September 9, 2010 – 10:39 pm
Tonight a cold front has moved through the Northeast, and suddenly it feels like fall outside, which is always just fine with me. If there’s one thing I detest (and longtime readers will know that’s something of a lowball estimate), it’s a hot September. But right now there’s a cool, crisp breeze coming through the […]
August 18, 2010 – 11:16 pm
Our cyber-pal Kevin Kim has gathered up a nosegay of posts spanning the gamut of opinions about the Ground Zero mosque. I haven’t written much about it myself — obviously I don’t want to see it built — but I will say that the proposal has done more to get people speaking frankly about Islam […]
August 6, 2010 – 11:12 pm
Elena Kagan lately having been confirmed as a Justice of the Supreme Court, John Derbyshire gives us a preview on this week’s Radio Derb (transcript here) of what he thinks we’ll be getting: Look for lots of wonderful new rights to be discovered buried in the Constitution ”” things that mysteriously escaped the attention of […]
August 5, 2010 – 10:09 pm
Lawrence Auster brings to our attention a hot item: the rank and file of ICE (that’s the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Union) have issued an angry letter announcing a vote of no confidence in their director, John Morton, and assistant director, Phyllis Coven. The letter says that the enforcement agents were, in effect, intentionally prevented […]
August 2, 2010 – 10:07 pm
Yet another excellent item from today’s above-average miscellany at NRO: a balanced and thoughtful essay on the banning of the burqa, by independent journalist Claire Berlinsky. Ms. Berlinsky begins by acknowledging the many good arguments against such a ban — in particular the compelling point (previously emphasized here at waka waka waka by commenters Peter […]
Lots of good reading over at NRO today. Heather Mac Donald has contributed a thoughtful analysis of the legal tug-of-war between Arizona and the DOJ over S.B. 1070 and the question of “preemption”. What does the existing body of case law indicate: does “preemption doctrine” apply only to statutes, or can it be extended to […]
Paul Krugman has been awfully lathered up lately. His fulminating resentment of conservatives for causing all the world’s ills (and worse, for disregarding his Olympian sagacity) has gotten downright pyretic, and in his twice-weekly tirades he seems — due, no doubt, to the July heat — increasingly indifferent to the need to clothe his recriminations […]
Online journalist and all-around gadfly Scott Ott (a Nittany Lion himself) focused his attention recently upon Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, of “hockey stick” fame. His account begins: Shortly after climate scientist Michael “Hockey Stick’ Mann got word that a panel of his Penn State colleagues had cleared him of misconduct in the so-called […]
Here’s a nice example of the graphical representation of quantitative data, from Adobe Flex guru Michael McClune. It’s a 3-D map of the distribution of various types of crime in San Francisco.
An opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof in today’s Times looks at whether, as some have suggested, the modern workplace is better suited to women than men. Mr. Kristof quotes from a “provocative” article: With women making far-reaching gains, there’s a larger question. Are women simply better-suited than men to today’s jobs? The Atlantic raised this […]
The latest tempest in the media teapot appears to be something called “i-dosing“, in which hellbound teens listen to brain-addling audio signals to get high. From what I have learned so far, it appears that the audio plays various tricks with what we audio weenies call “binaural beats”, a pulsating perceptual phenomenon that occurs when […]
On the corner of the block where I live, in the ultra-blue neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, there is an upscale little diner, right beside a busy subway entrance. Outside there stands a little blackboard. On one side of the blackboard the staff lists the daily specials, and on the other there is usually a […]
The influential (and generally non-partisan) think-tank The Cato Institute has published an in-depth assessment of the recent health-care bill. It’s a hefty read, and not at all encouraging. Here.
