Antonin Scalia, 1936-2016

February 13, 2016 – 9:31 pm

It was with the profoundest shock and sorrow that I learned, early this evening, of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

This is devastating news. I was an enormous admirer of this great jurist — not only as an irreplaceable defender of the Constitution, but as writer, a philosopher, a scholar, a humorist, a raconteur, and a patriot. His opinions stood out, always, for their clarity, scholarship, wit, and rigor — but also, without fail, for their unshakable fidelity to the Constitution, to the wisdom of the Framers, and to the principles upon which this extraordinary nation was founded. His opinions — perhaps, most of all, his withering dissents — will be an immortal contribution to the literature of jurisprudence.

This is also a political shock of the first magnitude. With the nation deeply, perhaps fatally, riven along widening and perhaps unbridgeable fissures, and a presidential election underway, what will happen now? The Republicans, such as they are, control the Senate; there are major cases on the SCOTUS docket; the Court (and the Constitution) has now lost its most reliable and articulate conservative champion. How will this all play out in the coming months? Already the battle lines are forming; would that there were a stouter heart than Mitch McConnell leading the Senate majority.

An old saying: “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.” Cold comfort to the living; this is a shattering blow. There is rough water ahead, and perilous times.

Thank you, Justice Scalia. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

It Was A Bright Cold Day In April

February 12, 2016 – 10:25 pm

Here’s your frisson du jour.

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

Service Notice

February 11, 2016 – 7:57 pm

I’ve been using the hosting service Bluehost for eleven years now, and until recently I’ve been thrilled with their service, and have recommended them often to other bloggers. Lately, though, they’ve been scaling up, and downtime’s increased. Worse, their tech support, which used to be prompt and helpful, has been all but unreachable lately.

We’ve just had another outage today. If you were trying to pay us a visit, I apologize. I might have to start shopping around.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (6)

New Wave

February 11, 2016 – 3:27 pm

It’s a big day in physics: researchers using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) have confirmed the existence and propagation of ripples in spacetime caused by the movement of massive objects.

The observation of such waves is a posthumous triumph for Albert Einstein, who first predicted their existence a century ago this year. While I’m sure he would have been happy, I doubt he’d have been surprised. In 1919, Arthur Eddington’s observations of a solar eclipse confirmed Einstein’s prediction of the warping of spacetime by large masses (in this case, the Sun). When a report of this reached Einstein, he received the news without much excitement, saying he knew that he had to be right. A graduate student, Ilse Schneider, asked what his reaction would have been had the experiment violated his prediction. He replied, “Then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord; the theory is correct.”

Also worth noting here is that the LIGO apparatus, which very sensitively compared the length of two perpendicular axes to detect expansions and contractions, is almost perfectly analogous to the famous (and shocking!) Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, which also used perpendicular-axis interferometry to refute the idea of the “luminiferous aether”, which until then was assumed by nearly all physical scientists to be a rarefied medium, filling all of space, that acted as a substrate for the propagation of light waves. Despite an all-but unanimous consensus, the MM experiment showed the science not to be “settled” at all, and threw theorists into a bit of a panic. Into this breach stepped the young genius Einstein, who, in 1905 (his annus mirabilis), began a new era of physics with his paper On The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, which introduced the idea that came to be known as “Special Relativity”. (It took Einstein another 11 years of difficult work to generalize the theory to include gravitation.)

Learn more about today’s historic result here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (3)

Today’s Assignment

February 10, 2016 – 5:16 pm

With the presidential campaign now at cruising speed, I thought it might be helpful to offer some readings and reflections on the nature of democracy itself: what it really is, what it isn’t, and how it really works.

Really, if you want to understand this contraption, what you ought to read is a book that I’ve mentioned in these pages before: Popular Government, by Sir Henry Sumner Maine. (You can read it free of charge here, thanks to Google.) But for today we’ll have something at least slightly briefer.

What is democracy? It is a form of government, and nothing more. Given that sovereignty is conserved, and always rests somewhere (though not always, or perhaps even usually, where it is thought to repose), we are always subjects to some sovereign or other; democracy, in theory at least, then becomes nothing more than a kind of inverted monarchy. The courtiers still grovel and flatter, and we, who imagine ourselves sovereign, flatter ourselves in turn that our infinitesimal slivers of power — what Bishop Berkeley, in another context, called the “ghosts of departed quantities” — confer upon us something august, and even more imaginatively, something real.

Curiously, despite the obvious liabilities of universal suffrage, most of us seem somehow to imagine also that every expansion of the franchise somehow improves our position, or at least does not diminish it. Perhaps this reveals a subliminal, and sophisticated, understanding of the irreducible teensiness of infinitesimals, though I rather doubt it. More likely, I suppose, it simply reflects a “good feeling” about democracy — as if it were in fact more important to be able to choose who governs than actually to be governed well — or perhaps it expresses what Mencken called “a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

Anyway, what I have for you today is an old piece by the pseudonymous Mencius Moldbug, on what, for the sake of discussion, he calls ‘cis-‘ versus ‘trans-‘ democracy: in other words, the various settings of the suffrage-knob ranging from ‘one’ to ‘all’, and on where actual power goes as the knob is turned. Along the way we’ll meet Senator Benjamin Hill, Deng Xiaoping, Lawrence Tribe (be sure to read his letter), Eugene Volokh, and yes, Sir Henry Maine. Astute readers will also note, in the final paragraphs, yet another summary of Auster’s First Law.

The essay is here. Take your time, and read it all.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Reaction | Comments (8)

Sherp

February 10, 2016 – 10:54 am

I. Want. This.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

Not So Fast

February 9, 2016 – 7:35 pm

Here’s a heartening item:

Supreme Court freezes Obama plan to limit carbon emissions

We read:

The court granted a stay request from more than two dozen states, utilities and coal miners who said the Environmental Protection Agency was overstepping its powers…

The stay means that questions about the legality of the program will remain after Obama leaves office. An appeals court is not scheduled to hear the case until June, and the Supreme Court’s order said the stay would remain in effect while the losing side petitions the Supreme Court for an ultimate decision.

As is its custom in stay requests, the court did not give a reason for its action. The court’s four liberal justices objected to the decision, but they did not give an explanation.

Once again, everything teeters on the balance of the Court. For now.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (4)

Toxoprogmosis

February 9, 2016 – 7:16 pm

About three years ago I wrote a brief item about Toxoplasma gondii, which is a cat-borne parasite that causes behavioral aberrations in mice — and appears to do the same in humans too. The article I originally linked to is here, and today I’ll add a link to another article, here.

At the time, however, I overlooked a related item, to wit, a 2013 article in Psychology Today explaining that liberals are much fonder of cats than conservatives are.

The effect of T. gondii is to make prey species less wary of predators. Draw your own conclusions.

By Malcolm | Posted in Darwin and Biology, Politics | Comments (5)

Res Ipsa Schmipsa

February 9, 2016 – 12:13 am

“Evidence is fact that discriminates between one theory and another. Facts do not “speak for themselves.’ They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.”

