The Roche Limit

November 21, 2021 – 11:00 pm

People are starting to peel away from the Democratic Party as it falls deeper into the gravity well of the Left Singularity. (Tulsi Gabbard is a prominent and recent example, but there are many others.)

If readers will forgive me for saying “I told you so”, in a post four years ago I used an astronomical metaphor for this: there’s a thing called the Roche limit, which is the orbital distance from a planet or star within which the stretching effect of tidal forces becomes so strong that they overwhelm the gravitational force holding a satellite together. (It’s why Saturn has rings.)

The context for the post was the apostasy of a liberal essayist, William Deresciewicz, from what he described as a suffocating “religion” that was taking over the universities — so the post ties in nicely also with our recent items on the “religious stance”, here and here.

Read the 2017 post here.

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

How Did They Know?

November 21, 2021 – 1:23 am

From 1969. Lyrics here.

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

Justice For Kyle!

November 19, 2021 – 7:36 pm

A splendid result in Kenosha today: Kyle Rittenhouse fully exonerated.

The Left is writhing in fury, of course — which is yet another example of the fundamental, axiomatic incommensurability of the competing worldviews fighting for supremacy here in the tottering West. Our side sees a brave young man with a virile and virtuous impulse to defend his hometown against a rampaging mob of anarchists, arsonists, and looters — a mob that should never have been allowed to run riot in the streets in the first place. He was attacked by a quartet of violent criminals — including a child-rapist and another who had assaulted his own grandmother with a knife — and he defended himself with honor (and, I might add, impressive skill). He exemplifies precisely those qualities that every human society, always and everywhere, has regarded as highest and noblest in a man, and so he is precisely the sort of man that our degenerated ruling class, and those ensorcelled by their poisonous ideology, seek to denounce and destroy.

Here’s to you, Kyle Rittenhouse — and three cheers for that jury, too, who bravely answered the call of justice at what I have no doubt was considerable risk to themselves, given the very real chance that they will be doxxed and attacked. Mr. Rittenhouse now will have to “watch his six” forever, I imagine, but I’m also pretty sure he’ll never have to pay for a drink as long as he lives.

Some wag on Twitter has already proposed that the type of weapon he defended himself with should be renamed the KR-15. I hope it catches on.

PS: Others have noted that Rittenhouse’s acquittal was the entirety of Kamala Harris’s legacy from her time in office as President.

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

The Religious Stance, Cont’d

November 18, 2021 – 7:39 pm

Following on last week’s post, here’s an essay by the Archbishop of Los Angeles, José H. Gomez, called Reflections on the Church and America’s New Religions.

The essay begins:

An elite leadership class has risen in our countries that has little interest in religion and no real attachments to the nations they live in or to local traditions or cultures. This group, which is in charge in corporations, governments, universities, the media, and in the cultural and professional establishments, wants to establish what we might call a global civilization, built on a consumer economy and guided by science, technology, humanitarian values, and technocratic ideas about organizing society.

In this elite worldview, there is no need for old-fashioned belief systems and religions. In fact, as they see it, religion, especially Christianity, only gets in the way of the society they hope to build.

That is important to remember. In practice, as our Popes have pointed out, secularization means “de-Christianization.” For years now, there has been a deliberate effort in Europe and America to erase the Christian roots of society and to suppress any remaining Christian influences.

Next, Archbishop Gomez explicitly adopts what I have called “the religious stance”:

Here is my thesis. I believe the best way for the Church to understand the new social justice movements is to understand them as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs.

With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied.

Whatever we call these movements — “social justice,” “wokeness,” “identity politics,” “intersectionality,” “successor ideology” — they claim to offer what religion provides.

They provide people with an explanation for events and conditions in the world. They offer a sense of meaning, a purpose for living, and the feeling of belonging to a community.

Even more than that, like Christianity, these new movements tell their own “story of salvation.”

(For a point-by-point comparison between the traditional Fall-and-Redemption story, and the ersatz version now ascendant amongst climate alarmists, see this post from 2017.)

I’ve said before that what makes religion work is that it offers a connection to the transcendent, a “skyhook”. In 2016 I wrote this:

When the supernatural basis for all of this is removed — when God dies — we’ve lost our skyhook; the warranty is void. But we are no less overborne by the chaos and mystery we face. We continue to seek the transcendent, but the sky is now empty, and the heavens have lowered. Having sliced off the apex of the sacred pyramid — the unifying presence of God — we are left with a truncated, frustrated hierarchy. God had been the Absolute from which both the natural world, and all human agency, emanated, but now the roots of both Nature and the soul of Man are exposed and disconnected.

We have not, however, lost our sense of awe, and of transcendent beauty and mystery, when we contemplate the natural world — and so in our new, sawed-off religion, we preserve Nature as a sacred object. (Indeed, with God now departed, many of us now promote Nature to fill his place.) And having lost God as the agent and guarantor of our protection and salvation, we must set our sights, and pin our hopes, upon the only thing we can still discern above us: the State.

The State! It is a low and shabby God, but it’s all that’s left. Needs must, when the Devil drives.

Archbishop Gomez sees this the same way:

Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic. They deny the soul, the spiritual, transcendent dimension of human nature; or they think that it is irrelevant to human happiness. They reduce what it means to be human to essentially physical qualities — the color of our skin, our sex, our notions of gender, our ethnic background, or our position in society.

I realize that this dispute about whether Wokeness is or isn’t a religion is becoming quite useless; after all the arguing is done, most people haven’t budged. Some (like me) think it is in fact a mutated, deformed religion; the rest think that there can be no such thing as an atheistic “religion”. This is why I tried, in that earlier post, to borrow Daniel Dennett’s approach, and reframe the question by taking the “religious stance” — in other words, saying that whether or not this pernicious mind-virus is in fact a religion, it’s best understood (and its behavior predicted) by treating it as if it were one. That’s what Archbishop Gomez is doing in this essay.

Read the whole thing here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Religion | Comments (9)

Let’s Go!

November 16, 2021 – 3:14 pm

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (1)

The Religious Stance

November 11, 2021 – 11:06 pm

I’ve been saying for a long time that what we are up against is a religion. (In 2017 I made the case contra Bill Vallicella, who was reluctant to apply the term.)

At the very least, I think it’s helpful to borrow a technique from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who coined the term “the intentional stance” to describe how we should approach systems that might not possess “intrinsic intentionality”, such as a chess computer, but for which treating them as if they were genuinely intentional provides us with the most predictive and most clarifying model.

Dennett describes the intentional stance as follows:

Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.

In the same way, even if you are inclined to quibble about whether Wokeness is in fact a religion, I think we are entirely justified in adopting “the religious stance” toward it. Dennett’s explanation is easily refitted for the purpose:

Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a religious system; then you figure out what beliefs that system’s adherents ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what goals the religion ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this religious system will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the religion’s faithful ought to do; that is what you predict the faithful will do.

I ask you: can anyone seriously look at this and not think we are dealing with a species of religion?

Also, ask yourself this: how would Wokeness manifest itself any differently if it were a religion?

Others have begun to make this case. John McWhorter adopts this stance in his book Woke Racism, while Michael Vlahos has been calling this movement the “Church of Woke” for at least a year or two now. Mencius Moldbug has been making the historical/genealogical/political case ever since the early days of his influential blog Unqualified Reservations, from which I often quote this piquant passage:

If you have a rule that says the state cannot be taken over by a church, a constant danger in any democracy for obvious reasons, the obvious mutation to circumvent this defense is for the church to find some plausible way of denying that it’s a church. Dropping theology is a no-brainer. Game over, you lose, and it serves you right for vaccinating against a nonfunctional surface protein.

Now Michael Schellenberg has posted a substantial item at Substack called “Why Wokeism Is A Religion“. What makes the article of particular interest is a detailed, zoomable graphic presenting the many, many qualities manifested by Wokeism that are also common features of religious systems. (You can see that presentation here.)

The case, I think, is overwhelming.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Religion, Reaction | Comments (11)

Biden: Build Back Better, By Bearing Kipling’s “Burden”

November 10, 2021 – 10:43 pm

Ann Coulter reads the Build Back Better bill. Here.

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

What’s In A Name?

