February 16, 2009 – 11:39 pm
One of the enjoyable quirks of the Outer Cape is Provincetown’s own radio station, WOMR (“Outermost Radio”). The station is everything you might expect from a place as full of artists, writers, musicians, eccentrics, oddballs, and misfits as the far end of Cape Cod is, and the playlist is eclectic, and seldom boring. A particular […]
February 16, 2009 – 10:46 pm
We congratulate Maverick Philosopher and Normblog for making the Times Online list of 100 best blogs. Cream does rise, it seems.
February 15, 2009 – 2:22 pm
We are in Wellfleet for the long weekend, and the Lower Cape seems particularly tranquil and beautiful under the blue winter skies. Yesterday the memsahib and I took a little spin up to Provincetown, at the outermost tip of the Cape, and along the way stopped at Longnook Beach in Truro to take a quick […]
February 14, 2009 – 10:28 pm
A reader has emailed us this link to a pithy, bullet-point summary of America’s security situation by retired general Barry McCaffrey (now Adjunct Professor of International Affairs at West Point). It’s terse, and worth reading.
February 14, 2009 – 9:58 pm
Tomorrow is a big day in Venezuela: a vote is scheduled on a term-limits referendum intended to assist the swaggering egomaniac Hugo ChÁ¡vez in the further consolidation of his fascist dictatorship. It appears that “El Comandante” is slightly in the lead. It will be interesting to see what happens if he loses.
February 13, 2009 – 12:43 pm
Things are not going well in Afghanistan. A resurgent and emboldened Taliban has been harrying the Karzai government and its Western allies with renewed truculence, even going so far as to make a brazen attack this week in the heart of Kabul. Meanwhile the Russians, who have for centuries vied with the West for dominant […]
February 13, 2009 – 12:34 pm
Today is Friday the 13th. Having actually been born on such a day, way back in 1956, I’ve never been given to friggatriskaidekaphobia myself, but anxiety about Friday the 13th lingers as one of our more persistent superstitions (taking a distant back seat to religion, of course). It’s said that to have been born on […]
February 12, 2009 – 10:45 am
If Charles Darwin were alive, he’d be 200 years old today, and there has been an enormous outpouring of ink commemorating the great man’s bicentennial. From reader JK comes a link to a Pew Research Center article on the degree to which acceptance of his “dangerous idea” — in many people’s opinion the most important […]
February 11, 2009 – 11:59 pm
We’ve had some noisy conversations here recently on the subject of immigration. My own position has been that we should admit those, and only those, who will be assets rather than liabilities — and that we need to cultivate in ourselves the discernment to tell the difference. We want intelligent, motivated, creative, hard-working people who […]
February 11, 2009 – 11:28 pm
I suppose this was bound to happen: two satellites have collided in Earth orbit. Somebody’s insurance is going to be going up.
February 10, 2009 – 11:48 pm
It being the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth on the 12th of this month, this week’s Tuesday science supplement in the New York Times offered an engaging crop of Darwin-themed articles. Have a look here, here, here, here, here, and here.
February 10, 2009 – 8:35 pm
Apparently the British government has now refused entry to the Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Wilders, who has made a name for himself with his outspoken criticism of Islam, and by his vociferous opposition to its increasing presence and influence in the dangerously multiculturalist West, has lived under police protection in Holland since the release of […]
February 9, 2009 – 11:03 pm
Kevin Kim mentions, in a post published this evening, his curiosity about what he refers to as “real-time searching”. If things had gone a little differently back in 2006, real-time search would be a lot farther along than it is: this is exactly what the start-up company I used to work for, PubSub Concepts, was […]
February 8, 2009 – 8:31 pm
Today was the annual Yee’s Hung Ga Lunar New Year parade, in which our dragon and lion-dance teams make their way along a circuitous, miles-long path that covers just about every block of New York’s Chinatown. It’s a long day of physical effort and deafening cacophony, and by the end we are all completely worn […]
February 7, 2009 – 11:47 pm
I’ve just read an interesting item over at Bill Vallicella’s website, The Maverick Philosopher. It was a guest post (actually a “promoted” comment) by philosopher Peter Lupu, who has joined us over here on occasion as well. The post by Peter was about Objectivism; it was a fairly technical examination of the Objectivist position that […]
February 6, 2009 – 11:13 pm
More than a few states, facing the prospect of an increasingly activist federal government under the new Democratic administration, have passed measures in their local legislatures to assert their sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment. Here are some bills from Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri (this one has to do with resistance to Federal […]
February 6, 2009 – 10:52 pm
In today’s Best of the Web newsletter, WSJ editorialist James Taranto pokes some fun at the New York Times: The editorial board of the New York Times has stumbled onto a possibly revolutionary economic idea. The paper is sounding a note of caution about Gov. David Paterson’s proposal to impose a tax on theater tickets: […]
February 5, 2009 – 11:23 pm
February 12th being the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has written a substantial essay on the status of science and religion in American culture 150 years after the publication of On The Origin Of Species, and on just how compatible the two really are. His […]
February 5, 2009 – 12:09 am
From Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: Daniel Pearl’s father writes, seven years after his son’s brutal murder, on how far we haven’t come.