— Thomas Sowell, A Conflict Of Visions

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (9)

Yeah, Yeah

February 5, 2016 – 8:16 pm

The other day our President, Barack Hussein Obama, took time out of his busy schedule to visit a Baltimore mosque. There he delivered an obsequious panegyric about the glorious role of Islam in America’s history. (If there is a major, or even mid-tier, religion that has in fact played a lesser role in America’s founding, history and rise to greatness, I’m hard-pressed to think of one; if you leave out the prominent role of Muslims in capturing slaves in Africa, then the salient appearances of Islam on the American stage have only been our difficulties with the Barbary pirates in the early 1800s, and the terror attacks of the past few decades. From the Mayflower to the Revolution, from the Framing to the Westward Expansion to the Great War to the Sixties and beyond, you will scour the annals of American history in vain for a notable Muslim patriot.) Mr. Obama also made sure, as usual, to castigate the rest of us for our egregious abuse of Muslims, and for thinking that the noble religion of Islam might be anything other than a great beacon of peace, casting a lambent aura of love upon all the world.

I’d comment at length, but I haven’t the oomph tonight. Others have, though. See, for example, here, here, here, and here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics, Jihad | Comments (17)

Gone Away, Is The Bluebird

February 5, 2016 – 5:46 pm

Snow in Wellfleet today. The view out our front door this afternoon:

 

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod | Comments (1)

Skinless And Boneless

February 4, 2016 – 10:41 pm

I’ve just read the testimony that Border Patrol agent Brandon Judd gave to the House Judiciary committee today.

Some longish excerpts:

In the late 1990s as a young Border Patrol Agent, I witnessed first-hand how adept these criminal cartels were at exploiting our policies. While I was working in the Buttercup Dunes in the remote California desert, smugglers would drive their products across the United States/Mexico International Boundary, easily making it to Interstate 8 just a few hundred yards away. In almost all cases the smugglers would drive west towards El Centro, California. If we attempted to stop the vehicle, the smugglers would drive across the median and continue west in the eastbound lanes and into oncoming traffic. At night it was worse, the smugglers would turn their headlights off as they drove into the oncoming traffic. The moment they crossed the median and began driving into oncoming traffic, we had to immediately terminate our pursuit.

The policy was that it was better for narcotics and illegal immigrants to enter the United States without apprehension than to put the general public at risk of vehicle accidents. Whether you believe this policy was sound or not, it was a policy that was exploited by the cartels. It took years for the Border Patrol to install vehicle barriers in this area and stop these drive throughs from taking place. During that time the cartel more or less operated with impunity…

Another example was the 500 pound marijuana smuggling threshold the U.S. Attorney’s office imposed on the Border Patrol in the mid-2000s. Due to prosecutorial discretion, Border Patrol Agents were not allowed to refer for prosecution anyone who smuggled or attempted to smuggle less than 500 pounds of marijuana into the country. Not surprisingly we started making quite a few 480 pound seizures.

Today our largest trouble area is in Texas. Criminal cartels are once again proving adept at understanding and working around our policies. Late in the year of 2013 and throughout all of 2014, anunprecedented number of unaccompanied minors entered our country illegally through the Rio Grande Valley Sector of operations. Instead of presenting themselves legally at Ports of Entry and asking for asylum, the unaccompanied minors were forced by the cartels to enter illegally at dangerous points along the border. In most cases, these minors were not trying to escape or evade apprehension, they were simply crossing the border illegally and giving themselves up.

The cartels understood that the unaccompanied minors would force the Border Patrol to deploy Agents to these crossing areas in order to take the minors into custody. I want to stress this point because it has been completely overlooked by the press. The unaccompanied minors could have walked right up to the Port of Entry and asked for asylum. Why did the cartels drive them to the middle of the desert and then have them cross over the Rio Grande only to surrender to the first Border Patrol Agent they came across? The reason is that it completely tied up our manpower and allowed the cartels to smuggle whatever they wanted across our border.

The creating of holes in Border Patrol operations was only one benefit to the cartels by the unaccompanied minor surge. The other was the exploration of our “catch and release’ policy. As this surge became too much to handle, the Border Patrol and the Enforcement and Removal Office began releasing nearly everyone we arrested. I believe this release allowed the cartels to increase their smuggling profits. With catch and release, the cartels could credibly say to potential customers that they would be able to remain in the United States without fear of deportation as long as they asked for asylum upon being apprehended. Although the problem began with unaccompanied minors, as word quickly spread of everyone being released, we started to see more crossings of complete family units, leading to a bigger problem than what we had in 2014. And once again we are playing catchup to a problem that in part we created through policy.

All individuals that were released during this period of time were given an official document that ordered them to appear before an immigration judge at some future date. These orders are called Notices to Appear (NTA). The only problem, however, is that these official orders are usually ignored; so much so that Border Patrol Agents have dubbed them Notices to Disappear. The latest data that I have seen shows that approximately 40 percent of the individuals being issued NTAs do not show up.

The willful failure to show up for court appearances by persons that were arrested and released by the Border Patrol has become an extreme embarrassment for the Department of Homeland Security. It has been so embarrassing that DHS and the U.S. Attorney’s office has come up with a new policy. Simply put, the policy makes mandatory the release, without an NTA, of any person arrested by the Border Patrol for being in the country illegally, as long as they do not have a previous felony arrest conviction and as long as they claim to have been continuously in the United States since January of 2014. The operative word in this policy is “claim.’ The policy does not require the person to prove they have been here which is the same burden placed on them during deportation proceedings. Instead, it simply requires them to claim to have been here since January of 2014.

Not only do we release these individuals that by law are subject to removal proceedings, we do it without any means of tracking their whereabouts. Agents believe this exploitable policy was set in place because DHS was embarrassed at the sheer number of those who choose not to follow the law by showing up for their court appearances. In essence, we pull these persons out of the shadows and into the light just to release them right back to those same shadows from whence they came…

Immigration laws today appear to be mere suggestions. There are little or no consequences for breaking the laws and that fact is well known in other countries. If government agencies like DHS or CBP are allowed to bypass Congress by legislating through policy, we might as well abolish our immigration laws altogether.

Once again, you saps fellow citizens, the word is “anarcho-tyranny”. Are you getting angry yet?

By Malcolm | Posted in Immigration | Comments (16)

Bob Elliott, 1923-2016

February 3, 2016 – 4:13 pm

Bob Elliott, the surviving member of the great comedy duo Bob & Ray, has died. He was 92.

Nobody much younger than I am will even know who these people were. It’s the curse of the old that only they know, as the great mill of history grinds the past into dust, what has been lost. And if you don’t know, why would you care?

