Monthly Archives: December 2024

All Trace Of The Barbarian Vanished

December 30, 2024 – 7:39 pm

Bernstein on Beethoven: Mencken: It is almost a literal fact that there is no trace of cheapness in the whole body of his music. He is never sweet and romantic; he never sheds conventional tears; he never strikes orthodox attitudes. In his lightest moods there is the immense and inescapable dignity of ancient prophets. He […]

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

A House Divided

December 27, 2024 – 6:18 pm

The social-media site formerly known as Twitter was aflame, over the past couple of days, with a squabble among various factions of the new Right about the importation, by H-1B visas, of tech workers from other countries. One one side were Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who argue that in order for the U.S. to […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (22)

ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

December 24, 2024 – 10:30 pm

Merry Christmas to you all!

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

The Frog And The Scorpion

December 20, 2024 – 5:38 pm

By now you will have heard about the murderous attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, by a Saudi doctor who had been living in the country for years. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: allowing mass Muslim immigration is the stupidest and most irreversibly self-destructive thing that any Western nation […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Jihad | Comments (4)

Don’t Be Tedious

December 16, 2024 – 12:38 pm

To argue productively requires some agreement on fundamentals. All theorems must rest on axioms. Oscar Wilde famously said “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” To harangue others about first principles can never be anything but tedious. (It will certainly never be productive, because arguments, to […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy | Comments (1)

Breaking The Spell

December 13, 2024 – 10:44 am

Do you feel life flowing back into America’s veins? What we are seeing everywhere, both abroad and at home, is the relief of a world that has suffered terribly over the past four years from from the vacuum created by a feeble United States. This doesn’t mean that the road just ahead isn’t rocky and […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

The Way It Is

December 10, 2024 – 11:19 pm

“There are three kinds of people: those who see; those who see when they are shown; and those who cannot see.” – Leonardo

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Riddle Me This!

December 10, 2024 – 6:49 pm

From time to time I get email alerts from Quora, a website where users post questions and others answer them. Occasionally the answers are of excellent quality. Here’s an example of a good one. The question, which vexed me all my adult life (though less so lately), was this: Does mathematics actually exist in the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy, Science, Religion, Curiosities | Comments (41)

Justice, For A Change

December 9, 2024 – 7:16 pm

I was happily surprised to hear this afternoon that Daniel Penny has been acquitted of charges related to the death of Jordan Neely, the homeless madman whom Penny bravely subdued as Neely was menacing riders on the F train in New York last year. It is a sign of our degraded times that Penny was […]

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

The Camel’s Nose

December 6, 2024 – 5:38 pm

It’s official: the most common name for baby boys born in England and Wales is now Muhammad. The fertility rate among Muslims in Blighty is close to 3 children per woman, while the rate for actual Brits is below 2. (Replacement-level fertility is 2.1 children per woman.) For centuries — and most recently, in the […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Jihad | Comments (23)

‘Tis A Pity

December 3, 2024 – 5:50 pm

Anybody who’s been paying attention will have noticed the increasing normalization of what used to be called “prostitution”. In these sophisticated times we are expected to regard it simply as “sex work”, a career like any other, whose practitioners we should consider every bit as respectable as secretaries, waitresses, cashiers, cab drivers, hotel clerks, or […]

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

Post-Mortem

December 2, 2024 – 6:35 pm

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has just released its 557-page final report. The whole thing is here, but virologist Robert Malone has provided a summary at his Substack website. Hint: it’s bad. This is a story not only of massive government incompetence — although there was plenty of that — but also […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)