Just to remind you, readers, as you contemplate the millenarian tableau unfolding before us: yes, there is also a comet. (Of course.)
In response to Friday’s post about the different emotional reactions of Democrats and Republicans to the Wuhan-virus pandemic, our longtime commenter, the indefatigable JK, posted a link to a thoughtful essay on the topic. I though it worth promoting to a post of its own, so here it is.
March 27, 2020 – 12:23 pm
Make of this what you will:
Here’s a brief video from an infectious-disease specialist. Well worth watching.
Having survived our trip to Charleston (a beautiful place, as we expected), we are now hunkered down in the remote precincts of our little peninsula in the North Atlantic. Self-isolation comes naturally to me. Confining myself to the basement music studio, a comfy chair with a book to read, and contemplative hikes in the nearby […]
March 11, 2020 – 12:00 pm
The lovely Nina and I are off to Charleston, SC for a few days. (We’d heard it’s nice, so we thought we’d go and see for ourselves.) Back next week.
Och aye. (Full screen recommended.)
I haven’t commented much on this Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. Clearly it is a serious issue, but it is just as clear that it is being whipped up as much as possible by our domestic media to create fear and chaos, in the interest of hanging a millstone around Donald Trump’s neck. When the swine flu […]
February 29, 2020 – 10:05 pm
We must note the passing of Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest minds of our era. He died yesterday, at 96, after a fall. Read about the life of this extraordinary man here.
February 14, 2020 – 11:22 pm
I’ll ask your forgiveness once again for the lack of substantial posts here over the past few weeks. Regarding the political scene, I’m finding it awfully difficult right at the moment to summon up the will to comment on any of it — not that there isn’t plenty I could say, but at this point […]
February 11, 2020 – 10:21 pm
There are times when it seems more important to me to read and think than to write, and these past weeks have been one of those times. I do apologize to those of you who come by here regularly, and I promise that these lulls are always temporary. But I hate to send you away […]
February 3, 2020 – 5:03 pm
I was shocked and saddened just now to learn that Rush Limbaugh has been diagnosed with “advanced” lung cancer. Mr. Limbaugh, a brilliant analyst of the American political scene, has most importantly been, for decades now, a vital brake (to the extent that such a thing is possible) on the entropic forces of the American […]
January 31, 2020 – 9:21 pm
The Senate has voted to shut down the Democrats’ impeachment stunt, and the U.K. has officially left the E.U. It’s nice to see things work out now and then.
January 26, 2020 – 1:07 pm
I’ve been a little preoccupied this week with family matters and other offline distractions. Back soon.
January 13, 2020 – 4:51 pm
As they all said, in bone-chilling unison: this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
January 12, 2020 – 1:50 pm
It was with terrible sadness that I learned today that Sir Roger Scruton has fallen from the ramparts at age 75. He was a man of incomparable culture, erudition, discrimination, and integrity. Not only has Western civilization lost one of its greatest defenders; it is also as if a magnificent library has just been burnt […]
January 5, 2020 – 11:45 pm
I hate awards shows, and never watch them (full disclosure, though: when I was nominated for an engineering Grammy in 2004, I did go) — but I rather have to hand it to Ricky Gervais for tonight’s monologue at the Golden Globes, which was splashed at once all over social media. You can watch it […]
January 1, 2020 – 12:37 pm
Buckle up, everybody – I have a feeling 2020 is going to be an eventful year. “Interesting”, even.
December 28, 2019 – 9:33 am
Taking a little holiday break. Back soon.
December 12, 2019 – 10:10 pm
Outstanding news: it looks like the Right has won a major victory in Britain’s national elections today.
November 29, 2019 – 8:50 pm
I’ve been thinking some more about the Curtis Yarvin essay we looked at a couple of days ago. There were good comments on the previous post. A couple of readers pointed out that, despite Mr. Yarvin’s assertion of the scarcity of sociopaths in the general population, many political systems (and in particular ours, I think) […]
November 28, 2019 – 11:42 am
We all have a lot to be thankful for, even in these uncertain times (and when were the times ever not uncertain?). I’m grateful to all of you for reading and commenting. Enjoy this special day — my favorite holiday of the year.
November 24, 2019 – 8:43 pm
Sorry for the thin content here lately. Now and then I just don’t have much to say: I’ve written 5,030 posts over the past 14 years, and sometimes I feel as if anything I’d write would, at this point, just be repeating myself. (And then the muse grants me her favor once again, and I’m […]
November 12, 2019 – 8:42 pm
I’m back in Wellfleet, after an interesting weekend in Baltimore. It’s snowing here — on November 12th. The temperature is supposed to drop well down into the twenties overnight. I have a feeling, on no particular authority, that it’s going to be a long, cold winter.
November 7, 2019 – 10:40 pm
I’ll be in Baltimore this weekend at the annual conference of the H. L. Mencken Club, and driving back to Cape Cod on Monday. Should get back to business here after that.
October 17, 2019 – 12:26 pm
The lovely Nina and I are “stateside” once more after a two-week visit with our daughter’s young family in Vienna. It was wonderful to see them — in particular, to be with our three-year-old and ten-month-old grandsons Liam and Declan gives us great happiness — but as someone once said, the best part of traveling […]
October 2, 2019 – 1:49 pm
The lovely Nina and I are on the road again: back to Vienna to visit our daughter and the wee bairns, and to celebrate Nina’s birthday (it’s one of those “big ones”). We’ll back in about two weeks, though I may post a thing or two from abroad. Please feel free to browse our vast […]
September 28, 2019 – 10:57 pm
Curtis Yarvin, alias ‘Mencius Moldbug’, seems to be getting back in the game. He discontinued his enormously influential blog Unqualified Reservations years ago (it has now been archived and reorganized here, minus the comment-threads), and seemed for a while to have tried to keep his head down, concentrating on his (apparently quite successful) computer-science career. […]
September 11, 2019 – 2:38 pm
I see that the Kakistocracy blog, which Bill Vallicella had linked to just yesterday, is gone. That’s bad: the author, Porter (who used to comment here occasionally), had exceptional sharpness of mind, wit, and pen. Porter, if you should see this: what happened? Drop me a line.