November 8, 2021 – 1:34 pm

Way back in 2006, I noted that when there’s a concept out there that’s socially uncomfortable, whatever word we use to refer to it soon becomes freighted with the underlying awkwardness of the thing itself, so we have to discard that word and replace it with a new one. Before long the new word becomes similarly attainted — because the thing it describes is as uncomfortable as it ever was — and so it in turn has to be replaced. (In my original post I noted that this process is conceptually related to the geology of Hawaii.) The result is an ultimately useless conveyor-belt of approved terms.

The same thing has now happened to the term “woke”. It used to be what SJWs proudly described themselves as, but now we are hearing in the media that the word has taken on negative connotations in right-wing media, so we shouldn’t be using it any more. The problem, of course, is that the referent of the term is what is objectionable to so many people, but as always it’s the word that gets the attention, as if that will make the issue go away. (One is, of course, no less afflicted by being “crippled” than “differently abled” — you still can’t get up the stairs, either way — but somehow changing the word is supposed to make everything better.)

Here, then, is a sharp little post from Freddie deBoer, asking just what expression the Left would like us to use to describe their secular religion, and its ongoing jihad, if we can no longer call it “woke”.

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

Curb Your Enthusiasm

November 3, 2021 – 10:41 pm

Well, that was fun. Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, and various other Democrats around the country, and Democrat propositions, were defeated. It was nice to see all those folks on the other side wailing and gnashing their teeth, and blaming the whole thing on ‘racism’ (which is pretty funny, given, say, the victory by Winsome Sears for Lt. Governor in Virginia — but then of course when all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail).

Enjoy the moment. Have a tasty quaff of lefty tears! But don’t for a moment think, as I see a lot of people suggesting, that the Tide Has Turned, and we’ll soon have America back. These little victories were a pin-prick, a flea-bite, to the foe we stand against. The decades of systemic damage to the nation we used to be, and the consolidation of immense power in every corner of society by those who have very nearly vanquished and subjugated us (and who have infected recent generations with their enfeebling mind-viruses) will not be easily undone. This enemy is far more like kudzu than Goliath, and all we’ve done so far is cut back a little brush here and there. And let’s not kid ourselves: as nice as it was to see that scoundrel McAuliffe take a beating (especially after that disgusting tiki-torch prank), aging Clintonista bag-men like him are hardly the modern face of the Party, and would soon be devoured anyway.

Yes, we won a battle yesterday, and it feels good. (I wouldn’t win any friends, I’m sure, by saying it might have been better if we’d lost, just to build the fury on our side a little longer, though it has certainly crossed my mind.) But don’t kid yourself: a battle is one thing, but the war we are in is quite another, and when it comes to the great cycles of civilizations, the lessons of history here are not encouraging. I’m not blackpilling here, mind you: traditionally minded Americans are made of sturdy timber, and one should never bet against them. But it’s going to be a long, hard slog against an implacable, ruthless, Hydra-headed enemy, and we can’t let up for a minute.

So: seize this momentum wherever you can. Organize. Prepare. But don’t imagine for a minute that this enemy might now be broken, or soon will be.

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

Power!

October 29, 2021 – 6:38 pm

The lights are back on here on our little dirt road in Wellfleet, where the power had been out ever since the thrashing we got from that nor’easter on Tuesday night. We get a lot of these storms out here, but this was a pretty nasty one, and it knocked down an awful lot of trees.

We want to offer our heartfelt thanks to the Eversource linemen (and, no doubt, some women as well, and battalions of others who came from all over the country) who worked around the clock to repair the electrical system and get our lights back on. These are the people — not the parasitic hot-house Laputans who deplore and sneer at them for their want of delicate sensitivities — that keep our civilization, or what’s left of it, alive. Someday very soon, if history is any guide, there is going to be a great shaking-out, in which the foundations of the nation will tremble and we will see just who owes what to whom.

I’ll say this also: three days without power is a grim reminder of how dependent we are on our brittle (and far too “tightly coupled“) global infrastructure. All it would take is a modern-day Carrington Event — which could happen at any moment — and we’d be reduced to barbarism in a matter of weeks. (Just saying.)

The lovely Nina and I (happily bathed, and with a suitcase full of clean laundry!) are heading up to Maine tomorrow to visit some old friends for a couple of days. Back mid-week.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Service Notice

October 27, 2021 – 4:33 pm

We took quite a wallop from last night’s nor’easter here on the Outer Cape, with lots of trees down and widespread power outages. (I’m posting this with my phone.) We have no electricity, which means no heat, water, or internet. (I just got back from filling buckets at Long Pond.)

Back when the lights come back on — it’ll likely be a day or two.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

What’s Different Now

October 27, 2021 – 12:00 am

As things fall apart in America, and talk of secession, “national divorce”, and civil war becomes more common, I’ve seen some people saying that the Sixties were just as bad, or worse — and that as bad as things were then, we got through it nevertheless, and hung together as a nation.

There’s something to this, of course. The Sixties, which I’m old enough to remember very well, were indeed a troubled time; it seemed that everything was crumbling into chaos. The Vietnam War, race relations, feminism, the Pill, the Bomb, the hippie counterculture, protests, race riots, and the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK — all of these things were terribly divisive and corrosive. I can see how someone could make a persuasive argument that the nation was in greater danger of coming apart then than it is now.

I disagree, for two reasons.

The first is that we never really did fully recover from the cultural earthquake of the Sixties; the bedrock of national cohesion and shared identity was badly fractured in that era, and the damage persists. Whatever we have built back since then has been erected on those weakened foundations. Moreover, the great ideological conflict of the Sixties never ended; what happened was that the counterculture consolidated its victories in the nation as a whole, and then its soldiers — most of whom were young — set about burrowing their way into all of the nation’s institutions of power and influence. That process now being complete, the brood, like a population of locusts, has emerged in its mature form — and it is prepared to devour everything.

The other reason is that, for all its discord and strife, the troubles of the Sixties took place in a very different social context. Even at its worst there was a feeling on both sides that America itself was still a noble idea, that the Founding was a triumph of human progress, and that there were objective, natural truths we all could agree on. The conflict of the Sixties felt like like a family argument, a bad patch we needed to get through before we could be a happy family again. The conflict of the present day, by contrast, is much more like a religious war, a struggle for subjugation and territorial conquest — frankly, a battle for extermination — between bitterly antagonistic nations with nothing in common at all.

I was struck by this just the other day when I heard on the radio the old Simon and Garfunkel tune “America”. Simon and Garfunkel were most assuredly a part of the Sixties “counterculture”, but that beautiful song was a paean to the shared American mythos: it sang of the great land of liberty that we were all blessed to live in, and of the endless possibilities for transformative experience and self-realization that this vast nation — containing multitudes and contradictions, but nevertheless dedicated in all its different parts to the same founding principles of liberty and opportunity for each of its citizens, however humble — had to offer. In short, despite being a product of an era of cultural revolution, the song expressed with deep and appealing emotion the traditional, romantic ideal of America, and as such it was profoundly, movingly patriotic.

That was then. It is hard even to imagine such a song, with its poignant affection for the commonality of the American experience, bridging the chasm that separates our warring factions today. It would seem naive at best, and at would almost certainly be seen by the clerisy of our new secular religion as a manifestation of “false consciousness” to be denounced and reviled for giving comfort to the enemy.

So: yes, the Sixties were bad, and set the stage for the crisis we are living through today. But if our situation in 2021 resembles any previous decade of American history, it is not the 1960s — it is the 1850s.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (11)

SSL’s New UF8 and UC1

October 25, 2021 – 11:09 pm

I mentioned in the previous post that I’ve just made some improvements to my mixing studio. I haven’t written very often about music and recording lately, so here’s a post about some of that.

For most of my recording career (I got my start as a staff member at Power Station Studios back in the late 70s), I mixed records on large analog consoles. I was trained on consoles made by Neve and Solid State Logic (SSL), and they’ve been my favorites ever since. When I first came to Power Station we had two Neve 8068s (there’s still one of these in Power Station’s legendary Studio A) but when SSL appeared on the scene we were among the first studios in America to get one. I’ve been using SSL consoles ever since; they have fantastic ergonomics and a distinctive sound. My mentor, Bob Clearmountain, was among the first adopters of SSL consoles, and mixed countless classic albums on them. (If, for example, you like the sound of “Avalon”, by Roxy Music, or “Let’s Dance”, by David Bowie, those were both mixed by Clearmountain on SSL consoles. He still has one at his studio in LA.)