You can enjoy some Bob & Ray here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Duck Song

February 3, 2016 – 2:24 pm

Among the most entertaining accounts on Twitter over the past year or so has been the reactionary heckler known to his audience as “The Duck” (@jokeocracy). With Twitter apparently getting ready to crack down on dissident-right accounts, the Duck decided to go out in blazing style, and spent a recent Sunday trolling mainstream, in particular “conservative”, journalists.

As expected, the Duck’s account was permanently suspended by the Twitter management when they showed up for work the next morning, and his oeuvre is no longer visible. But the flight-path of his kamikaze mission was recorded, and preserved for posterity, here.

The Duck gave a post-mortem interview with Radix Journal, which you can read here. I’ll excerpt one brief snippet, about the rise of Donald Trump (who has much support around the reactosphere, and is what is known in those circles as a “shitlord”):

[Interviewer]: In your opinion, how has the rise of Donald Trump galvanized what has come to be known as the “alt-right” on Twitter?

D: Trump recognized that the white working class had no voice in today’s American politics, and he’s become a rallying point for everyone who feels that the establishment needs to be torn down. His specific beliefs and policies are for the most part unimportant, he serves as a Schelling point for a deep anti-establishment feeling that has grown strong in the absence of any other permitted outlets to vent that emotion.

Yes, of course that’s it exactly.

At best, the situation in America today is like a computer that’s been left on for far too long, running thousands of buggy and leaky processes, with its firewall down and its anti-virus software disabled. At the very least, it must have a reboot, or it will soon crash. More likely, however, is that the national “hardware” no longer meets the system requirements of the original OS, as I explained here.

Meanwhile, if you feel the effects of your last red pill wearing off, and need to grab another fistful pronto, I’ll direct you as always to Nick Steves’ This Week In Reaction for a heapin’ helpin’.

P.S: A chain of links in Nick Steves’ digest led me back to this NRO piece from last spring. It’s as horrifying now as it was then.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (26)

How’s The Water, Frogs?

February 2, 2016 – 3:10 pm

From CNN:

The Department of Homeland Security said Monday that the acting administrator for the Transportation Security Administration would be reassigned, following a report that airport screeners failed to detect explosives and weapons in nearly every test that an undercover team conducted at dozens of airports.

According to a report based on an internal investigation, “red teams” with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General were able to get banned items through the screening process in 67 out of 70 tests it conducted across the nation.

Meanwhile, we ordinary chumps citizens are delayed, herded, groped, humiliated, and blasted with radiation for, as we see above, purely theatrical purposes.

The word is ‘anarcho-tyranny’, in case you need reminding. Have you had enough yet?

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (6)

Misc.

February 1, 2016 – 9:04 pm

Sorry — the little grey cells are resting tonight, so all I have is a few small items.

‣   The State Department recently announced that it would not be releasing some of the emails taken from the private, unsecured server Hillary Clinton kept in her bathroom in Chappaqua, because they are too secret.

Former Federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy comments here:

The reasoning behind that conclusion is alarming. It is not just that the intelligence community (IC) understandably wishes to keep top secret national-defense information under wraps. Because of how recklessly Clinton and her top aides handled classified information, the IC must operate under the assumption that there are copies of these 22 emails floating around ”“ whether in the possession of current or former government officials but unaccounted for or, worse, in the possession of, say, foreign governments that managed to hack into Clinton’s unsecured private system. If the State Department were to release publicly even redacted copies of the emails, those who may have complete copies will be able to figure out the SAP information and use that knowledge both to compromise government sources and programs, and in analyzing other U.S. government information to which they’ve gained access.

In other words, it is potentially catastrophic.

Not to worry, Mrs. Clinton. We have it on good authority (well, actually we heard from one of our commenters) that there’s nothing amiss here.

‣   Meanwhile, an item at VDare reminds the GOP that its dream of burnishing the brand with Hispanic voters is a fool’s errand, and that Mexicans are not Cubans or Puerto Ricans.

‣   Here’s why we need to colonize outer space, and soon.

‣   This is cute.

‣   Stern words from Solzhenitzyn.

‣   Probably the top story of the day, however, is this weird fish.

Update, a few hours later: should also have included this.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (11)

Plug

January 31, 2016 – 11:55 pm

Readers will be aware that I’m recovering, slowly, from having my left knee replaced. (It’ll be three weeks tomorrow since the surgery.) The operation was actually a redo of the original job, last March, which turned out to have been botched.

Total knee replacement is major surgery — it inflicts a grievous wound, and the recovery is slow and painful. For several weeks the patient must take strong medications for pain. That makes it hard to concentrate without fatigue, and, for me at least, it made reading and writing productively all but impossible.

To pass the time, then, I found myself listening to the radio a lot. And the best thing about that, both this time around and last, has been listening to John Batchelor in the evenings. If you’ve never heard his show, I recommend it to you all; it’s on the air for four hours, six days a week, from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Eastern time.

Mr. Batchelor is something of a political conservative, but that’s not the attraction here: he is a cultured man of high intelligence, with a roving curiosity that seems to touch upon, if you listen long enough, just about every topic imaginable. (This isn’t to say he doesn’t have particular interests, though: he does, and they are history, global politics, strategic security, and space exploration.) He is joined every night by erudite guests, and the conversation is always entertaining and informative. It’s real, old-fashioned, grown-up stuff, and you should tune in sometime. You can hear him during broadcast hours by going to the WABC-AM website and catching the live stream, or download podcasts from his own site.

I’m grateful to John Batchelor for easing many weary and uncomfortable evenings. If there’s a bright side to knee arthroplasty, this is it.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (14)

Confess!

January 31, 2016 – 7:33 pm

We’ve written often (for example, here) about the unbroken ideological and doctrinal thread connecting the Puritanism of the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the modern, secular religion of the Left. The “mission into the wilderness” continues unabated, its outward forms unaltered. All that changes is the temporal object of the mission: the MacGuffin varies from picture to picture, but the plot, and the acting, is always the same. The sin, the atonement, the soteriology are all still there, perfectly intact; why, one hardly even misses God.

Here’s a very good piece, by John McWhorter, on “anti-racism” as an expression of this religious impulse.

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

Circling The Drain

January 30, 2016 – 4:30 pm

I meant to comment on this when it happened a few days ago:

Rome’s nude statues covered up ahead of Rouhani visit

In further concession to Iranian president, official dinner with Italian PM does not include wine on the menu

What a craven, flabby, neutered thing our civilization has become. This is what ACID syndrome does to its victims: it sickens and enervates them with doubt; it destroys and disables their confidence, potency, and virility; it paralyzes them in the face of peril; it turns their bones and sinews to jelly.

In contrast: Winston Churchill, who was to host a dinner attended by ibn Saud, was told by the Arabian king that those attending must not drink or smoke in his presence. His response?

I said that if it was his religion that made him say such things, my religion prescribed as an absolute sacred ritual smoking cigars and drinking alcohol before, after and if need be during, all meals and the intervals between them. Complete surrender.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reaction | Comments (10)

What Say You, Tea Leaves?

