Despite the multiple eruptions of scandal threatening to engulf the Obama administration (a dazzling constellation of embarrassments that I would normally be commenting on with gusto), it’s the Jason Richwine affair that has my attention. It is the best and most public example, so far, of the pathological cognitive dissonance required to sustain mainstream multiculturalist […]
The DOJ/DOE announce new on-campus speech restrictions. Here. Oh, and don’t miss this, courtesy of @Iowahawk.
Now here’s an interesting item: it seems that upper-body strength in males correlates positively with opposition to redistributive economic policies. We read: “Our results demonstrate that physically weak males are more reluctant than physically strong males to assert their self-interest ”” just as if disputes over national policies were a matter of direct physical confrontation […]
The latest to comment on the Richwine defenestration: Patrick Buchanan, with perhaps the sharpest response yet. Read it at the peril of your soul — or at the very least, of your adjustment to the Matrix. Update, May 15th: adding Charles Murray and Andrew Sullivan.
More on the Richwine witch-burning, from VDare’s Peter Brimelow, here. This really matters, folks, and people (at least on the more mainstream, non-HBD Right) are starting to realize it, I think. This man was awarded a doctorate from Harvard on the basis of a carefully researched, quantitative analysis of empirical data. His review panel was […]
Michelle Malkin has now joined the small chorus of writers protesting the ruination of Jason Richwine for crimespeak (see our previous entry, just below). She writes: Richwine’s 166-page dissertation, “IQ and Immigration Policy,’ is now being used to smear him ”“ and by extension, all of Heritage’s scholarship ”“ as “racist.’ While the punditocracy and […]
Here is a map showing the occupation of the highest-paid public-sector employee in each of the fifty states.
The Heritage Foundation’s recent immigration study, mentioned in these pages just the other day, has now attracted the attention of the Inquisition. In particular, one of the study’s authors, Jason Richwine — who made the serious mistake of making public certain well-researched psychometric data of a profoundly heretical nature — today finds himself, in conformance […]
Speaking of the Heritage Foundation (see our Sanford post just below), here’s a report they’ve just released: The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer. Spoiler: it’s a lot.
Making the rounds today: gun homicides are way down in recent years, but a majority of Americans think they are more frequent than ever. I wonder why that could be?
Over at Mangan’s, Dennis returns to the spotlight a year-old article showcasing the destructive malevolence of the Cathedral. Go have a look.
On April 16th I wrote: It seems to me that there is a sort of ideological “singularity’, somewhere not far off in the distance, that we are accelerating toward. That singularity would represent the Omega point of the concurrent, onrushing streams of liberal opinion; it would be characterized by absolute non-discrimination, and rejection or elimination […]
April 28, 2013 – 11:56 pm
The Boston bombings have set off a new round of security-tightening everywhere you look. When I went to the train station in Providence last week, I saw that passengers now have to present ID to well-armed police officers just to get to the platform; some had their bags searched. Sporting arenas are adding item after […]
The blogger ‘Ace of Spades’ has on his banner this quote from H. L. Mencken: Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. Ace is whetting his blade today, I think, and not without good reason.
April 25, 2013 – 11:47 am
If you’ve ever wondered about just how subjective human notions of beauty really are (or aren’t), here’s an interesting item: Korean beauty-pageant contestants go for plastic surgery, and all end up with the same face.
April 21, 2013 – 11:44 pm
“There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.” – Marcel Proust
Public opinion moves fast these days; stick your head out the Overton Window for a glimpse ahead, and you’re liable to get whacked in the back of the skull. A position that was publicly held by the President less than a year ago — a neutral position at that, namely mixed feelings about gay marriage […]
April 13, 2013 – 11:22 am
Here’s more on the Gosnell case, if you can bear it, from Conor Friedersdorf. Here too is Andrew McCarthy on the too-familiar process by which dehumanization precedes atrocity. And here’s Roger Simon on the mainstream media’s discomfort with this story. Here’s a photo of the media area at the Philadelphia courthouse where the trial, of […]
March 26, 2013 – 11:14 pm
Today was gay-marriage day at the Supreme Court. Read the transcript here. Key points, I think, were two lines of questioning directed from the bench to Ted Olson, one from Antonin Scalia (“You ”” you’ve led me right into a question I was going to ask…”), and one from Sonia Sotomayor (“Mr. Olson, the bottom […]
One of the intrinsic disadvantages conservatives have in the P.R. war with the Left is that we weren’t brought up to think that victimhood is an appropriate foundation for a well-built life. For traditional, conservative sorts, weaned on solid Christian pessimism, it is simply the plain truth that life will always dish out insults and […]
March 23, 2013 – 11:05 pm
Here’s Alfred Jay Nock, writing in 1936 about a little-sought-after but highly rewarding career path: prophet to the Remnant.