Anyway, things have changed, and the advent of digital music-production equipment has made it possible to create virtual consoles that run entirely inside your computer. The technology evolved gradually, and at first was mostly used in professional studios just as a replacement for analog tape-machines, but in recent years the technology has improved so much that engineers have been able to forgo the physical console altogether, and do everything — recording, editing, overdubbing, and mixing — entirely in the virtual domain. (It’s called working “in the box”.) One platform in particular, called Pro Tools, emerged as the industry-dominating software for doing this.

This has all been enormously liberating: it means that instead of having to build a multimillion-dollar facility to make records (with a gigantic console that all by itself cost a fortune to buy and to maintain), an engineer can put together a fully operational, state-of-the-art mixing studio in his home for the cost of a decent computer, some (admittedly rather expensive) software, a digital audio interface, and some good monitor speakers. Some years ago, I did just that, and I’ve been mixing at home ever since.

The drawback to all of this is that your virtual mixing console, despite being capable of anything (and more!) that a physical console can do, is still just a display on a computer screen. For someone like me, who spent decades developing the complex “muscle memory” for all those knobs and faders on a physical console, mixing “in the box” felt, at first, like trying to play a piano with a mouse. You get used to it, but it’s never really the same, and you miss that intuitive expressiveness you felt when you could actually put your hands on the controls. Various companies have made physical controllers for digital audio workstations (DAWs), and for a few years I’ve had a little single-fader controller, but it never felt like what I’d been used to for all those years.

Last week, though, life got better: I decided to buy two newly released items from Solid State Logic, the company who made the consoles I’d earned my living on for so long.

The first is the UF8: a beautifully made controller, with eight motorized faders, that also has an assortment of user-assignable knobs and buttons for putting direct control of Pro Tools channel functions back in the engineer’s hands.

The second is the UC1. For a veteran SSL user who has rather reluctantly come round to in-the-box mixing, this thing is a godsend: it is a physical recreation of the SSL console’s channel-strip (filters, EQ, and compressor/expander), and it ships with SSL’s meticulously modeled software version of the original console-channel’s audio processors. What this means is that, by inserting an instance of this software “plugin” on each channel of your virtual console in Pro Tools, you can use the UC1 to work the channel settings with just the same tactile, “hands-on” feel as working on the analog console itself. Together, the UF8/UC1 setup looks like this (picture taken from an article here; I’d show you the thing in my own studio, but the camera on my phone is broken):

The UC1 also comes with a software version of SSL’s iconic stereo-bus compressor, and it has a set of controls — and an analog meter! — for that as well.

I’m writing this post just to go on record as saying that for me, having these two pieces of equipment on my desk is an absolute game-changer. I suppose there are lots of younger engineers who came up without ever getting their hands on a physical console, and for whom a dedicated channel-strip controller may seem an expensive luxury, but for professional engineers “of a certain age” — those for whom sitting at an SSL console was like learning to play an instrument, and who have felt a bit “numb” all these years staring at a screen with a mouse in their hand — the UF8/UC1 combination is like suddenly getting your feeling back. What’s more, the latest version of the SSL channel-strip plugin that ships with the UC1 is a fantastic recreation of the sound of the old consoles. There are other SSL plugins out there from licensed manufacturers — and they’re pretty good — but when you hear this one you realize what you’ve been missing.

If you’re an engineer reading this, and want to learn more, you can have a look at them here and here. And if you’re going to take the plunge, I recommend that you buy them from Sweetwater: best customer service in the industry.

P.S. I know all this sounds like a paid endorsement, but it isn’t; I’ve never done endorsements. I really just think these things are so good that I wanted to let others know. (And Sweetwater really is the best place to buy gear.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (1)

Coming Around

October 20, 2021 – 10:32 pm

Well, we are slowly recuperating and establishing order. We are going through the daunting process of consolidating decades’ worth of accumulated possessions from two households into our modest dwelling here in Wellfleet, and it’s a slow go for the two of us, but we’re gradually getting there.

There’s a lot going on in the world, most of which I’ve hardly paid attention to for the past few months. It does not seem that things are generally going well. The question right now really seems to be whether to expect coming events to accelerate suddenly and sharply, or whether we are simply looking at a proximate future of steady decline, as the quality of life in America degrades little by little, with everyone just being told to “lower their expectations”, and learning to do so. Nobody knows which it will be, least of all me, but I haven’t really been bothering with anything but personal matters for most of this year, and now will be trying to get caught up a bit so I can have a think about it all myself.

I do apologize for my lack of much responsiveness to those of you who have written comments and emails. I will be a better correspondent going forward, now that things are settling down.

As an aside, one thing I have done has been to make some improvements to my mixing studio, and for those of you who have an interest in such things I’ll write a post about that in the next day or two. (I have some gear to recommend.)

Back soon.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Made It!

October 9, 2021 – 10:52 pm

Mission accomplished: we completed the move.

It was a marathon on Thursday. The movers came at 7:30 a.m., loading the truck as Nina and I scrambled to make the place presentable for a final walk-through with the buyers at 1:30. We got on the road for Massachusetts about 2, with a plan to get to a storage unit in Bourne to drop some of the bigger items before getting to the house in Wellfleet in the early evening — only to find that all of Route 95 from NYC through to eastern Connecticut was clogged in bumper-to-bumper traffic. By the time we got to the CubeSmart in Bourne it was almost ten, and when we got there the elevator we needed wasn’t working. It took a while to sort that out, and so by the time we got to our house with our three-man crew it was well after midnight.

At this point we confronted the next problem: our house is on a narrow dirt road, overhung by trees, and we have a steep, curved driveway going up to our little hilltop. We’d been worried all along that the gigantic 1600-cubic-foot box-truck they’d us sent might have trouble with this, and so it did.

First we tried backing in, while the truck shattered the stillness of the wee hours with a beeping sound that must have awakened households from Truro to Eastham. This approach was too difficult in the darkness, though, and so our driver decided to pull back out to the road, turn around, and go up forward. After breaking off a few tree-limbs, he completed the ascent. (The team, by the way, had to be back in New York — 300 miles away — for another job at 8 a.m.)

For the next hour-and-a-half or so the four of us humped boxes into the basement. The crew — Damir, Lazar, and Enrique (three fine young men of superhuman strength, stamina, and spirit, two from Montenegro and one from Mexico) — at first urged me not to risk my aged sinews by lugging book-filled boxes, but as the hour latened and their deadline approached, they were glad to have me join in.

Finally, at 2 a.m. or so, the truck was empty. We’d hoped to be able to turn it around and drive out forward, but there wasn’t enough room, so it had to go down the hill in reverse — meaning another deafening round of God-damned beeping, which at this point, I was convinced, could be heard from low Earth orbit. But the driver, with remarkable skill (and guidance bellowed in Montenegrin from the roadway behind) did manage to get the truck all the way backed out without incident (except for, at the very last moment, snapping off one of my neighbor’s fence-posts).

And so it was done. Having not really slept for two days (and having spent the previous days and weeks in continuous physical labor getting ready for the move), I collapsed in utter exhaustion, while our indefatigable troika of young gods piled back into the truck and headed back to Gotham for another day on the job. (If you ever need to move, by the way — and after this I pray to God that you don’t — I highly recommend that you call these guys. They really were amazing. Five stars.)

Thank you all for your supportive comments and emails. I’ll get back to normal activities here once I’ve caught up on some sleep and my skeleton stops aching.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

D-Day!

October 6, 2021 – 12:33 pm

Well, this is it. Movers come at three today to pack, and early tomorrow we ship out.

The lovely Nina and I have lived in this three-story house, on the park block of Ninth Street in Brooklyn, since March of 1982. We started out as tenants, then gradually took over the place. When the aging lady on the first floor, who had lived here since the early 1900s, finally had to go, her family decided to sell, which would have meant we had to leave, if Nina hadn’t devised a plan to form a partnership with the other tenant in the building to buy the place. Back then this was a pretty iffy neighborhood — lots of muggings and car break-ins, so real estate values were low, but even so, we had very little money then, and just barely managed to scrape together our share of the down payment. We and our partner put a tenant in the unoccupied floor.

As the neighborhood improved, the market changed. For a while, co-ops were much more valuable than private houses, and so Nina had the idea to form a co-op corporation, which raised the value. When that changed, and private houses were preferred once again, we bought out our partner; the rising values meant we could finance all of this without coming up with any extra money down. (Have I mentioned that my wife is a genius?)