January 28, 2016 – 4:37 pm

It’s been almost a year — it was February 28th, 2015 — since I predicted that Hillary Clinton would not be the Democratic nominee. (Readers can find the historic vaticination — upon which I immediately staked a bottle of whisky in a wager with our commenter ‘The One Eyed Man’ — in the comment-thread here.) Among the reasons I gave, which of course hardly scratch the surface: too old, too sick, too unprincipled, too incompetent, too dishonest, too nasty, too much baggage.

How’s it looking? About as I expected it would. Some of you may be old enough to remember the old Clairol slogan: “the closer she gets, the better she looks”; I expected that this would be precisely the opposite of what would happen with Mrs. Clinton, and I have not been disappointed. Everywhere you look her support seems to be declining; at this rate, were she to stay in the race, the only votes she’d end up getting come Election Day would be Bill, Chelsea, George Stephanapolous, our monocular commenter, and perhaps Chelsea’s father, Webb Hubbell. (Why, just now I read an Op-Ed piece by Charles Blow over at the New York Times; even the comment-section there is overwhelmingly unsupportive, if not downright antagonistic, toward the former First Basilisk. And if you’ve lost Charles Blow’s commentariat, well…)

It’s obvious that this email business is pretty serious; Mrs. Clinton had things on her private server that should only have been viewable in a SCIF — a secure facility to which access is only granted on a strict case-by-case, need-to-know, eyes-only basis. The material in question is of the most sensitive sort, with a security classification above Top Secret — the kind of stuff that, if leaked, puts human lives at risk. (We can rest assured that as a result of its having been hosted in the Clinton’s bathroom, it is now read at leisure in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, and God-knows-where else.) The FBI has been investigating, but of course the FBI cannot bring an indictment; that duty rests with the Department of Justice — i.e., Loretta Lynch, and ultimately Barack Obama.

So what’s going to happen? The chattering classes have been predicting all sorts of things. Out of this welter of opinions, what has coalesced in my own mind as the most persuasive analysis, and the most likely sequence of events, includes these key points:

1) This thing will not go away. The security breach is too egregious, and the penalties for any ordinary person so severe, that even Hillary Clinton will not be able to walk away from it.

2) Barack Obama controls the DOJ, but even for a man with as little regard for the rule of law as he has, there’s too much pressure building for him just to switch the whole thing off, even if he wanted to. And are we sure he wants to? Because, after all…

3) …the Clintons and the Obamas hate each other. Any leniency that Mr. Obama might show Mrs. Clinton depends exclusively on the following:

      a) His concern for his own legacy, and for the future course of the Democratic Party. Given that Mrs. Clinton will likely yank the party back toward the center relative to where Mr. Obama would like it to go, and given also that Mrs. Clinton is hardly a person of natural political talent, or of charismatic personal charm, it’s hard to believe that Mr. Obama is thrilled to see her as his heir;

      b) His concern for any dirt that the Clintons may have on him. I will not speculate here about what that may be, but we can be sure that if Mr. Obama spurns and discards Mrs. Clinton, then the Clinton machine will bring its guns to bear, and that is not nothing.

4) My own impression is that Mr. Obama has the advantage as regards item 3). This opinion is reinforced by the asymmetrical toadying we’ve been seeing lately; it seems that Mrs. Clinton has been going out of her way to praise and bend the knee to the incumbent in recent weeks. We would not see this sharp uptick in ass-kissing if something were not afoot.

5) My feeling, then, is that Mr. Obama is turning away from Mrs. Clinton, and will turn loose the DOJ when the moment is right.

6) When will the moment be right? When she’s down, of course; he will want her prospects to slip as much as possible before siccing the dogs on her. So if she does poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire, then expect it sooner; if she does better than she seems likely to in those contests, then expect more damaging FBI leaks for a little while longer.

7) Does this mean that Mr. Obama now supports Bernie Sanders? No. In fact Mr. Sanders was summoned to the White House just the other day, and I bet he was told as much. Bernie Sanders is too kooky, too untethered from reality, too flighty to be a steady hand on the tiller once Mr. Obama leaves office. No, what this White House wants is someone more tractable, more middle-of-the-road, more biddable. And who is that?

8) Why, Joe Biden, of course. I predict that Mr. Biden is going to get back into this race, and soon — probably right after bad showings by Mrs. Clinton in Iowa and NH, if things go as I expect they will. And there is someone sitting in the wings, someone who checks a lot of desirable Democratic boxes, who would make a perfect running-mate — someone who has been very strangely quiet these past few months: Elizabeth Warren. At this point in this crazy political season, I think an Uncle-Choo-Choo/Fauxcahontas ticket could really have legs for the D’s, and I bet a lot of other people think so too.

Now none of this is particularly original; it’s just a distillation of my own thoughts and of what a lot of other political observers have been suggesting. But it’s what makes the most sense to me at this point, so I thought I’d write it all down.

Peter, no hurry here of course, as there are months to go yet, but I think I’d like a Highland Park 15. Nectar o’ the gods.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (21)

Rules Of Order

January 27, 2016 – 2:39 pm

Here’s an extended meditation on that modern Sisyphus, Wile E. Coyote, and on the genius of his creator, Chuck Jones.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Hoplology 101

January 26, 2016 – 7:55 pm

Here’s another clarifying and informative piece by Sean Davis on firearms: 14 Things Everyone Should Understand About Guns.

(I say “another” above because we’ve linked to Mr. Davis’s articles, such as this one, before.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Guns | Comments (13)

The Thucydides Trap

January 23, 2016 – 11:22 pm

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes wrote the following about why humans fight:

”˜So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second for safety; and the third for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.’

Rather than being some sort of masculine pathology, as I’m sure your children are now being told in school, these things all have a perfectly rational basis.

In the first case, which Hobbes calls “competition”, some rival stands between you (or your tribe, or your nation) and a necessary resource. Natural selection — i.e., differential survival and reproduction — will obviously favor organisms who will act to remove the obstacle, at least to the extent that doing so does not itself lower their own prospect of survival. (Obviously, a species of deer that tends to attack the tigers at the watering-hole will soon go extinct.)

The second case, which Hobbes calls “diffidence”, describes the rational behavior of the obstacle. If you are aware that some neighboring tribe has its hungry eyes on your hunting ground, you have two choices: you can upgrade your defenses, which locks you into a costly, and risky, arms-race in perpetuam, or you can make a pre-emptive attack and remove the threat once and for all.

The third case, “glory”, is the rational approach for defending one’s tangible assets when appeals to law are not an option: it is to make clear that any trespass will be met with swift retribution, and by so doing build a reputation for oneself as someone not to be messed with.

Of interest tonight is the second case. It is a major primer for international conflict, and has been understood as such since the Peloponnesian War. (Indeed, it was Hobbes’ reading of Thucydides that helped him understand the idea in the first place.)

So, with all this in mind (and a hat tip to J.D.), here’s an excellent article on the sudden rise of China as a major power, and what that might mean for global security.

