October 12, 2011 – 5:47 pm
Here’s a short video from Ray Kurzweil, in which he outlines his view of our progress thorough six “epochs” of the evolution of intelligence. I’m inclined to think he’s overlooking or ignoring some serious possible impediments to this progression, going forward (not to mention some unwelcome possible outcomes), but this is of course just a […]
October 7, 2011 – 10:59 pm
In our previous post about OWS, we linked to an item that’s been making the rounds today: this Huffington Post grumble from lesbian “electronic punk” musician JD Samson, who has become dissatisfied with how things are working out for her, affluence-wise. NRO’s Daniel Foster has add some pointed commentary over at the Corner. An excerpt: […]
October 7, 2011 – 3:10 pm
The weather being particularly fine here in New York this week, with Gotham’s hibernal sleet and snow still well over the horizon, the occupation of Wall Street is humming along nicely, and has the attention of everyone in the chattering classes. (Including, obviously, my own.) As longtime readers will know, the lovely Nina and I […]
October 4, 2011 – 5:20 pm
In case you haven’t heard, the good folks at OccupyWallStreet have made public a list of their demands. Given their youthful zeal, I had been worried that their expectations might be excessive or unrealistic, but as you’ll see, it’s all modest, reasonable stuff. Here it is: Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand […]
October 3, 2011 – 8:36 pm
Poking around at NRO just now, I ran across some solid pessimism from PayPal founder Peter Thiel. In a piece called “The End of the Future“, he argues that the steady technological progress that pulled the world’s economy upward for a very long time has stalled. The essay seems a shade too gloomy, even for […]
October 2, 2011 – 11:41 pm
Rings shall vanish from our noses, And the harness from our back, Bit and spur shall rust forever, Cruel whips no more shall crack. I can already taste those mangel-wurzels. All must toil for freedom’s sake! Learn more here.
September 30, 2011 – 9:27 pm
What’s the worst thing a person can be? No, no, not that. Way worse than that. Oh, that? Not even close. Once upon a time, maybe… What, that??? You’ve got to be kidding. That’s about the best thing you could be, these days. Want to get into college? Want a government job? Want to be […]
September 16, 2011 – 5:02 pm
Here’s an amusing remark from Lawrence Auster on conservatism, liberalism, and the Hegelian dialectic process whereby, as the liberal thesis moves leftward, the liberal/conservative synthesis tends to follow: In the Hegelian Mambo, as the left become more left, the right, in defining itself in opposition to the ever-more threatening extremism of the left, and not […]
September 16, 2011 – 1:49 pm
Speaking of Bill Vallicella’s excellent blog, here’s another fine post of his, just published.
September 14, 2011 – 10:48 am
Or perhaps a better title would have been Sauce For The Gander. Here.
September 13, 2011 – 10:33 pm
A while back I quoted some passages from the book Before the Sabbath, which is a year-long collection of daily musings by the longshoreman and autodidact Eric Hoffer, written in 1974 and 1975, toward the end of his life. I was reminded of Mr. Hoffer again today, when I ran across an item by Matt […]
August 13, 2011 – 11:57 am
Here’s some trenchant commentary on the UK’s oikophobic response to its wave of riots, from Brendan O’Neill at spiked.
It’s been a fortnight now since Anders Behring Breivik’s havoc in Oslo. Cultural-conservative bloggers, aghast, have mostly tried to do three things in their subsequent commentrary: First and foremost, to condemn Breivik’s mass slaughter as irredeemably evil; Second, to dissociate themselves from any responsibility for it; Third, to attempt, within the context of the strongest […]
A “tweet” from Iowahawk just now: Read this, then read this. O’Brien: You know perfectly well what is the matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged.