February 4, 2009 – 11:14 pm
Readers have often mentioned that they wished our comment box had a ‘preview’ feature, so I went poking around in the WordPress Plugins Directory and found one. It is a ‘live-preview’ plugin, which means the formatted text is displayed in a box below the comment, and is updated as the user types. There are others […]
February 3, 2009 – 10:53 pm
Here’s another item sent our way by Jess Kaplan, who is himself a frequent traveler to Moscow: passengers about to embark on an Aeroflot flight mutinied when they saw that their pilot was obviously drunk. (Quite a contrast, of course, with our own Chesley Sullenberger, who soberly managed to put his plane in the drink.) […]
February 2, 2009 – 10:46 pm
We’ve all heard of spelling bees. Now it turns out they can count, too.
February 2, 2009 – 12:37 am
From our friend Jess Kaplan come links to two YouTube clips, both of which show two chi-gung practitioners — one a Tibetan giving a martial-arts demonstration, and the other a Javanese healer. What we see in each is quite extraordinary, and will certainly tax the credulity of skeptical Westerners.
January 30, 2009 – 11:37 pm
In this clip from 1981, the future swims into view.
January 29, 2009 – 6:22 pm
Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich has been removed from office. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Next!
January 29, 2009 – 11:11 am
It’s time to leave immigration aside, and get back to our usual business; the past few days have given us enough to mull over for quite a while. Here, then is a project behind which waka waka waka can throw its enthusiastic and unambiguous support: Save The Words.
January 29, 2009 – 1:01 am
The little dust-up following Monday’s post was not, I’m afraid, this site’s finest hour, and I certainly take responsibility for doing a poor job as moderator. I had written the post during the day and evening Sunday, and put it up on Monday around lunchtime. There were a few responses early on, but I was […]
January 27, 2009 – 11:43 pm
So distracted have I been by a little melee (now ended) in another corner of these premises that I have neglected, I am sorry to say, to wish all of you a happy Lunar New Year. It is the Year of the Ox; may the markets be bullish. Yee’s Hung Ga will be taking to […]
January 26, 2009 – 3:47 pm
A few days ago Dennis Mangan posted at his website, Mangan’s Miscellany, some remarks of mine about a notion he had been discussing: the restriction of immigration on the basis of race. This gave rise to a long comment-thread. The comments were of varying quality, but nearly universal in their agreement that anyone who might […]
January 24, 2009 – 9:38 pm
It is Saturday evening now, and at last I have the time to begin to respond to all this brouhaha about immigration and race. Tomorrow looks like a very quiet day, and I should have ample time to compose a proper reply. The problem tonight is that my Internet access has been on the fritz […]
January 23, 2009 – 9:50 pm
So exhausted. Even complete sentences, subject-verb agreement is quite beyond me. Sleep first. Back tomorrow.
January 22, 2009 – 10:31 pm
OK, waka wakans, I can use a hand here. I am once again working till at least midnight, and have no time for a post. But I would like it if you would visit this thread at Dennis Mangan’s, where I am alone under heavy fire, and have no time to respond. Go forth, and […]
January 21, 2009 – 10:40 pm
I’m working late tonight (still at the office at 10:30), and have no time for writing. But as always I hate to send you away empty-handed, so I have a little tidbit that ought to give you one more thing to worry about. Have a look here.
