August 22, 2021 – 1:38 pm
Well, Henri has come ashore well west of the Outer Cape, and while I’m sure there are some pretty nasty conditions in Connecticut, we’ve got nothing more out here than stiff breezes, perspiration-inducing warmth and humidity, and some rough surf. The sun is even shining, sort of.
August 21, 2021 – 12:59 pm
Here in New England we’re awaiting the arrival of Hurricane Henri. The original projections showed the center of the tracking cone passing right over us in Wellfleet, but now it looks as though the storm will make landfall somewhere in central Long Island. What we’ll get out here will be storm surge and wind, but […]
August 17, 2021 – 10:29 pm
It’s important to keep in mind just who, or what, was just defeated in Afghanistan. It wasn’t the traditional American nation (and military), but rather those who have stunned it into helplessness and have been wearing its senseless body as a skin-suit. If there is any silver lining to all of this, it is the […]
August 15, 2021 – 11:27 am
I’m reposting this item about Afghanistan from December 2009, eleven years ago. * * * I watched the President’s speech last night. It was not encouraging. It had something for everyone: escalation for the hawks; an exit date for the doves; the usual rot about “distorting and defiling a great religion”, to keep the Muslims off […]
August 14, 2021 – 5:44 pm
We’ll get back to the previous topic in a bit — for now, yes, I think we’ll all agree that the best course has to be some sort of pushback on the part of ordinary Americans, and there are now some heartening signs that more and more of us are starting to realize this. Perhaps […]
August 12, 2021 – 4:09 pm
My previous post was, I have to admit, pretty gloomy even for me. It’s been difficult to watch events unfold over the last year or so without getting the feeling that the USA as it has existed for the past two-and-a-half centuries has reached a point of fatal exhaustion. (Looking at the familiar cycle that […]
August 10, 2021 – 1:04 pm
As I mentioned in the previous post, one of the reasons I hadn’t been writing much was that I thought things had got, gradually then quite suddenly, to such a state that further diagnosis and analysis had begun to seem pointless. Trump had been ousted. The shenanigans that tainted the elections were so swaggeringly, pugnaciously, […]
I’m glad to be able to start getting back to normal operations here. I haven’t really written much since the election. At first it was because I was, quite frankly, just too dispirited: the nasty shoulder injury I’d had back in the summer had made it difficult to type, and the forced discontinuation of my […]
August 5, 2021 – 12:38 pm
Still here. I’m anticipating, any day now, a long-awaited conclusion to a stressful process that has caused me, as a matter of prudence and caution, to keep a low online profile for the past several months. (I will explain later, but at this point I don’t want to jinx anything.) Lord knows there’s plenty to […]
I’m getting ready to put things back to normal here, but I probably won’t be posting anything new just yet. Thank you all for your patience.
I’ve reopened the site for now, but may soon have to take it offline again for a bit. Sorry about the weird situation here.
April 13, 2021 – 12:34 pm
We’re still on a break here. I do hope to be back in another weeks or two. Thanks as always for coming by – and do feel free to browse our archive, or try the “Random Post” link at top right.
I know it’s been awfully slow around here lately. It will likely be that way for another few weeks, I’m sorry to say, and I may even take the blog offline for a brief interval. (If that happens, feel free to write me and I’ll explain; my email is still the same old obvious one.) […]
March 15, 2021 – 12:07 pm
From last night’s Grammy Awards: here is the state of American “culture”. A while ago I wrote that it is a sign of an ascending civilization that what is lower aspires to what is higher, while the reverse is true of a civilization in decline. In the golden age of Hollywood, eros was Fred Astaire […]
March 11, 2021 – 11:40 am
Off to the White House it goes. It will be signed into law by Friday, if Mr. Biden can still lift a pen. (The full text of the thing is here, if you have a strong stomach, low blood pressure, and a month or two to read it.) “When the people find that they can […]
“The worst pain a man can suffer: to have insight into much and power over nothing.” – Herodotus
February 22, 2021 – 1:26 pm
Here’s Michael Anton (with whom, in 2018, we had a brief exchange in the linked series of posts starting here), writing recently at Claremont Review of Books: The vast majority of those who went to the Capitol did so without a plan, but they did have a goal: to be heard. Which was also the […]
February 18, 2021 – 3:42 pm
Sorry to have gone all quiet here again. We are getting our house ready to sell, and having lived here since 1982, it’s a huge task. By the time we get to the end of each day — which is when I usually have some time to write — we’re whipped. I’ll post up interesting […]
February 17, 2021 – 6:09 pm
How terribly sad this is. I really don’t know what to say… perhaps later. For now I’ll just quote Charles de Gaulle: “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”
February 14, 2021 – 1:50 pm
I was deeply saddened to hear that the great jazz/Latin keyboardist and composer Chick Corea has died, at the age of 79. He was one of the towering musical artists of our time, and I’ve been a huge fan for more than fifty years (I first heard him play on Miles Davis’s groundbreaking album Bitches […]
February 6, 2021 – 3:43 pm
This post was just reprinted at American Greatness, so I’ve taken it down from here for a little while. Please read it over at their website.
