September 13, 2011 – 10:33 pm
A while back I quoted some passages from the book Before the Sabbath, which is a year-long collection of daily musings by the longshoreman and autodidact Eric Hoffer, written in 1974 and 1975, toward the end of his life. I was reminded of Mr. Hoffer again today, when I ran across an item by Matt […]
September 12, 2011 – 9:55 pm
This could be trouble, guys.
September 11, 2011 – 8:17 pm
Here it is, then: September 11th, 2011. On that black day ten years ago, Nina and I stood on the roof of our Brooklyn home and watched the towers burn, and fall. Our daughter, now in her twenties, was in school at Stuyvesant High, just a couple of blocks from the doomed buildings; we didn’t […]
September 9, 2011 – 7:42 pm
With a hat tip to our friend David Duff, here’s a pungent English-history lesson from a Yeoman Warder of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Member of the Sovereign’s Body Guard of the Yeomen of the Guard Extraordinary.
September 8, 2011 – 11:08 pm
It was the first of two long days for me, and I didn’t get home in time to watch the Speech. I did read it, though. If I understand it correctly, there’s a bill Mr. Obama wants Congress to pass. Right away. If for any reason you don’t think that’s a good idea, you are […]
September 7, 2011 – 10:09 pm
Well, here we are in Gotham again (my, what a teeming, busy place this is!). Time to start catching up and getting things back to normal around here. Anything happen while we were gone?
September 3, 2011 – 10:22 pm
A reader has sent along a link to a rousing speech given by Geert Wilders in Berlin today. An excerpt: My friends, we need to give political power back to the nation-state, in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of human dignity. By defending the nation-states we defend our […]
September 2, 2011 – 6:26 pm
Well, the summer’s winding down on the Outer Cape, and after the terminal Labor Day spasm, it’s going to get a whole lot quieter here in Wellfleet. It’ll get quieter here on our little wooded knoll too, because the lovely Nina and I will be heading back to Gotham ourselves, come Wednesday. It’s been restful […]
August 30, 2011 – 11:36 am
Well, we’re stuck without power again, as of this morning. There are posts I’d like to write, but I’m not about to do so on this cell-phone, which is my only way of getting online. Worst of all: beer getting warm again.
August 27, 2011 – 4:24 pm
Well here we are again, almost exactly a year later, perched on our little hilltop way out on a sandy spit in the Atlantic, bracing ourselves for a hurricane. Last year’s offering, Earl, missed us to the east; this one is supposed to pass by a little way off to the west. It’s always a […]
August 25, 2011 – 10:33 am
It was Richard Dawkins who gave us, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, the idea of the “meme”. The concept, by replicating itself into millions of human minds, has turned out to be a robustly successful meme in its own right — and Professor Dawkins is rightly credited with setting it loose in the […]
August 21, 2011 – 1:44 pm
As advertised, we’re lying low out here in the remoter reaches of Cape Cod, and paying little attention to the wider world. I hear there are things going on out there — apparently something’s happening in the Middle East or something — but my attention has been more focused on oysters, old books, and keeping […]
August 16, 2011 – 10:44 pm
If we infidels are going to go around insisting that life arose spontaneously without miraculous intervention, then we’re naturally going to have a keen interest in providing an explanation of how that could have happened. To make the story hang together, what’s needed is for some sort of self-replicating molecules to have arisen, and a […]
August 14, 2011 – 9:07 pm
Here’s the great voice-over artist Bob Kaliban in some recently discovered studio footage. Have a glimpse behind the scenes in the ad biz of old.
August 14, 2011 – 2:18 pm
The Tea Party has taken heavy fire lately: blamed by the MSM for our recent market volatility and S&P credit downgrade, derogated as “hostage-takers” and “terrorists” by prominent Democrats, while leading Tea Party candidates have been the subject of scary magazine articles and intentionally hideous cover photos. (All part of the rough-and-tumble of American politics, […]
August 13, 2011 – 10:40 pm
Ah, the Casuals at the Beachcomber. What could be better? Here’s a live feed, if you read this in the next little while. They’ve been playing this joint for 31 years.
August 13, 2011 – 11:57 am
Here’s some trenchant commentary on the UK’s oikophobic response to its wave of riots, from Brendan O’Neill at spiked.
August 13, 2011 – 11:09 am
Charles Murray saw it coming.
August 12, 2011 – 9:13 pm
I have a feeling this could really catch on…
August 11, 2011 – 4:18 pm
What’s the biggest problem facing America today? What’s the Obama administration’s top priority? Jobs, you say? The economy? Of course not, silly! It’s carbon.
