Blogging can be a dispiriting business, and most of us scribble away in near-perfect (and perhaps well-deserved) obscurity. Existentially speaking, it can feel rather like shouting up a drainpipe. So it’s encouraging to see a hard-working blogger’s voice rise suddenly above the din, particularly when it’s a voice that was deserving of wider attention all […]
It appears that our good name (which, along with our tag-line, owes its derivation not to Pac-Man, nor to the Muppets, but to the song Coffin for Head of State, by the remarkable Fela Kuti) has now taken on a somewhat unsavory connotation in our deteriorating popular culture. Oh well, between this and Shakira, maybe […]
Think you’re a good speller? Well then, give this a go.
A reader sends along the widely circulated image below, with which the U.S. continues to burnish its gleaming international reputation for the education and intellectual engagement of its citizenry: (I see the predicted low temperature was 49°. How I wish; we’re sweltering here.)
Just got this email bulletin from the Washington Post: ——————– News Alert: Gulf Coast oil cap in place over blown-out well 09:55 PM EDT Thursday, June 3, 2010 ——————– A cap is in place over the Gulf of Mexico gusher, live video footage provided by the company showed Thursday night, but the spewing oil made […]
Paul McCartney was honored with the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song at the White House yesterday. He is only the third person to receive it, and he certainly deserves it. (The first was Stevie Wonder, and the second was Paul Simon, who by the way performed at our son’s commencement exercises two […]
To those of you who send me comments and other tidbits by email: I’ve been having technical problems, since Wednesday morning, that prevent me from accessing my main email account from my network at the office. So far I have resisted acquiring an email-equipped cell-phone, but these corporate-firewall issues may push me over the brink, […]
National Review has just reposted a fine, and scathing, editorial published on May 6, 1961, in the aftermath of the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion — which failure NR editors Buckley et al. ascribed to a “failure of will”, and a reluctance to offend “World Opinion”: Have we learned? There is always reason to hope. […]
From my friend Jess Kaplan (not to be confused with commenter JK) comes a very interesting item about just what’s painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Here.
It’s a busy stretch just now: I’ve been putting in long days at work, and will be traveling tomorrow evening. So for tonight, here’s a timely piece by Wellfleet resident John Stossel about the realities of “green energy”. He reminds us that it is unrealistic to imagine that there is anything in prospect anytime soon […]
I was saddened to learn today that the great Martin Gardner had died on Saturday at a rest home in Norman, Oklahoma. He was 95. For those of you who didn’t know him, Martin Gardner was universally regarded by those who did as one of the brightest lamps of the 20th century. He was best […]
We’ll be away all weekend, joining our son at his college graduation. Back in a few days.
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 […]
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.
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 […]
Here’s another pointed essay about the Arizona brouhaha: What If Arizona Were Quebec?
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 […]
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 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, […]
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 […]
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 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 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 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, […]
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.
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 […]
February 22, 2010 – 11:13 pm
As far as nifty gadgets go, it would be hard to top the computerized anti-mosquito laser cannon we showed you a few days ago. But a German tinkerer has certainly come up with an impressive little toy. Video here.