February 1, 2021 – 5:22 pm
All healthy organisms, societies included, stabilize in a dynamic equilibrium by managing energy throughput (which of course means that they depend on increasing the entropy of the larger system that supports them). “Rightism” acknowledges that there are natural principles that determine sustainable configurations and hierarchies, and incorporates that knowledge into societies as traditions. This vast, […]
January 27, 2021 – 3:40 pm
A while back the New York Times mounted a direct assault on American patriotism called “The 1619 Project”, which sought to promote the idea that the founding of the American nation was nothing more than an act of organized evil, with its only basis and purpose the subjugation of other races by white, male, Europeans. […]
January 20, 2021 – 7:40 pm
Here we are. It’s been a long twelve months: from sailing along at the beginning of 2020 with a booming economy and gathering momentum for a second Trump administration, and for holding terminal decline at bay for a precious few more years, to COVID, St. George Floyd, a long hot summer of government-sanctioned rioting for […]
January 17, 2021 – 7:37 pm
For a couple of years now, radio host John Batchelor has had historian Michael Vlahos drop by on Friday evenings to discuss whether America is embroiled in a civil war. (Gee, what do you think, readers?) The segments are short, and Professor Vlahos always has something interesting to say. This past Friday he used a […]
January 14, 2021 – 6:10 pm
From our e-pal Bill Keezer comes a handy checklist:
January 13, 2021 – 8:44 pm
The fog of war is abroad in the land, and in every direction sturdy, familiar realities dissolve into grotesque phantasms and chimeras. Trumpets and bullhorns blare in the smoke and chaos. The ground trembles and shifts under our feet. One thing seems clear, I think: this Republic, as we have known it in our lifetimes […]
January 13, 2021 – 12:35 pm
Here’s Michael Yon — who knows more about this sort of thing than anyone — about the role of Antifa in the Capitol riot.
January 7, 2021 – 7:01 pm
Curtis Yarvin, the former Moldbug, commented at once on yesterday’s big fizzle. In a post written late yesterday, he offered a quote from Twitter: The Internet impresario Kantbot, who has become one of the most obnoxious literary talents since Marx or possibly Wyndham Lewis, still captured the day perfectly: Imagine storming the Capital of the […]
January 6, 2021 – 11:41 pm
As I have been saying for a long time now: “Gradually, then suddenly”.
January 5, 2021 – 4:38 pm
OK, so the polls are open in Georgia today. At stake in the two runoff elections is control of the United States Senate. Is everyone feeling as optimistic as I am?
January 1, 2021 – 4:11 pm
Well, here we are. Happy New Year. I thank all of you who’ve visited in recent weeks; there hasn’t been a whole lot to see here for some time now. My shoulder injury kept me off the keyboard for a while, but that’s not a problem any longer. Mainly it’s been that we have entered […]
December 25, 2020 – 2:03 pm
Merry Christmas, everybody! Sorry to have been so shtum lately; I seem to be in a kind of limbo, just busying myself with reading and musical work. I’m sure I’ll perk up soon.