According to a new study, Russians dwell on gloomy thoughts more than Americans, but are less likely to let it all get to them. We read: Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy portrayed Russians as a brooding, complicated people, and ethnographers have confirmed that Russians tend to focus on dark feelings and memories more than Westerners do. But […]
Writing in the Washington Post, one Stan Cox, who presumably grew up in the jungles of New Guinea, suggests that we abolish the air conditioner, an artifact of human ingenuity that I consider to be roughly on a par with the invention of the wheel, or the taming of fire. Mr. Cox (rhymes with “pox”) […]
Suppose you were to come round a street corner and almost bump into a person going the other way. Odds are, nowadays, that one or both of you will say “sorry!”. This is new. Once upon a time we would have said “excuse me.” What changed? I think it must be that the primary sense […]
Readers of these pages will know by now that America, along with Western civilization generally, is most likely headed straight down the toilet. But it wasn’t always so. We’ve been focusing so relentlessly here of late on our accelerating collapse that I thought it might be nice to take a look back at a happier […]
103° today. It’s hard to think original thoughts while undergoing massive organ failure, so for tonight I will just add my own to the chorus of voices yelping in indignation over the interview that NASA director Charles Bolden gave to al-Jazeera. Here’s what he said (starting at about 1:11): “Before I became the NASA administrator, […]
This was just a matter of time.
John Derbyshire (who, by the way, if he ever finds himself at loose ends in midtown Manhattan at the end of the workday, should get in touch with me because I will buy him a good glass of whisky), aired a particularly snappy episode of his “Radio Derb” podcast last week. Have a listen here.
In an enormously gratifying decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has just ruled that Second Amendment rights are binding on local governments. The decision was close, and split along the usual ideological fissure, but a win’s a win. Story here, text of the decision here.
About a month ago the New York Times ran an aggrieved piece, on its front page, about the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk statistics. The article, clearly intended to tar the police as racists, opened with: Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, […]
From a comment on today’s topic at Mangan’s, here is James Bowery, Chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce, testifying before the House Subcommittee on Space July 31, 1991: In short, the lack of a frontier is leading us away from the progressive values of the Age of Enlightenment, upon which our country was […]
Following on our previous post about violent ethnic disaggregation in Krgyzstan, here’s an item from yesterday’s paper that I found interesting. It begins (emphasis mine): MOSCOW ”” The violence that has claimed scores of lives in Kyrgyzstan is frequently ascribed to ethnic tensions, but regional experts say the causes are more complex. “I don’t believe […]
Reading today’s paper on the subway to work this morning I learned about a clever new way to cut health-care costs: pay people to take their medication. In a Philadelphia program people prescribed warfarin, an anti-blood-clot medication, can win $10 or $100 each day they take the drug ”” a kind of lottery using a […]
On the front page of today’s Times we read about Kyrgyzstan, which is busy providing intelligent observers, at sanguinary cost, with yet another data-point about the incomparable blessings of Diversity. Meanwhile, Dennis Mangan brings to our attention an outstanding paper on said blessings, by Australian academic Frank Salter (original here, but visit Dennis’s place for […]
Our conversation with Jim Kalb and Kevin Kim continues, here.
I’ve never been much of a soccer fan, but I’ve been watching some of the World Cup games this time around. What made the biggest impression on me, however, was not the play on the field, but the unvarying, awful blare of plastic trumpets that fills the arena. It is a horrible, buzzing drone, and […]
I’ve written in the past about the idea, popularized by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, of an impending “Technological Singularity”: a convergence of accelerating progress in computer science, neuroscience, and biotechnology that will, in a few decades, lead to a kind of critical mass in all these fields, with historically discontinuous effects. (If, as […]
Too pooped to post tonight, so here’s a dismal item by John Derbyshire on the absurdities of our educational system.
Good news from Holland: I’m gratified to see that Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party made substantial gains in yesterday’s elections. Read all about it in this catty little article.
Jim Kalb, founder of View From The Right and author of the Inclusiveness essay-series that we discussed in a recent post, has dropped by to comment. Here.