So: we ended up living in the top two floors of the building, with a tenant below, for all the years that our two kids were growing up at home. When they moved out after college, we made a duplex out of the bottom two floors, and Nina and I moved to the top floor (where we’d started out as tenants all those years ago). Meanwhile this neighborhood, Park Slope, became thoroughly gentrified and Starbucky, and the value of these old brownstones improved handsomely.

When our tenants announced this spring that they were having another child, and were going to move out, Nina and I decided it was time to “up sticks”. After losing one buyer because of a fuel-oil smell in the basement (caused by our neighbor), we made the necessary remediations and put the house back on the market. And now we’re moving out: decamping to our modest little dacha in Wellfleet while we plot the next chapter of our lives.

It would have been 40 years in March. I can’t say I’m sorry to go. I grew up in a rural area, and as I’ve gotten older city life has become less and less pleasant for me
— and of course I am sharply at odds with the harsh secular religion that has completely taken over this neighborhood. I have little to tie me to this place any longer.

But still, 40 years is a long time!

I should be able to get back to blogging once the move is over, and we’ve had time to recuperate.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (7)

Only The Beginning

October 3, 2021 – 12:58 pm

The “Spartacus Letter” mentioned in last Wednesday’s post discussed the use of graphene nanoparticles as a transducer for brain-computer interfaces, and expressed concerns that the vaccines now being forced on everyone — which are said to contain these particles — might in fact be an insidious step toward mass behavioral control. I said this seemed to verge on “tinfoil-hattery”, as such concerns seemed to me to be, at the very least, premature, but an article I’ve just read this morning makes me think that perhaps there’s more to worry about, even now, than I thought.

At the end of his “Finest Hour” speech to the House of Commons in 1940, Churchill said this:

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

That abyss still yawns, it seems.

By Malcolm | Posted in Mind and Brain, Science | Comments (17)

This And That

September 29, 2021 – 7:14 pm

Sorry for the thin content here – we have one week here in Brooklyn till the movers come, and plowing through 40 years’ accumulated detritus, sorting what is to be moved, stored, sold, donated, and jettisoned, while taking care of last-minute medical stuff before we move 300 miles away from where all our doctors are, and other necessary things too numerous and trivial to bore you with, has consumed all of my energy (I’m no spring chicken, after all).

Here are a couple of items to pass along, though:

— Making the rounds is an anonymous essay called The Spartacus Letter: an extremely detailed and sourced exposition of the global catastrophe caused by the Wuhan Red Death, and a bitter indictment of those involved in its origins and (mis)management – including, at the end of the piece, a remarkable bit of tinfoil-hattery regarding graphene oxide and brain-computer interfaces. The letter was posted to Twitter by, among others, Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine, and I have yet to see a serious rebuttal. If half of what it says is true, it’s time for tumbrels and lap-posts. I’ve saved a copy so it won’t vanish; you can read it here. Let me know what you think.

— Steve Sailer takes a good hard look at the latest FBI crime stats, here. His specialty is saying the obvious things that nobody else will; his latest is no exception.

— Finally, a splendid piece at AG from an anonymous frog by the name of “17th Century Shyteposter”, about hubris and acts of God. Here. (As an OG dissident-right/frog-Twitter/NRx type myself, I’m starting to get the feeling that our time has come: the analysis we’ve been offering for more than a decade is becoming more and more obviously correct, more and more of us who used to be hidden in dark corners of the Internet are coming to public prominence, and our memes are everywhere.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (10)

Gone

September 26, 2021 – 10:28 pm

I lost a friend last Monday. His name was Alan Chevat. He was 72.

I met Alan about twenty years ago when he came to study at the Yee’s Hung Ga kwoon in Brooklyn, where I was an instructor. We became friends right away.

Alan was a very interesting man. He was Chief Attorney in one of the state court offices downtown, but his interests were wide-ranging. A lifelong Brooklynite, he lived near me in Park Slope with his wife and daughter. We used to walk home from class together, and we’d always get into some lively conversation, and end up standing on the street corner near my house on 9th Street, not wanting to part company and go home just yet. After he left the school to go study Wing Chun we stayed in touch, and we’d get together for lunch when I was in town.

Alan was a “renaissance man”. When he retired a few years ago, he dove into a variety of intellectual pursuits, including reading all of Shakespeare and studying advanced mathematics at Brooklyn College. He also loved history and music – and of course he was enormously knowledgeable about the law. We appreciated each other’s minds very much; he was the real deal. They say that “the owl of Minerva spreads her wings at dusk”, and this was never truer than with Alan. He saw retirement as a great gift, a garden to be cultivated. We could talk about anything at all, and though we didn’t always agree — he was a “red-diaper baby”, and a committed Progressive all his life, while I, as you will have noticed, am not — we could disagree in the best possible way: as an opportunity to learn, and to understand more deeply the contrary point of view. He was, in the truest sense, a gentleman and a scholar, and my life was deeply enriched by his friendship.

Alan’s wife Ruth called me a few days ago to tell me that Alan, who was quite fit — he rode his bike all the time, and worked out regularly with his Wing Chun training buddies — had died suddenly and unexpectedly sometime on Monday. It was sickening news.

Alan was of course fully vaccinated against the Wuhan Red Death. I can’t help wondering if that had something to do with his death. I guess I’ll never know.

RIP, Alan. You were truly a remarkable man, and a real kindred spirit. I will miss you terribly.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Chaos 1, Order 0

September 21, 2021 – 10:00 pm

Absolutely sickening news today: one of civilization’s great defenders, Angelo Codevilla, has died at the age of 78: struck and killed by a drunk driver as he walked home from church.

Here is his author page at the Claremont Review of Books, and here is one of his most recent items, published at The American Mind. Please take some time to read some of these essays, and to appreciate what a terrible loss this is.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

Ugh

September 14, 2021 – 4:47 pm

I wish Norm McDonald hadn’t died.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (6)

Science and Obvious Common Sense: Together At Last?

September 11, 2021 – 1:50 pm

The blank-slatist axiom at the heart of contemporary racialist Leftism is beginning — as was always inevitable, barring complete governmental suppression of all relevant research — to crumble under the patient advance of genetic and cognitive science.

Here’s Steve Sailer, writing about this at Taki’s Magazine.

Prediction: as this motte becomes indefensible, “luck egalitarianism” will become a household word and the next social battlefield. (This would, at least, begin to focus the ethical debate on actually existing reality, and valid moral questions, rather than on the maliferous-aether religion that dominates everything at the moment.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Science | Comments (7)

Prime Time!

September 8, 2021 – 11:19 pm

Tucker Carlson interviewed Curtis Yarvin, AKA “Mencius Moldbug”, for an hour today. That’s quite a development, I think.

Back at the end of July, I noted in a Twitter thread that a new and influential troika had taken shape:

“Moldbug, [Michael] Anton, and BAP [“Bronze Age Pervert”] have emerged as the three corners of the triangle for thoughtful and historically literate people on the Right who are trying to make sense of our predicament, and to peer forward into the murk.

Anton is the only one who hasn’t completely given up on the American Founding quite yet; that has a certain appeal to many of us, especially those of us who are old enough to remember pre-zombie America. But there isn’t much left to hang onto there…

BAP brings a rousing call for an awakening of the blood and spirit, of the simple joy of power and vigor, but his message is as yet inchoate as a practical blueprint for effective action.

Yarvin is the one who sees most clearly the awfulness of the predicament – but we out here in the reactosphere have had decades, now, of solid diagnosis, and it just isn’t enough anymore.

The question is what is to be *done*.

The awful fact is that at this point there may be very little that *can* be done, other than building some sort of ark to save what we can.

But you never know – and as chessplayers like to say, nobody ever won a game by resigning!”

I have a link to a copy of the show. (Haven’t even watched it yet myself.) Have a look here. (Audio-only version here.)

P.S. Here, also, are two conversations between Anton and Yarvin: one hosted by Jack Murphy, and the other a follow-up podcast hosted by Anton himself.

All of this is going to take hours of your time. Listen anyway.

P.P.S. If you aren’t listening to BAP, his podcasts are here. Also, do yourself a favor and read his book.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (11)

Crunch Time!

September 8, 2021 – 11:23 am

The lovely Nina and I, having sold the house in Brooklyn that we’ve lived in for almost 40 years, now have about three weeks to clear out of the place before closing with the buyers on or around September 30th. After a fantastic weekend of music in Maine, we are driving down to NY today from Wellfleet to tackle this monumental task.