By Malcolm | Posted in Darwin and Biology, Society and Culture, Foreign Affairs, Military | Comments (35)

Old School

January 22, 2016 – 10:20 pm

My boy Nick just sent me a link to a YouTube channel that you might find interesting. (I did.)

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (3)

Gyre, Widening

January 22, 2016 – 8:00 pm

I have to say: it would be hard to imagine a livelier political season, or one more fitting for these times.

Over on the left, Hillary Clinton is watching it all slip away all over again — this time to a pallid, septuagenarian Marxist from Vermont. (I’ve had many wonderful blessings in my life, but to be able to see this woman’s ambitions slowly burnt to ashes is about as good as it gets.)

Meanwhile, on the other side, the atavistic GOP is tearing itself to pieces. Conservatism, Inc. today has mounted a desperate assault on Donald Trump, as it watches its worst nightmare — irrelevance — come true. (You had your chance, guys.)

No, no, my friends, now things have changed. While the intellectuals of NRO, and of the Democratic editorial pages, have fiddled, the world has caught fire.

The blogger calling himself “Porter” summed it up perfectly in a recent tweet:

“Left and right are obsolete terms. All politics in the West are now State v. Nation.”

I’ve said for years now that this system was tottering. Now it’s beginning to tip right over. Who will win? Sanders? Trump?

“What difference, at this point, does it make?”

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (23)

Open Thread 12, Etc.

January 20, 2016 – 9:47 pm

I’m still way too fuzzy to write, so just a couple of links:

First, an amusing little allegory posted at Gates of Vienna (with a h/t to Bill Keezer; I’ve been offline a lot this week, and hadn’t visited GoV in a few days).

Second, I think a recent podcast by John D. on the topic of race is particularly good. You can listen to it here.

Beyond that, I got nuthin’. The floor is yours, folks.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (36)

If Looks Could Kill

January 19, 2016 – 3:19 pm

You just might have to watch this more than once.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (18)

Floating Metaphor Captured in Gulf

January 18, 2016 – 6:00 pm

The big story over the past week has been the news from Iran: the ransoming of our hostages, the fat payoff for the nuclear deal (but I repeat myself), and the humiliating capture by Iran of riverine patrol boats allegedly adrift in the Gulf.

Normally I’d really be digging in on this one, but it’s hard right now for me to concentrate. I’ll just say that there is obviously a lot more to this incident than we’ve been told, and that a lot of what we have been told is obviously not so. The Obama administration is spinning the whole thing exactly as you’d expect: a triumph of its diplomatic expertise, a huge win for U.S. interests, an encouraging example of how well things can go for America when we let geniuses like John Kerry, and the great man in Washington who deserves history’s applause but is too modest to mention himself by name, run the show.

I’m just going to give you a few links to browse:

First up is the analyst who writes as ‘Nate Hale’ at In from the Cold. His post asks the pertinent questions, and is (in its last paragraph) the source of the metaphor mentioned in our title.

For more skepticism about the official narrative, see also this item from American Thinker.

One place you should always check regarding matters naval is Information Dissemination. Galrahn’s post pushes back against some of the more hawkish reactions we’ve been seeing.

The New York Times beams approvingly, as one might imagine. The world is just a safer, happier place, now that the United States and Iran are BFFs, and the genial resolution of this affair is only our first glimpse of the broad, sunny uplands that now lie before us.

Before I go, here’s something to keep in mind with regard to political sympathies, presidential campaigns, and Mideast affairs. (I am not in a position to develop this in any depth for you, as I’m finding it hard even to type right now.)

The Saudis and Iran, to put it mildly, do not love one another. While Barack Obama, John Kerry, and the Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett gaze wooingly into Tehran’s eyes, and stuff its pockets with cash, it’s safe to say that the dulcifying effects of that great plume of oxytocin have not reached Riyadh.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, her husband, the international money-laundering and influence-peddling syndicate known as the Clinton Foundation, and Mrs. Clinton’s right-hand gal Huma Abedin all have deep connections with the Saudis.

The lifting of sanctions on Iran, and the sudden improvement of its financials, changes at a stroke the power-balance in the region. It is reasonable to assume that both Iran and the Saudis have mercantile access to nuclear weapons if they want, through various third parties, and this windfall for Iran, and large-scale resumption of its commercial dealings with external players, should have an immediate, and complicating, effect on the game of Mideast power.

In my diminished state, I really haven’t much more to say about all this for now. I just thought these things were worth mentioning.

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

The Kindness of Strangers

January 15, 2016 – 2:25 pm

Just got a package from Amazon containing a CD by the rock band Clutch. I have no idea who sent it to me, but I do get the occasional item in the mail from readers (mostly books).

Anyway, thanks, whoever you are. This is not exactly the sort of thing I usually listen to, but it’s a nice gesture. Between the effects of the surgery itself, and all the drugs I’m taking, I have a very hard time thinking in a straight line for more than a few minutes at a time (or, for that matter, even staying awake), and listening to music is one of the few things I can manage.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (35)

Service Notice

January 11, 2016 – 12:27 pm

OK, off for knee-revision surgery at 4:30. Back in harness before too long, I expect. At the very least I’ll post something, just as “proof of life”, as soon as I am able.

If not, carry on! The barbarians are at the gates.

Update, January 13th: I’m back home, but completely knackered. It was a sanguinary four-hour procedure, and I have some blood to manufacture before I’ll have the energy to do much of anything.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (36)

David Bowie, 1947-2016

January 11, 2016 – 12:12 pm

I was shocked and saddened to read this morning that David Bowie has died of cancer at age 69. He was one of the greatest artists of my age. He touched nothing that he did not adorn.

I consider myself enormously fortunate to have had a slight personal acquaintance with Mr. Bowie. (I met him first at Power Station Studios, where he was working on his 1983 album Let’s Dance, and later spent several weeks in 1986 in the engineer’s chair during the making of his album Never Let Me Down.)

He was a man of superior qualities in nearly every way: intelligent, witty, elegant, literate, well-mannered — and of course, flamboyantly, coruscatingly talented. He was also that rarest of things in top-tier celebrities: considerate of others. (As an example of this, while we were making Never Let Me Down on a tight schedule, he realized he had inadvertently booked an important session on Thanksgiving Day. To make up for it he took the lovely Nina and me out for a delightful evening on the town a few days later. I can’t think of another person in his position who would have done such a thing.)

In short, the man was, perhaps above all, a gentleman. I, and the civilization he decorated so brilliantly, will miss him forever.

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

Dead Man Walking

January 10, 2016 – 1:35 pm

I don’t know if you’ve been following this crazy Sean-Penn-El-Chapo story, but what an incredible dope Sean Penn is: The Man Who Got El Chapo Arrested. He will now have every neck-tattooed La Santa Muerte gang-banger south of the Rio Grande hunting him down until the end of his days. I reckon that at this point it would take about a hundred of this idiot’s lives to make one plugged nickel.

