In totalitarian states, you keep your private sentiments and beliefs about the world’s realities to yourself; the penalty is harsh for expressing opinions that conflict with the official line. Example: Khruschev was busy denouncing Stalin at a public meeting when a voice shouted out “If you feel this way now, why didn’t you say so […]
April 26, 2011 – 10:08 pm
For colleges, men’s sports are often hugely profitable, while women’s sports nearly always aren’t. This caused many schools not to support women’s sports at nearly the same level as men’s. Add to that the fact that far fewer young women than men are even interested in joining college sports teams — due, no doubt, to […]
Are deeds objective? If an agent performs some action X, then X influences the world’s causal network in some particular way, with particular consequences. Does it make sense to say that for the same X, X is good if performed by “good” agent Smith, and X is bad if performed by “bad” agent Jones? Why […]
April 25, 2011 – 10:58 pm
It’s another busy spell for me; I haven’t had much time to comment on the passing scene since putting up that brief eugenics post last week, and I’ve had no time for writing today. But don’t touch that dial! I have something I’m sure you’ll enjoy: Ants As Fluids.
My birthday’s just gone by, on April 13th — but in case you’re wondering what to get me next year…
April 22, 2011 – 11:15 am
A story that’s been making the rounds the past few days (thanks to the indefatigable JK for sending along this version of it) has to do with recent research that casts doubt on a cornerstone of contemporary thought about human language: namely that we all are born with a “language module” that constrains possible grammars […]
April 21, 2011 – 10:55 pm
A hot topic at the moment is taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Social and fiscal conservatives have allied themselves against it — the former because they think abortion is murder, the latter because they don’t think what Planned Parenthood does is among the government’s enumerated functions, and it costs money. Liberals support it, for all […]
OK, enough politics. Time for a little Kumbaya, and maybe a reason to go on living. Here’s a young Scotsman by the name of Brendan MacFarlane. And here, and here.
April 20, 2011 – 11:13 pm
I haven’t written much about this — I hate to get involved in this sort of thing, and prefer to focus on matters of genuine significance — but I must come out and say that it’s downright weird that the great big noisy fuss about the circumstances of President Obama’s birth hasn’t gone away. It […]
April 19, 2011 – 10:40 pm
I’ve been busy, so for tonight, with the budget debate on everybody’s mind, just a brief item: a post by statistician William Briggs that has as its central feature a starkly simple graph, devoid of any ideological content. It merely plots the amount spent by the US government per capita, year by year, in inflation-adjusted […]
April 18, 2011 – 10:57 am
We note with sorrow the death, at 66, of the great recording engineer Roger Nichols — best known for the immaculate recordings and mixes he made with Steely Dan. His artistic brilliance and superb technical craftsmanship were an inspiration to me and to countless other engineers. His New York Times obituary is here.
April 18, 2011 – 10:46 am
As I write, the Dow is collapsing; it’s down 237 points, and heading south. The reason? Standard and Poor’s has downgraded its long-term outlook for the US to “negative”. The reason for that? Simply put, we’ve utterly failed to demonstrate that we are serious about controlling our exploding public debt. We’ve been hurtling toward a […]
Who’s Doyle Dykes? Just one of the best finger-pickers alive. If you’ve never heard him play, you’re in for a treat. Here’s his version of that country classic, Wabash Cannonball.
This might be worth watching (I can’t say for sure, because I haven’t watched it myself yet): a debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig.
April 14, 2011 – 11:22 am
The conservative blogosphere is abuzz over Nancy Pelosi’s revealing remark that “Elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do.” A sample here, from Steven Hayward at Powerline.