This means that posting will likely be very spotty from now until October! I’ll do what I can as time (and exhaustion) allow.

Thanks as always for coming round, and please feel free to browse the archives, or to try out the “Random Post” link at upper right. I’ll be back in earnest after this is all taken care of.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Service Notice

September 2, 2021 – 2:06 pm

I’m off to Maine for my annual musical retreat. (Used to be on Star Island, but now Maine for logistical reasons.) It’ll be good to push the world away for a minute and just make music with old friends. (These are the same folks I’ve been making those collaborative “lockdown’ videos with, for example this one, from last year.)

Back next week. Happy Labor Day. Keep your chins up!

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Horror Movie

August 31, 2021 – 1:45 pm

I’m not much of a consumer of popular culture these days, but I think it’s worth pointing out that, aside from some news items, you almost never see anyone wearing masks in visual media — in movies, TV shows, etc. — despite the ubiquity of masks in this new era of the actually existing world.

Why is that? It’s obvious, I think: putting masks on the faces of actors would ruin everything. Their craft is to convey human experience on screen, and more than anything else they rely on their voices and facial expressions. But masks conceal faces, and muffle voices — so how could actors possibly work effectively under such a handicap? It would be a crazy thing to do, and so nobody producing content for the screen is doing it.

But: if masking the faces of actors would be so crippling to the presentation of human life on screen, doesn’t that mean that it has exactly the same stunting, crippling, pathological effect in real life? Ought we really be doing this to our children as they learn — they only get one chance, after all — how to be human?

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

Meet The New Boss

August 28, 2021 – 3:09 pm

New York has a new governor, Kathy Hochul. Obviously, she’s a Democrat, but what kind? Old-school centrist? Moonbat radical?

If you aren’t sure yet, read this brief item by Betsey McCaughey.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (5)

Ice, Ice, Baby

August 28, 2021 – 12:05 pm

It appears that Arctic sea-ice coverage is, shall we say, heading North:

SHARP UPTICK IN ARCTIC SEA ICE: EXTENT ON COURSE TO BE THE HIGHEST IN 15 YEARS

I’m sure this will be all over the nightly news.

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

Tinfoil Hats On, Please

August 26, 2021 – 1:28 pm

I’d hate to seem cynical here, but it’s hard, sometimes, not to imagine that there is some sort of powerful and malevolent agency at work behind the scenes that has, in the past two years:

1) Unleashed the Wuhan Red Death upon the world;

2) Usurped the primary-election process to install Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate, knowing that he is a) an imbecile, b) senile, and c) easily controllable by blackmail;

3) Sat Biden at home throughout the riotous summer of 2020, for all the obvious reasons;

4) Selected the most unpopular of all possible candidates, Kamala Harris, for VP, knowing that once they get Joe out her presidency will quickly cause America’s political polarization to descend into disintegrative chaos, and possibly civil war;

5) Arranged the 2020 election so as to install Biden, knowing that court challenges would be deemed so explosive that they would be waved aside without a hearing;

6) Compelled the zombie Biden to defy all common sense, and the advice (as I’ve heard) of his own military, in executing the Afghanistan exit in the obviously wrong order — causing such a monumental, and clearly avoidable, catastrophe that he will soon have to step down and yield the presidency to Harris;

7) See 4).

Crazy, I know! Perhaps, after all, it’s just some stuff that’s been happening. (And empires always die, of course.) But still… it’s all starting to seem a bit much, don’t you think?

P.S. Another possibility regarding the choice of Harris, of course, is that the prospect of her ascension would be so abhorrent to all that it would ensure the puppet Biden’s tenure as a controllable proxy for as long as possible.

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery | Comments (9)

“Shut Up”, They Explained

August 25, 2021 – 10:54 pm

You may have heard of Abigail Shrier, who recently wrote a book, called Irreversible Damage, about the “transgender” mind-virus that has lately infected so many young girls. Her book has aroused a fierce reaction from the clerisy of our new official religion, who have brought intense pressure to censor and bury it.

Ms. Shrier has written about this in an article recently published at Substack. Read it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (6)

Charlie Watts, 1941-2021

August 24, 2021 – 8:07 pm

How sad to learn today that Charlie Watts has died. The Rolling Stones have died with him, as far as I’m concerned: it was Charlie, not Mick Jagger, who was really the heart of that band.

I was fortunate enough to meet the legend in person long ago, when I was an assistant engineer on the mixing project for the Stones’ live album Still Life, back in 1982. The whole band, except for Bill Wyman, were there for the sessions. I remember that Charlie never said much; he sat at the back of the control room on a high stool, sipping a long-neck beer. But he was the one all decisions were deferred to. His quiet and august presence, it seems to me now in retrospect, must have been something like how those in attendance have described Washington’s role at the Constitutional Convention.

I can’t mention that album without telling (rather immodestly, and I hope you’ll forgive me!) a little story of my own from that project, a memory I’ve cherished ever since:

When we were making that record, we had to choose between lots of takes from different performances (that’s a big part of the time it takes to make a live album from tour recordings). There was a song — a cover of the old Smokey Robinson tune Going To A Go-Go — that was going to be the single from the album. But the one take that was by far the best had a technical problem with the drum mikes. When we put the track up late one evening, the engineer, the incomparably gifted Bob Clearmountain (who was my mentor in those early years), was dismayed to find that one of the drum tracks — the floor tom, which as it happens is the lead part of the drum pattern for that song — was unusable. Being a drummer myself, after a decent interval I cleared my throat and said “You know, I could play that…”

“Go for it!” Bob said. (It was late, and everyone else had gone home, so we figured we’d just give it a go.) We miked up the drums, and I played the part (it wasn’t particularly challenging). The next day we played it for Charlie; I waited with bated breath.

After a moment, he rendered his judgment:

“Sounds fine to me.” And that was that.

So, if you ever hear that tune on the radio: the floor-tom ride that opens the song, and drives it along throughout, is your humble correspondent.

Rest in peace, Charlie Watts. What a drummer! What a life!

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (3)

Untergang Down Under

August 23, 2021 – 4:17 pm

Australia, which started out as a prison colony, is returning to form under the shadow of the Wuhan Red Death. Despite massive protests, the government has imposed brutal restrictions in the name of “safety”, and nothing is off the table: censorship, forced confinement, criminal charges, social intimidation, propaganda, and all the other too-familiar tools of totalitarian control. (It’s worth noting that the people of Australia were disarmed by their government a while back.)

Our e-pal Bill Keezer has brought to our attention a post about all this over at Gates of Vienna, featuring a chilling video posted by Vlad Tepes. Have a look here.

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

Nothing To See Here

August 22, 2021 – 1:38 pm

Well, Henri has come ashore well west of the Outer Cape, and while I’m sure there are some pretty nasty conditions in Connecticut, we’ve got nothing more out here than stiff breezes, perspiration-inducing warmth and humidity, and some rough surf. The sun is even shining, sort of.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Before The Storm

August 21, 2021 – 12:59 pm

Here in New England we’re awaiting the arrival of Hurricane Henri. The original projections showed the center of the tracking cone passing right over us in Wellfleet, but now it looks as though the storm will make landfall somewhere in central Long Island. What we’ll get out here will be storm surge and wind, but probably a bit less rain than we were expecting before. (I’m just hoping the power stays on. We really should get a nice beefy Generac.)

Speaking of great swirling masses of hot air, I’ve no doubt that Henri will bring in its wake the usual gale of “extreme-weather” alarmism. For balance, then, I’ll offer a 2019 paper by Actual Climate Scientist Judith Curry.

The Executive Summary reads as follows:

This Report assesses the scientific basis for projections of future hurricane activity. The Report evaluates the assessments and projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and recent national assessments regarding hurricanes. The uncertainties and challenges at the knowledge frontier are assessed in the context of recent research, particularly with regards to natural variability. The following four questions frame this Report:

1. Is recent hurricane activity unusual?
In the North Atlantic, all measures of hurricane activity have increased since 1970, although comparably high levels of activity also occurred during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Geologic evidence indicates that the current heightened activity in the North Atlantic is not unusual, with a ‘hyperactive period’ apparently occurring from 3400 to 1000 years before present. Prior to the satellite era (1970’s), there are no reliable statistics on global hurricane activity. Global hurricane activity since 1970 shows no significant trends in overall frequency, although there is some evidence of a small increase in the number of major hurricanes.

