John McWhorter is a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University (he specializes in Creole languages), is black, and appears, politically, to be a Liberal/Centrist.  That, at least, should give him enough credibility so that one couldn’t from the outset totally dismiss his piece at The American Interest called “Atonement as Activism.”

It’s a two-barreled indictment, first of activist, writer, and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, about whom I can’t say much as I haven’t read him, and, second, about the self-flagellation of white people in the face of the indictments that Coates apparently levels at America: we’re a land of endemic, structural racism where blacks are due reparations and improvements in civil rights have been merely cosmetic.

All I can say is this: reparations is a hard problem, but I think something must be done to repair the damage of slavery and racism. That “something”, in my…

Knowing a bit about Robin DiAngelo‘s book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, having heard some of her lectures online, and also having read John McWhorter and listened to his exchanges with Glenn Loury, I was pretty sure that McWhorter’s review of DiAngelo’s book wouldn’t be full of encomiums. And indeed, it’s a pan.

Yes, I admit I haven’t read the book, and when I write about reviews like this one I’m always accused of not passing my own judgment on the book, but that’s like saying that you can’t criticize thumbscrews until you’ve had your digits crushed. At any rate, I’ll just present McWhorter’s take. I may read the book some time, but there are so many other books out there in the queue, and I’ve listened to several online lectures in which DiAngelo presents her thesis. (I’ve put one…

(April 9, 2018, Donald Trump and John Bolton)

In all candor I debated whether to purchase and read John Bolton’s new memoir THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED: A WHITE HOUSE MEMOIR.  Apart from stealing the title from a song from the Broadway show “Hamilton” I believe that Bolton’s approach is about maximizing his book royalties rather serving democracy, something he claims he has done throughout his years in government service.  By eschewing an appearance before the House Impeachment hearings for his own self-serving interests is rather hypocritical and Bolton showed his true colors.  In the past whether arguing for an invasion of Iraq or other foreign adventures one at least saw a man whose beliefs were clear, in the present instance I wonder except for the fact that his reputation for never finding a war he didn’t like remains.  After reading Bolton’s somewhat self-serving memoir one gets the feeling…

If you think computer-assisted and computer-display modern cars are complicated (I do; I have a low-tech 2000 Honda), then you’re going to be blown away by this new 14-minute video about now the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle jet fighter is controlled.  Col. Themely, who has flown these things in extenso, tells us what all the buttons are displays are for, though some of the displays aren’t activated because they’re classified. The amount of redundancy and safety features is impressive. Though the plane has been around since 1967, with continual upgrades, it remains a marvel of human ingenuity. And remember, every bit of this plane was made out of material wrested from the Earth, and designed by a mess of neurons in our heads.

Now guess what all this costs? After you’ve watched the video, click below the fold to find out, but guess first.  Oh, and the top speech is…

Rick first alerted me to the end of the popular rationalist blog Slate State Codex. Then it was all over my internet. I have never been a huge fan of the rationalist community, mostly because they don’t do history very well, but this is a big deal.

It has also produced some great conversation on both sides of the American cultural divide. Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote an excellent meta-piece on the whole affair. Lewis-Kraus uses “Silicon Valley” as shorthand for the intellectual right. This is more correct than wrong, even though the region votes Democrat, because Silicon Valley is more of a mindset than a geographic place.

Lewis-Kraus’s Silicon Valley is a new, decentralized informational ecology. He contrasts Silicon Valley with the old media: big corporations trying to maintain a stranglehold on “the narrative.” (Lewis-Kraus readily admits he’s part of the old media.) For Lewis-Kraus, Silicon Valley is trying…

Lady Jane Grey (c. 1537 – February 12, 1554), also known as Lady Jane Dudley (after her marriage) and as “the Nine Days’ Queen”, was an English noblewoman and de facto Queen of England and Ireland from 10 July until 19 July 1553.

Lady Jane Grey was the eldest daughter of Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk, and his wife, Lady Frances Brandon, the second child and eldest daughter Princess Mary, and Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk. Princess Mary was the daughter of King Henry VII of England and Princess Elizabeth of York. This meant that Princess Mary was King Henry VIII’s younger sister.

