on the Islamist renaissance that is coalescing in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’. Meanwhile, DEBKA reports that in Egypt, General Tantawi and the SCAF grow weary of their burden, and are negotiating an early handover of the reins of power to the […]
January 8, 2012 – 11:06 pm
Gotta love this: the upstart Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, who has attracted nationwide attention for his ostentatious Christianity, is fond of associating himself with the New Testament verse John 3:16. For you damned heathens out there who may not be familiar with this oft-quoted passage, it says: For God so loved the world that […]
January 8, 2012 – 5:43 pm
So, conservatives: who’s our guy going to be? Heading into the New Hampshire primary, Mitt Romney has a commanding lead — and the other candidates spent most of Saturday’s debate snarling at one another, while hardly even taking a swing at Mitt. There are two questions. First: who out of this lot would, by our […]
January 8, 2012 – 1:09 am
I’ve never been a fan of Rick Santorum, and I hope he doesn’t win the GOP nomination, because then I’d have to vote to elect him President. But any criticism I might make of him begins and ends with his public life: his opinions and intentions regarding government policy. Not so for liberal water-carriers Alan […]
January 7, 2012 – 3:44 pm
Just tweeted by “Karma’s janitor”, @Iowahawk: New York New York, it’s a helluva town / 3 foot rats, but the transfats are down
January 6, 2012 – 10:55 pm
Peter Kirsanow comments, here, on President Obama’s scorched-earth “recess” appointments. I look forward to an adjudication in the courts. This year’s presidential campaign is going to make Iwo Jima look like a pillow-fight. And if you thought U.S. politics were already polarized to the point of total dysfunction, Pat Buchanan argues here, just wait until […]
January 6, 2012 – 9:29 pm
New tests of the extract of Japanese raisin-tree seeds (hovenia dulcis) appear to have confirmed that their “active ingredient” is highly effective at blocking the effects of alcohol. Big Think reports: Scientists at UCLA gave a group of rats the “human equivalent” of 15 to 20 beers during a two-hour binge. We’ll call this group […]
January 6, 2012 – 2:44 pm
So I’ve decided to follow @kanyewest on Twitter. Should be great, I think.
January 5, 2012 – 11:27 pm
From the frontiers of science, here’s some breaking news — Men, Women Really Do Have Big Personality Differences — that any human being, plucked from anywhere on Earth at any time between the invention of language and the 1960s or so, and not in a persistent vegetative state, could have told you. I’m “on the […]
January 4, 2012 – 11:19 pm
Here’s something I meant to post a few weeks ago, when President Obama was delivering that Osawatomie speech. It’s an essay by Walter Russell Mead, in which he examines the persistent Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian threads in American political history, and argues that after a long period of Hamiltonian ascendancy, the time is right for the […]
January 4, 2012 – 1:18 am
In the discussion thread of our recent post about Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the issue soon became: what should the attitude of the West have been toward the democratic uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere? On the one hand, as Americans it seems we ought to support democracy wherever we can; on the other, […]
January 3, 2012 – 10:15 pm
This in the mailbag from our old friend David Pauley: Freeman Dyson on catastrophes, real and imaginary.
January 2, 2012 – 11:05 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Valicella, here are some prize-winning examples of spectacularly bad writing.
January 2, 2012 – 5:21 pm
Nearly a year ago, as the uprising in Egypt was gaining traction, I wrote: The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan’) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it […]
January 1, 2012 – 4:30 pm
Last January we noted in these pages a mysterious event at Beebe, Arkansas: thousands of red-winged blackbirds had fallen out of the sky on New Year’s Eve. An excerpt: It seems that thousands of red-winged blackbirds (and as far as I can tell, only red-winged blackbirds) fell dead from the sky on New Year’s Eve […]
December 31, 2011 – 2:26 pm
With grim 2011 winding down, I thought about making a New Year’s resolution to take a more positive outlook toward the future, to express more optimism in these pages, and generally to stop being so pessimistic about everything. I figured it probably wouldn’t work out, though, so I gave up on the idea. But just […]
December 30, 2011 – 2:42 pm
There’s something for everyone here at waka waka waka, and we’ve made it a late-December tradition to take a look back at some of the thousands of keyphrases that brought visitors our way from Google and other search engines over the past year. Here’s our 2011 selection; it’s a curious crop as always.
December 27, 2011 – 8:20 pm
We’re on something of a holiday schedule this week — so for tonight, just a grab-bag of little diversions: — An item that, if it were a post of its own, would surely have been titled “Bird Brains”, or perhaps “Counting Crows”. — A little hibernal music from the late Jackie Gleason. — For you […]
December 25, 2011 – 1:26 pm
Whatever Christmas means to you — be it everything or nothing — I hope you all have a warm and happy one, in the company of people you love.
