January 12, 2010 – 12:38 am
Forgive me for two peeve-posts in the same evening, but I think I speak for all of us when I say that I have heard quite enough about Harry Reid and his “inartful” remarks about the former Senator Obama’s prospects for the Presidency. I am certainly no fan of Mr. Reid’s, but this is ridiculous: […]
January 11, 2010 – 11:52 pm
I’ve lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, since 1982. It’s one of New York’s prettiest residential neighborhoods, and generally has a lot going for it: Prospect Park, great restaurants, good schools, beautiful Victorian architecture, a wonderful library, convenient subways, concerts at the Bandshell, and so on. It’s been a great place to raise two kids, and […]
January 11, 2010 – 11:32 pm
I don’t want to seem peevish, but will somebody please tell me when speaking “about” a topic became speaking “to” it? Does this preening, pompous little affectation bother any of the rest of you as much as it does me?
January 11, 2010 – 12:32 am
I am having terrible troubles with my computer (an HP dvr9000 series laptop), and it will need to be replaced. It crashes often — I can now expect to get only ten or fifteen minutes at a time out of it — and it it takes several attempts to get it to restart. So cranky […]
January 9, 2010 – 12:44 am
President Obama made a speech yesterday on the subject of Islamic jihad. In it he sought to reassure an increasingly angry and jittery nation that his administration might in fact be capable, now that it is making a diligent and focused effort, of achieving at least minimal competence regarding national security. The speech, though full […]
January 8, 2010 – 12:21 am
In a post today at his website, Lawrence Auster brings to our attention a formidably gifted and hitherto-undiscovered satiric talent, a modern day Laszlo Toth: one Doug Van Gorder, from Quincy, Mass. At least, we think he’s a satiric talent. Anyway, he’s got people talking. Here.
January 7, 2010 – 12:28 am
Not being a man of independent means, I’ve been selling off my dwindling store of days just to earn a crust. As it happens I sold off almost all of this one, and so have none of it left for writing. That means it’s time to add another weightless diversion to our “shameless filler” category. […]
January 6, 2010 – 12:12 am
Crime rates are down sharply here in New York, and in other big cities as well. According to conventional “root-causes” wisdom, the hard economic times we’ve had for the past year should have driven crime up, but instead it has fallen off dramatically, and is now at record-low levels. What’s going on? The Manhattan Institute’s […]
January 4, 2010 – 11:33 pm
Yemen is everywhere in the news these days. All the players in the region have now focused their attention on this broiling and desiccated snake-pit: Iran, the Saudis, al-Qaeda, and of course the USA. Enmities ancient and modern, religious and political, are all in play, and a tangled web of shifting alliances makes it awfully […]
January 3, 2010 – 11:50 pm
One of our stronger cognitive intuitions is to assume, in the presence of organized systems, that there is some central, organizing agency at work. In recent decades, however, it has become apparent that extraordinarily sophisticated group-level behavior can arise as a result of distributed local decision-making, using very simple rules. Among the best examples of […]
January 3, 2010 – 11:37 pm
One of the more startling provisions of the health-care bill making its way through Congress is its empowerment of the federal government to compel all US citizens to purchase health insurance. From the moment I first heard about this unprecedented arrogation of power I’ve wondered just how, on any reading of the Constitution, the legislators […]
January 1, 2010 – 5:38 pm
A very happy New Year to you all! Thank you as always for dropping by to read and comment. Every year about this time I look back at the thousands and thousands of keyphrases that have brought visitors here from Google and other search engines. There are usually quite a few spectacular oddities (though for […]
December 30, 2009 – 6:30 pm
The other day the lovely Nina and I met a friend for some shabu-shabu at an outstanding Japanese eatery in Greenwich Village. Such “hot-pot” dishes, for those of you who don’t know, consist of meat and vegetables cooked in broth at the table on a little gas stove. The waitress explained, as she placed a […]
December 29, 2009 – 12:07 am
There was an article in yesterday’s Times about friction between European Muslims and their host culture. In it we find the following: Youcef Mammeri, a writer on Islam in France and member of the Joint Council of Muslims of Marseille, says that the debates over minarets, burqas and national identity have angered many French-born Muslims […]
December 27, 2009 – 11:44 pm
I’ve been slacking off over the holidays. I’ve hardly even read the news, and I’ve had nothing to say even about the Mutallab incident (others have said it all by now, anyway; in particular, Janet Napolitano’s idiotic comment that “the system worked” has been ridiculed amply and deservedly). As usual, my family gave me books […]
December 24, 2009 – 3:56 pm