December 17, 2020 – 1:54 pm
Writing at American Greatness, Christopher Roach argues that the Left, after patiently mounting a well-organized assault on all institutions, and after a century of expansion of the managerial state, now has power that is “largely immune from elections.” (After what we’ve just seen in 2020, can anyone doubt this?) He advises us that henceforward “Any […]
December 14, 2020 – 11:20 am
From a just-released forensic report on the widely used Dominion voting system, as tested in Antrim County, Michigan (a red county where vote-tabulation errors were already known to have happened): We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system […]
December 12, 2020 – 12:55 pm
Aaaand… SCOTUS strikes again, refusing to take the Constitutional election-irregularity case brought by Texas and joined by many other states. Newcomers Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett all teamed up with Sotomayor, Kagan, and Roberts to stonewall the complaint. As Thomas and Alito pointed out in their dissent, this was an abrogation of their responsibility as original […]
December 8, 2020 – 10:30 am
… Mark Chapman took the band away. R.I.P. John Lennon, who transformed the world of music, and so the world.
December 2, 2020 – 10:13 pm
I haven’t written much lately — I’ve been too busy with work and with personal matters, and frankly I haven’t had much to say. I’ve been thinking a lot about where matters stand, here in the senescent West, as this pivotal year winds down, and have been doing a lot of interesting reading — but […]
November 28, 2020 – 8:16 pm
It’s possible to enjoy this world a whole lot more if you aren’t convinced it’s all there is.
November 26, 2020 – 11:42 am
Best wishes to all of you. This year has been a difficult test, and we will be tried even more severely in the months ahead, but we still have much to be thankful for. Take a breath, and focus on gratitude.
November 20, 2020 – 12:19 pm
A commenter on our previous post asks how any intelligent person could actually be suspicious about the result of the recent election. He also mentions, in support of his confidence that the results are legitimate, that Joe Biden won the popular vote by millions of votes. Here’s my reply: First of all, the point about […]
November 17, 2020 – 10:09 am
I’ll follow on my previous post by saying that, regardless of how persuasive the statistical, anecdotal, testimonial, technological, and other indicators of election fraud may be, none of it matters unless those litigating the claims produce a coherent and consistent case, with hard evidence sufficient to convince the courts and state legislatures to alter the […]
November 16, 2020 – 7:01 pm
I haven’t written for a few days, because I have nothing new to say; like all of you I am waiting to see how this election challenge plays out. We are up against titanic forces, not least of which is just the colossal, viscous mass of institutional inertia, media resistance, and partisan antipathy that stands […]
November 11, 2020 – 8:01 pm
David Harsanyi has posted a tart reply. An excerpt: When Democrats win the presidency, we are treated to solemn calls for national restoration and political harmony, and to the expectation that, for the good of the nation, the opposition will embrace decorum and pass legislation they oppose. When Republicans win elections, grown women put on […]
November 8, 2020 – 1:14 pm
Here’s another perspective on things: Curtis Yarvin, AKA “Mencius Moldbug”, has published an essay today about the 2020 election. In it he describes himself as being “so pro-Trump, I wrap all the way around to pro-Biden.” Yarvin makes an important point about the difference between traditional American conservatism and all forms of Leftism: subsidiarian, small-government […]
November 7, 2020 – 10:41 am
My last couple of posts have been, to put it mildly, a tad heated. It has been a bitter year in our cold civil war, and the counting of the votes in our recent election has been unlike anything we’ve ever seen before — in large part due to newly (and in many cases it […]
November 5, 2020 – 10:39 pm
Rage is building in America as the audacious manipulation of this election, and the naked complicity of the media, become more and more self-evident (the major networks cut away from the President of the United States today as he was making remarks at the White House). This cannot stand. The historic American nation has watched, […]
November 4, 2020 – 10:09 pm
And here we are: a closely contested election, which will now drag on for days or weeks and likely be resolved in the courts. (There appears to have been no shortage of electoral shenanigans and monkeyshines, exactly as we feared.) This certainly isn’t what we’d hoped for: if President Trump prevails by superior lawyering, the […]
November 2, 2020 – 12:40 pm
I am chastened by the discussion in the previous posts. (See here and here.) All I had sought to do in my original remarks was to point out the natural advantages of cohesion, compact unity, patriotism, faith, competence, and positive worldview that Red America has over Blue, and to suggest that whatever happens next, we […]