March 21, 2013 – 11:05 pm
This caught my eye: US plan calls for more scanning of private Web traffic, email Non-electronic communication will soon be a thing of the past. It’s interesting that the simplest of technologies — a packet of paper, a drop of wax — made possible, for thousands of years, something that for most people will soon […]
Here is a sensible piece by George Will on why the Court should strike down the ‘Defense of Marriage Act’. In brief: the definition and regulation of marriage is not among the Federal government’s enumerated and carefully limited powers. Students of history will recall that this actually used to mean something.
March 20, 2013 – 10:20 pm
I’m working late again tonight, so all I have, I’m afraid, is this brief item from NRO, in which we learn that a Connecticut principal has canceled his school’s annual celebration of its honors students, in order not to bruise the emotions of those less successful. Yes, readers, America is well on the way to […]
March 12, 2013 – 11:05 pm
I don’t drink Coke, but I certainly had a smile when I read that Michael Bloomberg’s infantilizing sugary-drink ban had been smacked down by the Supreme Court of the State of New York. (Smacked down by the very researchers he quoted in support of it, too, but that’s another story.) From the Times: In an […]
From Democracy In America, here’s Alexis de Tocqueville on the complexity of American law: The French codes are often difficult of comprehension, but they can be read by every one; nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents. The indispensable want of legal assistance which […]
Yes readers, it’s gotten this bad.
February 27, 2013 – 11:58 pm
From Norway: an uncommonly open-minded video about race. Here.
February 22, 2013 – 11:40 pm
Writing at NRO, Jonah Goldberg comments on the sky-is-falling hysteria surrounding the impending “sequester” — which, were you just to listen to the news or to White House Press releases, you’d never imagine would still leave the federal government spending more money than last year. Mr. Goldberg observes: Obama wants more tax hikes and thinks […]
February 21, 2013 – 3:29 pm
Over at Mangan’s, our friend Dennis links to a post by Bruce Charlton about the cratering birthrates of the developed, Westernized world. That there is something maladaptive about secular modernity has been apparent for some time, and I’ve written about this myself; most of the discussion to date, however, has focused on social and cultural […]
February 19, 2013 – 1:44 pm
With a hat tip to reader Bill Keezer, here’s a blunt, crepuscular rant from noted gloominary Victor Davis Hanson.
February 17, 2013 – 1:16 am
A vexing feature of modern physicalistic non-theism is that, followed to its logical conclusion, it leads to moral nihilism. (I realize that theistic attempts to put morality on an objective basis also face serious challenges, but that’s not the point tonight.) Moral nihilism being, to most folks, bad, there’s been a rash lately of books […]
February 8, 2013 – 10:15 pm
If you’ve been following the national “conversation” about immigration and race relations (at least as publicly reported), it may come as a surprise to you to learn that one can speak about these things in a heterodox way on any grounds but “hate”. To express such dissenting opinions, however rational their basis, and however common […]
February 4, 2013 – 12:13 am
Here’s the late Chris Kyle being interviewed by one Belinda Luscombe, an editor at Time. The gulf between them is obvious. It seems to me that to her he is almost incomprehensible, as if he belonged to some alien species. (Which probably isn’t very far from the truth: I expect that Mr. Kyle had very […]
February 2, 2013 – 7:38 pm
Here’s a fine curmudgeonly rant about some of the lousy products we’ve had forced on us by our government’s shouldering aside of free markets in the name of saving the Planet. (My pet peeve: those bloody CF bulbs.) If, upon reading this, your inclination is to leave a comment about how wonderful it is once […]
January 28, 2013 – 6:13 pm
More on why women in combat units is a really bad idea. Will somebody remind me again why this is necessary? (HT- Laura Wood.)
