January 5, 2013 – 5:54 pm
California, not so long ago the flagship of the American federation, has been going under for quite a while now: overfreighted with lavish entitlements, embarnacled with suffocating regulation, and holed below the waterline by demographic disintegration. Because attacking the root of the problem by reducing the expansion of government is for deep-blue California an ideological […]
December 21, 2012 – 11:33 am
One of our foremost gloominaries is Patrick Buchanan. Today, in a ringingly despondent essay, he looks at the past and the future of the Republican Party, and considers its prospects in light of the inexorable trend, in all democracies, toward relentless government expansion and ultimate exhaustion. His concluding remarks: If we would see our future, […]
December 19, 2012 – 1:53 pm
When America’s leftward “progress” encounters friction nowadays, we are told to have a national “conversation”. What is meant by the word “conversation” in this sense is something like: “the conservative opposition will now listen quietly and attentively, whilst enlightened liberals lead them through a long-overdue course of reeducation and rehabilitation. They may then speak, so […]
December 15, 2012 – 5:56 pm
In the wake of the Newtown shootings, the usual voices on the Left have resumed their call for the nation to “do something” about guns. In a longish post, here are some contrarian opinions from around the blogosphere, and a few observations of my own.
December 14, 2012 – 12:50 pm
Laura Wood, the Thinking Housewife, brings to our attention France’s newest public institution: the National Observatory of Secularism. Its function is to train the State’s benevolent and watchful Eye upon “religious pathology”. Whether secular pathology will be detected as well is left to the reader’s intuition.
December 13, 2012 – 11:43 am
Today Dennis Mangan comments on the actor Jamie Foxx’s recent opening monologue on Saturday Night Live, which I hadn’t seen until just now. It is startlingly frank (I realize I shouldn’t be startled by this sort of thing any more, but I’ll admit I was) in its triumphalist antipathy toward white people. At one point […]
December 12, 2012 – 11:09 am
Townhall.com has published a fascinating article about household income inequality in America, based on a novel analysis of historical income data. Applying the mathematics of log-normal distributions to census data for the incomes of working and non-working individuals of both sexes, the authors found a way of simulating various household combinations that allows them to […]
December 11, 2012 – 11:39 pm
Get thee post-haste to the Maverick Philosopher‘s website, where our friend Bill Vallicella has inked a splendid meditation on how very much we have to be humble about. The best turn of phrase: “…an early weaponization of the space between chucker and effer.” Too much the gentleman, he, to make it rhyme.
December 2, 2012 – 12:24 pm
We’ve added some new links to our Dark Enlightenment post. See also this essay on the tension between democracy and liberty.
November 30, 2012 – 12:48 pm
Another thunderbolt from the frontiers of science: men like sports more than women. This will require an intervention, I think.
November 29, 2012 – 7:08 pm
The title of this post is a term that is taking root in a certain corner of the intellectual blogosphere. Dennis Mangan has written about it just today; I first saw it in a post by John Derbyshire about a month ago. That post led me to a four-part series by Nick Land, in which […]
November 29, 2012 – 5:34 pm
Here’s an item that’s making the rounds today: it’s the abstract of a paper published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly. The topic is something called “benevolent sexism”, which refers to all those “chivalrous” things gentlemen do for ladies: holding the door for them, seating them at table, offering them your arm during a stroll, […]
November 28, 2012 – 7:01 pm
Here’s Stanford’s Peter Robinson, interviewing Antonin Scalia for the Federalist Society (in five parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Well worth your time, I think, and you might be surprised by some of what Justice Scalia has to say.