August 11, 2011 – 3:17 pm
In the past day or so Dennis Mangan and others have mentioned this important new study confirming the heritability of intelligence. The results will hardly be a shock to denizens of the HBD blogosphere, or for that matter anyone who has been following the actual science of psychometrics, but are bound to raise a hackle […]
August 10, 2011 – 8:10 pm
As the long-awaited global apocalypse unfolds before our eyes, I’ve done what any responsible citizen with a proper sense of duty — or in fact, any sense at all — would do: run away. The lovely Nina and I have withdrawn to a well-provisioned bolt-hole in one of the nation’s easternmost extremities, and as long […]
In today’s Times there’s a harsh look at Standard and Poor’s ratings system, by Nate Silver. An excerpt: [T]he evidence from the past five years suggests that it may be worthwhile to adopt a contrarian investing strategy that specifically bets against S.&P.’s ratings. If you were trying to predict a country’s default risk today, based […]
Winston Churchill was, in my opinion, the greatest statesman and wartime leader of the 20th century, and America’s surest friend since Lafayette. In the aftermath of 9/11, the UK sent a bust of Churchill to the President, as token of enduring solidarity from our closest and most natural ally among all the nations of the […]
Awful news: 31 US troops, including 22 members of Seal Team Six, were killed in Afghanistan by a Taliban attack on a Chinook helicopter in Wardak province, Afghanistan. This adds deep, and deeply symbolic, sorrow to what is already a very grim weekend indeed here in America. They went with songs to the battle, they […]
If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to be a drug mule who’s just swallowed five condoms full of heroin, ask someone who’s long in the market this weekend.
“In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs.” – Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
It’s been a fortnight now since Anders Behring Breivik’s havoc in Oslo. Cultural-conservative bloggers, aghast, have mostly tried to do three things in their subsequent commentrary: First and foremost, to condemn Breivik’s mass slaughter as irredeemably evil; Second, to dissociate themselves from any responsibility for it; Third, to attempt, within the context of the strongest […]
August 4, 2011 – 11:02 pm
Got home too late to write anything tonight — worked a long day at the office, then stopped off on the way home to grab a couple of slices with what was left of my 401(k).
A “tweet” from Iowahawk just now: Read this, then read this. O’Brien: You know perfectly well what is the matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged.
August 3, 2011 – 11:01 am
New blog on the way from our friend Kevin Kim. Here.
I had the TV on just now, and was watching Piers Morgan. He had on a fellow named Brad Thor, who apparently is a “terrorism expert” and author of “thriller”-style novels. They were talking about Norway, and about how much of a shock the Breivik rampage was to a nation that never saw it coming, […]
Well, we got our debt-limit increase. It’s a fantastic piece of legislation: it starts right off by “saving” almost a trillion dollars over the next ten years. (We’ll borrow that much in the next nine months, but hey: politics is the “art of the possible”.) Next, I think we should take care of the drunk-driving […]
August 1, 2011 – 10:19 pm
As advertised in this space a few weeks ago, Dr. John played at the Prospect Park Bandshell this past Saturday night (with go-go legend Chuck Brown and another very funky band called Red Baraat as openers). It was a fabulous show. Sorry you missed it. Dr. John is a walking encyclopedia of the American musical […]
Here’s Paul Krugman talking to Christine Amanpour this morning about spending cuts: “From the perspective of a rational person — in other words a progressive…” If you want to foreclose on civil discourse, to go beyond argument to mere polemic, to whip up bitter factional antipathies, to make the process of democratic government little more […]
John McCreary at NightWatch, always an indispensable resource for those who like to keep an ear to the ground, has offered some particularly pointed commentary on the Mideast over the past few days. First, Afghanistan. Our open-ended nation-building project having foundered on some sharp and immovable realities, we are leaving. But rather than make clear […]
Blogger Iowahawk tweets: Instead of car that gets 55 miles per gallon, how about a govt that gets 180 minutes per billion? I like that: minutes per billion as a measure of government bloat. Currently we get about 137 MPB.
I find myself imagining a gathering crowd watching the Capitol from some safe distance as the frenzy increases inside, with the two houses of Congress joined by the President in a furious battle-royal. The mighty building starts to quiver and shake. Clouds of steam begin to rise, and the walls start to glow — at […]
As the markets begin to totter in anticipation of the coming global collapse, investors are naturally wondering where to put their money. According to the latest data from NASA, I’d say definitely not the beach-umbrella or swimwear sectors. Maybe coal-mining and hockey equipment.
In this new climate of austerity, when we have to wean ourselves from so many lavish indulgences, it’s good to be reminded of life’s simple pleasures — like seeing someone give that Chris Hedges a good poke in the eye. Sam Harris does so here.
I had hoped to find some quiet time today for getting some thoughts written down about recent events (in particular the massacre in Oslo and what it means for the defense-of-the-West club that has been spotlighted from all angles in its aftermath), but it was not to be, and now, with a couple of very […]
I’ve been brooding and distracted, and trying to organize my thoughts for a serious post or two, but have hardly had a moment to myself all day, and so have nothing much to offer tonight. Except, of course, this appetizing illustration of sodium-ion channels in action, courtesy of my daughter Chloe.
A conversation with my father on the subject of the Armenian mystic Gurdjieff has led me to a re-reading of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which apparently G. had recommended to his study groups. (My father was a member of Gurdjieff’s London group after the war until G.’s death in 1949, and in fact went to […]
In a dark mood, I ran across this little shaft of light yesterday: When the sound and wholesome nature of man acts as an entirety, when he feels himself in the world as a grand, beautiful, worthy and worthwhile whole, when this harmonious comfort affords him a pure, untrammelled delight: then the universe, if it […]
According to this item, Internet-connectivity addiction is as powerful, and as difficult during withdrawal, as habituation to alcohol or tobacco. This is such palpable nonsense that I thought it warranted an immediate post. Perhaps I’ll mention it on Twitter, too. But first I’ll see what the reaction’s been around the blogosphere.