It’s getting harder and harder to remember that this was once a virile and vigorous nation. Here’s an appalling letter from today’s Times: To the Editor: In “The Hard Sell on Salt’ (front page, May 30), it was said that the food industry successfully persuaded the Food and Drug Administration not to regulate the salt […]
Here we learn that “lactose intolerance” is a racist slur.
Here is a fine little essay by Thomas Sowell on the seasonal tide of self-congratulating commencement speeches by public “servants”. So good is it, in fact, that I reproduce it in its entirety below.
National Review has just reposted a fine, and scathing, editorial published on May 6, 1961, in the aftermath of the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion — which failure NR editors Buckley et al. ascribed to a “failure of will”, and a reluctance to offend “World Opinion”: Have we learned? There is always reason to hope. […]
In yesterday’s paper was an article about how prevalent marijuana use is amongst professional chefs. (According to my wide-ranging observations, they could also have written the same article about professional writers, artists, dancers, musicians, psychologists, lawyers, accountants, etc.). It’s an interesting story, and remarkable for how casually marijuana use, which is after all still illegal, […]
An article in Monday’s Times describes the current state of affairs in Rwanda. It has been a full sixteen years since the challenges of multiculturalism got out of hand there, but for some reason the blessings and benefits of Diversity — despite the vigorous application of exactly the sort of enlightened government measures that always […]
As a counterpoise to the impression I might have given in a recent post, here is what all that Russian “directness” leads to at home.
One of the reasons America is declining in the world is that we (and the rest of the effeminized West) are perceived by our foes and rivals, rightly, as having lost our virile resolve. We are generally more concerned with “being better” than our enemies than actually defeating them, and so we court-martial Navy Seals […]
Our cyber-friend Jeffery Hodges has just published, and posted at his website, a thoughtful article on the intellectual and cultural requirements for productive discourse. The subject is of particular interest to Jeffery, who is a college professor in Korea — where, in keeping with Confucian social tradition, to question one’s superiors is to get above […]
A topic I’ve heard people kvetching about lately is the prevalence of unpaid internships for aspiring youngsters. The complaint is that they violate the spirit of minimum-wage laws, and drive out competition for entry-level jobs. I’ve written about minimum-wage laws before; they seem beneficent enough, but they have a darker side, and darker origins than […]
Today I read, at the new conservative/HBD website Alternative Right, an essay by Jim Kalb called The Effects Of Inclusiveness. A sample: No person or society can realize all human possibilities. We are finite creatures who realize ourselves–become good, happy, productive, vibrant, and creative–by becoming something in particular. Since we are social, that particularity requires […]
Here’s another pointed essay about the Arizona brouhaha: What If Arizona Were Quebec?
In a speech at the University of Michigan on Saturday, President Obama castigated critics of recent government excesses, reminding them that “government is us”. This seems innocent enough, but in fact it is chilling. The Founders saw a powerful central government as an unfortunate and dangerous necessity, the only way to administer certain tasks that […]
I’ve been mum about politics for a few weeks, and in particular haven’t said anything about the controversial Arizona legislation, although as you might imagine I of course see no reason why Arizona shouldn’t act if the federal government simply won’t. Meanwhile, here in New York our own mayor — who, as both New York […]
Our friend Dennis Mangan is a rising star in the conservative blogosphere, and in addition to his continuing work at Mangan’s he has begun contributing articles to the new conservative website Alternative Right. His latest is about the biological causes of the male-female “wage gap”. Read it here.
Unbelievable. Hat tip to Lawrence Auster.
April 17, 2010 – 11:24 pm
Last week my old friend Jess friend sent me, as a birthday gift, a book by Eric Hoffer. I’d known about Mr. Hoffer for years, but had never read him. I wish I had done so sooner. Eric Hoffer, for those of you who don’t know of him, was a most unusual autodidact. Born in […]
February 26, 2010 – 9:50 pm
Here’s a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: The sovereign extends his arms over the whole society; he covers its surface with a web of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls are unable to emerge in order to rise above the crowd; it […]