2. Have hurricanes been worsened by manmade global warming?
Any recent signal of increased hurricane activity has not risen above the background variability of natural climate variations. At this point, there is no convincing evidence
that manmade global warming has caused a change in hurricane activity.

3. Have hurricane landfall impacts been worsened by manmade global warming?
Of recent impactful U.S. landfalling hurricanes, only the rainfall in Hurricane Harvey is unusual in context of the historical record. Warmer sea surface temperatures are
expected to contribute to an overall increase in hurricane rainfall, although hurricane-induced rainfall and flooding is dominated by natural climate variability. Storm surge risk is increasing slightly owing to the slow creep of sea level rise. The extent to which the recent increase in ocean temperatures and sea level rise can be attributed to manmade global warming is disputed. The primary driver for increased economic losses from landfalling hurricanes is the massive population buildup along coastlines.

4. How will hurricane activity change during the 21st century?
Recent assessment reports have concluded that there is low confidence in projections of future changes to hurricane activity. Any projected change in hurricane activity is
expected to be small relative to the magnitude of natural variability in hurricane activity.

Read the whole thing here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (2)

On The Bright Side

August 17, 2021 – 10:29 pm

It’s important to keep in mind just who, or what, was just defeated in Afghanistan. It wasn’t the traditional American nation (and military), but rather those who have stunned it into helplessness and have been wearing its senseless body as a skin-suit.

If there is any silver lining to all of this, it is the catastrophic collision with reality, before the eyes of the entire world, that our hallucinatory state religion of Wokeness has just experienced. It was just two months ago, after all that our cordyceptic State Department actually hoisted a gay-pride flag in the capital of Afghanistan. Now look where we are.

Joe Biden’s Presidency, just seven months in, is collapsing in ruins. Even his Praetorian Guard in the media can no longer deny this. Nor can anyone plausibly deny any longer that, in his advanced stage of mental decline, he is simply incapable of meeting the demands of his office. It may have been the plan all along to get him out after a few months, to be replaced with Kamala Harris, but I don’t think that even the most cynical among us can imagine that even under such a scheme the disastrous Democrat regime of 2021 was ever meant to go quite this badly.

This brings us once again to the question of resistance, which I’ve meant to get back to since bringing it up a few days ago, and mean to pick up again soon. Suffice it to say for now that the prospects for effective resistance might just have become quite a bit easier, as public support for this administration, and for our new religion generally, have surely crumbled significantly in these last days and weeks.

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

Half A League Onward: Repost

August 15, 2021 – 11:27 am

I’m reposting this item about Afghanistan from December 2009, eleven years ago.

*          *          *          

 
I watched the President’s speech last night. It was not encouraging. It had something for everyone: escalation for the hawks; an exit date for the doves; the usual rot about “distorting and defiling a great religion”, to keep the Muslims off the streets; some bean-counting for the frugal; some American exceptionalism for the true believers; some mulitilateralism for the rest; a little torture-and-Gitmo-loathing for the base; and to wrap up, some right-makes-might for moral uplift.

The problem is that the situation is impossible; there simply are no good options. Never have I felt more pessimistic.

In brief:

If we leave, the Taliban will overrun the country again, al-Qaeda will set up shop as before, and nuclear-armed Pakistan will totter. The world will know, with certainty this time, that America (and the West generally) is a fickle ally that has no real stomach for a fight. As night falls, those in Afghanistan who have put their trust in us will find they have backed the wrong horse, and they will pay. The brave women and girls who have risked all just to go to school, to read a book — and who have been, for their trouble, beaten and murdered and burned with acid — will be ground into dust.

If we stay, we will never “win”. Afghanistan will be our tar-baby forever. We will never install a functioning democracy there, or a government free of corruption, or a reliable military dedicated to its preservation: these things cannot be done, any more than you can make butter from stones, or teach wolves to knit. We will fight and spend and bleed and die there forever.

Recognizing that we are now of modest means, and so cannot afford to hold our tar-baby forever, we have announced that we will begin leaving in the middle of 2011. This makes things easy for the Taliban, who have all the time in the world; they simply need to harass us patiently for 18 months, and then, as we step back, they will step forward.

We fight an enemy that is utterly unafraid to die, but we, good souls that we surely are, are afraid to kill. Our military is by far — by light-years — the strongest, best-trained, best-equipped, most sophisticated fighting force the world has ever seen; no enemy on Earth could hope to face us in full-scale conflict and live. But no army has ever won a war this way. Neither will we.

So: We have three options, none good:

A) We can leave now. B) We can stay and bleed forever. C) We can stay and bleed for 18 months, then leave anyway. (The fourth option, to cry “Havoc!”, and unleash our colossal war machine in all its incandescent fury, is apparently not an option.)

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

Notes From The Underground

August 14, 2021 – 5:44 pm

We’ll get back to the previous topic in a bit — for now, yes, I think we’ll all agree that the best course has to be some sort of pushback on the part of ordinary Americans, and there are now some heartening signs that more and more of us are starting to realize this. Perhaps things have got to the point now where even people who would generally prefer to pay no attention at all, and to give the media and all our other august institutions the benefit of the doubt, simply have to start noticing that everything’s going to hell, and that they’re living in an insane asylum.

Meanwhile, I just found out that I’m a domestic terrorist. Here’s what tipped me off:

You can learn more from the DHS’s urgent bulletin, here. In it, the agency explains that a big part of the problem is due to people perceiving things, namely “perceived government restrictions” and “perceived election fraud”. Given that “perceive” means “to attain awareness or understanding of”, or “to become aware of through the senses”, I think the problem here is obvious: roughly half the country is just too damn perceptive.

Fortunately, given that there must be well over a hundred million newly minted terrorists out there, I’m hoping it might be a while before they get around to rounding me up. (I still have a few things I’d like to get done around the house before beginning my new life as a zek, so I’m counting on there being lots of you out there who are even more “perceptive” than I am.)

Speaking of living in an insane asylum, don’t miss this chilling account, by the great Heather Mac Donald, of the racist-zombie assault on classical music. (Nothing is safe.)

Meanwhile, here’s a sharp essay, by Steve Sailer, that asks the question: Did Europeans conquer the world because, sometime around the beginning of the fifteenth century, they figured out how to think better? (Jared Diamond, take note.)

Finally, here’s a link that I’ve hoarded as an open tab for months now: a fantastic interactive animation on the working of that miracle of technology, the internal combustion engine. I’m glad to take this opportunity to post it here and get it off the top of my browser.

That’s all I have time for today. Back soon.

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

What Next?

August 12, 2021 – 4:09 pm

My previous post was, I have to admit, pretty gloomy even for me. It’s been difficult to watch events unfold over the last year or so without getting the feeling that the USA as it has existed for the past two-and-a-half centuries has reached a point of fatal exhaustion. (Looking at the familiar cycle that great nations and empires have gone through in the past only reinforces the conclusion.) In particular the abandonment of any lingering pretense of securing our border, and the resulting mass influx of hungry outsiders, brings to mind a near-perfect metaphor: forensic entomology“. (Now that you know what that is, just try to keep that idea out of your head next time you think about the border crisis.)

Still, something has to happen in America; we aren’t all just going to lie down and die. Commenter Jason had this to say:

Unless you believe that the U.S. needs to dissolve peacefully (i.e. constitutionally and lawfully), or you’re one of those intrepid bloggers (and his commentators) who intend to create an American Zion extra-legally – which probably would be beyond the purview of Motus Mentis! – I’m not sure there’s an alternative to attempting to resuscitate this “corpse.” Somehow the fractious peoples of the republic will have to learn to live together, or else. I wonder Malcolm if you and other commentators are underestimating the vast reservoirs of goodness and decency that still reside in many citizens. From my perspective it’s vital that such men of good will adapt some form of resistance, powerfully fueled by the deiform and secular virtues – without which action will I suspect become cruel and counterproductive. America’s soft majority need to call the hard minority’s bluff, from the realms of excessive COVID tyranny to laxity regarding immigration. And this will require the father of virtues, courage.

There’s a lot there. One thing at a time:

Can the US dissolve peacefully? Constitutionally? Lawfully?