Do we have a Witless Protection Program?

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (8)

An Onomastic Oversight

January 10, 2016 – 12:46 pm

In a post a few months ago, while developing a metaphor involving collapsing stars, I commented on the vulnerabilities of the load-bearing structures that support a civilization’s weight:

Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially ‘memetic’ — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”: given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind only a desiccated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse.

Some time earlier, in the wake of the Boston bombings, I had also cooked up another metaphoric description of the lethal memetic pathogen affecting the West. I called it Cultural Immunodeficiency Virus, or CIV. (See here.)

Somehow, though, an obvious coinage escaped me until just now. If HIV causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, a.k.a. ‘AIDS’, then the disease now killing Europe — which is caused, as described above, by CIV, a universal memetic acid — has an obvious name: Acquired Cultural Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or ‘ACIDS’. (We might prefer ‘ACID Syndrome’.)

I hereby bequeath this meme to the dissident Right, free of charge.

How I could have missed this for so long escapes me. As they say down South, if it was a snake, it would’ve bit me.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction, Society and Culture | Comments (10)

Many Roads. One Summit?

January 10, 2016 – 1:04 am

Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella has taken on the question, raised by a disciplinary action at Wheaton College, of whether Christians and Muslims worship the “same God”.

I’m not a religious believer myself, but over the past decade or so the naive atheism of my earlier years has withered away to a sympathetic agnosticism, and I have come, far too late, to a mature understanding of the importance and value (and in a Darwinian sense, the adaptive value) of religion in human affairs. (A separate, and diffident, post on the concept known as “Mount Stupid” is probably in order here, but I’ll save that for another day.) Bill addresses here an important religious and social question that is also a vexing and technical philosophical one involving the nature of reference.

Right now you could just go to the Maverick Philosopher homepage and work your way down, but after reading Bill’s posts it seems particularly apt, in order to to keep the reference “successful”, to link them as particulars. So, in chronological order, they are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. (And there’s also a podcast, featuring Bill discussing all of the above with philosopher Dale Tuggy.)

The series, which among other things examines the “same-God” question for a variety of different belief systems, is becoming quite a philosophical tour de force, and is a fine example of reason in action. It’s a lot to read, and somewhat technical, but some of you will, I’m sure, find it fascinating.

PS: As I’ve studied Islam and its history over the years, my own answer to the “same-God”question has become a firmer and firmer “no”. The reasons are, in essence, the ones that Bill dissects here. I thank him for dissecting and explaining them with a clarity and precision that I never could have managed. (This is the difference between the professional and the amateur.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy, Religion | Comments (15)

Friday Miscellany

January 8, 2016 – 5:51 pm

Sorry for another grab-bag post, but even with all that’s going on in the U.S. and abroad I just don’t have the “bandwidth” to do much writing at the moment. (It may not be until I’ve recovered a bit from Monday’s surgery that things will get back to normal around here.) I’m also so fatigued with politics and this tottering society that it’s hard for me to gin up any enthusiasm right now for discussing it; my attention is on family, work, and getting ready for next week. So, with a hat tip to the tireless Bill Keezer for some of these links, here’s another salmagundi (it is, I confess, a pretty dark one):

‣   That darned ice!

‣   Why cash matters.

‣   Diana West argues, pace Mark Levin and Andrew McCarthy, that Ted Cruz’s standing as a “natural-born” candidate is a legitimate question.

‣   The penalties behind the Oregon brouhaha. I’ve written before about the problem of overcriminalization; I’ll recommend again Douglas Husak’s excellent book on the subject.

‣   Speaking of books, I’ll also recommend Thomas Sowell’s scathing The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, which I’ve just read. (Thomas Sowell is now 85 years old, and I hope he’s taking very good care of himself.)

‣   If you’ve been thinking Europe is in serious trouble these days, you’re mistaken. Europe is not in trouble, it’s dying. We are watching the highest civilization that human history has ever produced commit suicide.

‣   While we are on the topic, here’s a sharp item on this slow, corrosive, and apparently inexorable jihad, written by “Kafir” over at Gates of Vienna. (I’m really starting to wish my own daughter didn’t live in Vienna.) GoV has been in fine form lately, so browse the homepage too.

‣   Here, too, is a hot and rousing post by Mark Steyn on the ostentatious “solidarity” expressed for the Charlie Hebdo massacre, both at the time and on its recent anniversary. This is, I think, one of the best things Steyn’s ever written, and that’s saying something. Read it and boil.

‣   Also, we had another example of the blessings of Islam — the gift that keeps on giving — in Philadelphia yesterday, where a jihadist attempted to execute a police officer. (The officer was badly wounded, but survived.) To steal a phrase from our political clerisy, we also got a “teachable moment”: a textbook example of Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society, which says:

The worse any designated minority or alien group behaves in a liberal society, the bigger become the lies of Political Correctness in covering up for that group.

In this case, the jihadi proudly declared his motive; about this there appears to be no dispute. He announced that he was acting in the name of Islam. Nevertheless, Philadelphia’s mayor, Jim Kenney, who clearly imagines us all to be imbeciles, assures us that this assault “does not represent this religion in any way shape or form or any of its teachings … It has nothing to do with being a Muslim or following the Islamic faith.”

Read that a time or two, friends. Roll it around in your mind. Think of how a person’s mind must be configured to utter such a thing. Ask yourself: who might actually be better acquainted with the Koran and the “teachings” of Islam — the Irish, Catholic Mayor of Philadelphia, or a dedicated Muslim who has has made the teachings of Islam his universe, and who has probably read the Koran many times over? Next, ask yourself, after consulting 1,400 years of history and the latest news from Europe, whether violence against the kuffar is not “in any shape or form” a manifestation of the teachings of Islam? (In other words, ask yourself this: who are you going to believe, Jim Kenney, or your lyin’ brain?)

Then reflect again on Auster’s law, pour yourself a stiff one, and drink to the memory of the West.

Well, that’s enough for now. There are some topics I’d like to dig into more deeply, including our “new normal” government-by-executive-caprice, of which President Obama’s latest gun-control ukase is just the latest example, and the deep and disturbing ties that connect the Hillary Clinton to the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood, but I think this will have to do for today.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (34)

Still Here

January 5, 2016 – 12:45 am

Sorry about the quiet spell here, readers. Our lovely daughter (newly betrothed!) has been visiting us from Vienna over the “hols”, and it’s been good to disconnect from the wider world for a couple of weeks.

I’m sorry to say, also, that another hiatus is coming up soon. Some of you may remember that I had my left knee replaced last March. As it turns out the thing was botched: the end of my femur was apparently sawed off at the wrong angle, and so my lower leg is crooked by nine degrees or so (what the boffins call a “valgus deformity”). This is so far outside acceptable mechanical tolerances that I am having the job completely redone this coming Monday, and no doubt will again be as beaten-up and drug-addled as I was for several weeks the first time round.

