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 […]
Well, we’ve spent far too much time lately dwelling on trivialities. Time for some serious news: Snake Dies of Silicone Poisoning After Biting Model’s Fake Breast With video! Here. (Have to file this one under “Shameless Filler”, I think…)
Today, 3/14, is Pi Day. What we really ought to celebrate, however, is Tau Day. The delightfully engaging vlogress and “recreational mathemusician” Vi Hart explains why, here. And for all the details, have a look here.
A reader has emailed me to take me to task for the title of my previous post. The note began: To me, G_d is synonymous with the Explanation for Everything; for you, He is an angry, immature old man. I responded: Just to set the record straight, to me God is not “an angry, immature […]
March 13, 2011 – 10:24 pm
I’ve wanted to post something about the horror in Japan, but everything I’ve begun to write has seemed so trivial, so trite, next to the awful reality. Nothing I can say, or even imagine, from the safety and comfort of my home here in New York can gain any traction on what that reality must […]
With a tip of the hat to David Duff — nay, for this one a low, sweeping bow, with a scrape and a fawning obeisance — I introduce you to Private Frazer, whose acquaintance I had not made myself until just the other day. Here. High point: the auld empty barn.
Just discovered in the National Archives: a forgotten collection of photos of Eva Braun. Here.
This is good: Rand Paul confronts Kathleen Hogan, the Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary for Efficiency, on light bulbs, toilets, and bureaucratic busybodies.
Well, here’s an odd little story: it seems that in the little town of Ilulissat, Greenland (69° 13′ N) the Sun, which rises exactly once a year, did so two days early this time around. This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen; if there’s one thing you are supposed to be able to count […]
As you may have heard, things are changing rapidly in the Middle East. Libya is in flames, Egypt staggers uneasily under military rule, and throughout the region political structures of enduring stability now creak and totter as the ground trembles beneath them. Meanwhile, the U.S. position is shifting too: we are soon to withdraw from […]
I’m working late tonight, with no time for writing. So I’ll just pass along this shocking item: Racial Identity Tied to Happiness, Study Finds Here.
On the commercial street near my house, there’s a comic-book store, and as I walked by it today they had a big picture of Superman on display. It looked something like this: It seemed to me that the Man of Steel was looking even more buff than ever, certainly way more so than when I […]
In the hugely popular sci-fi video game Halo, humans do battle with something called the Flood — a disgusting parasitic fungus that takes over the bodies of its victims, converting them into mutilated zombie soldiers. When that happens to one of our boys, the result looks like this: According to Wikipedia’s account of the Halo […]
As long as we’re on the subject, here’s a little mission statement that’s been making the rounds today.
Lawrence Auster brings to our attention an article, published by the National Association of Scholars, about a Christian student’s experiences in the Islamic Studies department at the Hartford Seminary (which is, by the way, the oldest Islamic Studies department in America). The Seminary represents itself as a secular institution dedicated to interfaith dialogue and comparative […]
With a tip of the hat to Norman Geras, here are some amazing photographs of an expedition to the lava lake in Africa’s Nyiragongo Crater.
All over the Middle East and the Maghreb, freedom-loving people are shrugging off the yoke of tyranny. Soon the world will be a far better place, as the entire region emerges from a tenebrous netherworld of medieval despotism into the broad, sunlit uplands of representative government and post-Enlightenment liberal society. Everywhere you look, the yearning […]
I’ve been reading Here, There, and Everywhere, a memoir by the Beatles’ recording engineer Geoff Emerick, and enjoying it no end. Though Mr. Emerick’s name may not be familiar to the public at large, it’s a very different matter for those of us in the recording studio’s hermetic brotherhood; in our little pantheon, he is […]
February 28, 2011 – 10:52 pm
Back in Gotham, but too pooped to post. Will resume shortly.
February 24, 2011 – 10:53 pm
The lovely Nina and I will be on the road for a couple of days — off to southern CA to pay my dear old Dad a visit on his 85th birthday. Might be quiet here till we get back, early next week.