November 27, 2012 – 4:32 pm
Here’s something: Germany is planning to ban sex with animals. This is not, mind you, because humans having sex with animals is something that a goodthinkful liberal society might wish to prohibit on any moral grounds. That would be discriminatory — and now that the universal acid of secular nihilism has dissolved away any foundation […]
November 11, 2012 – 1:40 am
In 2009 I wondered if secularism was an evolutionary dead end, a self-terminating defect. It is a fascinating question. The expansion of modern secularizing culture — in particular its characteristic features of irreligion, prolongation of education and the expansion of the educational franchise to women, widely available contraception and abortion and the elimination of any […]
November 7, 2012 – 12:44 pm
Peter Kirsanow posted this at the Corner today: Now that president Obama has been given more “flexibility,’ conservatives need to pause, recharge, assess, recalibrate. Then fight. Conservatives can’t be in denial. The country may very well be at a tipping point. Yes, millions fewer voted for Obama than in 2008, but it’s astonishing and disconcerting […]
November 4, 2012 – 10:24 pm
Here’s a post by our pal Jeffery Hodges in which he excerpts some remarks by Salman Rushdie on the subject of free speech. There is also a comment, by someone called “Crude”, that triggered a knee-jerk reaction on my part — but which, as I began to respond, I realized deserved more careful consideration. I’m […]
November 3, 2012 – 12:48 am
I’ve been almost completely disconnected from the Internet for the past couple of days (I traveled back yesterday to storm-ravaged New York City, where I’m staying with friends, as our house here is still uninhabitable due to a construction project). So for tonight, just an item from the mailbag. The latest edition of Jonah Goldberg’s […]
October 28, 2012 – 2:49 pm
With a hat tip to Bill Keezer, here’s a look at the Obama administration’s increasingly routine use of kill lists and drone strikes to prosecute foreign policy. I excerpt two notable quotes from this post. The first is by its author: Benghazi illustrates the problem of the President having the authority for everything and the […]
October 27, 2012 – 10:39 pm
With a hat tip to the indefatigable JK, here’s the latest on micro-drones. When I was at Singularity University this past April, a recurring theme was that the coming ubiquity of tiny, cheap and efficient sensors will soon have a seismic effect on the technological, and therefore the human, landscape. We like to think that […]
October 19, 2012 – 8:09 pm
Some “random thoughts on the passing scene” from Thomas Sowell: Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic. Yes, so much so that […]
October 15, 2012 – 8:30 pm
Here. Hat tips to Bill Keezer and GoV.
October 12, 2012 – 10:30 pm
Some house-guests arrived sometime after midnight Thursday night  —  the night of the bizarre VP debate  —  and of course before anyone could go to bed we had to spend an hour or so arguing about politics. (They’re liberal sorts.) Healthcare came up. So did the alleged “fact” that the healthcare system of the  U.S.A. […]
October 4, 2012 – 9:57 pm
Philly Student’s Romney T-shirt Likened To KKK Sheet
September 25, 2012 – 8:34 pm
We’ve been hearing a lot about free speech lately (though not nearly enough). Here’s the NYPD coming to its defense. (And responding to an assault.)
September 25, 2012 – 4:00 pm
The latest Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report has the U.S. ranked eighteenth, down from second place in 200o. Well, home of the brave, still, maybe. We’ll see.
September 17, 2012 – 12:16 pm
We can only hope that this sort of thing diminishes reproductive fitness. It may not.
September 5, 2012 – 10:56 am
One of the absurdities of modern political life is the assumption that everyone, regardless of innate qualifications, should have a college education (indeed the assumption, at least on the Democratic side, seems to be not only that everyone belongs in college, but that every citizen person within our borders also has an inalienable right to […]
September 4, 2012 – 3:09 pm
It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish P.C. from parody. The latest example (hat tip to VFR): here.
Yet another appalling story of Federal bullying, this time courtesy of our e-pal David Duff. Here.