Lady Jane Grey

The traditional view is that she was born at Bradgate Park in Leicestershire in October 1537, while more recent research indicates that she was born somewhat earlier, possibly in London, in late 1536 or in the spring of 1537. Jane had two younger…

The two noteworthy incidents in Cancel Culture this week—a term that the woke hate but seems pretty accurate to me—were the attempted demonization of Steve Pinker, involving a letter demanding that the Linguistics Society of America rescind two of its honors to Steve, and a letter in Harper’s and four other international magazines calling out attempts of both Right and Left to prevent free speech and discussion by deploying or inciting Internet mobs. (There’s a good half-hour video of Pinker discussing both issues.)

As the controversy winds down, with, I think, the woke getting pretty badly pummeled despite their loudness on Twitter, we have one more item to read: a piece by Jesse Singal, former editor at New York Magazine and signer of the Harper’s letter, at Reason.com.  There’s some new stuff in Singal’s piece about the ridiculous pushback against a letter simply calling for an end of social-justice…

This letter in Areo (click on screenshot) gets the point of the Harper’s letter in a way that many outraged people and offended intellectuals didn’t. The author, who asserts that he’s a “nobody”, isn’t really: his Areo bio says this:

Angel Eduardo is writer, musician, photographer, and designer in New York City. He has been published in The Ocean State Review, The Caribbean Writer, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, among other publications. See more of his work at angeleduardo.com.

But never mind who he is.  His point is that, as Steve Pinker mentioned, the letter wasn’t there to protect the speech and hegemony of the many intellectuals who signed the letter; it was to call attention to a culture that demonizes and, worse, injures the livelihoods of “regular” people who committed ideological transgressions, usually on the Internet. This isn’t in the interest of debate or of producing “counterspeech”, but…

Past is past; the future is now (and it doesn’t depend on the weather).

Very few climate warriors bother to advocate for nuclear power, which is a fair indication of what’s driving them. If CO2 really was about to destroy the planet, Extinction Rebellion, Greta and her worshippers would be talking about switching to nuclear power like their lives depended on it.

Instead, for reasons that escape the logical and rational, we’re told that the only way forward is backwards: ie a life dependent upon the time of day and the weather.

Climate alarmists railing about carbon dioxide gas and not talking about nuclear power generation, can’t be taken seriously. Nuclear power is the only stand-alone power generation source that does not emit carbon dioxide gas during the process.

Whatever your views on climate change, the idea that trying to run modern, civil societies on sunshine and breezes might somehow…

The Edict of Expulsion was a royal decree issued by King Edward I of England on July 18, 1290 expelling all Jews from the Kingdom of England. Edward advised the sheriffs of all counties he wanted all Jews expelled by no later than All Saints’ Day (1 November) that year. The expulsion edict remained in force for the rest of the Middle Ages. The edict was not an isolated incident, but the culmination of over 200 years of increasing persecution. The edict was overturned during the Protectorate more than 350 years later, when Oliver Cromwell permitted Jews to return to England in 1657.

Background

The first Jewish communities of significant size came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066. After the conquest of England, William instituted a feudal system in the country, whereby all estates formally belonged to the Crown; the king then appointed lords over these vast estates…

Position of the Storegga Slide (west of Norway). The yellow numbers give the height of the tsunami wave as tsunamites recently studied by researchers [credit: Lamiot @ Wikipedia] – Mer du Nord = North Sea
The report states: ‘It is thought the tsunami, the largest to hit Northern Europe since the end of the last ice age, happened following a period of global climate change.’
We can only speculate as to the cause(s) of such climate happenings.
– – –
Scientists have found new evidence of a massive tsunami that devastated ancient Britain in the year 6200 BC on the east coast of England, reports the Daily Mail.

The giant tsunami event, known as the Storegga Slide, was caused when an area of seabed the size of Scotland – around 30,000 square miles – under the Norwegian Sea suddenly shifted.

New geological evidence reveals three successive waves tore…