I had the TV on just now, and was watching Piers Morgan. He had on a fellow named Brad Thor, who apparently is a “terrorism expert” and author of “thriller”-style novels. They were talking about Norway, and about how much of a shock the Breivik rampage was to a nation that never saw it coming, […]
I haven’t said much about the debt-limit squabble, for at least two reasons: First, what’s the point of having a debt limit anyway, if it just gets raised whenever we approach it? Second, in the real world, as Kevin Williamson points out here, the only meaningful debt limit isn’t one that you impose upon yourself; […]
… goes unpunished. Next time, just throw it back. Accountants say the man who caught the home run ball that Derek Jeter smashed for his 3,000th hit Saturday will have to pay as much as $14,000 in taxes, New York media report. Christian Lopez, 23, caught the ball and promptly handed it over to the […]
From the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch: Human societies are based on the human tendency to want things, and are geared to satisfying those wants: possessions or facilities to bring ease and personal satisfaction. The results are frequently disappointing, and always terminate in the embarrassing non sequitur of death. — Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, p. […]
OK, everybody, setting aside our usual topics, here’s a question for you all: What’s the greatest album of all time? (I originally wrote “rock album”, but let’s just make it “album”.) You only get to pick one. All readers, even the most casual visitors, and all of you who usually stay on the sidelines, are […]
Well, here’s a shocker. Whoever could have imagined such a thing? Are the Wealthiest Countries the Smartest Countries? Actually, what’s shocking is not so much the rediscovery of the obvious truth that human capital matters — but that the story has actually been picked up by the press (it’s all over the place this morning). […]
I haven’t said much of anything about the passage of the gay-marriage bill; I haven’t really had a dog (or a God) in that particular fight. I have gay friends and I’m happy for them, but I also see it as a relatively benign symptom of a much larger process: an ever-expanding radical anti-discrimination in […]
Today brings another provocative essay by Victor Davis Hanson, this time on the hypocrisy of socialist elites. (I know I’ve been reposting a lot of VDH lately, but he’s been on rather a tear, I think.) Excerpts: This discussion is, of course, a belabored example of why and how socialists do not like socialism. Indeed, […]
Anthony Daniels, who writes as “Theodore Dalrymple”, gave a talk a few weeks ago at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, in Bodrum, Turkey. (The P.F.S. looks like an interesting outfit, by the way, if you have libertarian sympathies, and for this meeting they fielded an impressive lineup of speakers.) In […]
There’s a good deal of disagreement out there about whether we should be getting out of Afghanistan. The prospects are bad either way. A while back, after I’d finally emerged from the herd-minded and thoughtless liberalism of my youth, I became sympathetic to neoconservative optimism about remaking the world in America’s image. I imagined right […]
Good news. One cheer for Europe. Here.
Here’s a sad item about central California — a lament, perhaps, or something approaching the final draft of an obituary — from Victor Davis Hanson.
Yesterday the Times‘s Nicholas Kristof posted a risibly bird-brained column entitled Our Lefty Military. In it he lauds the U.S. armed forces as a socialist paradigm, comparing them in glowing terms to the morally inferior “gimme” mentality of the private sector. We read: The United States armed forces knit together whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics […]
If you haven’t already seen photographs, here is what happened in Vancouver when the Canucks lost the Stanley cup to Boston last night (after taking the first two games of the series). HT: Lawrence Auster.
Here are a trio of reviews of Byron Roth’s book The Perils of Diversity: by Fjordman, Steve Sailer, and Richard Lynn.
There are few surer ways to mark oneself as a moral leper these days than to be a “nativist”: to imagine that over time the particular inhabitants of a place form a naturally balanced community, with an organic harmony that the mass importation of aliens is likely to disrupt, often with catastrophic results. To harbor […]
Here’s an item I’m still trying to get my head round: Hebrew University has just awarded a research prize to a graduate student’s essay in which she claims that Israeli soldiers are “racists for not raping Arab women.’ Have a look.
San Francisco is considering a ban on circumcision. In support of this initiative, prepuce protectionists in the City by the Bay have published a comic book that may look eerily familiar to European immigrants of a certain age. It has attracted considerable attention, and rightly so. Here.