September 10, 2019 – 8:31 pm
I’m back from my annual musical get-together on Star Island, but am in no shape for writing just yet. It was a fantastic weekend — we spent the days working out the more difficult material, and hosted performances/parties for all the other guests on the island every night into the wee hours — but after […]
September 4, 2019 – 9:31 pm
I’m off to my annual musical retreat in the far-flung Isles of Shoals. Back on Tuesday, if we aren’t all washed out to sea by climate change.
August 16, 2019 – 8:07 pm
Still having problems here: all my old posts with block-quotes (thousands of them) now have broken character-encoding for various punctuation marks. I believe this is due to a database migration that Bluehost did recently (though I could be mistaken). They are looking into it.
August 14, 2019 – 8:06 pm
The site’s having problems: comments are not working. I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong. Update: There seems to be a problem with this WordPress theme. I may have to switch to another one. Update: Fixed. Back soon.
August 14, 2019 – 11:44 am
…there’s no place like home. The lovely Nina and I are back from our little trip abroad. We visited Slovenia and Croatia with our daughter and her young family, who had driven down from their home in Vienna to meet us, and we had a fine time getting to know these beautiful places a bit […]
Sorry about the near-total lack of content here. We’ve had a steady stream of houseguests, and I’ve hardly been online at all. I’ve paid as little attention to the news as possible, and have spent my scanty solitary time reading (Bruce Catton, Thomas West, and Forrest McDonald), working on a couple of mixes in the […]
Things might be a little slow around here for a bit; we have our children and grandchildren visiting, and the strife-torn world seems far away. Which is nice.
We’re back in the States after our whirlwind trip to Vienna. The expedition was a success: Lily, who turned ninety-eight today, bore up well, though it was exhausting for her. She was glad to visit her hometown one last time, and although she is almost completely blind, she enjoyed being taken around to some old […]
The lovely Nina and I will be away for a week. The Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna has mounted an exhibit featuring three artists who fled Vienna as the Nazis took over, and one of the three — the only one surviving — is my mother-in-law Lily, who has lived in New York […]
It occurred to me just now that July 20th of this year will be the 50th anniversary of the first time that men walked on the Moon. There should be Dunkin Donuts on the Moon by now. What the hell happened to us?
March 12, 2019 – 11:46 pm
Michael Anton comments on the seige of Tucker Carlson, here. The gist is in the final paragraph: The ruling Left cannot defeat Carlson and so must silence him. As it will attempt to silence anyone who carries his message or anything like it. Every “conservative’ who joins the ritual denunciation of Carlson wishing to be […]
The lovely Nina and I are back in the States after a ten-day visit to Ireland. We spent time with family in Lucan (a western suburb of Dublin), and toured around a bit. Among the latter were a “black-taxi” tour of the troubled sections of Belfast (an area still deeply divided, in which the walls […]
February 22, 2019 – 11:12 am
The lovely Nina and I are off to Ireland for ten days, for a visit with our new extended family (and a little old-fashioned tourism). Things may be quiet here till we get back. Meantime, do listen to John Batchelor’s recent discussion with Professor Cohen on the Sovietization of America in recent years. Part 1 […]
February 13, 2019 – 11:29 pm
I’d been getting worried again about John Batchelor — he’s been treated for cancer recently, took time off for surgery a while back, and has been away from the microphone again for the past couple of weeks. (The archival material he runs to fill in is always well worth listening to, but his latest absence […]
January 23, 2019 – 10:33 pm
I’ve just learned that Russell Baker, the longtime reporter and columnist for the New York Times, has died at the age of 93. I was a fan. I read his Observer column without fail, and have several of his books. He was a wonderful writer — graceful, witty, and piercingly but unostentatiously intelligent — and […]
January 21, 2019 – 9:57 pm
Tucker Carlson rang in the New Year with a controversial monologue on the failure of American government to address a fundamental problem of modernity: the breakdown of families, and the growing hopelessness of those who are neither intractably poor nor insouciantly rich. Unlike nearly every other “conservative” today, however, he spread the blame around, heaping […]
January 4, 2019 – 5:36 pm
This weekend, after a month in Vienna, the lovely Nina and I are heading home. We’ll be back in the States by Sunday evening. It’s been a fine time — Vienna is always a nice place to be, and we welcomed a new grandchild into our expanding extended family — but it’s time to get […]
January 1, 2019 – 10:28 am
And away we go, friends. I have no idea what 2019 will bring, but I doubt it will be boring. Keep your powder dry! I wish you all good health and good fortune, and I thank you all again for reading and commenting.
December 27, 2018 – 3:18 pm
We’re still in Vienna (for another ten days or so), spending time with our daughter and her young family, and enjoying a year-end break from our usual cares and concerns. I’ve scarcely paid any attention to the news, and I’ll confess that, as happens sometimes, I’ve had very little inclination to take up the pen. […]
December 25, 2018 – 5:53 am
…to each and every one of you. May we all put the world and its cares aside for a day to enjoy the sweet blessings of home and hearth and family, and love.