December 24, 2011 – 4:23 pm
Here’s a time capsule from December 24th, 1941, seventy years ago today: Christmas Eve remarks from the White House lawn by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the visiting Winston Churchill. The US had just entered the war; Britain had until a fortnight earlier stood alone against the Nazis, and since September had endured the horrors of […]
December 23, 2011 – 7:02 pm
Diana West comments here on the dismal verdict in the Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff trial in Vienna. Her crime, if you haven’t followed the case, was to comment disapprovingly on Mohammed’s deflowering of his nine-year-old wife Aisha. Well, tolerance is paramount in a decent society, I guess. Meanwhile, Christmas masses have been canceled in Iraq due to […]
December 23, 2011 – 11:40 am
Well, there you have it: a bumbling, humiliating performance by the House GOP on the ridiculous two-month payroll-tax moratorium (which, among its other shortcomings, is so idiotically brief that it presents costly problems to payroll processors). Nice work, guys. Charles Krauthammer offers a scathing summary here.
December 23, 2011 – 10:46 am
Here’s a page that shows a live stream of Wikipedia edits. You can filter the stream by language version and edit size. It’s curiously fascinating, for a minute or two at least.
December 22, 2011 – 2:28 pm
For you strategic-security wonks, John McCreary has published a substantial post on events in North Korea today at NightWatch — complete with a parting jab at the Times. I’ll reproduce it here. North Korea: North Korea is demanding that foreigners either remain in their homes or leave the country. Pyongyang authorities ordered some foreigners to […]
December 22, 2011 – 12:19 pm
I’ve been getting robocalls over the past few days for a “Draft Hillary” campaign. Mounting a primary opposition to the President would be a smart move for the Democrats, I think, given how deeply Mr. Obama has disappointed so many of his supporters. I have a feeling Hillary would be a lot harder to beat […]
December 22, 2011 – 12:41 am
Here is a long and deeply depressing essay about California’s dying Central Valley, by one of its lifelong residents, Victor Davis Hanson. How did we let this happen to ourselves?
December 21, 2011 – 11:59 pm
Time for some NRBQ, I think. Here’s Wild Weekend. And here’s Get Rhythm. Man, what a band.
December 21, 2011 – 2:07 pm
Via Drudge: According to an investigation by one James Hohman, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Chevy Volt bakes in up to a quarter of a million dollars of government subsidies per vehicle. Meanwhile, sales of the Volt for 2011 had reached just over 6,100 by the end of November, which looks to […]
December 20, 2011 – 10:44 pm
Here’s the latest from the Kepler planetary probe: Earth-sized exoplanets. Not in the temperate, ‘habitable’ zone, but we’ve found some of those too. All this after only a couple of years of looking, with a technology that is still in its infancy. Can anyone really imagine anymore that the galaxy isn’t teeming with Earth-like, watery […]
December 19, 2011 – 4:33 pm
An article in the current New Yorker begins: On the night of October 16, 1590, a palace apartment near Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, in Naples, was the scene of a double murder so extravagantly vicious that people are still sifting through the evidence, more than four centuries later. The most reliable account of the crime […]
December 18, 2011 – 10:30 pm
Kim Jong Il has died. This is going to be interesting.
December 18, 2011 – 12:40 pm
Horrifying images and video from Egypt, here. One of the consistent lessons of history, from Aristagoras to Gorbachev, is that authoritarian systems place themselves at great risk when they attempt to liberalize. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is learning this lesson today; they have unleashed forces that they have no idea how to […]
December 17, 2011 – 10:31 pm
You know who I feel sorry for? Flightless birds. Jesus, what a crappy deal.
December 17, 2011 – 8:16 pm
There’s been a huge outpouring of opinion about Christopher Hitchens from both Right and Left, most of it encomiastic, but mixed in with some harsh reviews as well. That isn’t surprising; obviously a polemicist like Hitchens — especially one who crossed the aisle as publicly as he — is going to have his fair share […]
December 17, 2011 – 5:56 pm
The Senate has passed their stopgap spending bill, which included a rider that annuls, temporarily at least, what would effectively have been a ban on incandescent bulbs beginning this year. The intrusive legislation had made an awful lot of people hopping mad — but looking on the bright side (especially now that it has been […]
December 17, 2011 – 12:25 am
The death of Christopher Hitchens has hit me hard today; he was something of a hero of mine. Mr. Hitchens was everything I admire in a writer: a master of language, with incomparable style and wit, and a restless and erudite scholar — but unlike so many in possession of similar (but almost invariably lesser) […]
December 16, 2011 – 1:14 am
Christopher Hitchens has died. Read this remembrance, by Christopher Buckley.