I have long been afraid of avalanches. I don’t ski at all and never have, so my danger from the phenomenon is basically nil. But it’s a primal fear nonetheless, perhaps from movies. That’s one of the reasons the news … Continue reading →
I’ve long tried to understand the upper reaches of scientific thought, often to no avail. Even as a very young child, I tried reading books about cosmology or higher-level physics, and although every now and then I managed to absorb … Continue reading →
I promised a while back to tackle this subject, and here’s my effort. I don’t claim to really know the answer – that’s the short version of this post. But I’ll give it a try. A great many people would … Continue reading →
When I look back, I see a cycle of upswing that began in July of 2024 with Trump’s near-miraculous survival of an assassination attempt and then his election, which continued in January of 2025 with his inauguration and his subsequent … Continue reading →
Solzhenitsyn famously said: “live not by lies.” How many politicians follow that maxim? Vanishingly few. And I wouldn’t expect them to; politics is a dirty, compromised business. And yet, not all lies are created equal. Some lies are minor: “I … Continue reading →
Probably all of us know a family or families where lives have been upended by drug addiction – probably not as dramatically as the Reiners’ lives were, where the endpoint was apparently matricide and patricide – but badly enough, and … Continue reading →
Too many murders, both of the public political and jihadi type, and of the private. They signify different things and threaten different things, but there’s this quality to it: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed … Continue reading →
Food for thought: Europe’s current elites still live in what can be called a “narrated world,” a reality facilitated by institutions, consultants, and public relations machinery. Narration replaces analysis; virtue replaces vision. For three decades, European societies were told that … Continue reading →
We’ve seen it many times before. Whenever there’s a murder or a terrorist attack that has some political overtones, first reports are that the person was/is a Trump supporter. This also happened with the J6 pipe bomber suspect. The usual … Continue reading →
I’ve certainly tackled giving explanations for the TDS phenomenon before, but the topic came up again today in this thread (see especially the first comment and the many responses to it). So I thought I’d add a bit more. I … Continue reading →
I consider that event Ground Zero for the popularization in the US of what one might call conspiracy culture. That’s not the best term for it, because conspiracies sometimes exist and are sometimes real. Maybe I should call it false … Continue reading →
In this post I’ll be presenting the “Two Minutes Hate” excerpt from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I think the template for the passage’s physical description of Goldstein (the object of the Hate) may have been Trotsky, at least in part. Here’s … Continue reading →