My friend Jerry Pournelle has died at age 84. Jerry was the embodiment of a famous quote by his mentor in the science-fiction business, Robert A. Heinlein: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance ...
This year marks the 20th anniversary of one of the odder best-sellers of the 1990s, polymath Jared Diamond’s ambitiously entitled but rather dry Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Why did a book stuffed with more arcane data about the history of crops and livestock than most ...
Much of the mania of the moment stems from a growing crisis of faith among elites over how much longer they can expect the ideological dogmas under which they have prospered so mightily to withstand the onrushing findings of genetic science. No family illustrates this tension more ironically than ...
Francis Fukuyama hypothesized the ending of history, but he failed to foresee the increasingly popular practice of the mending of history to delegitimize the right of the politically weak to their pride and property. Rewriting the past to help disinherit the powerless by demeaning their ancestors ...
Why the ever-increasing hatred for America’s past? You might think that, on the whole, American history is, relative to world history, fairly impressive and heartening. But it’s precisely American history’s virtues, more than anything else, that enrage so many people these days against the ...
Back in March, I asked in my Taki’s Magazine column “Diversity Versus Debate”: Does the increasing campus hysteria and antirationality portend bad news for Silicon Valley? If students increasingly grow up in a culture in which the person with the most wounded feelings rules, will they be able ...
The key moment in the self-destruction of the once great American city of Detroit over the past half century can be dated precisely to July 23, 1967, when blacks began the Detroit Riot. Before 4,700 paratroopers from the U.S. Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions finally halted the orgy of ...
Back in 2014, I ended my Taki's review of Christopher Nolan's ambitious but imperfect Interstellar by suggesting that his blockbuster-every-two-years schedule was too rapid even for a writer-director of Nolan's talents. (Likewise, Nolan's 2012 Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises had also suffered ...
A little-known survey revealed the single most decisive reason Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton: White Democrats have drifted into ideological extremism over not regulating immigration. By way of background, a general problem in political science with using polls to track ideological trends ...
Remarkably, European solidarity, once the progressive cause par excellence, is increasingly viewed as hateful racism, as suggested by the conventional wisdom's berserk reaction to President Trump's speech last week in Warsaw in praise of the people of Poland and of the Western civilization of which ...