I don’t think it can do so constitutionally, but I don’t think that really matters. It’s pretty easy at this point to make the case that the Constitution means very little anymore anyway, and of course if we get to the point of actually dissolving the United States, why would anyone even care what the Constitution says? After all, the Constitution is no longer just the document ratified in 1788, plus a few amendments; it has been so monstrously deformed since then by activist judicial interpretation that the Framers would find it unrecognizable. The remarkable John Randolph of Roanoke saw this coming, and in a speech against the amendability of constitutions given in 1829, had this to say:

“I have remarked since the commencement of our deliberations — and with no small surprise — a very great anxiety to provide for futurity.
Gentlemen, for example, are not content with any present discussion of the Constitution, unless we always consent to prescribe for all time hereafter. I had always thought him the most skillful physician who, when called to a patient, relieved him of the existing malady, without undertaking to prescribe for such as he might by possibility endure thereafter. . . .

Dr. Franklin, who, in shrewdness, especially in all that related to domestic life, was never excelled, used to say, that two movings were equal to one fire. So to any people, two Constitutions are worse than a fire. And gentlemen, as if they were afraid that this besetting sin of Republican Governments, this rerum novarum lubido, (to use a very homely phase but one that comes pat to the purpose,) this maggot of innovation, would cease to bite, are here gravely making provision, that this Constitution, which we should consider as a remedy for all the ills of the body politic, may itself be amended or modified at any future time.

Sir, I am against any such provision. I should as soon think of introducing into a marriage contract a provision
for divorce; and thus poisoning the greatest blessing of mankind and its very source at its fountainhead. He has seen little and has reflected less, who does not know that “necessity” is the great, powerful, governing principle of affairs here.

Sir, I am not going into that question which puzzled Pandemonium, the
question of liberty and necessity, “Free will, fix’d fate, foreknowledge absolute”; but, I do contend, that necessity is one of the principal instruments of all the good that man enjoys. The happiness of the connubial union itself depends greatly on necessity; and when you touch this, you touch the arch, the key-stone of the arch, on which the happiness and well-being of society
is founded. . .

Sir, what are we about? Have we not been the undoing of what the wiser heads — I must be permitted to say so — yes, sir, what the wiser heads of our ancestors did more than half a century ago? Can any one believe that we, by any amendments of ours — by any of our scribbling on that parchment — any amulet — any legerdemain — charm — abracadabra — of ours, can prevent our sons from doing the same thing? That is, from doing as they please, just as we are doing what we please?

It is impossible. Who can bind posterity? When I hear gentlemen talk of making a Constitution “for all time” and introducing provisions into it, “for all time” and yet see men here, that are older than the Constitution we are about to destroy … it reminds me of the truces and peaces in Europe. They always begin, “In the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity,” and go on to declare, “there shall be perfect and perpetual peace and unity between the subject of such and such potentates, for all time to come” and, in less than seven years, they are at war again.

. . . Sir, the great opprobrium of popular Government, is its instability… I see no wisdom in making this provision for future changes. You must give Governments time to operate on the people, and give the people time to become gradually assimilated to their institutions. Almost any thing is better than this state of perpetual uncertainty.”

If anything at all is certain in the America of 2021, it is that we have entered precisely that state of perpetual uncertainty. Our political life is simply a see-sawing contest for absolute power, like two people fighting over the wheel of a speeding car. The Constitution of 1788 is in rags and tatters, and the ruling oligarchy simply does what it likes, without the least regard for law or Constitution, and dares the people to stop it. (What, for example, would the Framers have said about the CDC issuing an eviction moratorium? They would have pronounced the Constitution dead, and called on patriots to take up arms in defense of their inalienable liberties.)

So forget about the US dissolving “constitutionally”; the point is moot.

How about “peacefully”? This is made difficult by the geographical interpenetration of the disputing factions. Our last civil war, which was a sanguinary catastrophe, was at least simple: one contiguous region wished to disconnect itself from another. A civil war between Blue and Red, by contrast, would look more like Yugoslavia. Or Rwanda. Some sort of peaceable mitosis is imaginable, I suppose, but in a nation so heavily armed, the odds of violence seems high. This in turn is compounded by the relentless whipping-up of racial and tribal hatred in the past couple of decades, beginning in earnest under the Obama administration. (Can you think of a more suicidally idiotic policy for a rapidly diversifying nation, with a long history of racial tension, than to make racial and tribal grievances the focus of all politics, media, and education? I can’t.)

Jason is hopeful about the “vast reservoirs of goodness and decency that still reside in many citizens”. I am too: if there’s any hope at all, it’s there. But even if that reservoir of decency is sufficient to prevent bloody war, we still have to confront the fact that the American system of politics and government are by now exhausted, denatured, bloated, and irredeemably corrupted. We must remember also a point I’ve made here before: that the American “form” was designed to suit a particular “matter” — the colonial population of America — and that the matter itself has changed profoundly. The system of libertarian government the Framers created was suited only to a people possessed of the virtues necessary to govern themselves. Only such a people could live in ordered liberty under a minimal government. We are — to put it mildly — no longer such a people. This is not to say that such people no longer exist in America — scores of millions of them still do — but they are now scattered, and are rapidly, by malicious design, being outnumbered. If they can withdraw together to some part of the continent, and be left alone to dos so, they might be able to create some sort of rump America. (If!) But the U.S. government needs, at the very least, some sort of reboot.

Finally, this:

From my perspective it’s vital that such men of good will adapt some form of resistance, powerfully fueled by the deiform and secular virtues – without which action will I suspect become cruel and counterproductive.

I agree, and perhaps there is indeed some hope there. But this post is already long enough, and I’ll save this for the next one.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (6)

So, Here We Are

August 10, 2021 – 1:04 pm

As I mentioned in the previous post, one of the reasons I hadn’t been writing much was that I thought things had got, gradually then quite suddenly, to such a state that further diagnosis and analysis had begun to seem pointless.

Trump had been ousted. The shenanigans that tainted the elections were so swaggeringly, pugnaciously, defiantly blatant, and the coordinated clampdown on any serious investigation likewise, that scores of millions of citizens lost all faith in the democratic process. The American people’s ovine submission to arbitrary authority, and to the capricious suspension of their most sacred rights by jumped-up petty tyrants, made it clear that the brawny and virile spirit that had once tamed a continent and risen to be the awe and envy of the world had sunk, after too many decades of easeful satiety, into flabby and timorous senescence.

The election was awarded to a career politician, now a gibbering dotard: a sniffer and groper of women known to all as a lifelong mediocrity, a rent-seeking jellyfish and fabulist whose long career at the public trough was distinguished only by his willingness to adopt whatever side of any issue would, for the moment, secure his incumbency, and by occasional exposures as a plagiarist. His running-mate, now only an unsteady heartbeat away from the Presidency, is a cackling, charmless schemer with so little appeal to anyone at all that she was the very first to be eliminated in last year’s primary races — but who, for no apparent reason beyond her sex and race, wafted up to take a place on the ticket.

Since taking office the new Administration has presided over: the systematic dismantling of America’s newly accomplished energy independence; the distribution of, and arrogation of credit for, vaccines that Mr. Trump had managed to bring into existence in record time; the flinging open of our southern border so as to admit to the bosom of the nation, without let or hindrance, a surging mass of intruders from parts unknown and unknowable; the increasingly naked attainder of the founding American stock, and of the heroes and traditions and culture they cherish, in a vendetta of racial hatred; the accelerating replacement of the rule of law by the whim of a ruling oligarchy, which was given a tremendous boost by the seizure of “emergency powers” during the pandemic, and by the enforced atomization and isolation that those enhanced powers made possible.

Meanwhile the Democrats, having for the moment got hold of the House of Representatives, have wasted no time in setting up what can only be called, to borrow a term that I learned from the Sopranos, a “bust-out“: the pillaging, to the tune of trillions, of the wealth of the nation and the inheritance of our children in order to bankroll an orgy of present consumption (and to secure the allegiance of the millions of voters they are systematically enfeebling and addicting to government dependency).

While all of this (and much more) has been going on, dissenters have been banned from social media, fired from their jobs, harassed and assaulted by mobs, harried with lawsuits and prosecutions, and denied access to financial services, web-hosting, conference centers, and more. The poisonous “1619 Project” — which makes Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States look like Johnny Tremain — has been adopted by schools across the nation for the instruction of our young children (whenever, that is, the kids are given a break from learning polyvalent sexual technique).

All nuance and subtlety has been drained from political, social, and educational life, along with all the complexities that used to flow from the infinite variety of individual personhood; all that remains is the boxing-up of everyone and everything into a row of bins, labeled by simple sexual and racial markers and sorted according to levels of oppression. All personal qualities above and beyond these crude categorizations are scraped off in the process, because they no longer matter.

