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Monthly Archives: August 2020

Not quite what the 2nd Amendment crowd expected

Sunday, August 30, 2020

Inside a Ruger gun factory, from a Ruger “how it’s made” video We’re starting to get data on who has been buying so many guns this year in America. Guess what. It’s not just old rural white guys. It’s women and African-Americans and liberals. A news release on Aug. 24 from the National Shooting Sports […]

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A flood of new data about prehistory

Thursday, August 27, 2020

Who We Are and How We Got Here. By David Reich. Oxford University Press, 2018. 368 pages. During the past ten years, gene sequencing machines have become available that are thousands of times cheaper to operate than earlier machines. The analysis of human genes can yield an astonishing amount of information about prehistory, an area […]

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The neighbors in the woods

Friday, August 21, 2020

The three sets of neighbors who own land contiguous to mine have sworn to leave the deer alone. One neighbor has spoiled them by feeding them and taming them. There are two bucks in this group. Bucks usually stay deep in hiding during daylight. If you have deer for neighbors, you can forget about such […]

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Oxford, Tolkien, and the fair speech

Friday, August 21, 2020

From my visit to Oxford, August 2019 A few days ago I finished my third reading of The Two Towers, and now I’m on book 3. The landscapes of Middle-earth are lucid in my imagination. And yet I find myself thinking again and again about Oxford. This story (the best story, I believe, in English […]

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Are you a prepper now?

Sunday, August 9, 2020

I am 60 miles to the east of the epicenter of this earthquake. What next? We are in the midst of a pandemic that is getting worse in many areas, including the state I live in. A severe tropical storm just moved up the Atlantic coast. That was only the first blow from what is […]

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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer. Simon & Schuster, 1959. 1,252 pages. If I had read this book five years ago, I would have read it pretty much purely as history. Barack Obama was still president of the United States. Having elected its first black president and experienced eight years […]

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Germany, redeemed

Saturday, August 1, 2020

Germany today: Hamburg, Nov. 12, 2017 I have only about 150 pages to go in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I just finished reading the horrifying chapter on the atrocities of the Nazis. Shirer also describes what the Nazis had in mind, had they won the war. They would have […]

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