Monthly Archives: September 2019

He’s Back

September 28, 2019 – 10:57 pm

Curtis Yarvin, alias ‘Mencius Moldbug’, seems to be getting back in the game. He discontinued his enormously influential blog Unqualified Reservations years ago (it has now been archived and reorganized here, minus the comment-threads), and seemed for a while to have tried to keep his head down, concentrating on his (apparently quite successful) computer-science career. […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction, General | Comments (3)

Well!

September 27, 2019 – 11:15 pm

From Sean Davis, reporting at The Federalist: Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (5)

Impeachable? No, Just Doing His Job

September 26, 2019 – 2:06 pm

Given the accusations leveled against Donald Trump for asking Ukraine to assist in corruption investigations, readers might like to have a look at this: The White House, November 10, 1999. To the Senate of the United States: With a view to receiving the advice and consent of the Senate to ratification, I transmit herewith the […]

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

The Children’s Crusade

September 26, 2019 – 1:52 pm

Mencius Moldbug: [W]hen we identify progressive secularism as one thing and Protestant Christianity as another, we have basically just walked up to one of the most dangerous intellectual pathogens in Western history, said “how ya doin,” invited it to a wild hot-tub party and promised to deactivate our immune system for the evening. Is this […]

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

The Year Of Magical Thinking

September 25, 2019 – 9:57 pm

This seems timely: here are the two latest installments of John Batchelor’s ongoing conversation with historian Michael Vlahos about the darkening clouds of civil war. In these two segments (twenty minutes in all), the two discuss messianic and millenarian revolutionary movements, past and present.   Things do seem to have ratcheted up a bit, even […]

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

Give Me A Break

September 20, 2019 – 11:37 pm

So: In 2014, the Obama administration backs a revolution in Ukraine, intended to turn that nation away from Russia. Joe Biden, then vice-president, becomes the administration’s go-between with Ukraine. That makes Biden a powerful guy, as far as Ukraine is concerned. Biden’s kid Hunter ends up being on the board of a corporation over there, […]

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

“Enlightened Statesmen Will Not Always Be At The Helm.”

September 19, 2019 – 7:10 pm

The militant Islamist group Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, is also one of the world’s biggest organized-crime cartels, dealing in drugs, weapons, and money-laundering on a global scale to support its jihad. During the Obama administration, the DEA mounted a massive investigation, and was prepared to mount an enormous legal assault on the syndicate — […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (3)

All The News That’s Fit To Flush

September 17, 2019 – 11:00 pm

The New York Times, fresh from beclowning itself over the weekend with a shameless (and journalistically indefensible) partisan attack on Brett Kavanaugh, gave further evidence today that the once-respected paper is truly in the toilet: a “woke” piece about the oppression of women by — I am not making this up — the “poo-triarchy”. Here’s […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (5)

Plug

September 16, 2019 – 10:52 pm

Finding myself with nothing interesting to say tonight about the passing scene (I’m beginning to worry that, after almost five thousand posts, I may well have said it all already), I’ll take a moment to plug a YouTube channel I’m keen on. This will be of interest only to a small subset of readers: drummers […]

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

Ice, Ice, Baby

September 13, 2019 – 11:27 am

Here’s an amusing story: Ship With Climate Change Warriors Caught in Ice, Warriors Evacuated To quote Philip K. Dick once again: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” The problem with the modern Left’s new religion is that, having shot Heaven down from the sky, they are forced into […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (1)

Getting There

September 12, 2019 – 6:00 pm

I’m gradually getting better from that debilitating chest-cold I came down with on Monday, and thought I was well enough to take on the Blank Page once again. So I sat down to write, and … nothing. (Maybe in another day or so.) So, instead, I’ll direct you to a review, at CRB, of a […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (1)

Beuller? Beuller?

September 11, 2019 – 2:38 pm

I see that the Kakistocracy blog, which Bill Vallicella had linked to just yesterday, is gone. That’s bad: the author, Porter (who used to comment here occasionally), had exceptional sharpness of mind, wit, and pen. Porter, if you should see this: what happened? Drop me a line.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Knackered!

September 10, 2019 – 8:31 pm

I’m back from my annual musical get-together on Star Island, but am in no shape for writing just yet. It was a fantastic weekend — we spent the days working out the more difficult material, and hosted performances/parties for all the other guests on the island every night into the wee hours — but after […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Service Notice

September 4, 2019 – 9:31 pm

I’m off to my annual musical retreat in the far-flung Isles of Shoals. Back on Tuesday, if we aren’t all washed out to sea by climate change.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

No True Scotsman

September 3, 2019 – 7:07 pm

Engineering firms have a difficult problem to solve: the laws of the actually existing world upon which their products operate are unsentimental and unforgiving. The judges of an engineer’s work are not feelings or opinions, but the simple and ruthlessly objective criteria of success or failure, and the stakes are high. If a bridge is […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Technology | Comments (1)