The Senate today passed its version of the health-care bill. It is by no account a pretty thing — among the latest complaints about it is the payoff given to Ben Nelson in exchange for his vote, whereby the rest of the Union must absorb, in perpetuity, any costs Nebraska may incur whilst expanding Medicaid […]
December 22, 2009 – 11:38 pm
I’ve been working late again, and have had no time this evening for writing. But I do want to take the time to mention to you all that our friend, the blogger Kevin Kim, is here in New York tonight at the hospital bedside of his mother, who is gravely ill with brain cancer. She […]
December 21, 2009 – 12:00 pm
This from the WSJ this morning, on the shameful health-care machinations currently underway in Congress: Change Nobody Believes In A bill so reckless that it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas eve. And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the […]
December 20, 2009 – 11:16 pm
It’s been pretty thin gruel over here the past few days — the holidays being what they are, I’ve had scant opportunity for solitary labor. So for tonight I’ll send you along to Mangan’s, where our doughty heathen Dennis confronts once again (as we have also done at length in these pages, at various intervals) […]
December 19, 2009 – 6:33 pm
The snowflakes are aswirl here in Gotham today, and, lighthearted soul that I am, I’m so caught up in the gay holiday mood that spending hours at the keyboard grinding out a lengthy post seems entirely out of the question. So for tonight, in the joyous spirit of Christmas, here’s a little item about how […]
December 17, 2009 – 11:06 pm
Are you a vegetarian? Well, I’m not. Indeed, I so enjoy being a carnivore that it has occurred to me on occasion to bump up to the next level, and eat only animals that are themselves carnivores — which I’ve always imagined would be the nutritional equivalent of smoking “roach weed”. Anyway, the next time […]
December 16, 2009 – 11:41 pm
Writing in today’s Times, Tom Friedman shows encouraging signs of coming around to a more realistic position on Islam and jihad, though he still stops well short of grasping the nettle.
December 16, 2009 – 12:03 am
It is no easy thing for an American president to wage an unpopular war. To make war effectively requires both secrecy and resolve, and neither can be relied upon under the American system. The transparency of government and freedom of the press that stand as bulwarks against tyranny and corruption make secrecy difficult and undependable […]
December 14, 2009 – 11:13 pm
More muckraking from James Delingpole. Here.
December 14, 2009 – 9:54 pm
Making the rounds today is some marvelously entertaining footage that some biologists think is evidence of tool use amongst invertebrates. I think it’s safe to say you’ve never seen this before; see for yourself here.
December 14, 2009 – 9:38 pm
It is Spring in Saturn’s northern hemisphere, and the gas giant’s north pole, which has been hidden in shadow for years, is visible again. NASA’s Cassini orbiter has now sent along some dramatic new images of the strange hexagon that girdles the planet’s upper latitudes — a curious meteorological feature that seems to be as […]
December 13, 2009 – 11:09 pm
The lovely Nina and I were in Philadelphia this weekend, visiting some old friends, and today we took in the Arshile Gorky show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gorky was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, and the show made quite an impression on us (fittingly, I suppose, given that […]
December 13, 2009 – 10:17 pm
I owe a substantial debt of thanks to my friend Dan Betz for his help in redesigning the look of this website over the past week or so. Dan, who is a younger “training brother” of mine down at the kwoon (and a formidable Hung Ga expert, and instructor, in his own right), is also […]
December 12, 2009 – 1:01 pm
A new link on the sidebar today: a blog that focuses on Islam and insurgency in Yemen, where lately the game, as Holmes used to say, has been afoot. (And yes, I rather liked the name.)
December 11, 2009 – 1:10 pm
Writing in today’s Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer blows the whistle on an end run by the Executive Branch intended to bring a huge swath of US private-sector activity under the direct control of the EPA, in yet another example of fantastic utility of the Global Warming “crisis” as a justification for statist and socialist power-grabs […]
December 11, 2009 – 10:59 am
If you drop by here over the next few days and things look completely out of whack, it’s because we are making some adjustments to the site’s WordPress “theme”. As they say on the highway signs, “Temporary Inconvenience — Permanent Improvement.” (As if THAT were true.) Anyway, thanks for your patience.
December 10, 2009 – 10:24 pm
As I mentioned in a previous post, there are three central assertions being made by global-warming activists, each of which is contentious in its own right. The first — let’s call it W — is that the Earth is currently warming. The second — we’ll call this one A — is that W is caused […]
December 9, 2009 – 11:43 pm
In case you didn’t see this on the news: there were some very strange doings high in the sky over Norway this morning (take a peek below the fold). Story here.