April 14, 2011 – 10:11 am
In a timely follow-up to our previous post, here’s an article from Science Daily: Cultural Differences Are Evident Deep in the Brain of Caucasian and Asian People The lead paragraph: People in different cultures make different assumptions about the people around them, according to an upcoming study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the […]
In the (rambling) discussion thread to Sunday’s post, commenter Dom gave us a quote from Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest: He quotes a scholar from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences “We were asked to look into what accounted for ”¦ the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West […]
From today’s Physorg newsletter: So much for drowning your sorrows Alcohol helps the brain remember, says new study They’re still kind of short and skinny First galaxies were born much earlier than expected This is news? Europe may be slowly disappearing under Africa Enough with the fracking leaks! Fracking leaks may make gas ‘dirtier’ than […]
I yammer on a lot about liberty in these pages, and sound the alarm when I think it is threatened. For all of that, though, I’m not an extreme libertarian; limitations on liberty are necessary for a well-functioning society. I just don’t like to see it limited beyond necessity, and I don’t like policies whose […]
April 10, 2011 – 10:51 pm
The taxonomy of contemporary conservatism isn’t simple; it’s more of a bush than a tree. Nevertheless, we can point to at least one major bifurcation — at the level of phyla, one could say — and that is the split between secular and Christian conservatism. Christian conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan or Lawrence Auster, see […]
Here’s the latest stab at a neurological explanation of political attitudes: a study that associates conservatism with larger amygdalas, and liberalism with larger anterior cingulate gyruses. We read: Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to […]
Muammar Qaddafi has sent a letter to President Obama. Here it is: Our son, Excellency, President Obama U.S.A We have been hurt more morally that physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. We still pray that […]
If you’re looking for a tranquil place to live, the Institute For Economics and Peace has published a table of the most and least peaceful U.S. states. The top 10 are: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota, North Dakota, Utah, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Iowa, Washington. The bottom 10 are: Maryland, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, […]
If you haven’t seen it yet (and by now you probably have): a spirited — to say the least! — response to Congressional archdhimmi Lindsey Graham, from a Colorado pepperpot by the name of Ann Barnhardt. Move over, Pat Condell! There’s a new kid in town. Watch it now, before it’s taken down.
Today’s Science Daily newsletter featured a story about a new website that mines Twitter postings to make stock-market predictions. Given that stock prices are themselves largely dependent on the sentiment of the crowd, there might be something to it. Read the article here, or visit the site itself: TweetTrader.net.
Andrew McCarthy, who has been on a tear lately, posted a very strong article today about the sniveling response by General David Petraeus and NATO ambassador Sedwill to the massacre of UN staff by a raging mob in Afghanistan. Read it here. And then read it again. What a nation of spineless, cringing quake-buttocks we […]
The other day I paid a visit to Google’s vast New York office complex to have lunch with my friend Greg, a former co-worker who took a job there about a year ago. As you’d imagine, it’s not your ordinary workplace. Everywhere you look, there are comforts, amusements, and diversions: toys, jungle rooms, sleeping pods, […]
Our surreal war in Libya has everybody talking. Here’s Mark Steyn: According to the New York Times, “Members of the NATO alliance have sternly warned the rebels in Libya not to attack civilians as they push against the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.’ We dropped bombs on Qaddafi’s crowd for attacking civilians, and we’re prepared […]
Over at Mangan’s, Dennis questions commonly accepted ideas about sleep; it turns out that our sleaves may in fact last a little longer if we leave them a little ravel’d. Here.
Over at NRO Andrew McCarthy comments on the amazing hypocrisy of the US government — particularly Sens. Lieberman, Kerry, and McCain — regarding Col. Qaddafi. I of course make no brief for Libya’s grotesque and brutal tyrant, but like him or not we had a deal, and our fickleness toward him — before their transmogrification […]
I’ve been re-reading the Koran the past few weeks. I’d previously read it only in bits and pieces, and I thought it was time I read it straight through, with truly focused attention and an open mind — and I have to say it has been, to put it mildly, an eye-opening experience. I’ve been […]
On Wednesday’s Today show, Matt Lauer interviewed Michele Bachmann. He is clearly of the opinion that our joining Libya’s civil war on behalf of the rebels was the right thing to do; she disagrees. In the course of their brief conversation came the following exchange: BACHMANN: …We don’t know how much al Qaeda is involved […]
March 30, 2011 – 10:30 pm
In a recent study of psychological “priming”, boffins at two universities have turned up an unsurprising result: anxiety about death can incline people more favorably toward belief in supernatural agency and purpose, in particular “intelligent design”. (The study might have been somewhat slanted, however; one of the metrics used for confidence in naturalism was “liking […]
March 29, 2011 – 11:02 pm
Readers, if this doesn’t get a rise out of you, I don’t know what will:
March 29, 2011 – 10:05 pm
President Obama’s in town, and in a spirit of hospitality I won’t have anything to say about last night’s speech. (Anyway, everybody’s already said it, for example here and here.) Instead, then: a grab from the Shameless Filler bag. Tonight it’s one of the damnedest eyetwisters I’ve ever seen. The squares in the image below […]
March 28, 2011 – 10:33 pm
This past Saturday was the occasion, once again, of “Earth Hour“, an annual smug-fest in which progressive ideologues the world over come together to thumb their noses en masse at the advanced civilization that feeds and shelters them, that allows them to take for granted a level of wealth and comfort unexampled in all of […]
My old friend Peter Kranzler, known to readers as the One-Eyed Man, tipped me off to an article in the WSJ about Bob Clearmountain, who is in my opinion the most gifted mixer ever to raise a fader. I was lucky enough to be Clearmountain’s regular assistant for a couple of years, back when I […]
March 25, 2011 – 10:06 pm
OK, time to take a break from Mideast news. Here’s a beautiful fractal animation.
