I note with heartfelt sorrow the death of the great recording engineer Walter Sear, who died on April 29th from complications of a fall. (Somehow I missed his obituary notices at the time, and have only just heard the news.) Walter occupied a very special place in the New York recording community. Having never joined […]
Here’s a pungent edition of Radio Derb, starting with an poignant obituary for England.
Readers, what do you make of this?
Stopping by Gates Of Vienna today, I read an item about yet another “interfaith dialogue” conference, this time in Macedonia. Given that religious acrimony has been such a mighty engine of sanguinary conflict throughout all of recorded history, people generally take a hopeful view of these little pow-wows, and their participants, for rising above the […]
Last week The Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing on “The Foundation of Climate Science”. The loyal opposition was represented by Lord Christopher Monckton, who made a persuasive technical case (see here) and gave a splendid performance. Here’s a glimpse: From Lord Monckton’s testimony: Warming at the very much reduced […]
We direct you to an intriguing item at Mangan’s, about a “slow-aging” subpopulation that had previously been masked by youthful deisease and trauma. Here.
I realize that the recent flooding in Nashville has imposed a frightful toll of hardship in all the many ways that such disasters always do, but as a musician and recording engineer I find this particularly poignant.
Over at NRO, Jonah Goldberg and others are wondering about something that has been puzzling me too: if Faisal Shahzad was trained by jihadis in Pakistan, why did he make such a crappy bomb? I mean, the guy even had an engineering degree, for crying out loud. He used the wrong kind of fertilizer, propane […]
Mark Twain, as posthumously quoted in the Montreal Gazette, April 25th, 1935: When a host asked Mark Twain if he would like a drink before breakfast, the humorist replied: “Thanks, I do not care for a drink for three reasons. In the first place, I never drink before breakfast. In the second place, I am […]
A topic I’ve heard people kvetching about lately is the prevalence of unpaid internships for aspiring youngsters. The complaint is that they violate the spirit of minimum-wage laws, and drive out competition for entry-level jobs. I’ve written about minimum-wage laws before; they seem beneficent enough, but they have a darker side, and darker origins than […]
David Brooks had a daring item in the Times today, in which he came awfully close (though stepping back from the brink) to saying some awfully unsayable things. But I’m not in the mood for more of this stuff tonight (if I were I’d likely be rounding on Mayor Bloomberg, too, for his flurry of […]
Today I read, at the new conservative/HBD website Alternative Right, an essay by Jim Kalb called The Effects Of Inclusiveness. A sample: No person or society can realize all human possibilities. We are finite creatures who realize ourselves–become good, happy, productive, vibrant, and creative–by becoming something in particular. Since we are social, that particularity requires […]
Here’s another pointed essay about the Arizona brouhaha: What If Arizona Were Quebec?
In a speech at the University of Michigan on Saturday, President Obama castigated critics of recent government excesses, reminding them that “government is us”. This seems innocent enough, but in fact it is chilling. The Founders saw a powerful central government as an unfortunate and dangerous necessity, the only way to administer certain tasks that […]
Much has been written in recent years about the taming and effeminization of the Western male. Though there are still pockets of resistance, the dismal process proceeds apace, and appears even to be accelerating. The community in which I have made my home for the past 28 years, the (more recently) upscale and uber-liberal neighborhood […]
I’ve been mum about politics for a few weeks, and in particular haven’t said anything about the controversial Arizona legislation, although as you might imagine I of course see no reason why Arizona shouldn’t act if the federal government simply won’t. Meanwhile, here in New York our own mayor — who, as both New York […]
Here, with a hat tip to my friend Eugene Dushkin, is a breezy item about investment strategies for the forthcoming collapse of civilization.