February 23, 2011 – 11:49 am
Lawrence Auster asks: “Is some kind of intensification of the world going on? At the very moment that uprisings are proceeding in several Muslim countries simultaneously, uprisings are proceeding in several states of the United States simultaneously.” Yes, some kind of intensification of the world is going on, and I think we can find an […]
February 22, 2011 – 10:40 pm
Well, it’s hard to feel cheery tonight, I have to say. Muammar Qaddafi, pausing on his way to martyrdom, is strafing his people, and blowing up oil pipelines. It is becoming clearer every day that the wave of “freedom” sweeping the Arab world is a disaster in the making. Europe watches aghast, bracing itself for […]
February 21, 2011 – 11:48 pm
If you haven’t heard, the University of Arizona will announce on Monday the establishment of a new alma mater, to be called the Institute for Civil Discourse. The effort to institutionalize its important new curriculum — which will target militaristic metaphors, contumacious dissent-mongering, and other unseemly manifestations of political faction — was triggered by the […]
February 20, 2011 – 11:51 pm
We’re back from our little retreat. Over the transom while we were en route: First, a tireless and Argus-eyed reader has noticed an item at Iran’s Press TV website reporting that Muammar Qaddafi (or however we’re supposed to spell that moniker of his; I never seem to see it the same way twice) has left […]
February 19, 2011 – 2:16 pm
I’ve been “offline” for a couple of days — avoiding the computer and the news media — but plenty has been happening. If you’ve been waiting for the Muslim Brotherhood to extend its hand in Egypt, wait no longer. The Ikwhan’s éminence grise and foremost theoretician Yusuf Qaradawi — the one who explained to the […]
February 17, 2011 – 6:02 pm
After a very busy spell we’re traveling tonight, and things might be quiet here for a couple of days (though you never know). But for now, here’s a gruesome item about the Tunisian uprising, with an odd twist: a mysterious blonde sniper.
February 16, 2011 – 9:15 pm
How one thing leads to another! With my glory days as a globe-trotting big-shot recording engineer behind me (for now at least), I earn my daily crust in a small cubicle in midtown Manhattan, writing C++ code for a medium-sized global corporation. It is now 9:15 P.M., and as is so often the case, I […]
February 15, 2011 – 8:39 pm
We’ve heard a lot for quite a while now about America’s stubborn Achievement Gaps. The stubbornest and most notorious of these is the gap between the races in primary-school education (as mentioned again in yesterday’s Times, where it is fully explained), but another lingering blot on our escutcheon has been the scandalous underrepresentation of women […]
February 14, 2011 – 11:03 pm
Well, I realize that I’m probably the only person outside of Pyongyang who didn’t already know about this website, but my son just introduced me to the Perry Bible Fellowship. My first click of the ‘Random’ link brought me to this, and I was stuck for the next hour or so.
February 14, 2011 – 10:23 pm
I wonder how many of you this happens to: I see a headline like “Clinton To Announce New Special Envoy To Afghanistan And Pakistan“, and the Clinton that comes to mind is that taller one, the one who doesn’t really even have a job any more. I have a feeling that doesn’t just happen to […]
February 14, 2011 – 12:09 am
The website spaceweather.com has been offering some amazing solar images lately. Here’s a good one: a video clip of a gigantic plasma ejection.
February 12, 2011 – 12:11 pm
From Stephen Fry, by way of David Duff: A girl goes into a bar and asks for an example of double entendre, so the barman gives her one.
February 11, 2011 – 12:58 pm
The latest from STRATFOR: Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman delivered the following statement Feb. 11: “In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, citizens, during these very difficult circumstances Egypt is going through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down from the office of president of the republic and has charged the high […]
February 10, 2011 – 5:08 pm
“Hosni, old boy, it’s time you made your farewell address to the Egyptian people.” “Why? Where are they going?”
February 10, 2011 – 12:36 pm
As you’ve probably heard by now, our second-term upstate Congressman, Republican Christopher Lee of New York’s western 6th District, has resigned after having been exposed, quite literally, by a woman to whom he had sent a half-naked picture of himself by way of Craigslist. (Mr. Lee is married, with a young child.) Booth Tarkington said […]
February 9, 2011 – 8:35 pm
I’m swamped again at work, with no time to write. So for this evening, just a provocative little tid-bit. I had coffee very briefly today with my friend Salim Ismail, a remarkable fellow who was most recently the director of the Singularity University. I don’t get to see Salim very often, because he is always […]