It looks like there’s going to be a little sectarian “disaggregation” happening in the Gulf States following that little Saudi/Iran Sunni/Shia proxy dust-up in Bahrain. Story here. In Yemen, it seems Saleh is on the way out. Meanwhile, it now appears that NATO either will or will not be taking over the Libya operation, and […]
March 24, 2011 – 12:16 pm
Here’s a long and sobering article by Adam Garfinkle about our incoherent campaign in Libya. Well worth your time.
This is brilliant, just wonderful. I don’t know how I hadn’t heard about it until just now.
March 22, 2011 – 10:24 pm
OK, readers: let’s all stop bickering for just a moment to wish the great William Shatner a very happy 80th (yes, 80th!!) birthday.
David Brooks, with whom I agree sporadically, published a pretty good item about multilateralism in today’s Times. Throughout history strong nations, ruled by confident men, reckoned their interests, and having weighed them, acted. No longer. As a modern Western democracy, America — despite having achieved in recent decades a supremacy of power without historical precedent […]
March 21, 2011 – 10:37 pm
The Times explains why it supports military intervention in Libya: Libya is a specific case: Muammar el-Qaddafi is erratic, widely reviled, armed with mustard gas and has a history of supporting terrorism. Right, that’s clear enough: he’s a one-off, sui generis, something the like of which we’ve never seen before. …unless I’m forgetting something… No, […]
March 19, 2011 – 12:09 pm
Well, that cease-fire in Libya might not have involved all that much actual ceasing of fire after all. According to STRATFOR it’s looking more like a race to control Benghazi before the curtain falls. Here. Update: more strategic analysis from George Friedman at STRATFOR, here. Qaddafi would have been wiser to make the cease-fire real, […]
In the wake of the UN no-fly resolution, Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa has called an immediate cease-fire. This is by far the wisest move for Qaddafi, because with the government’s reconquest of all but Benghazi and eastern Cyrenaica complete, there will now be a consolidation period during which, with far greater resources, Qaddafi’s strength […]
March 17, 2011 – 11:30 am
Should we intervene in Libya? This is the subject of a fierce debate at National Review. The editors say yes; Andrew McCarthy and Victor Davis Hanson say no. (As do I.) Meanwhile, the havering continues at Foggy Bottom. Regarding the escalating Iran vs. Sunni Arab proxy war in Bahrain, Hillary Clinton said yesterday in Egypt […]
I’ve mentioned the outstanding strategic security summary NightWatch before (see here for a bio of its author, John McCreary): it is the best of its kind, I think, and certainly the most condensed. Last night’s entry included an analysis of the situation in the Middle East that was so informative I thought I’d reproduce it […]
March 16, 2011 – 10:27 pm
It’s hard to know what to say on a day like today; the world just seems to be falling apart everywhere you look. Japan is barely breathing after a Trifecta of staggering catastrophes. The Mideast is in flames. Western civilization is slowly throttling itself. The once-great American nation, its citizens having learned that they can […]