Faith in the press, and in the institutions of government, are almost completely gone, because they have made it so abundantly clear that their respect for us is gone. Whatever framework of honor, laws, decency and tradition restrained them, however slightly, in the past is now gone as well; all that remains is the struggle for dominance. They tell us lies: daily, casually, nonchalantly, and entirely without remorse. The sense that, as fellow Americans, we are “all in this together” is now just rose-tinted nostalgia, a wistful memory of a vanished past — a past now seen as so irredeemably wicked that it must be trampled into oblivion.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. As I said above, what good does it do to keep pointing these things out? Everyone sees all of it already, and everyone who might object to any of it already does.

I’m sixty-five years old. The America I grew up in is a dead nation walking. No doubt its twitching corpse will totter on for a while yet, but it will not recover.

Can some part of it live on? Should it?

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (9)

Brushing Off The Cobwebs

August 8, 2021 – 9:45 pm

I’m glad to be able to start getting back to normal operations here.

I haven’t really written much since the election. At first it was because I was, quite frankly, just too dispirited: the nasty shoulder injury I’d had back in the summer had made it difficult to type, and the forced discontinuation of my normal exercise routine had had a depressing influence on my state of mind in general. I had surgery for the shoulder in September, but the recovery was slow and painful, and the meds made it tiresome to concentrate. Meanwhile, it seemed that things were going to hell in the outside world in pretty much exactly the way I’d been most worried they might, and so my own specialty in these pages, which had been diagnosis and prediction, seemed suddenly rather beside the point.

By February or so I’d begun getting back to normal, physically and mentally, but then my wife and I decided it was time, after nearly 40 years of living in the same house, to put it up for sale. The process, which seemed at first to be going smoothly and simply, suddenly encountered some unexpected problems and setbacks (a story I might tell some other time), and we lost what had been the perfect buyers. Because we live in one of the bluest, Wokest neighborhoods in the nation, and given my own unfashionable opinions and the persecutorial tone of the times, I decided that it would be prudent, just for the time it might take to get the place sold, to keep a low online profile so as not to scare anyone off. (While it would be hard for me to imagine not buying a property I wanted merely because I might disagree with the owner’s thoughtful interpretation of history and current events, I realized that we are, at the moment, deeply in the grip of a mass religious hysteria, and that in such times anything is possible.) I figured the world could do without my depressing commentary for a little while — especially as the time for diagnosis is now mostly behind us, and things are, I think, going to roll forward from here with a heedless momentum of their own.

I look forward to beginning to write again this week. I’m afraid, though, that I’m a bit rusty. I’m afraid, also, that I am going to have to work hard not to sound rather badly blackpilled; the situation in the West has deteriorated very sharply in these last months.

I may also divert a little from what had become my primary focus over the last few years. These months of relative seclusion have been for me a bit of a study in getting older, in “keeping one’s head when all about you are losing theirs”, and a few other things that might be worth talking about.

Back soon.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (8)

Home Stretch

August 5, 2021 – 12:38 pm

Still here. I’m anticipating, any day now, a long-awaited conclusion to a stressful process that has caused me, as a matter of prudence and caution, to keep a low online profile for the past several months. (I will explain later, but at this point I don’t want to jinx anything.)

Lord knows there’s plenty to comment on! – none of it good.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Nearly There

July 23, 2021 – 3:32 pm

I’m getting ready to put things back to normal here, but I probably won’t be posting anything new just yet. Thank you all for your patience.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (6)

Service Notice

May 1, 2021 – 12:34 pm

I’ve reopened the site for now, but may soon have to take it offline again for a bit. Sorry about the weird situation here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Service Notice

April 13, 2021 – 12:34 pm

We’re still on a break here. I do hope to be back in another weeks or two. Thanks as always for coming by – and do feel free to browse our archive, or try the “Random Post” link at top right.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Service Notice

March 16, 2021 – 9:42 pm

I know it’s been awfully slow around here lately. It will likely be that way for another few weeks, I’m sorry to say, and I may even take the blog offline for a brief interval. (If that happens, feel free to write me and I’ll explain; my email is still the same old obvious one.)

I hope to be able to get things back to normal later in the spring.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Stick The Fork In

March 15, 2021 – 12:07 pm

From last night’s Grammy Awards: here is the state of American “culture”.

A while ago I wrote that it is a sign of an ascending civilization that what is lower aspires to what is higher, while the reverse is true of a civilization in decline. In the golden age of Hollywood, eros was Fred Astaire dancing with Rita Hayworth, while authors, composers, and philosophers graced the covers of popular magazines. Our colleges and universities taught the great canon of Western literature and classical thought in order to cherish, preserve, and advance a magnificent cultural heritage thousands of years old.

And… here we are now. Draw your own conclusions.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (8)

H.R. 1319

March 11, 2021 – 11:40 am

Off to the White House it goes. It will be signed into law by Friday, if Mr. Biden can still lift a pen. (The full text of the thing is here, if you have a strong stomach, low blood pressure, and a month or two to read it.)

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

– B. Franklin

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

Time Out

March 3, 2021 – 1:56 pm

“The worst pain a man can suffer: to have insight into much and power over nothing.”

– Herodotus

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (12)

Airstrikes In Syria

February 25, 2021 – 8:49 pm

36 days in. Here we go.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Military | Comments (5)

Michael Anton On Our Reichstag Fire And Its Aftermath

February 22, 2021 – 1:26 pm

Here’s Michael Anton (with whom, in 2018, we had a brief exchange in the linked series of posts starting here), writing recently at Claremont Review of Books:

The vast majority of those who went to the Capitol did so without a plan, but they did have a goal: to be heard. Which was also the reason they voted for Donald Trump in the first place: they had not been heard in at least 30 years. But the actions of a few not only ensured that they would not be heard, but that instead they would get an earful of the same stuff most of them have been hearing their entire lives, only this time much louder: that everyone in the heartland, at least half the South, and anyone who voted for Trump is deplorable and irredeemable; that America itself is systemically racist; that most or all police are stormtroopers; that equal treatment under law is unjust; and that there are, fundamentally, two classes of people in the United States: the genetically deserving and the genetically guilty.

And now, in addition to all that, calls from the wise and good to investigate and “hold accountable” and cleanse from industry and employment people who did not storm the Capitol but who simply supported a politician and his agenda, as if this were somehow criminal. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson has proposed an effort to “deprogram” Trump voters. Prominent members of the Democratic Party such as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich have called for a “truth and reconciliation commission” like the kind that has followed the fall of shameful autocratic regimes. (And that, not coincidentally, uncovered little truth and produced even less reconciliation.) The Berggruen Institute’s Nils Gilman—a man who, perhaps not incidentally, recently called for my death—is having none of that. “These people need to be extirpated from politics,” he recently tweeted.

In Gilman and company’s eyes, Trump’s voters have no moral, political, or intellectual standing and no legitimate interests—only obligations arising from their inborn moral culpability. There is no reason at all to address their concerns or listen to them. Indeed, it’s dangerous even to let them speak lest they lead others into error. Worst of all is to allow them to organize around what they perceive as their interests, which inevitably leads them to express and perpetuate racism and other sins.

So that’s what Trump supporters hear; what do they see? Double standards and hypocrisy everywhere. Mike Flynn’s life ruined over a non-crime while the man who ruined it, James Comey, laughs about his handiwork on an Upper East Side stage. Four years of constant lies about Russian collusion and no reckoning, either for those who broke the law to get it going, or those who used their megaphone to keep it going. Changes to the voting system designed to help one party and marginalize theirs. A country flooded with immigration for more than half a century, padding the votes of the other party, driving down wages, and enriching oligarchs. A trade regime seemingly designed to ship their jobs overseas, close their factories, and empty out their towns. A media and intellectual class that no longer makes any pretense of fairness or objectivity but openly operates as the propaganda arm of the regime—to the extent it is not itself the regime. And now, an increasing tendency to demonize all dissent as terrorism and lock out of the political system—permanently—at least 47% of the population.

Read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile, the indefatigable JK has brought to our attention a podcast in which Andrew Sullivan “debates” Mr. Anton on Trumpism, the election, and the events of January 6th. (I dithered briefly about whether to use the scare-quotes around “debates”; you should listen to it here, and then tell me whether you think I was right to do so.)

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)