January 20, 2009 – 11:02 pm
After I posted this morning’s item, I watched the inauguration, along with the rest of the world. It is unquestionably a promising and historic moment, and I am not immune to President Obama’s charismatic appeal myself — but I have to say, at the risk of being a cranky old grouch, that I found the […]
January 20, 2009 – 11:25 am
Looking back over my 52 years, I must say I cannot recall anything like the giddy euphoria attending today’s inauguration. Perhaps the mood was something like this in January of 1961, but if so I was too young to remember, and anyway I doubt it. Certainly I don’t remember pilgrims descending on Washington in their […]
January 19, 2009 – 10:29 pm
Software engineers often imagine that Google must be just the best place to work. A couple of years ago I visited a friend who works in their New York office (which then was in Times Square), and I have to say it looked pretty good: a beautiful, modern office with all sorts of worker-friendly touches: […]
January 18, 2009 – 11:13 pm
The US has deliberately done nothing much to deal with the problem of piracy in the waters off the Horn of Africa; the idea was that this would instill a sense of urgency in other nations that had more at stake. One problem has been that nobody knew what to be done with pirates if […]
January 18, 2009 – 8:09 pm
In last night’s post we linked to a reminiscence about the late Patrick McGoohan. That essay, in turn, linked to another blog with a post about Mr. McGoohan, this time by a film writer by the name of Glenn Kenney. Mr. Kenny’s post is a good one, and if you were a McGoohan fan you […]
January 17, 2009 – 10:36 pm
We remarked with sadness the other day upon the death of actor Patrick McGoohan, star of the 1960s TV series Danger Man, Secret Agent, and The Prisoner. Our old friend David Pauley wrote in today with a link to this thoughtful essay about McGoohan’s icy appeal.
January 16, 2009 – 11:31 pm
There is a fascinating item making the rounds today. It seems that mysterious noise in an exquisitely sensitive gravity-wave detector may in fact be an indication that our instruments are now sensitive enough to detect the granularity of spacetime itself — and the argument is a very interesting one. The last time physicists announced that […]
January 15, 2009 – 11:00 pm
We must note with sadness the death of Patrick McGoohan, who was, I always thought, just about the coolest guy I ever saw on TV.
January 15, 2009 – 2:24 pm
Thanks to the kind and generous efforts of my friend Bob Wyman over at Google, Jeffrey Hodges’ blog, The Gypsy Scholar, is on the air once again. Go pay a visit. Many thanks, Bob.
January 15, 2009 – 2:17 pm
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the Ethiopians, who have been fighting Islamists in Somalia, have given up.
January 14, 2009 – 11:21 pm
What next for Israel? Thomas Friedman, writing in today’s Times, suggests that Hamas will be chastened by the fury of Israel’s assault, as, he says, Hezbollah was after the battle of 2006.
January 13, 2009 – 10:53 pm
We’ve been hearing for years how dangerous it is to talk on cell phones while driving, and many states have made doing so illegal. While I can easily see how distracting it can be to fumble with the device itself behind the wheel, I’ve always thought that merely talking on a cell phone, particularly a […]
January 13, 2009 – 12:26 am
You may have heard of a man by the name of Christopher Langan. I first learned of him a few years back, when he was profiled on some television show or other. He has, apparently, one of the highest IQs ever measured; it is said to be somewhere in the vicinity of 200. He has […]
January 12, 2009 – 12:21 pm
Here’s another item from the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed page: a look at the rapidly consolidating dictatorship of the grotesque Venezuelan despot Hugo ChÁ¡vez.
January 11, 2009 – 6:08 pm
A week ago the author and military historian Max Boot published in the Wall Street Journal an insightful, if morose, essay on the difficulty Israel faces in the situation in Gaza. I neglected to link to it at the time, but it has lost none of its currency and relevance. I reproduce it below in […]
January 10, 2009 – 12:37 pm
The appointment of Dawn Johnsen as head of the incoming Obama administration’s Office of Legal Counsel got my attention when it was announced yesterday; Ms. Johnsen is well-known as a critic of the Bush administration’s efforts to strengthen the power of the Executive Branch. An op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal argues that with the […]
January 9, 2009 – 11:52 pm
We’ll get back to weightier matters before long, but the demands of the workplace press heavily just now, and there will be scant time over the next few days for serious posts. Tonight, though, I have an interesting little item for you natural-history buffs.