Monthly Archives: January 2015

Service Notice

January 30, 2015 – 10:39 am

Leaving the country for a week. Probably no posts till we get back.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (28)

Enlightened Statesmen Will Not Always Be At The Helm

January 29, 2015 – 12:03 am

Well, here’s a heartwarming item. I may be wrong, but I am increasingly confident that Hillary Clinton will never be the President of these United States. She’s too old, too obviously incompetent, too ruthless, too unprincipled, too insincere, and she has too much baggage. Some combination of these things will bring her down, once the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad, Politics | Comments (4)

Land Of The Free

January 28, 2015 – 8:40 pm

President Obama has proposed that we make community college ‘free’. Leaving aside the obvious, inviolable, but apparently unmentionable truth that no public service is ‘free’ (and passing up as well the opportunity to razz the President for his cockamamie scheme, since ridiculed out of existence, to start taxing college-saving plans to help foot the bill), […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (27)

Adeste Fidelis

January 27, 2015 – 1:36 pm

In a post written earlier this month, after a conversation about global warming with an intelligent and well-educated friend, I remarked on the similarity between secular environmentalism and religion: I was struck once again by the clarity with which global-warmism reveals itself as a secular repurposing of the religious impulse — a deep and universal […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (9)

Lies, Damned Lies, And Sound Effects

January 26, 2015 – 8:50 pm

For some reason I find this story oddly dispiriting.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (6)

Plug

January 26, 2015 – 1:59 pm

You may recall that my son Nick, a baseball analyst and former college pitcher, launched a wildly popular website last year called PitcherGIFs. In it he presented animated GIFs of every pitcher in the majors throwing every pitch they had, along with Nick’s insightful analysis. The site was taking off like wildfire, until a dispute […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler, Sport | Comments (4)

Rock And Roll, Houthi Coup

January 24, 2015 – 3:46 pm

As you have no doubt heard, there has been a revolt in Yemen, where Shi’ite rebels known as the Houthis have seized control of the levers of power. About Yemen, President Obama — who, when it comes to foreign policy and a whole lot more, has been described of late as “King Midas in reverse” […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (7)

Meta-Meat

January 24, 2015 – 1:06 am

Saw this on the supermarket shelf the other day:     We are now twice removed from reality — not just ersatz pepperoni, but ersatz pepperoni made, in turn, of ersatz turkey. (And to add a frisson of horror: that awful, missing ‘e’.) But wait: is there such a thing as mock tofu? Nay, the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Food | Comments (4)

Degeneracy Pressure

January 21, 2015 – 2:47 pm

I hope you will forgive me for a series of nested self-quotes in this post. Back in November, I posted a little item in which I quoted this, from an even earlier post: The universal acid of radical skepticism having nearly completed its work, all transcendent values have now been dissolved — and if all […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Society and Culture | Comments (44)

Mind The Flying Pigs

January 20, 2015 – 11:10 am

My God, I actually agree with Piers Morgan — on a matter involving guns, no less. His thoughts on American Sniper, here. I think this might be a good time to visit Hell. Don’t forget your skates.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Yemen On The Brink

January 19, 2015 – 12:37 am

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (10)

May Cooler Heads Prevail

January 18, 2015 – 11:01 pm

You’d have had to have been trapped in a snowdrift somewhere not to have heard by now that NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has announced that 2014 was the warmest year in the history of Planet Earth (likely the whole solar system, if you’re an MSNBC viewer, though I’ll confess I haven’t tuned […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (2)

Battered-West Syndrome

January 17, 2015 – 11:21 pm

Sorry to bang on, post after post, on the same topic, but the Paris attacks continue to reverberate. Our e-pal and occasional commenter David Duff, with whom we see eye to eye about most things, has posted at his excellent blog an essay by one Qanta Ahmed, a self-described “opinion-maker” who is what Western multiculturalists […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Jihad | Comments (35)

More On Our Top Story

January 15, 2015 – 1:09 am

Just a few links for tonight, from two thoughtful observers. First, a couple of items from Bill Vallicella. The first is a meditation on the “No True Scotsman” fallacy; given how much rubbish we’ve been hearing about who is and isn’t a true Muslim lately, it is timely. In the second item Bill, citing the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Jihad | Comments (6)

What Will We Do?

January 12, 2015 – 11:42 pm

Much has been made, in recent days, of the fact that most Muslims are not terrorists. This is true: the percentage of the world’s Muslims who engage in the active slaughter of civilians is so small as to be a rounding error. But in an open and generally unarmed society, in which the default stance […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Jihad | Comments (87)

Coda

January 12, 2015 – 1:01 am

I realized today that I had been remiss in failing to note in these pages the death of the guitarist Jeff Golub, who succumbed on January 1st, at the age of 59, to a rare and incurable brain disease. I worked with Jeff for many years. He was a charming and intelligent man, and an […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (0)

You Learn Something New Every Day

January 10, 2015 – 11:21 pm

Well, some days, anyway. Today I heard for the first time about something called “Blaschko’s lines”. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about them: Blaschko’s lines, also called the Lines of Blaschko, named after Alfred Blaschko, are lines of normal cell development in the skin. These lines are invisible under normal conditions. They become apparent […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (2)

QOTD

January 10, 2015 – 12:57 am

“There is a deep reassurance for the frustrated in witnessing the downfall of the fortunate and the disgrace of the righteous. They see in a general downfall an approach to the brotherhood of all. Chaos, like the grave, is a haven of equality. Their burning conviction that there must be a new life and a […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (2)

Charlie Hebdo

January 7, 2015 – 5:00 pm

By now we have all heard the awful news from Paris. Time prevents me from commenting at length just now, but my feeling is that this will be as pivotal an event as 9/11 was, if not more so. This horrific attack is not only an assault on the prevailing social philosophy of the West, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (37)

Ourobouros

January 6, 2015 – 5:17 pm

Have you heard of Poe’s Law? Wikipedia defines it thus: Poe’s law, named after its author Nathan Poe, is an Internet adage reflecting the idea that, without a clear indication of the author’s intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism. Now […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (3)

But Let Us Persevere In What We Have Resolved, Before We Forget

January 6, 2015 – 12:17 am

As far as the RSS data are concerned, the Great Pause continues. More here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (10)

The Road To Perdition

January 4, 2015 – 12:22 am

An old friend, who lives in California, writes: I spent hours on New Year’s Day attending online traffic school, and only passed by the skin of my teeth, as there was a serious language/grammar/thinking gap between me and the authors of the course. Here are just a few examples. I would have spent hours more […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (6)

Old Wine, New Bottle

January 3, 2015 – 12:59 am

The New Yorker‘s essayist Adam Gopnik — whom I have always considered to be quite lavishly talented, despite his dainty and epicene style — beclowned himself one minute into this New Year with a stupendously mawkish item on gun control. It is so bad, in fact — so completely barren of fact, rational argument, or […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Global Warming, Guns | Comments (2)