Motus Mentis

I’ve been reading the book Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, by Arthur Herman, and was taken by this description of Churchill’s close friend F. E. Smith, the 1st Earl of Birkenhead, and Secretary of State for India from 1924 to 1928: “F.E. to his friends, his […]

We are in Wellfleet for the weekend, and earlier this evening I spent a delightful hour gathering a few dozen of our highly prized local oysters from the tidal flat at Indian Neck Beach. Though most of the critters you’ll find there at low tide are molluscs and crustaceans — clams, oysters, crabs, and the […]

I realize that if I am going to live and work in New York City I am necessarily going to come into contact with bothersome people, and that the effect is magnified in the confined quarters of the subway. Over the thirty-odd years I’ve been living here I have certainly met my share of unpleasant […]

I’m not much of a basketball fan, but you’d have to be out cold not to notice all the bracket-related hoop-la every March. One thing that has always struck me as odd about the NCAA tournament, though, is that to a disinterested observer, the point of the whole thing seems to be the semi-finals. The […]

Perhaps a more accurate description would be “dim-witted claptrap”.

Traveling today, minus laptop. Back tomorrow or Tuesday.

Here’s something odd. I’ve seen this a few times before, but this is the best example yet: If you aren’t sure what you’re looking at here, it’s an ice-tray I just pulled from the freezer. I’ve occasionally wondered how these odd stalagmites form, but until tonight I had no idea how, or what special conditions […]

I have been harping a lot lately, it seems, on cultural conflicts: immigration, racial and ethnic disharmony, and above all the struggle between Islam and the West. These are of course important topics, but the tagline of this blog (taken, as is the title itself, from Fela Kuti’s Coffin for Head of State), is “I […]

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.

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 […]

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.

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.) […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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.

Every year the website Edge.org poses a provocative question to some of the world’s brightest bulbs. The 2009 question is out. Drumroll, please:

The storm ended late last night, and as the clouds broke up the temperature fell sharply, down into the low teens. Today was sunny, but it was very windy, with a high of only about twenty degrees. This afternoon at about two-thirty or three I went back out to take some more pictures.

Over the transom today comes another item from our friend Jess Kaplan, mentioning yet another eccentric Russian academic. This time around it is a mathematician by the name of Anatoly Fomenko.

Our pal Kevin Kim, in a recent post, linked to a video clip featuring Carl Sagan’s famous “Pale Blue Dot” monologue. On Valentine’s Day of 1991, at Sagan’s request, the spacecraft Voyager 1 was turned toward the Earth to capture an image of its faraway home. The doughty little doohickey was, by then, about four […]

Democracy is best for the unexceptional man.

Sorry about the blank page yesterday; I expended what fuel I had in the comment thread of this recent post. It might be worthwhile to sum up a little later in a new one, and to promote some remarks made in that discussion to the front page, but today is a busy day. Meanwhile, then, […]

Something new for our sidebar, courtesy of our friend David Duff: Sister Wolf.

To all of you, a safe and happy Thanksgiving. Even on this day, as civilization’s foundations shudder and its enemies raise their bloodstained hands once again, we have much to cherish, and to be grateful for. “We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.” […]