My former (and perhaps future) editor Adam Keiper reviews Jonah Goldberg’s new book
Category Archives: Philosophy
Marx
He didn’t replace old ideas about commerce and money; he intensified them.
I assume that this is an excerpt or adaptation from Jonah’s new book.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related. From the brilliant Sarah Hoyt, who understands the Left as well as anyone: The Russians don’t understand America enough to successfully hack our election.
Acculturating
It’s hard. Very hard.
If you don’t read Sarah Hoyt every day, you should.
Groundhog Day
The movie, at once funny and profound, has become a classic at a quarter of a century.
The Scourge Of Multi-Culturalism
Thoughts from David Solway, and slightly less-recent ones on post-modern “progressivism” from Sarah Hoyt.
Virtual Assistants
Why you’ll fire Siri and do the job yourself:
I spoke to ObEN co-founder and CEO Nikhil Jain this week. He told me ObEN’s technology generates a 3D, computer-generated representation of the user’s face with a single selfie.
ObEN also learns to copy your voice. Once it’s got your voice down, it can do things with your voice that you cannot — speak Chinese, for example, or sing.
That “personality” is based not only on how you speak, but on what you know as well. It’s even possible to add knowledge manually.
Hard to imagine anything going wrong with that.
Tax Cuts As “Theft”
This characterization (and inability to distinguish between giving someone money and allowing them to keep what they earned) shows that Democrats do not believe in private property. Leftists never do. Unless it’s their own, of course.
Space Is Not A Global Commons
Scott Pace gave an important speech that is sure to upset many in the international space community at the Galloway Symposium a couple weeks ago. Laura Montgomery comments.
Speaking of Henry Hertzfeld, every time I see him, for over a couple decades now, we argue about the viability of reducing the cost of launch through reusability of rockets. I wonder what he’s thinking these days?
Merry Christmas
I want to wish the best of the season to all of my Christian readers. As my gift, here is Psalm 53, being sung to the Pope in Aramaic.
[Christmas-afternoon update]
Richard Fernandez has thoughts on the Left’s continually failed attempts to purge the holiday of its meaning:
“Happy Federal Holiday” is about as information empty as you can get and perhaps that is deliberate. It advances not just another phrase, but a completely different world view, a universe safely empty of everything but numbers on a calendar.
Eventually anyone indoctrinated in this tradition will find accounts of the Federal Holiday Truce of 1914 or “I’ll be Home for the Federal Holiday of 1943” hard to comprehend. Nor will they be able to understand why anyone in Mosul should want to observe the Federal Holiday of 2017. Yet how could it be otherwise? To understand history one has to understand why such events as Christmas are and you cannot do that in a meaning-free universe.
The effort to erase Christmas will probably fail for no other reason than that it meets a human need that a mechanical bureaucratic day off cannot fulfill. Humanity needs a time to mark the growth and change in the family, an occasion to renew hopes and put aside fears and a chance to remember something we once knew: that everything’s going to be alright in the end. It really will.
The best Christmas present I could get would be for the corrupt officials at the Obama Justice Department (including the IRS) to finally be confronted with actual justice in the New Year. And I continue to be very happy that She lost.
Seven Years
A very poignant XKCD today.