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:
March 19, 2010 – 10:04 pm
1) Alka-Seltzer: directions for use. 2) What I generally do at parties.
As often happens on Thursday evenings, I’m home late from class, with very little gas left in the tank. So for tonight, here’s an interesting website I ran across the other day: Floating Sheep. They count things, and make maps.
Last night, unable to decide what I wanted to listen to, I stuck my hand into the CD cabinet and pulled a record out at random. It turned out to be one I hadn’t listened to in a while, and one that brought back quite a few memories — some very sad, and one that […]
March 16, 2010 – 10:03 pm
The statist machinations of the new kings of the hill in Washington inspired me a little while ago to read The Federalist Papers, which previously I had only sampled, more or less at random. They are, if you have never read them, a series of 85 essays, published pseudonymously in 1787-88 by John Jay, James […]
We are now waiting at the airport, finally, for a flight home that will likely not be canceled. Back to normal soon, I hope. On the other hand, when it comes to the fate of the West, hope can be hard to come by. In case you missed them, here are an extraordinarily depressing article […]
We’ve been off the air for a few days: the lovely Nina and I flew down to central Florida on Wednesday evening to spend a few days with our son, who pitches for his college baseball team and is down here for an early-season tournament. (He goes to school some distance away from our home […]
I’m back in town briefly, but having got home after midnight from a 13-hour day at work, I have no time for writing. But… Remember our piece a while back about the “Monty Hall problem”? Well, reader J. Kapok has now sent along a dispiriting item about the relative mathematical capabilities of people and pigeons. […]
Starting tomorrow morning, I will be traveling a fair amount for a week or so, and things may be quieter than usual around here. For tonight: an essay from Mark Alexander on the Second Amendment case now making its way through the Supreme Court. Here. Also, there is a new website, Alternative Right, that has […]
The big political question at the moment is whether the Democrats will try to force their health-care bill though Congress using a procedural shortcut called “budget reconciliation”. This parliamentary loophole was put in place in 1974 for the sole purpose of making it easier to legislate the many adjustments that go into harmonizing a budget […]
Small changes in the relative timing and rates of growth of an animal’s parts — a concept called heterochrony — can make an enormous difference in the adult animal’s morphology. For instance, crabs and lobsters are built of essentially the same parts, but in the development of a crab the carapace broadens quickly, while the […]
Amphibian populations have been declining sharply for years now, around the world. An item in today’s Science Daily suggests that the cause may be a enormously popular weed-killer, atrazine, which apparently “chemically castrates” most of the males that come into contact with it, and turns the rest into females. You can learn more here. (I […]
Here’s an interesting item: Iowa State University Distinguished Professor of Psychology Craig Anderson claims to have demonstrated conclusively that playing shoot-’em-up video games “increases aggressive thinking and aggressive affect, and decreases prosocial behavior.” This is, of course, what various concerned sorts have been saying all along, although I had for some reason thought that the […]
February 28, 2010 – 6:52 pm
As you all know, the global-warming community has been under a great deal of pressure lately. Its Pontifex Maximus, Albert A. Gore, published a lengthy riposte in the Times today. You can read it here. It is about what you would expect: a reminder that even if the scientific claims of the global-warming industry are […]
February 26, 2010 – 9:50 pm
Here’s a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: The sovereign extends his arms over the whole society; he covers its surface with a web of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls are unable to emerge in order to rise above the crowd; it […]
February 25, 2010 – 10:37 pm
After working all day, teaching class this evening, staying after to practice a little Iron Wire, trudging home in a blizzard, and shoveling the walk and stoop, I’m whipped. So for tonight, then, here’s a pungent little rant about the sorry state of my former homeland, from Mark Steyn.