It’s a pity, not least because there’s so much to comment on at the moment — from continuing chaos abroad, to Barack Obama’s petulant gestures and insulting remarks about “gun control” here at home — and normally I’d be raring to go after such a good long break. (I’ve also been doing some interesting reading.) But this thing needs doing, and I am glad to be getting it over with. I’ll be very busy this week getting my affairs in order at work, wrapping up the recording project I started last month, and attending to other clamant obligations, but will post as time permits. Thanks to all.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (8)

Happy New Year!

December 31, 2015 – 7:16 pm

Here comes 2016. Buckle up!

Thanks again to all of you for reading and commenting.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

This & That

December 30, 2015 – 2:34 pm

This intercalary week is always a good time for a change of pace, and with all that’s been going on in the local physical world, I’ve hardly glanced at the computer for the past few days. (It’s been nice.) Even better, I’ve managed to pay almost no attention at all to the news.

Finding myself with a few moments alone today, though, I thought I’d take the time to post some of the miscellany that’s been accumulating around here. Let’s see what we have…

For starters, here are a nice online simulator of a classic drum machine, and some footage of a very large squid.

I’ve been saying for a while now that 3-D printing is going to be a world-changing technology. The technology is still in its infancy, though — think of presonal computing in the 1980’s — so it still isn’t on most peoples’ radar. With a hat-tip to the indefatigable JK, here’s an article about what we might expect from this nascent technology.

It’s Kwanzaa! Here’s the heart-warming back-story of this special holiday.

From Puerto Rico, more tragic evidence that we must find a common-sense way to deny the police such easy access to guns.

Over the transom the other day came an email from Barack Obama. The greeting was calculated to strike terror in the heart of those with any lingering fondness for the traditional American nation:

Malcolm —

I’ve got 12 months left to squeeze every ounce of change I can while I’m still in office. And that’s what I intend to do.

Charles Cooke offers some commentary on all that “change”, here.

Here is an excellent fisking of some typical climate-change propaganda. This is what we are up against, folks.

Oh, also, just saw this, from Ban-Ki Moon, on the Paris climate agreement:

“We have to do as science dictates.”

Yes, that’s from the Secretary General of the United Nations, folks. That amazing remark probably deserves a post of its own (if not a book). For now, though, I’ll just plop it out there. (Paging Bill Vallicella!)

From the New York Times, a sad story of a woman’s wrongful death. File under “Fantasy vs. Reality”:

Farkhunda’s death and the legal system’s response call into question more than a decade of Western efforts in Afghanistan to instill a rule of law and improve the status of women. The United States alone has spent more than $1 billion to train lawyers and judges and to improve legal protections for women; European countries have provided tens of millions more.

But like so many other Western attempts to remake Afghanistan, the efforts have foundered, according to Afghan and Western lawyers and officials. Afghan society has resisted more than 150 years of such endeavors by outsiders, from the British to the Russians to the Americans. This remains a country where ties of kinship and clan trump justice, and where the money brought by the West has made corruption into a way of life. The rule-of-law programs were often designed in ignorance of Afghan legal norms, international and Afghan lawyers say. And Western efforts to lift women’s legal status provoked fierce resentment from powerful religious figures and many ordinary Afghans.

No worries, though: settle them over here in their thousands and millions, and the Magic Dirt of the West will lift the scales from their eyes.

Let’s see… what else… oh yes: we were visiting with some friends the other day, and they were swooning, in all the right ways, over Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, Between the World and Me. I’ve read some of this book, and it is appallingly bad. Pusillanimous, paranoid, and petulant, the book manages simultaneously to insult, and condescend to, not only whites (by saying, explicitly and often, that their very existence as a people depends exclusively upon their domination of “black bodies”), but also blacks (by denying them all agency and responsibility) and the American nation itself (for the success of which enterprise Mr. Coates makes the audacious claim that slavery was both necessary and sufficient). Despite (or because) all of that, the book has become a sacred text in white liberal circles, and I’ve already discovered that failure to make conspicuous obeisances to it or its author, should either come up in genteel conversation, is to have one’s own virtue called seriously into question. So, rather than attract further opprobrium by further comment, I’ll just direct you, for the sake of balance, to reviews of this thing by (in ascending order of social radioactivity) Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. “Theodore Dalrymple”), Steve Sailer, and Jared Taylor.

That’s enough for now, I think. Back again soon.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (8)

Service Notice

December 27, 2015 – 10:42 am

On a little holiday break with family. Back soon.

Also, sorry about the outage yesterday (if any of you noticed).

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (7)

A Ghost of Christmas Past

December 24, 2015 – 11:33 pm

It being Christmas Eve, earlier this evening I found myself humming the “Christmastime Is Here” song from the old Charlie Brown Christmas special. (The show originally aired in 1965, when I was nine, and Vince Guaraldi’s beautiful score has stayed with me ever since.)

The tune got me thinking about the show itself, which is about the secularization and commercialization of Christmas. It falls to Linus, at the end of the show, to explain what the holiday is “really all about”. He does so by quoting the King James Bible:

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill towards men.”

“…That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

That was fifty years ago this December. I wonder if such a thing would be approved for production today.

But enough of that for now. A very merry Christmas to you all!

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

Headlights On For Safety

December 23, 2015 – 11:59 pm

I’ve written before about the transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom. His work is concerned with the long-term prospects of the human race, with particular interest in the future of artificial intelligence, and its perils. In these pages we’ve mentioned his suggestion that we might already be living in a computer simulation (see here and here), as well as his thoughts on the “Great Filter” — to wit, whatever it is that has apparently, so far, prevented intelligent life from spreading to very corner of the galaxy. (Here.) We’ve even touched on one of the more exotic, and disturbing, ideas to bubble up out of AI speculation, namely “Roko’s Basilisk”. (Some would say I am putting you at risk even by mentioning it, but here you go. Caveat lector.)

Anyway, Nick Bostrom is a very intelligent man who thinks about very interesting things. Now he is the subject of a substantial article at the New Yorker that I think would be well worth your time. In particular, an embedded video gives a clear and chilling metaphor for the general idea of memetic hazard, which alone will be worth your trip. (See the “Roko’s Basilisk” post, linked above, for other examples.)

When I was at Singularity University a few years back, one of the lecturers said something to the effect of: “If you can see the road ahead of you, you aren’t going fast enough’. Nick Bostrom, very wisely I think, wants better headlights.

Read the article here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Technology, Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy | Comments (6)

Build This

December 22, 2015 – 11:59 am

Here is “The Khaleesi“, a proposed skyscraper for West 57th Street in Manhattan. A tower for our times, I think.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (4)

We Are The Enemy

December 22, 2015 – 10:49 am

Headline at Salon today:

White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it

Salon is not a “fringe” publication. (Would that it were.) Apparently it has no qualms about declaring race war.

