Motus Mentis

It’s been quite a while since I’ve put up one of these omnibus posts. Let’s see what I have lying around here: ‣   Jonathan Bowden on the Soviet gulag. ‣   WWII waist-gunner training cartoon, featuring none other than the great Mel Blanc. ‣   Twelve ways artificial wombs will change the world. ‣ […]

Is it me, or does the Las Vegas shooting seem to have dropped right down the memory hole? We still don’t have a clear motive; there’s the laptop with the missing hard-drive; the time-line has gone through several revisions, and there was the very curious story of the actions of the hotel security guard — […]

The view out my front window just now (click for larger version):   These guys should really pay more attention to the calendar.

The volcanic island of La Palma (one of the Canary Islands) is in the news after an earthquake swarm. Why “yikes”? See here.

Well, the lovely Nina and I are on our way back. We’re traveling a day later than we meant to: we’d flown from Boston to Vienna (and had left our car at Logan Airport), but while we were overseas the carrier, Air Berlin, having declared bankruptcy, canceled all flights to Boston forever. So now we […]

I’ll be away this weekend (as I was last year at this time) for our annual musical retreat on Star Island. Back early next week. The comment-box is open, if anyone would like to broach any topics for consideration.

For nearly all of us, a gravestone or other physical memorial is in any real sense as temporal, as evanescent, a thing as we ourselves are. For when such memorials no longer serve as a token, reminder, or feeble proxy for the deceased in the minds of those who knew them, they simply display a […]

Four years ago, I wrote the following thing: America’s ideological landscape is like the continent itself: transected by deep fault-lines at the irregular boundaries of rigid plates. Though crushed tightly together, these great masses seek to move in different directions, and so they strain relentlessly against one another. The pressure builds, and builds ”” until, […]

Well, our daughter’s wedding happened this past Saturday, and it was a splendid event. We still have guests in town, and follow-on activities, but things are getting back to normal around the Pollack household, and I’ll soon be back in harness here at the blog. Thank you all for your patience. Meanwhile, here are just […]

Here we are again: it’s Independence Day, 2017, and the nation feels more deeply divided than ever in my lifetime — even more profoundly so, it seems to me, than it did in the Sixties. I say this for two reasons. First, back then the nation was far less heterogeneous; the real demographic inundation of […]

A busy few days here. Back in a bit.

Here’s a video clip that dramatically illustrates an interesting and counterintuitive fact: a small domino can knock over a domino up to 50% bigger than itself. This means that this knocking-over can very quickly “scale up”.   How is this possible? The first domino in this video can’t weigh more than a gram, while the […]

Recently I quoted Col. Jeff Cooper. Our e-pal Bill Keezer passed along the quotation to Bill Vallicella, who reposted it on his blog. Bill did, however, notice that I had offered no source, and remarked that he doesn’t like unsourced quotations. He looked for a source, and couldn’t find one. I can’t either. I have […]

Here’s something to listen to: a roving two-hour conversation between Sam Harris and Charles Murray. Of particular value is their discussion of the hard reality of intelligence, and of its measurability, its heritability, and the cross-cultural reliability of intelligence tests. Also: the word that changed the history of the world.

At the moment I must confess to being almost utterly exhausted, for some reason, by news and events. It’s not for lack of material to comment on: the Western polity is disintegrating, our nuclear fleet is steaming toward North Korea, there’s a mad killer on the loose, and that’s just the stuff above the fold […]

Don Rickles is dead at 90. Little by little dies an era.

“The ordinary man prefers easy ways so long as they may be followed, and is almost willfully heedless whether they end at last in a cul-de-sac.” — H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, p. 359

In the comment-thread to a recent post, our commenter Henry argues that Calexit, as the Golden State’s secession movement refers to its goal, is a non-starter. Is it? Is secession prohibited by the Constitution? Not explicitly. By Constitutional interpretation? Well, there’s Texas v. White (1869). Wikipedia has excerpted some key passages from Salmon P. Chase’s […]

Here’s me, three years ago: America’s ideological landscape is like the continent itself: transected by deep fault-lines at the irregular boundaries of rigid plates. Though crushed tightly together, these great masses seek to move in different directions, and so they strain relentlessly against one another. The pressure builds, and builds ”” until, sooner or later, […]

With a hat-tip to Bill Keezer, here’s a scathing response to our Praetorian press.

I’ll confess that its been a little hard to get back “up to speed” here since our little vacation. While we were away I was almost completely disconnected from the Internet, and from the news media. I thought I might draft a few posts, but the days and nights were full, and I never even […]

We’re heading off across the pond for a couple of weeks to visit family old and new. Things will probably be pretty quiet here till the week of the 8th, but you never know: there may be reports from abroad. Feel free to browse our eleven years of archived posts (4,292 as of this entry), […]

Consensus is orthogonal to truth.