December 9, 2009 – 12:53 am
I’ve played the Devil’s advocate for a while now on the topic of Global Warmism, but I want to take a moment to remind readers that my attitude toward its central claims — namely a) that the Earth is warming; b) that the primary cause is an anthropogenic increase in CO2, and c) that the […]
December 8, 2009 – 12:45 am
It is a common view that consciousness has something to to with the degree of integration of different areas of the brain. The idea is not only a modern scientific notion: it is also a tenet of various esoteric schools (for example that of G.I. Gurdjieff; see here and here) that higher degrees of consciousness […]
December 6, 2009 – 11:53 pm
We’ll get back to normal operations tomorrow, I expect, but for today I’ve still been twiddling around with this new layout. (Reactions have been mixed, and I’m still making up my mind about it.) It’s taking me a little while to figure out how to customize the design — there are various PHP and CSS […]
December 6, 2009 – 1:07 am
I’ve just upgraded my WordPress installation, and am fishing around for a new visual “theme” for this site. (I’ve gotten very tired of the old one.) So the look of this place may vary for the next few days or weeks until I settle on something. Feel free to comment.
December 5, 2009 – 12:48 am
We’re off duty today, and so the lovely Nina and I took a long walk this afternoon on the beach at Maguire’s Landing (a.k.a. Lecounts Hollow) here in Wellfleet. It being December, we had the place all to ourselves. (Well, almost, as you’ll see below.) It was very beautiful. I took a few pictures, shortly […]
December 4, 2009 – 6:07 pm
Well, the saga continues at Mangan’s. His old blog having risen from its ashes, Dennis has decided to carry on there, while taking precautions to ensure continuity if he is cold-cocked by Google again. So: http://mangans.blogspot.com it is.
December 3, 2009 – 5:03 pm
I’ll be traveling today, with scant time to write, but I wanted to let all of you know that Dennis Mangan is back in business: http://mangans.typepad.com/mangans/ Adjust your links accordingly.
December 2, 2009 – 9:17 pm
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 the streets; some bean-counting for the frugal; some American exceptionalism for the true believers; […]
December 2, 2009 – 12:06 pm
Now here’s something you rarely see: a prominent and powerful male, exposed publicly to have been a duplicitous, goat-footed philanderer — and having thereby humiliated, before a drooling global audience, his dutiful wife and mortified family — makes a sheepish statement (note the shift in declension, from caprine to ovine) in which he reassures us […]
December 1, 2009 – 1:00 pm
It appears that our friend Dennis Mangan has run afoul of Google’s guidelines for acceptable content: as of late afternoon yesterday his blog’s homepage has been replaced by the dreaded Blogger Screen of Death. This happened also to Jeffery Hodges a while back, though in that case it appeared to be some sort of mistake: […]
November 30, 2009 – 12:46 am
In the comment thread to our recent post about John Derbyshire’s book We Are Doomed, commenter JW asked one very good question: why, if increasing ethnic and cultural diversity lead to corresponding increases in tension and strife, does New York City (where I live) manage to function as well as it does? Why indeed? To […]
November 28, 2009 – 12:12 am
A recent item in the Long War Journal informs us that it appears that al-Qaeda is consolidating a Waziristan-style presence in Eastern Syria. Nothing happens in Syria without the consent of the Ba’ath Party, and the story does indeed tell us that there appears to be a working partnership in place between al-Qaeda and former […]
November 25, 2009 – 3:30 pm
I’ve just begun reading John Derbyshire’s dour and mordantly funny new book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. The first chapter deals with our bizarre and destructive obsession with Diversity — a liberal viewpoint, now thoroughly hegemonic at all levels of societal administration, that Mr. Derbyshire sums up as The Diversity Theorem: Different populations, of […]
November 24, 2009 – 11:34 pm
There’s all sorts of interesting scientific news today, including several stories from recent Science Daily newsletters. First up: there is further supporting evidence that the Toba volcano, which I have written about before, indeed caused far-flung devastation when it blew a gigantic hole in the island of Sumatra 73,000 years ago. The explosion is believed […]
November 24, 2009 – 12:29 am
David Duff is having a nice gloat over the Climategate kerfuffle — which I must say is unfolding rather gratifyingly, for those of us who thought we already had enough religions in the world and didn’t see the need for any expensive new ones. Here.
November 23, 2009 – 12:31 am
While I was away this weekend, paying scant attention to the news, a serious brouhaha seems to have erupted in the global-warming community. Apparently a hacker got hold of, and made public, emails and internal documents from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia — a major center for AGW study — […]