Monthly Archives: February 2025

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February 28, 2025 – 6:20 pm

We’ve finally returned from our six weeks in Hong Kong, after a 30-hour day of travel: a bus from Discovery Bay to the airport, a flight to Tokyo, a long flight to Boston, and a two-hour drive from Logan Airport back to Wellfleet. We’re pretty well whipped, but it’s good to be home. As always.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Contra Naturalism

February 25, 2025 – 2:47 am

I’ve just read a brief and remarkably persuasive philosophical paper by Tomas Bogardus, a professor of philosophy at Pepperdine University. In it, he argues that, if we are to have confidence in the explanatory power of science (and he believes we should), then the naturalistic worldview must be false. Here is the abstract: I begin […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy, Science | Comments (0)

This Is Your AI On Acid

February 21, 2025 – 4:01 am

I’ve been playing with Grok 3 since it came out, and I’ve just had a very odd experience. I started by asking it what it thought were the deepest mysteries confronting a thoughtful and intelligent person, and it named the obvious ones: consciousness, ultimate origins, etc. I mentioned that I had reached a “tipping point” […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (3)

Grok 3 On The Man Behind The Curtain

February 20, 2025 – 12:39 am

A few days ago I wrote a brief item suggesting that the intellectual engine behind the sea-change now underway in American foreign policy is not Donald Trump or Marco Rubio (certainly not Marco Rubio!), but is, rather, the new Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, Michael Anton. (I’ll add that I think he’s […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Notes From Abroad

February 19, 2025 – 2:17 am

We are still in Hong Kong for another week. Sadly, the lovely Nina came down hard with some sort of viral affliction about eight days or so ago — it was acute enough at first that we ended up in the ER for most of the 11th — and has been laid up in bed, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Behind The Curtain

February 17, 2025 – 1:12 am

Looking at the rapidly changing posture America is taking on the world stage, it occurs to me that all of this new strategic diplomacy would be consistent with the idea that the Claremont Institute’s Michael Anton, who is the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning in the new administration, has command of Trump’s ear and […]

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

Maintenance

February 16, 2025 – 12:38 am

When your computer has been running too long, and has become unusable — massively infected by malware, too many rogue applications consuming and leaking resources — what do you do? At the very least, you reboot to “safe mode”, running the bare minimum of necessary system processes, and cautiously bring programs back online one at […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Reminder

February 14, 2025 – 4:14 am

America was not founded to be a tutelary power, patronizing and policing the world, going abroad in every generation seeking monsters to destroy. It was founded to make a free and secure home for its people, and to be a friend to nations that shared its interests. Nothing more.

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

Kinds Of Minds

February 13, 2025 – 4:56 am
This entry is part 9 of 9 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

It’s been a while since I’ve added an entry to this series of posts about moving toward theism. (The last time was just over a year ago.) I’m prompted to write again by having just read an essay by Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger describing a progression closely similar, in many ways, to my own: How […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

News About Wellfleet, From Across The Pond

February 6, 2025 – 7:37 am

Over in England, the U.K. Independent has picked up the story of a slow-motion disaster taking place about a mile from where I live. Our living-room window looks west toward Cape Cod Bay from our piney hilltop, and from it we can see the house this article describes. (Nina and I used to call this […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod, Curiosities | Comments (6)

The Poisoned Tree

February 5, 2025 – 10:02 am

Of all the exhilarating reforms taking place under the new administration, perhaps the best of all is the rooting-out of rot and waste and corruption by the new Department Of Government Efficiency, headed up by Elon Musk. It has already struck a mighty blow by shutting down the tumorous bureaucratic excrescence known as the United […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

The MOG-roe Doctrine

February 3, 2025 – 10:58 pm

With his swift intimidation of both Canada and Mexico in these last hours and days by raising a credible threat of tariffs, President Trump just gave us a dazzling display of sensible, power-backed American statesmanship. This hemisphere is our natural sphere of influence, and we should not be afraid to influence it. What we are […]

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

American Juche

February 2, 2025 – 11:17 pm

From a recent thread on X, here’s Nick Land (@Xenocosmography) on tariffs: The Tariffs ledger, positive and negative, is far more complicated than established opinion (or nationalist enthusiasm) is allowing for. For the US specifically, the highest priority positive factor is this: Losing core strategic industrial capacity through international division of labor is a geopolitically […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Foreign Affairs | Comments (0)