April 29, 2010 – 11:17 pm
Time for more Shameless Filler. First: reader JK sends us this sample of high culture, American Style. (Try not to be too depressed by the remark right at the very end.) Second: an annoyingly persuasive optical illusion. Third: why we seriously need to rethink Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Finally, I hear you grumble: why does […]
April 28, 2010 – 10:09 pm
Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
April 27, 2010 – 10:38 pm
When I was a young man I played the drums, and was pretty sure that one day I would be a Great Big Rock Star. To advance this project, I went looking for a job at a New York City recording studio, on the theory that I’d then be right in the thick of things, […]
I’m old enough to remember the Apollo 11 mission, the one that put men on the moon for the first time ever. It was a pretty big deal. (We won’t be doing that again anytime soon, thanks to You-Know-Who.) Now, with a hat-tip to my boy Nick, here’s the fateful launch as you’ve never seen […]
April 26, 2010 – 10:18 pm
In every generation, some of us have children. Others, for various reasons, don’t. (Historically, most women do, and most men don’t.) In good times, it is relatively easy to bring offspring to adulthood, and populations swell. In hard times it can be very difficult indeed, and only a few manage. When times are bad enough, […]
More from Eric Hoffer: According to Bergson “the intellect is characterized by an inability to comprehend life.” Kant was certain that “the origin of the cosmos will be explained sooner than the mechanism of a plant or caterpillar.” How outlandish then is the belief that the intellect can fathom men’s soul. How can science unravel […]
Reader JK calls our attention (we’re taking a time-out in Wellfleet this weekend, and not reading the news) to an article in the Times about a new weapons system in the DOD pipeline: Called Prompt Global Strike, the new weapon is designed to carry out tasks like picking off Osama bin Laden in a cave, […]
Our friend Dennis Mangan is a rising star in the conservative blogosphere, and in addition to his continuing work at Mangan’s he has begun contributing articles to the new conservative website Alternative Right. His latest is about the biological causes of the male-female “wage gap”. Read it here.
April 21, 2010 – 10:40 pm
Here’s Eric Hoffer again, writing in 1974: The agitation about the population explosion is persuading many talented and enterprising Americans to have few children. The resulting change in the composition of the population will probably be not unlike that produced by war, which kills the strong and venturesome and increases the proportion of those least […]
Unbelievable. Hat tip to Lawrence Auster.
From a Times article about the possible causes of the Polish air disaster: [A Russian] official said that the pilot was aware “well in advance’ that he was headed to an airfield without a modern aerial navigation system. One possibility, he said, was that the pilot was not aware that the plane, a TU-154, loses […]
April 19, 2010 – 10:49 pm
With thanks to my friend Yaniv Sarig, here are some fantastic photos of Eyjafjallajokull.
April 19, 2010 – 10:45 pm
Of all the conceptual tar-pits into which discussions of Darwinian naturalism often sink, none smothers its victims so prolifically as the concept of “design”. We reserve it jealously for the foresightedly purposeful efforts of conscious agents, which leaves us fumfering about for a word to describe the beautiful machinery of living things, and the powerful […]
April 17, 2010 – 11:24 pm
Last week my old friend Jess friend sent me, as a birthday gift, a book by Eric Hoffer. I’d known about Mr. Hoffer for years, but had never read him. I wish I had done so sooner. Eric Hoffer, for those of you who don’t know of him, was a most unusual autodidact. Born in […]
April 15, 2010 – 10:19 pm
Is it just me, or does the Earth’s crust seem awfully fidgety these days? There have been earthquakes all over the place lately, it seems, and now air travel throughout Europe has been paralyzed by ashfall from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano. It might be getting worse. Apparently, as bad as the current eruption is, the real […]
April 14, 2010 – 10:36 pm
In Tuesday’s post about the puzzle of consciousness (I was off duty last night, celebrating my 54th at an Argentine steakhouse on the Lower East Side), I mentioned having seen an item in the paper that day that I thought seemed timely. It was a piece in the Times about growing interest in the use […]
April 12, 2010 – 10:06 pm
A correspondent (and occasional commenter) and I have been exchanging emails over the past few days about the mystery of consciousness — a topic that used to occupy a fair amount of space around here, but which has been bumped off the page lately by political rants and screeds. My friend and I make fundamentally […]
April 12, 2010 – 10:02 pm
Some time ago, while the lovely Nina and I were visting our daughter at college in Ann Arbor, we went to a local comedy club. The featured act was a very funny fellow by the name of D.C. Malone, who told us, after he was intoduced, that he had just quit drinking a few weeks […]
April 11, 2010 – 10:44 pm
Today’s mail-bag held a potpourri of postworthy tidbits. Here they are. First, another step for the U.K. along the path to dhimmitude. It appears that female Muslim hospital staff will be exempt from the requirement to keep forearms bare and scrubbed to reduce the transmission of pathogens. In this latest capitulation, we see once again […]
Here I am again, toiling away in the office on a Friday night, just to earn a crust. I suppose I shouldn’t complain, though; for all I know I could soon be replaced by one of these.