January 27, 2013 – 12:39 am
More from Tocqueville’s Democracy In America: There is one sort of patriotic attachment which principally arises from that instinctive, disinterested, and undefinable feeling which connects the affections of man with his birthplace. This natural fondness is united to a taste for ancient customs, and to a reverence for ancestral traditions of the past; those who […]
January 25, 2013 – 4:27 pm
Here’s a refreshingly forthright article about abortion, in which the author, one Mary Elizabeth Williams, avoids altogether the impossibly difficult task of parsing exactly when life “begins”. She cuts the Gordian knot by conceding, arguendo, that life begins at conception, and then justifies abortion on the grounds that some lives are simply worth more than […]
January 25, 2013 – 12:27 am
I’ve just read through both volumes of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which I had never read before in full. Tocqueville’s task throughout the book was to take the splintering-off of America from Europe as a controlled experiment on the grandest scale — and by identifying the independent variables, thereby to come to a […]
January 23, 2013 – 5:27 pm
The Secretary of Defense today announced that women will now have a front-line role in combat. Here’s why this is such a bad idea that virtually every society everywhere in the world throughout history has used only males as warriors: – War is an existential conflict. Nations that lose wars stand to lose everything. – […]
January 22, 2013 – 3:51 pm
Yuval Levin has written an excellent, and even-tempered, response to yesterday’s unapologetically collectivist speech by the President. Levin seizes on what I also thought was a key point, namely that Mr. Obama remains frankly and resolutely committed to the hollowing out of the essential layers of civil society that stand between the individual citizen and […]
January 22, 2013 – 12:00 pm
Commenting on a recent item, one of our regular readers shared with us a fulsome effusion about yesterday’s reinstallation of our nation’s chief executive. Monday’s re-enactment of the actual swearing in, which took place on Sunday, was attended by the usual pomp and pageantry. It was attended also by a heterogeneous conglomerate of ethnic, cultural, […]
January 20, 2013 – 9:55 pm
In case any of you (perhaps those of you who have been held prisoner in a sub-basement by your evil stepfather for the past few decades, or you folks miraculously emerging from a persistent vegetative state) have any lingering doubt about the partisan alignment of certain media outlets, here’s the political director of CBS News […]
January 15, 2013 – 7:54 pm
Seizing its chance, New York’s legislature has now, in a breathless rush of immoderate and ill-considered haste, passed one of the nation’s strictest gun laws. Similar measures are soon to be attempted at a national level. Those in power should be mindful, just now, not to push too hard, too fast; there is a tremendous […]
January 11, 2013 – 11:08 pm
I’m an admirer of the philosopher Daniel Dennett. He can be overconfidently brusque and dismissive, and in particular I have parted company with him on the issue of activist atheism (more about that in a minute), but he has an enviably fertile and wide-ranging intellect. He’s also a terrific writer; in particular I highly recommend […]
January 10, 2013 – 11:11 pm
Since emerging, chastened, from the militant atheism of my not-so-distant past, I have in recent years come round, despite being an unbeliever myself, to the opinion that wide-scale secularism is a maladaptation that sharply — perhaps even lethally — reduces a society’s fitness. In a recent lecture at Washington University in St. Louis, George Will […]
January 9, 2013 – 10:25 pm
Courtesy of Bill Keezer, here’s Victor Davis Hanson on the exculpatory blessings of hipness. I used to be pretty hip myself, you know. After reading this, I’m starting to think that maybe I should give it another go.
January 9, 2013 – 4:04 pm
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, it must release itself in […]
January 8, 2013 – 4:01 pm
There’s been so much focus lately on the senescence and decline of Western culture that I think it’s important to take a minute, now and then, to remind ourselves that we still possess much of great and lasting value — and that the magnificent legacy of Plato and Aristotle, of Shakespeare, Leonardo, Beethoven, Goethe, Newton, […]
January 7, 2013 – 12:21 pm
Here’s a heartwarming item from the Windy City. As Sandburg said: “Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action.”