Lawrence Auster, in a post commenting on the idiotic and occasionally dangerous fad known as “planking” (in which people take photos of themselves stretched out horizontally in odd locations), suggests that plankers deserve a Darwin Award. So far, so good, and I quite agree. But Mr. Auster, who has an intellectually unfortunate antipathy to Darwinism, […]
Mark Steyn weighs in on the DSK affair. A morsel: As the developed world drowns under the weight of Big Government, the gilded princelings of statism will hunker down in their interior courtyards and guard their privileges ever more zealously. Once in a while, as in that Manhattan hotel suite, a chance encounter between the […]
A couple of days ago, David Brooks wrote a column about the evolution of morality by group selection, an idea that is finally gaining broader acceptance. I’m glad to see that happening; the group-selection model provides such a solid foundation for an evolutionary account of the origins of religion and morality that I was persuaded […]
Biologists use the term “neoteny” to describe the retention of juvenile characteristics in an organism’s adult form. Humans exhibit neoteny in many of the morphological features that distinguish us from our primate cousins: our big heads, big brains, small jaws, thin skulls, small teeth, and lack of body hair. Thinking back the other day on […]
If you look at any vigorous society in its prime, you see a healthy balance between rights and privileges. When either grows too much at the expense of the other, a nation declines: on the one hand toward impotent mediocrity, on the other into tyranny.
April 27, 2011 – 10:31 pm
In the wake of the latest massacre of US personnel by our Muslim “allies”, here is a response from Diana West. We’ve lost our minds, and as a result the best among us are losing their lives.
In totalitarian states, you keep your private sentiments and beliefs about the world’s realities to yourself; the penalty is harsh for expressing opinions that conflict with the official line. Example: Khruschev was busy denouncing Stalin at a public meeting when a voice shouted out “If you feel this way now, why didn’t you say so […]
April 26, 2011 – 10:08 pm
For colleges, men’s sports are often hugely profitable, while women’s sports nearly always aren’t. This caused many schools not to support women’s sports at nearly the same level as men’s. Add to that the fact that far fewer young women than men are even interested in joining college sports teams — due, no doubt, to […]
April 21, 2011 – 10:55 pm
A hot topic at the moment is taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Social and fiscal conservatives have allied themselves against it — the former because they think abortion is murder, the latter because they don’t think what Planned Parenthood does is among the government’s enumerated functions, and it costs money. Liberals support it, for all […]
April 14, 2011 – 10:11 am
In a timely follow-up to our previous post, here’s an article from Science Daily: Cultural Differences Are Evident Deep in the Brain of Caucasian and Asian People The lead paragraph: People in different cultures make different assumptions about the people around them, according to an upcoming study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the […]
In the (rambling) discussion thread to Sunday’s post, commenter Dom gave us a quote from Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest: He quotes a scholar from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences “We were asked to look into what accounted for ”¦ the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West […]
I yammer on a lot about liberty in these pages, and sound the alarm when I think it is threatened. For all of that, though, I’m not an extreme libertarian; limitations on liberty are necessary for a well-functioning society. I just don’t like to see it limited beyond necessity, and I don’t like policies whose […]
If you’re looking for a tranquil place to live, the Institute For Economics and Peace has published a table of the most and least peaceful U.S. states. The top 10 are: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota, North Dakota, Utah, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Iowa, Washington. The bottom 10 are: Maryland, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, […]
The other day I paid a visit to Google’s vast New York office complex to have lunch with my friend Greg, a former co-worker who took a job there about a year ago. As you’d imagine, it’s not your ordinary workplace. Everywhere you look, there are comforts, amusements, and diversions: toys, jungle rooms, sleeping pods, […]
March 29, 2011 – 11:02 pm
Readers, if this doesn’t get a rise out of you, I don’t know what will:
March 28, 2011 – 10:33 pm
This past Saturday was the occasion, once again, of “Earth Hour“, an annual smug-fest in which progressive ideologues the world over come together to thumb their noses en masse at the advanced civilization that feeds and shelters them, that allows them to take for granted a level of wealth and comfort unexampled in all of […]