Monthly Archives: December 2023

Here We Go

December 31, 2023 – 6:09 pm

Happy New Year, everybody! Take a deep breath. 2024 is going to be “interesting”.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Okay, Okay

December 30, 2023 – 6:25 pm

I realize the tone’s been kind of gloomy over here since I started posting again. As Woody Allen once put it: More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Yep, we’re in a bit of a pickle, and no […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (6)

Blues For Cassandra

December 29, 2023 – 10:22 pm

Reading the news in these last days, I’ve been trying to find the right word to describe how it feels to watch the briskly accelerating disorder of all our civic and political affairs. “Shocked” won’t do, as I’ve been expecting it for years. “Appalled”? Well, yes, of course, but that doesn’t really catch all of […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Ruminations | Comments (4)

Whoops, Our Bad

December 28, 2023 – 6:13 pm

Philip K. Dick once said that “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” A great many people, including myself, have seen, and said, for a very long time now that there was never going to be any “victory” over Russia in Ukraine. Yet for the last two years we […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (2)

Tommy Smothers, 1937-2023

December 27, 2023 – 10:24 pm

I was saddened today to hear news of the death of Tommy Smothers, whose wholesome, good-natured comedy (and fine guitar playing) I, and all of my generation, grew up with. The America of that bygone era all seems like a fading and faraway dream. Here he is with another iconic figure from the Before Time: […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Fat And Sick

December 26, 2023 – 6:38 pm

The muse isn’t singing for me tonight, so I’ll just leave you with this: “Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in […]

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

Merry Christmas!

December 24, 2023 – 11:16 pm

I hope you all have a happy and peaceful day, and that you can set all this tumult aside for a moment, enjoy the company of those you love, and think about higher, better things. Thank you all for stopping by here, especially those of you who kept checking in during the long interval when […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

This Is Your Child On Modernity

December 22, 2023 – 7:01 pm

Watch this video (it’s brief): We have a serious mental health crisis in this country pic.twitter.com/dumx4nZagc — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 21, 2023 This is what we get when we tear everything down — all the sturdy scaffolding that children have relied on throughout history to learn to be adults — without putting anything […]

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

Is This It?

December 21, 2023 – 7:39 pm

Back in 2020 I published an article at American Greatness on the subject of civil war. In it I wrote: One of the peculiarities of civil war is that it is hard to say, except in retrospect, when a nation has passed the point of no return. There is rarely anything so distinct as Caesar’s […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reaction | Comments (31)

Notes From The Zoo

December 20, 2023 – 12:41 pm

We live in a world of obvious lies. Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, goes the old saying — “the truth is mighty, and will prevail” — but “will prevail”, as should be apparent to all at this moment in our history, is clearly not the same thing as “does prevail”. I’m fond of quoting Theodore […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Darwin and Biology, Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy, Politics, Science, Reaction | Comments (0)

After Reconstruction, Now Deconstruction

December 18, 2023 – 11:44 am

In Arlington National Cemetery stands a memorial, sculpted by a Jewish sculptor named Moses Ezekiel (who, by the way, was the first Jew to graduate from the Virgina Military Institute). It features a classical female figure wearing a laurel wreath, and bears the inscription “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into […]

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

Service Notice

December 17, 2023 – 11:59 pm

I’m just putting a placeholder here lest anyone think the blog is sinking back into desuetude (I’m not going to let that happen again). It’s Christmas season, and there’s a lot going on around here — for example, tonight we went to Chandler Travis’s annual Christmas Cavalcade charity show here on the Cape, which was […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Nice Work If You Can Get It

December 15, 2023 – 8:41 pm

I see that a jury has just ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay two Georgia election workers the stupendous sum of $148,000,000 for some things he said about them regarding the 2020 election. I will confess that I had known nothing whatsoever about this ongoing trial until hearing this news today, but I will say that […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (3)

Another Friend Gone

December 13, 2023 – 10:05 pm

I am very sorry to say that our longtime e-pal (and commenter) Bill Keezer has died. Our friend the Maverick Philosopher has written a remembrance of him, here. Rest in peace, Bill. It was a pleasure, and a gift, to have known you all these years.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

It’s Not A Feature, It’s A Bug

December 12, 2023 – 8:12 pm

There’s a branch of science called “forensic entomology”. It’s used in criminal investigations to determine the time of death for corpses by examining them to see what species of insects have invaded the body. There are specific timelines for this, depending on where the body is found, and I understand that it provides a pretty […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Reaction | Comments (1)

Now, Where Was I…?

December 11, 2023 – 10:51 pm

A great deal has been going on in America and the world since I last updated this blog with any regularity, so there’s an awful lot of backlog for me to pick up and comment on. Let’s start with Ukraine. When I left off, the war in Ukraine was still, more or less, the Current […]

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

Okay, Okay…

December 10, 2023 – 6:53 pm

I know I’ve said this before, but I really am going to get this blog going again now. (I may start with a post about what happened to me to make me lay off for as long as I did, or I may not; doing so might be just a bit too omphaloskeptic — and […]

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