As Saul Alinsky said in his Rule 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.’ Comparisons to the presentation of the Jews in German media during the 1930s will not be inapt.

The difference — and one that the author of the Salon piece and his ilk may eventually wish they had borne in mind — is that white American males, overwhelmingly, are the ones who build, maintain, grow, and transport everything that the coastal Eloi depend upon for their continuing existence. And unlike the epicene journalists and academics calling for their subjugation, the aforementioned white American males own the world’s largest privately held arsenal, and if pressed to the wall, will use it. Should Salon and its readership ever seek to make their dream a reality, their adventure will be brief.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (21)

Graveyard Of Empires

December 21, 2015 – 11:20 pm

Today we learned that six U.S. soldiers were killed by a Taliban suicide bomber in Afghanistan.

In today’s NightWatch newsletter, analyst John McCreary wrote:

Afghanistan: The deputy governor of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan said that the Taliban seized the police headquarters in Sangin District center, with fighting continuing.

Deputy governor Mohammad Jan Rasoulyar warned that the province itself could fall because of a lack of central government support. He said at least 90 soldiers had been killed in the latest fighting.

He said, “Helmand will collapse to the enemies and it’s not like Kunduz, where we could launch an operation from the airport to retake it. That is just impossible and a dream.’

Rasoulyar used a Facebook post to appeal to President Ghani for direct intervention in the province. “Be quick and act on this! Protect Helmand from this life and death situation and distance yourself from the circle of those lawyers who tell you everything is OK and the situation is normal,” he wrote.;

Comment: The provincial authorities have been warning the central government for weeks about the danger. News services reported that Western special forces teams have been deployed to Helmand. They should be capable of preventing the loss of the district offices, but most of Helmand already is under Taliban control.

The Taliban know the Western special forces cannot stay because they will be needed elsewhere. They also know that foreign special forces can win every clash, but cannot defeat the Taliban. They know that the Afghan forces cannot stand on their own.

The Taliban remain patient. They are still following Mullah Omar’s strategy to never make peace with the government; infiltrate and destroy the government from within; and wait for the foreigners to leave.

In 2015, they achieved more success than in any prior year. They are not yet ready and able to govern, but they are getting closer.

Six years ago this month, after Barack Obama made a speech announcing an eighteen-month extension of the American force commitment in Afghanistan, I wrote:

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 teach wolves to knit, or make butter from stones. 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 truly 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 not an option.)

Since I wrote this, over 1,400 more Americans have died in Afghanistan. Many more have been maimed. We have spent the better part of a trillion dollars on the Afghan campaign alone, much of which has gone into the pockets of warlords, politicians, and other profiteers, and another substantial portion of which is simply unaccounted for.

As we look back on all of this, what can we say we have achieved? What have we achieved in Libya? In Syria? In Iraq, which at least was once under our control, but is now fragmented and failing? What has our foreign policy, military or otherwise, achieved in any part of the Muslim world?

What ought we to learn from this?

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

Geometry

December 20, 2015 – 5:21 pm

Tomorrow we come to the solstice again, where the great wheel of the seasons pauses, for an instant, at top dead center. I went for a walk at sunset this evening. It was very still.

I’ll be sixty in the spring. How strange it is to be a line, in a circular world.

By Malcolm | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (7)

Peace On WhoseTerms?

December 19, 2015 – 3:36 pm

With a hat-tip to our friend Jeffery Hodges, here is a reminder that if Islam is a “religion of peace”, it is only the peace of submission, of surrender, of captivity.

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion, Jihad | Comments (1)

Stockholm Syndrome

December 19, 2015 – 2:40 pm

Writing for the Gatestone Institute, Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist describes the situation in her homeland — which for most of my lifetime was the holotype and exemplar of the advanced, peacable modern Western nation — as it sinks into darkness and disorder, thanks to its mass importation of wholly alien, mostly Muslim, immigrants.

Swedish citizens, like so many others in a rudely awakened Europe, now seek to arm themselves — which is no easy task in an Eloi nation where even sleeping with a baseball bat under the bed can apparently get you into legal trouble for being “prepared to use force”. Can there be any better example of the exhaustion and etiolation of a once-vigorous people? How can any human population survive when it forbids itself by law to defend its own women and children?

Speaking of Sweden’s women, they get the short straw in this anything-but-Brave New World:

Since the Parliament decided in 1975 that Sweden should be multicultural and not Swedish, crime has exploded. Violent crime has increased by more than 300%, and rapes have increased by an unbelievable 1,472%.

Read the whole thing here. As the world burns, it is harder and harder — especially in the wake of the recent synod of climate Houyhnhnms in Paris — to look at the modern West, or at least the anointed in charge of it, as anything but completely insane.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction, Darwin and Biology, Society and Culture, Foreign Affairs, Jihad, Immigration, HBD | Comments (5)

Speed Bump

December 18, 2015 – 7:33 pm

Self-driving cars, like 3-D printing, are a promising technology with quite a way to go before achieving their transformative potential. (See our post on one of the ethical questions they raise, here.)

An item published yesterday at Bloomberg Business describes a hard problem the people designing them must face: how fast should the cars go? If they obey the law, and poke along at the speed limit, then on most busy highways, where human drivers are whizzing along quite a bit faster, they are a moving obstacle, and are likely to cause accidents. But are we going to program these things to break the law?

I’ve always thought the biggest problem with these robot cars was going to be sharing the road with humans. If we could just switch over all at once, getting all the humans off the roads, then the autonomous cars could really shine: they could zoom down the highway in close formation, at high speeds. Traffic jams caused by accidents, volume, and rubbernecking would be a thing of the past. But that’s not about to happen; you won’t see mass acceptance of driverless cars until people see that they are safe and advantageous, and that wont happen until they’ve been out on the roads for a while. (This being ‘Murica, also, there’s going to be an awful lot of push-back from people who just love driving, like me.) But because the cars can’t really show themselves at their best until they have the roads to themselves, there’s a bit of a hump to get over.

Also, this issue points out something seriously wrong, that anyone who drives a lot will have thought about: if everybody’s driving ten or fifteen miles above the speed limit all the time, the obvious thing to do is to raise the speed limit, and then actually to enforce it. Having a law that everyone ignores just destroys respect for the law.

But we knew that already, I guess; in contemporary America, that’s just how we roll. Respect for, and consistent application of, the nation’s laws seems frightfully quaint these days.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (4)

Separated At Birth?

December 18, 2015 – 6:48 pm

Just saying…

 

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery, Shameless Filler | Comments (4)

Homer Nods

December 18, 2015 – 12:29 am

It’s amazing how hard it is to proofread your own stuff. I just saw a glaring typo in the first line of a recent post; it sat there for more than a day before I spotted it. (If you didn’t see it, too late; it’s fixed.) It ruined the whole flow of the line, and I must have looked right at it dozens of times before posting.

Ah well. As Arthur said in The Once and Future King:

“If people reach perfection they vanish, you know.’

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (6)