Born in Texas in 1956.

Explanation of screenname "NutCrackerBoy":

My father was a psychiatrist, aka a nut cracker. A GOP man, he brought together Republicans in Liberty County back when Texas was still a one-party, conservative Democrat state. For a while my Dad took up Citizen's Band radio and had the CB handle "NutCracker".

Links:

My Movie Reviews
The New Criterion
National Review Online

Career:

Software development, in Massachusetts, since 1978.

Interests:

Philosophical, cultural, and historical analysis as exemplified in The New Criterion. Publications like this represent the best commentary in the Anglophone world today - the vast majority of academic works being fatally tainted by bad ideas. What Antonin Scalia is to jurisprudence, at the base not even conservative but just evolving logically from a (falsely discredited) tradition.

My appreciation of two "existential" philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Søren Kierkegaard, was enhanced in both cases by essays skeptical of predictions in the arena of advanced computing. Wild-eyed academics and others evangelize (1) intelligent machines and (2) individual liberation via disembodied presence on the Internet. Hubert Dreyfus has brilliantly evoked Heidegger against the first and then Kierkegaard against the second set of fallacious predictions. He's also written a balanced summary of Michel Foucault.

Other influences:

Alasdaire MacIntyre's explanations of competing versions of rationality.
Charles Taylor's descriptions of the self in a secular age.
Theodore Dalrymple - literary observations on the sad trajectory of culture in the UK (he is a psychiatrist who has treated convicts and other down-and-outers).