Victor Davis Hanson’s family has lived for generations in the agricultural heartland of California — an area that is now, after decades of ruinously misguided policymaking, in the vanguard of America’s decline into third-world decrepitude. Nobody tells this dismal story better than Dr. Hanson does in his periodic dispatches. His latest is here (with thanks […]
I haven’t commented on the Chick-fil-A affray — so much creeping totalitarianism, so little time! — but Mark Steyn has, and you can read it here. This is a horrible story, and a frightening glimpse of the road ahead. To his credit, Michael Bloomberg publicly refused to join the mayors of Chicago, Boston, and San […]
I saw a little of the Olympic opening ceremony last night; it was playing on the television at a local eatery where our small nuclear family, soon to be riven to opposite hemispheres of the globe, had gathered for a bite. It was, from what I could see, a dismayingly shallow and garish entertainment. Apparently […]
In a tart item at NRO today, Kevin D. Williamson points out that eleven times more people die each year from neglecting to fill their heart-disease prescriptions than in gun assaults, and makes the piquant observation that “Gun control isn’t about guns; it’s about control.” Well, here’s something that should enliven the discussion: out there […]
From longshoreman Eric Hoffer, November 29th, 1974: I cannot see myself living in a socialist society. My passion is to be left alone and only a capitalist society does so. Capitalism is ideally equipped for mastering things but awkward in mastering men. It hugs the assumption that people will perform tolerably well when left to […]
I rail often about our swaggering, authoritarian mayor, Michael Bloomberg. (He gave me yet another reason to do so, just last night — and for a really tangy rant about Hizzonner, check out the inimitable Fran Lebowitz, here.) One issue I think he’s clearly on the right side of, though, is the battle over the […]
In the wake of the Aurora massacre, the usual groups are saying the usual things. Some of these things are flamboyantly stupid. For example, E.J. Dionne, complaining that dialogue about gun laws is “prevented” in America, wrote that ” where a gun massacre is concerned … an absolute and total gag rule is imposed on […]
This is pure gold: a dance montage featuring the heartbreakingly lovely Rita Hayworth, set to a familiar soundtrack. How vulgar our modern “culture” seems in comparison to the artistry, elegance, and allure on display here. It would have been even better with the original music, but what a treat nevertheless. Have a look.
I don’t go to my employer’s Manhattan office much anymore; mostly I work from home, to save the time and inconvenience of riding the subway from Brooklyn to Midtown. I did go in today, though, for a lunch meeting with some other members of our software-development team. It’s July, and so there is plenty of […]
From Big Think, a glimpse at the ongoing Graduate Studies session at Singularity U.
Here are some further thoughts on the Corpus Christi police-standards issue that was the subject of our previous post. A reasonable response might be: Malcolm, you grumpy old fossil: can’t you see the obvious benefits of putting women on the police force? Women, who handle social interactions and conflict very differently from the “rough men” […]
Here’s a brief transcript from Radio Derb’s most recent podcast: If you thought the federal Department of Justice could not get any crazier, try this. The Police Department of the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, has fitness standards for people who want to be police officers. Applicants must complete a 300-meter run, a 1½ mile […]
There’s an ad on my local news-radio station that’s been playing for years. It’s for one of those personal-injury law-firms. Now I have nothing against such firms, and they surely serve a just and necessary purpose in bringing succor to those wrongfully harmed. But there’s one line in this commercial that jumps out at me […]
We can’t seem to do anything at all any more. Here are two posts about that: one from Walter Russell Mead, the other from Dennis Mangan. Democracy works well enough for a while, I suppose, while a nation is young and virile enough to value opportunity over security, and while its people can muster up […]
Scientist James Lovelock, best known for his development (with Lynn Margulis) of the “Gaia hypothesis” and for his ardent advocacy of radical measures to prevent global warming, surprised us all a little while back when he told MSNBC that in retrospect he thought he had been too “alarmist” about climate change. (It is no small […]
Today’s Times reported that it is now possible to read almost all of a fetus’s genome simply by taking blood from the mother and saliva from the father. Lurking behind the headlines is an idea, once heartily embraced by Progressive intellectuals: eugenics. Thanks to certain mid-20th-century events, eugenics nowadays is generally thought of as entirely […]
OK, last item about Wisconsin: for those of you who hadn’t followed the recall campaign, here’s a video clip that should help to explain what happened there yesterday. The Dow shot up 286 points today.
James Lileks weighs in, so to speak, on the soda-ban ruction.
Shouldn’t be difficult, after you have a look at this.
The infantilization of America, and the accelerating subordination of a free people to self-righteous, moralizing, totalitarian bureaucratic busybodies, continues apace. Here.