I’m still feeling a bit blogged-out this week, and tonight, after a long day of working and teaching, I haven’t anything of substance to write about. I’ll just leave you, then, with an uplifting little news item about the discovery of a new species in the Philippines. (It is most unusual in this day and […]
Spring is upon us with startling suddenness this year; it will be, they tell us, 88° tomorrow. All over the city the daffodils and Callery pears are in bloom, and the pretty girls have shed their scarves and boots for skirts and sandals. For the first time I think Eliot may have been right about […]
Sojourning in Wellfleet for a few days. Back in a bit. Happy Easter, Passover, etc. to all.
Well, it’s been kind of an eventful morning. My response to a form letter from President Obama’s political strategist David Plouffe has led to a truly mind-expanding back-and-forth exchange, and, frankly, I guess I have to say the scales have fallen from my eyes. I’ve been a pretty harsh critic of the whole Democratic political […]
March 30, 2010 – 11:20 pm
At various times I have written (here, for example) about whether, under a naturalistic view, there can be objectively existing moral truths. I have argued that there cannot. There can be “facts of the matter” about what our moral intuitions tell us, and how they came to be what they are, but there is no […]
With work and other demands piling on a little bit just at the moment (it’s Sunday at 10 p.m. and I am still at the office), I must take a brief time-out from blogging. Meanwhile, please feel free to browse our archives (try the View A Random Post button at the right). Thanks as always […]
March 25, 2010 – 10:38 pm
Well, here I am, not writing about politics, or the accelerating decline of civilization, or any of that old stuff. It’s much harder than I thought it would be, because there are all sorts of post-worthy stories bouncing around the media and the blogosphere today, like xxx xxxxxxx‘s adventures up in xxxxxx, the “xxxxx-xxx” story […]
March 24, 2010 – 10:09 pm
Enough politics for now. I’m tired of it all, and I’m going to lay off it for a little while at least, as difficult as that may be (well, maybe just the occasional link now and then). When I started this blog, 5 years and 1,688 posts ago, I almost never wrote about such things, […]
March 23, 2010 – 10:45 pm
Well, as we might expect, the events of Sunday night have provoked quite a Festschrift on the right. Here’s Mark Steyn, at National Review Online, on the decline of great nations. Here’s Dennis Prager, also at NRO, who sees this ideological conflict as nothing less than a bloodless civil war. Here’s George Will, on “America’s […]
March 22, 2010 – 11:32 am
“Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’” The fell deed is done. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Strassel gives us a peep beneath the blanket. “Ay, […]
Well, it’s looking like this grotesque health-care bill is about to pass: the biggest expansion of the power of the federal government in my lifetime. Here’s Dennis Prager on the dehumanizing, emasculating, infantilizing effect of an ever-expanding State:
The philosopher and “New Atheist” Daniel Dennett, working together with clinical psychologist Linda LaScola, has undertaken an interesting project: a series of interviews with pastors who have lost their belief in God. Dennett and LaScola have presented the results in a paper now available online. Here is an introductory excerpt: