Monthly Archives: October 2016

Nice!

October 28, 2016 – 11:59 pm

I’ve been on the road all day — eight hours battling traffic in a fully loaded car with wife, daughter, grandson, and mother-in-law — and only made it to the stormy Outer Cape late this evening. We hadn’t listened to the news during the trip — the A.M. radio in our old Volvo stopped working […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (21)

Where Is Assange?

October 25, 2016 – 10:41 pm

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has been effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for four years. He is accused of rape in Sweden, and the U.K. has spent millions surrounding the embassy in the hope of swooping him up and extraditing him. I won’t comment on the merits of the charges, other […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (5)

The Swamp

October 25, 2016 – 6:00 pm

Hardly a day goes by now without new evidence of Clintonian corruption. The latest has to do with the FBI’s curiously handled investigation of the Clintons’ email server, and the FBI director’s audacious decision not to recommend charges in the case. As the Wall Street Journal reports here, after the FBI began its investigation of […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (17)

Birds Of A Feather

October 25, 2016 – 4:28 pm

The choleric president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte (the one, in case you’ve forgotten, who called Barack Obama “a son of a whore”), recently announced his “separation” from the United States, and a pivot to China. Why? Well, it obviously makes sense, in an era of spastic and ineffective American foreign policy, for a small […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (1)

The Soul Of A New Machine

October 24, 2016 – 7:28 pm

You’ve probably heard of “quantum computing”, but you may not know what it is. Here is a piece by Peter Diamandis, of Singularity University, that gives a helpful introduction to the key idea: that the bizarre “superposition” of a particle’s unmeasured quantum states makes it possible for n quantum bits (or “qubits”) to do the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (6)

Service Notice

October 22, 2016 – 9:51 am

Our daughter’s visiting from Austria with our infant grandson, and we are all out of town for a wedding this weekend. Back soon. Chat amongst yourselves, if you like.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

The Observer-Created World

October 19, 2016 – 8:31 pm

We’ve just had another intractable disagreement in our most recent comment-thread (with, of course, our resident Clintonian gadfly). The dispute is, in microcosm, the same that is pulling America, and indeed all of the West, to pieces. As I have said many times before, so much depends on axioms, and on what words mean. We […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (35)

I’m Shocked – Shocked!

October 18, 2016 – 12:11 am

It’s been a busy few days, with little time for writing. But I won’t run off without offering a morsel to sustain you (and to reassure you that things are, indeed, as they seem).

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (33)

Caste And Character

October 14, 2016 – 12:36 am

Tonight’s reading assignment is an outstanding essay, Weaving the Basket of Deplorables, recently posted at the site The Dissenting Sociologist. Its epopseudonymous author (sorry, but I felt the need for a name that’s both an eponym and a pseudonym), whom I shall call DS, has done a masterful job of distilling and clarifying some core […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reaction | Comments (14)

Pussy, Ariot

October 12, 2016 – 12:29 pm

This is where we’ve got to.

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery, Foreign Affairs | Comments (6)

Rules For Radicals

October 11, 2016 – 9:41 pm

Bil Vallicella comments here on the selectivity of Democrat outrage over Donald Trump’s hot-mike remarks. The gist: The insight is that the Left uses our decency, which they don’t believe in, against us, mendaciously feigning moral outrage at what doesn’t outrage them at all. (Cf. Saul Alinsky’s RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (15)

Round Two

October 9, 2016 – 8:54 pm

Tonight we have the second debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Before watching you might like to read Diplomad’s thoughts, which are generally the same as my own. In response to anyone who is on the fainting couch over the latest peek into Donald Trump’s character, and can’t imagine how anyone could vote for […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (19)

Bear-Baiting

October 7, 2016 – 4:35 pm

From this morning’s NightWatch: Russia-US-Syria: Russian relations with the US over Syria continue to worsen. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said on 6 October, “Let me remind the so-called US strategists that the air cover for the Russian military bases in Hmeimim and Tartus is provided by S-400 and S-300 surface-to-air missile […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (27)

Got Me!

October 5, 2016 – 5:31 pm

Just now I put up a post linking to a Washington Post article about simulated violence in football. “Not parody”, I said, and mocked its author. I’ve changed my mind, and taken down the post. The article is parody — well done, and richly deserved. A good example of Poe’s Law, either way.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Sport | Comments (5)

It’s Turtles All The Way Down

October 4, 2016 – 5:33 pm

In yesterday’s post, I wrote: It’s foolish to romanticize the past, to yearn for a Golden Age that in many ways was never so golden at all, and anyway can never return. But it is equally foolish ”” indeed, far more so ”” to revile and reject and discard it all, to imagine that in […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (1)

Service Notice

October 3, 2016 – 1:41 pm

Late this morning our previous post attracted a sudden flurry of distasteful comments. I don’t usually moderate comments — life is too short — so I’ve just removed all comments from that post and shut it down. I’ve generally been very fortunate in this regard. I flirt with serious heresy here sometimes, and so far […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy, Inner Work, Reaction | Comments (6)

P. P. P.

October 2, 2016 – 2:26 pm

When the Rachel Dolezal story popped up in June of 2015 (if you’re fortunate enough to have forgotten this one, she was a “black” activist who turned out, embarrassingly, not to be black at all), I wrote a little post about real versus fictional privilege. An excerpt: Once upon a time, people of mixed race […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments Off on P. P. P.